When I left my improvised bedroom, Kichlan and Lad were descending. Kichlan was dressed and ready, his damp hair flat and more organised than I had ever seen it. I wondered how long that would last as it dried. Lad rubbed his eyes, and from the look of his wide, oversized shirt and uneven-length pants, he was not exactly ready to face the day.
"Took hours to get him to sleep," Kichlan muttered as he caught me looking at his brother. "Can't imagine why that would be."
It was too early to be lumped as the cause of all of Kichlan's ills, so I ignored him.
Lad was snappish as Eugeny served us dawnbell supper: bread that was so over-toasted I guessed it was stale beneath the charring; eggs greasy from the lard they were fried in; honey still in its comb. Eugeny's tea was strong enough to clean streets with, and bitter. I finished the meal with a queasy lump low in my stomach.
Finally, as the sun strengthened and sent ice-sharpened rays through the window above the kitchen bench, Kichlan pushed aside his plate and stood.
"Lad," he said, in a tight, commanding voice. "You must dress."
His younger brother continued to poke at a swimming yolk with a tarnished fork. He held the implement so hard his knuckles were white, the veins on his hand prominent and purple. Eugeny sat very still, and I followed his example.
"Tired," Lad spat gooey flecks of egg onto his plate with the word.
"I know, Lad. But we have a duty. We need to get up early and work very hard."
"Tired!" Lad roared, and with a great swing of his arm launched his fork across the room.
I ducked, lifted arms to cross over my head. But Kichlan was faster. Kichlan was faster than I'd imagined anyone could be. His suit leapt from his wrists, shot out fine and accurate, and caught the fork in mid-air.
He retracted the thin silver arm slowly, and Lad watched the fork the entire time.
"Why did you do that?"
Lad blanched, and I didn't blame him. Kichlan's voice was low, dark with anger and disappointment. Lad twisted in his chair, peered up at his brother, and the pouting frustration fell from his face as tears crested over onto his cheeks.
"Kich-"
"Why?" Kichlan didn't let up. He placed the fork on Lad's plate with a clang. Lad's palms pressed the table on either side of the plate, and shook. "Don't you want to come with us? Don't you want to be a collector?"
"Kich-"
"After how hard I worked so you could collect with us, don't you want to come now?"
"I do!" Lad jumped up, knocked the table with his knee and sent cutlery clanging across the surface. "I do!"
Kichlan eased his straight shoulders and thunderous face. "Then you'd better get dressed, hadn't you?"
Air returned to the room.
Lad flashed me a quivering smile as he hurried upstairs. Kichlan, however, only spared me a scowl.
"This is your fault-" he started, but Eugeny stood, suddenly, and began collecting plates.
"Now, now, we know that isn't true," he said, voice soft, but his words cut into Kichlan's like glass. "Not at all." The old man glanced at me. "Got your coat, girl?"
I didn't hear the words, but I caught Eugeny and Kichlan murmuring as I left the room and pulled my coat from the line close to the fire. They were both quiet when I returned.
Now inspired, Lad only took a moment to dress and was soon back in the kitchen. Eugeny pressed food into his hands, a few slices of bread and possibly cheese, but offered nothing to Kichlan or me.
"We'd better hurry." Kichlan strode down the hallway, dragging on his patchwork coat as he yanked the door open. Cold Movoc-under-Keeper air reached into Eugeny's warm house, smelling of food and clothes, to slide icy fingers down my collar. I tightened it, and jammed my hat down so it covered my ears.
Kichlan stepped into the street, Lad ran after him, but I hesitated for a moment in the hallway. Eugeny stood in the kitchen door, watching his boys leave.
"Thank you," I said. "For everything."
The old man was inscrutable. "You just remember what I said."
I closed the door and hurried to catch up to Kichlan and Lad, where they waited on the street corner.
"Eugeny," I started to say, and waited until I knew Kichlan was listening to me. His face was stony. "Eugeny, is he one of us?"
One of us. Of us.
Kichlan's eyebrows rose a half inch before he remembered he needed to hold them still to keep that stony expression going. "You mean a debris collector?"
I swallowed hard. "Of us" seemed to be echoing in my head, like I'd shouted the words down a tunnel. Just saying them felt like a betrayal of my old life, of the hope I had been holding on to. The hope that this was all a big mistake. "Yes." Or maybe it was time to stop fighting the inevitable?
"No, the old man doesn't see debris."
"But he doesn't use pions either," I continued. Couldn't stop myself now. "He does things the hard way. Dries clothes and heats rooms with fire, or heals wounds with paste made from plants." I hesitated, and realised the stitches hadn't bothered me at all that morning, not even their usual post-sleeping ache. But I couldn't exactly strip in the middle of the street to check how effective Eugeny's gold mush had been.
Kichlan said, "No, he doesn't." Ahead of us, Lad was humming to himself, but not walking with the brisk enthusiasm I had seen the day before. How long could memories of Kichlan's anger keep his morning mood at bay? "Eugeny is an old man, and his sight is failing."
"Oh." That, really, explained nothing. Eyesight had nothing to do with pion sight. Even the blind could navigate a city like Movoc, lit with deeper, bright lights.
"That's how he explained it to me," Kichlan said. "But then, I don't understand that pion-binder talk. Said his sight was fading, his real sight, and his pion sight. He says he knows they're there, but he's happy to leave them there, not interfere. Happy to do things with his hands instead."
To choose to abandon one's binding skill. To choose. It was difficult to imagine.
But 384 Darkwater was so much closer to Kichlan and Lad's house than my own. I hadn't noticed properly, stumbling there the previous evening. A few blocks and slush-wet steps and we arrived. I felt foolish for holding onto my apartment, as Kichlan unlocked the door, collected something from the step, and led us down. My inconvenient, over-expensive home.
Sofia had been waiting in ankle-thick snow at the locked door. "You're late," she snapped when Kichlan turned the key. She walked behind me down the stairs, her arms crossed. "And she's early." I ignored the jibe.
"Never mind," Kichlan said. He headed straight for the table and began piling empty jars into his usual battered leather bag. Quietly, the other team members arrived.
Sofia, arms so firmly crossed they might never unwind again, glowered between Kichlan's hunched shoulders and me. "What have you done?" she hissed at me from the side of her mouth.
"Me? Nothing." That was true enough.
"Here, this has arrived," Kichlan said, and pressed something into my palm. "Your pay." He flashed me a dark grin, devoid of any pleasure. "You're really one of us now."
A scrap of paper. It crinkled as I unfolded it, edges tearing beneath my fingers. Cheap, sewn by pions none too interested in the task. A single figure glared at me from the off-white, fibrous weave. The black letters were blocky, all sharp edges and uneven ink. I blinked, certain there was something wrong with my vision. But no matter how many times I tried blinking, how slowly or how purposefully, nothing changed.
I became aware of silence and glanced up to find the collecting team watching me. All but Lad, who was struggling with his coat and humming softly in his throat.