Suited (38 page)

That surprised me. But I took the Keeper’s advice gratefully, and let the tubes be.

When the tube-forest thinned out, nothing arose to replace it. The sparkle-shine lights behind me faded, and a single beam flashed on in the distance. It was focused on something, but all I could make out was a rough form in white.

“Is that–?”

No. Continue past it
.

But something drew me forward. That white, draped form, glowing in the beam.

You will regret it
.

I broke into a run.

It was a sheet. Roughly formed material of off-white, stained in places with paint made from mud mixed with blood, and already fraying at the edges. After all, Volski and Zecholas had been rushed when they created it.

Lad’s shroud. I recognised the weave, made from jackets and scarves with listless, unstable pions. I knew the roughly painted symbols. I had seen him wrapped in it, by Kichlan’s side in the underground room. I had seen him carried away in it.

This was Lad’s shroud, and it was empty.

“What have they done to him?” I whispered.

He is dead
.

“What have they done to his body?” I demanded. My voice rang out louder than I intended, sharp against hard surfaces I could not see, losing itself among the buzzing tubes.

As I said, Tanyana. He is gone
.

I gathered the shroud to me. It lay on something that looked like a chair but was deeply indented, so that to sit in it you would have to squeeze into the form fitting-metal and it would hold you tight, like a hand. While it too seemed built of suit silver, like everything else down here, the inside was not. It was strange: dark, soft looking yet solid, and it throbbed. Almost alive. It made me shiver, it made something within me clench in fear. So I dropped the shroud again, let it fall and softly cover the chair.

And suddenly, I needed to leave this place; I could not stroll through and blithely observe abomination after abomination. “Where is Kichlan?” The words almost choked me. I stared at the dried blood. Was that really all that remained of Lad? My Lad. “Tell me.”

Run. I will direct you
.

So I ran. With the Keeper whispering in my ear I glanced aside from the forms looming in the bobbing lights that flickered on and off as I passed: vats, only bigger; something that looked like an insect, but metallic and still and many times too large; dials and flickering numbers and the ever-crackle of blue lightning. I did not stop to stare, to try and understand. I did not want to understand just what they were doing down here, and how they did it. What the puppet men were.

Slow down
.

I pulled back to a light trot and wondered, only briefly, that I was not out of breath. Another sign that the suit was rebuilding its strength?

There. Ah, stop them. Hurry, please
.

I knew that tone, that fearful, pained, desperate tone. He was failing again.

More tubes. Not a forest this time, but something stranger. They wound and twisted their way above the ground like hollow tendrils or webs, and planes of debris surged within them. I made my way through, arms lifted, careful of the energy that crackled over their surface.

The further I went, the thinner the tubes became. The debris within them solidified, but not into something I would call grains, and the energy surged until it was so thick, so bright that I couldn’t even look at the glass. I held my arms tight against my sides. But still I felt it, the touch of lightning racing up my limbs, the faintly nauseating scent of burning hair.

The tubes rose into a curve above my head, drawn together and secured with wide metallic ties. The whole structure, the blue, black, energy, debris, and glass snake ended at a great head. Weird and insect-like, bulbous with many small glass eyes, it was suspended from the distant ceiling by chains of bright links, and hung above another chair.

But this one was not empty. Kichlan was strapped within.

I ran to him. I could feel the pressure of debris planes above me. Wild, lancing energy broke from the creature to touch me, to quest over my back and arms with strange delicacy. My suit, quiet and compliant until now, rallied only enough to whip free, flick the energy away, then settle back into its bonds.

Kichlan was ashen. He had been strapped into the moulded seat with firm, iron-buckled leather. I brushed his cheek; his skin was clammy. I pressed a forefinger to his neck; his pulse was weak. He did not move.

I glanced around. The Keeper was certain the puppet men were here somewhere. So what were they doing? Hiding, watching, staging another test?

Kichlan’s eyelids fluttered. He squinted up at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and red-veined and I ached for the emptiness there, the fear. “T… Tan?”

