Guardian (3 page)

“
Did you hear that?” Kichlan’s voice was muffled on the other side of the suit, so I withdrew it from my face.

I glanced around the shadowed corners of the room. Nothing.
“Maybe we imagined—”

Three puppet men materialised out of the darkness right in front of us. They smiled their too-wide smiles, fake skin stretching, their eyes the colour of mould flickered between rage and bland amusement. Pristine white coats, darkness in their mouths, and the only sign that something was amiss—that I had destroyed their laboratory and ruined their plans or, at least, delayed them—was a stinking muck stuck to their shoes. River-mud and writhing tendrils of debris.

“Other curse you!” Kichlan staggered back from them, shocked.

As one they turned toward him, and said,
“The Other cannot curse anyone anymore.”

Too late
. The Keeper slipped from my hands.

“
What are you doing here, Miss Vladha?” one of the puppet men asked. “The connections here are lost. The programmers abandoned him. Our brother, your Keeper, sad and all alone.”

“
Stay back!” I hissed at them, and fashioned fresh blades. I edged closer to Kichlan, putting myself between him and the creatures that had hurt him so much. I wouldn’t let that happen again.

Dimly, I could hear the Keeper
’s hiccupping sobs. They sounded so empty, so hollow.

“
Listen to him.” The voices were coming from all around us now. “He has failed.”

More puppet men materialised out of the walls, three—no, five, no, so many of them.
“He cannot maintain the veil, as he was created to do, so he undoes himself. You might call it grief, Miss Vladha, though we do not feel such things. His programming fights for an answer. It finds none. And so it goes, twisting over and over until it tears him apart.”

They were barring the only exit. I glanced at the floor. How thick was the rock? Could I break through it fast enough to get Kichlan away from them?

“It is time,” the puppet men continued. One voice, many voices, all tangled together. “We have come for our brother. We will save him from such an unfair fate.”

Tanyana?
I could feel the Keeper’s fear through the debris we shared.
Please, don’t let them—

“
Get away from him!” I snapped. I’d done it once, I could do it again, escape from the puppet men with both Kichlan and the Keeper in my grip. Even here, deep in the mountain rock. The suit made me strong.

“
You had your turn, Miss Vladha, and you did so well. The destruction you wrought to save that man—” they all nodded to Kichlan, who shuddered behind me “—has done more damage than we could have hoped. The pion systems in Movoc-under-Keeper lie in desperate, misfiring ruins. See how it weakens the Keeper, even now? It spreads him so thinly he can barely hold himself together. It’s time for us to save him. And that is all thanks to you.”

“
No. I didn’t…” I felt like I was going to be sick but stood firm. “I didn’t—I couldn’t—I won’t let you!”

“
We have been given life by the veil itself. We are of both worlds. We are debris and pions. We are everything and nothing. You cannot stop us, Miss Vladha.”

I lifted my bladed hands, guided the suit back over my face.
“Try me.”

The world of darkness and doors was in chaos. Doors rattling, rust creaking out like disease from beneath the puppet men
’s feet. The Keeper huddled beside me, crouching, covering his face. “Come on,” I cried. “We have to—”

“
Tan!” Kichlan shouted, then something slammed into me. I was thrown to the side, the suit absorbing most of the damage, only to be hit again, and again. The silver dropped from my face so I could see—great spears of rock springing from the walls themselves. More came. They tore the ancient cabling, they shattered the programmers’ coffin, and hope fell out of me like air from my lungs. But suit was still strong.

“
You can’t kill me that way!” I shouted, found my feet, spun and sliced at the next shard speeding my way. “You made this weapon!” Anger and frustration raced through me. “You know I’m stronger than this.”

“
Are you?” voices whispered from the rippling darkness.

Hurts
, the Keeper whispered. Where was he? If only I could grab him, and get us out of here. If only I could command pions again, just like the puppet men were doing. I could calm the mountain, I could repair the coffin. I could… No. I couldn’t do any of that. I had to focus.

Tendrils of pulsing, animated debris licked out at me. The mountain shook. Great cracks at my feet—I leapt out of the way, straight into a wall that hadn
’t been there seconds before. Steel hands clutched at me, pinning me, just for a moment, just for as long as it took hundreds of tiny saws to breach from the silver of my suit and cut them all away.

I fell back. Debris wrapped around my ankle, my wrist and—and all my silver trembled. Somewhere, a whispering, at the very edge of my hearing, words I couldn
’t understand. And very slowly, out of my control, my blades began to retract.

“
Get out of my suit!” I pushed myself to my feet, tore the debris away. The puppet men were trying to reprogram me, the way Lad had done, using the debris to infiltrate and regain control over their weapon.

“
How strong are you again?” The puppet men chuckled. “Tell us, Miss Vladha.”

The floor fell away. I sent a grappling hook into the ceiling, pulled myself up. Rock slammed into me, sending me flying. I crashed into a wall, rolled awkwardly, stumbled to my knees. Something hitched in my side. The suit absorbed so much of the blows, but the suit was a part of me too. How long could I take this?

“How strong?”

I looked up. Three solid puppet men held Kichlan, while a mess of mist and disembodied faces writhed gleefully behind them. He hung limp and unconscious in their fake-skin hands, blood running from a fresh blow to the side of his head. The breath caught in my throat. The puppet men were dangling debris in front of his face. Not just any debris, the pale, scarred stuff that had nearly killed him. The kind that wiggled inside of you, undoing you, one pion bond at a time.

“Kichlan?” I called to him, but he didn’t move.

The puppet men all smiled, as one, and dropped the debris. It slithered inside his chest.

