I coughed until I could spit up the brick dust clogging my throat. "Kichlan? What is this?"
"How did it do that?" Someone – Sofia – was talking on the other side of the silver. Not, I noticed, trying to get me out from under it. "It's dormant, Kichlan. Dormant! We haven't even shown her how-"
"Give her help!" Lad shouted. "He says to be quiet and help her!" I agreed with him.
"Tanyana," Kichlan yelled again through the metal. "Don't let this frighten you. This is your suit, just your suit doing what it should do. You need to calm down and get it under control."
Calm down? I thought I sounded like the calmest person here. "How do I do that?"
A moment of half-heard muttering. "Your suit is more than bands of silver."
"I have come to realise this," I mumbled to myself. My voice echoed strangely in the tight space.
"Your suit is all this silver stuff too," he continued, oblivious. "It's in your arms and legs. It's so deep inside you wouldn't know it's there, until it does something like this."
I remembered being strapped to the veche's table. The muscle spasms from wrist to shoulder. The ache, the pressure, further down than any surface scratch could have been. Fluids pumped into me. Fibrous, wiggling things trapped in glass tubes. I had seen it happen, I had known the suit was moving deeper.
"I see."
He hesitated again. "The suit is part of you. Your legs, your arms. You know how to move your arms, don't you? Your feet? The muscles around your stomach, your neck?"
"Of course."
"Then you can move the suit."
I looked up to my wrist. Dimly, I could see a connection, where the silver on my wrist had grown, spread, flattened into the ceiling that now shielded me. The silver was part of those spinning, glowing bands. They were a part of me. And as I thought about lowering my arms that very symbol-scrawled silver bubbled back down into the bands on my wrists.
I blinked against sudden sunlight before large hands scooped me out of fetid sewage. "Tan!" Lad crushed me against his chest. "Too slow, too slow!" he cried.
It took a bit of coaxing for Kichlan to convince his younger brother to put me down. I was so grateful I even accepted Kichlan's shoulder to lean on, deciding walls weren't to be trusted. "Are you all right?" He studied my face, my head, my arms and my shoulder.
"Other of a first day." Mizra would have sounded more sympathetic if he hadn't been grinning evilly.
I fingered the top of my head and ignored him. Some of the bricks had scraped away skin, leaving dots of blood on my fingertips. And even though my uniform and suit had saved me from the worst of it, I suddenly felt sore all over. Exhausted and sore. Because from Movoc's greatest statue to one of its most decrepit walls, the city was trying to kill me. And maybe it was the dust clogging my throat, or the blood on my fingers, or the ache in my bones, but I was starting to wish it would just get it over with.
"How did you do that?" Sofia glared at me. "I thought your suit was dormant. How did you know what to do?"
"I didn't do anything." My head rang with the words. I knew I should have felt more shaken. Frightened by the wall coming down on me, confused by this suit that apparently should not have just saved me the way it had. Maybe it was the blow to the head. I just wanted to close my eyes.
"That's not possible."
"Sofia," Kichlan said in a warning tone that sent vibrations through me from his shoulder.
"Look what you found," Uzdal called from the hole I had made in the wall.
I pushed away from Kichlan's nice, stable shoulder and stumbled around loose bricks to stand beside him. On the other side of the wall was what could only have been an old city sewer. Walls chiselled into stone, not a dollop of cement anywhere, had eroded beneath a trickle of thick slop and made the foundations of at least three buildings now grown on top of it dangerously unstable. But, strangely enough, that barely caught my attention. It was the cluster of debris, squirming in the near-darkness like fat, baby snakes that held my eye.
"It was hard." Lad stood between us, stooping to get low enough to look in. "Should have known but didn't understand so you broke it. Sorry you got hurt, Tan. Sorry."
"Next time, try not to crush anyone." Mizra patted Lad's shoulder, but the large man jerked away from the touch and stomped off to huddle in a corner.
Kichlan watched his brother and sighed, before pointing a finger at Mizra and running it across his neck like a knife. Mizra frowned, but I couldn't help noticing how pale his cheeks were. "That's a great find, Lad," Kichlan said, loudly. His brother showed no signs he had heard. "Let's get it collected," Kichlan told the others in a softer voice.
He unhooked the bag he had over his shoulder and drew more metallic jars from its well-worn brown leather. He passed them out to the rest of the group. "Everyone set?"
I sat on a pile of rubble and watched as the others crowded around the hole in the wall.
"Here," Kichlan said, holding up his wrist and drawing my attention. "This is the way they're supposed to be used."
His suit flickered, more of the symbols rose to the top of the liquid and the spinning inside band stilled. The symbols pressed their sides against each other, swelled, and rose from his wrist before splitting into two solid, silver prongs. They grew, extended into the hole in the wall, pinched a small, wiggling piece of debris and drew it out.
"Debris cannot be touched." Kichlan held the debris over an open jar. "Not by hand, not by instrument, not by anything." He lowered the debris, opened his tweezers. "Except the suit." He sealed the lid. "And the jar."
I stared at the jar. Why? What was the suit made of, and was the jar the same thing? Why had mine protected me, moved without command? And could I ever get it to do something that precise, that controlled?
Kichlan gave me a sympathetic smile. "Sorry, it's been all too much for one day. And we don't usually drop things on new team members when we're trying to teach them either." He winced, and sent a guilty glance at his brother. "Just rest while we clean this up. You can try collecting some tomorrow."
Tomorrow? Another day with these people, this dirty stuff, these horrible silver appendages. What an entertaining prospect.
I leaned against chunks of ancient brickwork and let myself feel the aches. The throb in my head, matched by a larger, broader pain in my shoulder where I had fallen. Sharp twinges from stitches pulled and jolted. Had any dust found its way into my bandages? I would have to strip them all when I got home and clean everything carefully.
Sunlight lanced down from the small gap between leaning buildings. I tipped my head to feel it on my cheeks, and squinted against the pale gold. Were those clouds, edging their way over the blue sky, or my poor eyes made hazy by a throbbing head?
Dimly, I became aware of Lad whispering, "Didn't mean to, didn't know, should have told me." How could I hear him? It sounded like he was right beside me. My head was too heavy to lift, my eyes held closed by the sky's light. "Can't hurt her. Not again. If I hurt her, I can't go out any more."
He's sorry, you know. A voice from the rubble, from the sagging building. Don't blame him. It isn't his fault.
"I know," I whispered.
"Tanyana?" Kichlan's worried face blocked the sunlight. "Are you all right?"
I struggled to sit up, finally levering my body straight with my elbows. My mouth tasted dry, caked with the same dust that weighed down my face. I ran a tongue like paper across my teeth.
"Were you talking to anyone in particular?" Mizra crouched beside Kichlan.
I blinked, spurring tears, and my head rolled on a stiff neck. "Dreaming," I croaked. I must have fallen asleep with the sun on my face.
Kichlan's smile didn't quite ease the worry in his eyes. "Well, it's been a hard day. But no time for that now." He glanced up. "We'd better get moving before it hits."