“Shh.” I traced soft fingers own the side of his face. He was shaking, almost imperceptibly, but a constant deep-cold or deep-shock quake. “I’m here. You’re safe now.”

“Should have run, Tan. I told you to run.”

“I couldn’t, Kichlan. I couldn’t leave you.”

“They took him.” His mouth wasn’t working properly. He drooled as he spoke, so I unfolded the end of my clean shirtsleeve and dabbed at his lips. “They–”

“Shh.” And because I had nothing else to say. “They can’t hurt him anymore.” What had he seen? I thought of the shroud and the chair and prayed to a Keeper I knew could not help me that he had not seen it working. That he had not been forced to witness whatever it was the puppet men had done to his brother’s body.

He groaned, turned his head to the side. I winced. Below his collar, around the edges of his suit, he was bruised. Horrible and deeply black, I wondered if they had broken his collarbone. What they had done to the rest of him, to the parts of his body I could not see, to make him as ill and weak as this? How they had even brought him here at all?

Hurry
.

“Keep still,” I whispered, as though he could do much else.

I extended a short, sharp knife of suit to slice clean and quickly through Kichlan’s leather bonds. Their iron buckles rattled sharply against the metal chair. Then I bent, scooped my arms beneath him and lifted him free.

He cried out as I moved him, a weak noise of exhaustion beyond pain. But still, he braced himself as I placed him on his feet, as I slipped his arm around my shoulders and steadied him against me. Even in his hurt and loss, Kichlan tried to be strong.

“Let’s get you out of here,” I said, as though it would be that simple, that easy.

The debris
, the Keeper murmured in my ear.
You’ve seen what they are doing to it. Right above your head they are torturing me, right as we now speak. Can you really leave here, Tanyana, and not stop them
?

I scowled into the darkness; aware the Keeper probably wasn’t right in front of me, but hoping he could see the expression anyway. “We came to save Kichlan.”

Not him alone
.

I should have known the Keeper was interested in more than Kichlan’s welfare. “But what can I do? I thought you said there was no point in breaking the tubes.” I glanced up at the monstrosity above us. Just what would have happened to Kichlan if I had not come?

Those tubes, yes. But that thing above you that… that abomination, is different. You must destroy that
, he pleaded, his voice desperate.
Do not let them do it again
!

“Do what?”

Why won’t you simply do as I ask, Tanyana
? He sobbed, and drew away.
And now they are here
.

Mist settled in from the darkness, drifting around my ankles, coating and filling the chair, wrapping the insect head and its glass body. Forms birthed in its thick folds and the hazy, bobbing light. Shadows and faces and smiles.

“Do you like our laboratory, Miss Vladha?” a puppet man whispered. “Did you see our little toys?”

“We have improved so much upon the programmers’ crystal hubs,” said another. Or the same one. It was impossible to tell.

“You could have had access to all our knowledge, all this power. Yet, you ignored us. You even fought against us. You did not choose well.”

“Even so, we give you another chance.”

One of the puppet men stepped clear of the mist, his body solid in an immaculate white suit, his face full of dry amusement. The rest, for I was certain there were more – countless masses, perhaps – remained in the mist as shadows and half-illusionary horror.

“We are fair, wouldn’t you say?” He tipped his head. I fought the need to back away, all too aware of the mist behind me. “To give you so many chances.”

Break it! Break anything you can find. Do it, hurry
!

I shook my head, unable to speak, barely able to move. My suit began spinning, sending its own bluish light to join the mist, to cast shapes and movement of its own. It tugged, deep in my bones, as though the very presence of the puppet men was enough to awaken it, to give it strength and remind it that I was but its host, and it needed a body to control.

The puppet man gestured to the empty chair. “Replace the collector, if you will. Our experiment is about to begin.”

“No!” I spat the word out around wires in my throat. They fought my voice all the way. Not again! I would not let the suit control me again. “No.” A deep breath, steadier. “I am taking him with me, and we are leaving this place.”

And you will destroy the tubes as you go
.

