Suited (21 page)

Kichlan could not stay the night with me, he had Lad to look after. As I’d expected. I kept my back to him as I pulled my uniform on.

“I always liked the way you looked in that uniform,” he said, and held me again. Not skin to skin, but almost the same thing. The uniform was like that. “And now can you tell me why you’re keeping so many secrets?”

I unwound my arms and stepped away. “What?”

He smiled. “Don’t give me a look like that, you know I don’t deserve it.”

“You didn’t…” I swallowed. I had a horrible sense that somewhere, Devich was laughing at me. “You didn’t do that with me just so I would answer you? Did you?”

His smile became disappointment, a kind of weary sadness. “I thought you knew me better than that, Tan.”

Tan. Uncertainty tugged at me like it was a suit itself.

“I–” I had lied to him all night, lied in the worst way possible. Surely Kichlan deserved truth. But that made it even worse. I really couldn’t tell him now.

“Never mind then.” Before I knew it, Kichlan brushed a light kiss against my lips. I waited for the demands, for the questions, for the promises he would expect me to make. None came. “I should get back. I need to be there when Lad wakes up. And I could do with a bit of sleep myself.”

I felt my cheeks redden.

He chuckled. “Why so bashful now?”

True, I was the one guiding his hands.

“Don’t think this means I’m going to give up,” Kichlan continued. His eyes were still fierce, his body and breath still close enough to warm me. But in his smile he held onto that gentle sadness. “You aren’t alone. And one day, I’m sure you’ll believe me. Although I don’t know what else I could possibly do to show you.”

He made to turn. I grabbed his hand, pulled him back to me, and kissed him deeply. “I do believe you,” I murmured, then kissed him a while longer.

I watched as Kichlan dressed, then descended Valya’s rickety stairs. He lifted a hand and turned into the dark night, hunching his shoulders against the sudden cold.

With him gone, I pressed fingers to my abdomen. He was Kichlan. I could tell him, couldn’t I? I could trust him, couldn’t I?

The bands on my suit spun faster.

“Damn it to all the Other’s black hells!” Natasha railed as she lifted the flimsy grain of debris she had just spent half a bell crawling on her hands and knees to collect. “This is ridiculous, this is impossible! Where has all the debris gone?” She stalked toward Lad and me, with her debris brandished high like a weapon, and her face dark as thunder. “Where?”

Beside me, Lad shrank against my shoulder, quite a feat for someone as large as he.

I shook my head. “We don’t know, Natasha.” I understood the worry, bright with fear in her eyes. Yesterday – Mornday – we had managed to fill another jar and a half of debris. It was already Highbell on Thriveday and we hadn’t done much better. Time was running out. We had collected so little that it didn’t matter that the Keeper had not returned to receive his share. We would never make quota.

So I understood her concern, even if I wished she would stop shouting at Lad about it.

Natasha growled an inarticulate noise and snatched a jar from Mizra. She shoved the debris in, forced the lid down and continued along the street. “Get moving!” she called from over her shoulder. “We’re not finished yet.”

Mizra let out a low sigh, something closer to a groan. “I’ll be glad when this day is over.”

“What makes you think tomorrow will be any better?” Aleksey asked, his voice strained.

“A man needs something to hope for.”

“What are you doing?” Natasha yelled, already far ahead. Too many curious faces glanced in our direction at the noise. I wished she could keep her frustrations to a slightly quieter level.

We hurried to keep up, and Mizra watched me critically. “How are you handling this, Tanyana?”

“Better than you might expect,” I answered, and it was the truth. Ever since Rest night the pain and the battle of wills, had quietened. I’d even managed to eat my dawnbell supper two days in a row. Valya was delighted.

Mizra narrowed his sharp blue eyes at me, obviously sceptical. “And have you made a–”

“No, not yet.”

“You should–”

“I know, Mizra. I know.”

Aleksey listened, trying to be unobtrusive about it. Lad, it seemed, was too frightened of Natasha to pay attention to much else.

“You certainly seem to be feeling better,” Aleksey murmured, as Natasha set us to work on a street lamp. The driver of a cheap coach with unsteady wheels had stopped her in the street, complaining of faults in the steering mechanism and an uneven acceleration that no amount of maintenance seemed to be able to fix. Lad and Mizra crawled beneath the chassis while Natasha climbed to the driver’s seat and started digging up the upholstery.

I knelt, and was able to bend forward and scrape a long, thin strip of suit into the gap between lamp base and paving stones. “Yes, I am feeling much better actually.”

“So suddenly?” He focused on extending his suit into a pointed, narrow implement as similar to mine as he could make it. Aleksey had not yet mastered his suit, but he learned quickly, and I had to admit the result was pretty good.

