"Here." Kichlan stopped at a nondescript door once painted in a dark poly-mix, now peeling like snowburned skin.
I glanced around the door, the wall beside it, even the street, but found no number. Helpful, considering the missing street name.
Kichlan turned an old-fashioned iron key in the door's old-fashioned iron lock.
A tight, claustrophobic staircase led below the frozen ground. Dim lights wavered, and I realised with a shock they weren't pion-powered.
"It's gas." I stopped by one of the lights. A small flame flickered behind heat-smudged glass.
Kichlan, several steps below me, glanced over his shoulder. His thin mouth was made firmer and more disapproving by lines drawn with heavy shadow. "Of course."
I stroked fingers along the wall below the light. A faint bump betrayed the presence of a gas pipe behind thin cement and flaking paint. "I didn't think the gas lines still worked." How long had Movoc-under-Keeper employed its factories of pion-binders to keep the lights on? A hundred years, possibly more? And who would use a potentially dangerous, unreliable substitute instead?
"Not many do. Debris collectors are the only ones who use them." Kichlan resumed his descent.
"Why?" I hurried to close the gap between us, my feet slipping on the steps' wet edges.
He snorted. "What do you mean 'why'? You can't expect us to rely on pions instead." The stairs ended at another dark door. Kichlan wrapped his gloved hand around a handle of twisted metal. "Would you trust something you can't control? Something you've never seen and can't even smell, or taste?"
I held back "I would if it's safer than gas" on the tip of my tongue.
Light spilled into the stairwell as Kichlan opened the door. I followed him inside.
My eyesight adjusted to a wide room, sparsely furnished. A low table was pressed into one corner and surrounded by ratty couches and sagging armchairs. Desks lined the wall beside the door, and cabinets crowded another, their doors closed and locked. There wasn't much else. A few empty wooden cartons that didn't seem to serve much purpose. The ceiling was high, with the bottoms of windows letting in light from the street and the occasional glimpse of booted feet hurrying by.
Five curious faces peered at me from the couches and chairs. I clenched my hidden hands in my pockets.
"Found her." Kichlan tugged off his gloves and threw them on a desk that sagged beneath the paper piled on top of it. Paper: another relic from an age before the revolution.
I started to notice the warmth in the room too, and reluctantly withdrew my hands and slipped the cap from my head. "Hello," I said, as I fussed with my hair. The problem with wearing a hat and styling cream at the same time.
"Cutting it close, aren't you?" said a pale young man lounged across one of the couches.
I said, "Streets with no names, doors with no numbers, I have trouble with them. Call it a fault of mine."
He lifted his head to smirk at me. His eyes were sharply blue, his skin heavily freckled.
"We're hard to find, Mizra." Kichlan unbuttoned his coat. "We all have trouble the first time." He hung his coat on the wall and waved his hand loosely at the free hooks.
I undid my coat. They were all watching as I hung up my jacket. I tugged at my shirt collar, feeling intensely self-conscious.
A sharp-eyed woman standing behind one of the chairs stared at my wrists. "How long?" Brown hair framed her face and bobbed as she nodded toward my suit, wrapped and dimmed by dark cloth.
My throat went dry. "Sixnight and one. I think. And maybe another day or so." It all jumbled together, the falling and the healing.
"Other." When she brushed a strand from her face her suit flashed brightly silver in the morning glare. "Doesn't it hurt, the cloth?"
I raised my wrist. "No. Not any more, at least."
Her face crinkled into a disgusted expression. "Other."
"Is that unusual?" My eyebrows lifted, tugged stitches, and I eased them down.
She snorted a soft laugh. "Unusual? You could say that."
The pale young man, Mizra, chuckled. "We thought you might be fun."
They thought?
"Natasha, Mizra, enough." Kichlan frowned at both of them. "Tanyana, welcome to your debris collection team." His voice drawled the words out a little, making them bitter, tinged with sarcasm. Hardly reassuring.
I swallowed hard in the silence. "Thank you."
"You have met Mizra."
The young man waved his hand in the air, suit glinting on a soft wrist.
"His brother Uzdal."
A nearly identical man sat in an adjacent armchair and regarded me gravely. Twins, they had to be. It was rare to see twins in Movoc-under-Keeper; it was rare to see them in the whole of Varsnia. Few lived beyond infancy.
"You now know Natasha." Brown hair, sharp green eyes. Right.
Would I remember any of this?
"This is Sofia. If you need anything, she's the best place to start."
A small, solid woman glanced up from the wad of paper she was reading. She chewed the end of a graphite pencil. Thin hair, a featureless brown, was pinned in a knot at the base of her head. She wore a shapeless dress in layers of grey.
"And this, finally, is Lad."
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself. But when Kichlan turned to Lad his voice softened, and he smiled. I'd been starting to wonder if he was capable of it.
Lad was even larger than Kichlan. Poorly cut blond hair stuck out around his head, and his cheeks had a glow to them, strangely childish beneath a fine layer of stubble. He had been sitting on the edge of an armchair and leapt to his feet at the sound of his name. He grinned at me, so widely it seemed to split his face, and shuffled forward.
"He told me about you." Lad grabbed my hands, squeezed them in his own, and shook vigorously. I hissed as he tugged at sensitive skin around my suit, and the wounds beneath my left glove. "Knew you were coming."
"Be careful, Lad." Kichlan touched the larger man's shoulder. "Be nice to the new lady."
"I am." He squeezed harder and leaned in close to me. His breath smelled sweet, like sugar drops. "He's glad you're here. Waiting a long time."
I tried to pry my hands from Lad's grip. "Thank you."
Beaming like a newly risen sun, Lad gave me one final, extra-enthusiastic shake, and released me. I staggered a few steps and grabbed at the wall for balance.
Kichlan frowned at Lad, but even so his face held none of the disregard he had shown me. "What did we talk about?"
Lad fidgeted with the hem of his shirt and shuffled foot to foot. "Be nice," he said, voice muffled, head low. "When the new lady comes, got to be nice."
It was hard to imagine a man of his size, his strength, talking like such a child. I rubbed at the throb he had set off in my hand. How could I relate to a new circle like this? No, not a circle. Not any more. They were a collecting team. I had to get used to that. Resentment from Natasha, flippancy from Mizra and nothing from his twin, disdain from Kichlan and the small one, now spiced in the middle with Lad's excessive enthusiasm. A bizarre lot.
"And how do we be nice to her?" Kichlan continued to lecture the large man.
Lad lowered his head closer to his chest and mumbled. "Don't touch. Keep back."
"That's right. Are we going to be careful, now?"
Lad nodded. In places, his hair was long and frizzy, and it jiggled wildly. "Yes."
"All right. But I'll be watching you. So you be careful."
When Kichlan returned his regard to me, his face closed up again. It was like a door, a glance of a bright room and suddenly I wasn't allowed to see any further, any deeper. "My brother is enthusiastic. He likes to meet new people."