Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  While Lila could not find Tath at all, Zal located the echo of his spirit easily. Zal’s andalune wasn’t like Tath’s, or Dar’s, Lila recognised. It had a sparky quality to it, glowing at strange, half-glimpsed levels, like far-off cities in her mind where night skies were alight with dark red and amber warning flares. It flowed harmlessly, smoothly, an ocean of potential.

  Zal breathed energy back into Tath, though Tath fought it every inch of the way. Tath wanted to die, had thought he already had. The fact that it was Zal reanimating him made him furious and shamed, but as soon as he had enough strength to do it he turned, as fast as a snake, and began dragging on Zal suddenly, sucking energy through him as though he couldn’t get enough. He pulled Zal towards him through the aetherial current, and with a filament of words, bound them for an instant.

  Lila, inhabited by both of them, watched their fusion and felt the triple shock of it: Tath hating and loving Zal, Zal mostly furious with him, the two of them locked in something like a territorial war with Lila the landscape. The energy and the emotion suffused her body, intoxicating. There was a flash and recoil. She smelled brimstone and Tath was once more the bright green burn of resentment he had been in the first instant they were fused together. Zal’s contempt for him was blistering.

  “Now,” Zal said to Tath. “Be a sweet boy and go to sleep.” He did something devious to Tath’s energy body and Lila felt Tath slump eagerly into dormancy, ready for oblivion if it meant escaping Zal’s regard. To Lila, Zal said wearily, “If you poke him hard, he’ll wake up. So don’t poke him.”

  “Poke him?”

  “You know what I mean.” Zal withdrew his andalune and sighed. She felt him relax.

  Oh, she thought sadly, Is that all it was for? To save Tath? She wanted him to come back, but had no idea how to get there from where she was. But, as it had done before, the conjoined healing therapy of Sathanor left her exhausted in mind and spirit. Lila struggled to stay awake, even though she was colder now. She took some confidence from the fact that his arm was still around her, his hand on her, his body close and warm against her back. “Zal?”

  “Yes.”

  She could tell by his voice that his eyes were closed. That was a strange thing, she thought. Or perhaps it was in the deepening relaxation of his body. “How come you can hear me?”

  “Through my skin. It’s dull as hell, and everything sounds like we’re living in glue, but it works, just like yours.”

  She thought he was opening his eyes, more awake than he had been a second ago and then he lifted his hand from her waist and gently brushed heavy strands of wet hair back from the side of her face. Suddenly she wasn’t drowsy at all. She was fearful of breaking this moment of apparent tenderness and stumbled somehow in the simple words, “Does it hurt? Your ears I m-mean.”

  “What do you think, Einstein?”

  Be practical, said a voice in her head. Shut up, Lila thought to it viciously. “I haven’t got any drugs left. And your heart—”

  “Is like a sponge, but it’s still working.” Zal’s fingertips caressed her cheek so softly they barely touched it. They traced the shapes of her face with a sensuous gentleness she had never been touched with before, passing over her ordinary skin and the magical stain and the filaments of metal beside her temple without pause. Not even her mother…

  Without the slightest warning Lila suddenly felt an enormous surge of emotion. It was so overpowering that she had no defence against it. She didn’t even know what it was. It was too strong to identify, too intense to bear. Tears welled and burst from her eyes and heat flared across her exposed skin. She couldn’t breathe or see anything. She was as rigid with fear and shock as a rabbit about to be run over by a truck.

  Zal’s flutelike voice seemed to come from another world, one that obviously didn’t contain her, because it was one where thought was still possible. “I always wondered what you’d look like if you didn’t have your pain locked up in your face.”

  Lila could not speak. Tears streamed unchecked from her eyes. She hoped he wouldn’t stop, and at the same time, if she had been able to move, she would rather have knifed him than have him continue now he’d given a name to her agony and released it into her mind. Zal’s touch opened all her self-loathing and her anger, everything she’d never said to Dr Williams or Sarasilien, everything she’d never ever let make it through from the inside of her to the universe of thoughts, in case it sneaked into words and one day gave her away. “No,” she moaned.

