Kichlan retrieved empty jars. As we contained Mizra's collection, Uzdal arrived with more debris. Lad, arms wrapped around his chest, sat on the couch and stared darkly into an empty corner.
"Something's going on." Sofia and Natasha arrived together, balancing debris between them. "Did you see all the debris?" Sofia started decanting.
"Walked through it." I kept an eye on Lad as I answered her. He had started to rock, slowly back and forth.
"You need to look again."
Lad could not be convinced to climb the stairs so we left him huddling into himself. I felt it before we even reached street level. A tightness in the air, a constriction. And heat. Waves of it like a summer day funnelled down the stairs, whooshing with noise and pressure.
Outside was dark. Clouds hovered over Movoc in a swirling mass that had nothing to do with rain. Lights flashed on and off around us. Something rattled against a door down the street and water gushed in a torrent from beneath it. Someone screamed in the distance, over and over like an ineffectual dog's bark.
"What is this?" Uzdal murmured.
I lifted my wrist, stared at the suit. It was dull, spinning slowly. No lights, no map, no call.
"Can't be right."
"Maybe it's the technicians' laboratory?" Natasha ventured. "Maybe they can't call us because it collapsed and that's where they normally do it from?"
Did we really need to be called? I glanced between the faces of my team members and understood their fear. But why were we standing here waiting to be told what should have been so obvious, what should have been so natural?
I had thought about that a lot, as I sat at the top of my stairs and kept my dormant wrist heavy on my knees. Why did we need to be called, to be told what debris to follow, what emergencies to attend? Because that was all we ever knew, and our tools to do otherwise, the things that could have made us powerful, had been taken away. Our language, our rituals, our history. On our wrists we had – at the very least – a map, a way to know where we needed to go, what we needed to do. If we could read it on our own, read it properly, who knew what we might discover? So we had been told we were useless in this bright new world, useless and dirty and not particularly smart. How often did you need to be told something to believe it?
But they were wrong, the veche and the technicians who seemed happy to hold us down. We could be so much more.
At a juncture between two buildings, debris was growing. Like a fungus, a body, it bulged out of bricks and cement. One tendril snaked over the cracked footpath to wrap around the base of a nearby lamp. Light flickered fitfully against the glass like a terrified insect.
An explosion rocked the street. As one, we crouched, hands over heads. Fire leapt from the window of an apartment three blocks away. The same screaming continued.
"We shouldn't be here. Everyone was leaving, as I walked here," Sofia rattled off words as she crouched. "Enforcers were leading them all away. To the Tear. Boats on the Tear. Other, we need to get away."
Lad, panting, crashed into Uzdal's back as he ran from the stairwell. "Bro!" he screamed into the preternatural silence. "What happened, bro?" Clapping eyes on Kichlan he launched himself onto his brother and wrapped his arms around Kichlan's waist. Great tears ran over his cheeks. He gasped in hitching, sobbing breaths.
Kichlan, bent over backwards and struggling for breaths of his own, patted Lad's shoulder awkwardly. "Calm… fine…" he laboured to be heard.
"We go now, bro. Bro, go downstairs. Stay there, shut the door. Wait. Can we do that? Can we do that?"
Fear for everything.
A terrible premonition settled over me, pricking my scalp with a breath of ice. I wasn't going to wait to be told what to do, no matter how low I had supposedly fallen. Even in this bright world debris collectors could be strong. Especially in this bright world, that could create so much, but understood so little.
"Lad." I stepped toward him, shook off Sofia as she scrabbled to hold me back. Mizra and Uzdal watched me like a snake, or an untrustworthy dog. "Lad." I touched his shoulder, drew his gaze and loosened his grip on his brother. "What is it, Lad? What have you heard?"
For a moment he stared at me, blank. Then Lad said, "You know, Tan. I know you do."
"Know what?" Mizra asked, voice high and cracked.
Footsteps. We turned and watched as a man bolted down the empty street. He ran in silence, the only sound his rasping breath and the beating of his feet. They were bare, I realised with horrible curiosity, skin smacking the stones.
"Other's balls," Uzdal breathed.
"Know what?" his brother croaked again.
"Why don't you tell us?" I tried to soothe Lad. The muscles in his forearm shook beneath my hand. "For the others."
Lad released his brother and straightened. "Bad things," he whispered. "He said there would be bad things."
"Lad-" Kichlan started. But his brother pointed at me, and if anything grew paler.
"They are real!" he screamed into the empty street. "Tan hears them too!"
I could truly lose the team, in this moment, if I wasn't careful. I could become another Lad to them, one they weren't too interested in protecting.
"I can hear the voices too," I said, softly. "Because they are real."
Lad nodded, his face a mixture painful to watch. Desperate fear and desperate hope, added to a childish excitement.
"This is what I tried to tell you, Kichlan." I turned to him, not letting the mouths around me speak, battering against arguments and hoping I could wear them all down. "What I meant. Lad's voices are real, he's not the first to hear them and he will not be the last. And I have heard them too."
"Are they speaking to you now?" Sofia asked, tone condescending.
I turned on her. "No. I cannot hear them all the time, only-" when I was wearing my suit. It hit home with a force that made my head ring.
"Only when?" She blinked, face falsely patient and lips pursed.
"Lad can hear them all the time." I ignored her. "That's what makes him so special, so good at what he does. He follows the voices when we use only our eyes. And that's why he knows something is going wrong."
"Follows the voices?" Mizra was leaning forward, his expression animated by morbid curiosity. "How does that help him collect?"
"The voices are the debris." I looked at Kichlan as I said this. "And that is why some things should not be changed."
His face was blank, a badly painted mask.
"That's ridiculous," Sofia snapped.
In the distance, another explosion sent flames into the sky. Heating units overloading? Or cooking benches, perhaps. This was the greatest fear of a nine point circle society. This was debris overrunning the city, turning all its complicated systems into chaos, its life into death. What would happen if it was left unchecked?
Kichlan's mask didn't matter. Sofia's acid or Mizra's panic, both were irrelevant.
"Lad." I held his hands in mine, drew his focus. "Do you know what's happening?"
Lad shook his head. "He says this is the end. He says we can't go backwards."
The Keeper. The debris. I didn't understand it, but I had heard it with my own ears, seen it limp in my own hands. The Keeper, the debris. They were the same thing and they were talking to Lad.
Fear for everything.
I shivered. "Where is he, Lad? Do you know?"
Lad nodded.
"Take me there."
"Stop this!" Sofia lunged for Lad's hands. "Where are you going? We haven't been called anywhere!"
But Lad jerked away from her, and still holding my hands nearly lifted me from the ground. "No!" he screamed at Sofia and she stumbled away in shock. "No! Tan believes me, Tan is my friend. It's true. Never lied!"
Sofia fell hard against the stones and this, at least, dragged Kichlan from his distraction.