Debris

"Of course." She smiled prettily, and let none of the distance between us show. "Of course."

I would have to introduce her. Another thing I had hoped to avoid.

"Everyone," I said. "This is Tsana. She's here to fix the ceiling, she's an architect." Like I used to be stalled on my lips. "Tsana, this is my debris collecting team."

Sofia coughed. She stood, head high and neck uncomfortably straight. "Not that she needs our help. Sometimes it seems she can just do it all herself."

Tsana extended her smile. "She was a very skilled binder too."

She probably meant that as a compliment.

Sofia lifted an eyebrow. "I wouldn't know about that." She fixed me with a sharp expression devoid of any trust. "Lots we don't know about her." She left the sublevel with ice in her wake.

Mizra and Uzdal didn't speak. They followed Sofia closely, heads down.

"Don't be long." Kichlan helped Lad out of the chair, and pressed a coat into the man's hands. "Make sure the door locks behind you." I noticed he didn't offer me the large iron key in his pocket. "Try to make the ceiling as smooth as possible. Don't give the technicians a reason to notice it again."

Tsana, affronted, sniffed loudly. "I only do the best work."

Kichlan raised his eyebrows at her. "Come on, Lad."

Lad continued to stare at Tsana like she was an exotic bird.

"Is he quite all right?" Tsana murmured to me from the side of her mouth.

"He's Lad," I answered the only way I could. "It's just the way he is."

"Come on." Kichlan tugged Lad's hand. "Let's leave them to their work."

"What's the lady going to do, bro?" Lad asked as he followed Kichlan.

"Fix the ceiling, Lad."

"All by herself?"

"Yes."

"Oh." Footsteps receded up the stairs.

"Hello." Natasha, who had waited smiling under sunlight from the windows, approached Tsana. She held out a hand, and the two women shook.

"Hello," Tsana replied.

If their situations were not so vastly different, I realised, the two women would have been a lot alike.

"I'll leave you to it." Natasha flickered her smile on and off like a broken lamp as she glanced between us. "Better make sure there's not a scar left, or you won't hear the end of it."

I groaned and rolled my eyes to say I knew she was right.

Chuckling, Natasha left Tsana and me alone in the sublevel.

"So, that's your new circle." Tsana wasn't impressed. I could see it in her stiff shoulders, hear it in her clipped words.

"Team," I corrected her. "We don't use circles. Debris collecting is done in teams." Except, of course, for the circle we had made when we all worked together.

"Ah." She frowned. "So how do you-?" She made a gripping gesture in the air.

I held up a hand and pulled back my sleeve. Rather than balking at the slowly spinning, shining suit, however, Tsana leaned in and peered at it. That surprised me.

She said, "I still don't understand."

"Stand back." I spread my suit out over my hand, at first in a glove of silver, and then beyond my fingers and into the traditional pincer shape. It didn't want to go that far. The suit fit so well over my hand, so snugly. Like a dog with a new trick, a child with a new word. It had learned to coat me from toes to neck and it seemed now it didn't want to do anything else.

"Amazing." Tsana frowned for a moment. "I can't see it at all. With pions, I mean."

Couldn't she? I withdrew the suit, watching it glint silver in the sunlight. That was strange. Something without pions. Or, I reconsidered, maybe they were too deep, too dense for her to see them. Like the ones that had thrown me from Grandeur.

"Shall we?" I pushed those thoughts aside and gestured to the ceiling.

"Of course." She found the crack and stood beneath it.

I figured I should thank her. While we were exchanging white lies. "I appreciate you coming to do this."

"You asked."

Given the circumstances she could hardly have said no.

It didn't take her much, but I'd known that would be the case. I could have done it with a glance, and certainly with more grace, in the days of my old life. Tsana's frown returned, she flexed her hands at her sides and muttered to herself, then the hole began to fill. The cement was fluffy, like foam. I resisted the urge to criticise, to tell her to keep her pions under tighter control. There was too much air. A moment and she realised this, corrected it, and the cement grew darker, harder and solid. Soon, nothing was left, not a scar to prove the crack had ever existed.

Jealousy surged somewhere in my stomach. I had not been patched as elegantly as she did the ceiling.

Tsana shook her hands out, adjusted the colour slightly, frowned deeper and adjusted it again. "There." She turned to me. "Done."

I forced a smile, still tackling acidic envy. "Thank you."

"Are you sure that's it?"

Such a small thing to repay such a large debt. "Yes, that's perfect."

"Good. Great."

It must have been a massive weight from her conscience. At least, I hoped it was massive.

We stood in the sublevel beneath the healed ceiling, staring at each other with nothing to say.

"Well, that's it." I clapped my hands together.

"Yes."

"Shall we-?"

"Of course."

I was careful to lock the door as we left. Last thing I needed was another reason for Kichlan to dislike me.

A landau was hovering in the street, resplendent in polished mahogany and silver. How many kopacks was Tsana paying to have it wait? Or maybe it was her own, the driver's family employed by hers through the generations.

Tsana hesitated at the coach door. "Can I offer you a ride up to the Tear?"

"Ah." I swallowed. "No. I was forced to move. I live near here now."

"Oh." The door swung open with a creak loud in the darkening street. "I am still happy to take you home."

I shook my head. "The walk is not far. I enjoy it." Why did my tongue feel like a strip of torn cloth in my mouth? Thick and unresponsive.

"I see."

I watched Tsana climb in. She was being assisted by pions, I realised with a start, probably looping around her waist in ribbons of colourful light and gathering beneath her feet. It added a graceful, floating quality to her movements. "It was lovely to see you again, Tsana."

She gripped the silver handle, nodded. "It was." She started to pull the door closed, and hesitated. "Goodbye, Tanyana."

The coach glided away the moment the door snapped shut. I stood in the street and watched it disappear in a flicker like moonlight on dark water.

I reached inside my jacket, past my blouse, and into one of the folds of my uniform tight against my chest. I pulled out Devich's scrap of paper, thick between my fingers, scanned the address and turned into the evening. To follow it.

Devich lived further away from the city centre than I would have believed. I could have told myself it was to keep close to his work, to the building that no longer was. But it might have had more to do with a childhood unaccustomed to luxury or city living.

Still, it wasn't the top floor of an old house, above a food-obsessed crazy woman. It had that in its favour.

Devich's home was surrounded by thin triple-story buildings squashed in together along a street that ran close to the Tear. It looked the same as all the others, wind-stripped paint on weather-pocked stone patched with off-colour cement. His, I noticed, had a small garden between the gate and the two sagging steps to the front door. Flowers I couldn't identify, petals anaemic, stems yellowing, wavered against a chill lifting from the Tear. Three small worms of debris wiggled their way through his garden.

Everything was washed out, starkly colourless in the light from street lamps. I pushed open a well-maintained gate, skirted plants, and pressed a pion lock beside the door. It wouldn't unlock for me, but it would send streams of colour and light to let him know someone was at the door.