But the puppet man shook his head. “We gave you choice, you used it poorly. We showed you strength, you rejected it. We even gave you space, quiet and time to grieve and to reassess your situation. You did not take it. We are done with freedom, we are tired of choice.”

My hand tightened into a silver-coated fist. I forced it open.

“Do as we command, Miss Vladha, and place the body in the chair.”

I did not move.

A shrug, elegant and unemotional. “As you wish.”

The puppet man stepped back, and above us, insect eyes opened.

Too late
! The Keeper cried.

Glass slid free from the insect’s head, countless small, round caps that fell to crash against the stone floor. Then the blue energy sizzled, the glass tubes pulsed and rattled. Debris wriggled out of the insect’s eyes. Like pale snakes it squirmed free of its incubation chambers and writhed down to join the shattered glass.

I recognised those thick, animated scars on the fabric of the world. I knew the touch of their hunger and need.

“Oh, Other.” I held Kichlan tighter against me and tried not to picture Lad, with the Hon Ji Half’s head in his lap, as the debris devoured her. I tried to forget the weight of her blood on my silver hands.

You should have listened to me
.

“Replace the body.” The puppet man smiled his horrid smile.

“No.” I would not let them destroy Kichlan. “We have to open a door,” I called to the Keeper, uncaring if the puppet men could hear me. “We have to get rid of the debris.”

Open one in here I cannot promise I will be able to close it
.

But I knew of no other way to deal with debris like this.

“Can you stand?” I whispered to Kichlan.

He glanced sideways, his red-shot eyes wide and fearful. “Are you sure about this?”

“I haven’t been sure of anything for a very long time.”

Kichlan could not stand. So I eased him to the ground and swept long and fan-like suit appendages over the surrounding stones, clearing them. The debris snakes were not fast. They had not yet fattened themselves on life and pion bonds and were not able to fully coalesce, to rise body-like against me. Which, I supposed, was why Kichlan had been strapped to the chair beneath them. A first meal. The very idea made me shudder.

I stood in front of Kichlan, legs wide and stance strong, ready for whatever the puppet men could throw at me. No one would take a blow for me this time. I could suffer my own scars.

“Once I have destroyed your weapon,” I said, teeth gritted, to the puppet man so implacable before me, “I will destroy the rest of your
laboratory
.” I swept an arm wide. “Every last tube, every creature, every chair. That is what I choose, and that is my strength.”

You could have done that a moment ago and saved us the trouble
.

I chose to ignore that.

The puppet man shook his head again. “Weapon? Are you still so fixated on that? We have moved beyond the need for weapons, Miss Vladha. And you have followed.”

“What do you mean? I know you have built more weapons like me and Aleksey.”

His smile grew. His mouth was black inside his ill-fitting lips. No teeth, no anything. I could not look at it. “The enforcer showed promise, that is true. But only you have come this close to reaching your full potential. We are pleased you have returned to us. Together, we will achieve it.”

“No.” I flexed my suit. It slid urgently over my arms, legs, and torso. I would use its battle lust, for now. Only now. “No, I came to rescue Kichlan. And you don’t have Aleksey, this time to stop me.”

“What a shame.”

My suit was slowing, its growth nearly stilled, even though I urged it on. This was not usually how our battles played out.

“But the time for choices is over.” The puppet man lifted an arm. And the mass of torn debris that had been writhing toward me rose at the gesture. They thickened, united, wound into a shape like a many-clawed hand, like the tentacles of glass coiling from the insect’s head.

What was happening to the debris? How was it growing like that, moving like that? In time to the puppet man’s movements, in tandem with his stretching fingers. It was almost as though he controlled it.

And the idea chilled me.

No, stop it
! the Keeper shouted at me, utterly panicked.
Please, Tanyana, make them stop it
!

“While we would usually be happy to let you open a door, encourage it even, that is not the purpose of this test. He is.” The puppet man tipped his head toward Kichlan, still slumped behind me. “And so, I’m afraid, we cannot allow you to interfere. Not this time.”

Allow me? Who did they think they were?

“And not you either, brother.”

