Suited (14 page)

“So there you have it.” When he looked up again he was all smiles and regretful nose rubbing and I wondered if I had imagined it. “And now I have answered your questions. It’s not that hard. You could give it a try.”

“Enjoying the walk, are you?” Natasha scowled over her shoulder. “Ever consider, oh, I don’t know, looking for debris with us? After all, that’s why we’re here.”

With a guilty look, Aleksey hurried forward to join her. Mizra held back long enough to whisper, “Did someone swap her with an overemotional double while we weren’t looking?”

“Mizra!”

Lad and I, however, could not be summoned with the snap of a name, and Natasha knew that. So she allowed us to follow at a gradually slowing pace. I was beginning to feel light-headed, even dizzy, and more thankful for Lad’s support than I would ever tell him. He took his responsibilities seriously enough, and did not need to know that without the strength of his arm and the grounding warmth of his body, I could not have kept up even our slow, slightly limping rate.

Natasha took us down all the usual ways: along dark alleys, between lampposts, around the back of factories. But all they yielded were small and sluggish grains, not even a faint webbing of grey planes. It was almost as though the city’s debris had felt with its pions.

Highbell tolled and faded. Natasha allowed us to stop long enough to buy hot roasted sweet potato and cups of chicken broth. The food vendors were having trouble with their stalls. Made out of clear poly inlaid in parts with steel, the stalls usually floated above the street, moving gradually around the city on legs of pion threads – invisible to us, but bright and strong to those who could see them. But these looked more like they were being dragged than shepherded as they lurched along, leaving scratches and dents with their corners in the cobblestones. The three point circles that manned them called out loudly to the usually helpful pions, a desperate and unseemly thing to do in the middle of the street. It didn’t seem to help.

I was ravenous, but the smell triggered my nausea again. It didn’t help that the food was poorly cooked – potato skins burned while still cold on the inside, and the broth watery and overlaid with an fatty film – but I ate anyway, aware how much I needed to. The meal sat heavy, sloshing in my stomach.

The day wore on and the debris grew even harder to find.

“Only three days,” Natasha muttered to herself. “I’ve only been doing this for three days. Do you think that’s the shortest amount of time anyone has led a collecting team before it was disbanded?”

“Maybe it isn’t just us,” Mizra ventured.

“What difference would that make?”

“Well, if everyone’s having trouble finding debris then we won’t stand out, will we? And they can’t exactly disband every collecting team in the city.” He paused. “Can they?”

Personally, I wouldn’t put anything past the puppet men and the national veche. But I didn’t say so. It was taking all my concentration to keep upright.

When Laxbell sounded, mournful and tired, I knew we had run out of time.

“Natasha,” I said, startled by how weak and wavering my voice sounded. Mizra’s hawk-eyes returned. Thankfully, I didn’t need to say any more. Natasha knew I had to take Lad back to his brother, and she knew she was defeated. Her shoulders sagged. “Yes, all right. Let’s go back. And hope they don’t come to collect the jars for another few days at least.”

Lad stopped pointing out potential hazards on our route. But somehow, his silences were worse. He joined Mizra in attentive, ever-watchful concern, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders instead of holding my hand. While I was thankful, I couldn’t stop thinking that it wasn’t fair. I was here to look after him, not the other way around. No matter what Kichlan said.

The stairs at Ironlattice were killers. I staggered too many times, and even Natasha seemed concerned about me by the time we returned to the toplevel.

“Not even two.” She sighed as she added the jars to the four full ones on the shelves and returned the empty ones to the table. The shelves looked so bare like that, so stark. What hope would we have, when the veche came to collect?

Then Natasha turned to me. “You’re taking Lad back to Kichlan, right?”

I nodded.

“And getting home from there…” hesitation “Would you like some help?”

I almost fell over. This wasn’t too strange, considering Lad was the only thing holding me up, but even without the now-constant pain and exhaustion, Natasha offering to walk me home would have knocked me from my feet.

