Selling Out (3 page)

Why bother? You look freakish enough as it is. Anyway, it will not get you what you want.

Oh. And what’s that?

Another woman came in to put some water in a can for plants and to touch up her makeup. She glanced at Lila nervously. Lila said, “Hey,” adjusted her shirt, and left.

To fit in with everyone else and be normal
, Tath said.

I can get you extracted in a minute, you know. I don’t even have an idea of what to say to Sarasilien.

How interesting that you know his long name
, Tath said.
It must be worthless. I wonder why. Do your human magic experts not suspect?

Perhaps it’s a sign of mutual trust?
Lila snarled. A secretary carrying papers and coffee shrank to the wall as she passed. “Sorry,” Lila muttered aloud, trying to slow down.

If it is then it is the first of its kind. We should find out the truth.

No. I trust him. Don’t even say things against him if you know what’s good for you.

Do not reveal me to him
, Tath insisted.
He may have noticed something, but it was not the fact of my inhabitation.

We went through this already.
Lila found the exit doors to the staff garden, an enclosed square at the heart of the main building. She walked out into the sunlight and fresh air and took several deep breaths. She doubted that it was even possible for her to have a private thought or feeling secret from Tath but she daren’t think about that for more than a second at a time, because when she did the sensation of being invaded and violated got too much to bear. To his credit—his minor credit—if this was the case he was smart enough to keep quiet about it when it really mattered. She thought that she could detect when he was being truly withdrawn, because his energy signature changed and the electromagnetic patterns around him altered.

Now the opposite effect occurred as she walked across to the garden’s two orange trees and leant against one of them. Tath expanded and flowed outward through her body and beyond it into the tree. She gave him a few minutes. It was nothing like a tree in Alfheim, nothing like the huge nature which made that place unique, and this Otopian tree had no magical aura she knew about, but the contact had a calming and regenerative effect on him in spite of those things. She knew he had to fight his corner against her now because he was so vulnerable to her. The opposite had been true in Alfheim, and might be again.

Lila connected to her AI-self and ran through the internal pharmacy she carried as part of her field medical supplies. There was nothing useful in there. It had all been used up treating elves and herself in Alfheim. The day’s list of meetings—a collection of briefs, debriefs, and resupplies—scrolled obediently up over her view of the garden’s mild morning colours. For an instant she imagined missing all of them.

A blue flash blinked on like a werelight dancing on the top of the yucca plants opposite and she took the private phone call, hearing the line link directly to her auditory centres with a soft click.

“I hope I’m interrupting something important.”

Zal!
Lila almost jumped with relief at the sound of his unique voice, soft because it was a flute pure as any elf’s but at the same time as deeply harmonised as a demon’s. She replied on internal voice only so that nobody could see she was online.
Where are you?

“Bohemia. Not interesting without you. I have no idea what it looks like. How are you?”

Perfect. Was Otopia SA very hard on you?

“Your people are the model of tedious interrogative pursuit. Next time ask them to beat me up. I’m old-fashioned like that. It’s hard to give away secrets without severe pain. Feels like cheating and I like to play fair.”

Lila felt the snap and zing of wild magic crackle in the air around her for an instant and knew she was being played all right. The Game between her and Zal, a magical bond with severe forfeits and excruciating rules, was perfectly intact.

That’ll be the day. What did you tell them?

“I stuck to the story we agreed on, though it could have used a few more years to get the paste straight over the worst of those holes. Your replacement thorn-in-my-side is a former model from Aragon. I think they hope she’ll pillow-talk the truth out of me.”

Lila’s face prickled and the sharp scent of citrus peel shot up her nose. Far from hating the Game that tied them together with its barbs of mutual lust she found she was getting fond of it.
How are Poppy and ’Dia? Still talking to you?

“I’m easy to forgive,” Zal said. “I bet you’re going into Demonia.”

You keep guessing, o elf I am not supposed to speak to. Any other predictions?

“They’ll crack this encryption in about another thirty seconds. When you get there watch out for the mafia. The highest families are the Cassieli and the Solasin. Oh, and the Ahrimani.”