  “You don’t mean it,” Zal said softly.

  His touch was so lovely, it was killing her. “Please.”

  “Ah, you mean that,” he said and she felt him lean up on his elbow to look at her. His move freed her from her immobility.

  “Stop!” She rolled around towards him suddenly. Her hands were locked around his neck and she could feel his pulse under her thumbs and his breath moving carefully beneath her palms.

  Zal’s face was calm and gently intent on hers. He blinked slowly, soporifically, without the slightest reaction to her hold on him, and continued his exploration of her face and neck on the other side he hadn’t been able to touch before. She stared at him, shaking, “What are you doing?”

  His slanted, large eyes flicked to make contact with hers, teasingly, seriously. They flirted with a smile, narrowing slightly from the lower edge, and then they went back to work. “Making love to you. I thought it was obvious.” He opened his lips and took a thoughtful breath. His fingers drew their patterns on her forehead, around her eyes, across her cheeks, connecting things, solving things. He watched the place he was touching with absolute concentration.

  Her hands on his neck became slack. She let them separate, lower and come to rest on his collarbones. The pungent herbal odour of the grass that was crushed between them filled her nostrils. Lila knew the word for what she felt then. Sad. How could she have been so stupid all these years? How could she have gone along like an idiot, letting her employers mould her and make her, lead her one step at a time from her foolish, innocent life? How had she agreed to all of this—until she was here, with him, disfigured beyond belief, a dead person walking and him so alive in front of her, Zal who had never lost himself.

  “The Game!” she cried. It was a stupid objection, but she was desperate to make this stop. Hot, blinding tears streaked down across the bridge of her nose and ran down her temple into her soaking hair. Her ribs had become rigid. Her breath fought in and out between her clenched teeth.

  “Be quiet and let me do it, or punch me out and leave me here,” Zal said with a tolerant frown, never breaking the flow even for an instant.

  “Please,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  He stroked her brow, “You’re okay. See? Elf strong. Demon strong. Make pretty robot girl hero better.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  “Don’t understand what? That it hurts to belong nowhere, to nobody?” He pressed gently on the centre of her forehead, between her eyes, and then smiled to himself and let his finger trail down her nose and down to where her lips met, where he let it rest.

  It was as though he’d flicked a simple switch. Lila felt older, but the fury of feelings had abated and become something past and done. It wasn’t gone, it was resolved. Zal yawned and blinked at her with catlike self-possession.

  Lila tried to smile but it didn’t work. “I killed someone.” All the charm of the moment died, and she had killed that too. She regretted it bitterly. Her whole body shivered with intense love for him.

  Zal took his hand away. His dark brown eyes, black in the indigo light, glanced down and left, into the infinity of memories before they met hers. “Me too.”

  There was none of the joking, teasing demon about him in that minute. Lila saw only the elf, older than she’d thought, whole worlds of experience far behind his gaze as he looked first at her, then right through her with the thousand-mile stare she was coming to know so well. His skin was pure white in the moonlight, all the shadows on it
and in his hair soft blue tones, pools of liquid shadow. He came back from his sojourning and looked at her again, no further, “And don’t it make my brown eyes blue?”

  Lila wanted him as she had never wanted anything in her life. She rose up on her hands and knees and turned him onto his back. Crouching over him she took a long look where her needles had pierced him, the points only bruises now, mere shadows in a world of tree shade and cold moonlight. He lay with his arms fallen either side of him, lax in the deep grass, his face expressionless as he looked up at her. She didn’t know what he would do, but for the first time she didn’t mind, even if he rejected her, and placed her lips gently on the site of one wound.

