‘True. But I’m still not going there and no cheap shot about my courage is going to make me. Scientifically speaking you’re
excellent. I don’t doubt that. But you’re not on my side and killing you can’t have made you any more likely to move there,
so unless you have a reason I don’t know about to make you attach yourself to him and me, then we’re done.’
The android figure made a very human micromovement of frustration, weight jerking back and forth slightly. ‘And what exactly
is your side, Black?’
‘Lila Black is my side,’ Lila said, and for once her conviction was faultless. ‘What’s yours?’
‘I go where the interest is,’ Lane said. ‘Where things aren’t certain and don’t add up.’
‘And this elf story doesn’t add up.’
‘The energy transferences between aether and matter, between the non-baryonic and baryonic, as we understand them, do not
accommodate the claims made concerning what is passing in Alfheim,’ Lane replied crisply. ‘Nonetheless, what is occurring
is causing the structure of our information to undergo an unforeseen entropy acceleration, which, if it continues, shall begin
to compromise the organisation of our fundamental materials. If you were attuned to the machine instead of shutting it out
all the time, you would already know this.’
Lila considered it. ‘None of the other cyborgs seem bothered. Just you.’
‘They do not have my levels of synchronisation,’ Lane said pointedly but Sarasilien stepped forward at the same time, holding
his hand out to the side a little so that it came in front of her, warning her off and protecting her at the same time.
Lila’s heart seethed with jealousy.
‘Lila, she is telling the truth, but what she is saying is only a machine interpretation of what I am trying to say also,
from a
different perspective. The aether backlash is affecting all of the realities at the most fundamental level, that of energy.
However, there has been a result in Alfheim that was not foreseen in any way and this is what I require your help with. And
Zal’s.’
Lila finally managed to swallow the worst of her resentment. Maybe it was the pleading attitude he had, the way he looked
like a picture-book Jesus with both his palms held towards her, though he was looking down at her face and not up to empty
blue heaven. Maybe. ‘Go on.’
‘I cannot risk an entry into Alfheim myself,’ he said slowly. ‘In case what has happened there affects me too. However, after
some reconnaissance taken by Sandra here I believe that Zal may be immune.’
‘May be. Hmm. Why can’t she do this work you have to have done there?’
‘I’m not an elf,’ Lane said. ‘I can’t perceive their psychic reality. And neither can you.’
‘And what did you find?’ She directed her gaze at Lane.
‘Nobody,’ Lane said. ‘And nothing.’ She meant the entire population.
‘Where are they?’
‘We think they have gone into the forest,’ Sarasilien said.
Alfheim was made of forest. Aside from its few civil centres, which barely registered on the scale of cities, they were a
scattered lot. Into the forest meant only that the cities must have been abandoned. But his tone now was pressing and she
got the feeling he was willing her to go along with him, not to ask Lane for more, though the reason why he wanted this was
something she couldn’t even guess at. That the two of them were slightly divided was enough to satisfy Lila for now.
‘And there are no other elves you can ask?’ she said, but she knew the answer. No elf was like Zal. There was no other elf
to ask. ‘Teazle could go.’ If she knew where he was. If he came back. If. Thinking of him made a pang of concern knot her
brows.
‘I think, given the pressing nature of this matter, that it would be a good idea if you all went,’ Sarasilien said.
She decided to omit telling him about the divorce. ‘And you’ll babysit the undead while we’re gone? Safe and sound in the
bunker? Because I sense more than a hand of yours in all this.’
Apparently her mercilessness wasn’t satisfied yet. She was still
interested in all the things he so delicately didn’t want to say. She gave in to the delicious desire to nail him.
‘You were in at the start, weren’t you? You were one of those who made the mess. And now you have to clean up, but you don’t
want to get dirty.’ She looked him in the eye and then she got up in one, clean, fluid rise that wasn’t entirely human in
either its speed or its elegance so that they were face to face. ‘Level with me. All those machine parts magically appearing
here, at the right time, in the right place, pushed on people with so many good reasons – that was your hand, right?’
