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something.”
    “I know.” I rubbed at my eyes and only then realised how tired I was.
    “The veche men know about the Keeper,” Kichlan said, and all attention turned to him. “He told you, didn’t he–” he glanced at me, and I nodded “–and Tanyana saw it with her own eyes, heard it with her own ears. They know, they hear him, they speak to him, but they don’t believe him. Or they don’t care.”
    But Yicor and Valya didn’t seem to hear. Instead, they both stared at me, almost reverential.
    “You have seen the Keeper?” Valya whispered.
    “You have spoken with him?” Yicor murmured.
    I nodded, wary.
    They shared a glance. “Then it was good, that we found you.”
    Kichlan and I shared a glance. Didn’t they understand? What exactly, did they think we could do?
    “We will help you,” Valya said. “We are already working against them, moving in shadow, infiltrating. Readying to attack. You will join us.” She scratched yellow nails across the tabletop to clutch at my hand. Kichlan stared in horror at her wrinkled, bony talons and drew back. “And this time, with you here, this time we will win.”

2.
     
    I leaned against a newly repaired brick wall and watched a flock of Strikers glide by. Dressed in white leather, hooded, and surrounded by a ring of crimson-clad Shielders they were a splash of colour against Movoc’s grey streets. I could only imagine what they would have looked like if I could still see pions. Solid colour, fierce lights; proud and deadly.
    While this area of the city had not suffered as much as others in the debris outbreak two moons ago, it still bore scars. The wall I was leaning against was one. The puppet men had released a powerful fiend created by twisting and torturing a large amount of debris. This creature had critically interfered with the pion systems throughout the city, blocking sewerage ducts, shorting out heating and light streams, and ultimately undoing the foundations of the city themselves. The resulting damage was terrible, and still being repaired.
    Several buildings on this street had collapsed when their pion systems unwound. There was still a gaping hole in the ground two blocks away, where a thread of heating pions had torn, backed up and eventually exploded in waves of heat and pressure. I’d eavesdropped on the few people who walked passed me, and learned that light had still not been restored to two large, bland apartment complexes across the road. No matter how many critical circles the veche sent to restore the buildings’ systems new bindings refused to take. The pions were shallow and few.
    “Unusual,” Kichlan murmured, as he and Lad arrived. Lad watched the military men pass with wide eyes. Kichlan and I tried to be less obvious about it.
    I straightened, and dusted sand and tiny stones from the brickwork off my shoulders. The veche needed better architects than whoever had constructed this shoddy piece of work. “Maybe there is more trouble on the border with the Hon Ji?”
    “Isn’t there always?” Kichlan gave a tight little shrug. “Still, Strikers. Seems like an overreaction.”
    Varsnia’s relationship with her largest neighbour had always been fraught. Since Novski’s critical circle revolution, few nations could compete with our pion-binding strength. But as the centuries passed, the others were catching up, and the stronger they grew, the braver they became. Hon Ji had established a coalition to lead the push against us. I’d heard of skirmishes in the frontier colonies – arguments over mining land, mostly – spies and intrigue I’d never fully understood, even the odd attempt to assassinate a low-ranking, new-family member of a colonial veche.
    But this had been going on for years. It did not justify Strikers. I ran a light finger over the solid silver on my wrist. Neither did it justify the weapon the puppet men had created from me. After all, wasn’t that what I was? A weapon that no other nation had, a way to wrest