"We should get away then, shouldn't we?" Uzdal said, through a fog, from a distance. From the ground so far below. "Shouldn't we run?"
Run.
"We're here to do our duty." Kichlan lifted his wrist. "We've been called to collect it."
"Collect that?" Mizra shouted. "We can't collect that. It threw Tanyana across the room."
I looked down as they argued – at my feet, at a distant construction site so vivid in my memory – and knew we were about to be swept away. Knew there was nothing we could do.
"Bro!" Lad ran down the street, Sofia gasping in his wake, clutching her shoulder and dripping blood from her arm. "Angry, bro. So angry."
"I couldn't stop him," Sofia choked on the words. Uzdal rushed to her side, slipped his shoulder beneath her arm to hold her steady, and stared in horror at the bright blood coating her hand.
Kichlan nodded his understanding. "I'm sorry, Lad. I didn't mean to forget about you."
But was Lad really talking about himself? I thought of the debris dancing with destruction like a cruel cat. The whack like a fist against my chest. Lad wasn't angry, was he? But the debris was.
"Who would summon furious pions from too deep inside reality?" I whispered, but there was no critical circle below me to respond. And this was debris, not pions.
Why was it all so angry?
They talked, while the debris consumed. I thought of the bodies in the rubble of what could easily be Devich's building. His work, not his home. He wouldn't have been there in the middle of the night, surely. But someone was there, enough people to plaster blood across bricks and cracked cement. I couldn't stand here talking about Lad, when all I wanted was to know was if Devich was in that pile of rubble.
Pions, debris, the lot, they could take their anger and be Other-damned! I would not be swept away again.
"We have to," I said, firm over the flame and hum. "We're debris collectors. We have to go into that building, and we have to stop the violence." I lifted my arm. My suit, still coating me from wrist to elbow, shone so brightly I squinted against it. "We have been called."
And I had to find out if Devich was safe. I had to know, for certain.
"She's right." Kichlan squared his shoulders, stood tall. "Sofia, you and-"
"Not staying!" Lad cried.
"I'm not an invalid, Kichlan," Sofia said, her tone leaving no room for argument.
"Fine," Kichlan said with a resigned sigh. "What about Natasha, have we seen any sign of her?"
No one answered. Mizra glared at me, Uzdal at least seemed resigned to his fate. Kichlan and Sofia maintained varied degrees of forced determination. Lad looked like he was about to cry.
"We can't wait any longer." Kichlan took the bag of containers from Lad. "We have to do what we are here for. We have to stop this."
"Hurry." I set off without waiting, crossed the street and kept as far from the building as I could. Something licked my foot, and I glanced down to see a dark plane flicker from a scattering of shattered tiles – to glance off the suit that had wrapped me from my knee to my toes.
I shook it off, but Kichlan had seen. Kichlan was staring at me, frowning, thinking, wondering. I began to run. I couldn't start that wondering. Could the debris have heard me, or seen me leaning from the window? What had made it drop the glass? What had made it launch itself at me, and destroy the entire building around me? The same thing that had made the pions throw me from Grandeur's palm? What, exactly, could do that? Or who? A pion-binder who could not only see debris, but control it as well?
Nonsense.
The hole where the technicians' building had once been was a scar in the earth, smoking and raw. Heat radiated from its darkness, from its burns. Binders had set up a perimeter around it, urged tall stone fences to spring from the street to try and confine the destruction. They wouldn't hold long. They crumbled as planes and rubble crashed against then, falling faster than the pion-binders could replace them. But the debris was interfering in a far more insidious way. Upsetting the circle systems, destabilising the bindings, wreaking a far more common chaos, but a chaos just as terrible. As we hurried toward them, one whole side of a large stone fence sluiced into mud, and the six point centre who had been working on it roared curses into the flame-lit sky. Planes flickered out of the gap this made, testing freedom with wide black sails.
"We're collectors!" Kichlan shouted as we ran to a huddle of people near the fence. "Debris collectors! Let us in!"
A crowd of brave or stupid spectators had gathered to watch. Nine point enforcers held them back, though why you'd need a powerful binder to convince you not to run into the head of chaos and death I couldn't understand. Between them and the fence, healers worked on bodies and I was thankful that the ruddy light cast everything red. It made blood that much harder to distinguish.
One of the enforcers broke away from the crowd. A circle centre, with bears roaring from his shoulders and lapel. Representative of the veche. He cast us a disdainful glance and pointed to one of the healers. I couldn't make out the mess of flesh the latter was working over, fingers weaving pions I could no longer see in a wild fight for life. "That's all that's left of the other team," the enforcer said, voice rasping. "What do you think you can do?"
"Other's hells," Mizra groaned.
Kichlan paled, but shifted the bag on his shoulder. "The only thing we can do." He held the enforcer's gaze. After a moment the man's salt-and-pepper stubbled mouth eased into a dry grin.
"Do it then. Any chance you can stop this is better than none." He lifted a hand, hesitated. "Good luck." Then turned to the binders on the fence and bellowed, "Let them through!"
We slipped through the gap in the stone. I kept my head down, unable to meet solemn, exhausted faces. The other side of the fence was strangely quiet. As the pionbinders sealed us in, a kind of stillness and dread settled on my shoulders.
"Any great ideas?" Mizra snapped.
I ignored him and scanned the ruins, the rubble. "There!" A body, a lump of pale cloth stained pink, of mushed meat and pooling blood.
Kichlan pushed past me, came to the body first. "Other." He pressed his hand to his nose and mouth. "It's the technician. From yesterday. Other."
Lad took a step forward, peering and curious. Kichlan spun, grabbed his shoulders, pushed him away.
Something had dropped out of me at his words. I slumped to my knees. They clinked against the cement, suit silver on stone. It couldn't be, not like this, not so suddenly and violently. I swallowed an urge to vomit and looked down.
Into the face of the second technician, the one who had assisted Devich, the one I didn't know.
"Tanyana?" Sofia from a distance, her voice like reflection on water, faint as rising steam. "What are you doing? We need to – Other!"
The world swam. I fell forward, too close to the red mush, to the collapse of body and bone, but I couldn't hold myself up. It wasn't him. It wasn't Devich, dead and torn. There was still a chance, wasn't there, that Devich was alive? But if his assistant was here "Tanyana!" Kichlan roared.
I lifted my head to see my team retreating to the fence, to see panic and confusion.
"Move!"
Then I was caught again. Something hooked around my leg, high, up along my thigh. Above my suit. It lifted me, dangled me like a doll, and tossed me.
I opened my hands to catch the ground but my suit caught it instead. Two wide, solid poles charged from my wrists into the cement. They crunched deep, held me suspended a moment still struggling with shock, before retreating, easing me down. Bare hands pressed to the earth, I struggled for breath, struggled to understand what had just happened. It had to be debris planes, tossing me around like the broken glass.