She got into a sitting position and saw that the black leather look had gone. Quite human skin was left in its place, the same off white cream that she’d always been naturally, with the light tea-coloured tan of her childhood set over it, temporarily browning her as if she’d had all summer in the sun. The armour was also changed, its skirts lengthened into a dress. She had bare feet. This of all she stared at a long time before reaching down to touch her toes in wonder. Her toes. She had never had toes since she’d had the prosthetics fitted. They’d always been boots with, she’d assumed, the illusion of feet inside them. Her own softness was overwhelming. She felt like a crab without its shell and horribly vulnerable, although when she dug her toes through the sand it was a heavenly feeling, so real, so familiar.
A dog came running up to her, surrounding her suddenly with panting and snuffling and licks. She pushed it away, shielding her face for a minute, and then got a good look at it’s rangy wolfhound form and absolutely white thick fur, its blue-white husky eyes. “Teazle?”
Teazle barked and panted at her, his blue tongue lolling. He seemed anxious. She expected him to change form and speak to her but he didn’t. She stroked his head and scratched his ruff and then got to her feet. She signalled the World Tree, seeking to make connections with the Agency server.
An alert ran through her, prompting her to pause. Once these things would all have been readouts, interfaces that kept a clear line between her and the machines. Now there was only what she knew, what she felt, nothing more. Her login effort had been rejected and classified as an intrusion attempt. For a minute she stood there, staring at the ocean, unable to figure out what might have caused it until she realised it was possible the Agency had changed while she was gone, unlikely as that seemed, and maybe something had happened to cause her to be seen as hostile or at least unwelcome. No, unwelcome agents were liabilities and liabilities weren’t something left to run around. There was no way to find out now.
Teazle whined unhappily and ran in a small circle.
She knew that they’d be sending agents to locate her. Imagining meeting them, what they might say or do, felt very bad to her. The dress ruffled against her legs as if in the breeze, though the breeze was blowing the other way.
She began walking, quickly, making her way past the familiar shape of the headland towards home. Anxiety began to creep through her emotional numbness. She moved faster, starting to jog. Teazle trotted at her side.
As she came to the more common areas of the beach she noticed the houses had changed their frontages, glass replacing a lot of old wood and new fresh-looking timbers creating arches and circles where rectangles used to be. A rash of circular, elf-style doors were everywhere, and the fences that used to stand, bent or upright, to mark property lines and footpaths had been removed. She passed a couple walking who gave her the smile you give to an eccentric woman running along the beach barefoot in an evening dress with a large dog at her side. She didn’t care but their own clothes looked strange to her; too short, too long, odd colours.
She reached the road and stopped dead. All the cars were soft, bubble-shaped lozenges of bright colour, the people inside visible through big shaded windows reading, watching, staring, none of them driving. Strangest of all, they glided in silence. The gulls overhead were the loudest thing nearby. She looked more closely and didn’t recognise half the homes in sight, though they stood on the same plots as before, and her path took the same course it had had when she was a child. She began to run. She saw the house at last and felt a surge of relief that it was still there, still the same, but then she noticed as she got closer that it had somehow become terribly dilapidated. Paint peeled off its boards and the windows were all different, the glass curiously matted. And there, on the back porch where the dogs should be, a stranger was sitting.
Lila slowed down and took a longer route, concealing herself behind bits of shrub. She stopped dead on the corner, staring at the tree that was between her and her own driveway. It was huge, tall enough to shade right across the street, its canopy broad and majestic. She remembered it being almost invisible, tied to a stake in a little earth plot of its own. The neighbour used to water it every day. Now it was rucking the pavement with its roots.
She walked around it and up the path, seeing change everywhere, not wanting to know what it meant, though she already did.
She knocked on the new, half-round door.
It was answered by the person she had seen on the porch. She recognised the face of one of Malachi’s friends, a cookery and housebound domestic brownie whose name she’d forgotten.
“Hello, Tatty dear. He said you’d come back one day,” the faery said, stepping back to let Lila in.
Lila stared at her gentle old lady form, the unassuming way she led through the old house, up to Lila’s bedroom, and showed her in.
Nothing had been moved since she left—no, it had, because it was spotless, but otherwise no different. The imprint where she last lay on her old mattress was still there, crushed into the springs by her heavy weight. She turned around, her sense of unreality peaking. “Where am I?”
“You’re home,” the faery said kindly, patting her arm. “Shall I make you something to eat?”
Lila looked at her, completely bewildered. “But everything’s changed.”
The faery glanced down modestly. “Yes, of course. It’s been a while since you’ve been gone. We looked after everything as best we could ..
Lila shook her head, but nothing changed. “I’m sorry. How long? Where’s Max?”
The old brownie bit her lip and met Lila’s gaze with difficulty, her glamour starting to flicker so that the much smaller, rounder little sprite was visible under the human guise. “My dear, you ought to sit down perhaps?”
“I’ve been gone two days, tops,” Lila said coldly. “Now where the hell am I?” She felt Teazle press against her leg, solid and warm. He pushed his nose into her hand.
“Fifty years have passed,” the faery said gently. “The Hunter came as you asked, a few days after you had gone, and he took the moths away. His play here was brief, a year of strangeness, no more… Since then… other things have come and gone, but look, you ought to rest before…”
Lila started from her awful conclusions, with the sudden feeling of being watched, like arrows pointing at her back. Some kind of waves were being used to detect her presence in the house. “They’re coming!”
