The yurt interior had been tidied. Of the ocean of empties there was no sign, and the icebox had its lid back in place; the
faeries had been in and cleaned up. Zal was sitting on the rug where she had left him, his fingers moving on the pattern in
a piano action. He was wearing his headphones and his eyes were closed.
Lila sat down beside him, without disturbing him. The headphones tracked his hands. She guessed from the movements that he
was playing a replica of Mozart’s piano – a favourite of his recently – though he hated using the virtual instruments as there
was no feedback to his hands. After a moment he opened one eye and slid the ’phones off one ear.
‘Trouble?’
‘Yes, of course, what else?’ she said. ‘Xaviendra’s father’s back. With a robot sidekick. And a conspiracy theory. At least,
I think that’s what it was.’
He nodded, as if this happened every day. ‘Oh yeah? What do they want?’
‘I get the impression they want me to help them against something big and scary. They have a stick, which is that they’re
already in my offices pursuing me like a pair of mad aunts. And they have a carrot, which is maybe finding out that Sarasilien’s
sticky fingers were in all our pies. And he’s maybe here to create one big pie. For some reason.’
‘Carrot pie?’ Zal wrinkled his nose, rabbitish. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Put like that her analysis sounded crazy. She smiled. ‘I’m glad I learned to analyse so clearly from you, oh master. Anyway.
Zal, do you know where Friday is?’
Now he took the headphones off entirely and looked at her with both eyes.
Friday was a golem. Zal had created him, accidentally, when he got stranded in Zoomenon, the dimension of the elements. Friday,
rudimentary as he was, had saved Zal from disintegration by hauling him through Voidspace to the Fleet. But the reason Lila
mentioned him now, the only reason he was important, was because his clay was embedded with the bones of the long dead. They
had been murdered in the experiments when the Shadowkin had been created. They were the ones who didn’t survive to become
the elves’ weapon against the terror Xavi named as ‘the sleeper within’. Besides the bones Friday
held the remnants of their spirits and voices. Ignorant of this at first Zal had brought him to Otopia and used him as a
hatstand and general prop. Lila hadn’t seen him since Zal’s last concert when the golem had stood on the stage as part of
the set. Since Friday couldn’t be moved against his will she’d assumed it was okay.
The only other thing Lila remembered about Friday was that the faeries had wanted to lose him. They said he was a chalice,
a grail. They had been very interested in that. She would have asked Malachi now but he wasn’t there.
Zal’s dark aura bloomed suddenly and made the room seem brilliant. It drew shadows towards him, as if they were comforters.
Lila had to work for a moment not to start and recoil. This was new to her, new to him; she even saw his own surprise and
they shared a look in which each silently acknowledged their discomfort. They were strangers in their own skins these days.
Zal reached out and took her hand. She watched her fingers darken, her wrist submerge into the blue-black tinge halfway to
the elbow. She couldn’t feel it, only the gentle pressure of his fingers and thumb as he stroked her knuckles. ‘I left him
behind.’ She knew that he meant he had left Friday in the past, on the day they’d gone to Faeryland and thought they’d be
back in under a week. Fifty years ago.
‘Yeah, but where?’ She slid close to him and they leaned on each other. She put her head on his shoulder and wriggled until
she could rest half across him, ear flat to the top of his chest. He stroked her hair and she listened to the strange sigh
of his heart.
‘At the Folly,’ he said. ‘In the basement.’
She shuddered slightly with the mention of the old house. ‘I don’t get it. You didn’t even live there then.’
‘The landlord agreed to store a lot of my stuff. When I was touring I’d leave it in the basement or in one of the lockups.
The energy sink meant any magical things were pretty much secure. I sent Friday there. It’s an earth energy well. He’d be
right at home.’
There was a moment’s silence as she noticed his defensiveness but didn’t pursue it, and he was relieved. ‘He’s evidence in
a genocide,’ she said.
