Chasing the Dragon

by Justina Robson

  "This practice of you putting me on the ground all the time has to stop. I'm starting to think you like me. Also, Mrs. Greer elbowed me out of our health insurance policy so now she gets to go to spas twice a week and have her head shrunk by some woman in an office the size of Maui while I just got the ice pack and a can of Faery Dark." He got to his feet with some difficulty and adjusted his suit.

  Lila leaned close to him and looked him in the eye. She could see him doing the usual thing of searching for her pupils and finding only himself reflected. It was pleasing. "We may work together when it suits us, but you are not and never will be the boss of me." She poked a finger at his top pocket where his ID badge was clipped, prominently displaying the insignia of the Otopian Security Force. "You and your big dog too. You people had your money's worth from my ass. I agreed to nothing. And that's all. Get me some damned elemental fire and a demon to work it or get out of my face." She did like him. Curse it.

  She turned and found Bentley next to her, apparently waiting for some kind of command. Bentley held up a small plastic tag, "Your ticket, for the-"

  Lila brushed past her. "Tell me what the hell happened to make your crew all grey and flat like Benzo Barbie, and stick that thing in your pocket. It's Mal's. I don't have time for the rest of whatever. Write a memo."

  As she reached the medical lab doors she heard Greer saying, "Apparently when she's rattled she loses all social skills. I guess there just isn't enough processing power. Do you find that happening to you?"

  Bentley's answer was lost as the doors to Zal's room slid open and the thick, jungle sounds of the Alfheim night poured over her. The bed was almost lost amid the imported plants that crowded the place, and from the ceiling a false moon shone, three quarters phased in its Harvest cycle, an auspicious alignment with the stars in constant adjustment.

  For all her speed and fury she was only able to move slowly in approach. Her heart was in her mouth, and despite the humidity and the heat of the room she felt cold all over. She was too afraid to look. She wanted it to be him, so badly. She wanted it to be really him, for him to live and to wake up and laugh, and that made her afraid.

  Bentley and Greer reached the door. She heard it open, then close, and their voices stayed outside. A nurse's voice over the intercom said quietly, "Please don't touch him."

  She didn't intend to touch him. If she did and it wasn't real she felt that she would be crushed enough to die. Instead she crept closer until she was at the side of the high bed, its lights winking at her as if he were lying on top of a model city. Linen covered him from chin to foot, covered over with a layer of some kind of herbs, then the shining silver of a heat blanket. The rags and his exposed skin glistened in the moonlight, coated in a thick layer of oxygen-rich regenerant gel. A tube ran out of his mouth and the gentle hiss of a pump sounded in time to the rise and fall of his chest.

  The skin around his closed eyes was still blue and all the shadows of his face were darker than usual, as he'd been shortly before Jack had tried to kill him, fifty years ago in the winter lock. They emphasised his emaciated state. His cheeks were hollow, eye sockets too big, the skin of his face blistered and raw, cracked in so many places he was barely recognisable. The tips of his ears were frostbitten off. Around the tube where his lips were stretched his teeth were broken. Now that the ice had melted, the few tufts of hair still left on his head were dark with blood and water, clinging in the gel over the raw skin beneath. She understood that part at least; he'd ripped out his own hair to make the rope.

  Fifty years. Where and when had it passed for him? Was it him? Greer's hyperbolic warnings aside, what the hell had happened to bring him here like this?

  "I was quick as I could," she said, wondering at the same time if that were true. What had she been waiting for? A bigger gun, a better time, a ticket to Faeryland? "I didn't know what to do. She said-" Yeah, some faery had told her she'd repair Zal and send him home, a faery similar in its nature to the dress in age and weirdness. And she'd been waiting for the call? She had, but that seemed stupid now. Strangely at the time she'd felt like the faery was telling the truth. "Don't leave me." She was surprised to find herself saying that, but now that she was here and there was no need to go on the rescue run and no bad thing to fight she was so helpless it hurt. She meant it too. Zal was like her, and there weren't many of those around. Losing him entirely seemed real now, possible, whereas before she could imagine easily that she'd find him and they'd get out, he'd come back, and they'd live together somewhere anywhere, and she'd seen his face laughing that old laugh that didn't care how strange or difficult things were, he could take it all in his stride and take her with him. They'd run away once for a day. They'd run away again. She was waiting for it, surely, all these other things were just a delay to that inevitable? Nothing made sense if that wasn't the ending.

