Selling Out (32 page)

“A great . . . big . . .” Her hands came up in front of her, holding an image for her mind’s eye. She worked her jaw, lost for words. “Blue and white, like a huge dog, but with a snaky neck and it, oh, d’you remember those violet lights in nightclubs that made everything white shine? It glowed like that. Like it had negative light, or something. It was surrounded in that. It kinda looked like it wasn’t really there. But it was. And it looked at me, Liles. It looked right at me, like I caught it doing something. I guess I did. It had these great, big, yellow eyes and a sort of snakey face. And then it faded right away. And there they were. Dead.” She gave a single burst of a laugh that wasn’t remotely funny and then turned to Lila, cold sober. “But of course it couldn’t have been there. I imagined it. That’s what the police said. They said there had to be an autopsy because it was strange, but they kept asking questions about intruders, strangers, people. I said it wasn’t people.”

“It was there,” Lila said, looking into her sister’s eyes with conviction and what she fervently hoped was reassurance. She couldn’t bear to imagine the strangeness of seeing what Max had seen, the horror, and then the days alone with only the questioners for company. She had to protect her, but part of that was the truth, no matter who wanted it buried or why. “It was there. I’ve seen things like that.” And she prayed it wasn’t her doing. How could she say that part?

Max nodded, silent, and resumed walking along the dunes, stumbling here and there where the sand fell away beneath her, Lila reaching out, never quite grabbing her elbow because that would have been an end between them. The uneven ground was very dry. Lila sank deeply and slid now and again. Her hip hurt and the muscles that still attached to it twinged as she slipped once further before they made the tideline’s smoother way.

“Is that why you’re here? That woman. I saw her before,” Max said dully. “She came to oversee the . . . when they were taken away. She took stuff from the house. I wanted to go in the ambulance but she said no.”

Lila mentally drew a black line around Delaware and coloured it into a big, black block. “She’s part of the government.”

“Thought you were a diplomat’s secretary.”

Ahead of them Buster and Rusty snuffled around in the banked seaweed and driftwood. Their pace was slow, steady. They didn’t look at each other.

“I was. She’s part of the same department. His boss.” Which wasn’t a lie. His boss in the secret service, not his boss in the foreign office. “I work for her now that he’s retired.”

“And she made sure you didn’t have a phone.”

Lila drew in a hissed breath between her teeth. “I was really hurt.”

“Weren’t we all?”

They walked another hundred metres.

“You know, after you were gone a man came to tell us that you went into Alfheim and just didn’t come back. It was all very hush-hush. He gave Mom and Dad a big cheque. Compensation. I always wanted to be in a spy thriller. Didn’t you? Sure you did. Something happening to us instead of the good old ordinary way.” Max’s voice had taken on a loathing tone. “Of course, they pissed it away. Mom’s half was her big Making-It stake. Dad’s was the vodka and the golf club and all that. We had garden parties. We had a big service for you. Horses, the works. Dad gave thousands to some guy who went looking for you. Never came back. I thought he was a con artist but they’d never let go of any hope.”

“What did you do?” Lila said quietly.

“Me? I worked at the Organic Café, making veggie burgers the hard way, throwing things in the juicer, putting in the hours. My girlfriend, May Lee, she met another girl, so I moved back home for a while. I saved up for a motorbike.” For an instant her posture and face lightened. “I walked the dogs. I went to tai chi and did all the good health shit. I wrote you letters at first. They all came back. Course, my friends helped me a lot. I’m going to move in with Addie and Ydel next week. They’ve got a duplex in the Heights.”

Their walk had taken them beyond the houses and the regular streets that opened onto the shore. They kept along, around the curve that led to scrappy woodland and the cliffs where the riptides were so fierce nobody swam.

Max was quiet for a while, but Lila sensed she was the one who got to ask all the questions, so she said nothing in turn, only kept her pace and felt the soft, receptive presence of Tath, who had been very quiet since her entry into Otopia. It never occurred to her he hadn’t been here before. He wasn’t about to intrude but he couldn’t withdraw anymore. He just rode along.

