Debris

15.

Movoc was silent as I returned to my flat above Valya's house in the smoky mid-afternoon, her streets empty of anyone but the enforcers, architects and healers scrambling to clean up the damage. I kept as far from all of them as I could manage, head down. But my body had not come through the night unscathed and I wasn't as agile as I would have liked to be, nor as hidden.

"Tanyana?"

I stilled with the voice, so out of place in these backeffluents and rills.

"It is!" A second voice, closer.

I looked up to see Volski running toward me, arms open, face smeared with ash and dirt, but glowing with fierce joy. "Tanyana!" Those arms wrapped around me and lifted my feet from the stones. I dangled in his embrace, watching the rest of my former circle from over his shoulder. Tsana, hands lifted to her mouth, was stumbling toward me like a drunk woman, legs wobbly. Zecholas broke away from them too, mouthing "My lady?" over and over.

Then Volski let me go. He beamed down on me and I felt dull – empty compared to their light. Debris to their pions. "They said collectors had been killed!" His hands flexed again, moved for my shoulders before he could pull them back. Did he need to touch me to be certain I was there? "It was an accident, with debris, and six collectors had been killed before they could control it. I thought… we thought… oh, I'm so glad it wasn't you!"

We thought? Worried about me, were they? Their fallen centre.

I couldn't share in my circle's joy. "Many more were killed than that." My voice was raw, it sounded like sand scraped down my throat, uncomfortable to my ears. "Technicians, binders. People in the street. So many people in the street." Was that the suit, scraping words with its legs?

"They were?" Volski's sunlight faltered. "Tanyana, are you all right?"

Devich had been taken from me, but taken to be healed. I had saved him.

I had to believe that.

Zecholas hovered by Volski's shoulder. "My lady?" he asked. His gaze swept from my ash-flecked hair, to the torn clothes, the weight I couldn't put on one leg, the hollowness in my eyes I knew had to be there. A hollowness I could feel tunnelling deeper.

"Not any more," I told him. Then, to Volski, "Let me go, I need to get home." I needed to tell Valya I was well, tell her it was over. Needed to spend a very, very long time lying down.

Across the street, behind the rest of my huddled circle and their probably terribly embarrassed new centre, a spot of darkness drifted by. Not ash, this one. Something solid, flesh-like, wiggling. My suit spun that little bit faster, and tension travelled in spasms from my wrists to shoulder.

It was over. Wasn't it?

"Oh." Volski stepped back. Something in me pulled tight like the suit, something that told me pushing him away like this was foolish. But I had tried to tell Volski the truth, and he hadn't listened. Volski, who had known me so long and so well. Volski, who I had always believed I could trust. If he wouldn't listen, if he refused to believe me, then what chance did I have to get the others to hear me? To help me.

"I'm glad you're well." Such sadness in that face, the same look he had given me on the bench in front of the gallery. It felt so long ago. "We all are."

Were we? Llada's face was so red she shone from the building they were repairing across the street. Was that Savvin's back? I hoped it was, I hoped he couldn't bear to show his face. But Volski was here, and Zecholas, and even Tsana, holding back, still pressing her lips like she was trying not to be sick. That meant something, I supposed.

"Thank you," I managed. Another glob of debris floated by, closer this time. I clenched my hands to try and control the spasms. "Be careful. There was a lot of debris." More than I could hope to explain. "The effects could linger."

Volski nodded, grave. "You be careful too," he told me, and didn't move as I started walking again, just watched me with that same, sombre expression.

A few steps, and I halted. Tsana was here. Tsana, the only person who had believed me. "Tsana, do you remember what I asked you?"

She hurried forward, removed her hands long enough to reach for mine, realised I wouldn't take them, and pressed them back on her face. "Yes," she said behind fingers, muffled.

"While you are all here, in this area of the city, do you think you could?"

"Oh, yes, of course." Her cheeks were growing flushed against her fingertips. Didn't she want the others to know who she met at parties?

"Can you remember an address? Can you be there, tomorrow, laxbell? It isn't far from here."

"Ah-" She glanced over at Llada's red face.

I shifted the weight away from my aching leg again.

"Of course."

"Great." I gave her the sublevel address. "Tomorrow."

And I left the circle, wondering if they would find bodies in that rubble, or if the enforcers had already swept through, diggers in tow, removing every last one. If the healers had saved any of them.

The bruises on my upper thigh flared into painful life as I crawled into the space between a rickety fence and the back wall of a tall building. Mud clung to my knees, it hung heavy from the front of my jacket. I pinched a blob of debris, the last of a cluster we had found clinging to the unstable and rotting fence.

The lights of the whole street, only two blocks away from the sublevel, flickered in poorly kept time. The rest of the team were working on them. It wasn't even thirdbell, and we had already filled almost twenty jars.

