Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  ‘God, you’re such a liar,’ Lila said. ‘You primed entire Otopian generations—’

  ‘I did,’ he said, cutting her off firmly but gently. ‘But it wasn’t part of a master plan. It was me, doing what I do, which is pretty plotless and I intend for it to stay that way. I don’t care if someone thinks I’d make a good whatever. I’ll do what I like for my own reasons and screw the rest. But you, you’re not like that.’

  ‘I’m getting more like it.’

  ‘Even so.’

  She frowned, not sure where this was going but sure she wasn’t liking it. It smelled of separation, divided ways. It felt like a version of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. As the prospect of Zal going one way and her another grew more palpable, a jolt of anguish shot through her and in its wake everything that had been occupying her for the last few days faded into a grey desolation.

  ‘And then again,’ he said, looking at the wall of forest in front of them, ‘You’re involved with the Agency and your own issues, Teazle’s fucked off without a word, which makes me assume he’s got more interesting people to kill. Malachi, well, he’s more your friend than anything to do with me. My friends are all dead or gone. I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I feel the need to do something useful, worthwhile, of purpose since I’ve been back here. Never thought I’d say that, but I need to make their deaths worth something more than another few years of me living on. ’

  ‘Zal, I—’

  ‘Hear me out. I don’t want a pity party. I want something to do so I don’t have to think about what I lost twenty-four-seven for ever because then I’ll be a morose sonofabitch and drink, drug or fuck myself into oblivion, which looks like a waste even from this end. Going into Alfheim is like a fucking godsend. But you going to find Ilya – I don’t like that and Sassy’s story doesn’t quite add up. You can throw in with her if you want to, but I’m out. I don’t care if Sarasilien is playing the best hand in history across all of time and space and if I serve his purposes or not. Fuck him. I should probably thank him, because without him there’d be no you right now, but fuck him anyway.’ He sighed. ‘I guess you have to go satisfy yourself you know what’s going on before you gut him.’

  Lila pulled at the rotting bark next to her leg, ‘Every time I think I know what I want to do I stop myself. Every time I do something, the consequences . . .’ She shrugged. ‘You know what? If there are players in this Long Game, and everything that happened with me is part of some scheme, I think I get where Sassy’s coming from. You get used enough, you want in. I want to dish out some of what I’ve been getting. And then I want out and the way I see it, the only way out is to get rid of all the bastards in my way. There may be an endless supply of bastards, is the thing that worries me. In Demonia I can’t move ten steps before I have to gun someone down.’

  ‘No,’ Zal said. ‘Of that I am sure. The stronger you get the less you can be played. That’s why I am the strongest thing that there is. I slipped up with Sorcha and paid Jack for it. I don’t do that again.’

  She looked quizzically at him.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t play.’

  She thought it over. ‘I’m so angry,’ she said, ripping bark free and throwing it down in the grass where their feet had crushed it flat.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘That’s why I love you.’

  ‘So you’re going to do what Sarasilien wants?’

  ‘No. I’m going to Alfheim, take a look around, see what’s happening. You can tell him it’s what he wants if you like.’

  She thought it over. ‘I will.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m going to find Ilya, talk to him. Don’t know how I’ll get to Ilya short of standing in front of a freight train and praying but I’ll find a way. I feel like I owe something to Greer, don’t ask me why.’

  ‘It’s the anecdotes,’ Zal said without hesitation.

  She ripped another piece of bark free and scrutinised it, trying not to smile. It was covered in grey-green lichens, just a few of millions on that hillside. They took hundreds of years to grow, didn’t go anywhere, didn’t even look like anything special. ‘You’ll need gear.’

  ‘I’ll pick it up in Demonia.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Any excuse for a fight.’

  ‘You read my mind.’

  Neither of them moved to get up. Lila put out her hand and Zal took it. They interlaced their fingers and closed them.

  ‘I liked our little house and our rebellious teenage daughter,’ Lila said. She didn’t look at him, she looked at her feet and the crushed grass under them.

