Debris (43 page)

  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.

 
 
 
 

I hadn't returned to Proud Sunlight since I had graduated: Three Point Circle, First Class, Architect with Distinction. I would have been welcome before, particularly as my binding skill improved, my circle increased and the number of kopacks I could have donated rose with both. It was strangely satisfying to think that the first time I would return was when I was no longer welcome, when I had no pion-binding skill left, no circle and a pittance for an income. Maybe the fall had twisted something in my sense of humour.

  On Thriveday we filled our quota early, with a large cache barely a few yards from the Darkwater door. We scooped it out of a pothole in the street, had not been forced to lie face-down in muck, wade through sewage or scale the side of buildings. However unnatural that enormous heap of debris lying easily accessible in the middle of the street was, I couldn't help but be thankful. Just this time. With our jars filled the remains of the day were left empty. I was not invited to shop, to travel to graveyards or enjoy Eugeny's cooking. I took the ferry into the city and tried not to see the patches of darkness hugging walls, lampposts, even the deck of the boat.

  And I returned to Proud Sunlight.

  The university was an imposing building of sandstone and marble close to the banks of the Tear River, a few rills north of the bridge. It hulked above the old city buildings, ancient as they yet larger, its pale walls broken by dark stained-glass windows. The Keeper had been sculptured into the stone at every corner, above every doorway. Both the mountain and the myth it was named after, he who defended us from the Other. That kind yet stern face, strong and everlasting.

  A tall iron fence enclosed the building and the manicured gardens that stretched to the river. An old jetty reached out into the Tear, but I had never known it to be used. Before Proud Sunlight had opened its gates and heavily reinforced doors to anyone with sufficient binding skill, that fence would have been guarded, old family children alone invited to study in its halls. Now the main gates were left open, and enforcers no longer patrolled the corridors or garden paths, but to me it felt no more inviting. As I passed through the gate I felt like an intruder. So I hunched my shoulders and jammed hands in my pockets and hoped I could remain unnoticed. Just in case enforcers from the distant past did, somehow, remain. In case they could see through my secondhand clothes to the suit on my wrists and the honour I had lost, and throw me from the rooms I had once studied in so proudly.

  But no one did. I attracted few second glances as I made my hopefully unobtrusive way past the main hallway. Pion-binders were practicing, bathed in colour from the tall windows. They huddled in groups of three and seemed to be altering the temperature of the room. I wondered at that. If Proud Sunlight had stooped so low that it was teaching binders to work in heating factories, then it shouldn't have been so quick to strike me from the honour roll. The university I remembered specialised in disciplines that required precision and skill, disciplines that if not done correctly could put lives at risk. Architecture, healing, military technologies and the more arcane investigation into circle formation and pion skill.

  I continued beyond the main hallway, beyond offices and classrooms on the lower floor. A voice droned from somewhere, lecturing in a dull monotone that even Kichlan would have struggled to match. The thought made me smile and realise I missed his lecturing, at least compared to his silence and his distrustful glances.

  The building was roughly divided between the disciplines; the kind of unofficial rule new students spent their whole first year trying to work out. Ground-floor rooms were allocated to the military; architects preferred the upper hallways. I knew the ways well, even after all these years. How many was it? Ten years? Yes, it must have been.

  I found the half-hidden stairs behind an out-of-place bookcase in an old, empty office. The stairs themselves were an architectural wonder, and I could understand why the first architects who had come to learn and teach here had been attracted to them. They wove their tight way through the building, bypassing the rest of the levels to reach the top. Proud Sunlight had a strange roof. Designed with odd angles, some areas made of great sheets of glass that let the sun or the moonlight in, most built from the stone itself. What might have once been an attic had been divided into rooms, and these the architect lecturers had claimed as their offices. It was here I would find Jernea. If he was still alive.

  I made my way down a thin hallway. Deep afternoon sunlight glanced in through patches of glass above me. It lit some of the offices, while others were left in dark shadow. A few faces I did not recognise watched me from desks as I passed them. A small group of ridiculously young students passed me in the hall. They whispered circle theories and hardly noticed me. I remembered what that was like, to have such passion, to be so skilled, and ready to create your future with both.

  I had almost given up when one of the faces I didn't know did more than just watch me pass. Young for a teacher, his black gown too big for him, his silver bearclaw too bright, he was twitching through the invisible contents of a slide when I walked past his office. He looked up, surprised, placed the slide on the desk and strode into the hallway.

  "You!" He pointed to me, and I stalled as a streak of warm light touched my face. "Who are you?" He approached me, hands hidden in folds of black cloth. The crimson satin edging on his gown surprised me. He must have graduated young and with high honours to have made second-senior lecturer by his age. "You're not a student."

  I wondered what tipped him off? The scars? The clothes, or just because I looked colossally older than everyone in the Other-damned place? Which was exactly the way I felt.

  "What are you doing here?"

  I repressed a sigh. "Just looking for someone."

  "Just looking?" He stepped into the sunlight and I noticed sporadic pale hairs dotting his chin and upper lip. Didn't help my mood. "You can't
just look
. This is an exclusive university, only the best–"

  "What's going on here?"

  I turned as a woman stepped out of the office at the end of the hallway. She strode toward us, step sure and brisk, and the young teacher took an involuntary step back.

  "Who are you, what is–" Then she saw me, bathed in the light from the roof, and she stopped. "Ah. So, you did come." She was still in shadow so I could not see her face, but I could hear the rueful smile in her voice alone. "I suppose they were right." Another step, and the light touched her as well. I realised I knew her. Her sun-browned face carried more lines than I remembered, her dark hair was pulled back where it had always floated free. Dina. Only now, she wore a gold edge upon her black gown. Architect dean. It was rare for a woman to lead any university faculty, but she had always been skilled. Jernea's assistant when he had mentored me, a sub-senior lecturer those ten years ago. Quite a rise.

  "Petr, thank you, but you can go now."

  The young lecturer made to argue, but Dina cut him off.

  "Please. Leave us."

  With a final scowl in my direction, Petr returned to his office. Dina watched him go before casting her hard eye on me. "They did better work on your face than I expected, when I was told you were scarred."

  Of all the students Jernea taught, why would she remember me? "It will never be the way it was."

  "No, it won't." She seemed to hesitate, to be debating something silently within. "I suppose you have come to see him."

  "It was my last resort." I had already steeled myself to hear of Jernea's death.

  "I'm sure it was." Instead, she gave me a sad smile. "I will let you see him, but you should be prepared. He can't help you, he can't help anyone anymore."

  "He is still alive then?"

  Dina laughed, full and throaty. "That old bear will outlive us all. He refuses to hear the call of the Other, and you know what he is like when he sets his mind on something. The Other can shout as loudly as he wants, the old man won't listen."