Jo Anderton - Debris

"Now we need to measure how well you can see it." He cast me what I'm sure he wanted to be a reassuring smile. How could I be reassured with debris floating around like that?

Devich's fingers twitched and I stared at them, hard, trying to read what he was doing with the pions from his movements alone. Something in the debris chamber shifted, and I looked up quickly to catch the end of a strange haziness on the other side of the poly.

"Tell me," he said. "What do you see now?"

The debris was clearer now, clumped together in distinct groups. It looked like the deposits of several dogs on someone's unfortunate courtyard. "I see debris."

Devich was a statue of patience. "Yes, but what does it look like this time? Describe it for me."

I did, analogy and all.

"Very nice." He chuckled, twitched, muttered. "Count them, will you?"

"Why? You said you couldn't see them. How will you know if I get it right?"

"This isn't an eye exam, Tanyana. I need to know if you can tell the debris apart, or if it's all one hazy mass."

Eye exam? Arrogant statue of patience that he was. "And that will make a difference?"

"A big one."

I counted six deposits.

"Very nice, very nice indeed." More of that same strange fuzzing in the chamber. "You need a challenge, my lady."

"I'm nobody's lady." Not any more. I was not longer the centre of a nine point critical circle. And I did not need reminders of it.

"Will you look again and tell me what you see?"

The debris had changed. No longer distinct clumps it had become something flat, dark. Like the shadow of a featureless building. The poly cage began to mist up, and Devich removed one hand from the glass panel. He opened a door in the side of the machine and turned a small crank. A fan whirred, and the condensation faded.

I leaned over the edge of the bed again, and wished I could stand. Wished I could face Devich on my own two feet. "It's hard, this time." I squinted in a vain attempt to work out what the debris was doing.

"To see it?" Devich's voice was carefully controlled.

"No." Oh no, I could see it. But I couldn't understand it. It had become squares, rectangles, shapes with too many sides to name, of thin black or grey. They stretched across the cage like the webs of a tribe of particularly disorganised spiders. Were they holes? Gaps in the air, or little solid sheets of paper? "I don't know how to describe it."

"Can you try?"

I gave him my jumbled description, and his fingers flew.

I touched the poly, lightly. It felt warm, the whir of the fan a slight vibration. The debris flickered and its webs redrew themselves, crowding around my fingertips. The poly grew warmer. With a small shudder, I sat back. "So what does it mean?"

"It means you are as highly skilled with debris as you were with pions. Few collectors see more than a haze, or a shadow of the stuff. Not like you."

"I am a collector, then?"

With a sigh, Devich lifted his hands from the glass panel, and the whole machine turned off. He replaced the sheet in silence.

"Yes. And you need a suit."

"Suit?" Why did such a small word seem to echo so, in this unhomely room?

"All debris collectors wear them." His green gaze held mine. He hesitated. "Tanyana, I can't do this to you, not if you don't want it. I mean-" he fidgeted, fingers plucking at each other with startling violence "-that's not what they would want me to say, but after everything that's already happened to you. I could pretend. If you wanted. To spare-"

The door slammed open, and Devich jumped. Pale, he turned, his hands still plucking their guilty twitch. Two veche men this time, impossible to tell apart. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, filling the doorway.

"You have tested her?" one said.

"Can she see it?" the second continued.

Their voices were the same, their unmoving hands, their stiff, expressionless faces.

The edges of Devich's mouth pinched. "I-"

"Answer us."

Devich swallowed, throat bobbing visibly. "Yes, I think so, but I might need to do further tests."

"No, that will be enough."

"But it was difficult to-" Devich tried to speak, but the veche men cut him off.

"Step aside."

"She will come with us."

Devich, too pale, almost green, cast me a silent, fearful glance. Then the veche men entered the room, bringing their chill with them. Devich gripped his testing machine and forced it out into the corridor. It screeched against the wood again and left a deeper gouge.

In its place, the veche men brought a bed. It floated above the ground, obviously on pions I could not see, and was made of a kind of silver poly mesh.

"What are you doing?" I straightened.

"You will come with us." The men stood at either end of my bed and gripped the blankets. "You will be suited."

"I don't know what that means? Wait! Stop!"

Holding the blankets above and beneath me, the veche men lifted. Together, they carried me as though I was no heavier than a child, and deposited me on the bed. The jarring set off pain in my hip and behind my knee. I held my left hand with my right and pressed it tightly to my chest.

"You will be suited."

I looked up to the veche man closer to my head, about to argue, but stopped. A line ran along his chin, impossibly fine. It curled up to meet his mouth. Dark. Thin. Like a seam.

The bed moved. They floated me out of the room, down a long, tiled corridor that echoed the tread of their shoes. We passed few people, and they all looked the other way as I tried to meet their eyes. They all glanced fearfully at the veche men, nodded, twitched fake smiles. Still, we kept moving.

Down a ramp, along another corridor, down a second ramp. Down and down until I thought we had to be far underground, because even Grandeur, surely, could not have been this high.

Finally, two large doors swung open and we came to a stop in a wide, circular room. It was filled with more strange machinery, and as I levered myself to my elbows I noticed a table, smooth and chrome, awkwardly starshaped. Lamps surrounded it, and burned it into brilliance. "What is that?" I asked.

"You will be suited here, miss." In the sharp glare of lights reflected on metal, I caught those lines on his face again. More of them. They ringed his eyes like spectacles, they dipped down from his nose like a puppet.

That's what it was. These veche men, they looked like puppets.

"But what is that?"

Then Devich appeared. "Tanyana." He held my hand, his palm cool and dry. "I'm sorry." His hand squeezed mine. "Please trust me. I'll be here."

Someone stepped out of the bright-lights-on-silver glare. A faceless shadow, a brush of displaced air and then something sharp pierced my upper arm.

I tried to jerk away. "What-?"

Numbness seeped through me like bleach through cotton. Hands from the bright lights took my blankets away. They undid my gown, they peeled off bandages.

I turned my head toward Devich, on a neck gone to damp and dissolving sponge. My mouth wouldn't form his name, no matter how hard I pursed it, or how I lolled my tongue around like so much flopping fish.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, and leaned close. His breath reminded me of maple cakes, the kind Thada brought in from the western colonies and kept aside for me. I was suddenly hungry, then nauseous, in alarmingly quick succession. "I'll be here, I'll look after you." Devich's enormous eyes swam close to me, rich with concern, before floating away.

The shadow hands lifted, and laid me gently on the silver table. My skin was too bright, naked under the lights, my stitches too dark in comparison. I couldn't feel temperature anymore, not hot nor cold.

Shadows hovered at the edge of my vision. When one leaned in, close to my face, I could only make out pale blue eyes, distant with concentration. The rest was hidden in a tight mask of shiny silver fabric. Only when I tried to touch it did I notice my hands were clamped to the table, encased in a large-fitting glove of the same chrome metal. A lift of my sluggish head, and my feet were the same.