"It's going to keep doing that." The Keeper reappeared. "You have to calm it."
"I don't know what you mean!" I shouted back.
"That debris is more powerful than anything you have fought before." The puppet men started again. "It will kill your team."
"It will ravage every pion system in the city."
"Will you let that happen?"
"Destroy it, Miss Vladha."
"Destroy it."
"No!" the Keeper cried. "All these doors, Tanyana, they are pieces of me. Like this one below you – broken, twisted, and scarred – is a piece of me. They have all been torn from my body. If you destroy it, you will create another door. Didn't you hear me? If you don't return it to me, I won't be able to keep the doors closed!"
The debris-thing fought, lurched and tipped beneath me. Its faceless visage strained, not to the Keeper, not to attack me, but toward the puppet men. Whimpering, snuffling, a desperate and beaten dog.
"You created this?" I asked them, gasping as I fought to hold on.
"This is the final test."
My hands slipped. The debris-thing skittered toward the puppet men. As one they opened their jackets, together they drew out something bright, sharp, and terrifying. I flinched, and the scuttling debris-thing did the same. Smaller, but still arms – like the ones that had fitted me with my suit. Needled, thick with wires, slightly curved and altogether cruel. The puppet men lifted the devices, pointed them, flipped buttons to start the cords moving and fluids churning. And the debris-thing screamed, flickered in and out of existence, before twisting back toward Lad. It pushed the Keeper aside and I leapt to my feet, but not before catching the triumphant grins on the puppet men's faces.
The only emotion I had ever seen them express and it was horrifying. Lines rose all over their pale skin. Seams of darkness, jagged, covering foreheads, cheeks, and necks. Their mouths opened widely, too widely, their eyes darkened over and they weren't human. No expressionless faces and stilted movements, not any more, just ridges and vast grins and dark, bottomless eyes.
In an instant, it was gone, and the puppet men were pale and wooden again.
I jumped at the debris-thing, plunging my suit into its pale shoulders, pushing the creature down against the doors. The Keeper gasped, faded further, and staggered. They were one and the same. Joined. The Keeper and this manic thing beneath me. Knowing that, could I fight it, cut it into pieces and force it into jars?
"How is this a door?" I panted.
"We told you not to listen to it," the puppet men sneered.
"The doors connect us, Tanyana. They connect the Dark World and the Light World. I am that connection. Debris is that connection. When they rip a part of me away, when they twist it to their own ends, they are tearing the doors from my control!" Keeper straightened, though he still shook. "If the doors open, the worlds merge. If I can't close them, we will lose them both. Both worlds."
"It lies," the puppet men leered, mechanical and unemotional.
"That is why my Halves exist. They alone will hear me should a door open, they alone can help me close it. That is why they are precious. And that is why you cannot do what these men are telling you to do!"
"Superstitious nonsense."
"You must choose. What do you believe?" Keeper asked.
"There is but one choice, Miss Vladha," the puppet men said. "If you do not destroy the debris now, it will kill your team. One by one."
"No," the Keeper whispered. "I cannot take much more. If you do not tame it, the doors will open, and this world will be lost."
"That is ridiculous. Use the weapon we have created in you, and finish this test."
My head reeled. Weapon? I looked down to my silver-wrapped wrists and thought about everything I had done and all that had been done to me. The suit had protected me so many times, caught me when I had been thrown, shielded me from the planes of debris that had killed so many and from threats so mundane as a rotten and falling wall. I remembered Comedian and Barbarian, and what I had done to them. Was that what I was, what the veche had made me? A weapon that could withstand any debris storm, that could break any pion-made bond, that could maim or kill without thought?
"Is that what this is all about?" I asked. Suddenly, it all made sense. "This is why you have used me, all this time." What greater weapon could there be? What pionpowered weapon could fight against an army with suits like mine?
I added, "I'm doing this for our future. My life, for a stronger Varsnia." Dina's funding complaints, rumours of weapons and war, and the obsessive attention of the old veche men.
"You understand." As one, the three puppet men pretended a smile.
This was why I had been thrown from Grandeur's palm.
"I have one problem with it, though." I shook my head. "I am not a weapon." I was an architect. I had worked hard to make my life what it was. And suit or no suit, Grandeur or no Grandeur, tests or Keepers or doors or debris, it didn't matter. Even Devich. None of them could make me anything other than who I was.
And I was no one's weapon.
"Then you will die, like the others who have been suited, tested and failed before you."
"Others?" Kichlan whispered, his voice cracking.
"Do as we tell you and you will live. Fail, and you will die. You and your team."
The debris-thing struggled, and the Keeper winced. "Please," he groaned. "Calm us. Rejoin us. It hurts, Tanyana. It hurts."
"Destroy it, Miss Vladha. Destroy it before you are destroyed."
The debris-thing thrashed again, kicking my gut, whacking fists against my head and neck. I felt each blow through the silver. How long could I withstand that? How many more times would it have to vanish and reappear before I was too tired to follow? Would Lad be the first to go, when that happened? The first to be flayed alive, to be stripped of skin and life. Then who? Kichlan?
I couldn't let it happen. Not Lad. Not Kichlan. Not another debris collector, not while I had the strength to stop it.
I would have to destroy it. I withdrew a hand from the debris-thing's shoulder. It shivered beneath me and the Keeper cried out, weakly. I lifted the hand above my head, sharpened and curled my suit into a great, shining arc.
"Hurry," said the puppet men.
"No, please," the Keeper whispered.
I was not a weapon. "But I don't know what else to do!" I looked into the Keeper's dark eyes, to the debris that surged through transparent veins and skin across his face, and realised how much the puppet men had looked like him. Just for that instant.
"You do know," Lad said, his quiet voice nearly lost behind them all. "You did it before. Remember, Tan? When you told the debris to go backward, and it did. When you asked it to stop turning all the lights off, and it did. When you told it to stop hurting people, so you could save that man. Can't keep hurting it. That's what he means. Stop the hurting."
How do you stop a scarred mirror-image from hurting? How do you give peace to untouchable sails, to bubbling grains? To waste?
The same way you convince pions to build a building for you.
I eased my cruel suit back, and relaxed my shoulders. I closed my eyes. As the debris-thing bucked under me, thrashed and flickered in and out of solidity, I slowed my breathing.
"Shh," I whispered to it. "It doesn't hurt any more, you know that? Feel it, it doesn't hurt." And I sank deeper. I gave the debris-thing everything I had. No enthusiasm, no wild desire to weave lights and patterns into the world. I gave it peace. I gave it calm.
"Miss Vladha? What are you doing?"
I gave it standing in the cemetery with Kichlan, as Lad placed rosemary at his mother's grave.
I gave it Mizra's wild stories.
I gave it Lad's smile.
And the bucking stopped, the tension eased, the screaming dwindled into a soft sobbing and the body dissolved away.