Max dug in her jeans pocket and got out some matches and a folded paper pack of cigarettes. She lit one and disposed of the match with an expert flick of her wrist that put out the flame and sent the stick into the piles of bladderwrack by her feet. The sea rippled softly. The dogs explored the grassy parts of the dunes that rose towards the woodland. Max jammed the cigarette in her mouth and her hands into her pockets, looking out beyond the cliffs. “Let’s have it then. What could possibly make you want to abandon a cook, a gambler, and a drunk?”

Lila recognised the look she hadn’t seen before in Max. Self-hatred. It rang a chord in her that was undeniably powerful. Her stomach churned. There was a sharp pain in her ear but the words were already on their way out under automatic. “Don’t talk about Mom and Dad like that!”

“Why not?” Max was almost cheerful. The cigarette moved up and down between her lips like a judge’s gavel. “It’s the truth. Can see why you would. Hell, who wouldn’t? We spent our fucking lives on this beach dreaming about getting rescued by pirates.”

“They had their shit together!” Lila roared, full of anger. “They got us out of Bella Vista. We went through school! We had a good time . . .”

Max laughed, her head thrown back, skinny neck and Adam’s apple sharp against the blue sky. “We ran like there was no tomorrow. You got to be the one who got away. Nice white-collar job. So smart. Then your accident or whatever. And now you look like you dress on Berkeley Square and your boss in the government is here to smooth it over for you. Congratulations.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Lila bit back tears with the hot teeth of anger. “I never meant to leave you . . .”

“We both wanted to, Liles. It’s no big. So, what happened? Total the big man’s car?”

Lila turned, her mouth full of poisonous things to say.

Keep going.

But she wouldn’t. Max was only being that way because she was so hurt. Mom and Dad—they’d only been like that because they’d had it bad, tough starts, wrong decisions, bad luck . . . She could fix it, if she got a good job. And she had. If she got enough money, if she did the right things, worked hard, was a good girl. And she did, she had . . .

Max turned to face her, eyes full of a frankly undiluted fuck-you stare that was full of love and hate and, worst of all, jealousy.

“We . . .” Lila started, and stopped, because she wanted to say,
We had a perfectly good childhood
, but it wasn’t true. “You . . .”
You’re just talking out of grief
, but Max wasn’t. “I . . .”
I only did what anyone would have done and I never wanted to get away and leave you with them
. . . but she hadn’t, and she had. “I’m . . .”
I’m a good person, not this self-serving bitch.
But then again . . .

And then she stopped. She just stopped. Lila could not move or talk any more. It only lasted a moment but she realised inside it that what hurt about Max’s spite was that she shared it, always had. Holidays were coming next year. Dad would stop drinking as soon as he could find some work. Mom didn’t need to play cards except with the ladies who held bridge lunches on the terraces of the country club. She’d made their money and she’d stopped. Things were going to be better in the future. Real soon. Hard work at school, and then hard work in jobs, and then maybe something like a relationship with a house and more work and then the kids and some more waiting and hoping and wanting with the mysterious pain in the middle of things always there because nothing was Now and everything was on the line, all the time, and they lied, nonstop.
I’m fine. It’s great. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. They’re only tired. My heart is not breaking. I’m fine.

In that minute all her anger went out. She took a breath and felt it leave as she breathed out. The whole thing. Gone on the wind and blown round the headland, towards Solomon’s Folly, the place where she’d met Zal, where this journey had started. She looked at her sister, her tall, skinny, tomboy, brave sister, whose head was always partly cut off in family photos, who met her silver eyes hesitantly, not knowing where to focus her attention exactly, then looked away.

They were alone on the beach, beyond the curve of homes.

“Max, I gotta show you something.”

Max gave a short little nod of someone who can’t do much lest they break, expecting another lie.

Lila took off her clothes. As they fell on the sand Max snickered and took her cigarette out of her mouth, “What’s this? Going freaky on me . . . whoaaaaa!!” As Lila stepped out of her skirt in her knickers and bra she also let the simulated skin-colour of her metal prosthetics fade away. Where the simulated flesh covered her hands and forearms she allowed it to separate away and pulled it off, like gloves, to reveal the black and chrome metal of her true arms. She stepped back, making sure she had room, and then just cued up Battle Standard.

