“Rusty! Buster!” Lila crouched down instantly and put her arms down, hands to the floor in let’s-play position. She was so grateful and happy to see them for that minute she didn’t care about Delaware or whatever reason she’d chosen to show up.
At the sound of her voice they dashed forward, confident they’d been right the first time.
“Hey dogs! Hey boys!” Lila stroked heads and ruffled ears as the two ancient retrievers bashfully licked her face and wagged themselves off balance in apology for their moment of nonrecognition. She felt the softest glimmer of a strange kind of feeling from Tath inside her chest, something so unusual from him she didn’t know it at first, until she realised it was the same fleeting sensation she had right then, amid the hearty bustle of thrilled-to-bits dog buddies: happiness. From behind them inside the house a figure appeared, running a few steps and then pausing . . .
“Lila?” Maxine’s amazement was held back a fraction, waiting to break out. Her voice was tight and creaky, the sound of someone who’s been crying too much.
Lila looked up, a smile on her face from the enthusiasm of the dogs, and Buster buffeted her with his nose and knocked off her glasses.
Maxine gasped and her hands flew to her mouth as she took in the sheer silver surfaces of Lila’s eyes. “Oh my god! What happened?”
Lila didn’t really blame her. Dogs were creatures of the nose. People liked to look you in the eye and that wasn’t really possible with her anymore. “Hey Max,” she said, straightening up with a big sister swagger she thought she’d forgotten. She was aware of Malachi getting out of the car behind her, and Delaware, closing in a step and then thinking twice about it. Rusty and Buster made happy noises, snuffling around her feet and examining her skirt hem for news of where she’d been.
Staring for another minute, Maxine came down the steps and glanced left and right at the other two, and the cars. Then with a moment of courage she decided to ignore both strangers and enveloped Lila in a tight hug. “Where did you go? What happened to you? Why didn’t you call us? Where have you been?”
Don’t notice, don’t notice, don’t notice, Lila thought as she hugged back and felt the fragile form of her always-too-thin sister. If possible she was even taller and thinner than Lila remembered. Her body felt soft and friable. Her face was grey and there were dark-brown half-circles under her eyes—still their usual hazel brown. She smelled of cigarettes and her breath was full of last night’s wine.
“I was in an accident,” Lila said with the airiness of an almost utter lie and glanced sideways at Delaware. “I’ve been in hospital.”
“Buh . . .” Maxine let go and looked at the others with more unease, referring back to Lila for information with a face full of uncertainty.
“Oh, this is my partner, my colleague, from work, a friend, Malachi,” Lila said clumsily and quickly in an attempt to dismiss their presence, which she didn’t want. “And this is my boss. She’s come to pay her respects.”
Max shook hands with them both as if it didn’t matter too much to her. Her eyes slid off their faces and into a distant nowhere with a greasy flatness that scared Lila more than anything that had happened to herself. “Fey,” Max said with a smile at Malachi that didn’t quite make it beyond the corners of her mouth. “A lot of you were with the police. I never saw so many before. I didn’t know . . . Liles worked with outworlders.” She finished her sentence as though she’d already forgotten the start by the time she got to the end.
“Max, you look awful,” Lila said rapidly, cutting off that line before it could go anywhere. “Can I come in? They’ll stay outside. We need to talk.”
“Oh, sure.” Maxine shivered suddenly and clamped her arms around herself, hugging her ribs through her thin T-shirt, then, part way through going back to the house turned and said, “Can we go down to the beach instead? I hate being here. We can take the dogs. They need a walk.” Rusty and Buster rushed up to her at the sound of the word “walk” and bounced around for a few moments until their elderly legs had enough. They turned towards the narrow path that ran between the houses here to the road that led to the shore.
Max walked after them, stiff-legged herself, and Lila followed, glancing once over her shoulder at Malachi, who gave her a nod and indicated he’d wait in the car for however long it took. Delaware stood uncertainly, unable to enter the house or to follow. Lila was pleased but it didn’t linger as she set off after Max and the dogs. Even without her assisted senses she was aware of the pale blue clapboard house behind them with its white-edged windows watching them go. They were always running out of it, along this sandy, grassy pathway, past where the expensive houses sat on bigger lots with beachfront views and crisp green gardens like giant bowls of salad, constantly cleared of sand by the eternal rain of sprinklers waving celebration fountains. Oh, she’d wanted one of those.
Ahead of her Max’s shoulder blades stuck out at awkward angles. The T-shirt looked like she slept in it. A familiar, but forgotten, grinding pain started up in Lila’s belly. She wanted to run and catch up, but at the same time she didn’t. She didn’t know what had happened, and she was afraid to find out. She walked faster and put a hand on Max’s shoulder, pretending not to notice the flinch that happened under her hand. She put it down.
“You first,” they both said at the same moment and for a second their gazes met and they were grinning, like the old days, when that kind of thing happened a lot and they were hoping the other would come up with a better story, a better plan.
“You look like a Regency action figure,” Max said. “So, get well a long time ago?”
Lila absorbed the accusation and the observation and set her teeth. She wanted to get on with Max, not aggravate her, though it was hard. “About six months ago.”
“We didn’t go anywhere. Still got the phone connected. Surprising really. How lucky that the government paid out so well on your insurance . . .” Max physically bit her lips together until they went white. Then she sighed. “That was the wrong thing to say. I was gonna save it until later but your sudden return from nowhere got me on the wrong foot.”
“You never needed time.”
“Hah, no,” Max said, “but the thing is, this time it’s gonna be harder. I took your room and most of your stuff. You know. Missing means dead. And Mum and Dad, they were always such airhead optimists . . .” She stopped and put her hand over her mouth tentatively though there didn’t seem to be more words to stop. They had reached the shoreline. The dogs bowled steadily over the sand, determined to enjoy themselves.
“Max, how long have you been like this?” Lila asked, trying to cut past the indirection and not notice how much she sounded like Dad. He’d never had the patience for a roundabout way of anything. He was slow, but direct. She wasn’t slow.
“This?” Max plucked at her shirt and ran a hand through her hair. She coughed theatrically and smiled at herself, cynically. “This is pretty new actually. Just since the day before yesterday.”
Lila was prepared to take it at face value. Max had never had much time for eating and the necessities of life. “Did you find them?” She almost winced herself at that one.
“Yeah. And I saw a thing too.” As if Max hadn’t been a bad colour before she paled further and shivered under the hot sky. “It was right there in the room. Hm! D’you remember before the bomb? None of these things were real.” She sounded spacey and reached out for Lila’s hand, finding it, then rejecting it out of spite, the way she had to when she didn’t want to look weak.
Lila’s heart ached but she knew any show of kindness would be wasted, until later. She stuck to the brute facts. Toughness was Max’s preferred mode. “What did you see?”
“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 neg
ative 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, th
e 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
In 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.
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