“It wasn’t that bad to begin with.”

“Ah, must have looked worse than it was, then.”

“Exactly.”

Together, we poked at the greening copper, carefully avoiding each other’s gaze.

“Nothing,” Aleksey muttered, inspecting his clean suit. “No debris at all.” He sat back. “Damn it, I’m starting to understand why this is getting to Natasha.”

“Weren’t you trained to handle stressful situations?” I asked, with a grin. “To remain calm under attack?”

Aleksey chuckled, instantly good-natured again. “Ah yes, and if we were actually doing something, achieving something, I wouldn’t mind. But all this walking and searching has been for nothing! That’s hard.”

“That’s collecting.” I glanced up at the light. While it burned steadily, only flickering slightly – like the passing of clouds across the sun – the fact that it was on at all in the middle of the day while its companions along the street remained silent and dark, meant something had to be going wrong. And that something was likely to be debris messing around the pion system.

“Let’s try the valve,” I suggested.

Lamps like this one, on a public street, worked on an automated valve system spread throughout the city. As evening fell they were activated, all at once, triggering the flow of light-creating pions. With my collecting suit I was able to pry open the metal panel riveted to the middle of the lamppost, which covered the valve and it complex system of pion-bindings.

“Nicely done,” Aleksey said.

Sure enough, we found debris inside the valve. A thin splattering of dark grains clinging to the spindle tip and clogging its thread. By the time we had cleaned it – painstaking work involving thin suit tools and lots of guessing – we had collected barely enough to fill my palm. At least it started the valve working again, and the lamplight above us slowly died.

“See what I mean.” Aleksey scowled at the lint-looking ball in my hand. “That hardly seems worth the effort.”

“True enough.” I returned the plate, securing it to the post with careful blows of my suited hand. The copper bent easily, as though it was as soft as paper. “But you can’t tell me there weren’t frustrating times when you were an enforcer.”

He rubbed his nose. “You’re right, of course.”

We turned from the lamp. Mizra still squirmed beneath the coach, Natasha held strips of fabric and packed wool in her arms and argued with the driver, Lad hovered between the two of them, looking worried.

I wrapped fingers around the debris to contain it and decided he could do with our help.

“When I started out,” Aleksey said, as we waited to cross the street together, letting a sleek black landau pass smoothly by. “They stuck me with guarding the technicians.”

I paused, one foot lifted, just about to step into the gutter. “Debris technicians?”

“Yes.” More nose rubbing, so vigorous he left the scarred skin pink. “Ironic now, I suppose.”

“I suppose.” My mind buzzed with possibilities. “What was frustrating about that?”

“Ah, secretive bunch, you know.” We wound our way through foot traffic. My suited hand attracted far more attention than I would have liked. I hid it in a pocket. “Can’t go into this room or that room, don’t look at this, and sign to swear you will keep your mouth shut if you do see anything.”

“Really?” I slowed our pace, pretending to inspect the bottom of my boot. “What were they trying to keep from you?”

“At the time, I had no idea. But now I think it must have been the suits. And all those needles.” He shuddered. “I guess they don’t want too many people to know just what it takes to make a collecting suit work.”

“You could be right.” I scraped my sole on the edge of the gutter. “So what did you do? How could you defend a building when you weren’t even allowed in some of the rooms?”

“That’s what I mean.” He nodded, apparently pleased. “Worst job for an enforcer, so they always give it to new recruits. Patrolled the hallways, in a Fist of two if you were lucky enough not to do it alone. Most of those rooms were locked, anyway. Biggest, most complicated bindings I have ever seen. If you try to get past them, and the locks don’t recognise you, the whole building is locked down. Alarms and Fists summoned from across the city, and every single one of those doors shut tight. So I don’t know why we were there in the first place. Nothing for us to do.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“And dangerous,” he looked away from me as he spoke, as though lost in memory. “Well it would be, if you wanted to break in. Most people wouldn’t even know about these defences. Deep in the world, those pion locks are. Too deep for most binders to see.”

I couldn’t decide what he was trying to say. Was this some kind of warning? What did he know? I scanned Aleksey’s rough clothes, his messy hair, unsure how to approach this. “Who would want to break into a technician’s laboratory?”

He met my eyes again. “No idea. But they’d want to be well-prepared.” No nose-rubbing now. A seriousness that sent tingles of discomfort up from the suit-scars in my belly. “And they’d probably want to make sure they’ve chosen the right side to fight on, you know? Some decisions made rashly, without fully understanding the circumstances, can be the wrong ones.”

I held his gaze, breathless. What was he saying?