  His back arched and he made a soft, unshaped sound of pleasure. She felt the feather touch of his andalune body against the inside of her wrists, brushing the metal that was antithesis to it, sliding off its unreactive, impenetrable surface. She covered his throat with kisses, licking and biting his warm skin. He stretched his arms out wide and lifted his chin, head tilting back in a wanton gesture that made heat flare through her body like tracer fire. She moved her attention down, over the strong, flat muscles of his naked chest. Where Aparastil Lake had tasted of nothing at all, his skin was faintly salty, sweet and spicy. When she brushed across his nipple with her tongue and felt his hands in her hair suddenly, drawing her closer to him, she forgot who and what she was and lost herself in sensation, action and reaction, in the bliss of being close to him and his willing submission to her pleasure.

  Lila heard Zal’s breath come faster. He shivered and moved below her, pushing up towards her whenever she lifted her mouth from his body. His andalune body came skating across the surface of his skin, touching her lips and tongue, stroking her closed eyelids with tiny hot snaps and languid tingling blurts of energy. She felt tendrils of it dancing through her hair where it caused static sparks to jump and sting on her shoulders and neck as she bent low across him and licked her way over the hard muscles of his abdomen, lingering in their hollows as they flexed and tautened in response to her touch. He groaned and dug his hands into the ground, holding fast. His body was poetry in her mouth and below her hands, moving inward, back from thought, into all that came before, pure desire. With a snick she opened the switchblades in the index and middle fingers on her right hand.

  Zal glanced up at the sound and smiled at her, panting. She spent a minute looking at him, perfectly enraptured with the sight of him, as beautiful as a statue, but real and panting beneath her. His long, pale hair, half dry, half wet, was tangled around his head making him look like a fallen angel. He returned her gaze and then, slowly, closed his eyes.

  Lila took hold of the waistband of his leggings, pulling them clear of his flesh, and cut through in two precise strokes, slicing the heavy silk from waist to thigh down both groins. A flush of heat raced through his andalune where it touched her at her throat and breasts as she peeled the soaking cloth away and bent over him again. He gasped as she licked up the length of his erection and then took him into her mouth.

  Lila lost herself in him, in the game of drawing him to the edge and then leaving him there, in the perfection of talking to him in this way. She watched his body become her instrument, listened to him cry out, made him do it again, learned how to play. She never wanted to stop, never, wanted only to be lost, but there came a point where she heard him pleading in whispered elvish. A crackle of wild energy rushed up both her arms like lightning and earthed out through his andalune body.

  He came, pulsing strongly against her tongue, repeating her name amid syllables that were both elven and demonic. Lila drank him, she didn’t want to let him go. Zal ran his hands down the length of her arms where they were planted against the earth on either side of his hips and, when he couldn’t move her, slid himself along the ground underneath her and caught hold of her head. His tongue was long and hot as he kissed her, mouth savage and hungry as he pulled her down to him, arms locked around her neck.

  “I weigh enough to crush you,” she warned him, poised with machine precision on her elbows either side of his head, her knees against the outside of his hips.

  “Shut up, Plutonium Girl.” He slid his hands down, opening the rest of Tath’s old clothes where they hung on her. Defeated by the strong elastic of her remorseless military vest he kissed her harder and used fingers that were entirely energy to slide under it and caress her breasts while his ordinary hands moved downwards.

  Being touched by him was an even more intense pleasure than touching him. Where his hands lingered Lila burned, almost as if he had touched chilli and brushed the oil on her skin, and when his fingers crossed over the biometal surfaces of her skin they created strange electricity that replicated the surge and tide of his andalune.

  When he reached the rags of Tath’s leggings, now little more than shorts where her active armour had ripped them to bits, he simply took the remains in both hands and tore them off. The delicate touch he had employed on her face now teased down across her belly and buttocks and up the inside of her long steel thighs.

