Debris (40 page)

  "It?" Mizra screeched. "What in all Other's hell?"

  "Get... out." I fought for each word. "Unstable." The pain was easing, being replaced by a numbness spreading down from my side to my hips. Better, or worse?

  Kichlan didn't waste breath. He scooped me up, grunting as he pushed himself to his feet. "Damn, Tan. You're too heavy for someone so small."

  I didn't smile. I thought of the numbness, of insect feet and silver sleeves. I was too heavy. How much of what Kichlan was carrying was me, and how much was the suit?

  He lurched for the stairs and nearly tumbled down them with Mizra and Uzdal pressing so close behind us.

  Another plane crashed into the building as we burst onto the street. Rubble shook from the walls. Tiles slid to shatter on the paving stones.

  "Put me down." I pushed against Kichlan's shoulder and he did not argue.

  "Are you all right?" His look was searching.

  I nodded. "Yes. Knocked the wind out of me."

  "What did?" Uzdal at my shoulder, breathless.

  "Planes of debris." I flicked a hand toward the building. "They're everywhere in that mess down there. They're–"

  "Attacking the building," Uzdal finished my sentence. "It doesn't do that. Kichlan?" He begged like a child for reassurance. "It doesn't do that, it's never done that. Has it?"

  "I've never seen anything like that. Holes and fire and bodies." Kichlan frowned at me. "This isn't normal."

  And I realised why this felt so familiar, the shock and the violence and the breath pulled from my lungs. I could have been eight hundred feet high.

  "We should get away then, shouldn't we?" Uzdal said, through a fog, from a distance. From the ground so far below. "Shouldn't we run?"

  
Run.

  "We're here to do our duty." Kichlan lifted his wrist. "We've been called to collect it."

  "Collect that?" Mizra shouted. "We can't collect that. It threw Tanyana across the room."

  I looked down as they argued – at my feet, at a distant construction site so vivid in my memory – and knew we were about to be swept away. Knew there was nothing we could do.

  "Bro!" Lad ran down the street, Sofia gasping in his wake, clutching her shoulder and dripping blood from her arm. "Angry, bro. So angry."

  "I couldn't stop him," Sofia choked on the words. Uzdal rushed to her side, slipped his shoulder beneath her arm to hold her steady, and stared in horror at the bright blood coating her hand.

  Kichlan nodded his understanding. "I'm sorry, Lad. I didn't mean to forget about you."

  But was Lad really talking about himself? I thought of the debris dancing with destruction like a cruel cat. The whack like a fist against my chest. Lad wasn't angry, was he? But the debris was.

  "Who would summon furious pions from too deep inside reality?" I whispered, but there was no critical circle below me to respond. And this was debris, not pions.

  Why was it all so angry?

  They talked, while the debris consumed. I thought of the bodies in the rubble of what could easily be Devich's building. His work, not his home. He wouldn't have been there in the middle of the night, surely. But someone was there, enough people to plaster blood across bricks and cracked cement. I couldn't stand here talking about Lad, when all I wanted was to know was if Devich was in that pile of rubble.

  Pions, debris, the lot, they could take their anger and be Other-damned! I would not be swept away again.

  "We have to," I said, firm over the flame and hum. "We're debris collectors. We have to go into that building, and we have to stop the violence." I lifted my arm. My suit, still coating me from wrist to elbow, shone so brightly I squinted against it. "We have been called."

  And I had to find out if Devich was safe. I had to know, for certain.

  "She's right." Kichlan squared his shoulders, stood tall. "Sofia, you and–"

  "Not staying!" Lad cried.

  "I'm not an invalid, Kichlan," Sofia said, her tone leaving no room for argument.

  "Fine," Kichlan said with a resigned sigh. "What about Natasha, have we seen any sign of her?"

  No one answered. Mizra glared at me, Uzdal at least seemed resigned to his fate. Kichlan and Sofia maintained varied degrees of forced determination. Lad looked like he was about to cry.

  "We can't wait any longer." Kichlan took the bag of containers from Lad. "We have to do what we are here for. We have to stop this."