  ‘Yes, me too. I was looking forward to the pony rides in the forest.’

  ‘Christmas, with everything.’

  ‘Throwing unsuitable boyfriends off the deck.’

  ‘Shopping for clothes.’

  ‘Being shunned at the school gate.’

  ‘Graduation day. Oh, the prom!’

  ‘Walking through Alfheim, for the first time.’

  ‘Dinner at home.’

  ‘It would never work.’

  ‘No, not in a million years.’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday it did. Ten years in one minute.’

  ‘We aren’t going back there.’

  ‘I will,’ Lila said. ‘Let her think I’m taking her offer.’

  ‘You’re going to play?’

  She took a deep breath and sighed it out through her nostrils. ‘You know, I never even played cards with Mom? Wouldn’t. Not once.’

  ‘Why not? She must have known all the games.’

  ‘Sure. Every rule, every variation, every cheat. She couldn’t lose.’

  ‘You didn’t want to lose either.’

  ‘No no, it wasn’t that. You forget that you’re not a blackbelt in codependency, sensei. I was worried that one day I might win and break her stride. Poker’s a confidence game. What if I beat her at something, anything, and she lost a bit of her faith? She got the stuffing kicked out of her three or four times a year anyway. I didn’t want to be the person who did that. Not even a little bit. Even though if I had played with her at least we would have had one thing in common, ’stead of nothing.’

  ‘But you’re going to play now?’

  ‘Hardball,’ Lila said, closing her free hand into a fist until the black leather of her fingers creaked and it felt like a solid mace at the end of her arm. She turned it, admiring its flat knuckles, the gleam of the daylight cold and grey on the curving planes of her thumb.

  Zal put up his own fist in response, larger and bonier than hers. He touched knuckles with her and they pressed against each other for a moment. ‘This is where I’m supposed to warn you off the dark side of the force,’ he said, and opened his hand out then, shaking it as if he’d already punched someone and hit bone.

  ‘Feel free.’

  ‘I would, but this way seems more fun.’

  Now they turned to face each other and touched foreheads, tilting slightly to the side so that their noses didn’t clash, they could press the flat bones together like small bulls, staring wall-eyed.

  ‘Don’t get killed, Blackout,’ Zal said.

  ‘Aces high, is what you’re s’posed to say,’ she told him, grinning to match his grin.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s the code,’ she said. ‘That’s what you say.’

  ‘Aces high, then.’

  ‘And to you.’

  It took only a slight movement to change the headbutt into a kiss.

  Lila let it evolve of its own accord. To really kiss Zal was a pleasure she could afford and he never disappointed her. He put all of himself into it, and she could feel it and it made her dizzy and shy and gratified and strange with delight.

  At last she murmured, ‘So, do you think she heard us?’

  ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘I guess she figures we’re safe bets – I can’t be arsed to lie and you . . . are you.’
>
  Lila frowned. She didn’t like to be thought of as solid and predictable. ‘That’s just my poker face.’

  He grinned at her, a fiendish, wolfish expression that agreed, but he wasn’t going to say it aloud. This made her feel that what she had boldly said to lift her spirits might actually have potential as a truth. She kissed him again and stood up, brushing bark off her trousers.

  ‘How about a little trip into Cedars? I’m pretty sure there’ll be a portal there.’

  He cocked his head to the side, ‘And check a few small stories while we’re there?’

  ‘You see, telepathic again. I think you must be magical.’

  He made a slight kind of shrug and for an instant she saw his shadow body emerge, flickering; black flames dancing across his skin. ‘Must be.’

  *

  They walked a wide circle around the house, maintaining their nominal safe distance, until they reached Podunk Flats. The ground was low and swampy, being at the end of the mountains and at the edge of the vast, watery delta that ran over Bay City’s rocky outcrops and along its faultlines to the sea. The sound of insects was loud, the grey morning muggy as they stepped out of the trees and onto the hardtop of the road. Lila had called a taxi and it was waiting for them at her coordinates a few metres from their position, in hibernation, lights off, signalling systems offline.

