Suited (39 page)

But as the suit smothered the debris and joined with it, it smoothed that hunger away. Sated, whole, the debris eased out of its weeping shell and became a part of me.

A part of whatever it was we were all becoming.

See. Reprogram the debris, the way you always have. But this time, take that code into your own. Absorb it, and use it to fight
.

“Lad?” I whispered.

I whispered?

Your turn
.

I nodded, revelling in the motion. It didn’t matter that Lad was dead, and yet inside of me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand most of what he had just said. Because it was my turn to look after Kichlan, as I should have done his brother, as they both had done for me, for so long.

Tanyana
? Now that was the Keeper. I could hear the tears in his voice, his shock and fear. But something deeper started my heart fluttering, and my suit spinning faster. Hope.
You… you feel like a Half
. Hope shone through his anguish like sunshine after a frozen night.
No, not just a Half. I did not understand at first. Why I could speak to you? Why you could hear me? And just what are you changing into? But now it is clear. I can sense you, I can feel part of me within you. And Tanyana, you feel just like Lad. Like he has not left me. Like he is not gone. Not all of him
.

I could feel the Keeper too. Close beside me, and terribly weak

“Lad,” I said, loudly this time, and the puppet man’s gaze snapped back to me in an instant. Darkness edged the whites of his too-wide eyes. His mouth gaped. More darkness. Damn him and his suit of skin. It did not belong on him.

“Lad is with me.” Lad had died in my arms and yet some part of him, it seemed, refused to leave us. We needed him. We always had. I held up a hand and thought of the blood he had spilled on to me, the blood that had run along the lines of my suit and slid between the cracks. Was that why he was a part of me now?

“No,” the puppet man said. He lifted a hand. “Stop!”

I crouched. I extended my fingers, touched the ground and sent spider-webs across the floor. Each thread wrapped around a debris scar and absorbed it.

I could feel each piece as they were drawn back into my body. There was much movement at first from each, then the terrible memory of what had been done to them. Until the suit subsumed them, calmed them, drew them inside of us and made them one with us.

Thank you
, the Keeper breathed.

Around us, the rest of the puppet men solidified, stepping out of their mist with identical expressions of black-rimmed shock.

“Unspecified error. No definition.”

“Control flow interrupted. Exception.”

“Command invalid. Emergency override nonresponsive.”

More nonsense, but I had no more patience for their senseless ramblings. And I no longer feared them, no matter how many shifted into existence in front of my very eyes.

“What are you doing, Miss Vladha?” the puppet man asked, and he was afraid. Strangely, that did not give me satisfaction. “How are you overriding our programming?”

I ignored him. It was time to free Kichlan. I had promised his brother I would.

I approached the chair. The puppet men did not stop me, instead, they hung back, their uncanny group-mentality apparently unable to decide just what to do about me. The debris reared away from Kichlan’s body, recombined into a hand-like state. I extended my own arms, palm up.

“Come to me.”

“No!” The most solid of the puppet men lurched toward me, fingers clawing and clutching like he was struggling to regain control.

I refused to let that happen. I stepped up to him and grabbed those outstretched hands. He staggered back, shocked, horrified. The skin on his face drooped, and I dug my fingers into his false flesh and pulled.

The skin over his hands tore away. Beneath, he was debris. He was grains and planes held tight in a loosely human shaped membrane, flowing and pulsing like the Keeper’s own semi-visible heartbeat.

For a moment, everything seemed to still.

“I knew you were not human,” I said, sounding far calmer than I felt. “I thought you might be like the Keeper. You walk the paths of his world, after all.” I shook the gloves of skin, shuddering at the feel of them, the leather-like weight and icy chill. “But what are you?”

“We told you.” The rest of the puppet man’s skin was peeling away, the seams undoing, as if in that act of exposure I had destroyed everything that held his mask together. “We are both.”

“If you are debris then why do you tear it from the Keeper? Why do you twist it into monsters and weapons? Why do you harm him?” I shook my head. “And if you are made of pions, then why do you need to hide behind a false face?”

“We are both, we are neither. We are in between.”

“Are you…” What was I, some child frightened of stories told in the dark? “The Other?”

Laughter. And the mist was no longer mist, it was a mass of dark bodies, faceless, seams all unravelling. “You don’t even know what that means. You understand nothing.”

What did it matter? I was here to help Kichlan, and that was exactly what I would do.

But the mass of bodies closed in on me, and they blended with the once-puppet man until I was surrounded by darkness and shifting movement.

Tanyana
! The Keeper was beside me, close. I could feel him as though his body was a part of mine. The heightened fluttering of his debris pulse sent quivers of panic through my own heart.

“What are they?” I gasped at him.

They are impossible
.

I turned my back on Kichlan and the debris, and extended my arms into ugly blades. Still, the darkness tightened. The puppet men weighed down the very air, like pressure or humidity on my skin. I backed into the chair, metal chiming on metal as I knocked it, and Kichlan groaned.

My heart leapt. He was still alive.

“Haven’t you worked it out yet, brother?” the darkness hissed.

Behind me, the debris was falling, scattering over my back like soft, living rain. Whether it was an attack, or simply because the puppet men – not men, not even puppet-like any more – no longer cared to control it, I couldn’t tell. But my suit absorbed each scar that touched me, and it was filling me, replacing what Aleksey had stolen, making me strong again. And perhaps it was the memory of Lad within me, or perhaps it was how close I had come to the Keeper, or because these soft grains had been feeding on Kichlan who wished me no harm. But I could control it all, every last surge of energy within my suit, and they were not turning me into a weapon.

That strength was mine, that suit was mine.

“We are just like you.”

No no no
, the Keeper rattled out the words.
You are nothing like me
.