‘Yes, one which has never gone to trial,’ Zal said. ‘Nor will I should think. Is that why you want him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Apart from Xavi, Friday’s all there is left. But it occurs to me that there might be a lot more to him than
that. I want to talk to the people inside him.’ She meant the spirits of the long-dead
elves who had shared Xaviendra’s fate as the subjects of unsuccessful experiments; theirs much less successful than hers.
‘Most of them have gone, passed over,’ Zal said but he was uncertain.
‘I want to find out. Unless you know of living elves who are contemporaries of Sarasilien’s? The thing is, I used to be convinced
that Sarasilien was the one who had left their bones in Zoomenon as evidence; he was the good guy in the war I imagined. But
here’s Xavi, and it looks like he wasn’t much good at all. Do you think he could have had a hand in what happened to you?’
‘No,’ Zal said. ‘I’m not sure he had much of a hand in what happened to you either.’ He held up a hand as she started to interrupt.
‘Not that he couldn’t have been involved. Just that it violates every principle of the world that I hold to for anyone to
succeed in having so much control.’
Lila thought it over. ‘That’s just
your
theory though.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And if you prove otherwise I’ll be very upset.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘Are you going to prove otherwise?’
‘For my own satisfaction I’ll prove something,’ she said.
Zal looked at the sand clock on Malachi’s vast and expensive banker’s desk. ‘Four a.m., still early. Let’s go dancing.’
Lila rubbed her cheek against his own. ‘Let’s dance right here.’
‘Oh well,’ he said, pretending to be disappointed. ‘I suppose so, if we must.’
Later, as they lay naked under the strew of their clothes she said, ‘Did you have a beer vision?’
‘Not really,’ he said.
He didn’t mention the odd sensation he had experienced while she was gone. He felt that he’d nodded off as he was playing
the piano, just for an instant, and as he’d faded out there was something else, most definitely not asleep, which was looking
out at the room through his eyes. It had felt very real, but he had known it was the beer. Like it said on the Dark bottles:
any hallucinations, visionary experiences or out-of-body journeys resulting from consumption of our ale will be accompanied
by our illusory guarantee – it ain’t real, so don’t fix it!
Now that he thought about it, that was less comforting than it seemed.
Lila fell asleep for a moment, her head back on his chest, then she
gave a small start. ‘Teazle. What happens now? He’s alone. They’ll kill him.’
Zal put his arms around her. ‘Doubt it.’
‘It felt better the other way, when we were married.’ She went back to sleep. He could feel the drop of her energy into stillness
like a fall. It almost pulled him with it but he didn’t want to sleep. He stayed awake until well after dawn thinking about
the dragons he’d met.
First there was the water dragon who had eaten Arie, and now spat her up again without apparently digesting any of her more
repulsive aspects. When he was her prisoner it had talked to him, after a fashion, but he’d thought it only remarked on his
strange dual nature. Now he wondered if it had only been waiting for her.
The other one was the green dragon that had been a prisoner of the three sisters and their Mirror. He knew next to nothing
about that one either even though he’d spent half a century living with its aspect – a dwarf who spent all his time looking
after the littlest sister, doing her cooking and cleaning while Zal had ferried her yarns from one end of the world to the
other. Zal had no idea at the time that Mr V, who smoked a pipe and snored in an armchair for most of every day, was a dragon.
If it hadn’t been for a competitive spirit between the three sisters that had allowed him to free Mr V from his prison he
would never have known. He had no idea why they had kept Mr V in the Mirror at the endbeginning of the world, but probably
there was a good reason. He’d never even found out what V stood for, though he’d tried to guess. A true name was as good as
a soul-bond for the ancient creatures, so maybe it was just as well he couldn’t divine it. Even so, he wished he knew it now.
Zal tried composing songs in his head. Music used to come to him so easily, but where it had been inside him there was now
a soft, woolly deadness like the kind of snowfall that mutes every sound. He could only remember melodies he had recently
learned, and other people’s songs that he had heard. The notes didn’t run together for him. He remembered that they used to,
but not what the experience felt like. There had been music in his head, and now there wasn’t.
