Debris (5 page)

  "Step aside."

  "She will come with us."

  Devich, too pale, almost green, cast me a silent, fearful glance. Then the veche men entered the room, bringing their chill with them. Devich gripped his testing machine and forced it out into the corridor. It screeched against the wood again and left a deeper gouge.

  In its place, the veche men brought a bed. It floated above the ground, obviously on pions I could not see, and was made of a kind of silver poly mesh.

  "What are you doing?" I straightened.

  "You will come with us." The men stood at either end of my bed and gripped the blankets. "You will be suited."

  "I don't know what that means? Wait! Stop!"

  Holding the blankets above and beneath me, the veche men lifted. Together, they carried me as though I was no heavier than a child, and deposited me on the bed. The jarring set off pain in my hip and behind my knee. I held my left hand with my right and pressed it tightly to my chest.

  "You will be suited."

  I looked up to the veche man closer to my head, about to argue, but stopped. A line ran along his chin, impossibly fine. It curled up to meet his mouth. Dark. Thin. Like a seam.

  The bed moved. They floated me out of the room, down a long, tiled corridor that echoed the tread of their shoes. We passed few people, and they all looked the other way as I tried to meet their eyes. They all glanced fearfully at the veche men, nodded, twitched fake smiles. Still, we kept moving.

  Down a ramp, along another corridor, down a second ramp. Down and down until I thought we had to be far underground, because even Grandeur, surely, could not have been this high.

  Finally, two large doors swung open and we came to a stop in a wide, circular room. It was filled with more strange machinery, and as I levered myself to my elbows I noticed a table, smooth and chrome, awkwardly starshaped. Lamps surrounded it, and burned it into brilliance. "What is that?" I asked.

  "You will be suited here, miss." In the sharp glare of lights reflected on metal, I caught those lines on his face again. More of them. They ringed his eyes like spectacles, they dipped down from his nose like a puppet.

  That's what it was. These veche men, they looked like puppets.

  "But what is that?"

  Then Devich appeared. "Tanyana." He held my hand, his palm cool and dry. "I'm sorry." His hand squeezed mine. "Please trust me. I'll be here."

  Someone stepped out of the bright-lights-on-silver glare. A faceless shadow, a brush of displaced air and then something sharp pierced my upper arm.

  I tried to jerk away. "What–?"

  Numbness seeped through me like bleach through cotton. Hands from the bright lights took my blankets away. They undid my gown, they peeled off bandages.

  I turned my head toward Devich, on a neck gone to damp and dissolving sponge. My mouth wouldn't form his name, no matter how hard I pursed it, or how I lolled my tongue around like so much flopping fish.

  "I'm sorry," he repeated, and leaned close. His breath reminded me of maple cakes, the kind Thada brought in from the western colonies and kept aside for me. I was suddenly hungry, then nauseous, in alarmingly quick succession. "I'll be here, I'll look after you." Devich's enormous eyes swam close to me, rich with concern, before floating away.

  The shadow hands lifted, and laid me gently on the silver table. My skin was too bright, naked under the lights, my stitches too dark in comparison. I couldn't feel temperature anymore, not hot nor cold.

  Shadows hovered at the edge of my vision. When one leaned in, close to my face, I could only make out pale blue eyes, distant with concentration. The rest was hidden in a tight mask of shiny silver fabric. Only when I tried to touch it did I notice my hands were clamped to the table, encased in a large-fitting glove of the same chrome metal. A lift of my sluggish head, and my feet were the same.

  My tongue slipped in and out of control. "What...?" Had I dribbled? I couldn't feel wetness, but something in my slurring mouth convinced me that I had. "What... doing?"

  The blue eyes sharpened, stared at me, and skin bunched around them. A frown.

  "She's too awake." There was a woman behind the silver mask. It moved as she spoke, rippling into mesmerizing waves.

  "Give her another shot." I knew the monotone of the puppet men.

  "No," Devich said, from somewhere that made his voice sound like he was wedged inside a can. Tinny and muffled. "Too much and we will dampen the nerve-networks. She's strong. That's all."

  The blue-eyed woman watched me for a moment more, indecisive, before retreating from view. Then a whirl beside me, mechanical parts and crackling pionpower. A hooked finger of thick metal, of pumping fluids and sizzling energy, rose from beneath the table to arch over me. The tip came to rest against my wrist. It was heavy and solid; I could feel its pressure.