She felt Lane’s entire electrical signature change as she said this and saw the pupils of his fox-brown eyes dilate fractionally,
darkness increasing inside their perfect rings.
Grim satisfaction ran through her even as the confirmation of betrayal bit deep.
‘What else have you made over the years? What for? Come on, spit it out, don’t be shy.’ She made an expansive gesture with
her hands and smiled to show her teeth, the smile as hard as iron. Inside its metal prison a little girl screamed and beat
her fists against the walls. But the time for crying was over and that, more than anything, fuelled her rage and hardened
it into ice. ‘We’re all friends here.’
And we all know what happens to my friends, don’t we?
In her mind’s eye she saw Dar before her, friend and lover. She saw the resignation and sadness, the shock and disbelief
in his face as she pushed the dagger into his heart. In Sarasilien’s arms she’d cried her misery, thinking he was safe and
solid when all along it was his hand on her strings.
And she was still here, wanting so much to hear how she was wrong, that it was a mistake, a comedy of errors that just looked
bad, that it all had explanations that didn’t add up the way it seemed. She could see the window for this explanation as if
it were a progress bar in front of her, the rising colour slowly eating up the time, counting down to the moment when there
couldn’t be any more room for credulity. She willed him to say the magic words, the perfect line that would undo all that
disappointment and set her free. She looked at the soft brown colour of his hair that had meant comfort.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I did it. I made you to go where I couldn’t go.’
Beside her she was vaguely aware of Lane stiffening for a microsecond. Lila wondered if it would change things between them
that the cyborg hadn’t known this extra truth behind her own genesis in the bowels of this miserable building, but at the
same time as she thought this she dismissed it.
She felt her shoulder push him aside as she walked between them and out of the room. The laboratory was dark, silent. She
closed the door behind herself firmly and stood for a moment with it at her back.
In the corridor a line of hopefuls was waiting to see her, and a cleaner was there, quietly and wearily pushing a vacuum cleaner
around their stepping feet, head bent low, looking for dust. Lila walked past them, avoided the vacuum, ignored their voices,
went up along the familiar route to the garden and bent down to fling open the door of the yurt there, ducking straight under.
Malachi was there, sitting in his chair, feet on his desk, asleep. The place was a mess, like they’d left it that morning.
Lila slapped his foot with her hand. ‘Did you know?’
‘What?’ he shook his head slightly, groggy. He peered at her in the room’s natural twilight, slowly putting his feet down
as he leaned forward to turn on the lamp. He rubbed his face, looking around him for the little moondial that told him the
time wherever he wanted to be. ‘Know what?’
‘Did you know who made me?’
The tone of her voice made him stop and be still. His orange-red eyes blinked and his wings briefly manifested around him
in shimmering clouds of anthracite dust. His skin darkened to the true black of his faery form and around her the dress became
lissom and floaty, rising in waves of bloodstained white fabric. The strips coiled slowly, taking on the movement of snakes.
‘I was sent—’ he began.
‘I said – did you know?’
His face was a mass of changing emotional reactions but she held his gaze as he struggled, although that delay in itself was
almost good enough for an answer.
‘Yes, but . . .’
Lila took a step back, straightening up, and flicked out the fingers of her right hand, changing them into blades. His slit
pupils widened and he jerked back. The chair bumped the yurt’s back wall.
Lila stuck her fingers into Tatterdemalion’s high collar cut straight through from top to bottom. Her edges were so sharp
they made only a whispering sound as the cloth parted. She didn’t know if the dress was surprised or not, but it wasn’t important.
She tore it off her shoulders and legs and bundled it up into a ball before flinging it at
him. It was heavy and it sent him toppling backwards off his seat although she didn’t stay long enough to see what happened
next.
‘Lila!’ he shouted after her, sounding hurt and angry.
She ignited the jets in her boots.
