Jo Anderton - Debris

"No!" Focus. Touch them, command them. Pions had listened to me since I was a child, been keen to please me, never hating me, never too wild to be caught, too angry to be soothed. "Don't let this happen!" My voice broke, I took shuddering breaths to try and control myself. How could I hope to control pions if I couldn't even do that? "I don't know who's doing this, but you don't have to listen to them. I'm here. You know me. Trust me, and come back. Come back to us."

I could have been talking to empty air. Nothing changed, the chaos, if anything, grew fiercer. And while my fingers passed through them like I wasn't solid, those particles hooked themselves into the pion-bonds in my coat, my hair, the outer layers of my skin and dragged me forward. Grandeur shook. I could feel her swaying, as her systems were ruthlessly undone. Creaking eased around me, below me. Somewhere glass shattered. The threads of Grandeur's dress, pulling away?

No. I wouldn't let this happen. Not to me, and not to all the people below who trusted me, who relied on my strength and my skill not only to work such wonders, but to keep them safe while we did so. I would not let them down.

So I stood, braced, haloed by blazing fire. I called out to the pions again and opened my arms wide. They rushed over to me from all across the site, and further out too, from the rest of the city, as far as my call could reach. I gathered every clean pion I could summon, anything that wasn't crimson and furious and blind, and wound them into tight, complex threads. Unstable without my circle's strength to support me, surrounded by the chaos of the construction site, still I tied my threads into all the weakening pion-bonds below me. I stitched up Grandeur's feet and legs where she had been rapidly dissolving; I injected solidity into the decaying finger bones; I recombined the lifters' stones and helped them reform their tattered circle; I caught the edges of my own, frayed circle, and bundled them together.

"It's Tanyana! She's taking control-"

"-restoring integrity! That's amazing, my lady, amazing-"

"-can you come down? The bindings in her arm are still loose and we need-"

Voices flashed at me, snippets of sound. The circle flashed with them, lightning strikes of panic.

I strained to hold them all, to control so many pions and keep their threads safe, solid. And it looked, for a moment, like I was winning. I, and my binding, was stronger than the furious crimson pions trying to undo us. Grandeur strengthened, the circles below hardened into solid colour and began channelling fresh pions of their own. More binders were joining us, emergency and relief crews, and I even allowed myself to smile, and whisper to my pions, "There, do you see? We can do it. Together we are strong."

Until all the bright and furious lights slowed in their whirling chaos, then stopped, hanging like too-close stars in the air around me. They flashed, coordinated, and my stomach clenched as they gathered into a wide and terrible thread of red light. And attacked.

They did not attack Grandeur again. Not the circles below, not anything else in the construction site. This time crimson pions attacked me, and only me. They crashed into me, through me. And all my threads were torn from my control, and all the systems inside my body cried out and jumbled up, and I stumbled forward, toes on the edge of Grandeur's palm. I burned, and the sky burned with me, for an instant of tortured brilliance before they all disappeared. The bloat of crimson, the normal few, every last pion that lit Movoc-under-Keeper was gone.

And in their place, darkness. A sea of the wigglingworm stuff.

Tanyana, is it? Welcome. And a single voice, a whisper more imagined than real.

Metal screeched and shuddered at my feet. Strangely numb, I turned to see Grandeur crack below her elbow. For a moment we hovered, her arm and I, in a strange handshake eight hundred feet in the air. She took her time deciding which way to fall. Then the sky tipped, pions pushed, my soft-soled feet slipped forward, and I was free.

Silver knuckles shone, bright in the sunlight of a clear day, and even as I fell I squinted back to watch them arch toward me, filling the blue sky. She was Grandeur to the end. Not content to throw me to the earth and away from the safety of my nine point circle, she had to slap me on the way down.

When I opened my eyes again the world was empty.

I lay, propped up on hard pillows in a bed that creaked beneath me with each breath. The room was not my own. A white-painted ceiling; beige walls dotted with washed-out pictures; a chair in each corner; a small table. A lifeless room, certainly not home. But that was not what made it empty. The pions were gone. The walls were colourless and hollow without them, the tiled floor dull and flat. No bright connections between particles, no flickering eagerness, no foundations of light.

Empty.

A man sat beside the bed. His skin was pallid, surprisingly free of freckles or sunspots, his hair so blonde it was almost white. His eyes were a faint, dirty kind of green.

His jacket was dull. His striped shirt, his woollen pants: there were no pions in them either.

"Where are the pions?" I tried to turn my head and ask. But pain surged up like a tide at the movement, and my mouth felt full of cloth and too weak to form proper words. I wavered, and from the corner of my eye caught sight of what had once been my left hand. Wrapped in thin linen I could see through it to something dark that wound its way over my fingers. Fingers too misshapen, twisted, and thick to be mine.

Those former fingers cleared my head. Those former fingers were terrible enough that I could turn my neck and speak.

"Where am I?" My voice was raw and dry. "Who are you?"

Face like a statue, the man watched me. Not impatient, not bored or even caring. Nothing. "I am glad to see you awake, Miss Vladha." His voice reminded me of ice over a lake. Cold. Smooth. Dangerous. With a strangely halting hand he drew an insignia from his jacket and showed it to me, a roaring bear's head ringed by nine concentric circles. "I represent the national veche. I am here about the incident."

Grandeur. Oh, Other.

I gathered what authority I could. What had happened at the construction site – those crimson pions and the chaos they had wreaked – that was not my fault. "Do you know who summoned them?" I asked. Something tugged at my face with the croaking words. Dimly, I was aware of the thin, almost paper-like gown I wore. It crinkled softly beneath the weight of blankets. It was mostly transparent, and I knew I should have been embarrassed beneath the man's constant appraisal. I wasn't. Because there were bandages between gown and skin. A dark shape beneath sheer green.

He blinked. A long and precise movement. "I beg your pardon?"

"The crimson pions." I swallowed hard. Other, I could have killed for water. "They disrupted our systems, they undid my bindings. They pushed me. Do you know who unleashed them?"

"The only person responsible for your statue, Miss Vladha, was yourself."

He had misunderstood me. "No, no. I was attacked. Pions too deep for the others to see, but I saw them. They broke Grandeur, they pushed me off the edge. You need to find out who did this!"

The veche man shook his head. Sharply to the left, then to the right. "Listen to yourself. You know how impossible this sounds."

"But there were-"

"Pions the members of your own nine point circle couldn't see, let alone three qualified veche inspectors?" He lifted the corner of his mouth in a precise sneer, before dropping it back to the expressionless thin line. "The incident has been before a veche tribunal. The inspectors reported none of this. Neither did your circle, or the lifters, or the healers. No one. Grandeur was your contract, Miss Vladha, and you must take responsibility for it."