The puppet men seemed to be distracted by the Keeper, so I took advantage of that. I turned and collected Kichlan again from the chair.

And yet, as I lifted him, most of his left arm fell away.

I nearly dropped him. I wanted to be sick. And he cried out weakly, head lolling on a useless neck, as the suit band from his left wrist clattered empty and dull to the ground.

“That is true. We are stronger. Later models, you might say. Or updates.”

I don’t believe you
! The Keeper screamed, and I winced.
I was created to be the guardian. Me, only me! And this is my duty, mine
!

“And look how well you are doing it.” The darkness laughed, low and echoey and cruel. “Without your programmers to help you, you are useless. A jumbled collection of impossible commands.”

In my arms, Kichlan sweated and struggled to breathe. But nothing else of him fell apart, no more limbs disintegrated. I didn’t dare to move, like I was made of stone and he of precious, precious glass. His left arm ended at his elbow, and it was a strangely clean ending. Perhaps that was what the puppet man had meant by painlessness, by efficiency. Instead of the mess of blood and tissue and organs and debris that the Hon Ji Half had become, Kichlan was being dismantled one neat part at a time. In their twisted logic, I supposed that could be considered an improvement.

Gently, terrified the slightest movement would loosen more of his body, I shifted Kichlan’s weight into one arm and collected his empty band. My suit quested softly over it, touching living to dead silver, like the nose of an inquisitive cat. And Kichlan’s suit seemed to know me. It had stilled, without his body to drive it, yet with each touch it quivered with life and spinning symbols flickered.

“We are not your replacements. We have not been sent here to relieve you of your duty. So do not fear, Guardian.
Keeper
. The men who programmed you are still very pleased with your performance. We have made certain they will not discover just how useless their most favoured of creations has become.”

Then who are you
?

The bone at Kichlan’s elbow was visible. It, and the muscle and skin around it, had been sliced, cleanly. In his marrow I could see thin slithers of silver, more like a pattern in his tissue than the solid slabs of scarring that now made up most of me. But his blood was beginning to well free, to pulse and spurt with each heartbeat, and I didn’t think anyone could live with their arm cut in half for long without a healer.

I gripped his suit band tightly, as my own absorbed the very last of the twisting debris worms.

“We are the mistakes. Didn’t we say it already? Not debris or pion, yet both. Mere shadows of your program. Rejected by our makers and cast into the veil.”

Mistakes
?

“Indeed. Your unwanted brothers.”

I wrapped my suit over all of Kichlan’s band, squeezed it hard, ever tighter, until his symbols bubbled and an unwavering blue light beamed out from between my fingers. Then I pressed it to the stub at his left elbow.

He gasped and tried to move away. Blood ran down my arm and splashed against the empty chair. But he was too weak to shake me off, and my suit was with his suit, and together, they bonded to the thin metallic patterns in his body. The connections I made were rough, indelicate, thick, and they burrowed viciously deep for more space in his muscle and bones. Devich probably would have been horrified at my workmanship.

When I withdrew tendrils of liquid metal still connected us, visceral, like blood shining and strong. The band was tight on Kichlan’s elbow. It ringed the edge of his wound, and as I watched the viscous suit spread to cover his open flesh, and solidified, until it cupped and sealed the stub of his left arm. No more blood, no more open wound.

Kichlan flickered his eyes open and tried to fix me with an unsteady stare. “What did you do to me?” he seemed to say, but his voice was so soft I could barely hear him.

The puppet men had continued to goad the Keeper, although I was only half listening to them. “But even our creators, those who fashioned the veil – ah, sorry, it’s not the veil on this side, is it? Shall we call them doors? Even those who carved the doors, brother, do not understand their true nature.”

But at that, I lifted my head, and I stared into the mass of shifting bodies, lights and distance. “Doors?” I whispered.

Stay out of this
!

The darkness chuckled. “Did you know, Miss Vladha, that they are not really doors? They might look like doors in this world, but on the other side they are called the veil.”

You should not be telling her that
!

“The veil? What does that mean?” I asked. Kichlan could not hope to stand on his own, and even with my suit and my strength, I could not hold him forever in one arm. I shifted him, cradled him with both arms so his head rested on my shoulder.

“Hidden by the doors, there is a veil. It rests over everything, dividing your world with its opposite.”

I wished I had something to focus on, rather than the shiftless mass of darkness and haze. However much I had hated the false skin of the puppet men, their human masks and emotionless eyes, as least I knew where to look. What to speak to. “I know about the worlds.”

That same chuckle. “Hardly.”

Silent! Tanyana, don’t listen to them. We need to get out of here
!

“But with each pion your people use, the veil thins. The veil tears.”

“I know this too.” Replace veil with door and I understood. Anyway, the Keeper had a point. I glanced around us. The puppet-men mass surrounded us, ringed us in a great dark circle. But the floor was still stone and – I looked up – the insect head with its tubing remained. I followed the glass trail. It seemed the puppet men were careful to part their mist around it, not to touch it. Even unmasked, they were cautious of their machines.

“It became necessary to fix it. So the Guardian program was designed, and uploaded into the veil itself, to patch the holes. Or, on this side, close the doors.” Soft, constant laughter rumbled an undertone to their words. “For a while he even had helpers. Programmers sent across the veil to work with him on the other side. You would know them as Halves.”

Stop it, stop it
!

I braced my feet against the stone floor; I tightened my grip on Kichlan. I only had one chance. “Who designed the Keeper?” Keep them talking. I hoped, oh I hoped, that they were so engaged in tormenting him that they would not react to me, not fast enough anyway.

“The same programmers who created the veil. And us, of course.”

“And where are they?”

“On the other side of the doors you have been so keen on opening and closing.”