Debris

"I-"

Then a pit-a-pat like a bird against glass cut me off, and there was Tsana, fist against the door to the sublevel, expression uncertain.

I swore beneath my breath, "Other."

Tsana's large eyes fell on the shocked faces of my team one at a time. "Tanyana." She stepped into the room, one hand held out.

I crossed the floor quickly. Why was she early, of all things? "Tsana." I took her hand. "Thank you for coming."

"Of course." She smiled prettily, and let none of the distance between us show. "Of course."

I would have to introduce her. Another thing I had hoped to avoid.

"Everyone," I said. "This is Tsana. She's here to fix the ceiling, she's an architect." Like I used to be stalled on my lips. "Tsana, this is my debris collecting team."

Sofia coughed. She stood, head high and neck uncomfortably straight. "Not that she needs our help. Sometimes it seems she can just do it all herself."

Tsana extended her smile. "She was a very skilled binder too."

She probably meant that as a compliment.

Sofia lifted an eyebrow. "I wouldn't know about that." She fixed me with a sharp expression devoid of any trust. "Lots we don't know about her." She left the sublevel with ice in her wake.

Mizra and Uzdal didn't speak. They followed Sofia closely, heads down.

"Don't be long." Kichlan helped Lad out of the chair, and pressed a coat into the man's hands. "Make sure the door locks behind you." I noticed he didn't offer me the large iron key in his pocket. "Try to make the ceiling as smooth as possible. Don't give the technicians a reason to notice it again."

Tsana, affronted, sniffed loudly. "I only do the best work."

Kichlan raised his eyebrows at her. "Come on, Lad."

Lad continued to stare at Tsana like she was an exotic bird.

"Is he quite all right?" Tsana murmured to me from the side of her mouth.

"He's Lad," I answered the only way I could. "It's just the way he is."

"Come on." Kichlan tugged Lad's hand. "Let's leave them to their work."

"What's the lady going to do, bro?" Lad asked as he followed Kichlan.

"Fix the ceiling, Lad."

"All by herself?"

"Yes."

"Oh." Footsteps receded up the stairs.

"Hello." Natasha, who had waited smiling under sunlight from the windows, approached Tsana. She held out a hand, and the two women shook.

"Hello," Tsana replied.

If their situations were not so vastly different, I realised, the two women would have been a lot alike.

"I'll leave you to it." Natasha flickered her smile on and off like a broken lamp as she glanced between us. "Better make sure there's not a scar left, or you won't hear the end of it."

I groaned and rolled my eyes to say I knew she was right.

Chuckling, Natasha left Tsana and me alone in the sublevel.

"So, that's your new circle." Tsana wasn't impressed. I could see it in her stiff shoulders, hear it in her clipped words.

"Team," I corrected her. "We don't use circles. Debris collecting is done in teams." Except, of course, for the circle we had made when we all worked together.

"Ah." She frowned. "So how do you-?" She made a gripping gesture in the air.

I held up a hand and pulled back my sleeve. Rather than balking at the slowly spinning, shining suit, however, Tsana leaned in and peered at it. That surprised me.

She said, "I still don't understand."

"Stand back." I spread my suit out over my hand, at first in a glove of silver, and then beyond my fingers and into the traditional pincer shape. It didn't want to go that far. The suit fit so well over my hand, so snugly. Like a dog with a new trick, a child with a new word. It had learned to coat me from toes to neck and it seemed now it didn't want to do anything else.

"Amazing." Tsana frowned for a moment. "I can't see it at all. With pions, I mean."

Couldn't she? I withdrew the suit, watching it glint silver in the sunlight. That was strange. Something without pions. Or, I reconsidered, maybe they were too deep, too dense for her to see them. Like the ones that had thrown me from Grandeur.

"Shall we?" I pushed those thoughts aside and gestured to the ceiling.

"Of course." She found the crack and stood beneath it.

I figured I should thank her. While we were exchanging white lies. "I appreciate you coming to do this."

"You asked."

Given the circumstances she could hardly have said no.

It didn't take her much, but I'd known that would be the case. I could have done it with a glance, and certainly with more grace, in the days of my old life. Tsana's frown returned, she flexed her hands at her sides and muttered to herself, then the hole began to fill. The cement was fluffy, like foam. I resisted the urge to criticise, to tell her to keep her pions under tighter control. There was too much air. A moment and she realised this, corrected it, and the cement grew darker, harder and solid. Soon, nothing was left, not a scar to prove the crack had ever existed.

Jealousy surged somewhere in my stomach. I had not been patched as elegantly as she did the ceiling.

Tsana shook her hands out, adjusted the colour slightly, frowned deeper and adjusted it again. "There." She turned to me. "Done."

I forced a smile, still tackling acidic envy. "Thank you."

"Are you sure that's it?"

Such a small thing to repay such a large debt. "Yes, that's perfect."

"Good. Great."

It must have been a massive weight from her conscience. At least, I hoped it was massive.

We stood in the sublevel beneath the healed ceiling, staring at each other with nothing to say.

"Well, that's it." I clapped my hands together.

"Yes."

"Shall we-?"

"Of course."

I was careful to lock the door as we left. Last thing I needed was another reason for Kichlan to dislike me.

A landau was hovering in the street, resplendent in polished mahogany and silver. How many kopacks was Tsana paying to have it wait? Or maybe it was her own, the driver's family employed by hers through the generations.

Tsana hesitated at the coach door. "Can I offer you a ride up to the Tear?"

"Ah." I swallowed. "No. I was forced to move. I live near here now."

"Oh." The door swung open with a creak loud in the darkening street. "I am still happy to take you home."