He was sad, but not as sad as he might have been because of that. Worse than the dead music was a sudden lack of purpose.
Even as a plaything of the faeries he had had the purpose of survival, the focus on an end to his imprisonment. Before that
had been music. Before that his political passions, a zest for living, the world itself calling with its million wonders.
Now he groped around for any of them, fumbling across the strangely flat zones of his inner world.
Traces here and there, like the crumbs left over from a feast, were all he found. Their taste was almost undetectable and
instantly gone. Jack the giantkiller had purged him of almost everything he had ever done, and the Three Sisters had sifted
what was left and taken some of that. He remembered the middle sister saying it was for his own good. He wished he could remember
what she’d taken, but he had no idea at all. He had been robbed, but what of?
Fifty years,
she said,
you’ll never manage it if you remember everything.
But that hadn’t prompted her to restore it when his time was up.
Only Lila was sharp and clear. He felt a continuity with her. From the first second he laid eyes on her he hadn’t forgotten
that. It had been the strangest and most unexpected thing he had ever encountered in his long life; a young human woman, barely
a fifth his age, mostly made of metal, powered by a nuclear reactor, staring at him with disapproval from the top of her regulation
Agency suit and him
at the height of his fame, a demigod of the media, adored by millions and hated by a few hundred key players within interglobal
politics. He elf, she robot, love at first sight.
Hardly plain sailing, however. Lila didn’t take well to love. She preferred antagonism. Zal hadn’t minded. Antagonism meant
she cared and he could live with that. It also made his demon side happy. He knew these things, and he remembered the red
splash in her hair and her strange, cyberpunk mirror eyes, which he always thought of as blue, in spite of the fact he could
only see his own eyes reflected in them; brown and earthen and full of self-mockery.
Now Lila Black snored softly against him, the strange alloy of her body barely heavier than an ordinary human being, but as
far from that as you could possibly be and still qualify for the term. Then he felt a strange sensation on his chest and realised
his skin was wet, and that she was crying. The tears were silent and her breathing hadn’t changed, so she was trying to hide
it.
‘What is it?’ he said.
Her voice was very small but controlled when she answered. ‘I’m not sure, I feel . . . like I want someone to look after me.
Isn’t that stupid? I think about going home, and I don’t want to. But I do want to. I long to go. I can’t go.’
He knew then that she was speaking of her sister. Max had died in Lila’s absence, but returned and lived again in their family
home. She was a Returner. Maybe the first. Certainly not the last. ‘You don’t have to see her.’
Lila took a deep breath, ‘She wants to see me. She keeps calling to ask when I’m coming over. She wants to make me chicken
pot pie. She says she’s still got some of Mom and Dad’s old stuff and I should check to see if I want anything.’
By the end of the final sentence her tone had started to rise and fade. She snatched another breath through her teeth and
forced herself into control.
‘In my lifetime
they
died months ago.
She
died weeks ago. I haven’t stopped once to think. There hasn’t been time. There hasn’t been a funeral, not for me. And now
we’re at chicken pot pie and Mom’s poker books and Dad’s crystal collection and what to do about the leaking roof. I’m not
there yet. I don’t think I’m even out of the front door on the day I last left home, ’cause that never ended like it was supposed
to. I’m way behind. Or like I sidestepped into another world and I don’t want to go back to the old one. Can’t. Don’t want
to.
’Cause it feels like if I don’t go then all that still hasn’t happened yet. And I wish it was her. I’d love to see her. I
want to see her so badly. But it isn’t her, Zal, is it? How could it be? And if it isn’t her then what do I do? Do I kill
her? Should I? What is she?’ She took another breath. ‘I just don’t think I can face it.’
Zal stroked her shoulder and then let his hand press down firmly. He didn’t say anything because there wasn’t any need. She
was talking to herself, he was only the catalyst.
