Debris

2.

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."

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.

He watched me, expectant, like a loyal dog.

"Tanyana," I finally said.

He poured more water into the glass and placed it on the table beside the bed, just within reach. "I know who you are." And his eyes were so heavy with concern, with worry and even fear, that his look caught a lump in my throat. I swallowed on it, hard. "And I'm so sorry for you, my lady. So sorry." He knew about Grandeur, then. And the pions. "But I'm here now and, oh, Tanyana, I will try and help you. I will."

Could he bring my pions back? Because that was the only way to help me now.

He began dragging something large and covered with a white sheet through the doorway. Almost too large. It ground horribly against the wooden frame, the sheet caught twice in the wheels and almost tipped the whole trolley over. I caught glimpses of metal, but couldn't begin to guess what it actually was. Devich, red-faced, yanked and dragged until the contraption came through. It left two large dark marks either side of the door frame, and with a nervous laugh and ruffle of his hair, he glanced down the corridor and quickly shut the door.

"What is that?"

He laughed again, self-deprecating. "Ah, in good time. This is first." He rummaged beneath the sheet. "Here." He produced a clear glass tube, apparently empty. "This will help with the pain. I feel almost as bad as those veche men saying this, but you're going to need to be able to concentrate. And pain is never helpful, is it?"

"Concentrate? On what?"

Another nervous laugh, and he didn't answer. "Let me show you how to apply it." Devich walked around to the left side of the bed. He began untucking the blankets that covered me and instantly I tensed. His face fell. "I'm sorry, my lady. I'm sorry to have to do this to you so soon. And I… I don't even want to test you. But they are waiting. And I know it's not fair, and I don't want to push you…" He seemed to flounder, eyes on the floor, tube in his hand.

With a groan, I reached for the water. Again, I filled my mouth, my throat. It washed through me, so fresh and clean. Everything I did not feel. I watched him from the corner of my eye and wondered if I could trust him. I almost wanted to. Because of the smile, perhaps. Definitely because of the water. But perhaps it was the sorrow in his eyes and the hitch of his voice, so real compared to the veche man's statue face and false sympathy.

"What test?" I placed the glass back on the table carefully. My right hand shook. My left side ached.

Eyes to the floor still, Devich mumbled like a shameful child, "For debris."

"Debris?" Something quivered in my stomach and had nothing to do with my injuries. The same terror I felt confronted by a world without its pions.

"The veche need to know if you can see debris, they need to know if you will be a collector. A debris collector. As quickly as possible. You see, the longer we wait the harder it is for the networks to-"

He'd stopped making sense by that point. I could see Devich's mouth moving, but no words came out. All I could hear was Grandeur, as she fell. All I could think of was emptiness. A debris collector? That was impossible. I was an architect, a highly skilled pion-binder. Nothing less.

"That's not possible," I breathed out the words. "I'm not a debris collector."

Devich looked up, he clasped the tube at his chest. "I hope so, my lady. I truly do." Then he tried for a smile, it shook slightly. "Now, let me help you." He unscrewed the tube. "This is for the pain, and to help you heal."

"What is?" The tube still looked empty to me.

"The-" He paused. "Oh. Of course. You can't-" He floundered again.

"I can't see them." I had no way of knowing what the pions in that tube were doing, and what they would do to me.

I allowed him to lift back the covers and expose my left side. The strange gown was tied at the seams, and he undid them with fumbling fingers. His touch was very warm. A layer of cloth bandaged me down the entire left side of my body. Carefully, tip of his tongue caught between his teeth, he lifted my leg, my arm, and undid them.

Someone had embroidered on my skin. Thick, ugly dark lines woven from face to thigh. My left hand seemed to be held together by the stitching alone.

Devich sucked in a sharp breath. "Oh, you poor thing."

I rather agreed. Instead, I asked, "Who did this? Do you know?"

He just shook his head. "They didn't tell me. The veche brought you here, to me, as you are now."

Devich squinted at the glass tube and held it above my left hand. I breathed in sharply as one rounded end rippled, like the glass had just turned to water, and pulled back to create an opening. He lowered it, then, so the newly formed edges rested softly on my stitches. He held it there, for a moment, then repeated the action, moving along the left side of my body. Face, arm, chest, leg. His touch was sure, gentle. He glanced up at my face and whispered apologies, even as he cradled my hand in his.

Whatever those invisible particles of once-were-light did seemed to work. Wherever he touched me a cool, numb sensation slid over my injuries, easing the roaring ache. When he finally finished he bandaged me again and did up my gown. "Here." He discarded the tube, and handed me more water.

