Chasing the Dragon (23 page)

Lila brushed past her. "Tell me what the hell happened to make your crew all grey and flat like Benzo Barbie, and stick that thing in
your pocket. It's Mal's. I don't have time for the rest of whatever. Write
a memo."

As she reached the medical lab doors she heard Greer saying,
"Apparently when she's rattled she loses all social skills. I guess there
just isn't enough processing power. Do you find that happening to you?"

Bentley's answer was lost as the doors to Zal's room slid open and
the thick, jungle sounds of the Alfheim night poured over her. The bed
was almost lost amid the imported plants that crowded the place, and
from the ceiling a false moon shone, three quarters phased in its Harvest
cycle, an auspicious alignment with the stars in constant adjustment.

For all her speed and fury she was only able to move slowly in
approach. Her heart was in her mouth, and despite the humidity and
the heat of the room she felt cold all over. She was too afraid to look.
She wanted it to be him, so badly. She wanted it to be really him, for
him to live and to wake up and laugh, and that made her afraid.

Bentley and Greer reached the door. She heard it open, then close,
and their voices stayed outside. A nurse's voice over the intercom said
quietly, "Please don't touch him."

She didn't intend to touch him. If she did and it wasn't real she felt
that she would be crushed enough to die. Instead she crept closer until
she was at the side of the high bed, its lights winking at her as if he
were lying on top of a model city. Linen covered him from chin to foot,
covered over with a layer of some kind of herbs, then the shining silver
of a heat blanket. The rags and his exposed skin glistened in the moonlight, coated in a thick layer of oxygen-rich regenerant gel. A tube ran
out of his mouth and the gentle hiss of a pump sounded in time to the
rise and fall of his chest.

The skin around his closed eyes was still blue and all the shadows
of his face were darker than usual, as he'd been shortly before Jack had
tried to kill him, fifty years ago in the winter lock. They emphasised
his emaciated state. His cheeks were hollow, eye sockets too big, the skin of his face blistered and raw, cracked in so many places he was
barely recognisable. The tips of his ears were frostbitten off. Around
the tube where his lips were stretched his teeth were broken. Now that
the ice had melted, the few tufts of hair still left on his head were dark
with blood and water, clinging in the gel over the raw skin beneath.
She understood that part at least; he'd ripped out his own hair to make
the rope.

Fifty years. Where and when had it passed for him? Was it him?
Greer's hyperbolic warnings aside, what the hell had happened to
bring him here like this?

"I was quick as I could," she said, wondering at the same time if
that were true. What had she been waiting for? A bigger gun, a better
time, a ticket to Faeryland? "I didn't know what to do. She said-"
Yeah, some faery had told her she'd repair Zal and send him home, a
faery similar in its nature to the dress in age and weirdness. And she'd
been waiting for the call? She had, but that seemed stupid now.
Strangely at the time she'd felt like the faery was telling the truth.
"Don't leave me." She was surprised to find herself saying that, but
now that she was here and there was no need to go on the rescue run
and no bad thing to fight she was so helpless it hurt. She meant it too.
Zal was like her, and there weren't many of those around. Losing him
entirely seemed real now, possible, whereas before she could imagine
easily that she'd find him and they'd get out, he'd come back, and
they'd live together somewhere anywhere, and she'd seen his face
laughing that old laugh that didn't care how strange or difficult things
were, he could take it all in his stride and take her with him. They'd
run away once for a day. They'd run away again. She was waiting for it,
surely, all these other things were just a delay to that inevitable?
Nothing made sense if that wasn't the ending.

That's how it had felt, yes, even Sorcha dying and listening to the
Signal day and night, using Teazle to wipe away the pain and the
uncertainty because he was so strong she never need worry about him in any way. Except ... screw that thought, she couldn't afford that
thought about him right now. And all of that was bearable, anything
was, because Zal was coming back and he'd have known she was
coming for him, surely; he wouldn't have given up on her. But fifty
years. Even for an elf it was a long time. And for him how long? And
he'd never sit still of course. Of course he hadn't waited.

