I approached the desk, and could feel Kichlan and Lad close behind me. I said, "Don't bother lying." I placed my hands on the wood, flexed my fingers. My suit shone in his eyes and the administrator flinched back. "You recognised me, now you can tell me why you ran like the Other-cursed wind when you did."
The administrator's eyes flickered fast and panicked from my face, to what I could only imagine was Kichlan's thunderclouds, and up to Lad.
Then the large man crashed his fist on the desk beside me, and all of us jumped. "You tell Tan!" he bellowed, and the administrator stumbled back against the wall. "You stop lying to her and tell her!"
"Lad! It's all right, don't shout." Kichlan reached for his brother's arm, but Lad easily shook him off.
When I looked up at him, Lad had tears in his eyes, and his face was red. On him, it was frightening. "Not nice," he hiccupped the words, sniffed loudly. "Doesn't feel nice in here. And don't lie to Tan."
"All right." The administrator ran a finger around the edge of his high-collared yellow jacket. No wonder he was hot, wearing that in a room like this. "No need for threats."
Lad sniffed again, shifted and crossed his arms. Kichlan patted his elbow, looking helpless.
"Yes, I know who you are." The administrator drew a kerchief from a pocket and used it to wipe his face. "But if you're here for the kopacks you should know there's nothing I can do. I allocate payments, or retract those payments, based entirely on the instructions given to me. I can't just produce kopacks, no matter what you threaten me with."
I blinked at him. "Kopacks?"
"Don't tell me this is about kopacks!" Sofia snapped from behind me.
"It isn't." I straightened. "I don't remember your name."
"Pavel," he murmured. "I wouldn't have expected you to."
"Pavel, then." I walked around the desk to stand in front of him. Kichlan, I noticed, remained attached to Lad. "I haven't come to get my payment for Grandeur back, if that's what you think."
If anything, Pavel paled further. "Why are you here then? Trying to make things worse for me?"
"Worse?" I frowned, waved a hand at the room. "This isn't where you used to work, this isn't where I met you. So I could ask you the same question. Why are you here?"
Suddenly, he grinned. It was like a crack through his face, jagged, violent, harsh. "You really have no idea, do you?"
"What?"
Lad let out a damaged-animal groan.
Pavel said, "I'm not the only one. Everyone else in my office, all of the other administrators who helped you at some stage in their career, have been relocated to Otherholes like this place. Your circle members survived, they're too well connected to be pushed around so easily. But everyone else." He laughed, a ragged sound. "Even heard some woman on a desk at the tribunal chamber spoke to you and was sent to work in death records in the colonies! Death records! Can you believe it?"
Something hard and cold seemed to have been dropped in my stomach. "No." It set me shivering. "No, I don't."
He laughed again. "What are you here for, then?"
"I-" I swallowed. "I need your help, Pavel. You have contacts, you must have, in the veche. Like the people who send you those instructions! High up. I need… can you tell me who they are? Where they are? I need a tribunal opened, I need to tell the truth!"
"The truth about what?" Natasha muttered at my back. Lad sniffed loudly.
Pavel simply shook his head. "Did you hear me? No one would listen to me now, thanks to you. Whatever contacts I had, whatever career I had been building, they're gone. Gone! Because you touched my life, and you are Other-damned cursed."
Cursed? "Tell me who they are then, where they are, I'll-" I said.
"Listen to me, you debris-collecting bitch!" Pavel lurched off the wall and I realised how tall he was. He lifted a hand, I held a wrist above my face and my suit shone brightly on us both. "It's over! Over. Look what they did to us, we who hardly knew you. And we were lucky. Pale bastards with their wooden walk and those vacant, empty faces. We're lucky all we lost was our livelihoods, our careers, our status and our friends. Got no pity, got no feelings, got no limits to what those men – those things – will do! Truth, is it? Don't you understand? The truth is what the veche say it is, and you better just shut your mouth and do whatever it is they want you to do. Or people will stop disappearing and start dying, until finally, they get rid of you. Do us all a favour and kill-"
With a roar Lad tore himself from Kichlan's hands and barrelled forward. He knocked me to the ground, grabbed Pavel by his upraised hand, lifted him from his feet, and sent him crashing against the wall.
"Lad! No!" Kichlan stumbled after him.
Sofia dropped to my side. "Are you all right?"
I struggled to sit up.
Lad picked Pavel up again, held his shoulders in those huge hands and lifted him high. "No!" he roared into the man's terrified face. "You cannot lie to Tan! You cannot hurt Tan! No more!" And with a great twist and a heave he threw Pavel across the room, to crash over the desk and onto the floor.
Tears streaked Lad's face. He batted Kichlan aside like a fly, reached again for Pavel. Mizra began digging in his jacket for the little bottle that could quell him.
I stood. "Lad?"
Lad dragged Pavel up by the front of his jacket. He sniffed.
"Lad?"
He turned his wet, guilty face to me. "Tan?"
"It's all right, Lad. You can stop." I walked past Kichlan, I touched a hand to Lad's back. He shook beneath me. "He's not hurting me. He's not shouting any more. Thank you for protecting me. Please, Lad, put him down now."
Pavel dropped like a doll. He looked up at us with wide, frightened eyes. His forehead and left cheek were red and already swelling. One arm lay at a strange and painful-looking angle on the floor.
Lad turned into me, wrapped arms around my shoulders and started to cry. As I held him, I stared down at Pavel, who still hadn't moved. "I'm sorry." And I was. Not just for Lad. But for what his life had become, because of me.
Because I was cursed, and the puppet men seemed to be wreaking evil on everything I touched.
"We need to go." Kichlan gripped Lad's elbow, tried to peel him away from me. "Now." In his eyes I read fear and urgency.
I nodded. Together, we eased Lad into walking and left Pavel's office. I didn't look back.
I knew, without needing Kichlan to tell me, that there would be no more collecting today. The bell was late, and the streets full as we made our slow way back to the sublevel. Kichlan kept as close to Lad's shoulder as he could without tripping over his feet, and eyed each person that passed us with suspicion. Lad watched the ground, and sniffed constantly.
I'd ruined the rest of the day, created more work for the next five days, brought out the kind of violence in Lad that Eugeny had warned me about. Strangely, Kichlan's silence made me feel worse. Spitefulness was, I supposed, easier in its way to deal with.
But I didn't feel as guilty as perhaps I should have. Because anger burned inside me again, even deeper than the suit. Pavel's story had fanned the flames.
None of this was right. I'd known it, felt it that moment on Grandeur's palm, and every time I tried to speak the truth since. While the veche could silence me, while it could keep me busy with this garbage collection, keep me exhausted, aching and out of the way, it couldn't quench that fire. It could alienate the people I had once trusted, it could ruin anyone even remotely connected to me, but that wasn't enough.
Someone had summoned the crimson pions that had thrown me from Grandeur. Someone had done this to me. I would not, could not, forget that, not until I exposed them. Not until I proved to everyone that I had not been responsible for my own ruin. I would have my tribunal, I would tell the truth. No matter what I had to do to get it.