She snuggled closer to him, wrapping her legs around his. ‘They haven’t decided if killing a Returner is a crime or not, you
know. There are squads of faith killers out to scrub the world clean of the undead, vigilantes hunting the half fey and hackers
trying to grab control of cyborgs. My inbox is bursting with them. Not to mention the Hunter’s children still out there who
are as close to were-creatures as I’ve ever heard of. I get letters from people complaining that their fortune tellers are
holding out on them, and I get complaints inside the Agency from people wanting to know if we should make any more cyborgs
or not, because there’re always candidates coming up, interesting candidates, ones who are half human or not human at all.
And I know that if I say no, don’t make any more of us, you idiots, then that’s as good as saying let them die instead.’
Zal stared at the yurt roof. He could see very well in the near darkness, almost better than in the light. It reminded him
of being in his father’s hut, long ago. His father could move easily in pitch blackness, just by sensing the energy patterns
of objects. He’d never mastered that himself, and had had the bruises to prove it. He just hadn’t been shadow enough.
Lila wiped her face on his chest and absently rubbed his skin dry with the sleeve of his shirt where she found it beside them.
‘I don’t know what to do with this job. And I don’t know what I’d do without it either.’
‘We should get another place,’ he said. ‘Somewhere that you like.’ He felt that she was slightly taken aback.
‘What, you mean
not
sleep at the office?’
He heard the smile in her voice. ‘Yes. It probably won’t vanish if you’re not here all the time.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
He nodded, honest-faced. ‘Temple Greer goes home at weekends.’
She snorted. ‘That’s just a story to frighten children.’
Zal smiled. ‘We could take a drive up the coast and maybe pick up Friday and a condo on the way.’
She hesitated. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said and then added with difficulty, ‘anything that feels like roots makes me frightened.’
The last words were hesitant and they sounded like it was a thought she’d carried for a long time, but only just realised.
‘Then we can just rent.’
‘Can’t afford it,’ she said, but without much resistance.
‘I can. I was a rock god once, and even dead rock gods make money. Besides, aren’t you owed fifty years’ back pay? That must
come to a lot.’
She opened and closed her mouth once without speaking before she said, ‘That never occurred to me. Can we, really?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anywhere you like.’
She got up with a sudden burst of energy. ‘Let’s go right now!’
‘You have to get dressed first,’ he said, grabbing for his clothes.
‘I am dressed,’ she said with only the faintest hint of discomfort and he saw she was right.
Her leather gauntlets and boots stood out sharply against her tanned skin and where there had been nothing a second before
a silk bias-cut lilac minidress swirled its luxurious skirts around her thighs.
The faery, he realised. Lila had no clothes now, not like he did. She could be human or machine, leather or flesh and all
she wore was the faery, who had made everything else redundant. It gave him a shiver as he pulled his shirt over his head
and flicked the long tails of his hair free of the collar, all the while watching the dress’s apparently ordinary movement.
Vague, half-realised runes wove themselves through the fey cloth like waves moving idly on an ocean, speaking of realities
unseen. They didn’t make sense to him, but he had never studied the written forms of energy very hard, only music, and much
of what they were saying was lost on him.
Glancing at Lila’s face he was sure she wasn’t even aware of the dress’s conversation with itself. He wondered if she was
so used to wearing it she’d forgotten it was a living fey. Maybe she was resigned to it. Was it a battle she had lost? He
felt unable to ask outright. Something in the self-conscious way she wore it made him feel she wouldn’t have told him the
truth.
They left Malachi’s room, closing the doorflap behind them. As dawn started to creep slowly along the line of the ocean it
found them on the coast highway, their knees skimming the tarmac as Lila’s bike
bent over into the curves of the hills. She took them out of the city archipelagos, across the small breakwaters and lagoons,
beside the endless quarrelling streams that formed the shining net of the Bay proper and held its thousands of islets together
like a shoal of fish. Slowly they climbed away from the water. The land grew firmer and taller as they topped the cliffs that
looked out over the Pacific Reach towards the invisible volcanic island chain of the Jewelfires. If the wind was right a streak
of smoke marked their evolution, but this dawn was misty and they could only see a few tens of metres beyond the land.