She reached out without thinking and only at the last moment
realised and took her hand back. "Don't go," she said, in her mind the
images of all those who were gone, and Zal was there, with them, all
wrong, shrugging like it didn't matter either, mocking even his own
end like everything was the world's dumbest joke. "I can't bear it." She
didn't want to think about what she would do if she were forced to
think about it to.

She waited, but there was no response. The traces of aetheric body
near his heart remained steady and that was all. She wondered how
ordinary people did it, people without any power or ability to do anything, when their loved ones were lying there. What did they think
about, what did they feel, where would they go? She felt that everything in her was reaching out, searching for connection, for reasons,
comfort and strength, and nothing answered, not out of spite or
deserving, but just because nothing was there.

The pump hissed. A nurse came in, checked something, went out.
Bentley came in, quiet as stealth itself, held out a cup of tea. Lila took it.

"After we were all machines," she said gently, starting her story,
and after some of us had decided we had to be free to follow the
Signal's call, we fought a war."

She leaned down and looked at the blinking lights of the bed, a
code she could read easily. "It didn't take long, just hours really. They
wanted all of us to be free. Those of us who disagreed and wanted to
continue with the human world were heretics to them. They took on
the look you saw, the black machines, as a political statement. We kept
our usual looks, of course, like you."

She straightened up. "One of the attacks before the stalemate
occurred was a viral bomb. It infected all of us. There was an infoquake. Most prime-targeted items were erased, along with a lot of collateral damage. Among those were all of the markers of our identity,
every one, across every format. By the time we countered it almost all
of our personal data was gone. Now there is no record of what we
looked like, even in our own memories, even in our DNA. They
replaced it with the android and plastic features you so dislike. They
even drilled out our ancestral records so that no reconstructions could
be made by best guess. Here and there they missed a little." She
touched the necklace she wore briefly. "But not much. There is some
doubt about my name, actually. But you have to be called something.
For a while we fooled around and made new appearances for ourselves-the viral program was easy to adopt and use, once we had it
cornered-but after the stalemate and the loss of what we knew a lot
of us let the grey state be as it was. It is who we are now; a human manifestation of the Signal, and the badge of our war. And before you pity
us let me state that none of us feel the loss. We have no memory, so we
have no loss. Just this story."

At least I could do that, Lila thought, staring at the android figure
and hoping her face didn't convey horror though she wasn't sure it
didn't. I could wipe it all out.

She felt herself relax fractionally for the first time in hours.
"Thanks," she said, lifting the tea, but meaning the story too.

"My pleasure. The demon agent's ETA is another hour and ten,"
Bentley continued in the same, relaxed voice. "I can stay here, if you
would like to sleep."

"No, thanks," Lila said. "I'm staying."

"Would you like me to stay?"

Lila shook her head. "See if you can find any sign of Mal. Maybe we
missed something at his office."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Wait, before you go. Do you know where the agency portal is?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Are you going to tell me?"

"I do not have permission."

"Okay. I guess I can spend my time hacking the information then.
And you can stop the ma'am-ing, I'm not the damn queen."

"As you wish."

The door sighed open and then shut after Bentley's silent departure.

After another minute of listening to the pump Lila abandoned any
thoughts of stealing the portal knowledge from the agency AIs. She
would rather not start an all-out battle with them, not only because
they might win it, but because it would be yet another hostile action
she couldn't afford if she wanted to rely on help later. Instead a better
plan occurred to her-make the demon agent take her back. Or better
yet, if less hopefully, search the rest of Sarasilien's libraries and chattels
for some implement that would do the job. Upon this decision's
moment, the thought she hadn't wanted to entertain at all crept in and
settled at the forefront of her mind.

Teazle was late.