That would be your lot.

“Remember that the demon mafia value loyalty, just like the Otopian set. But in other respects it isn’t like Otopia. The mafia are accepted as part of demonian government. Law is a mutable concept, depending on who applies it and for what.”

Who can I trust?

“Nobody, obviously. One more thing. The Mephistopheli are involved in a vendetta with the Ahrimani going back about three hundred years, and they particularly want me dead. Long story. If they find out that you know me, they’ll put you on the list, and if any of the demons catch a whiff of Tath, they’ll be after you for all sorts of interesting reasons you don’t want to know about.”

Demons don’t like elves?

“They like them like you like chocolate. Tath’ll fill you in. Time’s up. Give them hell.”

Zal?

He had gone. There were three messages waiting for her attention, blinking red. She was running late but the conversation, laced as it was with dire warnings, had put her back in a sunny mood.
Come on, Tath.

The elf reluctantly returned to his hiding place.
Your trees hardly count as alive. They have the aetheric energy of deadfall. You do realise that roots are for more than simply connecting them to the ground, don’t you? What kind of idiot plants trees in concrete bunkers and expects to gain pleasure from their contemplation?

No more compliments, darling
, Lila said as she walked back inside.
A girl can only take so much in one day.

She apologised to the microrobotics technicians for her tardiness. They exclaimed at how well everything had held up under the various loads. They couldn’t find much to fix so they tested everything and gave her a clean bill of mechanical health.

The medical team couldn’t understand what had happened at the junctions where her machine prosthetics were bonded to her flesh body. They wanted to keep her in overnight for testing but didn’t have the authority.

“Is this the kind of thing that aetheric intervention can do?” asked one. “We need to start trading for that right away. Look at this. The tissue and the metal merge right into one another. The metal changes from crystalline to cellular and these metallic cells have their own kind of biology. And then the metal. Look at it. I thought we made her out of titanium-based alloys, but this has an even more efficient structure and it looks . . . I don’t know, like it changes structure where it needs to, as if it had grown like bones in natural reaction to stress. How freaky is that?” The doctor looked up at Lila’s face for the first time and into her eyes. “Are you suffering any pains or discomfort these days?”

“Not a thing,” Lila said.

They resupplied her medical kit and she went on to the nuclear technicians, who said the reactor would go on its current fuel cell for another thirty years. She stopped at the armoury and reclaimed her weapons.

“Concealed guns only,” the sergeant-at-arms told her. “And you’re limited to what ammunition we can hide. That isn’t much. And as far as we know demons are very resilient. There’s not much research, but you have to get very lucky to nail ’em with firearms.”

Lila checked the two guns that were stored in the empty spaces within her thighs and then closed the vents in her jeans over the top of them. The weapons in her forearms were all functional. She reloaded them and left, rolling her shirtsleeves down as she walked away. At the end of the corridor, behind special electromagnetic shielding, Sarasilien’s office waited for her.

With every step she covered towards it she felt heavier and knew it was because she was going to lie to him, and nothing in her wanted to. She wanted his approval, but she didn’t deserve it. It was easier when she was a bedridden wreck and he was the only one who could reach her, his the only touch that was light enough to bear. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. She opened it.

The only warning that anything might be amiss came from Tath. He uncoiled as the crack in the door widened, a shimmering, agitated bursting sensation under her ribs. He didn’t need to call out to her. She could feel his “no” like a freezing jolt, but it was too late.

Her momentum carried her forward into the room, AI-self synchronising with her in that split second of unstoppable action. As her foot fell it placed her inside the aetheric energy field that had been set up to match the room’s perimeter, a magic circle enveloping the entire office. To pass a spellcast wall like this was literally to leave the world behind, whichever world you had happened to be in at the time. The other side might be anywhere, if the spell was a portal, but this one was the so-called circle: in reality a sphere of space and time that had been temporarily disjointed or replaced by the conditions that the spellcaster determined.