“No!” I lunged forward, scrambling at the debris, at Kichlan. The puppet men, laughing, shoved him into my arms. I gripped him tight, and together we fell through the gaping holes in the shattered floor.

Laughter still around us, as I crashed down, down, through corridors, rooms. Crushing ancient glass murals. So much rubble, it felt like the mountain was coming down on top of us. Down. Down.

Until, suddenly, there was no floor, just a roar rising up from below.

We smacked hard into rushing water, and were swept along. The source of the Tear River, from deep within the mountain itself. Even with my silver-strength it stunned me, and for a moment I couldn
’t quite feel anything, didn’t quite realise what had happened. Kichlan was torn from my grasp. Then all was riverbank and water flow, and the only light was the faltering glow from my suit, and Kichlan was a limp shadow, lost and carried away.

“
Kichlan!” I tried to call to him. Water in my mouth for my trouble.

I fought to right myself, but the weight of the suit dragged me down. Into darkness, deeper and darker than I thought the Tear could go. She smashed me against rocks, she forced my face into gravel and her murky, unseen bed. I tired to swim, but her pressure was intense. And while the suit saved me from her crushing hands and tearing teeth, it added so much weight.

My lungs burned. I’d promised Lad that I would look after his brother. And now…now Kichlan was gone. Had I killed them both?

The dark paths.
The Keeper sounded so distant, so faint, voice thin and wavering.
Take the dark paths
.

I ignored him, I had to find Kichlan, but eventually my suit chose for me, spreading over my head, easing the pressure in my chest.

There was no river in the Keeper’s dark world, only doors. All around me, they shuddered and splintered, Movoc-under-Keeper in thick wood and ruining steel. Once before, I had walked between them. The Keeper had held my hand and led me along the calm between each door.

“
What dark paths?” I whispered. There was no calm. Doors in the torn earth beneath me, doors in the sky above me.

“
We make our own paths.” The puppet men had followed. A stairway of entirely different doors arched up from that mass of breaking wood. Smooth metal with gleaming dials instead of handles, lights captured in glass instead of hinges, hissing steam and all of them, being steadily eaten away. A mass of rust, flecking copper like shedding skin.

They brought the Keeper with them—well, what was left of him. Half his face had peeled away, revealing only darkness like his eyes. Hands too, and up to his forearms, strip by strip, piece by piece, the Keeper was losing form.

“They’re winning,” he gasped, and his half-a-mouth flapped like cloth in the breeze.

“
Oh, Keeper,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“
You should not be,” the puppet men said. They moved as one great mass, so many faces all the same, bleeding into each other. No longer even pretending to be human. “He has been alone for so long. A cruel fate, for a guardian.”

The Keeper
’s single eye moved as he turned his head, looked around him, behind him.

“
But no longer. Now, now he has brothers.”

Countless hands reached out of the mass, and tore at the last remaining strips of the Keeper
’s skin. And then he was nothing but darkness—living, beating debris—and then, he was gone. Absorbed into the puppet men.

Leaving the veil unguarded.

With a terrible, rusty creak the handle of the door closest to me turned, unlocked, and opened.

“
No!” I lurched forward and gripped it. In the past, I had struggled simply to touch these doors. Not any more. Even without the Keeper’s help, I was debris enough.

“
We programmed the suit inside you in our image.” The puppet men closed around me. They pressed, shifting, rustling and warm. Strangely warm. “You are just like us, and just like the Keeper. We could even call you sister, if you liked.”

“
Sister?” I choked over the word.

Emptiness leaked in through the open door. It wrapped like tendrils around my arms, my shoulders, and my body. I gritted my teeth. I had watched the emptiness from that other, opposite world dissolve everything it touched: from steel to stone to suit metal and flesh. It was only a matter of time before that happened to me.

“You would not be alone, not with us.”

I clutched the door harder, even as the metal on my arms wavered into particles like sand and dissolved from my skin. I could close this door. But around me the handles of the city and the sky turned. Not even the Keeper could close them all and he had been created for the task, designed for it. I was nothing but an architect, turned against my will into a weapon, used to help facilitate the end of two worlds.

“Isn’t that what you want? A circle, a team? A lover, a brother? We can be all of these.” Laughter. “We will be everything, soon. We will be all that remains.”

My circle had long ago tattered. My collecting team was now disbanded. Lad was dead. Kichlan—

Was there anything left to fight for in this world?

I placed a hand on the silver unwinding from my belly.
“Well,” I whispered to the baby within me. “There
is
you.”

“
Join us, Tanyana.” The dark mass of puppet men closed in.

Other curse them to the deepest hells, Other chew on their fake-flesh and spit out those mould-coloured eyes, I was
not
going to become a part of the puppet men!

“
No.” I shook my head. “No, I will not give up. No matter what you do, no matter who you take from me, I will find a way to fight you!”

I turned my back on the puppet men. Before me, nothingness stretched out with its impossible arch of stars. I smelled smoke, caught a sound like the faint crashing of distant waves. Strange, because surely nothingness could not have a smell?

The Keeper had told me it was impossible. I could not cross the veil, and even if I tried, the other world—the dark world—would undo me. But the Keeper was gone, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. And nothingness was better than the puppet men.

So I stepped forward, into that world, and slammed the door closed behind me.

A face hovered above me.

It leaned close and frowned with deep worry lines. Brown eyes, unruly blond curls, stubble. I knew that face.

And it was impossible.

It spoke, lips moving slowly. I heard nothing but waves crashing somewhere in the distance.

“Lad?” I tried to whisper in reply.

But I didn
’t have a throat. And he disappeared.