Jo Anderton - Debris

Worst of all was the way the silver bands moved. At the centre of each was another ring, a thinner version of the whole apparatus that spun slowly, constantly. I hadn't gathered enough courage to touch it. This extra ring seemed to float on something liquid, it moved so smoothly. Around the floating ring were symbols, signs and letters of scrolling silver, and these were the bastards that glowed. As they moved – not with the floating ring, not with any apparent symmetry or reason – they flickered. Some dipped into dull nothingness while others rose from the silver shining, beaming their arcane meaning proudly.

I couldn't decide what Devich and the puppet men had fitted me with. Six bands of silver drilled into my skin were hardly what I could call a suit. If it was liquid, then why didn't it spill when I moved my hand? If it was solid, then how in all the Other's worst dreams did it move? And I wondered, dimly like a dull headache, what the pions were doing. Surely they were there, spinning the silver, shining the ciphers.

The veche returned me to my apartment after the suiting, and left me there. I lost track of days. No one visited. Not the puppet men, not Devich. No member of my circle. I couldn't do much other than throb with my collective pain and hope I was healing.

I went through the days like I was a puppet myself, someone else pulling the strings. Slowly my hand knitted together, fingers started to look like fingers again. Twisted. Stunted. But fingers. A few days, and I could bend my left knee. I slid from my bed each morning and struggled the length of the apartment, moving, walking as much as I could. Gradually, my strength grew. I cleaned my wounds, washing the bandages in my bathroom sink. I stared at myself in the mirror each morning, wondering what kind of scars would they leave.

Then I sat in the study, shutters drawn and only one lamp burning low. I had to turn the lamp on manually: remove the small latch on the side of its base – the Otherdamned thing was stuck, and I snared a fingernail in the process – stick my finger in and twist and curse until the valve opened enough to allow the pions to flow. For countless days I did nothing but peer at its light and wonder why I could see it, but not the pions that drove it. I supposed that was the point. In a factory somewhere on the outskirts of the city pions were being asked to create this light. Then, when they knew what was expected of them and were ready to perform it, they were rushed down one of the many great systems that spread across the city, just so they could arrive here, in this lamp, to bind this light for me. I didn't really know what they were doing to create the light. I was an architect, not a lamplighter. The pions had to be generating some kind of reaction, inside that ornate glass tube on its sculptured brass fittings, but I didn't know what it was. I'd never bothered to learn.

I thought about the pion-binder, sitting in a lamplight factory with hundreds of others all bound in complex critical circles, coaxing an enormous number of pions across Movoc-under-Keeper to give me this small amount of light. A man, I decided, after much staring and thinking, there in the semi-dark, balding and fat. With poor hygiene. The members of his circle can't stand the way he stinks. And he sits there, in seven-bell shifts, after which he is even more pungent, and earns maybe two hundred kopacks a day with the rest of them.

I sat for days alone in the study, at least a sixnight and one, probably more. Days covering my wrists, ankles, waist and neck with blankets.

What was I doing?

Giving up? That didn't take long, did it, Tanyana? A little push, a few cuts, some creepy statue-men and a bit of new jewellery and already you're sitting in the dark nursing your misery. That's the Tanyana who worked her way to the centre of a nine point circle, is it? Did you win the contract to build Grandeur by sitting around? Do you remember how you did all that? Hard work, skill, determination. Hardly the traits of a debris collector.

I stood, left the room, and opened the valves for every light in the apartment.

I shouldn't be a debris collector. And I wouldn't be, if someone hadn't pushed me. If the veche knew I was telling the truth.

I rinsed my face and hair in the bathroom basin, and rubbed as much of myself as I could with a wet towel. I worked honey-scented nut oil into my skin, and dabbed vanilla onto my neck and wrists. My stomach gurgled with awakening hunger at the smell, and I allowed myself a chuckle as I pulled open the lacquered closet. Bears growled down at me from its corners, their eyes inlaid with beechwood, their teeth glinting mother-of-pearl. My hands shook slightly as I pushed aside the highnecked navy jackets I had worn on construction sites. Instead, I pulled on thick pants and a pale angora sweater. I had lost weight, and even these small, shapeless clothes were baggy on me. I rubbed gel over my hands and ran them through my short blonde hair so it stuck out around my face, not that different from the sleep-messed look, to be honest. I owned little in the way of cosmetics and jewellery. Nothing dusky to compliment my pale, almost grey eyes. Nothing to cover the freckles and sunspots endemic of a fair complexion subjected to too many days working in the sun. The only adornment I had to add was a watch that would remain hidden in my jacket.

The watch was a gift from Jernea, the old architect who had mentored me through university, given on the day I earned my own critical circle. It opened with a small catch: inside concentric circles rotated slowly, tracking and chiming with the bells. No pions had crafted it, and none worked the gears that moved it now, all it took was the turning of a tiny wind-up key. Old-world technology and craftsmanship, and that meant it was at least two centuries old. For that, it was precious. For the skills that were lost, far more so than its polished brass and coloured glass inlay.

At the door I squashed my feet into heavy black boots. I pulled on a dark coat. It was cut for a man, but far more comfortable than any ridiculously-long-sleeved-draped across-the-shoulders-and-narrow-at-the-waist woman's wear would be. Outside I pressed fingertips to the pionpowered lock. It had a flat, crystalline panel designed to read my touch alone. Normally, I would have watched pions buzz about my fingers, glancing against those busy within my own body and checking I was, in fact, the person who lived beyond the door they guarded. Now, I only felt a tickling over my skin and had to take the security they provided on faith.

Outside, a crisp Movoc morning breeze carried the tolls of thirdbell up from the city centre and set the skin on my face tightening. It irritated my stitches. I turned into it, discomfort or no, and started to walk. Slowly, shuffling, limping slightly. But at least I was walking. The centre of Movoc-under-Keeper was more than bridges, grand old houses, and romantic spots where pions danced. I could find veche chambers there. The project halls. The tribunal.

The veche couldn't silence me. I would give them no choice but to listen.

Where pions should have stretched from rooftop to rooftop in light-beaded banners there was only empty, cloud-grey sky. Movoc was a strange, dim place without the busy lights and complex systems that gave it life. It felt haunted. Not only because of the countless unseen presences I just knew were there, hidden beneath it all. But things just seemed to move, to work, all on their own. Metallic doors opened or closed themselves, so did the windows. I had to cross the street to avoid a fountain I had once thought of as beautiful. It was built with gaps in the stonework, so the complex bindings could be better appreciated and the very colour of its pions added to its form. Now it just looked like a lot of blocks of carefully shaped stone suspended in thin air, dribbling water that came from nowhere. Unsettling. Unnatural.