  Zal’s angular face lay completely open below her, sometimes kissing her, sometimes not, every flicker of emotion visible; delight and arousal their only two forms. She felt supremely beautiful and powerful as he slid his fingers, warm in contrast to the cool damp air, across her lips and then inside her. She saw him smile at her wide eyes when he used his ethereal body at the same location, licking her with multiple small tongues of alternating heat and cool. They teased her as mercilessly as she had teased him, and his fingers, sometimes one, then two or three, penetrated her in agonising counterpoint that would not settle into the necessary rhythm. Lila wanted him so much she lost her mind, “Azrazal Ahriman…”

  Zal slammed his hand across her mouth. His eyes glittered. “No names. No pack drill.” With a strength and energy she had never expected he could possess he flipped them both over. His andalune coated him in a faint red coat of plastic energy, making him momentarily as strong or stronger than any of her machine counterparts, fed as it was with Sathanor’s endless, absolute fuel. He burned.

  Lila wrapped her elegant chrome legs around his waist and buried her hands in the heavy mess of his hair, touching the long tips of his ears with her thumbs. He made her wait, holding her just out of reach until she lay still on the ground and stared up at him with seriously murderous intent. Then he gave a wicked grin, slid his arms around her and pulled them both upright, chest to chest. He sat back on his heels, his energy body giving him much more than ordinary power, and then he let her go, very, very slowly.

  The sensation of sliding down onto him was purely perfect and exquisite. She heard her own voice shouting out in joy.

  His hands slid up across her back and took hold over her shoulders, pulling her down onto him with rough power. They devoured one another’s mouths with abandon. Cold red fire and swift green heat flashed as winding, twisting skeins of wild magic curled through Lila’s hair, through her ears and eyes and nose, mixing with the charged envelope of Zal’s aether and crackling as it met antagonist charges. Heavy ionisation made the air as freshly primed as the ocean wind. Lila breathed it, drank it, dimly aware of herself changing with its tides in ways she didn’t understand or care about because all she wanted was right there in the sinuous flex of Zal’s hips, the drive of his pelvis and the deep, repeating thrill of his body moving inside hers.

  His andalune tongues passed through her flesh and into the bone, vibrating on multiple wavelengths that effortlessly tipped her over the edge. She looked into Zal’s eyes and they were weeping flame like tears. Pale yellow and white petals of fire flecked the surface of his tongue and his passion-slackened mouth. He looked faintly surprised, gazed deeply into her eyes and then a column of white fire rushed up the length of her alloy and bone spine and out the top of her head. Lila was surprised too, and then she was unconscious.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When Lila woke up it was daylight. She was lying on her back, and above her she could
see the azure of the Sathanor sky through dancing green leaves. The first thing she noticed was that she was alone. Zal was nowhere to be seen.

  She rolled over and looked at the ground. Apart from the flattened area where they had slept she was able to pick up their incoming trail, and see that he’d retraced her steps. With the exception of her vest she was naked. Tath’s shirt lay where it had been put under her head. She picked it up and put it on, its stained white linen draping her from neck to a third of the way down her thighs. Tearing off the sleeves to use as a belt to hold the thin material close around her hips helped slightly on the modesty front, but that was it.

  She climbed up the small rise, looking back towards Aparastil, and expanded her hearing acuity as much as she could. Once the environment had been cleaned from the signals she could hear elven voices, and Zal’s among them. They were about two kilometres distant, almost back at the lake itself, and it was very difficult to pick out words but she gathered from the snatches she managed to hear that Zal had found sympathetic company. One of the others had a voiceprint that matched Tath’s sister’s. They were working hard to help survivors of the lake implosion but were insisting that Zal leave them quickly.

  “It is too soon…” Lila heard Astar say. “Go back to Otopia and we will contact you there.”

  One of her male companions agreed. “We will mend matters here as best we can but it will… a long time… government weakened… worse to come. Take…”

  But then they must have turned away. Their sounds became too weak to decipher. She waited and began to pick up the vibration of running feet coming her way; just the one pair. She was more relieved than she liked to admit when Zal returned, He was fully dressed and carrying light packs in both hands.

  “Clothes,” he said, throwing her the first one. “Food,” he added as he sat down beside her and started delving into the other pack. He handed her a birch-bark packet.

  Lila tore it open and found the contents waterlogged and squashed but edible. They didn’t speak for several minutes, only ate.