  "Don't let it frighten you, Tanyana," Devich murmured. "It's strange, I know. But this will give you your suit. You won't feel it."

  Maybe I should have closed my eyes? But within the finger hidden parts whirled, lights flashed, then tubes opened to merge fluids into startlingly beautiful pinks and blues, and I couldn't look away.

  I felt it when it entered my skin. Not with pain, not the sharp of cutting or the excruciation of foreign bodies, but dull pressure and unemotional awareness. Needles plunged from the fingertip into my wrist, injecting things that wriggled up my arm like parasitic worms.

  Blood slicked from my skin to darken the chrome table. It flowed slowly, like mud.

  Then my shoulder twitched. I saw it from the corner of my eye. Steady, in rhythmic succession the muscles spasmed, starting behind my shoulder blade to end near the base of my neck. Then the top of my arm did the same thing, then near my elbow, and finally down, partially obscured by the finger, close to my wrist.

  "That is good," a puppet said, without emotion.

  "But we've only just planted the network." Devich sounded concerned.

  "Continue."

  "Not if it is too strong. I will suit her, but I won't hurt her!"

  "Continue."

  Over and over my arm twitched, as the wriggling below my skin intensified. Then, suddenly, the finger clicked loud and echoing, and everything stopped.

  I blinked down at my wrist as the finger lifted. All I got for my trouble was a hazy image of blood and wire.

  The finger withdrew. Another rose in its place. Wide, with a thick hinge at each knuckle, and brazenly golden amidst so much chrome and white light. This one also hovered above the mess of my wrist and I winced as it lowered, though I felt nothing, and loosened more saliva.

  "Shhh," Devich murmured. "Don't be afraid."

  The fingertip opened like an insect's jaws and clamped over my wrist.

  "Be a good girl, keep still. Just a moment."

  The pressure on my wrist – all around it – grew until I was certain it had to break. Then the finger clicked like its thinner brother had done, folded in on itself, and withdrew.

  There was something on my wrist when I lifted an uneasy head to peer at it. Something that glowed. Not with the lamplight, but with its own power. Colder, artificial. If I could have shuddered, I would have. A good, long one that touched every hair, that eased out every creep.

  Not only did the thing on my wrist glow, but it moved too, spinning in a slow, encircling rotation.

  "This is your suit," Devich explained.

  Suit? It was some strange bracelet, more like jewellery than a suit. Then I remembered the photographs on the walls, the adorned wrists, the ankles. The waist.

  The waist? What about the neck, what I had assumed was a necklace? Would they stick needles into my throat, pierce my blood and breath and plant something that wriggled, that crawled, that glowed and spun?

  My body remained numb, heavy and limp, and I couldn't struggle.

  The first finger whirred into existence again, this time down at my right foot. I couldn't see it properly, but I knew it would be hovering, pumping its fluids and charging its pion-power. Anticipation of its weight, its pressure, its penetration ran unfelt tremors through me.

  If my legs twitched the same as my shoulder, I didn't see it. The fingers repeated their ministrations on both of my ankles, then over on my left wrist. Strangely, it felt no different on the stitched-up skin there. I almost threw up when two fingers, larger than the ones that had destroyed my wrists and ankles, latched onto my waist and pushed down hard.

  I stayed awake until three new fingers rose around my head, thin and tentacle-like. They arched above me, and clamped themselves over my throat so hard darkness spotted my vision. Then there were needles. And crawling things. And pumping fluids. I felt it all in that numb way, the way that assures you there will be pain, oh, there will be pain, but not now. Not just now.

  Devich whispered from his distant can as two of the fingers withdrew, and ejected the empty glass tubes that had held their colourful fluids. "Let it go. You've done so well, Other knows, better than I thought you could. So let it go, let them finish, and sleep. Can you sleep for me, my girl?"

  As I closed my eyes I saw Devich's face, the cheekiness in his slightly upturned mouth. Not, Other help me, the metallic arch of the fingers. Not the new canisters that slid in to replace the empty ones they had ejected. Not the things that filled them, fibrous, soft and wiggling in the glass, as they lowered themselves past my face and into my throat.

