"Another factory?" I shouted.
Kichlan tapped the solid metal stand of a lamp as he passed it, wrapping a hand briefly around the carved lines and the bear heads peering eyelessly out of dark steel. "I doubt it." His voice hesitated, his feet pushed on. "Things go wrong when factories don't keep themselves clean. Lights fail, heat dies. I've never heard of one disgorging fire before."
The ground rocked again and Kichlan ploughed into me, pressing me up against a wall as stones hailed onto the open street. I felt them hit his back, heard the dull thuds and his low gasps of breath. "Kichlan!" I hissed, struggled to peer around his shoulder, but he leaned more of his weight on me and I couldn't move.
"They're not big. The uniform is taking most of it." Something very large crashed a yard from where he shielded me, spraying the cobblestones with dry rain.
"Liar," I whispered. It was hot, wrapped in Kichlan's body. I had forgotten how tall he was, how large. It was easy to do, with Lad to compare him to.
"See you prove it." He chuckled, breathlessly.
As the stones petered out a voice shouted from across the street, "Hey!"
Kichlan turned; I took the opportunity and slipped around him. "Kichlan! Tanyana!" Mizra from a high window. "Door." He pointed out from the shattered glass, arm strangely angled to avoid the edges. "Get up here. Hurry!"
We crossed the street, pushed in a door hanging loose from its hinges, pion lock buzzing sickly. Two flights of dark stairs and Uzdal was waiting. Firelight lit his hair and the side of his face, as though the room behind him was burning.
"You have to see this." He coughed, spat onto the floor. "Ash," he explained, by way of an apology.
The firelit room had once been a home, though now it was mostly rubble. A decrepit couch remained, and a low table.
"Don't know where the owners have gone." Mizra was staring out a gash in the wall on the opposite side of the room. "Got out as fast as they could, I'm guessing." He faced us, skin dirty, eyes darker than the cinders. "Don't blame them."
I approached him like it was a dream. Those weren't my feet stepping ash into someone else's carpet. Those weren't my eyes watering against grit, my face flushing with sweat as heat washed through the hole in the wall that had, I realised with an architect's detachment, been a supporting structure. The building could fall any moment. But it didn't matter, because it was a dream, all of it. None of it could be real.
"Other," Kichlan whispered the word. It summed everything up rather neatly.
"We can't stay here," I said. "It isn't safe."
The scene outside belonged in nightmares, not reality. A crater in the street, a hole where buildings had once been, so deep the bottom was all shadow and spitting flame. The building beside it – a squat, ugly thing – was torn apart like a limb, spurting water into the flames, hissing steam. Things dangled from the cracks in its walls and floors, soft things. They wavered in the steam, they cooked in the heat. Some moved, and those were the worst, some were still living, torn like the building, fiery like the sky. Bodies.
"What happened here?" Kichlan asked. No answer could satisfy that desperate question. "Why are we here?"
"Can't you see it?" I answered him, because neither Uzdal or Mizra could. Something darker leapt with the flames. Unreflective and dull. Planes of debris. Sails of it, roaring with the steam, surging with the light. It traced itself in a dim web around the building, it arched out of the hole like the wings of a giant, terrible dragonfly, and it leapt into the air, displacing stones, body parts.
Not displacing them. Throwing them.
"Oh, Other," Kichlan whispered beside me.
A glass window winked up at me from the crater. Planes of debris were playing with it. Cruelly. Like a cat. They flicked underneath it, lifted it, tossed it, cracked it. Silver wire held the glass together in a mangled pattern. Sharp shards dangled like cold flesh.
"Did you see that?" Kichlan asked, struggling with a mouth that must have felt as dumb, as cotton-filled as mine.
I said, "Yes."
Mizra and Uzdal glanced between us, faces pale beneath ash, their fear all too obvious.
"We have to get away," Kichlan said. "We have to get out of here now."
"Yes." I swallowed solid grains of ash in my throat. "This building isn't struct-"
I stopped. Peering from the gash made in the earth, glinting from many levels below the ground, the edge of a metallic table caught my eye. And an arm. A great, silver arm. I remembered a needle attached to the tip of that arm. I remembered Devich's voice from the darkness beyond the halos of hot lamps.
"This is familiar." I gripped loose bricks; I leaned forward. "I was suited in a place like this."
My words seemed to hang in the air as the debris stilled. The planes dropped the window they had been torturing and rose out of the crater like great dark fingers. They swept slowly over the rubble, touching, testing, then with a flash they lashed the side of the building. I cried out as debris, very hot, very black, slashed at the gap in the wall. Slashed at me. I stumbled back. The dragonfly twitched its enormous wings and the next plane that attacked was sharper, more precise. It slammed straight into my chest.
Breath rushed out of me as I was flung back. I crashed into the couch and came to a sprawling halt up against the far wall.
Running, shouting, and everything drowned out by fire in my chest and buzzing in my head. I blinked against a blurred haze, a fog hanging over my vision. Kichlan leaned very close. I watched his mouth, but couldn't hear anything he was saying.
Another voice took his place. You should run.
But I couldn't move. Dimly, I realised my arms were silver, my suit activating without guidance and coating me from wrists to elbows, ankles to knees, neck to waist. I closed my eyes, focused on my chest, and pushed against the pressure. Air rushed into my mouth as my suit retracted. I swallowed it greedily.
To be safe. You should run.
"What was that?" Mizra screamed.
I could hear again.
"Debris," I gasped out the word, and something flared in my side. Fire, sharp, hot. Something broken?
"I saw it." Kichlan was still close. His hand under my head, his face beside mine. But he was straining to look at the ceiling. "The building. It's attacking the building."
"It?" Mizra screeched. "What in all Other's hell?"
"Get… out." I fought for each word. "Unstable." The pain was easing, being replaced by a numbness spreading down from my side to my hips. Better, or worse?
Kichlan didn't waste breath. He scooped me up, grunting as he pushed himself to his feet. "Damn, Tan. You're too heavy for someone so small."
I didn't smile. I thought of the numbness, of insect feet and silver sleeves. I was too heavy. How much of what Kichlan was carrying was me, and how much was the suit?
He lurched for the stairs and nearly tumbled down them with Mizra and Uzdal pressing so close behind us.
Another plane crashed into the building as we burst onto the street. Rubble shook from the walls. Tiles slid to shatter on the paving stones.
"Put me down." I pushed against Kichlan's shoulder and he did not argue.
"Are you all right?" His look was searching.
I nodded. "Yes. Knocked the wind out of me."
"What did?" Uzdal at my shoulder, breathless.
"Planes of debris." I flicked a hand toward the building. "They're everywhere in that mess down there. They're-"
"Attacking the building," Uzdal finished my sentence. "It doesn't do that. Kichlan?" He begged like a child for reassurance. "It doesn't do that, it's never done that. Has it?"
"I've never seen anything like that. Holes and fire and bodies." Kichlan frowned at me. "This isn't normal."
And I realised why this felt so familiar, the shock and the violence and the breath pulled from my lungs. I could have been eight hundred feet high.