Suited (17 page)

All I could feel, for a terrible moment, was the spinning of suit and the tugging in my bones as I wondered, yet again, just how much of me was left.

“But that’s impossible. If your pions really were gone somehow, then you simply would not be here. Yet, there you are. And it’s not just your abdomen. Your head, I can hardly see any of your brain! There should be countless pions there, frantically working to keep you living and thinking. But I can’t see them. Forearms, some of your legs.” He ran a hand over his face. “It’s impossible, but true.”

Gaps within me, breaks in the pions that made me?

“You mean, like, holes inside her?” Uzdal asked, voice strangled.

Another shake of Edik’s head. “I don’t think so. If there were holes, if the pions really were missing, then you’d see the damage. She wouldn’t have a head, for one. Rather, I think there is something else – something that isn’t made of pions – in the way.”

Something not made of pions? But everything, surely, was made of pions. They were the foundations of our world, the raw materials.

Everything, that is, except for debris. And the Keeper.

Slowly, I lifted my hand, stared at the spinning, begging, tugging suit.

Was it even possible? There was only one way to be sure.

“Watch my hand, please,” I said. My voice sounded distant, even in my own head. “Watch the pions. Tell me what happens.”

I released the suit gradually. Already aggravated, it pulled for freedom, wanting to coat more than just my upraised hand. I held it in tight check, the memory of its last attack still fresh and sore.

As it slithered its slick way over my palm, the back of my hand, finger by finger to the very tips, Edik gasped.

“What do you see?” I asked, but I was already certain of the answer.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “It smothers the pions. I can’t see through it, I can’t see past it.” He fixed his gaze on me. “You don’t think much of me, miss. I know that. But I was once greater than this filthy place attests, and I am telling you the truth. Your pions are not too deep for me to see, it is not my lack of skill that hides them. That, that
stuff
. It wipes them away.”

I reined the suit back in.

So what did it all mean?

I wished Kichlan was here.

“The suit is in your way?” Sofia frowned. “But you could see me clearly. You could,” she hesitated, “operate. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does,” I answered for him. “My suit is not like yours, Sofia. You know that, we all know that.” My suit was tied to more than my bones, my muscles and my will. It filled me. It made me. And now, it was trying to control me.

Oh, what a weapon it could be.

“I have a question.” Mizra lifted a hand. What kind of class did he think this was? “I thought everything,” his raised hand waved around the room, “was built from pions. Us, the room. The suit. So why can’t the healer see it?”

I was beginning to understand something, as impossible as it seemed. “Why do we wear these suits?” I asked, a rhetorical question, but Mizra took it up.

“To collect debris,” he answered.

“Why do we need them?”

“Because they are the only things that can touch debris,” again, he answered promptly. Too much the attentive student. “Nothing else, not our fingers, not our tools… Oh.”

“Oh, indeed.” The strange mixture of liquid and solid, of light and symbols that swum in the bands and deep beneath my skin, I had always wondered how it worked, what its pions were doing to create something so strange, so unlike anything I had ever seen. Anything pion-made.

“Isn’t that impossible?”

“What?” Sofia glanced between us. “What’s impossible?”

“The suit,” I said. “It’s not made of pions, that’s why Edik can’t see into it, why he can’t see past it. The suit doesn’t only collect debris. It is debris.”

Edik laughed. It sounded a little strained. “Now that is impossible! Everything is made up of pions, to begin with. And debris is just rubbish. It certainly can’t be used to create anything, particularly nothing as complicated as your collecting suits.”

I shared a weighty, silent look with Mizra, Uzdal and Sofia. One thing we knew about debris was it certainly was not the inanimate waste product everyone else believed. So was it really that implausible? After all, the ancient Unbound had written books with debris. The puppet men had created monsters with it. Who could say they didn’t also create weapons with it?

Other, I needed to talk to Kichlan.

“What about the child?” Uzdal murmured.

