I swallowed the pill with a dry throat, and returned to Devich's side. As I lay flat, hand on my naked belly, I hoped the pions from that pill were already doing their work. I hoped they were destroying the possibility of any child that might have come from Devich and me.
7.
Light snapped on and flooded my dark bedroom, jerking me from a dream that might have involved Kichlan being chased by a giant cat. That, or talking brickwork.
With a cry I lifted my hand to block my eyes, but that only made the radiance brighter. I struggled to sit up, tangled in my own sheets and tipped fighting to the floor.
"Other!" Devich swore from the bed. "Point it at the wall!" He yelled. "The wall!"
"Point what?" I screamed back. Why were we shouting at each other?
"Suit, Tanyana. The suit!"
Kicking against tight blankets I wriggled until I could press my back against the side of the bed. Then I waved my wrists around, no idea how to point the suit at anything without crashing into it and causing yet more unaffordable damage. But I must have done something right, as the band on my right wrist gave a low clicking sound and as quickly as it had sprung to life the light dimmed. I opened my eyes a crack to see the suit's shifting symbol patterns beaming from my right hand and reflected large on the bare wall opposite the bed.
"Oh, Other!" Devich swore again. "You've been called."
"I've been what?" I freed my feet, pushed myself into a sitting position still wearing the sheets like a cocoon. "What are you talking about?"
But Kichlan's warning muttered in my mind before Devich could answer, "It's an emergency. Something's gone wrong."
"With debris?" Feet on the floor, free arm pressing sheets against my chest, I hauled myself up. Where was my uniform? Why hadn't I put it back on? Wasn't this what Kichlan had said could happen?
"What else?" Devich slipped from the mattress with delicacy and enviable decorum. Nude, he crossed to the signs. They ebbed and glowed the same way they did on the suit, only writ large, and revolved in great slow arcs as I gradually turned my wrist.
"How do you know something's gone wrong? How can you be so sure it's debris?" And why hadn't I been told this was going to happen? Symbols on a wall, bright lights in my sleep, and I had no idea what any of it was trying to tell me.
"Because I designed your suit." Devich ran a hand on the wall beside the reflected ciphers. "I tested it for three solid moons, I know a call when I see one."
"Then what does it mean?" The floor was cold; wooden floorboards seeped chills up through my calves. I flexed my toes, shifted weight from the ball of one foot to the heel of another. The symbols moved with me.
"Keep it still!" Devich snapped. He ran a finger over the top of a box-like symbol before it shifted away into nothing. "Your team leader must have explained this to you."
"No." Kichlan had started, hadn't he? Wear your uniform, Tanyana. Because you'll be called, Tanyana. By the suit. The suit. Always the suit. Perhaps I hadn't been all that interested in listening. Yet, as Devich frowned, I found myself explaining, "But really, it's been hectic, accidents, snow storms." Why was I defending Kichlan of all people? "At least I have you here to teach me."
He shook his head. "I don't know how to read it. The men you met in the hospital, remember them? They send the call, they could tell you what this all means. Technicians like me, we just make sure your suit can hear it."
"Oh." My heart did a half-beat. Those men, oh yes, I remembered those men. "Can you try?"
I kept my wrist up as I scrambled on the floor with my left hand for the bottom half of my uniform. I had managed to pull it up to my thighs before Devich answered "The call is a map. Of a kind."
He didn't fill me with confidence.
"Not of the city, though. It's a map to debris."
Was it? I glanced down to the signs beating out their light on my wrist. Did it only respond to a call? Or was this how Lad found his debris so well? Somehow, the idea of Lad reading a complex set of symbols imbedded in his own suit didn't make a lot of sense. Particularly if Kichlan and the others couldn't do it.
"How does it work?" Topless, pants scrunched around my thighs, I shuffled close to the wall. Devich glanced at me and flashed a sudden and very filthy grin, before helping me pull them up the rest of the way. I tried to focus on the map and ignore the occasional slip of his fingers.
"Well, from what I have been able to ascertain, although I've never actually been taught, this one, here-" he tapped on the box symbol again, although this time it looked like it contained a bolt of lightning and some dots "-this is the one you need to pay attention to. This is the debris you need to find."
It was the darkest of the symbols, the most solid, and hovering around the top of the roughly rectangular band beamed onto the wall. It swam on the crest of so many ciphers all with strokes and dots and jagged lines and was difficult to differentiate. "The debris that set off the call?"
"I think so."
"How am I supposed to know how to get there?" I spotted my uniform top half hidden beneath a cerulean throw that had been kicked from the end of the bed.
"You need to find your symbol first." More searching, face so close to the wall I was surprised the light didn't hurt his eyes. "Ah, here we go. This is the suit owner. I think."
I abandoned the attempt to fish my top out from the throw with my toes alone. Devich pointed at a squiggly image, the brightest of the symbols, but tucked all the way down in the bottom left corner of the rectangle. It looked like a dot under a small hill.
Devich sucked his teeth. "You have a long way to go."
Just what I wanted to hear.
"The debris symbol is far away from your symbol, and it's dark. The closer you get, the brighter it will become, and the closer you will move to it."
"What about the rest, that mess of symbols?"
Devich shrugged. "Don't know. But as long as you head toward the debris symbol, you should get there."
"Assuming you're right about them."
"Yes."
I had to finish dressing then, map or no map. As soon as I lowered my arm the light disappeared, and for a moment I panicked in darkness. But it wasn't fully black. My suit still glowed, giving me just enough to see by as I fumbled for the lamp valve. I tugged on my uniform top.
"Now what do I do?" I didn't bother with proper clothes. A knit with a warm neck, the thickest pants I could find, boots that wouldn't close around my suit properly, and gloves. I had to leave gaps, a space between the clothes at my waist, a way to expose the bands on my neck, wrists and ankles.
Devich had pulled on underdrawers and his shirt. He shivered. "You should hurry," he said, and wrapped his arms across his chest.
"Why don't you come with me?"
But Devich shook his head. "I would be in the way. A single useless pion-binder, unable to see, unable to help. You don't want me there. This is your chance to help people, to show them what debris collectors can do. I don't want to get in the way of that."
What could debris collectors do? And how, exactly, was I supposed to hurry across Movoc-under-Keeper without a full rublie? I headed for the door anyway. Devich followed, and helped me drag on my jacket.
"Be careful. Hurry, and be careful."
Be careful? How dangerous could it be? I thought he didn't know anything about debris collecting, anyway.
With the map clear in my mind and nothing else to go by, I decided to head right. If I was in the bottom left of all those bright symbols, somewhere, then I should probably head right.
At first, I tried running. But my lungs burned with the cold air, and my stiffened muscles and stitch-sore skin protested painfully. I resorted to a brisk walk, which simply did not feel fast enough.