Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘It was weeks,’ she hissed and he heard the ache and anger in her voice. Between hot kisses that ran up to his ears she breathed, ‘It was only weeks and we waited for you and we didn’t know if you were alive or dead and we had no idea what to do, no idea at all.’ Her hands flared with hot and cold pulses, with bursts of specific vibrations tuned to the channels of aether that ran in him and he lost control of his aether body. Black spilled out in clouds around both of them, swallowing the pathetic remains of the light. With his free hand he found her waist, tiny and taut with power not far above his own. As he touched the dress he felt it slither away from his grasp with an eel-like shiver, cotton turning to satin the better to slip away from him, even though threads of it curled lasciviously around his fingers as it did so. It parted, unstitching itself, sliding away from her so that she made a sound of surprise as the faery thing escaped and his hand found her naked skin. He let it rest for a moment, feeling the texture of her, cool on the surface, hot underneath, soft and silky, dry enough for him to slide his palms on her with the same skimming ease she used on him.

  He remembered his other hands, without regrets, their thick, three-fingered gloves that were overstuffed with the remnants from the weaving of the three fey sisters. For fifty years they’d left him able to feel almost nothing, were so clumsy he couldn’t have picked up a spoon to feed himself; not that there had been a need for food, or anything else in that time-lost place. His hungers now were savage in retaliation.

  With anger he pushed the unwanted image away, feeling his rage direct itself at the skirts of the dress, now trailing themselves like waterweeds around his wrist and elbow, teasing him in their own inscrutable way. He had brought this dress to Lila, armour as it was then. He didn’t know what he’d done in that gesture. He hadn’t known what it was. He couldn’t tell if its complicity in getting Lila to jump the fifty-year penalty of his ‘death’ was a blessing or a curse, he didn’t know if it meant her harm or good or if, like any faery, it would change its intentions with limitless caprice. He didn’t want its strange flirtation now. He focused his shadow body on it and pulled.

  With the speed of lightning a charge of aether shocked through him with such enormous force that he thought he’d killed himself. For the split second of its possession of him it interpenetrated every part of his being in a way he hadn’t felt since the day that the three weird sisters had pulled him from the cloth. It was not simple, inert charge. With it he felt the faery herself – a feral intelligence, as peculiar as anything he had ever encountered – searching him. Then she was gone and only the energy he had sucked out of her remained with him. He felt her understand that he only wanted her out of the way to be alone with Lila and in that moment the tendrils of soft fabric around his arm became suddenly a thick rope wound there, binding him, then in a second instant he felt the slide of silk sateen as a python’s coils slipped around him, letting him go. There was a hiss of heavy rich fabric falling to the floor off to their right, as if an entire theatre-curtain’s worth had gone sashaying to the ground.

  ‘What the hell . . .?’ Lila was saying, finding herself suddenly naked and touched not by one but by many hands of Zal.

  But Zal was the darkness, his aether given form and mass in Tatterdemalion’s wake as some of her faery nature lingered in his aura; a strange gift or theft he understood intuitively with a shock as great as the result of his bad-tempered attack. Now Lila’s hands gripped and held onto his body beneath her as he was able to repay her kindness with his own new touch. His many hands, many more fingers, long and articulate, delicate as feathers, powerful, tentacular, slippery as oil, flowed across her. He was able to caress her everywhere at once as the dress’s metamorphic patterns cascaded through his andalune body. It was a fantasy he thought could never happen because she was human – they couldn’t even make the common interface of one aether body to another like elves would together. But now he could play with her breasts and feel their soft reactivity to the teasing of his fingers and the lick of his tongue, at the same time as he played sweeping scales along her back and over her buttocks. His senses were filled with the roundness, the soft weight of her, the sound of her gasping moan in his ears. Meanwhile his hand on the wall held them from disaster and the one at her waist gripped hard enough on her to anchor him and stop him falling into delirium and giving in, coming like a kid before he was ready or the gift was wasted. Before that happened he wanted to pour everything he felt for Lila into the way he touched her. Centuries of practice with musical instruments of every kind and with his own breath for voice rose through him, guiding his actions and his reactions. A sensitivity greater than any he’d had as an ordinary elf flooded back into him and he was able to attune himself to her as keenly as she was able to play him.

