Suited (31 page)

He reminded me of the Hon Ji half, and I, at least, had showed her enough mercy to end her suffering quickly. I had not sent her to death by undoing.

Aleksey teetered, fell to the side. His arm dissolved where he landed, his shoulders sank and caved in. He stared at me with that same look of utter confusion and emptiness that I had seen on Lad’s face as he died.

“Tanyana?” he whispered. The wires in the mess that had once been his wrists, his ankles, waist and now his neck, fell to sand, to countless tiny specks like stars, and the emptiness whisked them away in a flurry of sparking wind. “I– I’m sorry.”

Then the emptiness took Aleksey’s body and scattered him too.

“The door, hurry!” The Keeper pushed me upright. I didn’t have the strength to fight him as he placed my hands on the wood, hands no longer wrapped in silver; my suit was a coward. Together we pushed. The door shuddered to stay open, the wind wrestled with us in turn. But slowly, too slowly, the door closed.

At that last moment, before the door clicked and the lock snapped and we both collapsed, breathless to the dark floor, I saw something in the darkness. Impossible, I knew, because there was nothing on the other side of those doors; a dangerous, ravenous nothing. But still, I saw flickers of light, like the breeze-swirled remnants of Aleksey’s suit, unsteady at first, then blazing into something strong. Stars grouped close together and connected in a tight, curving formation, in dozens of colours from suit-light blue to a dark, warning red. It made no sense, because nothingness did not have a colour and nothingness did not glow. And it did not howl like distant wind or crash like distant waves. And it certainly did not smell like smoke, like gas, like the heady energy of pions.

Together the Keeper and I closed the door on such impossibilities, these figments of my unstable imagination, conjured up by a mind fighting to stay alive.

“Thank you,” I breathed out the words.

Lying beside me, the Keeper shook his head. “Every time we do this, we lose a piece of this world. How many scars do you think it can handle?”

How many scars could anyone handle? Too many, I thought, too many to still live.

The exhausted suit retracted sluggishly from my face. Darkness and doors were replaced by the ruin of the basement. Great fissures in the concrete and broken protrusions of stone were all that remained of Zecholas’s valiant binding. Half the ceiling had collapsed; I could see hand-shaped scars on the concrete where Aleksey had clawed his way out.

Then faces lurched into view and Sofia was pressing something against my chest – something soaked in blood – and crying and screaming, but I could not hear her. All I could hear was laughter, unnatural, inhuman, manic yet mechanical, echoing over and over in my head.

I knew I should be dead. Aleksey had stabbed me somewhere in my spine, and twice in the chest. I had to fight to breathe around the liquid in my lungs. Yet somehow, I lay there, watching Volski take the bloodied cloth from Sofia while Zecholas peeled away my jacket and shirt, but baulked at the tight uniform beneath them.

“No,” he mouthed. Or spoke; yet still I could not hear.

I knew what he must be seeing, what sent him so pale. But even so, I levered myself up and stared down at my chest. Two silver gashes tore their red-edged and puckering way through the dark uniform and into my skin. One above my right breast, the left just below. How much of my blood was suit-tinged now, with each unnatural pulse of a heart that should not beat?

“My lady?” Volski supported my head and shoulders, he helped me sit up, while Zecholas covered me again with my clothes. “How?”

Bent over, I coughed and spat out blood until my throat was raw. I hurt. Chest, back – everywhere. The suit was weak, its healing slow. “How am I alive?” I could hardly speak.

They helped me stand. Volski beneath one arm, Mizra the other. Sofia wept, and Uzdal shook. I couldn’t see Natasha, Fedor, any of the others. Kichlan. Or Lad’s body.

Still standing on the platform, raised above the chaos in the basement, the puppet men laughed. They tipped heads back at an impossible angle, opened their mouths so wide I thought their faces would split in two, and clapped while they roared without humour, without merriment, without any real emotion.

“Because of what I am.” I spat more blood to the floor. It swam, thick with living specs of silver. “What they made me into.”

The laughter stopped suddenly, like a switch had been flicked. Eyes fixed on me. They still grinned so widely. “You continue to amaze us.” I couldn’t tell which of them was speaking.

I wished I could stand on my own feet, I wished I could have been strong before them and had not needed to rely on the support of my debris collectors and pion-binders both. As it was, I scowled at them and knew that was the best I could manage. “You toy with us, you play with us like dolls.”