  One thing that had changed about Bay City in the last fifty years was something that had affected the entire human population. In Lila’s earlier life citizens had been freer to move around. After the Hunter’s Reign and the influx of new blood the citizen registry had changed and now everyone was tracked, not only by their spending patterns and their phonecalls, but every device that contained an OS was enabled to collect data and match it to the national database, either online or merely as a precautionary memory of where someone had been and what they had done. It was possible to get around a lot of types of tracking device, but when almost every working machine could sniff your genome in seconds, it didn’t do much good. Thus, although Lila had shut herself off from the other cyborgs, and from the network except for times of her choosing, she couldn’t vanish entirely from the vast infopool that was the Bay City Memhub. At least she was more or less invisible thanks to her Agency markers, depending on the day. Zal had no entry at all, which made him an Unknown Entity, identifiable perhaps as an elf but nothing else. This would create a security alert that would instantly call attention and also prevent them using the car, so to preempt that eventuality she signed herself on to one of the pending Cedars murder investigations and arrested him.

  It was then a matter of a few easy seconds to wake up and direct the taxi, blotting it from the majority of the tracking subnets with regular police protocols. They sat inside, reclined on the two sofas, and watched the dreary smalltown stubble of buildings begin to roll past the windows as it slowly took over from the trees. Podunk Flats gave way imperceptibly to another, larger suburb with more crowded housing. Zal looked at it despondently. He wasn’t happy in cities and suburban areas even less so. The filtered light showed lines on his face. Lila moved across to him, keying the windows to blank themselves, and pushed her way into his arms. They held one another and in the still calm of his embrace she felt the seconds ticking away. She filled her nose with the smell of him and pressed her tongue to the exposed skin at the neck of his shirt, held him closely and listened to the steady beat of his heart, immersed until a note sounded and she felt the brakes bring them to a smooth halt.

  The car had stopped short of its destination. Lila unpacked herself from Zal and stood up. She opened the door and stepped out into the sudden burn of sunlight as it cut between two high rises. There was a roadblock ahead. To save herself trouble she started downloading hubdata, allowing her AI to surface sufficiently that she meshed with it in real time, her mind getting access to all its resources.

  Between one step and the next she had armed herself in semi plate under the leather harness and let her arms and legs revert to their machine mode, weapons forming and loads priming inside her forearms. She stood in line with Zal as he got out, shielding him from most of the unseen guns who were overlooking them from the shady balconies of the two closest high-rise blocks, and from the curious stare of the police officer looking their way from the city’s side of a substantial barricade. On the gang side a cohort, including several demons and changelings, moved restlessly. It was a temporary standoff, one of several each week. This one however was a lockdown from the inside and the officers here were standing around bored as their leaders talked with gangmasters on private lines.

  Lila let the taxi go, keeping Zal behind her shoulder. By the time she reached the barricade’s gateway she’d burst enough comms lines to know that the gang known as Motley had called the freeze on migration. Cedars obstructed the free flow of traffic from downtown to the strip – the major route in the city. Closing it caused a headache of big enough proportions that the city wanted to reopen desperately but Motley were holding out for information and what they wanted to know was where one of their gang members had gone. The city would know, even if they’d left the limits and headed out towards another hub. The city didn’t have the information – she found an Agency trace on the deletions – and Motley didn’t believe them. The blockade was into its second day and tempers were short. It didn’t take much to figure out that Sassy was the missing person in question.

  Once the police had satisfied themselves that she was who she said she was they let her through, eyeing Zal with a mixture of curiosity and distrust that was almost palpable, though Lila got the impression he was enjoying it. For someone who couldn’t move without being mobbed it must have been strange. For her part she could have done without the hostility – it felt so much worse than the past, when demons were still mostly features of lurid stories rather than actual beings on the street and when faeries were one-way tickets to the champagne lifestyles of the celebrities.