The rented house on the hill was glowing from all of its windows. Lila could see it from miles away after she turned to follow
the line of the upstate highway – a few bright spots in a huge wall of dusk. She landed short, in the woods, and took off
her armour and boots the old fashioned way, leaving herself naked except for a vest and underwear. The air was cold and damp
against her skin. It felt refreshing and she stood and bathed in it for a minute or two until the last of the heat had ebbed
from her. She lifted her face to the sky, listening to the woodland sounds, the cicadas, the breeze. She would have given
a lot to be able to sit there and do nothing but enjoy the night, but there wasn’t time for that.
Instead she sat down on a rock and picked up the shoulderguards of her bike leathers and looked at them with machine eyes.
In the days of her cyborg youth these had been her issued clothing but latterly she had come to spontaneously create and absorb
the armour and even cloth items. Her surface could be remade in any material, her insides too. She knew that on the inside,
although she felt as human as she ever had, there was little that resembled human biology now. She looked and sounded like
the real thing, but it was like the faeries’ glamour and the demons’ generosity – an illusion. But she hadn’t examined this
process in action before. Probably she would never have, since it made her extremely uneasy to the point where she would rather
do almost anything than continue.
And then Lane had turned up. A clone. A life-size, real, updated to the last living second clone. One of potentially many.
But at least one that was an exact copy of the original at some point. Instantly Lila had wondered how Lane had done it and
instantly her answer had come – in the same way that Lila made her armour.
Until this moment she hadn’t considered removing her self-made
armour the same way she’d take off ordinary clothes. Sure, she’d once stripped off some of her synthesised skin to make a
point, but that was strictly to make the most of the moment. It hadn’t occurred to her that she could remove pieces as a matter
of habit and then, after that thought did cross her mind, she felt like it would be removing a part of herself and she was
repulsed and a little frightened. Now she sat and held the pieces and they felt and acted exactly like the human-made artefacts
she had copied so faithfully. In fact, they were comically accurate when seen from a machine angle.
Lila had copied leather, Kevlar and metal, picking the engineering plans out of the machine whisper as easily as breathing.
She could have done what the machine had done to her and simply given the appearance of those materials whilst creating something
entirely other beneath the surface, something much more effective, but she didn’t feel ready for that.
More to the point, having removed the items she could hold them now and in no way did they feel like holding her own severed
arms. They felt quite detached, because they were, in every way except one, just leather biker armour. The difference existed
in the extra information they contained at the quantum level, one step up from raw energy. This code was like a watermark.
Their pattern was her pattern, an holographic exactitude of sameness at a fundamental plane. Lane and Bentley’s choice of
form was more than a political statement, it was a kind of ironic art. The evolved cyborgs were truly, exceptionally plastic.
Having thought of that Lila still didn’t get what was so great about being Boring or Evil Barbie without the hair or the little
shoes.
She did wonder where all the material came from. Where did the sheer mass come from out of which these things appeared? She
didn’t feel smaller now. In fact, weight for weight, she was the same. So when she absorbed it, where did it go? Was she creating
her own miniature inequality that would tear space and time apart when she left the two sides of the equation unfulfilled?
Is that what the elves had done in their own way? Did it start like this?
She put one of her gauntlets back on and this time watched closely as her body assimilated it. Sure enough, the weight of
the gauntlet vanished as it vanished into her skin and left her, freckles and finger-nails, exactly the same as a moment before.
The machine part of her mind revealed with impeccable observation that the gauntlet was simply unmade into pure energy again.
But that begged another and
even more curious question: where did the energy come from, and where did it go to? The gauntlet itself contained enough
pure energy to run Otopia for a week, if converted into electricity say, but she didn’t feel a thing as these processes –
their speed and nature incomprehensibly rapid and accurate to her human mind – flowed effortlessly to the guidance of her
will alone. She realised she could make anything.
Anything.
Surely there must be some price? So where was her debt?