I shook my head. "The walk is not far. I enjoy it." Why did my tongue feel like a strip of torn cloth in my mouth? Thick and unresponsive.

"I see."

I watched Tsana climb in. She was being assisted by pions, I realised with a start, probably looping around her waist in ribbons of colourful light and gathering beneath her feet. It added a graceful, floating quality to her movements. "It was lovely to see you again, Tsana."

She gripped the silver handle, nodded. "It was." She started to pull the door closed, and hesitated. "Goodbye, Tanyana."

The coach glided away the moment the door snapped shut. I stood in the street and watched it disappear in a flicker like moonlight on dark water.

I reached inside my jacket, past my blouse, and into one of the folds of my uniform tight against my chest. I pulled out Devich's scrap of paper, thick between my fingers, scanned the address and turned into the evening. To follow it.

Devich lived further away from the city centre than I would have believed. I could have told myself it was to keep close to his work, to the building that no longer was. But it might have had more to do with a childhood unaccustomed to luxury or city living.

Still, it wasn't the top floor of an old house, above a food-obsessed crazy woman. It had that in its favour.

Devich's home was surrounded by thin triple-story buildings squashed in together along a street that ran close to the Tear. It looked the same as all the others, wind-stripped paint on weather-pocked stone patched with off-colour cement. His, I noticed, had a small garden between the gate and the two sagging steps to the front door. Flowers I couldn't identify, petals anaemic, stems yellowing, wavered against a chill lifting from the Tear. Three small worms of debris wiggled their way through his garden.

Everything was washed out, starkly colourless in the light from street lamps. I pushed open a well-maintained gate, skirted plants, and pressed a pion lock beside the door. It wouldn't unlock for me, but it would send streams of colour and light to let him know someone was at the door.

Devich answered. He was pale. His hand, wrapped around the door frame, shook. His nails were bloodless.

"I can go, if you like," I said as he stared at me in shock. "If you need to heal."

He pulled the door all the way open, stepped out onto the first step and wrapped me in an embrace. One arm held my shoulders; the other, I noticed, was bound to his side. "Tanyana."

Awkwardly, Devich drew me inside.

His home was lit warmly, by pions generating light behind rose-coloured glass. I rather liked the effect, and realised it reminded me of flame. Proper, real, not-a-pion in-sight flame. An interesting choice for a debris technician.

"Thank you," Devich said. He stood close, face mostly shadow, and ran a finger over my cheek.

"What else would I do?" At least he appreciated what I had done. That made for a nice change. "Couldn't leave you there, could I?"

He laughed, still rich, full, despite his near death, despite his bound arm. "I meant, thank you for coming here. I've been waiting for you. I thought you might have lost the address."

Waiting for me? "You were hurt. Badly hurt. I didn't know where they would send you. I thought you might not be here." Did he remember dangling in my arms as limp and as alive as a cloth doll? "Don't you need time to heal?" I had needed time.

But Devich leaned in and kissed me, deeply. "There were skilled healers on site."

There were skilled healers beneath Grandeur too. "What about your arm?"

"This?" He lifted his bound arm slightly and winced. "Dislocated. Apparently the healers can't fix the swelling. Of all the things they can do, they can't fix that."

"What did the healers do, then?"

He looked down. "You don't really want to hear about that, do you?"

I placed a finger on his chin and tipped his face toward me. "I do." I hoped he could see how serious I was. I needed to know what had happened to him. If he was one of us now.

"Fine." But his eyes slid from mine. "They stopped bleeding in my chest and abdomen and patched something that had ruptured, and I'm not talking about that any more. They put my shoulder back where it belonged and patched up a fracture. They fixed three broken ribs and a shattered ankle. That's what they did."

So, that's what a healer should be like. To put all that back together without stitching, without scarring. It left me throbbing between jealousy and relief. With the unfairness of it all.

"And this?" I ran fingers over his forehead. He closed his eyes.

"My head?"

"Yes. Is it okay?" Could Devich still see pions?

"Wasn't hit. You saw me, you saved me. My head wasn't hit."

Did it take a head injury then? I didn't think so. Mizra and Uzdal had not been connected by their skulls.

How could I ask? "So, you are all right then? Nothing that can't be fixed?"

Devich looked at me with confusion for a moment, then eased into a sad smile. "Are you worried that I have to become a collector too?"

A perfectly reasonable concern, I thought. "Well, are you?"

His free hand took one of mine. He stroked the scars. "No, my dear. I am still my same old self."

I wrapped both of my arms around him and kissed him as hard as I could without bruising. His tongue slicked mine. His teeth were cool, sharp.

"Good," I whispered against his lips.

I saw little else of Devich's house that night. We ascended a staircase in darkness, two flights. The carpet was thick and absorbed all sound. His bedroom was sparse, but held books. We were similar in more ways than I had realised.

I peeled away my uniform, helped him with his shirt and pants. Our roles felt strangely reversed, as I eased myself onto him. He was the injured one, the one who needed to be cared for. While, in the long run, I was far more broken than he could ever be, I was stronger for the moment, and I would give him the love and the acceptance he had shown me when I most needed it.

Devich moaned, lifted his hips to meet me. I smoothed him down.

"Just lie there. My turn to look after you." I licked the edges of his smile.

"I will miss this." His chin tipped up, head angling back.

I stilled. "You will?"

"Ah." He gave a soft, rueful laugh. "I would have missed this, I mean. If you hadn't come to save me, if I wasn't here now. I'm glad I am still alive, to be here with you."

"Oh." I was glad too. Even if the team had turned against me, even if Kichlan offered nothing but silence and suspicion, it didn't matter. At least I had Devich.

I put his strange and probably pain-rattled words aside, and I kissed his exposed neck.