Guardian (12 page)

“
But what about those?” He gestured to the dragonheads and the Mob. “You’re developing weapons of your own.”

“
Only to defend ourselves.”

Kichlan closed his eyes. This was pointless.
“You’re wrong about Tanyana,” he whispered. “The veche was not using her, the puppet men were. And they don’t care about the Hon Ji, or borders, or colonies.” He opened his eyes again. “Sooner or later, none of that will matter to anyone.” It was, after all, only a matter of time before the puppet men brought down the veil, and washed them all away in emptiness. He was not going to spend the rest of his brief, sorry days fighting for someone else’s revolution.

Kichlan turned on his heel, and started to walk away.

Natasha lunged, grabbing his arm, “What are you doing?”

He tried to shake her off, but she was strong.
“I’m leaving you to your revolution. I want no part of it. You have no right to decide the fate of the people of this city. And neither do I.”

“
You will leave when I say you can leave!” She would not let him go. Instead, she pulled on his arm, spun and tripped him up with ease. He fell heavily on his hard silver elbow, and she knelt beside him. “This is your fight, Kichlan.” She did not seem to be able to decide between imploring him and commanding him. “Even if you don’t realise it! Tanyana should have been here, but it’s you, now. You’re all that’s left.”

Was he really? What about his debris collecting team? What about Fedor and his Unbound—those people who could see debris, but had escaped being fitted with a suit and forced to collect it? What had happened to them when Tan destroyed the city?

“No.” He jammed the butt of his silver elbow against the ground and levered himself up. “I’m going. You won’t stop me.”

Natasha released him, drew back. She muttered something to herself, a rapid-fire of spiteful sounding words Kichlan could not understand, then drew one of her blades.
“I’m in charge now, Kichlan,” she said. “And you will obey me.” Blade out, she lunged forward.

Kichlan
’s suit was not like Tan’s, but years of living with his strong, unstable brother had taught him to make the most of his limited strength. When Natasha attacked, he lifted his remaining arm, knocked her knife aside, and slid his suit into a blade of his own.

“
Don’t assume you can command me,” he said. He still wasn’t used to the changes Tan had made to him. He staggered a little, the lack of his arm keeping him off balance. “I’m not one of your Mob.”

Natasha curled her lip. She tossed her blade aside, and drew the silver in her right wrist out into a club.
“You’re not the only one with a suit here, either.”

Again, she leapt at him, and she was fast. He lifted his blade to parry her club, but she ducked, twisted, and he just couldn
’t follow. Her silver crunched hard into his left side, beneath the arm that wasn’t there. He dropped to his knees, and stuck his blade into the shattered cobblestones to keep from falling on his face.

“
Damn you,” he gasped.

“
You’re not as fast as Tanyana,” Natasha said, as she stalked around him. “Or as strong.” She paused, and crouched in front of him. “That bitch gave me the hardest thrashing I’ve had since training, and you know the worst part?” Natasha drew one of her clay disks from her armour. “She wasn’t even trying.”

Natasha pressed the disk against Kichlan
’s blade. Its lightning surged into the silver of his suit, and through him, all of him, every last deeply-sewn wire, every shaving of silver, his skin, muscles, bones. His suit spasmed and retracted, completely out of his control. Kichlan fell, as his body jerked; his bones were on fire, his head filled with a rushing like the waters of the Tear trying to crush the life out of him.

Natasha sighed, a wistful sound.
“She really should have joined us. What a soldier she could have made.”

Kichlan couldn
’t move, let alone answer.

Natasha stood, walked away.
“Pick him up,” she said to the Mob he couldn’t see. “And take him with us.”

He refused to let them do that! But his suit did not respond, and his body was just as bad, and the only thing that didn
’t burn with Natasha’s lightning was the silver cap on his elbow. The little part of Tan’s suit she had forced on to him. Not connected to the rest of the metal in his body and, apparently, unaffected.

The Mob rolled him over. One wrapped arms as strong as steel around his legs, another grabbed his torso. Kichlan squeezed his eyes shut and focused on his elbow. It was still a part of him. No matter how poorly Tan had connected it to his arm, how mangled the nervous connections, it belonged to him how. A part of her, ever with him.