  "Hurry." I set off without waiting, crossed the street and kept as far from the building as I could. Something licked my foot, and I glanced down to see a dark plane flicker from a scattering of shattered tiles – to glance off the suit that had wrapped me from my knee to my toes.

  I shook it off, but Kichlan had seen. Kichlan was staring at me, frowning, thinking, wondering. I began to run. I couldn't start that wondering. Could the debris have heard me, or seen me leaning from the window? What had made it drop the glass? What had made it launch itself at me, and destroy the entire building around me? The same thing that had made the pions throw me from Grandeur's palm? What, exactly, could do that? Or who? A pion-binder who could not only see debris, but control it as well?

  Nonsense.

  The hole where the technicians' building had once been was a scar in the earth, smoking and raw. Heat radiated from its darkness, from its burns. Binders had set up a perimeter around it, urged tall stone fences to spring from the street to try and confine the destruction. They wouldn't hold long. They crumbled as planes and rubble crashed against then, falling faster than the pion-binders could replace them. But the debris was interfering in a far more insidious way. Upsetting the circle systems, destabilising the bindings, wreaking a far more common chaos, but a chaos just as terrible. As we hurried toward them, one whole side of a large stone fence sluiced into mud, and the six point centre who had been working on it roared curses into the flame-lit sky. Planes flickered out of the gap this made, testing freedom with wide black sails.

  "We're collectors!" Kichlan shouted as we ran to a huddle of people near the fence. "Debris collectors! Let us in!"

  A crowd of brave or stupid spectators had gathered to watch. Nine point enforcers held them back, though why you'd need a powerful binder to convince you not to run into the head of chaos and death I couldn't understand. Between them and the fence, healers worked on bodies and I was thankful that the ruddy light cast everything red. It made blood that much harder to distinguish.

  One of the enforcers broke away from the crowd. A circle centre, with bears roaring from his shoulders and lapel. Representative of the veche. He cast us a disdainful glance and pointed to one of the healers. I couldn't make out the mess of flesh the latter was working over, fingers weaving pions I could no longer see in a wild fight for life. "That's all that's left of the other team," the enforcer said, voice rasping. "What do you think you can do?"

  "Other's hells," Mizra groaned.

  Kichlan paled, but shifted the bag on his shoulder. "The only thing we can do." He held the enforcer's gaze. After a moment the man's salt-and-pepper stubbled mouth eased into a dry grin.

  "Do it then. Any chance you can stop this is better than none." He lifted a hand, hesitated. "Good luck." Then turned to the binders on the fence and bellowed, "Let them through!"

  We slipped through the gap in the stone. I kept my head down, unable to meet solemn, exhausted faces. The other side of the fence was strangely quiet. As the pionbinders sealed us in, a kind of stillness and dread settled on my shoulders.

  "Any great ideas?" Mizra snapped.

  I ignored him and scanned the ruins, the rubble. "There!" A body, a lump of pale cloth stained pink, of mushed meat and pooling blood.

  Kichlan pushed past me, came to the body first. "Other." He pressed his hand to his nose and mouth. "It's the technician. From yesterday. Other."

  Lad took a step forward, peering and curious. Kichlan spun, grabbed his shoulders, pushed him away.

  Something had dropped out of me at his words. I slumped to my knees. They clinked against the cement, suit silver on stone. It couldn't be, not like this, not so suddenly and violently. I swallowed an urge to vomit and looked down.

  Into the face of the second technician, the one who had assisted Devich, the one I didn't know.

  "Tanyana?" Sofia from a distance, her voice like reflection on water, faint as rising steam. "What are you doing? We need to – Other!"

  The world swam. I fell forward, too close to the red mush, to the collapse of body and bone, but I couldn't hold myself up. It wasn't him. It wasn't Devich, dead and torn. There was still a chance, wasn't there, that Devich was alive? But if his assistant was here–

  "Tanyana!" Kichlan roared.

  I lifted my head to see my team retreating to the fence, to see panic and confusion.

  "Move!"

  Then I was caught again. Something hooked around my leg, high, up along my thigh. Above my suit. It lifted me, dangled me like a doll, and tossed me.