“That’s it,” Mizra said. “I have to know.” He approached Natasha, peered at her, head tipped. “Did you hit your head on anything?”

“Pardon?” she asked between clenched teeth.

“You’re worrying about the jars.” Mizra started ticking things off on his fingers. “Offering to help Tanyana home, bossing us around. It’s like you’ve taken lessons from Kichlan. Is that it? Did the old boy teach you a few things? Haven’t got any lectures hidden in there somewhere, have you?”

“Mizra, if you don’t–”

“Tan,” Lad said, quiet compared to Mizra and Natasha’s rising voices, but his frightened tone cut through their bickering like a knife. “He asked if he can talk to you.”

In the sudden silence I forced myself to push tiredness and my rebellious stomach aside. This was my idea, wasn’t it? So I couldn’t tell the Keeper to leave me alone, not when he was keeping to our arrangement.

“All right.” My suit was still sluggish, stretched thin from the night before. I gritted my teeth against flare-ups of pain around the bands, and the solid ache within my bones. Not the usual enthusiastic longing for freedom, the suit felt more like it had burrowed deeper inside me and did not want to leave. It spread slowly over my body, encasing my head last. The Keeper stood beside Lad. He wrung his pale hands so tightly the debris within him bulged between his fingers. His dark gaze darted around the room like he was a trapped, frightened animal. But still, he was keeping his word. He did not touch Lad, or crowd around him, or ramble nonsensical words in his ear. The room was small – doors at my feet and at my back – but at least these seemed secure.

“Yes?” I addressed the Keeper, aiming for politeness.

He nodded, too fast, too hard. I thought I heard the cracking of bones in his neck, bones I wasn’t even sure he had. “You came, Tanyana. Thank you.”

“Are–” I didn’t really know what to say. “Are you hurt?”

His hands stilled. “Hurt? I always hurt.” He opened his palms, stared at his semi-transparent skin rubbed black, then pointed somewhere behind me. “That’s why I need them.”

I turned. The jars were difficult to see in this world, they were small and embedded deeply in the patterns of the door at my back.

“There isn’t much in them,” I answered.

“What?” Natasha, wavering between darkness and the doors, stepped in front of the jars. “No, he can’t have the debris. That’s all we’ve been able to collect!”

I turned back to the Keeper. Debris grains bulged in the veins along his neck and shoulders, squirming like insects or snakes beneath his skin.

“I need them,” he said, simply. Then he began muttering to himself in a strange, meaningless staccato like the words he had spoken with the Hon Ji, before I had killed her. He shook, muscles quivering, and resumed wringing his hands.

I thought about all that debris I had given over to the emptiness last night, what it must have felt like for him to close the door on part of himself and know it was gone forever. Just how much more of that could he take?

“If we have nothing to give the veche, we put ourselves at risk. All of us.”

The Keeper nodded again, and again his neck bulged. “I know. I know. They– they could come. They could be here. Even now. Here.” And his eyes darted and I began to wonder if his shivering was exhaustion and grief for the parts he had lost, or fear.

“They?” I whispered.

“Please?” he pleaded, hands wringing, body bent, everything about him desperate and imploring. “I am so weak. They are so strong. And the doors, the doors. You have so little, I know, but you are the only ones I can ask. The only people I can rely on.”

I turned back to Natasha. “Doors,” was all I said.

She flinched. “But what about us?” she asked. “This will only make us more vulnerable to the veche. That’s dangerous. For all of us.”

“I think we should,” Lad said, his voice quiet. “He needs us, and he hurts, so I think we should.”

Natasha hung her head. “The Keeper tell you to say that, did he?”

“No,” I answered for Lad. “The Keeper didn’t tell him to say anything. Those were Lad’s words.”

“I promised. See, I promised,” the Keeper whispered.

Natasha stepped out of the way.

