Debris

I didn't pull away, but I did make a face. "You should try sleeping with these sometime."

"It's the small things that are hard to get used to at first. Here." He kept one hand on my knee as he slid open the buttons on his jacket and pulled dark cloth from a pocket. "You might need to wait a few more days for your skin to heal, there's nothing I can do about that. But these are for you."

There were five of them, tight circles of a dark cloth that stretched in my hands. "What are they?"

"To cover you. So you can sleep." He took one from me and ran his fingers along it, demonstrating the elasticity. "These will hide the light." He placed the fabric back with its fellows. "Helps you sleep." And the cloth would hide the horrible metal bands from the rest of the world. He didn't say it, but I could read it in his face.

I had never hidden before. Would I do so now?

Devich collected his cup from the rug.

I lifted an eyebrow at him as he sipped, carefully. "Is that all?"

Crestfallen, he replaced the cup on the floor. "Well, I still need to help you with the pain. Show me your wrists."

Wary, I did so, shoulders tense, ready to snatch them away.

"How are your wounds?" He inspected the suit and lifted bandages along my arm.

"Healing slowly."

"Do they hurt?"

I described the pain, the changes and the rises and the rare, rare dips. He listened, expression hidden.

"I will show you some exercises. Keep the muscles working, and they will heal faster. Pay special attention to your neck. You need to keep the blood vessels and nerves there healthy."

I lost track of the bells as Devich tortured me some more. He bent my wrists, he rolled my ankles and bowed me from the waist. He massaged the tender muscles around my shoulders. Hurt like the Other's own claws, left me feeling twitchy and sore and irritable. The monster even waited for his tea to cool to room temperature before drinking. What kind of Other-spawn would do that?

Finally, he loosened more pions across my skin, to ease the damage he had done. "It hurts now, I know."

"Oh, do you?" I wrapped myself in my arms as he took the cups away, determined to stay in the chair for at least another sixnight, and possibly never move again.

"It won't hurt as much tomorrow. Trust me."

"Why would I ever trust you?"

Devich smiled, and drew his jacket from the corner of my desk where he had tossed it. His sleeve disturbed two old-fashioned graphite pencils I had bought for the novelty, never imagining I might actually need to use them. I watch him rearrange them. His hand was shaking.

Was I really that horrible? To look at, to touch, to force himself to speak to?

"Because I know a lot more about debris than you do, Tanyana." He kept his back to me as he shrugged on his coat. "You might be able to see it, but I've spent my life studying it. I worked with suits more primitive and painful than yours will ever be. I coached dozens of collectors, helped them through the beginning, when everything is nasty, painful and new. You're not the first collector I've visited to teach them how to sleep, whose knotted shoulders I have eased, who's resisted the exercises I designed for their own good. You're not the first, and you will not be the last." Smiling, open and easy, he flicked buttons into holes. "You're not the first, Tanyana, but by Other, you're the strongest."

Curled into a chair, sulking, I snorted a laugh. "What could possibly make you think that?"

"You can't know how quickly you tied to the network. Some collectors take weeks to heal as much as you have in the past, what is it now, sixnight? Yes, it's only been a sixnight. And your suit is generating, it started generating the moment it touched your skin. You are strong, Tanyana. Please, in the coming moons, with the coming changes, remember that. You are strong."

I had no idea what to say, so I didn't reply.

"And do your exercises." Grinning, Devich left me. I heard the door close, the sizzling click of the pion lock, and silence. Lovely silence.

The skin around my suit stung when I pulled the dark covers on. My left hand screamed protests. But it was worth the discomfort to sit in darkness – actual darkness – and silence. Didn't have time to move from my chair before I fell asleep.

4.

"As you appear well enough to make a scene in the tribunal chambers-" a puppet man, standing in my doorway, passed me a small white card "-you are doubtless well enough to begin collecting. Leave now."

I stared at the side of his neck, at his jaw, his eyes. Nothing. No seams, no wooden hinges. But I had seen them. I knew it. "How do you know that?" Two days since Devich had been here, two days since I had met Volski in the city. Had Devich told them? But I hadn't told Devich about the tribunal records. "What are you doing? Following me?" But how could these wooden puppet creatures have followed me without being terribly obvious?

"We know that you are ready to begin collecting, Miss Vladha."

I met his dirty-wall eyes and wondered what was going on behind them. "And what will you do if I don't?"

His expression didn't change.

"I am not a debris collector," I hissed at him. "I don't belong with those people. I was pushed, do you hear me! This isn't right, it isn't fair!"

The puppet expelled a long sigh, the most human thing I had seen any of them do. And in that movement I caught a glimpse, tiny and almost hidden by pale hairs, of a line etched down his neck to disappear beneath the collar of his shirt. Fine, thin, dark. But there. Definitely there. "You tried to reopen a tribunal, did you not?"

"Other's hell, how do you know that?"

"Let me assure you, Miss Vladha, that if you do not follow our instructions, if you do not meet up with your collecting team by breakbell this morning, you will be brought before a tribunal of your own. You will repay the veche for the damage you caused, and for the skills you have lost, one way or the other. If not through the collection of debris, then through a sentence of manual labour in the colonies. Abandon your duty, and the veche would have no choice but to strongly condemn such a blatant waste of your newly acquired talents. And as you might imagine, miss, there are few positions for a woman with no pion-binding skill at the edges of civilisation."

Something inside me quailed. I tried not to show it. "You wouldn't really want that. Set up a tribunal and all I'll do is tell the truth. That's the last thing you want." But my voice shook, however much I wanted it to hold steady.

"You refuse to understand, miss. The truth has already been told. Backed up with testimony by senior veche inspectors, no less. The matter is ended." No change of expression. No bluff to call, no threat to challenge.

I looked down at the card in my hand.

Sublevel, 384 Darkwater

8th Keepersrill, Section 10

"Eighth Keepersrill? Are you mad?" Dawnbell had just sounded. How did he think I could travel so far before the next bell?

But when I looked up the puppet man had gone. Too silently, too quickly.

I rubbed my face as I closed the door, and resisted the need to return to bed, pull blankets over my head and pretend none of this had ever happened. Instead, I wrapped my piecemeal suit in the black bands Devich had given me. They were easier to fit now, the skin around the silver mostly healed. I had discovered in my first, nervous proddings of this newly touchable skin that the suit went further into me than it appeared. When I tried to squeeze my finger under the edges I couldn't find a gap between skin and silver. It was a part of me now, deeply.

I had discarded most of my boots – left them on the street for beggars with small feet – so the shoes I pulled on were not as high as I would have liked, not as tight to my calves or made of the kind of hard leather that could keep out cold slush and street-funnelled wind. I made up for it with heavy woollen pants and stockings underneath them. The shirt I picked was the same snowmush grey as my pants, with sleeves long enough to cover my wrists. Then I wrapped myself in my comfortable jacket, tucked my watch into a pocket and again, I stepped out into the city.