He remembered what it was like when he was first suited, all those years ago. After he had injured himself, taken away his own pion-binding ability so he could remain with his brother instead. Getting used to a suit was like learning to walk all over again. It took concentration, and hard work, constant training of the mind to recognise the silver and learn how to make it move. He’d done it once. He’d thought of himself as skilled, really, until Tan came along. He could do it again.

The Mob picked him up, but he barely felt it. There was nothing in the world but the alien silver on his arm, and the need to make it move.

“Careful,” Natasha said somewhere, dimly. “Support his head, I don’t want him hurt.”

Something rippled. Kichlan felt it in twitching along his shoulders, to his upper back and even the top of his thighs. Tan
’s messy nerve connections, struggling into life. Another ripple, this one stronger, sent Kichlan’s jaw clenching. Silver slipped free of his elbow. Long and loose at first, almost liquid, it took every inch of his focus to get it to move. But it was! And hardening, sharpening, responding to him like a real suit should.

The Mob paused.
“Lady Natasha,” one said. “There’s something—”

Kichlan whipped out with the suit from his elbow. It sliced across the arms of the Mob, scoring deep. They dropped him with a curse, and he would have fallen hard, but the whip coiled beneath him like a spring then lowered him, softly, to the ground.

“Other’s hell!” Natasha cried. “How did you—?”

The strangest feeling was rolling through Kichlan, starting at his newly awakened silver. A heady sense like victory, a need, an urge, so deep it make him shiver, and yet, almost impossible to define. He breathed deeply, and it filled his lungs. It loosened his lightning-struck body, one muscle at a time, and made his suit tingle and sting like it was new.

Coughing, shaking, Kichlan pushed himself to his feet. He lifted his left arm, drew the whip back and again, fashioned a blade. It was so responsive, this suit. Fast and sure, it seemed to know what he wanted to do even before he did. He found himself grinning, as he faced the two Mob.

“
Go on,” he said, his voice rough. “Go on, just try that again. I want you to!” And he really did. He wanted to plunge that blade into their pion-strengthened bodies, he wanted to see just how hard they would fight to stay alive. Let them try, let them—

—this wasn
’t right. This wasn’t him. This need for blood, the urge for battle. Why was he—

Kichlan clutched his head. What was going on?

“Kichlan?” Natasha stepped forward, softly. “Just calm down, please.”

But she was lying to him. He would read it clearly on her face, like it was mapped out for him, translated. And he could feel the dangerous, clay disk in her hand, as she made to throw it. So he lashed out again, blade back to whip faster than an instant, caught it in mid air between the finest, most delicate pincers. He was so gentle it did not detonate, and all it took was a little flick to send to flying back to its master, and her Mob.

Natasha flung herself away from the lightning explosion at the last moment. Kichlan spread a wide shield for himself. But her Mob were caught and when the light and the dust cleared, all three were lying prone.

Natasha stared at him in horror.
“How did you do that?” she gasped. “Have—have you been able to do that the whole time?”

Enough of this. He
’d had enough of fighting, hadn’t he? Kichlan gritted his teeth, and drew his suit back in. He pointed his elbow at her, and Natasha flinched. “I’m going,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“
You could be one of us!” Natasha cried, as he shuddered and lurched away. “Just like Tanyana should have been. You would be a great weapon!”

He ignored her. His new suit throbbed inside him, across all its jagged network, and even pinched the edges of his old internal wires. Strange words whispered, at the edges of his hearing. Strange shadows, like ghosts, haunted his vision.

He ignored it all, and just kept walking.

Somewhere, beneath the chaos, in the centre of the storm, his old debris collecting team had been hiding. Innocent, dragged into battle by Tan and the puppet men. If he could do one thing before the world died, it would be to find them. To make sure they were all okay.

Natasha and her battles could just go to all the Other’s hells. That was what he would do.

I jerked awake, scratching at my elbow and screaming,
“I am not your weapon!”

Lad hunched down in front of me. He ran his hand over my sweat-slicked hair.
“Shhh,” he whispered. “Not so loud.”

