“Weird that they’re so interested in evidence about it then?” Lila asked, recalling that it was faeries who had been key to Zal’s kidnap in the first place.
“Yes. It is also known to us that Zal’s own efforts are hardly limited to making money or music in Otopia. As you said in your report, your Jayon Daga informant . . .”
“Dar. He was called Dar.”
“Yes. Said that it was not an accident where or what Zal sang. That he was one of Alfheim’s principal defenders until he ‘went native’ in Demonia.”
“Elf and demon aetheric usage is very different,” Sarasilien said quietly. “Their cultures are built around those differences. Elves use language to mobilise and shape aetheric energy. Demons use music. We suspect that Zal is adept in a new, hybrid form of aetheric control. It is possible that he was made so by demon agencies and acts for them, or that he was deliberately involved in this spell of Arië’s . . .”
“No way,” Lila said.
“We are assigning you to discover exactly what happened to Zal in Demonia,” Cara told her. “We need to know how, when, and why he was changed, and what it means to the demons, the elves, and everyone else on the aetheric block.”
Sarasilien winced—Lila knew it was because of Cara’s words. Clumsiness or imprecision of speaking were almost physically painful to elves. She was surprised that Delaware didn’t notice. “Zal is no innocent bystander,” Sarasilien said and Lila wanted to kill him, even though, of course, he was right and she knew that.
Dr. Williams made a note.
“You will go into Demonia under a scholarship ticket,” Delaware was saying. “You have diplomatic immunity but you are there to study demon culture and lore, to covertly discover Zal’s heritage and to bring back as much information as you can on whether or not the demons are also interested in Bomb faults or whatever they call them. Sarasilien has organised your entry with a friend of yours who is native. He will brief you before you leave.” Delaware got up, looking at her watchface where it was scrolling with bright charts and schedules. “If you’ll excuse me, I have other meetings . . .” She shook Lila’s hand with formal vigour. “Feels just like the real thing,” she said, with an encouraging smile.
“Yeah.” Lila blinked, releasing the woman from her synthetic skin’s grip. Since she had been in Alfheim she’d forgotten to keep remembering that her arms and legs were mostly prosthetics. They had started to seem her own, until now. “From the other side too.”
Delaware glanced at her, revealing more sharp intelligence in that moment than she had all day. Lila shook her head, letting the matter go. “Good luck,” Delaware said.
Sarasilien stood when she had gone. “I too must depart and prepare to meet with you this afternoon when our demon guest will be with us.” He held his hand out to Lila and she shook it, feeling really stupid now until she realised he was only doing it as an excuse to touch her. His andalune body ran across her hand and arm. He held her hand in both of his and lifted one eyebrow in a very uncharacteristic invitation to complicity. “I look forward,” he looked down at her chest, “to hearing more details of your visit to my beautiful homeland later.”
Tath cursed.
Lila nodded. “Sure. Later.” She wanted to hug him, to warn him, to tell him not to say a damn word about whatever he could see, but as she met the strong gaze in his slanted blue eyes she knew that he wasn’t about to give her away. Not yet at least. The pointed tip of his right ear twitched—something like a silent smile. “Sure.”
He left her alone with Dr. Williams, the one person that Lila really, really, didn’t want to be talking to right now, though since all the formal information-gathering had been done there was no way she could put it off a minute more.
“Hello Lila,” said the doctor with a gentle smile. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
Dr. Williams sighed and turned her clipboard around. She tapped the paper with the end of her pen, activating it. It showed Lila that what she had taken for shorthand were a lot of drawings of little stick figures. They were standing in groups, shouting, and in the middle was one with robot arms and legs which had its hands pressed against its head. It was surrounded by a large scribbled circle of darkness. “Anything you want to tell me about in particular?”
Lila thought about it. “Dar, the elf agent who almost killed me, the one who was hunting Zal. Well, I nearly killed him, but then I saved him—in Alfheim. He saved me. I was having a bad time with all my metal. Like last time you saw me, it was all too powerful for my bones. I kept getting hurt. But after we did this healing in Alfheim I was fine. Better than fine. Zal said I have elementals fused into me now and Dar must have done that. I don’t know. We . . . Dar and I . . . we worked together . . .”
“Not as enemies?”
“No! No, not at all. We worked together to get Zal free. But our cover got blown and I had to kill him just to stay in with a chance of finishing the . . . of getting Zal out and stopping Arië. He’s dead. I think he was a true friend although there were lots of times when he . . .” She paused. She wanted to explain how the loyalties to state and friend, to family and self were so mixed up. But that wouldn’t be the right thing to say now, perhaps ever, in her position, since it could only be seen as a weakness in her. “Funny how we always end up talking about Dar.”
“Not really. If it weren’t for Dar you wouldn’t be here at all.”
“No,” Lila said. “I’d still be a desk cowboy in Foreign Affairs with all my arms and legs and family and I’d never have met him, or Zal, or you. Can I go?”
“Yes, if you answer me just one question.”
Lila looked at Dr. Williams’s gentle, sympathetic face. “What?”
“Was what you did in Alfheim right, or wrong?”
CHAPTER TWO
Lila looked at the doctor. “Everything I did was right.”
Williams nodded, encouraging her to go on.
“At the moment I did it,” Lila said, and loathed the qualification.
“I advised Delaware not to send you out immediately,” the doctor said wearily. “But she doesn’t like to listen to me. No doubt the rest of today is already scheduled up to its eyeballs with briefings and any number of other necessary checks and balances before you leave. So, you’d better spill the rest of it in the next five minutes.”
“There is no rest of it,” Lila said.
“You overused your Voluntary Emotional Override shunt so much that the logistics here advises me that you should have it removed for your own mental health.”
Lila shrugged. “So remove it.”
“I see that the Automatic Warrior setting or whatever ridiculous name it goes by these days functioned as it ought to.”
“Yeah. The off switch actually worked this time.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Tell me about Zal.”
Lila was almost caught out by the sudden shift of topic, which was not accompanied by any change in tone or delivery. She hesitated. “He’s very annoying.”
“Are you involved with him? As they like to say when they mean, Do you love him?”
“None of your goddamned business.”
“Congratulations. You may go.”
“You know,” Lila said, standing up. “You may think you know all about me, but you don’t.” The childishness of it surprised her.
Shut up when you’re losing, Tath said, with a twinge of smugness.
“Call me,” Williams said kindly.
Lila walked out. She was so angry she didn’t know what else to do. Outside, in the warmly lit corridors of power, her colleagues and fellow agents greeted her with varying mixtures of friendliness, respect, and condescension that marked out very clearly to what extent each of them thought they knew something about her recent mission. She cued up the Voluntary Emotional Override and met them with interested politeness. Once she’d reached the women’s toilets she uncued the VEO, vomited up her rage in one of the cubicles, and washed her mouth out at the sink.
She looked in the mirror as she dried her face on a paper towel. Scarlet hair, silver eyes. She watched her hands screw the towel up and throw it away. Their synthetic skin looked normal. She considered stripping it off.
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 y
ou 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.
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