Groaning, I edged my way out of the gap and straightened. If this kept up we would have no problem meeting quota. And I knew that should have been a good thing, but there was so much of it, I could only imagine the debris was residue, parts of the planes that had escaped. So each glob, either floating in the air or stuck to buildings or oozing from sewerage vents, reminded me of Devich, half-dead and in a healer's care. Or the voice that had pleaded with me. Or dragonfly wings. So I wished things were normal, I wished we had to rely on Lad just to come close to what the veche demanded of us. Because none of this was right.

"At least this is easier." Mizra, hand laden with full jars, stretched his back out, wincing.

I couldn't stop the "Hmmm" under my breath.

"Not risky enough for you, is it?" Mizra must have heard me, and snapped, "No fun if you can't put your life and the life of others in-"

"Mizra!" Kichlan shouted from his lamp at the end of the street. "Enough."

The twins, muttering together, moved on to a lamp as far from me as possible. With a sigh, I nodded to Kichlan, and he just looked away.

I couldn't shake the feeling we'd all moved back a few sixnights and one.

When we could carry no more we returned to the sublevel. I missed the scent of porridge cooked on Kichlan's fireplace. I missed Lad's unerring and probably dangerous focus on the flames. I missed everything that had, for a moment at least, made this cold room a new home.

As Kichlan arranged the jars on the shelves, Lad and Uzdal sank into couches. I glanced at the sun creeping in through the half-size windows. Lax was bells away. Nothing to be concerned about.

"Tanyana has a point," Kichlan said, suddenly. He turned from the shelves, a jar still in his hand. "This isn't normal."

I gaped at him. "Er-"

"No, Kichlan." Mizra leapt to the fray, eager anger in his face. "No! Walking out of that Other-hole wrapped in her suit, that isn't normal! Saving that cursed arrogant technician, of all the people who died, that isn't normal! What we found out there was debris on lamps. That happens all the time."

"A whole street of them?" I murmured.

Kichlan sighed. "You're not helping."

"A whole city of them for all I care!" Mizra spat the words. "Anything is better than yesterday."

I pictured the dead technician. I could still hear screams as buildings fell from the sky. "Yes," I said. "It is."

"Then stop complaining about it. Stop wanting it to happen again!"

I spluttered, made inarticulate by fury, by a bitter sense of how Other-damned unfair this was.

"Mizra!" Kichlan snapped. "Tanyana doesn't want-"

Sofia, looking pale, drawn, had been leaning on the wall. She pushed herself upright. "Think of everything that has happened, since she stepped foot in here. Three emergencies, Kichlan. We don't get that many in thirteen moons and a day. Something is going on." She pinned me with a vicious, animal-protecting-her-young eye. "And it's got to do with her."

"Yes, Tanyana," Natasha said with her all-knowing, uncaring smile. "You do rather seem stuck in the middle of it."

Shivers traced fingers along my spine. The anger of pions, the rage of debris, all rushed around me like waves.

"She can do things with that suit no one should be able to do," Sofia continued. "She steps into the middle of the Other's own hell and suddenly the whole thing stops? We don't know her, Kichlan, not really. For all we know she's making this happen-"

"I'm not!" Wrapped in their anger, surrounded by memories I did not understand, I struggled for something to make sense. "I didn't do any of this. The pions, Grandeur, the planes. I don't know why they are so angry."

Uzdal, face dark from where he lay on the couch, glared at me. "What are you talking about?"

I took a deep breath. After everything we had been through, my collecting team would surely believe me. "Grandeur was the name of the statue I was building when I fell."

Reluctant nods. Lad's head was hanging so low I couldn't see his face.

"That wasn't an accident. I tried to tell the binders in my circle, the pupp- the veche men, no one believed me. But someone pushed me off. Someone who dug too deep into reality and summoned angry, violent pions. I'd never seen any like that before." I swallowed, saliva sticking in my throat. "Like the debris was yesterday."

The room hung heavy with silence, broken only by Natasha's unsympathetic snigger.

"So, what?" Sofia pressed on. "What does that mean? Pions are out to get you? Debris is too? Don't be ridiculous."

"Doesn't sound very likely, does it?" Natasha smirked.

"I know," I said. "But it's true. You saw what happened yesterday-"

"You're saying that was your fault?" Uzdal pushed himself off the couch. "All those deaths, they were all your fault?"

Other. Was I saying that?

"Just like the statue?" Uzdal asked. "All the damage that caused, all the debris teams brought in to collect the mess? That was your fault too?"

"No," my voice cracked as I spoke. "Someone else was-"

"They were targeting you!" Mizra shouted. "You just said it. They pushed you off, no one else! If they were targeting you then it was your fault."