Shuddering, I tore the makeshift blankets from my arms and stared at my left hand. It felt so wrong. In the dim, passing lights from the other side of boarded-up windows, it looked unreal. Flesh and silex, skin and light. Cold, bright light. Not silver, not fluid and mobile.

What was going on?

“
Just a dream.” Lad took both my hands and tucked them back beneath the blankets. “A bad dream. Don’t disturb the silex any more than you already have. Take a breath, that’s my girl, and calm down. That’s one hell of a Flare going on inside you. Just try to relax, see if you can settle it down.”

I leaned back, beneath Lad
’s gentle hands.

“
Good, good. That’s the way.”

I had been so angry. But here, in the semi-dark and the stench of smoke and beneath Lad
’s constant, heavy worry, I couldn’t quite remember why.

Except, it had to do with Kichlan, didn
’t it? Because when I dreamed—

“
Tan?” Lad brushed tears from my cheeks; what I could make out of his expression was shocked. Perhaps he did not think me capable of crying. “Oh no, Tan. Please. Here.” And he wrapped arms around me, and held me, as I cried for his brother. For Kichlan.

I watched through a crack in the boarded-up windows as Lad killed a
useless piece of shit junkie
and stole the man’s weapon. When I’d asked him if it was really such a good idea to attack an armed man like that, he’d only answered, “Crust is a rough teacher, and I remember her lessons well.”

The
junkie
did not look healthy. He shuffled along the poorly lit street below the abandoned building we were hiding in with a strangely hitching gait, as though his legs didn’t quite work. His hands snatched at invisible things in front of his face.

“
He spent too much time wired to a Flare,” Lad said, when I asked what was wrong with the man. “I hear it’s nice for a little while. The world…changes. You change. All the darkness and the hunger of Crust are gone, replaced with anything you can imagine. And many things you can’t. But spend too long playing with reality, and you lose it. Even when you disconnect, like this guy, you don’t know where you are. Or what’s real.” He drew me gently away from the windows. “What did I say about keeping out of sight?”

But when he headed downstairs and out to the street, I returned to the windows and watched, cradling the silex bath against my chest as it repaired a crack down my left arm. I wasn
’t entirely clear on what Crust’s lessons were, but Lad was right about one thing. He had nothing to fear from the junkie, weapon or none.

The man did not even see Lad coming, too busy swiping at invisible flies. Lad strode right up to him and punched him. The junkie dropped to the dark road like a doll, unsteady legs akimbo, arms flailing wide. Lad crouched, wrapped his large, strong hands around the man
’s face and smacked the back of his head against the ground. Three sharp, hard movements, and it was done. Then he searched through the junkie’s clothing, found a few things apparently worth stealing, and left him there, on the pavement, bleeding wide trails of thick blood into the filthy gutter.

I stared down at the man
’s body in horror. I had seen Lad—
my
Lad—in his violent moods, but they were nothing like this. This was the coldly calculating act of a killer, not the desperate misunderstanding of a stressed and child-like mind.

And that was all my fault. I was all too keenly aware of what I
’d done to Lad, on both worlds. Everything I’d taken away from him. And it hurt so much I didn’t even know how to talk to him anymore, how to look at him, to trust or know him. All I knew was guilt.

The junkie
’s eyes were still open. They stared back up at me, sightless.

“
I told you,” Lad said, as he reappeared, “to stay away from the windows.”

I returned to my bedding. The building Lad had chosen to hide us in had once been an apartment block, but that was a very long time ago. Time had destroyed most of it, eating through steel, cement and silex like a disease. I was certain it was unstable, and probably dangerous to be hiding in, but I supposed that made it the best place. Who would risk their lives to look here?

There was silex everywhere in the building, but it was different from the crystal in my skin, or the stuff that made up my son’s body and powered his tube. A dull, grain-like smattering of mineral embedded with wire and threaded through the walls and floor—linking lights in the ceiling, heating units, and devices with functions I did not understand and had asked Lad to explain to me. Steam presses for clothes, screens like the ones the programmers used that had once provided entertainment, and other devices that enabled communication over great distances. Of course, only the bones now remained. I could see the heating units because most of the floors had long-since disintegrated. Their thick metallic loops reminded me of pion factories. Of the lights, only small silex hubs dangling from the ceiling remained, in some cases still semi-encased in glass. But mostly, all that remained were sockets, where any device could be activated by creating a connection of crystal and light.