I felt a guilty pang. I had forgotten about that.

“Well.” With another awkward laugh Edik drew a kerchief from his pocket and wiped his face “As I said, with that, whatever it is, in the way like that, I can’t be sure. But I think, yes, very probably, you are pregnant. The pions I could see have clustered toward your abdominal region, and the division of energy leads me to believe your body is currently sustaining another life. But I cannot tell you what kind of child grows within you. A binder, or a collector.”

Strange, but it didn’t take a moment to digest such news. Maybe it was because I had already come to believe it. Or maybe it was because, compared with what I had just realised I was carrying around, bearing a child sounded so normal.

“Right then.” I slipped from the edge of the bed and began dressing. “Just don’t expect to be paid the full amount.”

“But–”

I turned, held a finger up and silenced him. “You don’t seriously expect me to pay for something you didn’t do.”

Edik wiped away more sweat. “One hundred kopacks.”

I snorted. “Fifty.”

“That’s robbery!”

“One hundred is extortion.”

“Seventy-five!”

“Sixty, or nothing.”

Sweat ran in rivulets down the side of his neck to stain his already dirty collar.

“Fine.”

We touched rublies, and Edik led us out of his filthy home. “I am sorry I couldn’t help you. Believe me, I am.”

I nodded, unsure whether I believed him, unsure whether I cared.

Back on the streets all I could think about was Kichlan. He would be home with Eugeny and Lad. Surely he wouldn’t mind an unscheduled visit? As long as I didn’t turn up injured, freezing and newly evicted it would be better than my last surprise appearance at his door.

“Tanyana?” Mizra stopped me as I began to stride ahead.

Surprised, I met his concerned expression. “Yes, what?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I was thinking I would ask Kichlan. I mean, he has a history with suits.” I blinked. Maybe they didn’t know that. How much of his past had Kichlan told the rest of our old collecting team? “Well, he’s been doing this for a long time. I think I should run this theory past him.”

“The baby, Tanyana!” Sofia snapped, grabbed my arm and shook it. “Not the suit! What are you going to do about your baby?”

Something sharpened within me as I stared at her, as I met her frustration and disgust. I breathed deeply. The suit stilled.

“I don’t know,” I said, and meant it. I really didn’t know.

“Edik didn’t say it would be a collector,” Mizra said. “And he certainly didn’t know if it was like– Like Lad.”

“I heard him.”

“So I think aborting it could be a mistake, don’t you?” Uzdal finished the thought.

“But the choice is yours.” Sofia still held me. “Whether or not the child is a collector you will have to deal with the consequence of its birth. You will be responsible for its life. Do you want that? Can you handle it?”

I stared at them, one at a time. “You realise, don’t you, what Lad is.”

Silence.

“He is a Half. Broken by our standards, maybe, but vital – absolutely vital – to the future of this world.” I pried Sofia’s fingers from my sleeve. “And you two,” I glanced at Mizra and Uzdal, “think I should kill this child if it is like Lad. If it is a Half.”

They shook their heads with a slightly unsettling synchronicity. “We didn’t say that,” Mizra said.

I turned to Sofia. “And you think I should kill it regardless?”

“No!” Sofia said. “I am telling you that your choice will impact not only your life, but the life of your child. And you should think about what kind of life that would be. What kind of life Lad has had.”

“Halves are–”

“This is the modern world, Tanyana.” Uzdal stepped forward, his expression like cold stone. “You might have contact with the Keeper, but most people don’t even believe he exists.”

“But–”

“Let him finish!” Mizra snapped.

“It’s all very well to stand here discussing higher purposes and the good of the world, but this is a person we are talking about. A life!” Uzdal took a deep breath and lowered his voice. We were starting to attract attention. “In this world Halves live in danger, in fear. You know what Kichlan has gone through to keep Lad safe! Is that what you want? Another scared creature who cannot understand why they are forced to hide? And do you want to be just like Kichlan? Always worried that the veche will come and take your child away?”