  He felt her hands slipping down from his shoulders as she grounded and balanced herself on her knees. She leaned forward and he felt his breath, then her lips against his neck. The tough cotton of his trousers that had been hard-stretched against his hips in that position, suddenly loosened and separated as she precision-dissected them, leaving them in tatters around the top of his thighs. He shifted precariously into a better position, crates juddering. He was as hungry to join her fully as she was for him. In the complete darkness of his shroud body the touch sensation was so heightened he had to bite his lips as she mounted him.

  The metal elementals bound into her form acted as conduits for his shadow energy. There was traffic both ways; a subtle vibration ran through his aether body as she found a way to touch him back through the same circuit. Her charge, metabolised by the elementals, was very strong. The absolute dark of his covering, andalune about them, began to glow very faintly red like a smouldering ember. He noticed it and felt the change but he was too far gone to care what it was or what it meant. It wasn’t until she screamed and then sighed with delight on him and he did the same that he opened his eyes to a hot yellow-white flare so bright he was nearly blinded. Without his concentration his andalune reverted to its ambient energy form and she grabbed and held him as the crates gave way at that moment and they fell to the concrete floor amid the smoking, splintering wreckage. He landed on his ass with a painful jolt that ran up his spine and he got a lungful of nasty smoke. Lila was laughing. He heard her quick footsteps and then the hiss of a foam fire extinguisher being used. Something wet splattered around his feet and ankles as he stood up.

  Now that he had lost contact with her the brilliant glare died away rapidly, through all the colours to red and then crimson before his ordinary shadow body was all that was left, giving him a sunglasses-view of a mess of wooden planks and singed tarps. In the midst of it Lila stood naked, holding the extinguisher in front of her. The nozzle was pointed at him.

  He read the look on her face as he pulled a splinter out of his hand and raised an eyebrow, daring her.

  Cold, wet froth covered his face and chest, then his naked crotch. He heard her laughing – the carefree, mischievous laugh of the pixies – and leapt forward at the same moment. She was hard to catch off guard but he did wrest the canister away from her and dance off with it far enough to give a good blast on her butt as she darted away, shrieking and dancing over bits of engine without treading on a single one.

  When the foam ran out they were in the midst of a wobbling white hillock, splattering each other with huge handfuls of soapy film, using great, cartoonish knockdown throws that gave the softest kiss to wherever it landed. Zal’s trousers had become sodden legwarmers around his boots.

  As he looked down at himself, Lila got a double handful and dumped it on his head, mashing it well into his hair and ears. Cold trickles of run-off showered out across his face as he looked up at her.

  He raised his fist and shook it at her threateningly.

  She scooped up some ammunition but he made a dive for her legs instead, caught her around the hips and they both slipped and went down hard into the mound of foam. He heard the breath shoot out of her but both of them were too tough to care a
bout a thump onto some dirty concrete. They wrestled, limbs slip-sliding against each other. It was a struggle but eventually she got the best of him and he found himself on his back with his arms pinned by a single hand of hers above his head. A triumphant look made her face radiant. In her free hand she held a mountain of white.

  ‘Give me one reason not to.’

  ‘Uhh . . .’ He stared at her breasts, dripping with suds. ‘You like me too much?’

  ‘Right,’ she said, sitting down on his pelvis and letting up on his hands a little before smushing the lot right into his face.

  He spat the horrible taste out, blowing, after she let up. ‘Okay, okay! You win.’

  ‘Say it again?’

  ‘You win.’

  In a flash she was gone, standing over him. He ignored the hand she held down to him and got up, spitting and shaking his head.

  ‘For now,’ he added. ‘Come here.’

  ‘The winner doesn’t come here.’