“
What happened?” I had asked him, as Lad led us through the decaying rooms to one that looked the most stable, and less likely to collapse on us in our sleep. “To the people who lived here?”

“
Flares happened.”

We could not climb to the building
’s roof—the upper stories were little more than steel frames and ghostly, glittering silex—so Lad risked the street, for just a moment, to show me a nearby Shard. It grew out of the very earth, the lower end of its angled, reflective surfaces hidden below the street. It reared high into the sky, dwarfing the buildings around it, and scattered light across their dark and empty edifices.

“
A Pionic Flare, right in the centre of a neighbourhood like this one, causes significant loss of life and property damage. Unchecked, it could undo the subatomic structures of the entire city. As you can see, it has been contained, but everything it touched—buildings, people, pets—was destabilized. Some were euthanised, a quicker death than slow disintegration. The buildings were condemned, and the area cordoned off.”

I glanced around. We had seen few people in our rush from the pod, where it had landed in another condemned area, much like this one.

“Of course, that was hundreds of years ago.” Lad did not allow us to stay out on the street for long. He feared the Legate and its satellites. “Such regulation is no longer enforced. It’s all the Legate can do to keep this world together. Even so, only junkies and homeless and criminal gangs would dare a place like this.”

I leaned against the broken remains of a tiled wall and watched as Lad sorted through the items he had stolen from the junkie. He had made our bedding in what was once a bathroom, on a hard floor, between a ceramic tub and exposed steel pipes.

“The strongest place in a building, and the last to fall. So if this place starts to go, we might have time to run.”

I
’d expected the small room with tiled floors and walls to be cold. But nothing in this world, it seemed, was cold. Not any more. Even the constant heavy clouds and the bouts of hard, needle-like rain brought nothing but steam and humidity. Flares released a considerable amount of heat with all their potent energy.

Lad placed the weapon on the floor. Small, metal, and dangerous-looking, even though I didn
’t know how it worked. He caught me staring at it. “This is a gun,” he said, lifted it, tossed it lightly in one hand. “There’s nothing like it on your—on our—on that—world.”

He tried so hard not to think about the world where he had died. Could he feel the blades through his back, as clearly as I could still see them?

“This is a gun,” he said again, his voice rough, constricted. “It shoots bullets. Here.” Something inside the weapon clicked, and the middle rolled free. Six more pieces of metal fell into his hand—small, pill-like, and edged with silex. “These hit you, at great speed, and get inside your body. Then—” he made a small explosion motion with his empty hand “—the silex inside them shatters.” He studied the bullets, clicked his tongue disapprovingly, and returned them to their case inside the gun. “These are cheap, their silex is weak and not even threaded. The guns the Legate uses, for example, will release an isolated Flare inside your body. No one comes back from that. A good shot and this could still kill you: head, chest, any major artery. But more likely to leave little bits of brass and silex inside you, to fester.” He snapped the gun shut again, and pocketed it. “But better than nothing.”

“
That’s horrible!” I gasped. It still hurt, to compare this Lad to the man who had held my hand so tightly, and demanded nothing more complex than a good story. His haunted eyes made him look so ancient, so distant and different from me. His beard was growing unchecked, his hair always was unruly, and his white programmer’s jacket was filthy now. Kichlan would not have let him get into this state. “Why would we want—”

“
Don’t be naïve, Tan. This is Crust. Everyone down here is armed.” He shuffled on his knees around the ancient bathtub. Behind there, between loose floorboards and what he hoped was a sturdier lattice of pipes, Lad had hidden his bag. “And anyway, we only have enough silex to keep you alive for another week.”

I
’d tried my hardest to keep still, to remain calm. But we had been forced to run from the pod when it landed in a semi-abandoned slum, to climb into buildings and hide, as lights lit the sky below the distant Fulcrum and the denizens of Crust emerged to investigate. Add that to my nightmares—occurring nightly, now—and the bright Flare they summoned, and Lad had already been forced to use more of the silex than he would have liked. Soon, too soon, we would run very low.

