Suited (24 page)

He scowled at me. “What?”

Another breath. “Why this place. Of all the laboratories in Movoc-under-Keeper, why did you choose this one?”

He ran a hand over his face. “I don’t know why it matters.”

“Tell me–”

“If you must know.” He interrupted me and dropped his hand abruptly. “Several sixweeks and one of careful observation. Bells spent hiding in the shadows, waiting for the veche to gather jars full of collected debris. Like you and Kichlan, I stalked several different collection teams and followed most of their jars here.” He released a deep and resonant sigh. “Even before I allowed myself to be suited I watched, and waited. All that time.”

“And after that, you decided on this laboratory?”

He nodded. “Most of the debris was brought here. In fact, over the past three sixnights and one, all of the jars came here. You saw it with your own eyes, you and Kichlan. I thought my reasons for choosing this place were obvious.”

So, had he made that decision on his own, based on the intelligence he had gathered? Or had Fedor – had all of us – been led to this laboratory? I wouldn’t put that past the puppet men, they rarely left anything to chance.

And where had all those jars of debris gone?

“Tan?” Lad spoke so softly I almost missed it in the ringing echoes of anger and frustration. “I think he is here.”

Silence settled over us.

“The Keeper?” Fedor hissed.

Lad’s voice hitched. “Tan, please. I think he is crying.”

Crying?

I gave myself another moment to become reacquainted with standing on my own two feet, before I stepped into the vast space.

We were standing on a platform, raised above the rest of the room and fenced in with steel tubes similar to those in the stairwell. There were no steps down to the empty floor. Gritting my teeth I grasped the handrail and used it to swing myself down. Thankfully, the platform was not very high.

I walked down the middle of the empty room. The place seemed to reverberate. As I walked, I imagined the size of whatever had left such deep tracks in the grey painted floor, and had required bolts so thick they threaded into holes almost the width of my wrist. Where had they all gone? And how had they been taken from a room beneath the ground that had no doors?

I released more of my hold on the suit with each step, careful not to loosen the stubborn knot of control I maintained in my abdomen. As the metal crept over my eyes I realised why the room felt so alive and dangerous. And why the Keeper would sit here and cry.

The entire room was made of doors. Solid and so real I could smell newly stained wood and the oil on their iron knobs. I glanced over my shoulder but could not make out anyone else. Not even Lad. There were only doors. No space between them: doors on the walls, the ceiling, the floor. This entire room was nothing but an opening to another, empty world.

The Keeper sat in the centre, legs pulled against his chest, face pressed to his knees like a child. He wept, shoulders shuddering, black tears streaming down his white cheeks.

I ran to him. The doors rattled beneath me.

I crouched at the Keeper’s side and held out my arms to him. He turned – so much like Lad in this moment, so large yet lost and vulnerable – and wept into my chest while I held him. Against my firm suit he felt soft and barely real.

“Is this where you have been?” I asked him, when his shuddering had subsided. “Here, all alone?”

The Keeper drew a deep breath and tipped his head back to face me. Ragged streaks of the debris within him traced terrible patterns beneath his skin. His hopelessness, his grief, written in black and white.

“Do you see what they did?” he groaned out the words.

I glanced around us. “I think we should get you out of here.”

The Keeper shook his head. Debris bulged in his neck. “No! I must stay here. I must close these doors when they open.”

“They are opening all over the city.” I tried to help him up, but his weight hung dead and heavy in my hands. “Not just here. You need to close those other doors too.”

He hiccupped a helpless sob. “Too many. I can’t keep up.” He wiped black onto his pale forearm. “They tell me I will fail. Over and over they whisper from the darkness. How can they, Tanyana? Unless they are just like me? But that can’t be, can it? There is only one Keeper.” He tipped an imploring face to mine and I had no idea how to answer. “What good am I, if I can’t stop them? This is what I was built for. What will happen to me, Tanyana, if I fail?”

Built? I blinked. “Who built you?” I whispered, hoping none of the others could hear me. Who had given him this impossible task?

It had never occurred to me that the Keeper was following instructions. I had always believed he simply was; born of debris, part of debris, working to defend us from the beginning of all time. Or something like that.

He ignored the question, or did not hear it. “There is no point trying. I am already failing.”