  ‘She does,’ he said more firmly and grabbed her.

  The foam cut out conduction between them. They were just bodies this time and they took longer about it. The garage had an old, pitiful shower stall and toilet in one corner of its office and they used that to clean up in, though there was only a trickle of icy water until Lila siphoned it through her arm to make a warm jet. Zal threw his trouser legs in her rag bucket and tipped water out of his boots. His shirt was the only thing left and it was soaking. He wrung it out hard and put it back on. Then he felt cold. The scrapes on his knees and elbows stung. He went out and found Lila wriggling into a lilac spaghetti-strapped evening gown that clung to her figure as if it was designer cut. For the first time he forgave the faery for her position, though it was a temporary arrangement. She was still on parole as far as he was concerned. He held up his arms.

  ‘Great, you can go eat at the finest restaurants now and I can sell myself for fifteen bucks on the strip.’

  She shook her head. ‘Twenty at least, have you no pride?’ But she paused and retrieved the trousers, stitching them up roughly and quickly. Needles flashed in and out of her fingers, thread spooled spiderlike from their trailing ends. They were still wet but they were wearable. ‘That’ll work until you get home.’

  He dragged his boots back on and pushed his dripping hair out of his face. He didn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘You’re not coming with me?’

  She hesitated. ‘Let’s get coffee. Talk where it’s warmer.’ Her eyes were looking at him with affection. He agreed and they wheeled the Agency’s state of the art black bike outside. He sat on the seat as she locked up the garage and set some security device on the door, checking it over.

  ‘Expecting someone?’ he asked as she pulled the dress skirt up and set herself behind him.

  ‘I sometimes get rogue attacks,’ she said as if it were an everyday matter. ‘I like some warning as to when they’re coming so that I don’t have to monitor the situation myself all the time.’

  Zal paused. ‘You do?’ The rogues were those who had survived Otopia’s cyborg project, as she had, except they had felt no loyalty to the Agency once created. Those who wouldn’t guarantee loyalty to the state were hunted down. The project was concluded now and there were very few left, he knew, and none who could cause her trouble, she claimed. But he felt less sure of that suddenly.

  ‘You know how it is with machines,’ she said lightly. ‘A hacker war. If they feel they need to get close enough for a direct connection well . . . then we fight.’ She nudged him to start driving but he was too disconcerted.

  ‘I thought they were all taken care of?’

  ‘It’s fine, Zal. Don’t worry about it. Ride.’

  After a moment of failing to muster any real objection he put his hands back on the bars. Nothing happened. ‘How do you start this thing anyway?’

  ‘Like this.’ She leaned forward around him and showed him, then wrapped her arms around his waist. He found it touching she would let him drive though he’d never say so. He carefully teased the bike out onto the narrow streets until he figured he’d got the measure of it, waiting for her to say something about it though she didn’t. She just snuggled against his back. On the highway he opened it up slowly. He saw what she meant about it then. He could drive it as hard as he liked, it was full of compensatory mechanisms that made the ride perfect and secure. He could have had more thrill from a hairdryer.

  ‘Can you turn it off?’

  ‘Here.’ She held out her hand and a brief spark shot across from her to a part of the machine just under the tank. Suddenly it came alive, juddering and sliding under them across the surface. Then he had to fight to control it and keep the speed, dodging the sedate lanes of AI-ordered cars and floats, setting off a dozen proximity alarms until he’d got the hang of the thing – too light and overpowered – and found a path through. It was so much fun that he almost forgot he was freezing his ass off, starving, aching and hungry. But then Lila tugged his hair and put her hand to his ear. She was playing music for him in the palm of her hand – his favourite old track – but she interrupted it DJ-style to say, ‘Food!’

  He obediently took a look around on the GPS, saw what district was closest and took a curve down the next off-ramp, easing back until their speed matched the dawn traffic. Bay City had changed almost out of recognition since he’d been there last but in recent days he’d been finding a new way around and this place was something that was so unusual he found himself pulled to it easily. There was no lot so he parked on the street and they got off in the early, misty yellow light of morning as a cleaner truck whirred past on automatic, almost spraying them with its washer jets.