On the rocks below them the tide was high and filled with the soft, luminous green of seagleam – the remnants of moth dust
that had fallen into water and been taken up by algae. It painted the cliffs with a weak, spectral light of its own. Into
Zal’s head ran news reports of talking fish, of mermaids, of leviathan spotted from deep ocean trawlers, scaring crews into
early retirements.
They were alone on the road. Lila pulled on the brakes and slid them towards the edge of the cliff, stopping a half a metre
from disaster. Loose chippings scattered into the air, fell and fell. Dust settled around them. Zal put his foot down beside
hers.
‘Do you believe in that dragon stuff?’ Lila said, staring out into the water and the cloud above it. From this viewpoint the
effect of the dust in the sea was clearly visible. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘look at all that dust. Touching everything, changing
everything, making the world magical. See it and believe it. I don’t know why I find the dragon stuff so hard to believe.
It doesn’t make sense. Look at you, at me. You’d think I could believe anything now. But I don’t.’
‘You’re always looking for a reason,’ Zal said. He put his hand out gently onto her back, where the thin straps of the dress
exposed the black leather of her, and caressed her. He felt muscle under his fingers and worked at the tension there. ‘You
think there’s another order behind everything you find, and that if you see what it is then you’ll escape.’
‘If there is I don’t even care,’ she said, looking out to sea. ‘I think that’s awful. But I don’t care.’
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s why we’re having this conversation,’ Zal said easily. He leaned forward and kissed her neck where the
wind had blown her hair away from it. ‘There’s no getting out of it, Lila. Not dead, and not alive. Doesn’t matter who pulls
the strings. Doesn’t matter.’
She kicked down the bike’s stand, levered it up easily, and settled it. Then she spun around on the saddle and kicked her
leg up high over his head until she was sitting facing him. She rested her legs over his thighs and put her hands on his face
gently. They were cold but gentle.
‘I hunted down all the rogues,’ she said. ‘Every last one. Lane knows it. She’s not the only one who had a clone, but there
aren’t many and those that there are have gone silent.’ Her lips were white, they were so bitten together as she paused.
He waited, knowing there was more and put his hand up to brush the hard line out of her mouth with his thumb. Her steady lilac
gaze, that faked human look, faded away to the hard mirror-shine of her true machine eyes in which he saw himself, the road,
the cliffs and the sky all bent and curved in perfect detail.
‘I thought they would know something I didn’t,’ she said. Her leather hands flexed very slightly and he felt how easily she
could have broken his neck. Her fingertips pressed his skull with precision and he knew that this is how she’d hacked their
systems, straight through the head.
Zal kissed her nose.
Lila let her hands drop down into her lap. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘They didn’t know anything.’ She looked down. ‘It’s strange
to have a battle fought in less than a second. Almost like nothing happened.’
Zal kissed her forehead.
‘I didn’t kill them,’ she said quietly. ‘But I might as well have. They couldn’t understand how I beat them. It was almost
funny.’ She gave a hollow laugh that died as soon as it came out of her mouth. ‘The elementals. Reconfigured them. Just a
few electrons is all it takes, in the right place at the right moment. They’re the only reason Lane couldn’t rip everything
she wanted out of me in the first place. I realised that.’
She paused and took a deep breath. It shuddered and he knew she was trying not to cry. When she looked up at him her face
was set and angry with a refusal of pain. ‘Zal, do you think that if Max is back, or, if she’s gone and something else lives
in her place, outside her time, will they all be coming?’
He knew who she was talking about. Dar, who had healed her from her body’s original rejection of the machine technology, and
fused her with the metal elementals in the first place. She had killed him in cold blood, to save Zal’s life. ‘I don’t know.’
Tears filled her eyes. They lensed the mirrors and the world reflected there shimmered, wavered, fell apart. ‘I have to tell
him I’m sorry.’