A similarity struck her then. Lane could make anything, including copies of herself. She could make any object and fill it
up with her own awareness. What then was Tatterdemalion? Did it make sense to think of the faeries the same way, as aspects
of an awareness that existed in forms that weren’t tied to living things, or places, or times?
She didn’t know the answers, guessed it wasn’t so simple, and picked up the rest of the armour from the ground where it had
become cool and damp with condensation. She was about to carry it up to the house when she hesitated and put it down again.
What happened if she left it there?
This time a spooked feeling did run up her arms and down her back. Magic operated to energy signatures; she knew it was a
big mistake to leave it where it could fall into unkind hands. She bent and picked it up again and absorbed the pieces by
putting them on and unmaking them. By this time she had started to shiver – her body was programmed to react exactly like
a human one – but she saw no point in feeling extra pain so she toughened the soles of her feet as she made her way up to
the house and heated herself. It was genuinely strange to be without the faery dress, but she didn’t regret abandoning it.
The relief was much greater. She hadn’t known until now that half her constant discomfort was the unwanted presence of Tatter-demalion
and its unfathomable motives. Without Tatters she felt vulnerable, especially when she realised how much she’d relied on the
faery to do her magical defending. She was like a snail without a shell, but she didn’t feel abused or overlooked or spied
upon any more and that was better
Quietly she crossed the open expanse of the driveway and padded up the steps to the porch. The lights were all on inside,
glowing low on standby. The door opened to her hand silently and she closed it behind her, listening. She could hear rock
music playing very quietly. In the living area she looked past the central fire where logs were
slumping down into embers and saw Zal’s blond head resting on the back of the sofa. A reproachful smell of cold Chinese food
came from the kitchen.
She walked around the cosy scene and saw that the screen was on showing a live Hyper Metal Angels concert from the other side
of Otopia. It was in Marentz, she realised as her AI matched city shots and ran TV guides. The show’s gaudy colours shone
on Zal, slouched in the corner in an uncomfortable position, eyes slitted as he watched. Sassy was lying full length on the
rest of the sofa, her head resting awkwardly against Zal’s shoulder where she’d fallen asleep.
Zal moved his eyes to look at Lila as she came into view although he showed no surprise. She felt a feathery touch and a slight
sparkle and the room dimmed as he reached up to embrace her with his aetheric body. He glanced pointedly at the sleeping girl
to indicate why he wasn’t leaping up and slowly extricated himself. He pulled one of the back cushions down to act as a pillow
for her and straightened up gently as if he’d been lying there for a long time. Lila started to apologise but he put his fingers
against her lips and pulled her into his arms.
Lila pulled back just enough to look up into his face. In the penumbral gloom of his
andalune
body it looked like it was made of rock. Then she smelled lime spritzers and recognised the smell of wild aether that gathered
in sudden rushes around the blooming potentials of any major aetheric lightning bolt preparing to ground itself and discharge – suddenly her nose was full of citrus.
Zal’s eyes narrowed. ‘I do so hate it when that gives me away.’
‘Me too,’ Lila said, meaning that she had been in the same state, would have done anything just then to fall into bed with
him and couldn’t care less about the game and its consequences one way or another. ‘But I missed it when it wasn’t here. Where did it go?’
‘I wondered about that,’ he said. ‘I had a headache maybe?’
They hesitated even longer, enjoying the feeling of each other’s bodies so close, the anticipation of the night, the fact
that they weren’t accompanied by anyone – at least nobody awake. Lila was especially happy. Everything was simpler around
Zal.
Lila glanced down at the sleeping girl. Her breath was long and even, she didn’t stir. Zal’s fingers against her jaw gently
turned her head back to face him.
‘Will you run away?’ His whisper was soft but full of wolf promises.
She moved her lips closer to his, so that as she spoke they touched. ‘I never run.’
