Suited Read Online Free

an unspoken offer of support. I stretched to brush cobwebs from the mess of his blonde hair.
    Together, we stared at the rubble that had once been a sewer. Water was starting to pool around the earth and jagged stone. Sooner or later the sewer would flood, and the veche would be forced to employ architects to rebuild it. Would they wonder what had caused it? Would the wrongness of it all – the missing material, the heat-warped stone, and tangled, ruined pion systems – warn them that something terrible was happening in Movoc-under-Keeper, something they needed to stop?
    “The Keeper brought us down here to see this.” My words sent the heavy, pungent steam coming off the sewerage tumbling away from my mouth. “The door was opening, and he didn’t shut it, not straight away. So we could see this.”
    Kichlan spat into the fetid water. “I knew it.” He scowled, face flushed with anger beneath smears of muck and what was left of a spider that had foolishly tried to crawl on his cheek. “Your Keeper is dangerous.”
    I didn’t answer. What, really, could I say?
    “Spitting like that is a delightful habit,” Uzdal, hand still on his brother’s back, made a disgusted face.
    “It’s a sewer,” Kichlan growled. “I’m hardly going to get any dirtier, am I?”
    “Can we leave now?” Lad asked. “He’s gone.” He lifted a leg. “And it’s wet and stinks.”
    “Best thing I’ve heard all day.” Mizra needed no further encouragement to hurry back the way we had come.
    I was too weak to push myself through the flow so quickly. Almost as large as his younger brother, Kichlan lent me his strength, one hand on my shoulder, one on an elbow, keeping me balanced and moving.
    “There are so many doors,” I whispered to him. “And he said this was the beginning. If they all open...” I didn’t need to say it.
    “Then we need to do something about it.” He started to spit again, cast me a guilty look and stopped. “But that involves helping that Keeper of yours. Following him, listening to him. Trying to make sense of what he says.”
    And that was the problem.
    When we emerged – wet, filthy, and fatigued – and returned to our sublevel rooms, the veche was waiting. They stood under the decrepit awnings on Darkwater, creating a rough semicircle around the locked door. Two technicians, one of whom I knew. Two collectors like us, though I recognised neither of them. And two puppet men, pale, expressionless, looking damned near inhuman to me.
    Lad flinched at the sight of them and huddled against his brother. I forced myself to keep a steady pace, to show no apprehension, and meet Devich’s eyes squarely. I was proud of that. But I did not look at the puppet men, their wooden faces and emotionless, mouldy-green eyes; or the seams I had seen running along their skin, between mouth and chin, jaw and neck, along the hairline, like they were wearing masks, sewn on.
    “What do you want?” I didn’t even pretend politeness. Not for Devich.
    One of the new collectors cast me a surprised glance. He was a broad-chested man, wrapped in a thick leather coat and a head-hugging cap that could not hide an ugly-looking scar running diagonally across his forehead, nose and cheek.
    Fair enough, I supposed. The technicians that fitted our suits were employed by the veche and had considerable influence over our lives. They could inspect us on a whim, and even send us back to the horror of the suiting table like machines to be serviced. It would therefore be prudent to be polite to the men who could, if they desired, clamp us down and inject us with the Other only knew what.
    And that didn’t even take the puppet men into account. They reported directly to the national veche, to the most powerful members of the most powerful families in all of Varsnia. Unless you knew better, you’d think they might deserve some kind of respect.
    We, of course, knew better.
    Puppet men was not, strangely enough, their official title. With