• • • •

I was still on the table when I woke, but I was covered by a grey blanket of roughly woven wool, and the lamps were dimmed.

  Devich stood beside me, holding my hand in his.

  "Why did you do that to me?" Something pressed against my throat as I whispered. Small twinges of pain told me the numbness was wearing off. "I'm sick of this. People keep doing things."

  "Oh, Tanyana." He pressed his forehead to the back of my hand. I could only see him from the corner of my eye; my neck was stiff with a strange combination of deadness and blossoming ache. "You have been suited, my girl."

  Your girl? I wanted to explain in no uncertain terms why, exactly, I was nobody's girl, and certainly not his, but heavy eyelids and the threat of more drool stopped me.

  "Hurts," I managed instead. "Pions hurt, now this hurts. Had enough. No more."

  "The pions?" Devich's head jerked up, expression alarmed.

  "Pushed me. No one will listen. But they did."

  "Pushed you?" He hesitated, as though searching for the right words. "I– The suit, it will hurt for a while. So will the stitches. Until the networks stabilize. Until your skin heals."

  Stitches and scars and suit, what did they look like? Was I still me?

  "Can you forgive me?"

  I couldn't quite move my mouth to answer him.

  Devich sighed and stood slowly, joints creaking and back stooped, tired like an old man. "They will take you home now." He squeezed my hand. "You need to rest and to heal and then, then, I would like to see you again." He leaned close. "If you'll forgive me."

  As he called to the puppets, as he held onto my hand, I knew I already had. If not for his self-deprecating laugh, if not for his soft touch, then at least for the water he had given me, when no one else would.

 
 
 
 

I learned to cover the suit if I wanted to sleep.

  Any resemblance to jewellery ended with the silver. The fixtures were large and ungainly, as wide as the length of my middle finger. They were thick too, half an inch at least, so I couldn't pull sleeves down to cover them if the jacket was too tight, and most of the boots I owned were now unwearable.

  Worst of all was the way the silver bands moved. At the centre of each was another ring, a thinner version of the whole apparatus that spun slowly, constantly. I hadn't gathered enough courage to touch it. This extra ring seemed to float on something liquid, it moved so smoothly. Around the floating ring were symbols, signs and letters of scrolling silver, and these were the bastards that glowed. As they moved – not with the floating ring, not with any apparent symmetry or reason – they flickered. Some dipped into dull nothingness while others rose from the silver shining, beaming their arcane meaning proudly.

  I couldn't decide what Devich and the puppet men had fitted me with. Six bands of silver drilled into my skin were hardly what I could call a suit. If it was liquid, then why didn't it spill when I moved my hand? If it was solid, then how in all the Other's worst dreams did it move? And I wondered, dimly like a dull headache, what the pions were doing. Surely they were there, spinning the silver, shining the ciphers.

  The veche returned me to my apartment after the suiting, and left me there. I lost track of days. No one visited. Not the puppet men, not Devich. No member of my circle. I couldn't do much other than throb with my collective pain and hope I was healing.

  I went through the days like I was a puppet myself, someone else pulling the strings. Slowly my hand knitted together, fingers started to look like fingers again. Twisted. Stunted. But fingers. A few days, and I could bend my left knee. I slid from my bed each morning and struggled the length of the apartment, moving, walking as much as I could. Gradually, my strength grew. I cleaned my wounds, washing the bandages in my bathroom sink. I stared at myself in the mirror each morning, wondering what kind of scars would they leave.

  Then I sat in the study, shutters drawn and only one lamp burning low. I had to turn the lamp on manually: remove the small latch on the side of its base – the Otherdamned thing was stuck, and I snared a fingernail in the process – stick my finger in and twist and curse until the valve opened enough to allow the pions to flow. For countless days I did nothing but peer at its light and wonder why I could see it, but not the pions that drove it. I supposed that was the point. In a factory somewhere on the outskirts of the city pions were being asked to create this light. Then, when they knew what was expected of them and were ready to perform it, they were rushed down one of the many great systems that spread across the city, just so they could arrive here, in this lamp, to bind this light for me. I didn't really know what they were doing to create the light. I was an architect, not a lamplighter. The pions had to be generating some kind of reaction, inside that ornate glass tube on its sculptured brass fittings, but I didn't know what it was. I'd never bothered to learn.