“Oh no, never dolls.” A spate of whispering, and I had the strangest sensation that they were insulted by the remark. “A prized sword, polished and sharpened, that is what you are. Named, even, and blessed, inscribed. Whatever ceremonies were once performed.”

I did not understand them. My stomach rolled and for a brief and terrifying moment I wondered what had happened to the child within me when Aleksey’s blade plunged into my lower back. How far had it gone in? And could this body – little more than death and metal now – even support a life other than its own?

I pushed both thoughts aside. Aleksey dissolving. My unborn child struggling.

Lad, dying.

No, I focused on the puppet men and tried for strength. “I came here to kill you.”

They paused. The muttering ceased.

“You threw your best weapon at me–”

“Second best, Miss Vladha,” one of them whispered.

“–and yet still I stand. You should run, flee. While you can.” But I was all too aware of just how weak I was in my half-dead suit, they could do anything to me and I would not be able to fight back. Not yet. Not until we healed.

Zecholas stepped forward, his fists tight. “Get out of here,” he grated over the words. “Or we will see how strong you are without your weapon.”

Volski passed my arm over to Uzdal’s shoulders and stood beside Zecholas. “Leave.” His voice, so quiet, so darkly furious and grieving, sent shivers through me. I hated that he sounded like that, that I had given him such pain, by drawing him back into my life. “And don’t come back for her.”

Collectively – it was still difficult to tell how many of them there were – the puppet men tipped their heads to the side. Their false and stitched-in grins slid to something smaller, sly. “The sword does not turn on the arm that wields it.” A group nod. “But a misused blade is blunt and weak. Return to your sheath, little sword. Apply the oil and sharpen. See how long it takes before you are begging to be drawn.” Even as they spoke the puppet men grew hazy. They did not leave through the door behind them, but seemed to turn into mist, and I blinked because something had to be wrong with my eyes, and they were gone.

Sofia moaned. “What are they?”

I shook my head. They were mad, they were impossible, they were like darkness to the Keeper’s own broken light. But I was too exhausted, too stunned and aching to know the answer. All I wanted was to close my eyes and wish the basement and everything that had happened within it far away.

“We need help over here!” someone called from the rubble. Volski and Zecholas hurried over, with Sofia close behind. Uzdal and Mizra helped me follow at a much slower pace.

At least one of the vats had been breached. Debris blobbed and floated from a crack where a chunk of ceiling had crashed down on top of it. The basement around it was a ruin: shards of concrete speared up from the floor, water streamed down from a burst pipe, and lights flickered fitfully with the interrupted pion flow.

Fedor and a handful of his Unbound wandered the basement. In the guttering lights and cement-dust cloud the vats seemed to stretch out like trunks of a looming, colourless forest. Blood trickled from a cut in Fedor’s forehead, his face was smeared with dust and bruising. He cradled a wrist against his chest.

Zecholas hissed as Volski, visibly shaken, turned his face away. “We did not mean to hurt you! We were trying to destroy that… That thing. I did not mean…” His words faded into helpless silence.

Fedor did not acknowledge him. He just stared at me in horror, skin pale beneath his injuries and dirt. “What happened?” He choked and coughed over the words. “What did you do to Aleksey?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even stand.

Volski and Zecholas began putting the basement back together, even though it was a battle for them with the loose debris tangling their bonds, and the residue emptiness from an open door scaring their pions away. The floor Volski and Zecholas remade was lumpy, the cracks and stitching visible, and the ceiling they fixed sagged. They could do nothing for the broken vat.

Their work was slow, and the Unbound aided with their bare hands – lifting rock away before Volski and Zecholas drew it back into the architecture. Not everyone had escaped the rubble with little more than blood and bruising.

Fedor found Yicor’s body. The old man lay crumpled beneath a jagged slab of ceiling, pinned to the side of the vat. Fedor wept as his Unbound took the stone away, and Zecholas spread it messily back into the ceiling.

Three more of the Unbound were trapped by rubble. Yan had been hit by a lump of concrete that had ricocheted from Aleksey’s upraised hand. He had bled to death. Anna had been crushed when she had tried to help him. The third was alive, Egor, a man almost as old as Yicor, though trapped. I did not stay to watch the Unbound free him.

“Kichlan,” I managed with a groan. “Please.”

Mirza and Uzdal, transfixed by the scene, hesitated. Then they carried me around the vats, deeper into the basement.