When I touched the jars they sprung into sudden and sharp focus, as solid as my suited self. I flipped the clasps that sealed them, their lids opened with a soft hiss. The debris grains inside them floated free, aimless in the open air.

I curved my suit into a scoop and collected them. There was hardly enough to fill my cupped palms. I held them out to the Keeper, a small offering, but as Natasha had said, all that we had to give.

He held his own hands over the debris, palms down, while his head tipped back and his eyes closed. The grains were drawn up into him, through his skin. Debris filled the veins in his arms for a moment before being pumped deeper into his body.

He released a great breath. “You do not know what it is like, to have that which was lost returned to you.” He opened his eyes. They were calm. His arms hung loose by his sides. “This debris has not been tortured, twisted, or carved into a tool. It is a relief, and I thank you for it.” A small twist of a smile played on the edges of his mouth. “And there, do you see what it can do?”

I glanced over my shoulder. The door that made up part of Natasha, part of the wall, part of the table and shelves, was smaller. Not by a lot, but noticeable.

I felt something within me give. Such a small amount, we had just given him, and yet what a difference it had made. His fear, his pain, so obvious a moment before was gone. However brief this glimpse of strength, of sanity, it showed just what the Keeper could be, if only we helped him.

We could not do it with our suits, with our jars and our quota. At least, we could not do it for long before we were discovered, and punished. But Fedor could. Yicor, Valya and their underground, Unbound revolution. They might not know it, but they and their plans were the only, and most unlikely, thing that could help the Keeper now.

So that was what I had to do. Even if it cost me my safety, even if it put our collection teams in danger. Even if it brought Lad to the attention of the veche, or threatened the stability of every pion system in the city. The Keeper needed our help. How could we have thought about saying no?

“I understand,” I said and met the Keeper’s eyes.

“I believe you do.”

And then I shattered it all, by asking, “Who are they?”

He faltered. “They are impossible,” he whispered, eyes darting, hands clasping. Back to where we had started, back as though he had not absorbed any debris at all. “That’s what I think. But there are so many gaps, now, so many spaces in my memory. So many spaces in me. Maybe I do know them, maybe I have forgotten. It has been a long time since they sent me a Half who could actually help me, you know. One who remembers. One who understands. One who can connect. So long, and I am old and tired–” The Keeper dissolved into his dark and door-filled world. I stared at the spot where he had been for a long moment, trying to understand any of what he had just said, before pulling the suit back from my face.

The lamplight that lanced in through the toplevel windows was sharp. How long since Laxbell had sounded?

“So that’s the new plan, is it?” Natasha said, bitter. She leaned against the shelves with their open, empty jars, and ran her hands through her hair. The bright lights gave her face heavy shadows. “Whatever debris we find, we give over to him?” When she glanced up at me she looked exhausted. “I don’t think we will last long.”

“I know,” I said. Slowly, I dragged my suit back into its bands. After a day of quiet sluggishness it was finally taking up its usual battle of wills. “Trust me, I–”

The suit pinched me. Silenced, I blinked down at my own clothes, at the stomach I could not see beneath all the layers of cloth. Though still not fully withdrawn, the suit was no longer spread across my abdomen, only the scars from its last attack – those solid streaks of deeply woven silver – remained there. How had it pinched me?

“Tan?” Lad leaned forward, touched my shoulder. “You okay, Tan?”

Almost as though it felt him, the suit reacted. It pushed into me, like hands pressing against my belly, while the bands at my neck and on my right wrist slipped from my control, coating my upper body and flicking Lad away with a spasm.

He gasped and started back. I could barely breathe, for all the pressure. Spots of light dotted my vision. I tried to clutch him, as I sagged onto my knees, but I could not move my right arm. It felt like it did not belong to me. It felt like the suit was in control.

“Tanyana!” Mizra hurried to my side, hands lifted and hovering. In response, the suit slipped further down my back and across both shoulders. “What’s the matter? Are you ill? Does it hurt?”