  I opened my hands to catch the ground but my suit caught it instead. Two wide, solid poles charged from my wrists into the cement. They crunched deep, held me suspended a moment still struggling with shock, before retreating, easing me down. Bare hands pressed to the earth, I struggled for breath, struggled to understand what had just happened. It had to be debris planes, tossing me around like the broken glass.

  I stood, legs shaking. My thigh ached where the debris had touched me, like a bruise throbbing deep.

  "Tanyana?" called voices from the other side of the hissing steam.

  Where was I?

  I turned, prickling dread. A tangle of bricks, of cement and steel frames surrounded me like corpses. Caustic smoke oozed from gashes in the ground. Water rushed in a putrid waterfall from the end of a shattered pipe. I was in the hole. The debris had not pushed me away this time. It had trapped me.

  "Tanyana!" Kichlan called, his voice so far away.

  I ran to the wall of rubble. I hooked fingers around stone and found it sharp and jagged. But I knew with some hunted-animal panic that I had to get out. That this had been no accident.

  "Tanyana?"

  "I'm coming," I whispered an answer. "Fast as I can."

  "Tanyana?" But the voice, though it came from above, was closer. Not screaming, not panicking. I looked up.

  Devich watched me from a small gap in rubble. My stomach clenched.

  "Other, why are you here? Get away, Tanyana. Run. Please."

  But I couldn't run. I could barely climb. "Devich?" I ignored the cuts, the pain in my fingers and palms, and pulled myself up. Suit-enclosed feet fought for purchase, slipped on smooth rock. Hand by hand, foot by painfully slow foot I dragged myself toward Devich.

  Where was the debris? It was there, I could feel it like a threat at the back of my neck.

  "What are you doing?" Devich gasped. He coughed wetly, and my stomach flipped again.

  "Wait," I said to the stones against my face. "Wait for me."

  "I'm so sorry, Tanyana. I can't believe it was you. It shouldn't have been you." His voice trailed into exhaustion. Into silence.

  Something told me to keep him talking. "What happened here? Devich? Tell me what happened."

  Darkness skittered over the rubble close to my left foot. It sent small stones trickling down. I watched them fall, and realised I hadn't climbed very far at all.

  "The storage." He coughed again. "Below us, there was storage. For the debris."

  "Yes? Keep going." Rubble fell against my face and I blinked sand out of my eyes.

  "There was a blast from below. An explosion. Then fire, and smoke, and everything collapsed."

  I didn't understand it. Of all the debris I'd seen none of it had managed to move rocks, let alone blow a hole in the ground. It floated in the air, passed through cement and stone. Only certain kinds of poly, and our suits, could touch it, could hold it.

  Why had it changed?

  "Are you all right, Devich?" My shoulder screamed as I hauled myself up the final stretch, overextending my arm and taking all my weight on one hand. But none of it mattered, because I was close to him. Close enough to fit my fingers through the crack and touch his face. He was very hot.

  Devich said, "Something fell on me." He held my eyes with a fearful expression, and something deeper I could only describe as courage. The will to stay awake, to keep talking. "I can't move." He even smiled, small and wry. "But I'd like to get out, if I could."

  "I'll get you out." How did I expect to do that? "We're here to clean up. We'll fix it, and we'll get you out."

  "I knew they would send a team. But I didn't want it to be you." Devich grunted, shifted slightly.

  "Don't move!"

  He wiggled enough to drag a hand out from beneath him. I could reach in, far enough, to wrap the tips of my fingers against his.

  Devich said, "This isn't right. This is dangerous. Other, I didn't want it to be you."

  A scream, and the mountain of rubble rocked. Stones and shattered bricks cascaded down on Devich and me. I hunched forward, let my suit extend two metallic semicircles, great hybrids of mirrors and wings. Rubble crashed against them, I bore each hit with a grunt, and held on to Devich's fingers. When silence returned I folded my suit inside and whispered, "I'll get you out." And the planes attacked me again.

  I gripped Devich's fingers hard as debris wrapped hot and painful around my legs, but couldn't hold on. I heard him scream as I was lifted into the air.