Then the Keeper began to scream. I could make no sense of the words he gabbled in his pain. The puppet man twisted his hand and the debris clawed the air, raw and surging, and I hated to imagine that the Keeper was there, right there, being attacked by what had once been a part of himself.

“Oh, brother.” The puppet man snarled through his blackened smile. “Are you not weakened enough, how much more must we do to you to make you understand?”

Brother?

“Enough!” I lurched forward, my suit still half-spread over me, away from my face and my eyes. Even though I could not see what he was doing to the Keeper – and maybe I was glad – I would not stand by and let it happen. “I won’t let you–”

“Stop.”

More voices than that single puppet man. Voices from the mist, from the stones, from the coiling debris and the metal and glass. All around me, resonating within me. And to my horror, I obeyed.

I stopped. One foot slightly raised, what suit I had summoned over my hand in the act of sharpening, all of it froze. I could not breathe, and the pumping of my heart slowed. Head dizzy, sight dotting with black, I stared in horror at the puppet man and the faces materializing, smiling, all around me and could do nothing. Nothing at all.

“Tan?” Behind me, Kichlan gasped over the word. I could not turn to console him, I could not move to protect him, while the debris grew and loomed over us. It was Lad, all over again. And I could do nothing.

“Perhaps you understand a little more clearly.” The puppet man lifted his second hand. “You have surpassed what we expected of you, Miss Vladha, and your experiment is ended. So you shall serve us, as you were designed to do.”

I could not move and I could not speak.

“Step aside.”

Again, my body acted without my consent. Two steps to the left, feet together, a curt turn so I could see it all: Kichlan, the chair, the debris and the puppet man. Or puppet master. Perhaps that is a better term.

“What are you doing?” Kichlan pleaded with me, struggling to stand.

This was no battle in my body; this was not the suit vying for control of our flesh. If anything, the suit had gone dormant, silent and still in a way I had never known. In the face of the puppet man’s control, it did not fight. The spinning slowed, the light died, and the ever-present tugging in my bones, that need for violence they had planted in me with their living wires and their horrible needles, faded away. I had never felt so empty, so alone.

The suit.

It was all so clear. I was more suit than human, more silver than muscle and bone. The suit was debris. And there, twisting and grown, was all the evidence I needed that the puppet men could do the impossible and manipulate debris. Control it, the way I had once controlled pions.

So what was I really, other than a human-shaped tool utterly under the puppet man’s control? A weapon, a sword, should he so wish it.

“See, you do understand.” The puppet man nodded, like I was a servant or a pupil and he was pleased with my work. “Brother, if only you could join her.”

He tipped his head, appeared almost to be listening. I heard nothing.

“Fool.” A murmur of agreement from the mist. “He will join us, in time. No matter. The experiment must begin.” The puppet man made a small flicking motion with his spare hand, palm up and fingers slightly curled. I could see the seams where his fingernails were attached, the stitching, so clearly.

The ground rumbled, and the stone lifted beneath Kichlan, a mirror almost to the puppet master’s movement.

Kichlan had found the strength to kneel on one knee, but as the ground lifted he fell back again and he gripped the cupping stone with desperate hands.

I had known from the beginning that the puppet men could manipulate pions. Theirs were the furious and crimson points of light that had thrown me from Grandeur’s palm. And I had known they could twist debris, that they could create monsters from grains of the Keeper’s own flesh, that they could solidify planes into suit metal and infuse it into the human body. But this? Debris that responded to their will like pions, what was this? How was it even possible not only to control one, but both?

“Because we are both,” the puppet man said, in answer to the question his control would not let me ask. “And yet neither. Therefore, we are all. And nothing.”

Which didn’t help me at all. Except the Keeper was debris, and we were pions. So the puppet men were part of him, and yet one of us.

No, I did not understand.

The puppet man lifted Kichlan high, passed him from rock palm to rock palm. When those pion-made arms fell back into the floor they were smoothed over with so much skill that not a scar was left behind, not a dent. If this had been the work of a circle I would have been awed at the ease with which they performed such a powerful manipulation. But it was the puppet men, and it was terrible.