They sprang together with mutual hunger. She was stripping off his clothes, feeling stitches rip. His hands cupped her buttocks,
lifting her, and she felt his moment of surprise as he succeeded easily in getting her off the floor. She wrapped her legs
around his hips as she pulled his shirt free. His mouth was hot on her neck as she flung the remains to the floor. Across
his back the demon flare was burning deep orange and red, the shape of the wings looking like a clear window into his body – an interior of living flame. It shone its flickering, weaving light on her fingers as she raked her nails along the powerful
muscles, feeling the delicious resistance of smooth skin over the hard contours of flesh and bone.
He growled in appreciation and opened his mouth wide to bite hard into her shoulder, easing a need to use his teeth where
it would do the least harm and she thrust a hand into his thick hair, pulling his head closer. The heavy fall of his hair
slid over her forearms and tickled her. She kissed along the thick upper ridge line of his long exposed ear, feeling the gradual
thinning with her tongue as she moved along to the tip and took the cool point in her mouth. She nipped it and he broke his
hold to gasp in a deep breath.
On the sofa the girl stirred and muttered.
Zal carried Lila into the bedroom, ducking so that both their heads would fit under the lintel. He used the same movement
with a well-timed burst of energy to fling her down on the bed and kicked the door shut behind them. Once it was closed the
darkness was nearly absolute. His demon wings lit the room as if it was on fire. Yellow-orange light bled out across his skin
as he undid his belt and kicked off his trousers. He paused, a half-grin on his face, one knee on the bed and she wondered
what he was doing when she felt his fingertips brushing her face. She could see perfectly well that it wasn’t his actual hands
but nonetheless it was there and sure, very light but as tangible as real flesh. It was his
andalune
body, so strong in the dark that he was able to make it solid, she realised. She looked down and saw her own tanned skin
lit by his golden light. Uncast shadows moved across her where his touch slid down her collarbones and across her breasts.
She saw the same dark patterns move across his body – forming shapes that looked like hands for brief moments before they
dissolved into cloudlike, nebulous forms and remade themselves again. They crisscrossed the iron-shirt ridged muscle of his
torso and surrounded
the base of his erection, moving languidly there. At the same moment she felt a touch much more like a tongue than fingers
trail across the inside of each thigh. Her attention was all on Zal’s face however. She looked at him more closely than she
had looked at anything in her life. In his expression she read beneath the desire and passion nakedly displayed and saw his
abiding nature. Zal danced at the edges of all things, lightly. Beneath his apparent commitment to nothing was a complete
commitment to his own nature. And there was love in his gaze, playfulness and deadly serious intent in equal measure as he
came forward, prowling over the top of her, his breath hot. She lay completely relaxed and open beneath him. She had never
wanted anything more than she wanted him. His presence was like medicine to her battered spirit. She reached up and drew him
down. His hair fell around their faces like a veil, closing them off from everything.
‘It’s been too long,’ he said, not pausing as he entered her.
The feeling was so purely ecstatic she lost her mind for a moment and when she came round she found herself saying, ‘Never
leave me.’
His reply was in elvish and muffled against her neck so that she didn’t hear the actual words but it didn’t matter.
They made love for a long time, at first fiercely and later lazily until the light in Zal receded beneath his skin and Lila
couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. They slept until dawn.
When she awoke the first thing Lila saw was the strange girl, standing in the open doorway eating a popsicle. The headscarf
was back in place, oddly adult and formal on her young head – reluctantly tamed dreadlocks peeked from its skirt at her shoulders.
The pearly sheen on her black skin was distinctive, outlining her in a peculiar whiteness at shoulder and hands where the
daylight streaming through the kitchen windows crossed the hall and caught her.
Sassy removed her popsicle with a smacking noise. ‘You’re in trouble.’ She said this with certain grimness and licked her
lips in an interested kind of way. Her gaze was flat and direct. Lila noticed for the first time that her clothing was ragged
and unwashed and too small for her.
‘Dial the news desk,’ Lila said, closing one eye. Zal’s legs were over hers and he was heavy and warm. She didn’t want to
move.