Kichlan lay beside his younger brother’s body, on the hard, cold floor. Natasha knelt beside them. In the weakened light it was difficult to see Lad’s blood, or the wounds that had killed him; wounds so like my own. He could have been asleep.

“Tanyana.” Natasha stared at me in disbelief, still bloodied and bruised by what I had done to her but apparently more mobile than I. “What happened to you?”

I shook my head. What was there to say? “Down.”

Uzdal and Mizra helped me to the ground. I managed to prop myself against the vat and find Lad’s hand.

He was still warm. I took that hand and pressed it against my cheek. But he didn’t move, didn’t crush my fingers with his unconscious strength, didn’t whisper a strange abbreviation of my name.

Beside him, Kichlan shifted. He sat, fitful light flickering shadows and stark colour over his face. His eyes were empty, his face wet and smeared with blood.

“I–” There was nothing I could say. Sorry? What did I think that could do? Would it bring Kichlan’s brother back? Would it change the past, so I’d never made my way into their lives?

Lad had died for me. I knew it, Kichlan knew it. We could never be the same.

Kichlan held Lad’s other hand. Together, we hunched in the darkness of the debris vats as cement dust settled over us, as the Unbound treated their injuries, while debris collectors wept and pion-binders did what they could to rebuild this place, and we held his hands. We would not leave him here alone.

“My lady?” Volski, so close to my ear I could feel the warmth of his breath. “My lady, you should wake. We must leave.”

Wake? Surely, I could not have slept. Coughing, I struggled to move, to unwind folded legs and straighten a crooked back. Someone touched something cool and preciously liquid to my lips and I drank, and I wondered who had thought to bring water.

I glanced around. They were all watching me. Fedor standing, arms crossed. Zecholas and Volski hovering and concerned; Sofia standing behind Natasha, who crouched on the floor, with Uzdal and Mizra like a guard on either side. The half-dozen Unbound I did not know waited in a loose group, some pacing, some curled or hunched on the ground.

Kichlan had left me by the vats. He knelt before four bodies wrapped tightly in colourless cloth. Judging from the missing jackets and scarfs, Volski or Zecholas had patched the shrouds together with the few pions they could find to help them.

My throat was raw and my head pounding. I leaned on the vat for balance and pushed myself to my feet.

Mizra leapt forward. “Say something before you do that! Let us help–”

But I didn’t need it. Oh, I was weak. I shook so hard I could barely control my arms. Numbness and tingling travelled through me with equal vigour, and the newly cut scars in my back and my chest pained me. But I was healing. Somehow, I was healing.

Fedor spat, and looked away from me. “Look at her. Stabbed, crushed, yet she stands, yet she moves.”

I didn’t blame him.

“We need to get out of here,” Volski made to take my arm. Shuffling, pathetic, I moved away from the vat before he could touch me.

“I’ve lost track of the bells,” Mizra said, as he and Sofia helped Natasha her feet. “It could well be dawn. Either way, I don’t want to know how many Mob are waiting for us outside.”

“We aren’t going that way,” Zecholas said. Despite the battle, despite the basement repairs and the exhaustion I could see in his unsteady hands as they grasped for pions, Volski was building us another way out. A set of stairs, leading from one of the basement walls, beneath the streets above us, to open up in the lower floor of a run-down building two blocks away.

I had thought, once, that I created miracles from the centre of my architect’s circle of nine. But nothing we had once done, no majestic building or symbolic statue, was as grand as what the two traumatised points of my circle were doing now.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. Wasn’t there any more water? “I should not have slept.”

“I don’t think you had much of a choice.” Kichlan stood with a low grunt. He wobbled for a moment, head bent as he stared at the wrapped body of his brother – easy to identify, by far the largest of the four – then he turned his empty eyes on me. “Even you, even that thing inside you, could not have recovered from that fight with Aleksey so quickly.”

I wavered, and he grabbed my shoulder. Not that he was much steadier than me. “Careful, Tan.”

And suddenly, I could cry. And Kichlan was holding me, and we were weeping together. I was dimly aware of Fedor organising people to carry the bodies, while Mizra convinced Volski and Zecholas to let Kichlan and I be. I cried onto Kichlan’s shoulder. Because I would never hold Lad’s hand again. Because I would tell him no more stories, or eat his apple pie or allow myself to be swept up in that energy, and that smile.

We wept. Because Lad was gone.