  Lila looked it over from its ordinary oh-so-subtle stone and glass front to its heavy, studded wooden door like a cathedral vault entrance, and he was sure she was pulling all its files. He felt smug that he knew somewhere she didn’t.

  ‘An elf bar,’ she said, not quite believing it. ‘Isn’t that some kind of Alfheim statute violation?’

  ‘We’re not in Alfheim,’ he said and palmed the door. A trace of magic reacted to his aether body and the locks slid open in five separate heavy-bar slams before it silently swung ajar.

  ‘Seeing that . . .’ Lila glanced up at him with a wry grin and real pleasure, the light flashing off her eyes into his. He grabbed her wrist and kissed her hard as he moved her past him. She smiled up into his face before sliding beyond into the dim glow of the oak-panelled room and its two fully armed elf guards. He didn’t blame them for overdoing it here.

  The humans were in the middle of an agonising fall from a world that had been scientific and made sense to them, and the throes of it vomited up some horrible scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in an all-out war. Sometimes he wasn’t sure it wasn’t a war conducted on very slow guerrilla lines. In any case, though Zal was non grata he was still a persona and a previous visit and some bloodied noses had gained him enough respect to get in a second time without questions. The guard who had spat at his demon blood before was standing there now, looking straight ahead from his black eye as if he was bored beyond belief. The other one, much more advanced, gave Lila a curious look that was a mixture of so many expressions it was comical. Surprise, awe, disbelief, interest and the difficulty posed by being expected to do a pat-down weapons check on her all warred for a moment and left him slack-jawed. Weapons weren’t allowed and Lila, well known among the worldly elves at least by reputation, was nothing if not a weapon in herself. Also, they universally despised what he was wearing and the condition he was in.

  ‘She’s with me,’ Zal said in elvish, quietly, as if that covered and explained everything.

  Lila glanced at him curiously and returned the frosty guard’s icy glare.

  The guard looked at Zal and their auras briefly entangled, communicating faster and more efficiently than speech. With a slight blink of deference he moved aside and held open the heavy black curtain to let them pass. Behind the defensive one-way glass surrounding the entry
way Zal felt several more guards pursue a sudden curious interest in him. As they moved through into the main room he felt them tracking him through their secret passages in the walls.

  A familiar sensation of several very widely diffused andalune energies greeted him and he recognised the mages employed as wait-staff from his previous visit, briefly touching them all before he withdrew into his customary silence, inside his physical body. They all turned to watch Lila, feeling the oddness of her presence and he was aware of a degree of ill intent, which he ignored completely. Beyond the second room with its gentleman’s-club arrangement of sofas and low tables, the bar proper opened out into an enormous glass-roofed conservatory entirely filled with grass and trees like a tiny park. They sat at the edge of this on a huge floral recliner, Zal in the pit of it and Lila in his arms, looking up through the roof at the clearing skies.

  ‘Too surreal,’ she murmured.

  ‘Just one of many things,’ he agreed, ordering for them both through the auric connection to the spiritual net that swirled invisibly around them in a pale imitation of Alfheim’s own massive psychic presence. In the casual touches of the other elves he read all the nuances of their feelings about him and they were deeply ambivalent. Only one mage had no animosity in her signature. He asked her to fetch the breakfast and a set of clothes from the room he used when he was staying in town.

  ‘What happens at night?’ Lila peered around, identifying the bodies of sleeping elves under and in the trees in the glasshouse, a few human companions scattered among them and the odd faery. They kept human hours. Most of them were hungover, Zal guessed, or exhausted.

  ‘It’s a madhouse,’ he said. ‘But on the plus side, lots of teenagers desperate to hook up.’

  ‘And do they get their wish?’

  He shrugged, ‘No idea but there are plenty of predatory elves in the world and surely some of them are here. There must be thirty in this room so hundreds potentially in and around the place.’