  The police closed their side of the cordon and the Motley gave her and Zal the long, assessing stares that she knew from gang members everywhere, including the one she’d run with in secondary school. She saw a savage-looking dog who was clearly a demon in his natural form, spiked all over with bony spars, teeth as big as knives, ears flat close to his red head. Beside him two other demons, one draconid, another a humanoid with natural bone armour and a scowl that could have curdled milk at a hundred miles, went through the lip-curling business of sensing and then having to double-take Zal’s own demon nature as well as his elf body. Then they stared even harder at her, able to feel traces of aether but not able to pick the source. The human among them, a young man with a ferocious set of brightly coloured tattoos covering his face and hands, his hair bound in black rags, was the only one to break silence.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Lila showed her badge on the flat of her hand, letting it shine out of her skin and fade away as he recognised or at least acknowledged it.

  ‘Feds?’ he said uncertain and incorrect but cowed, his glance at Zal frankly disbelieving. ‘What you want?’

  ‘Respect,’ said the bone demon angrily, glaring at his gangmate with contempt. ‘This not any cop. This Friendslayer and this with her is the rolling rock itself, ain’t it? Ahrimani scum. We thought you dead and gone. You look like you returning but don’t smell dead. Where you been all this time?’

  His companions glanced at him. ‘Ahrimani?’ the dog muttered, shaking its massive head as though at a mistake. Lila ignored it. Any demon running gangs in Bay City was either rolling for the fun of it or was too weak to claw a place of any power back home. Zal’s old adoptive family had been a power to reckon with fifty years past in Demonia, second only to Teazle’s rapacious broodclan, but their star had fallen when Zal was lost. He commanded a share of Teazle’s recent reign of blood and terror, but only by marriage. Legally he was also dead in Demonia, which meant, should he do the prodigal thing, that he would have to start again to prove his worth. The Ahrimani name had been brutal enough t
o be legend in its own lifetime however, and this couldn’t be discounted. Here he was, elf, dead, alive, Ahrimani and standing cool, tall and elegant in their neglected gardens, a strange dark flower blooming out of season. He barely awarded them a glance.

  ‘You must be older than you look,’ Lila said, shifting into the gap and taking up a relaxed stance, carefree as if she were at a party. ‘We want the answer to the fey murders taking place on your patch and then we want a portal to Bathshebat.’

  ‘Yeah, well I want a condo with a boat and a car and six chained naked chicks in every room,’ the human said, stepping into her path. ‘What you got?’

  Lila made a laissez faire gesture with one hand. ‘Life and death.’

  He blinked at her stupidly and groped around visibly in his head for her meaning. ‘Cops don’t kill on sight.’

  ‘I’m not a cop. Now, do you know anything about . . .’ She read the details, keeping her eyes in contact with his. She was going through the motions but if they worked she didn’t care. ‘. . . the murder of Janie Six? Fullblood human.’

  ‘Shit no, but if she was one of those undead freaks then who gives a fuck?’

  ‘She was a dancer from the strip. Attack looks werewolf,’ Lila said.

  The guy looked at her with uneasy distaste, picking up things from the demons’ body language that kept him from outright attacking, but he was jittery. The dog growled.

  ‘Well, I’m not here to interfere with the law-abiding ignorant,’ Lila said pleasantly. ‘I will take your silence as a no. Let’s go.’ She saw Zal give the nod to the demons, meaning he wanted to talk to them alone and without a word all four of them began to walk away. She turned to follow them, leaving the human gang member watching her with sudden misgiving.

  ‘Police been here about that before,’ he hissed at her as she passed him. ‘Nobody’s goddamn business what prying whores get their dues. Stay out of . . .’

  Lila ignored him and what he wanted to say about territory although every word about the dead woman filed away in her mind, burning slow trails towards her gut. She could smell drugs on him, enough to convict, and perhaps something that might have been a doglike odour but she didn’t think he had enough fey blood to have a nightmare let alone be one. She heard him follow them a few metres later but just kept after Zal as they were led across a small open sandy area that had once been a kids’ playground and was now the local cat toilet as far as she could make out.