I remembered what Kichlan had said. That people like Lad, people we now knew to be Halves, would be taken by the puppet men and never seen again.

“We don’t know this child is a Half,” I whispered. “We don’t even know if it is a collector.”

“Exactly.” Sofia crossed her arms. For some reason, that made me feel better. Like we were back on solid ground, relating in a way I could understand. “That’s why you have to weigh up the risks and make a decision.” She glanced away. “Like I did.”

Together, Mizra and Uzdal looked to the ground, and suddenly the weight of what Sofia was saying hit me. She must have felt like this. Confused and hurting, but hopefully not alone. She’d had Mizra and Uzdal’s support, and maybe that of the father, whoever he was.

I baulked a little at that thought. I couldn’t even imagine Sofia – sturdy, hard working Sofia – enjoying an irresponsible romance. She didn’t seem to care about anything other than debris collecting. Well, that, and Kich–

Kichlan? When I first met her, I’d watched Sofia follow him around like a loyal puppy. I hated myself for thinking that now, but it was true. And even now, the way she questioned me about him, the way she looked at me, she’d even waited for Lad with him on an evening or two.

It, it couldn’t be. I could feel myself blushing. Did she know the way Kichlan felt about me, the way I felt about him? Did she hate me for it? Had he kissed her too, beneath unsteady lamplight? And had it led to… to this?

I didn’t believe it, not really. But I needed to know. “Your child. Who… Who was–” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

She met my eyes and her gaze was flinty, her expression closed. But she knew the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said, her voice soft. “The father was no one you know. There is more to my life than debris collecting.”

I tried not to feel quite so relieved.

She looked away. “He never saw me that way,” she whispered so softly I didn’t think she expected me to hear. “And now, he never will.”

But where did all this leave me? I still didn’t know what to do. “I can’t make that decision. Not yet.”

“Don’t take too long,” Sofia said. “Or it will be made for you.”

I nodded. “I’m going to talk to Kichlan.”

She looked away again, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Do whatever you need to do. Just make sure you think about it.”

“I will.” I turned, and hurried away from them, already thinking about the suit, and debris, and whether Kichlan could shed some light on the whole thing.

The trip to Edik’s surgery had taken up only the morning’s bells. I made my way through the back streets toward the eighth Keepersrill. Until I turned the corner, and almost collided with Tsana.

For a long moment I stared at the woman who had ruined my architectural career and taken my place as the head of a nine point circle. She stared right back at me, squinting as the light from the band peering out at my neck shone brightly in her face.

“Tsana,” I said her name through clenched teeth. “What are you doing here?”

She was not alone. Behind her, my once-circle wove pion patterns over the supporting wall of a collapsing factory. On Rest. Why was my critical circle working on a Rest day? Not even debris collectors worked on Rest.

My surprise must have shown. Tsana straightened, her expression firmed into superiority, and she waved little dismissive gestures at me. “All circles are busy at the moment, just like us. Movoc-under-Keeper needs us. We don’t have time to take a day off.”

Behind her, the repair wasn’t going well. Of course, it can’t have helped that the circle’s so-called centre was not guiding the gathered pions at all, but rather stopping for a conversation. But it was more than that.

I approached them. The nine binders were clustered closely together, ringing the wall in an inelegant semi-circle. Not how I would have arranged the circle, certainly – pion threads could get tangled that way, and extricating them was nothing but a waste of time and energy. They were attempting to reconstruct sandstone blocks from the broken shards cluttering the ground. But every brick they made slipped quickly into mud, and from the pleading, rambled words and frantic expressions, it seemed they were having trouble simply attracting enough pions to work with in the first place. I crouched, close to the bottom of the ragged break in the wall, and scooped up a handful of mud. As I watched, it dried to sand, thinned until it was almost transparent, and then seemed to dissolve into air.