And then Lad spotted us, and started waving.

Aleksey’s expression was swamped by a wide smile, and he waved back. I had to wonder, just what was the real Aleksey like? Smiling and self-effacing; boiling with barely concealed rage; or stern and coldly calm? Had I really jus heard what I thought I’d heard?

Did Fedor know about the enforcers and pion locks and citywide alarms? How, exactly, did he plan to get past them?

And why had Aleksey told me about them? No, more than that. He had warned me.

By the time we reached the coach Natasha had tossed the remnants of the driver’s seat into the gutter and joined Mizra under the chassis. Lad hurried over to us. “Natasha is upset and the driver is mad and Miz can’t find anything.”

“Are you two part of this ridiculous group?” The driver lurched over to us, carrying torn strips of upholstery in his hands. “Do you see what that madwoman has done to my coach? What are you going to do about it?”

Lad pulled away, expression terrified. But before I could say or do anything, Aleksey stepped forward. He took the material from the driver and shook his head over it, expression sorry. “Sir, I must ask you to calm down.” There was such authority in his voice, and such a height and breadth to him, that the man did just that. “Now, you understand, I trust, the importance of debris collection and cannot therefore begrudge this woman the enthusiastic execution of her duty.”

The driver met Aleksey’s reasonable, but firm expression with a blank look I was certain Lad and I were mirroring. “Of– of course.”

“I knew you would.” Aleksey lifted an arm and his sleeve pulled back just enough to expose the spinning suit band on his wrist. He guided the driver around, toward the rest of his destroyed seat “The veche is reasonable, you must know that as well. There are many avenues for reparation.” Them they were on the other side of the coach and out of earshot.

“Tan?” Lad whispered into the silence. “What did Aleksey just say?”

I shook my head. “No idea.” Reparations? I supposed that was the enforcer part of him, coming out when he was needed. As long as Aleksey calmed the man down it didn’t matter what he told him.

“Nothing!” Natasha growled behind us. Lad flinched. “What about you two?”

I pulled the small ball of debris out of my pocket and deposited it in the jar Mizra held out for me. If anything, Natasha’s expression soured further.

“I don’t understand it.” She grated out the words. “Something is interfering with the pions in that damned contraption.” She kicked at the coach. “But it’s not debris!”

I thought of pions disappearing, fleeing this city with its opening doors, but said nothing. It wouldn’t help us, even if it was the truth.

“Why did you tear his seat apart, though?” Mizra said returning the jar to its bag.

Natasha scowled at him. “I was trying to get to the gear box – where all the steering pion bindings are, of course.”

“Gear box?”

Aleksey coughed delicately behind us. “The driver is currently collecting his upholstery – he is under the impression that the veche will repair it for him, as long as he brings it all in to the central chambers. Can I suggest we leave him to it, before he realises just how unlikely that is?”

“How did he come by that idea?” I asked with a smirk.

Aleksey coughed again. “You know, I’m not entirely sure.”

We hurried away, through the twisting back streets and alleys of Movoc-under-Keeper.

“I’ve never heard of a gear box,” Mizra muttered, even as he glanced back at the coach and its hapless driver.

“Well, they exist,” Natasha insisted. “And they are usually beneath the driver’s seat.”

“Usually?” I asked.

She blushed deeply. “Not on this one, though.”

“So you ruined his coach for nothing?” Mizra said with a grin.

“Yes. But not on purpose.”

We found no more debris by the time Laxbell sounded, and Natasha released us with more sighing and muttering about jars. When Lad and I met Kichlan at the corner, he wore a similar expression.

“Bad day?” I asked, as I handed Lad over to his brother. “Have trouble finding anything to collect?”

He gnawed on the inside of his cheeks. I touched his jaw, lightly, and he stilled. “You too?” he asked with a guilty smile.

“Yes,” Lad answered. “We didn’t find much and Natasha broke a chair.”

I shook my head when Kichlan cast me a questioning look. That was too long a story.

“Don’t push yourself tomorrow,” Kichlan said instead. “Eugeny confirmed it this morning. Tomorrow is the night. Can you contact your friends in time?”

“Yes.” Volski had left me with details of his contacts on this end of the river, a way to reach him without the kopacks to catch a landau into the city centre or hire a messenger. Of course, it would mean a long detour on my way home, and I wondered why Kichlan had not mentioned it earlier.

But then Lad’s eyes brightened. He took my hand as well and drew them both to his chest, and I realised what Kichlan had given me. A day without Lad’s constant, pleading pressure.

“Tan,” he said. “And bro.” Bright eyes glanced between us. “I want to come.”

Kichlan started to answer, “Lad, no, I don’t think–”