Guardian (4 page)

He crawled out of water that clung to him like hands, heavy and cold. All alone he climbed sharp stone, clutching rosemary bushes for purchase. The scent of crushed leaves tore sobs from his burning throat. It mingled with a layer of ash, disturbed by his scrambling, and the unmistakable smell of death.

Lying on his back in the rubble, he dug at his chest, pushed clothes aside, scrambling fingers searching, searching. But he found nothing. Thankfully, impossibly, nothing. He was still alive. The river that had almost drowned him must have also saved him. It washed everything away.

He forced himself to his feet, staggered, collapsed against the broken roof of a fallen tombstone. The sharp edges of shattered tiles cut into his hand.

But he managed to walk. Just one foot in front of the other. Then again. And again. Down the ruins of the cemetery path. He did not look for broken names, did not want to think which recently buried bodies had been flung up to reek of decay in the sun. Just keep moving.

Away from the river.

All alone.

I opened heavy eyes. I was floating, surrounded by a humming light of many bright colours, always shifting, from sharp blue to a deep-salt sea green.

This was not what I had imagined nothingness would be like.

I blinked with difficulty. Gradually, the light dimmed, and I could see. The world seemed strangely wavy. It consisted of a tiled wall, square lamps, and a large dark slide scrawled with pale writing.

With a jolt I realised I was looking through glass. I turned my head. I was in a tube, supported in a thick liquid. Small, clear solids—like glass, or crystal—floated beside me, gently knocking against my face, my arms, my legs. Whatever this liquid was, it didn’t appear to be drowning me. I could breathe in it, despite the airless feeling in my chest. I was alive and suspended in a tube.

None of it made sense.

“She’s awake.” A distorted voice came from above me.

Who was that? The puppet men? Had they caught me? Brought me back to the laboratory, trapped me in this bizarre prison while they waited for me to wake up to begin the next experiment?

I tried to struggle, but I could hardly move. Just like the suiting table! I wasn’t going to let them—

“
Don’t move!” The voice was tinged with fuzzy, metallic panic. “The silex structures haven’t properly formed yet. Quick, knock her out before she does herself any more damage.”

Something whirred above me, the unmistakable spinning of gears.

I would not let them do this! But my arms would not respond, and I couldn’t feel much at all from the neck down. Dull pain etched strange lines through me, following the path of the suited scars that held so much of me together.

“
No!” A real voice, not above me but from somewhere on the other side of the curved glass. “No more drugs. Let me talk to her.”

“
Now is not—”

“
Fuck off Marcus. I’m not going to interview her. I’ll just calm her down.”

A pause, and the whirring quietened.

“Think she’ll listen to you?”

“
Yes.” A figure rippled into view. I couldn’t make out any real details, except for a white coat, what looked like a pale mask that covered mouth and nose, and something dark over the eyes. “I’m certain.”

I knew that voice; it called to me like a ghostly memory.

“Lad?” The word came out weak, semi-formed, and muted. When I spoke, I realised my mouth was full of the strange liquid. It had no taste at all, but the feeling of it filling my throat made me want to gag.

Lad pressed both hands against the glass, and leaned forward. I wished I could see his face. I needed to. Like a fluttering in my belly, a craving. Lad, here. Alive. Where we both should have been dead, taken by nothingness and cast like dust to the winds. But he was here.

“How do you know my name?” he asked, voice low.

I tried to move again. Slow, this time, not in panic or fear, I lifted my arms and reached for him. Palm to palm, either side of the curving glass.

Until I saw my wrists.

The suit was gone, and in its place I was nothing but light. The glow that filled my tube, the strange shifting of colours, they came from me.

I tried to cry out, but made no sound. Other’s eternal darkness—my throat! If the suit on my wrists was gone then what about my throat? My waist? What had happened to the silver scars in my abdomen? The plug in my heart, the suit in my lungs?

What was going on? Where was I? What had happened to me?

Was I even alive?

“
I thought you were going to calm her down?” The distorted voice. “She’s redlining! We need to bring her under again.”

“
No!” Lad tore the masks from his face and pressed his nose against the tube. His brown eyes pierced me through the glass, through the liquid, through all my panic and fear. “Please, I don’t know who you are or how you’re even here, but please calm down. You made it this far. We don’t want to lose you now.”