"Thank you." I drained the glass again. "Well, are you going to tell me if I'm a collector?"

With a sad nod, Devich pulled the sheet away. It revealed a bizarre-looking station of buttons, flashing lights, flickering dials and quiet screens, all topped with a large dome, something like a birdcage in clear polymer. Its wheels squeaked as Devich pushed it closer to the bed.

Crammed into that ungainly chamber, I saw the truth. Truth twitched and floated aimlessly, truth vibrated and wiggled. I saw debris.

Debris was the waste created by pion manipulation, and Other did it look like it. It looked like little clumps of squirming dirt, the dark and dim-minded younger sibling to the pions' lightness, their energy and colour.

It could not be controlled, it did not have the ability to unbind and rearrange the very structures of the world. In fact, all debris could do was interfere with existing pion systems. Too much debris left uncollected could slow down the working of a system, weaken and ultimately undo its bindings. It was dangerous, if left unchecked.

And I realised I had seen it before, in the moment before Grandeur hit me. Squirming darkness turning my construction site into a dumping ground. But I hadn't known what it was as I fell toward it. I had not understood the implications.

I sat straight, raised a hand. Devich grunted, pushed the station closer. I leaned over the edge of the bed, ignoring the pull of stitches and smothered pain, and brushed warm polymer with my fingers. Inside, the debris scurried haphazardly; it didn't react to my touch. The debris had none of the semi-sentience, the playfulness, that allowed binders to persuade, to coax, or control pions.

"Ah well, that answers the first question. Looks like you can see it."

I glanced up to meet Devich's flushed face, and took my hand away. "You can see it too?" Maybe there was hope for me, if Devich could see debris, and he could still bind pions, then But he shook his head. "No. Would make it easier, but then who'd operate this?" He pressed his hands to a clear glass panel and all the lights that ringed the polymer cage started flickering. "Collectors fill the chamber for us." Something beeped beneath his fingers. "They check it from time to time, so we know it's still full." Odd-looking dials moved and the filament inside half a dozen or so valves began to glow. "Not easy working with something you can't see."

Wasn't that my whole life, now? Living in a world created and run by things I could no longer see.

What was going on inside this bizarre machine? The dials and the valves were a throwback to old, pre-revolutionary technology, before critical circles were discovered. So what was powering this thing? Fire? Steam, gas, water? If so, then there'd be exhaust, surely. And noise. I'd almost believe a pair of poor abused rats turning a wheel. But what was Devich doing, then? Hands on a glass panel, eyes slightly unfocused, whispering under his breath. That was pion manipulation if I'd ever seen it in action.

"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.

My tongue slipped in and out of control. "What…?" Had I dribbled? I couldn't feel wetness, but something in my slurring mouth convinced me that I had. "What… doing?"

The blue eyes sharpened, stared at me, and skin bunched around them. A frown.

"She's too awake." There was a woman behind the silver mask. It moved as she spoke, rippling into mesmerizing waves.

"Give her another shot." I knew the monotone of the puppet men.

"No," Devich said, from somewhere that made his voice sound like he was wedged inside a can. Tinny and muffled. "Too much and we will dampen the nerve-networks. She's strong. That's all."

The blue-eyed woman watched me for a moment more, indecisive, before retreating from view. Then a whirl beside me, mechanical parts and crackling pionpower. A hooked finger of thick metal, of pumping fluids and sizzling energy, rose from beneath the table to arch over me. The tip came to rest against my wrist. It was heavy and solid; I could feel its pressure.

"Don't let it frighten you, Tanyana," Devich murmured. "It's strange, I know. But this will give you your suit. You won't feel it."

Maybe I should have closed my eyes? But within the finger hidden parts whirled, lights flashed, then tubes opened to merge fluids into startlingly beautiful pinks and blues, and I couldn't look away.

I felt it when it entered my skin. Not with pain, not the sharp of cutting or the excruciation of foreign bodies, but dull pressure and unemotional awareness. Needles plunged from the fingertip into my wrist, injecting things that wriggled up my arm like parasitic worms.

Blood slicked from my skin to darken the chrome table. It flowed slowly, like mud.

Then my shoulder twitched. I saw it from the corner of my eye. Steady, in rhythmic succession the muscles spasmed, starting behind my shoulder blade to end near the base of my neck. Then the top of my arm did the same thing, then near my elbow, and finally down, partially obscured by the finger, close to my wrist.

"That is good," a puppet said, without emotion.

"But we've only just planted the network." Devich sounded concerned.

"Continue."

