Jo Anderton - Debris

With a frown, I peered over the edge. The distant ground was hard to see with heat waves adding their haze, and a sky thick with lights. My circle was still complete and distinct, linked by varied colour and dotted with light like dew on a spider's web.

Movoc-under-Keeper stretched out beyond the construction site, a sprawling city of dark stone and bright lights. Threads of thin, sharp pions surged between buildings, carrying light, carrying heat. Down along the Tear River, further south of the Keeper Mountain, factories burned. Thick patterns of orange rose above a rubbish disposal. Twisting, complex green over carpenters working. And on top of it all, the mess of the everyday. Lives made up of pions shifted, prodded, caressed and coaxed into action. It would be easy to say Movoc wasn't built of bricks, of cement and steel. It was erected on a frame of pions, it lived through them, and was lit by them. A true city of the revolution.

All this was normal. Nothing amiss. Just a few more pions than usual, overexcited for reasons I did not understand. And the wind, battering Grandeur's glass dress. Swallowing vertigo, I returned to the steadily solidifying knuckles.

"Tanyana?" Tsana's pions sped by so fast they took most of her voice with them. "I think something's wrong."

I completed the knuckles, each a hub of steel with half a dozen smaller pins extended, ready to brace fingers. Only an eighth or so of the boulder's total mass had been used. I drilled for more ore, removed it, and started construction of five thick beams.

"I need details, Tsana. Anything you say is useless to me without details."

The wind hit again, harder still. And below, my circle flickered. No, not just my circle – all the pions in the construction site. Gone was their light, their colour. All I saw, for a slow and breathless moment, was Movoc as it would look without the pions that gave it life. The city was grey, wet, and darkness haunted its corners.

They returned in a flurry, somehow faster, somehow thicker, and wilder than before.

"There's too much interference, I can't keep the pions focused." Tsana's words spilled around me. "I don't understand why-"

Llada burst in. "Systems are failing all over the site! The lifters are down: two of their stones have dissolved, they're trying to contain the third but, my lady, they can't even maintain a circle. The bonds in Grandeur's feet are loosening. Her hem. Her ankles. Other, we're losing pions and I can't stop-" Her thread of purple lights whipped free of the circle, thrashing unrestrained against the sky, and her voice disappeared. It only took her a moment to rejoin us but it was far too long for someone with her pion-binding skill.

Other, what was happening?

I took a deep breath, and put all thoughts of the inspectors out of my mind. I didn't need this now, not now while they were watching and reporting on me, but worrying about them would only weaken my focus. The safety of my circle, indeed my entire construction site, was my main priority. I would deal with the effect on my career later. "Everyone, come in close," I said. "Tighten the circle and you should be able to bring-"

"They won't listen to me!" Tsana's jarring, sporadic voice peppered me as her pion thread tore violently through my fingers. "Too many-"

"Can you hear me, my lady?" Volski, at least, remained calm. "You need to get this place back under your control."

"I know. Shorten your threads-"

"My lady? Can you hear me?"

Other damn us, we couldn't even get through to each other. The site was just too bloated, overrun by wild, fierce lights. Any pions I sent down to my circle were surrounded, torn from their threads, and riled into abandon until they joined the powerful and unruly throng. And I didn't understand why. The pions were my friends, and had always been. When I called them from their home, deep in the layers of reality, they responded with enthusiasm, with joy. Not this.

This felt like madness, and the very idea sent a chill over my skin.

When we controlled them, pions could change the very structure of the world. But mad, like this, and out of our control, what would they do now?

"No," I whispered to myself. "No, I won't let-"

A great screeching sliced through my words. The finger bones, being carefully constructed only a moment before, writhed in the sky like pockets of termite-infested timber. I focused all my attention on them. I let go the circle below me, I ignored the chaos infesting the rest of the site and the inspectors, observing it all, scribbling away only the Other knew what in their reports. All I saw, all I knew, was those finger bones, and the tiny particles of energy bright within them.

"Enough of this," I told the pions. My pions. Stern, but kind, I was a mother, a teacher, a firm hand. "We have a job to do. Enough."

But they couldn't hear me, or wouldn't. So I approached them, balancing on hot steel beams wet with condensation. I reached up to the closest finger bone, placed my hand against its stretching, writhing notquite-metal-anymore form so the pions in me and the pions in it could touch, could mingle.

"Listen-"

But then, only then, so connected to the finger bone, so focused, did I see them.

Pions, yes, but not like any pions I had never known. Red, painfully red, and buried so deep inside reality that even the collective skill in the building site below hadn't seen them. When I tried to communicate with them they burned like tiny suns and heat washed over me, and anger, such a terrible tearing anger I could feel from my head to my chest and deep, deep inside me. In my own pion systems.

Gasping, I stumbled back. They bled out from the finger bone, infecting the particles around it, undoing all the bonds I had made. I spun, and they were everywhere. It wasn't the wind battering Grandeur around like she was little bigger than me. The crimson pions whirred around us like a nest of furious wasps. Bereft of any guiding structure they crashed indiscriminately against my statue, against my circle, the earth, the street. They infected every pion they touched and tore apart every system in their way.

Desperately, I stumbled back to the edge of Grandeur's palm. My circle was holding on by only a few stubborn threads. Volski. Tsana. Llada.

I drew all the clean pions I could gather into a single, solid thread and thrust it back down toward my circle. "Can you hear me?" I had to penetrate that mess, I had to warn them. "It's not the wind, do you understand? Let everything else go, look to the sky, the edges of Grandeur and you might see them. There are pions!"

I was answered only by screaming below. Not passing my ears, not touching my senses with a brush of colour and scent. Below.

The finger bones fell. Two crashed onto Grandeur's palm, only feet away, and there they lay, writhing. One dripped, hot like melted cheese, over the side. The other curled over itself in a snake-sex frenzy.

Where had the others gone?

More screaming and great thuds. I swallowed, clammy in my jacket, too hot.

I had to take control. I was the only one who could. Not even my circle, skilled though they were, could see pions this sharp, this deep into the world.

I ran hands through my hair. My short fringe stuck up hard, styling cream rearranged by sweat.

Take control, but from whom? Who had coaxed these crimson pions from the deep places they must have slept in? Who had disturbed their dormancy? Pions could not be created, just as they could not be destroyed. So this anger, this burning rage, must have always existed, somewhere deep inside all things.

Why had it been set free?

Legs folded beneath me as I shook tension from my wrists, and reached out with open, cupping hands.

The fiery particles slipped through my fingers. Not around them, like water, but through them. Like reflections on a wall, like shadows. Like my fingers weren't even there.