That meant he wasn't coming. There could only be one reason for
that-he couldn't. The only thing that could stop him was death,
obviously, or else a thing like some unstoppable force or containment
which-and she had no idea what it might be-could not be diced,
burnt, or teleported away from. She didn't rule out rogue vengeance
for the loss of Sandra Lane, but in the list of deathwishers they were
rather low. She didn't rule out something weirder. She'd planned to
meet him tonight, now, and test the dampener system on him to see
if he was able to counter it. She'd been going to explain the dress's
trick of outwitting the frequency-not that she was sure it would be
any use to him. He had been brewed to be a powerful demon, ruler of
a considerable chunk of assets in a world of absolute greed and
unflinching violence, but the journey to Under had altered him, and in the months that they had been back the subject of exactly how had
never come up. She'd been busy avoiding that, and it never occurred to
her that he was anything but completely balanced, confident, and certain of himself. To be otherwise was not to be Teazle.

Another minute crawled past. She was certain then that, like Zal,
she had spent too long running. Even listening to the Signal was running, because what it said was pure information, but no suggestion of
how to make any decision about what it said. Listening felt like doing
something, as if eventually, listen long enough and all the answers to
what bothered her would pop out in a moment of blissful lateral
inspiration. She'd waited months, and all she got was sodden with
knowledge about things, their material forms, their movements, the
operations of the cosmos, the permutations of series ... dead things,
to be honest.

"... no life," she found herself mumbling at Zal as she traced the
dull line of his thermoblanket for the hundredth time. "And then it
infiltrates living things, but it doesn't live. It just copies, and remoulds,
and stores, and keeps on talking the talk. Everyone's details and
everyone's movements in a big list of unconnected events, one after the
other after the other. It never shuts up and it never says anything. Like
me right now. I want to talk at last, and look, everyone went away. Poor
little Lila in her raggedy dress that you gave me, you bastard, without
warning me or anything. Wake up so I can punch your lights out."

She really wanted a drink so that something other than the beckoning misery would wipe her out. "Did you know it's only been ..
She checked her clock. "Five months and two days since we met? Your
last concert was just a few weeks ago. Fifteen thousand people watched
it, two thousand in person and the rest by live broadcast. And today
almost nobody knows your songs, except old farts like Greer, my boss,
who turns out to be a fanboy. Hey, there's another thing. You never
mentioned you really were turning tricks with those songs. That was
sneaky, positively demonic."

It was a struggle. She took a deep breath, was stopped short by the
corset, and tried not to notice how awful he looked, how frail and
ruined.

"I think you could make a comeback. Demon music is popular in
the charts; lots of people are getting used to a half-fey world. That was
my fault. I told him he could have a year. I didn't know what he'd do.
I just said it. And that was that. Cure worse than the disease, probably,
I'm not sure. Seems like it was. You should have been the one to cut
the deal, not me. I should have run. You should have been there. Then
you'd have got this sword thing. Maybe not. I wish it was you. You
know what to do with this stuff."

The ventilator hissed, paused.

"None of that sounds very inviting, does it? None of it sounds like
it's worth coming back for."

Above her the fake moon reset itself to three degrees beyond Arcturus and started its brief cycle of calming light one more time.

"I still have the house. Falling down a bit now. I should probably
demolish it and start again. Sell it. The faeries kept it for me. They
don't have too much of a record on paying bills. I don't think any utilities are even connected now."

She stared into the dark beyond the bed and saw the leaves of the
elven cycads dripping water as the misters worked for a few moments.

"Some bad shit's gone down in Demonia. Teazle's killed everyone
and taken their stuff. I'd blame myself but ..." She stopped. "With
you gone if he dies then I'll be number one target in several worlds. So
you know, if you come back then it'll be you in the hot spot; might
want to think about that before you stop playing possum. Oh yeah,
and we've been sleeping together. Quite a lot. Didn't really mean to.
It just kind of happened. You know."