  That's how it had felt, yes, even Sorcha dying and listening to the Signal day and night, using Teazle to wipe away the pain and the uncertainty because he was so strong she never need worry about him in any way. Except ... screw that thought, she couldn't afford that thought about him right now. And all of that was bearable, anything was, because Zal was coming back and he'd have known she was coming for him, surely; he wouldn't have given up on her. But fifty years. Even for an elf it was a long time. And for him how long? And he'd never sit still of course. Of course he hadn't waited.

  She reached out without thinking and only at the last moment realised and took her hand back. "Don't go," she said, in her mind the images of all those who were gone, and Zal was there, with them, all wrong, shrugging like it didn't matter either, mocking even his own end like everything was the world's dumbest joke. "I can't bear it." She didn't want to think about what she would do if she were forced to think about it to.

  She waited, but there was no response. The traces of aetheric body near his heart remained steady and that was all. She wondered how ordinary people did it, people without any power or ability to do anything, when their loved ones were lying there. What did they think about, what did they feel, where would they go? She felt that everything in her was reaching out, searching for connection, for reasons, comfort and strength, and nothing answered, not out of spite or deserving, but just because nothing was there.

  The pump hissed. A nurse came in, checked something, went out. Bentley came in, quiet as stealth itself, held out a cup of tea. Lila took it.

  "After we were all machines," she said gently, starting her story, and after some of us had decided we had to be free to follow the Signal's call, we fought a war."

  She leaned down and looked at the blinking lights of the bed, a code she could read easily. "It didn't take long, just hours really. They wanted all of us to be free. Those of us who disagreed and wanted to continue with the human world were heretics to them. They took on the look you saw, the black machines, as a political statement. We kept our usual looks, of course, like you."

  She straightened up. "One of the attacks before the stalemate occurred was a viral bomb. It infected all of us. There was an infoquake. Most prime-targeted items were erased, along with a lot of collateral damage. Among those were all of the markers of our identity, every one, across every format. By the time we countered it almost all of our personal data was gone. Now there is no record of what we looked like, even in our own memories, even in our DNA. They replaced it with the android and plastic features you so dislike. They even drilled out our ancestral records so that no reconstructions could be made by best guess. Here and there they missed a little." She touched the necklace she wore briefly. "But not much. There is some doubt about my name, actually. But you have to be called something. For a while we fooled around and made new appearances for ourselves-the viral program was easy to adopt and use, once we had it cornered-but after the stalemate and the loss of what we knew a lot of us let the grey state be as it was. It is who we are now; a human manifestation of the Signal, and the badge of our war. And before you pity us let me state that none of us feel t
he loss. We have no memory, so we have no loss. Just this story."

  At least I could do that, Lila thought, staring at the android figure and hoping her face didn't convey horror though she wasn't sure it didn't. I could wipe it all out.

  She felt herself relax fractionally for the first time in hours. "Thanks," she said, lifting the tea, but meaning the story too.

  "My pleasure. The demon agent's ETA is another hour and ten," Bentley continued in the same, relaxed voice. "I can stay here, if you would like to sleep."

  "No, thanks," Lila said. "I'm staying."

  "Would you like me to stay?"

  Lila shook her head. "See if you can find any sign of Mal. Maybe we missed something at his office."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Wait, before you go. Do you know where the agency portal is?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Are you going to tell me?"

  "I do not have permission."

  "Okay. I guess I can spend my time hacking the information then. And you can stop the ma'am-ing, I'm not the damn queen."

  "As you wish."

