Debris

"Night," Kichlan murmured with a sigh. "It's night, Lad."

As I left Kichlan helping Lad into his jacket, their voices followed me up the stairs. "Bro, is Tan lonely when she's at home?"

"I don't know. Why do you ask?"

"She never wants to go there. It's home, isn't it? Means you should want to go there."

I plunged into Movoc's dark, icy night. He had a point, that large man with a childish, volatile mind. But it was my home. And I shouldn't have to give it up because of kopacks, because of lies and threats.

I would make the veche listen to me. Pavel thought I was alone, he thought the veche could get to everyone who might have listened to me and cared what I had to say. He was wrong. True, my circle had turned their backs on me. True, the few people I knew who worked for the veche had been demoted and sent away. But I still wasn't alone.

I had Devich.

9.

I'd promised Devich.

The next Olday night, I dug clothes I'd assumed I would never wear again from the bottom of my closet. Somehow they needed to look respectable, fit over my uniform and hide as much of my suit and its lights as possible. Tailored pants of black silk and satin; they wouldn't do up around the band at my waist and I was forced to wear them low, so my heels stood on the hems. A fine layered shirt, with a gauzy top layer, of white and icicle blue, and a loose undershirt in silver. It opened wide at the neck and wrists, and I stood in front of the mirror for bells, trying every scarf and necktie I owned. Finally, I settled on a cream silk scarf with bluebell stitching. It was long enough to loop twice around my throat and I tied it tightly. My wrists were harder to hide. I did the buttons on the overshirt, glad the cuffs were solid against the gauze, and hoped any glimpses of silver might be mistaken for jewellery.

Hair, at least, was still simple enough, although it had grown over the past sixnights. I ran a handful of the remnants of my precious cream through the blonde strands so it swept back from my face and curled into wisps behind my ears. There was hardly any of the cream left, a faint clogging at the bottom of the jar. I couldn't remember how many kopacks I had paid for it, and that said enough, really. I wouldn't be able to afford it again.

I lacked the appropriate cosmetics and jewellery. With bandages still stuck to my neck and shoulders, and pink scars wriggling on my face, neither would have helped.

I pulled on flat-heeled boots that were low enough to button up, and examined myself in the standing mirror. A parody of my old self smiled grimly from the glass. The pants no longer hugged my hips and thighs; indeed, they hung baggy and too large over my abdomen and legs. The extra length and the flat shoes made me short. The shirt too had lost its once-feminine look. No longer tight around my breasts, no longer tailored to highlight my waist, it was floppy and loose.

I wavered in front of the mirror. Feeling short, feeling baggy, feeling tired from a sixnight of debris collecting and missing the Darkwater sublevel, with its smells of Kichlan's cooking and its footprints of ash across the cement floor.

Then Devich knocked.

He greeted me with a grin as I opened the door, and swept inside. One arm wrapped around my waist as he pushed me up against the hallway wall and kissed me.

"You are lovely," he said, as he allowed me to catch my breath. His eyes flickered over me, starting with hair, to scarf, to shirt and pants. "Like I imagined."

With a frown, I straightened, and pushed him away. "The trousers certainly look better on you than me."

"Hardly." And he whipped out a pale lily from his jacket.

I took the flower, not entirely sure what I was supposed to do with it. Devich wore pants similar to mine, of a thicker cotton and with a satin stripe down the side. His shirt was the colour of sunset, his jacket black with a crimson satin lining. He looked roguish, charming, and his clothes fit altogether too well.

"I don't think this is a good idea," I murmured, more to myself than Devich. But he heard me.

His face grew serious, not quite stern. "You promised me, Tanyana."

I lifted my eyebrows at him.

"I don't understand the problem." He shoved fists into his jacket pocket and actually pouted. "You look lovely, you will fit right in. You belong with us."

With a controlled breath, I kept my hand from my face. "Too late to back out now, anyway." Oh, I wished there was a way.

"Not that you want to." Devich smiled again. "Trust me."

He helped me into my jacket like a true gentleman and I realised it probably wasn't suitable for a ball, or whatever this event was going to be. It smelled like the streets, like damp snow and road dust. But the other jackets I had owned were veche-marked, or sewn with the pattern of Proud Sunlight. Still, Eugeny's fire-drying room scent was there, somewhere in the weave, as well as traces of Kichlan's cooking. I took the comfort they could give.

Devich tucked the lily stem into an empty buttonhole on my breast, and I hoped it was enough to draw the eye away from the smudges, the dirt and the damp patches.

There was a waiting landau hovering in the silvering twilight. I sat beside Devich, his arm wrapped around my shoulders and pressing my hair against his cheek, and tried to forget the last coach ride I had taken. I tried not to compare the icy night that whipped us through the torn doors of Kichlan's coach to the pion-heated air and down-soft cushions in Devich's. I closed my eyes to the four small lamps lighting the interior, looked down from the gold inlaid handles and ignored the plush, bloodcoloured carpet.

We headed into the centre of Movoc-under-Keeper.

The veche chambers took up most of the centre of the city. They spanned the bridge itself, local courts on the east bank, national and province buildings on the west. In the shadow of these buildings, the city changed. It still looked haunted to me, but instead of the apparently unaided movement of otherwise inanimate objects – from walkways to coaches to food stalls – the older parts of the city were occupied by the ghosts of time. Age wore down on them. Not in a way that dulled the handcrafted beauty of polished marble, or blunted the pointed grace of rows upon rows of tall conifers. Rather, as the apartments and the factories fell away behind us, as the streets narrowed and the landau was forced to slow down, it felt like a weight of memory, of bells and moons and years, draped over us. These were the foundations of Movoc-under-Keeper as we knew her, built in the protective shadow of the Keeper Mountain. Our history, our ancestry, our past. And my own face, reflected in the coach window, could have been the spectre of any longdead debris collector.

Not all the buildings we passed were veche chambers. Indeed, some of the most beautiful were the homes of the oldest families in Varsnia. My reflection paled further as we pulled up at the gates to one such family home.

Devich was from a younger family, I had been certain of it. How could he have been invited to a place like this?

"Just what circles do you swim in?" I asked. To my horror, my voice shook.

Devich simply laughed. "Me? Oh, I'm not much of a circle swimmer. But some veche members are interested in what we do. They consider debris somewhat of an oddity, they're curious. Lord Sporinov is one of them." His face brightened. "Oh, he'll be happy to talk to you!"

"Wonderful." Just what I wanted. Now I was an oddity in baggy, inappropriate clothes.

But as I glanced at Devich from under my eyelashes I realised what this meant. Lord Sporinov? An old family, then, and a member of the national veche. If he was interested in debris then maybe he would be interested in listening to how I came to be able to see it. And just why I needed a tribunal of my own.

"It is a great opportunity," Devich said.

More than he could know.

A small army of servants pulled the large silver gates open. At first I thought that was odd: I'd expected them to be powered by pions. But perhaps a wealthy man with an interest in debris collectors liked the old-fashioned touch.