The stone dropped Kichlan back into the chair, beneath the arching and writhing dreadfulness of debris snakes.

“This body is stronger, you see, than the last one,” the puppet man said. I had the horrible impression that he was explaining himself to me, as though I could be anything other than sickened and impotently furious. “The pion bindings within him are solid, brighter, so more energy will be transferred to the debris as they are consumed. We believe this will make the process more efficient, the suffering less.” He actually looked at me, he actually nodded. “We are not in the business of pain.”

The puppet man wrapped the chair in the wiggling debris mass. Dimly, as though muffled by their grains, Kichlan cried out. And I thought of the Hon Ji Half, in her terrified agony, and knew that I could not slice through Kichlan’s neck, not even to save him from pain. I had watched Lad die, I could not do the same for his brother.

Help him
!

The Keeper? I had to break free, I had to stop this!

But I could not move. Debris wept its way along tracks in the chair, impressions that seemed to have been made to channel this seeping death. It dripped around Kichlan, writhed over his skin and burrowed into his clothes. He bucked once, before the leather straps moved on their own, knitted together where I had cut them and clasped his wrists, ankles and neck, their buckles closing tightly. He struggled, even so tied down, and I could not see his face from my position, standing still and straight behind him, I could not see his eyes or his pain, but I knew it was there. I felt it like it was my own.

Do not
let them do this!

“It will be quick.” Was the puppet man actually trying to console me?

Not all of the debris could squeeze between Kichlan and the chair. Some of the torn snakeheads fell to the ground, where they thrashed, discarded, questing blindly for more warm flesh to devour.

I was not a healer. So even if I had not fallen, even if I was still a pion-binder, I would have struggled to see the bindings deep within Kichlan’s body, or understand what was happening to them. The living body was a complicated knot of bonds and powerful particles that I had not been trained to control. How long before his flesh undid, before he collapsed like the Hon Ji Half’s head had done in my hands?

Did the puppet men think this was painless?

The misty mass of hazy faces stared at Kichlan’s bound, thrashing body with curiosity. The light in their mould-green eyes, the stretching of ill-fitting lips and what looked like a black parody of the tip of a tongue, it was worse than their usual impassivity. They either did not notice or did not care about the surplus debris worms wiggling free from the chair, across the floor, toward me.

I whispered apologies in my head, silent and useless, to a dead brother I had failed to protect. Kichlan would follow Lad soon, and I had been unable to save either of them. I had watched both die helplessly.

Kichlan’s struggles were weakening.

Something tingled through me, following the patterns of my silver.
Tan
?

If I could have, I would have shivered. To hear Lad so clearly, like a torturous memory, or the Keeper with a Half’s voice.

Tan, help bro
.

I felt his phantom arms around me, as heavy and as warm as his hand had been. I felt his blood again, too. The course it had taken as it had run over me, the fire it had lit through my soul.

Look after him. They messed around inside of you, so they could control you. I reprogram you now, so you can look after him. I remember it now, Tan. Your programming reminded me
.

His warmth spread through each scar, each notch and graze, to settle into my bands. Then deeper, into my bones. And the suit started moving again. The puppet men had stilled it, even its very spinning, and deadened its light when they took control of me. But now, with each phantom touch of Lad’s remembered blood, the suit reawakened.

Here, this is what you should do. They made you in their image, programmed you so similar, so they could take over any time. Just like now. You need to scramble up your code. Be you, not them. Dilute. That way, you will be strong enough to help him. I show you
.

The suit spun darkly. No glowing light, nothing but the stealthily silent spreading of silver over my body, though it left my head clear. And as those free debris-heads closed in, the suit cast a fine metallic web from my toes to catch them. Not to collect them in a tweezer-pinch. It touched them, it spread over them, and it absorbed them. Into me.

And for an instant–

–I was the debris. I was hunger and emptiness, I was ever-fighting, ever-yearning, to fill the splits scored into me with needle and lights. From metal slab to buzzing glass to disfigurement within the insect head I had been created merely so I would consume.