  The door sighed open and then shut after Bentley's silent departure.

  After another minute of listening to the pump Lila abandoned any thoughts of stealing the portal knowledge from the agency AIs. She would rather not start an all-out battle with them, not only because they might win it, but because it would be yet another hostile action she couldn't afford if she wanted to rely on help later. Instead a better plan occurred to her-make the demon agent take her back. Or better yet, if less hopefully, search the rest of Sarasilien's libraries and chattels for some implement that would do the job. Upon this decision's moment, the thought she hadn't wanted to entertain at all crept in and settled at the forefront of her mind.

  Teazle was late.

  That meant he wasn't coming. There could only be one reason for that-he couldn't. The only thing that could stop him was death, obviously, or else a thing like some unstoppable force or containment which-and she had no idea what it might be-could not be diced, burnt, or teleported away from. She didn't rule out rogue vengeance for the loss of Sandra Lane, but in the list of deathwishers they were rather low. She didn't rule out something weirder. She'd planned to meet him tonight, now, and test the dampener system on him to see if he was able to counter it. She'd been going to explain the dress's trick of outwitting the frequency-not that she was sure it would be any use to him. He had been brewed to be a powerful demon, ruler of a considerable chunk of assets in a world of absolute greed and unflinching violence, but the journey to Under had altered him, and in the months that they had been back the subject of exactly how had never come up. She'd been busy avoiding that, and it never occurred to her that he was anything but completely balanced, confident, and certain of himself. To be otherwise was not to be Teazle.

  Another minute crawled past. She was certain then that, like Zal, she had spent too long running. Even listening to the Signal was running, because what it said was pure information, but no suggestion of how to make any decision about what it said. Listening felt like doing something, as if eventually, listen long enough and all the answers to what bothered her would pop out in a moment of blissful lateral inspiration. She'd waited months, and all she got was sodden with knowledge about things, their material forms, their movements, the operations of the cosmos, the permutations of series ... dead things, to be honest.

  "... no life," she found herself mumbling at Zal as she traced the dull line of his thermoblanket for the hundredth time. "And then it infiltrates living things, but it doesn't live. It just copies, and remoulds, and stores, and keeps on talking the talk. Everyone's details and everyone's movements in a big list of unconnected events, one after the other after the other. It never shuts up and it never says anything. Like me right now. I want to talk at last, and look, everyone went away. Poor little Lila in her raggedy dress that you gave me, you bastard, without warning me or anything. Wake up so I can punch your lights out."

  She really wanted a drink so that something other than the beckoning misery would wipe her out. "Did you know it's only been .. She checked her clock. "Five months and two days since we met? Your last concert was just a few weeks ago. Fifteen thousand people watched it, two thousand in person and the rest by live broadcast. And today almost nobody knows your songs, except old farts like Greer, my boss, who turns out to be a fanboy. Hey, there's another thing. You never mentioned you really were turning tricks with those songs. That was sneaky, positively demonic."

  It was a struggle. She took a deep breath, was stopped short by the corset, and tried not to notice how awful he looked, how frail and ruined.

  "I think you could make a comeback. Demon music is popular in the charts; lots of people are getting used to a half-fey world. That was my fault. I told him he could have a year. I didn't know what he'd do. I just said it. And that was that. Cure worse than the disease, probably, I'm not sure. Seems like it was. You should have been the one to cut the deal, not me. I should have run. You should have been there. Then you'd have got this sword thing. Maybe not. I wish it was you. You know what to do with this stuff."

  The ventilator hissed, paused.

  "None of that sounds very inviting, does it? None of it sounds like it's worth coming back for."

  Above her the fake moon reset itself to three degrees beyond Arcturus and started its brief cycle of calming light one more time.

  "I still have the house. Falling down a bit now. I should probably demolish it and start again. Sell it. The faeries kept it for me. They don't have too much of a record on paying bills. I don't think any utilities are even connected now."

  She stared into the dark beyond the bed and saw the leaves of the elven cycads dripping water as the misters worked for a few moments.

