Jo Anderton - Debris

A veche tribunal?

Unsettled, I glanced around the room. How long had I been sleeping here? Why would the veche hold a tribunal about Grandeur before I could attend? Panic rose like the returning of blood to a limb. This couldn't be right.

"No." I seized the edge of the bed. "The veche can just open a new tribunal. If you're not going to listen to me, then they will. You just sit there and I will-" I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed. Pain flared along my left side and instead of storming out to find justice, and answers, I fell back against the pillows.

The veche man watched, and offered no help. "As you can see-" his voice maintained that emotionless monotone "-you are in no position to do anything. The tribunal is closed. The veche, whom I am here to represent, will not open a new one. People with injuries like yours often find themselves confused. I suggest you put these supposed memories behind you. I suggest you concentrate on the future."

Injuries. "What happened to me?" I swallowed. "What have the healers done to me?"

"The healers did the best they could. Your wounds were more extensive than you realise. Trauma to the brain has rendered you unable to see or manipulate pions. The veche extends its well wishes in this difficult time."

What was he saying, in that uncaring monotone? The brain? Pions?

I touched my head with gingerly soft fingers. No padding there, no pain.

Had I dreamt up that wild, crimson force that had thrown me from Grandeur? But it was all so vivid, and I would not have fallen, could not have fallen, unless I had been pushed. But he didn't believe me. "What does this mean?"

"You have cost the veche significantly, and we will give you the opportunity to pay us back. Once you can get out of bed." He didn't even offer his hand as he stood, but I found myself looking up to watch him go.

The door to my room opened up to a white-tiled corridor. After the veche man had left a gradual stream of men passed by. Most wore long white coats over their clothes and talked in hushed tones. What was this place, some kind of hospital? Strange pictures on the walls caught my eye. Faint sepia ghosts of arms, legs, and what had to be someone's waist, although I couldn't understand why anyone would hang an image of a waist on a wall. In each of those glimpses I thought I saw jewellery. Bracelets, necklaces.

That was odd, surely. For a hospital.

Odder still, because these images hadn't been created using pions. What were they, drawn by hand? With ink – actual, physical ink? Or were they photographs? It was hard to imagine anyone still did any of that. And yet, if they had been rendered, I wouldn't have even known they were there.

Rendering was reasonably common nowadays. It involved the manipulation of tiny particles – water droplets, all kinds of dust, even hapless insects in the wrong place at the wrong time – and arranging them in just the right way to catch and reflect carefully directed light so an image resolved itself, apparently out of thin air. A truly skilled nine point rendering circle could create a life-size duplicate, detailed right down to the pores on their subject's skin, of shimmering light and colour that could stand like a statue or attach itself to a wall like a painting.

The left side of my body felt heavy, weighed down by dread, by the wrongness of it all. I lifted my left hand, placed it in my lap, but couldn't bring myself to peel back those bandages, to look at those fingers.

"You have to come back," I said to the particles of light that had always been my friends and would not, could not have abandoned me now. "Do you hear me?"

I wrapped my right hand around the ruin of my left and slowly, slowly began to squeeze. Pain like fire, like the burning of hot lights, sparked deep beneath my skin. Still, I squeezed, as though I could just force the pions back out from wherever they were hiding. Maybe, if they saw how much I needed them, they would return.

Pions had always come when I called.

I remembered running through the tight corridors of the textile factory my mother had worked in, prying loose the pion streams of their small and ungainly circles with nothing more than a whispered word. My mother was not a skilled binder, but she did what she could to provide, widowed and burdened with a precocious little brat like me. It was so easy, it had always been. A hook of my finger, a smile and a call and the factory workers' thin aubergine pions lightened to sharp pink, flocking around me. The other members of the factory circles must have hated me, but I never even noticed. Not with so much light all gathered in my hands.

I squeezed, gasping in difficult, hitching breaths. Push past the pain. Pions were there, somewhere, deep in a world that had always opened up for me, that had never felt as solid and impenetrable as this.

My first year studying at Proud Sunlight was when I really started to realise that I was different. I didn't come from a wealthy family with a strong pion-binding ancestry; in fact, I could only afford to attend at all because of the scholarship my skills had bought me. And I was young, compared to the rest of the students, a sixteen year-old girl surrounded by men and women at least four years older and all vastly more experienced.

They were surprised, so surprised, that I could keep up with my lessons. Keep up, and exceed them. Three moons into my first year and an experimental circle in the military sublevel collapsed in on itself, threatening to drag most of the riverside wing with it. I still remembered that feeling, standing in the middle of the churning, tattered remains of their six point circle, fearless, at peace, because the power and the energy rolling around me was my friend. The only friend I had in such a strange place.

I'd opened my arms to it. I'd let those pions play across my skin, touch my own systems, grow to know me, to trust me. As they always did. And I'd whispered calming words, like a mother to her child. And I'd stroked their tense formations, like soothing a wild beast. Working together, the pions and I unravelled the circle that had so entangled and enraged them, and then put right the building they had almost destroyed.

And I'd realised, in the aftermath, that I might be different and I might be poor, but with pions beside me none of that mattered. With my skill, with their help, I'd form myself a new identity.

So this wasn't possible, couldn't be possible. They had to come back, they couldn't leave me. We were all connected: the pions gave me strength and I gave them purpose.

I squeezed harder. Something tore beneath the bandage and I gasped at the sudden rush of pain. But no lights came with it. It was like the pions just couldn't hear me any more, as I couldn't see them. The world had become a barrier between us.

And I was alone. And everything I had worked for was gone.

"What are you doing?"

I flinched, and released my left hand as I looked back to the doorway. An entirely different man stood there. Worry wrinkled the edge of his green eyes – nothing like mould, closer to the Deep Salt Sea – and he brushed a fringe of rich dark hair across his forehead.

"I'd leave those bandages alone, if I were you. They're there for a reason, you know."

I frowned at him, and croaked, "Just leave me alone." Alone. Could I really be more alone than this?

He shook his head. "He didn't even offer you any water, did he?" He produced a large, full glass with a flourish. "Those men, the veche ones I mean, they never change. Don't even think to offer a thirsty lady some water." And he smiled at me, all white teeth and shining eyes. What, exactly, did he think I had to smile about?

"Devich," he introduced himself as he swept into the room, white coat billowing. He helped me hold the glass to my lips, tip it and ease the precious fluid into my dry and aching throat. Despite everything I sighed when it was gone, rested my head back, and realised how much I had needed it.