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open the door. The cold night air was welcome as it rushed inside. I felt too hot beneath my uniform, prickly and uncomfortable.
    Valya stood at the top of her unsafe iron stairs, wrapped in a padded jacket and shawl, as though the quick trip up one level required wrapping up. Yicor stood behind her and grinned widely at me as I gaped at them both.
    “Time to talk,” Valya said, and pushed her way inside. It was her room, after all.
    Yicor took my hand, pressed it between fur gloves. “If you would be so kind,” he said, an apology and a plea in his eyes.
    I let him pass. As I closed the door Valya was peering up at Kichlan – who looked just as shocked as I felt – and nodding. “You are here too, good.”
    Kichlan caught sight of Yicor, and his surprise slid into disapproval. “What’s going on?” He had never liked the old shop owner who had helped me find Valya when I had nowhere else to go.
    Possibly because, even though he could see debris, the man was not a collector. Neither was Valya. They had escaped the puppet men and the violence of being suited, when the rest of us had not. Kichlan said collecting was our duty, and doing otherwise was irresponsible. Somehow, I didn’t believe that was what truly bothered him about the man. Rather, I think he wished Lad could have escaped too.
    “Time for talk,” Valya said. She grabbed Kichlan and dragged him back to the chair. “Then time for action. Can’t wait any longer.”
    I fixed Yicor with a stern expression. “This is about the signs, isn’t it?”
    He gave a sheepish, guilty look. “Ah, I should have known you’d work it out.”
    “Signs?” Kichlan allowed himself to be seated – though I couldn’t see what choice he had – and scowled at us over his shoulder.
    “You might know them as being nearly crushed in a collapsing sewer,” I explained, as Yicor and I obeyed Valya’s imperious gestures, and joined Kichlan at the suddenly crowded table. “And what the Keeper’s door did to my suit.”
    “The Keeper. Again.”
    “Watch your tone,” Vlaya snapped. “Be thankful for him. Without him, we would all be lost.”
    Would we, I wondered? Could the Keeper really help us now?
    “The Unbound have always been guided by the Keeper,” Yicor said.
    In the old tongue, in a time of legends and stories and myths, that was what we would be. Unbound by pions. Unbound by society. Unbound and outcast. Now, we were debris collectors. I was still struggling to work out if that was an improvement.
    “Our predecessors saw the world changing,” he continued. “When Novski and his critical circles harnessed the true power of pions and upset the balance, they knew it would be trouble. Since before history our kind has worked with the Keeper to hold the doors closed. And they knew, the more pions are manipulated, the more debris is created. More doors. But the veche would not listen to our pleas.”
    “Turned us into refuse collectors instead,” Valya said with frightening venom.
    “They broke us up, they mutilated us.” Yicor pointed to the suit bright on my wrist. I fought an urge to cover it with my sleeve. “Silenced us. But some fled, took what relics they could, and hid. Two hundred years we have hidden. So much was lost. Elders discovered, taken away. Halves experimented on, their voices silenced.”
    From the corner of my eye, I saw Kichlan shiver.
    “We few do what we can. Keep the texts, and look for those who can listen.”
    “Such as you,” Valya said.
    “We have tried to keep some small memory safe, some small part of a lost history. But with each year there are fewer. With each year, the veche men grow stronger. And now it is too late. If we do not stop them, the doors will be open.”
    “Fear for everything,” I whispered. And shifted my gaze to Kichlan. “Which leads us back to the same problem.”
    He nodded, grim. “It does.”
    “What can we do against the veche men?”
    Valya smacked the table. “We must do