He didn
’t know. Somehow, that was what calmed me. Why didn’t he know who I was?

“
She’s stabilising,” the voice said. “It’s working, keep talking.”

Slow kicks in my tube and I managed to propel myself closer to the glass. Lad watched me from the other side, eyes wide and concerned but fiercely thoughtful. So much like him, yet different entirely.

“Don’t move too much—”

“
What is this?” I whispered, and silenced him. My light-made throat could only manage the smallest of sounds. “Where is my suit?” The very act of talking was exhausting, and painful.

“
Suit?” Lad whispered back. “I—” he glanced up, away from me “—I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

I tried to shake my head, but quickly discovered that was not such a great idea. My hands shook, where they pressed against the glass. I was strangely grateful for the fluid holding me up, because I certainly did not have the strength to do so.

“This, then?” I peered at the light, held down the tides of fear washing through me. “What is this?”

Lad glanced up, somewhere above and behind me. I wondered if he was seeking permission.
“That is a Pionic Flare,” he replied, and I almost did not hear him. “Powerful, but held in check by your program and the silex we are binding to you.” He leaned forward. “Who programmed you? I have never seen coding like—”

“
Aladio, be quiet.” Not the distorted voice from above but another, outside the tube. Sharp and angry. “Enough!” I caught the hazy outline of another figure, somewhere toward the back of the room, but could make out no details.

Aladio? I had never heard Kichlan call him that.

Lad drew back, visibly hesitant.

“
No.” I pressed my hand harder to the glass. “Stay.” The light brightened, and beamed from my wrists. That was suit light, I realised, unbound from its symbols and silver.

“
What the—?” The distorted voice. “I don’t believe this. You need to take a look at these figures, Sir!”

The indistinct figure disappeared.

Lad leaned forward again. “Who are you?” he whispered. “What are you?”

“
Don’t you remember me?”

The look in his eyes as he backed away was enough to break my heart. Maybe I deserved it. I had, after all, killed him. I had convinced him to fight the puppet men, to follow me to the laboratory basement. And he had flung himself in front of Aleksey
’s blades for me, taken their brunt, all to protect me. I no longer deserved his trust. The fear in his brown eyes, the panic and confusion…yes, I had certainly earned them.

So I turned myself away, with my slow-paddling movement. And noticed another tube, only half as tall as mine. The top was capped with metal and cables, ringed with flickering lights, and what could have been dials or numbers that moved.

Something shifted inside the tube. Small and slow, turning, glowing.

I watched, in morbid fascination.

A face—tiny and barely made, only the very beginnings of a person, the merest of sketches. The curl of semi-fists pressed close to a chest. The soft curve of a delicate spine.

It almost looked like a child. But it was mostly light, hardly flesh at all. What skin it had was so thin it was transparent, and colours shifted inside it. They rippled like sunrise on a pond.

A knot of fear tightened low in my stomach.

I had always wondered what the suit was doing to the child growing inside me. Just how much silver it had become.

I glanced down. No suit scars across my naked abdomen, only strips of light, as though it was shining up at me through a grate. Light and—stitches.

Stitche
s?

“
You cut into me?” I wanted to cry but I could only whisper. I tried to bang on the glass but I could only tap. I pressed my whole body against the tube and shone so brightly I had to close my eyes. “How dare you!” I finally managed to scream.

And my throat tore with it.

“The silex bonds have ruptured!” A terrible wail like an injured cat shattered the room, echoing through my tube and deep into my very bones. I opened my eyes to great red lights flashing in time to the noise, drenching everything in blood.

I had never truly made the kind of decision Sofia, Mizra and Uzdal had wanted me to make. I had never known what I wanted to do about my unplanned pregnancy. Terminate it, or risk giving birth to a debris collector—doomed to scrape out a poor life at the bottom of society—or a Half—broken and living in constant danger. But that had always been my decision to make. And it should not have been taken from me, not like this, no matter what the child would have been. No matter what.

“We have a freeforming Flare!”

More voices, all at once, some from a distorted distance and some in the room with me.

“Lock down the sector.”

“
Institute secondary control mechanisms.”

“
Up the silex count, we need to reform those bonds.”