I fought the need to shake him; he felt so fragile I was afraid he would break. “You are not alone,” I told him. “I am here to help you. And can you see them?” I gestured with my head to Kichlan, Lad and the others. “They are here to help you too. Collectors, Unbound, pion-binders and a Half. All of us. We came here to help you. We wanted to find the debris that had been collected here, and set it free.”

“You can’t,” he whispered. But at least he had stopped crying.

“I know. It is gone.”

He shook his head. “No, Tanyana.” And he stood, holding my arms and drawing me up with him. “It is still here. Can’t you see what they have done?”

“Still here?” I glanced around us. There was nothing, surely, but the doors.

Then I thought of Zecholas, unable to see past the walls of this place, unable to see through the warm, steam-rising vents. Suddenly I realised how odd that was, how wrong. Steam, even when the debris was gone. “Oh.”

Together, the Keeper and I approached the wall. When I touched a door all I felt was wood and a faint but terrifying vibration.

“Let me go for a moment,” I asked the Keeper. “The doors are too strong here.”

He nodded, firmer now, as though my presence had somehow strengthened him.

I drew the suit in from my face and hands. It tugged against me, fought with a numbing throb deep inside my bones. I pushed it aside. I had far more important things to worry about now.

“Tan? You okay?” Lad asked behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder. He, Kichlan and Fedor had followed me down, while Yicor, Volski, Zecholas and the rest of the Unbound waited on the platform.

“You said something about doors?” Fedor asked. When I didn’t immediately respond he turned to Lad. “What’s happening? What is the Keeper saying?”

“Leave my brother alone,” Kichlan growled.

I ignored them both. “I am okay, Lad.” He didn’t appear particularly reassured. I turned back to the wall.

My fingers brushed against concrete where a moment ago they had touched wood. It was not, however, the deep cold I was so used to in Movoc buildings, nor the chill that had seeped up the stairwell. It was hot, slightly damp. And if I turned my head just enough, I caught steam rising softly from the walls in the weak pion-generated light.

“Other.” I let the suit slip back over my hand and curled sharp claws onto the end of my fingers. It didn’t take much, a little scratching, a little digging, and a layer of thin paint and plaster fell away to reveal metallic walls. And not just any metal. Silver and smooth and glowing, faintly, with a touch of blue. “Damn them.”

Why would they do this? Create a room out of debris, out of suit metal? What were they trying to achieve?

“What is that?” Kichlan peered into the gash I had made.

“Debris,” I answered, shortly. “The debris that was stored in here.”

“Impossible!” Fedor gasped.

Kichlan’s searching expression deepened into a scowl. “It looks like a collecting suit. It looks just like the same material!”

“That’s because it is,” I answered, sharply, and covered my face.

Back in a world of doors and darkness the Keeper still stood beside me. His tears had dried, their black streaks fading, their spilled grains and planes reabsorbing through his thin skin. “Do you see?” he asked.

“I do.” Useless. That was how I felt, so pointless and helpless and small. “Why have they done this?” I whispered.

He released a great, sorrowful breath. “To keep it from me.” He waved a hand at the doors. “Like that, it is beyond my touch. Twisted and tortured into something that was once a part of myself, but is no more. It is debris without my will, the will that tempered and controlled it. It means the end of everything.”

Fear for everything
.

“Like the monster,” I murmured. “Like the snakes.” Like the suit?

He nodded.

“But why would the puppet men do this?” I hissed at him. “Surely they are not fools, and I know they are not blind. They know you exist, they can see you too! And they have been warned.”

“I– I cannot–” His control, his strength, fell from him.

“You cannot what?”

“Believe it.” He clutched his head and squeezed his skin until darkness swelled between his fingers. I recoiled from the sight of it. His veins, his debris, pulsing, his head juddering, his body hunching over itself like a child hiding his face. “Impossible.”

“Hush, please. Hush.” I breathed out the words, leaving my insides tingling and taut. “We came here to help you. You are not alone.”

His fingers eased open and he looked up, eyes empty and desperate. “But I should be. I was created to do this. Just me. Only me. They should not exist.”

I didn’t know what to do, what I could possibly say to calm him. Maybe I really did need Lad. Maybe he should have been here, with the Keeper, instead of me.

So, I said, “I closed a door,” because I did not know what else to say.