My son, in his tube, leaned into a corner close to where I slept. Lad had wanted to hide him somewhere else in the ruin, just to be safe. I understood his reasons, but I
’d still refused. When I slept, my son slept with me. When I woke, I knew he was there. So we resorted to throwing a blanket over him, to smother his steady Flare.

“
Only one week.” I nodded. “Yes, I know that.”

“
So now I’m going to try to get some more.”

I frowned at him as he shuffled over to sit in front of me.
“From where? And why will you need a gun?”

Lad sighed, and gestured to the windows.
“That corpse out there, that junkie, he had been wired to a Flare.”

“
Like you said.” I nodded. “To forget Crust. To change your reality.” Almost sounded like a good idea.

“
Thing is, it’s not that easy to do. Can’t just walk up to any old Shard and connect. You need implants, you need the right hacking equipment, and they all require silex. That means there must be a gang around here—not too far away, I don’t think he could have walked far in that condition—with access. So I’m going to get some.”

He stood. I hurried to follow.

“You’ll use the gun to force them to give you some?” I asked.

He laughed, a tough, humourless sound.
“Oh fuck no. That would be suicide.” He shrugged. “I have some credits to my name, if the Legate hasn’t wiped my funds, of course. If not, I have skill. I am a programmer, after all. I can create the kind of crystal connections those thugs can only dream of. Strike the right deal with them, and I’ll keep you alive for a lot longer than a week.”

“
Lad.” I clutched his arm. “This—I think this sounds dangerous.” Actually, I’d only understood half of what he had said. “Please, don’t put yourself—”

“
Shhh.” He unwrapped my fingers where they bunched his shirt. “I help you, Tan. Bro said—” He shook his head. “I mean, this is my decision. This is what I meant, when I said there were options, here on Crust. I didn’t say they would be good ones, or safe ones. But I grew up on Crust, and I know the way things work here.” He glanced down at my hand, clamped in its silex bath. “I just didn’t think I would need to go to the gangs so soon.”

Guilt dipped low inside me, and set off fresh flickerings of light through my mineral skin. It did that so often now. I
’d already killed one half of Lad; if I let the other die here, for me—

He untangled me easily.
“So just sit still, and rest. That’s the most important thing you can do.”

I watched him leave. But I was not good at sitting here, calmly, while he went out into the dangerous world to try and save me. Even as an architect I had never taken orders well, and had only ever been comfortable as a circle centre. The point where all the lights converged.

Could I really just sit here, nursing my injuries, while Lad risked his life for me? Again.

What choice did I have?

I paced, slow and steadily, careful with the silex in my skin and the weight of the bath.

Time was strange on Crust, just as it was
on board Fulcrum. Sunless, bell-less, it passed only with the sound of my feet against hollow floors and the flickering of lights outside. I peered through the slatted window. The Flares from countless floating Shards reflected against the low, heavy cloud, and gave the ruined city a constant, twilight glow. Every so often something bright sped along the street past the building. Lad had told me they were pods, like the one that had carried us down to Crust, the carriages of this world. Only the Legate and its programmers, however, had access to them now. So I was to hide, each time one flew by.

With Lad gone, however, I did nothing of the kind. I pressed my nose to putrid wood and stared intently at the first flash of oncoming light. The pods moved too fast to see properly: a streak of silver and a blaze of light. They weren
’t regular enough to provide a decent way to estimate time. But in the heavy silence of eternal twilight, they were all I had. Three passed, before I began to worry that Lad had not returned. I slept a little, between the second and third. I wasn’t hungry, not even thirsty either, but that meant nothing. I wasn’t sure how much I needed food, any more.

How long had he been away? And what did that mean? I deserved to be abandoned, and wouldn
’t fault him for it. But had I sent him his death again? Fear and guilt and hopelessness played through me, and I didn’t handle any of them well. So I paced, and worried, and stared outside, and longed for the strength of my silver.

I was watching the trail left by the third pod—the fade of light left behind in steam and low-cloud haze—when I saw two, as Lad would have put it,
pieces of shit junkies
. They waited in shadows across the road for the pod to leave, then hurried to the dead body still lying in the street. They were both thin, like the man Lad had killed, the skin tight on their faces. I held my breath as they searched his pockets, and found nothing.