Were any of them Lad? I didn
’t care. I tried to bang against the tube but the liquid was thickening. And I couldn’t make any sound anymore, only open my mouth and try to scream. To call to it. The semi-flesh, semi-light unborn creature they had taken from my body.

“
Redlines all over the grid.”

“
Knock her out, now. I want so many drugs in that soup she doesn’t wake up for a week.”

Darkness pooled down with the tinny voices and the whirring at the top of my tube. A soft darkness that was dissolving my panic, my fear. Everything.

“I’m sorry,” I thought I heard Lad say. But I had heard his ghost so many times before, I couldn’t be sure if he was real.

Darkness was far easier, much more what I had expected a world of nothingness to be. So I let it take me.

Movoc-under-Keeper’s wall was gone. It had stood strong for centuries, unbent by storm or quake or the force of an invading army. Tan, however, had destroyed it in one night.

Figured.

Kichlan climbed the ruins of the wall to escape the cemetery, and headed back into the city. It was difficult with one arm. At least the metal stump where his elbow had been didn’t hurt, no matter how hard he knocked it. But it wasn’t a hand, and it couldn’t grip.

His city had moved on from chaos into a heavy melancholy. The fires had been doused; in their place smoking timber and scarred stone remained. The streets were torn, some made impassable by fissures in the cement, others risen up into jagged peaks spouting pipes and the ragged ends of steel frames. So few buildings remained. Most were shells. How could anyone survive this?

Yet they had. The citizens of Movoc-under-Keeper dug through the ruins of their city, shocked, numb, every movement slow, every word hushed. It felt like a great silence had fallen over the city, broken only by bodiless weeping coming from somewhere in the distance.

Hunched over, elbow hidden beneath his coat, Kichlan walked steadily down the broken streets. He wasn
’t really sure where he was going, or what he was hoping to do. He just knew he had to keep moving. Because if he stopped, if he just sat at the side of the road like he so desperately wanted to, then everything would come crashing down on him, and he might never get back up again. He was exhausted beyond anything he had ever known. Yet he walked, threading a slow path among the pion-binders dragging bodies and body parts out of the rubble.

Where were the bodies being taken, now that the cemetery beyond the wall had given back her dead? Perhaps the Tear River could have them, drag them down into darkness and nothingness. Like it had done Tan.

Tan.

He ran the back of his sleeve over his face. He
’d always thought she needed looking after. Liked to pretend strength, to push her way forward and bear the brunt. But he would never forget her standing small and near frozen on his doorstep, that precious book in her hands. Or the defiance in her eyes, the challenge, when she had first shown him her scars.

Other damn her. Prideful and stubborn and oh so blind.

And gone. With his brother. Because he had failed them both.

He couldn
’t think about that.
Just keep moving
.

He grasped his silver elbow as he walked. His shoulder hurt; it was so much heavier than a normal arm. What had Tan been thinking, when she forced it on him?

He walked until his legs could hardly move. A constant mess of tiny debris grains brushed against his feet like sludge, but he ignored them. His debris collecting days were well and truly over. A ragged looking street vendor pressed poorly roasted sweet potato into his hand, but Kichlan couldn’t find the will to eat it. Just to walk. Deeper and deeper into the city, past leaking effluent channels, collapsed factories, smouldering apartment blocks. Over broken glass, inches thick in places. The city grew hazy, his head spun, and everything smelled like sewage, and death.

Until a shadow passed over him, and Kichlan looked up. He blinked. Where was he? How long had he been walking? Somewhere, he
’d dropped the sweet potato, but he was still clinging to its wrapper.

Two Strikers flew low above, passing overhead with the deep rushing of displaced air, leaving heat and debris in their wake.
Strikers were the ultimate soldiers, held aloft by invisible pions, their mutilated faces hidden in sleek hoods of white leather. All around him, recovery work stopped. Stones were dropped, bodies placed gently back against the earth.

Kichlan paused, glanced around. Something didn
’t feel right. It was unusual to see Strikers deployed above the city, yes, but given the circumstances Kichlan wasn’t all that surprised. The veche had imposed martial law even before Tan had destroyed Movoc-under-Keeper, thanks to skirmishes on the Hon Ji border and Fedor’s Unbound insurgency. He’d seen the Mob, Shielders and Strikers marching through the city streets. So why were all these people so shocked?