And his shivering stopped, instantly. His eyes widened and he straightened, he looked me in the eye. “You closed one?”

“It was only open a crack.”

He watched me for a moment of disconcerting silence. “Still, you closed it.”

“There are others.” The words poured from me. Anything to maintain his focus, to sustain this lucidity. “The city is collapsing. Bit by bit. Door by door. At least, that is what I believe.”

The Keeper squared his shoulders. “I must get back to the city, then. I cannot fail them. This is why I am here. Isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“And I do a good job, don’t I? You think I do, Tanyana? I try hard. All the time. So hard.”

“I do.” My throat was dry and my stomach aching. “But, you should probably hurry.”

He hesitated. “I won’t run away again. Promise.”

“Good. Stay where we can find you.” I was going to be sick. And that would be very messy on the inside of my suit.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and began to fade. “For finding me.”

I withdrew my suit as he disappeared, drawing myself out of that door-riddled world and returning to an argument sharply echoing through the empty room. I nearly leaned against the wall for support. Then I remembered what it was made of, and found Lad’s conveniently positioned chest directly behind me instead.

“It can’t be!”

“It’s impossible!”

“I would have known!”

“Unnatural!”

Kichlan and Fedor shouted at each other, but they did not appear to be disagreeing.

“What happened to keeping quiet?” I asked Lad, who had stuck his fingers in his ears.

“Oh, Tan.” He gripped my shoulders, pressed his body against my back like I could become a shield between him and his raging, red-in-the-face older brother. I didn’t mind. It was keeping me upright. “Please tell them to stop.”

“I don’t think they will hear me.” I cleared my throat, and tried a sharp, “Enough!”

It seemed to do the job. Silenced, Fedor and Kichlan both turned on me. I felt Lad shrink away from those intense eyes, that sweat and anger, and I didn’t much blame him.

“Is that why you asked me how the suits were made?” There was so much more than anger in Kichlan’s face. Anger I could deal with. But hurt, I didn’t want to cause that. “You already knew they were debris, but you still wouldn’t tell me. You need your secrets, don’t you? Why don’t you trust me, Tan? Even after everything we have been through together?”

I deserved his anger, I knew it. I still couldn’t tell Kichlan the truth, but I didn’t want to keep pushing him away either. It was selfish of me. I needed his touch, but I had guided his hands.

I nodded. “Yes, I did know.”

“How did you find out? How long have you known?”

I couldn’t answer that.

“What did the Keeper say?” Fedor snapped, forcing me to focus on him instead. “Tell me what he wants us to do!”

At least it gave me something to concentrate on, other than the look on Kichlan’s face.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, and placed a finger on the warm wall. “We cannot release this debris.”

“Because it has been changed into suit metal?” Kichlan asked. I nodded. He looked down to the bands on his wrists.

I pried Lad’s fingers free and led him across the open floor. Kichlan and Fedor hurried behind. Lad helped me clamber back onto the platform.

Zecholas touched the low ceiling. “We will have to climb the supporting beam again, I’m afraid. I can’t alter anything else in this room.”

Of course he couldn’t. Was it luck that one small square had been left in this room, a closed door only an architect could open? I had stopped believing in luck.

“Are we safe?” I asked Volski, aware of the futility of the question but unable to remain silent.

“I am blind here. There are lights within our bodies, and our breath has added some life to the air. That’s all.” He glanced at the smooth ceiling. “But we should be able to leave the way we came in.”

“Well, let’s hope so.”

Zecholas began drilling us a horrifically difficult passage out. As the first of Fedor’s Unbound helped each other up into the tight space, Volski gripped my wrist.

“Wait,” he whispered. “I see something.”

Together we turned to stare into the empty room.

“In the air. The pions we breathed out, they are... changing.”

Fingers of dread clutched my spine. Behind me, Kichlan was pushing Lad up into the hole. I hoped he could not hear us.

“They burn,” Volski murmured, trance-like. “They flare like tiny crimson suns, and die. They just disappear.”

Crimson suns? Like the pions that had thrown me from Grandeur, those psychotic bursts of fury too unreal, too impossible, for the rest of my team to see?

One by one the weak pion lights that lined the room flickered off. As darkness spread I hurried Volski into the tunnel, accepted Kichlan’s help up and tried very, very hard not to scream.