"Not if it is too strong. I will suit her, but I won't hurt her!"

"Continue."

Over and over my arm twitched, as the wriggling below my skin intensified. Then, suddenly, the finger clicked loud and echoing, and everything stopped.

I blinked down at my wrist as the finger lifted. All I got for my trouble was a hazy image of blood and wire.

The finger withdrew. Another rose in its place. Wide, with a thick hinge at each knuckle, and brazenly golden amidst so much chrome and white light. This one also hovered above the mess of my wrist and I winced as it lowered, though I felt nothing, and loosened more saliva.

"Shhh," Devich murmured. "Don't be afraid."

The fingertip opened like an insect's jaws and clamped over my wrist.

"Be a good girl, keep still. Just a moment."

The pressure on my wrist – all around it – grew until I was certain it had to break. Then the finger clicked like its thinner brother had done, folded in on itself, and withdrew.

There was something on my wrist when I lifted an uneasy head to peer at it. Something that glowed. Not with the lamplight, but with its own power. Colder, artificial. If I could have shuddered, I would have. A good, long one that touched every hair, that eased out every creep.

Not only did the thing on my wrist glow, but it moved too, spinning in a slow, encircling rotation.

"This is your suit," Devich explained.

Suit? It was some strange bracelet, more like jewellery than a suit. Then I remembered the photographs on the walls, the adorned wrists, the ankles. The waist.

The waist? What about the neck, what I had assumed was a necklace? Would they stick needles into my throat, pierce my blood and breath and plant something that wriggled, that crawled, that glowed and spun?

My body remained numb, heavy and limp, and I couldn't struggle.

The first finger whirred into existence again, this time down at my right foot. I couldn't see it properly, but I knew it would be hovering, pumping its fluids and charging its pion-power. Anticipation of its weight, its pressure, its penetration ran unfelt tremors through me.

If my legs twitched the same as my shoulder, I didn't see it. The fingers repeated their ministrations on both of my ankles, then over on my left wrist. Strangely, it felt no different on the stitched-up skin there. I almost threw up when two fingers, larger than the ones that had destroyed my wrists and ankles, latched onto my waist and pushed down hard.

I stayed awake until three new fingers rose around my head, thin and tentacle-like. They arched above me, and clamped themselves over my throat so hard darkness spotted my vision. Then there were needles. And crawling things. And pumping fluids. I felt it all in that numb way, the way that assures you there will be pain, oh, there will be pain, but not now. Not just now.

Devich whispered from his distant can as two of the fingers withdrew, and ejected the empty glass tubes that had held their colourful fluids. "Let it go. You've done so well, Other knows, better than I thought you could. So let it go, let them finish, and sleep. Can you sleep for me, my girl?"

As I closed my eyes I saw Devich's face, the cheekiness in his slightly upturned mouth. Not, Other help me, the metallic arch of the fingers. Not the new canisters that slid in to replace the empty ones they had ejected. Not the things that filled them, fibrous, soft and wiggling in the glass, as they lowered themselves past my face and into my throat.

• • • •

I was still on the table when I woke, but I was covered by a grey blanket of roughly woven wool, and the lamps were dimmed.

Devich stood beside me, holding my hand in his.

"Why did you do that to me?" Something pressed against my throat as I whispered. Small twinges of pain told me the numbness was wearing off. "I'm sick of this. People keep doing things."

"Oh, Tanyana." He pressed his forehead to the back of my hand. I could only see him from the corner of my eye; my neck was stiff with a strange combination of deadness and blossoming ache. "You have been suited, my girl."

Your girl? I wanted to explain in no uncertain terms why, exactly, I was nobody's girl, and certainly not his, but heavy eyelids and the threat of more drool stopped me.

"Hurts," I managed instead. "Pions hurt, now this hurts. Had enough. No more."

"The pions?" Devich's head jerked up, expression alarmed.

"Pushed me. No one will listen. But they did."

"Pushed you?" He hesitated, as though searching for the right words. "I- The suit, it will hurt for a while. So will the stitches. Until the networks stabilize. Until your skin heals."

Stitches and scars and suit, what did they look like? Was I still me?

"Can you forgive me?"

I couldn't quite move my mouth to answer him.

Devich sighed and stood slowly, joints creaking and back stooped, tired like an old man. "They will take you home now." He squeezed my hand. "You need to rest and to heal and then, then, I would like to see you again." He leaned close. "If you'll forgive me."

As he called to the puppets, as he held onto my hand, I knew I already had. If not for his self-deprecating laugh, if not for his soft touch, then at least for the water he had given me, when no one else would.