Kichlan frowned. Now that he was getting a better look at them, they didn
’t look like normal pion-binders. They were wrapped in rags and digging through rubble, just like everyone else he’d seen. But they were…too big. All solid-looking figures, faces obscured and turned up to watch as the Strikers turned in a wide arc across the sky.

An overwhelming desire to run swelled with the quickening beat of Kichlan
’s heart. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was certain he really didn’t want to be in the middle of it.

The sound of fast, heavy feet echoed from the streets around him.

Kichlan ran. A staggering, broken-stride of a run, hardly any faster than walking.

Shouts. The feet marched faster. Strikers swooped down again and this time hovered.

“Stop!” Mob ran toward him like a tidal wave, so many, so large. “By order of the veche!” He had no way of fighting them. His suit was not as strong as Tan’s had been.

He turned, met the Mob face on. But they weren
’t after him, and surged around him like thick, dark water. Black armour riddled with the silver hints of pion-powered weapons, golden eyes glowing behind wide, thick helmets. One, the large bear head on his black armoured breast ringed with nine circles, paused to scowl down at him. Which was an achievement in itself. Not many people were taller than Kichlan.

“
Get out of here!” he snapped, shoving Kichlan aside.

Breathing hard, Kichlan staggered and struggled to right himself. His body was shaking uncontrollably. The suit metal cap on his elbow rolled, squirming, questing out with small lumps, like it was alive.
Damn you Tan, he thought, and clenched his teeth. The movement he could not control started somewhere near his shoulder in the twitching of muscles, and ended with the unruly suit. It felt like an invasion of his body.
What have you left me to deal with
?

The large figures he
’d seen digging through rubble, the ones he’d just assumed were normal pion-binders like everyone else, pulled off their robes as the Mob ran towards them. And Kichlan couldn’t stop a gasp. They were Mob too, some Varsnian—from various local and regional veches, if the coloured bars on their heavy armour were anything to go by—but some were distinctly Hon Ji. Their bright blue armour shone in the crisp sunlight, dimmed only by the black dragon twisting across their breastplates. They all drew weapons, hidden in their rag disguises.

Hon Ji Mob in the city? Running battles in ruined streets? He had to get away, and he had to do it now, before he was caught in the rush of pion weapons he couldn
’t even see.

But he couldn
’t stop the shaking. And he had only stumbled a weak step forward when suddenly, everything flashed white. Then cries around him, behind him. He spun, desperately rubbing his eyes.

The Mob were fighting each other, and spilling back towards him, weapons like humming, vibrating swords that flickered and buzzed as they clashed; projectiles fired; flares burned; blood sprayed; chaos and violence around him in a terrible ring. He scrambled back, lost his footing and fell hard.

A great shadow loomed over him. Varsnian Mob, a bloodied blade lifted and ready, held out an armoured hand. “Hurry, let me help you.”

Kichlan stared up at the roaming golden eyes and did not understand what was going on.

“Quickly, before—”

Two more bursts, so bright they hurt, then explosions rocked the street. The Mob cursed, dropped to a knee, swung to deflect the blade of one of his fellows and followed through with a blow to the man
’s gut. It took two vicious hacks to cut through the black armour, and then the man fell to pieces on the street.

Kichlan turned, stomach heaving.

“Get out of the way!” The Mob bent, hooked arms around Kichlan’s chest and swung him around with strength born from the massive pion manipulations going on inside his body.

An instant later the Strikers fell, crashing to earth right where Kichlan had been. He stared at them, their bodies broken and burned. Charred leather, terrible smoking gashes blasted through masks.

What could possibly—

Natasha emerged from the battling Mob. Natasha as he had never seen her. Dressed in a strange arrangement of pieces of Mob armour, with a Striker
’s hood, over her debris collector’s dark, boned uniform. She smiled when she saw him. Blood plastered her hair to one side of her face, and the other was darkened with soot. The silver handles of countless small knives protruded from her armour, and she held a small clay-looking disk in her hand.

She paused beside him, took in his exhaustion and silver-healed injury with one sweeping glance.

“Other’s fiery hells, Kichlan,” she said. “What happened to you?”