The familiar whine and snick of metal moving was quiet but distinct against the sound of the surf. Lila went from a five-foot-seven medium-build redhead to a six-foot-some mech warrior, limbs bristling with weapons, changing into weapons, her normal human motion altered into the soft, sinuous mechanoid movements calculated by her array of intelligent targeting and defensive systems. In constant, weaving motion, she was set for lightning reactions.

The cigarette fell out of Max’s hand.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
n the car, Malachi reflected for a few minutes. He felt a strong pulling inside him, and recognised it as his soul starting to separate into pieces. Pecadore: the state of falling into parts inside the soul and so becoming divided from god. In faery lore it was a grave misfortune and one to be corrected immediately, before any other ill could befall one—as it was bound to do to anyone with so much shattered negative energy surrounding them. Unreflective as he often was, at these points he knew it was worth the discomfort and effort. He was sure the Pecadore wasn’t due to the politics of the situation getting antsy—no faery could care for such Vannish (this was the word for un-fey behaviours) stupidities.

He did not mind the implication that he had revealed the existence of the Others to Lila, nor the fact it went against what he had agreed earlier with Zal, who was in no position to complain in any case since he didn’t speak for Alfheim, nor that it disagreed with his instruction to the other fey not to do so. No doubt they would heed his law as long as they remembered it (which in the case of the flower fey may be up to an entire minute) or until a countermand appeared, which was all one could ask.

He did not feel disturbed by the fact that Delaware was probably attempting to cover up some demonic dirty work here, perhaps with plans of her own to use Lila’s parents as further experiments in her ever-experimental explorations of what power humans might wield in the newly formed (to them) post-bomb universe.

He did not mind that Jones had double-crossed her friends for the sake of staying true to her self and her driven reasons. It was almost noble, given the stakes at hand.

He wasn’t disturbed by Zal’s disappearance. Perhaps it would be temporary and perhaps not, but if there was another single being he was confident could take care of himself, it was Zal.

He didn’t care if the tourism treaties being wrought with Demonia all failed due to a breakdown of relations here nor if the GDP of Alfheim threatened Otopian economies nor if the casual disregard of any rule by the fey was a matter he was supposed to be resolving, pointlessly, with the stone-minded humans. He didn’t even mind who had killed Lila’s parents, only that they had.

He was not significantly concerned about his promises to the Ghost Hunters to provide faery gold to continue investigations into the Fleet. He was sure he could achieve it. He briefly considered the Nornir, the Moirae, but they were another matter entirely. No, they were far at the end of the list of concerns and in a separate category, marked Do Not Go Here Under Any Circumstances, No Really. So he wasn’t bothered about them.

He
was
concerned about what Lila was going through, and this was the fracture point. He was concerned that Delaware’s bosses had created Lila in the first place and whether or not it would come to harm her more. The separation taking place was between his job, which demanded loyalty to Otopia (Vannish foolery to expect he was capable of it), and to Lila herself. He could feel Delaware as a heavy, dark presence over his right shoulder, where she sat in her own car, seething or doing some business, or both. Waiting in cars was the order of the moment whilst in front of them the empty house sat, door ajar, drapes swinging in the breeze.

Malachi considered his position. It hardly served any fey interests to trudge along with human designs here. Besides which, what was eating him, like a slow worm in his gut, was Zal’s suggestion that Delaware and others might have a leak into Lila’s head. So, anything he said to her might trickle out of her and down some wireless link into a grunt’s daily stack of data to churn over and somewhere, somehow maybe they’d have drunk enough coffee or pumped enough smart drugs to figure out he’d mentioned the Others. And it might be two-way. He zoomed all his senses on Delaware for a minute and considered whether she was capable of ordering a takeover of Lila using her fickle AI. Would the woman have a secret code—the equivalent of a True Name?

After about half a millisecond he concluded that of course she did. If he were a dumb human with no magical senses and had invested the value of a minor city into an experiment who was supposed to . . . aha! He realised. Supposed to be able to operate in any area . . . of course. They must have been waiting and hoping for a candidate . . . they must have planned it out. Now his curiosity really started to itch. Between the itch and the worm and the Pecadore he was in serious need of fey antidotes to his ills. And he realised with a smile that he hoped Cara couldn’t see in the mirror, that he had the perfect idea.