On the other side of this barrier Lila found that she was still inside Sarasilien’s office, and the office was much the same as usual, except for the strange general increase in colour saturation and the faint tendrils of visible wild aether moving curiously around the magical equipment racks. That and the fact that Sarasilien was seated on an altogether new sofa divan of oddly baroque design, draped with sumptuous carpets and thick white sheep’s fleeces. He was his usual tall and upright self, stern-faced and attentive to the tiny and elegant pair of feet he held in his hands. The feet were attached to the long, shapely legs and infa mously curvaceous bottom of Sorcha, Zal’s sister. Sorcha was reclining at full length, leaning against the other arm of the divan. Her dress was filmy and perfectly designed to reveal nothing whilst appearing to reveal everything. She was eating a chocolate bar, her black-crimson skin sparkling with a raspberry glitter from within as she pretended to lash the elf’s solemn shoulders with her arrow-tipped tail. “Harder,” she snarled, in a voice that could have melted paving slabs.

Sarasilien frowned and dug his fingers into her feet with more concentration. Lila could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead and, in this aetheric world, could see his
andalune
body clearly; a blue-green shimmer in the air around him, its edges clearly defined. Sorcha’s tail tip was catching hold of the substance of it behind his back and kneading it like it was saltwater taffy, stretching it out and letting it snap back into place like elastic only to dive forward and snag it again.

He glanced up as he noticed Lila and briefly closed his eyes and almost shook, ears flattening against his head in a clear elven gesture that was the equivalent of a human shrug of helplessness and embarrassment.

Sorcha quivered with pleasure and turned her head lazily to meet Lila’s astonished gaze. “Hey honey,” she said. “Welcome to Demonia.”

CHAPTER THREE

“
H
ey,” Lila said weakly. “I . . . um . . .” She didn’t know what to say.

Sorcha had no such trouble. “Come and take a load off.” She sat up and offered Lila the space directly behind her, patting it with her hand. To Sarasilien she simply murmured, “That’s it, baby. Keep it going.”

Lila simply couldn’t believe her eyes and ears. She stared at her supervisor as he massaged the demon’s feet, his aetheric body drawing the occasional pink spark from Sorcha’s impeccably smooth skin where they touched. The sparks made the frown lines between his eyebrows deepen but Lila got the clear impression that he wasn’t unhappy about the situation, only about being seen in it. She sat down where Sorcha indicated and the small, lithe demon leant back on her.

“Gods, I forgot you’re metal!” she exclaimed. “And what happened to you? Who gave you the aetheric respray in Alfheim? I hope you weren’t all unfaithful to my brother. Well, not more than once a day.” Sorcha wriggled herself comfortable against Lila’s shoulder and offered Lila a bite of her chocolate bar. “You can finish it. I need to save myself for the banquet.”

“Banquet?” Lila asked, completely afloat in this strange unreality. She took the chocolate and sniffed it. It was not an Otopian brand. She took a bite. It was heavenly.

“Your entry to demon society is to be somewhat more of an affair than we had originally intended,” Sarasilien said, keeping his gaze firmly on Sorcha’s toes.

“Oh no,” Sorcha said airily, licking melted chocolate off her fingers. “Nothing we wouldn’t do for any visitor. Not like you queens of the prim frontier serving her nothing but leaves and all that shit. Even foreign assassins coming to murder us would get a decent meal before we tore their skins off and fed them to the dogs. She’s coming in as my Otopian groupie.”

“Your groupie,” Lila repeated. Sorcha was as much of a pop phenomenon as her brother was a rock one, but their relation wasn’t known about in Otopia and, even though she was sublimely beautiful and a great talent, Lila didn’t feel in an homage-ous mood.

Sorcha snorted. “Okay. Friend. My geeky scholar friend come to assimilate our information for the Otopian homelands, ready to report back to all the glamorous magazines and medianets on the glorious realities of life in the perfect world.”

“Report?”

“You are going to write journal articles, reports, and press releases for various outlets,” Sarasilien said drily. “And some for the Demonian Tourist Board.”