  "Some bad shit's gone down in Demonia. Teazle's killed everyone and taken their stuff. I'd blame myself but ..." She stopped. "With you gone if he dies then I'll be number one target in several worlds. So you know, if you come back then it'll be you in the hot spot; might want to think about that before you stop playing possum. Oh yeah, and we've been sleeping together. Quite a lot. Didn't really mean to. It just kind of happened. You know."

  The misters stopped. Down on the floor the flowers of night-dryads bloomed and their strange smell of old bookcases and woodsmoke slowly filled the air. The luminescent spores glowed faintly as they coated the tubs of grass. The gel on Zal's face warmed another degree in response to the bed's programming and started to liquefy, running very slowly down across his cheeks, nose, chin, forehead. Thin sheets of old, dead skin began to peel off with the movement.

  Lila folded and refolded the elven clothes. She recognised them by and by. Sarasilien had worn them as lab clothes, washed them, put them away and forgotten them. They were quite threadbare, although the magical signs still glimmered in and out of the weave if you held it at the right angle to see. She put them on top of the mound of silver blanket, in case they had the power to do any good. Surely they would do no harm.

  "How am I? I'm okay. I'm fine thanks. I just talk like a moron and I do things without understanding them and I feel quite horrible most of the time. I'm full of hate, that's the problem. And rage. But they're okay because underneath them is the sadness and I can't ... I can't ..." She pulled the topshirt off the pile of clothes and screwed it up, mashing it onto her face, stuffing it in her mouth and against her eyes, but it didn't block out all the howling scream and it didn't help at all in making it stop.

  CHAPTER ELEUEN

  iz Black?"

  The voice jolted her awake. She was face down, head on hands, hands and arms resting on the edge of the bed. A steamy wetness clung to her face-the shirt. She sat up and peeled it off. It fell heavily into her hands, warm and fleshy, slimed with snot so that she quickly rubbed at her nose and mouth with the drier edges. There was a savage aching in her throat and her head. Moonlight glared off the heat blanket, making her wince and blink. "Yes?" Only the corset's rigid, unyielding deman
d kept her from wobbling as her legs unlocked from their AI-determined position of rest and let her turn around.

  She put the shirt down and rubbed her face with both hands in an effort to wake up before she thought to use chemicals and let her insystem pharmacy dose her with uppers. The drugs took effect rapidly, pushing her back into the speed and anxiety of the moment with hellish acceleration that left her feelings behind entirely. Her chest felt like someone had shotgunned it from the inside, but the iron bones of the dress held that wound in check.

  A demon in human form was standing in front of her. He was tall and magnificently handsome, though that was no surprise-she'd never seen an ugly one in changed state. He wore a complicated silk robe that revealed a great deal of skin here and there whilst fitting human standards of modesty. His body was the colour of a midday storm, his hair twisting and lifting of its own accord to float on the lightest currents of air. The theatrical silliness of it reminded her of Poppy, the faery singer. Poppy had tried to save Zal from the Giantkiller's vengeance, and now she was dead for her pains. Lila forcibly hauled her sharpening attention away as she remembered Poppy, the stupid kind vacuity of her and her foolish act of defiance. In life Poppy had annoyed her and been the kind of girl Lila had always mistrusted and envied, but Poppy had never noticed Lila's animosity or been put off by her aloof manner. Now was not the time to think of ill-judged acts of love and fury and bodies rolling cold in black water.

  The demon addressing Lila was a water demon of some kind she guessed, by the look and the exacting distance from his body at which he held the clay crucible in its glowing wire frame.

  "I am Agent Vadrahazeen. Your elemental," he said, and put the heavy container down, stepping aside from it quickly. "I am sorry I am late." He bowed low to her, even his azure eyes ducking for an instant in one of the most submissive gestures. A normal demon of middling standings would make such obeisances only to royalty, so either he was peasant stock or Teazle had been boasting much less than she'd imagined and was in far greater danger.