“Who dear?”
Lila’s conviction was stronger than anything she was used to feeling from herself. She heard the door break downstairs. The faery jumped with fear and cowered back against the wall.
“Ah. I forgot they might detect you so soon. They will have been watching. They fear your return. Malachi thought he might outwit them but he has been slower of late. Forgive me. Run,” she whispered to Lila. “It’s your best hope.” Then she vanished into thin air and all trace of her was gone.
Heavy footsteps came thundering up the stairs. Lila watched the door, cold and tired.
“Hell I will,” she said quietly, bending to her unzipped ammo bag. She was about to eject the cold iron rounds and equip herself with new magazines when an electromagnetic pulse struck her, its frequencies jabbering around and effectively slowing her down so much that she was unable to move. Her sight dimmed and blacked out. Her hearing faded. Slowly her nerves deadened until she was trapped in silence.
They crashed through the door and window at the same instant, timed as perfectly as only machines could be, confident in their plan and abilities, and stopped, confounded by the sight of a young woman in a fancy dress, alone, and her pet dog.
Lila’s perception was grainy and vague, her ability to move minimal.
Words came through to her as through a great distance.
“Aetheric… suppressor… backup…”
She knew they were going to shoot Teazle, that they intended to take her prisoner. Her armour told her. There was a struggle. Teazle transformed. Shots were fired. One of
them would have hit her but the armour stopped the shot when the bullet touched it through some action like a sleight of hand, palming its velocity and turning it through one hundred and eighty degrees. The bullet returned to the gun and smashed it out of the hand of the holder. At this point whatever machine they were using to stun her was disabled and full awareness returned.
She saw Teazle, bleeding heavily, fighting with both swords against a tall, humanoid machine whose speed and power exceeded his own. It looked like a perfect android, black as she’d been, and seamless. It had no hair and its features were simplified. It had shot the demon several times, even though it was now missing an arm.
The second attacker was female but otherwise the same as the android. She was struggling to recover some object from the floor using just the one hand she had left. Lila emptied her magazine on it and cut off both its arms with solid cold iron shot. She saw the severed limbs begin to slowly reconfigure themselves into different objects as they lay on the floor—and then saw the thing they’d been trying to grab: a highly altered but recognisable controller set. Lila bent first and picked this up, delivering a fatal shot of EMP right back at it through her hand.
The armless woman attempted to round-kick her as she did this, and once again the armour reversed the impact, sending her spinning away. “Stop!” said the woman, loud and persuasive but with the eternal calmness of a true machine. “We mean you no harm. You are in danger…”
Two more of them suddenly appeared at the window. They climbed in, spiderlike, and aimed their guns at her. These were different. They were all different models but shared the common black machine aspect Lila knew as well as her own skin.
“Convincing,” she said. The bag of ammo was now closer to them than her. One of them pulled it out of the way and heaved it out of the window. They closed on her. She heard Teazle’s blades carve through something with a keening whine and two heavy thuds made the floorboards shake.
“Terminate the demon,” said one of the faceless figures, keeping its twin guns aimed at her head. The other three moved to obey.
Lila could hear Teazle’s pained breathing.
They pointed another of the controller pads at her.
She saw Teazle, bracing himself against the wall, his swords lifting too slowly. He was very badly injured. His eyes blazed red, weakening as they coloured.
Rage filled her that she was going to lose him too. She wanted to slay them all and found the dagger in her hand, swinging it at the swift shape moving past her with its guns arming to finish Teazle. The desire to kill consumed her completely, their deaths all that mattered to her. She wouldn’t have cared if she’d died there too, as long as they didn’t take Teazle with them.
The dagger cut the android in two, but before the halves of it could go anywhere they were sucked into the blade itself, vanishing. It did the same with the others, in one single sweep, cutting and consuming, and then she was left standing alone in the room, Teazle sliding down the wall with exhaustion, both of them looking at the huge, twohanded sword she was holding in her one, delicate hand.
It was massive, almost taller than she was. The blade was curved, complicated. It had a grey matte surface the colour of graphite. It weighed almost nothing to move around, but this was only because her hand had become the fulcrum of an impossible balance, around which the sword and grip moved in perfect equilibrium. Its actual weight was supported in an altogether different universe. On the flat of the blade no trace remained of any of the creatures, or people, or whatever they were who had come to apprehend her. From the palm of her hand she felt the distinct presence of an andalune body, like an elf’s.
“It’s alive,” she said. Then she tried to let go of it, so she could drop down and look after Teazle, but instead of allowing her to let it go the sword became the dull old dagger in her hand. She put it in the dress’s belt and got to her knees without waiting to see more. Teazle’s swords, still glowing, were next to him. His usually bright eyes were almost closed. Under him lay two more of the smashed controller units and a lot of blood. Explosive rounds had made a mess of him.
“Tease,” she whispered to him, trying to look at his wounds. “Don’t sleep.”
“That imp,” Teazle murmured, struggling to move so that she could apply some of the medical supplies she was unpacking. “Said it was his. Do you know what it is?” He sounded like he did.
“No, what? Some faery sword?” Lila was concentrating on stopping the blood flowing out of him like water and wondering how she was going to perform some fast and necessary surgery in time to get them safely out of there. “Trust them to trick me.”
“It’s an artefact,” Teazle said, gasping in pain as she moved him about and injected him with various needles. She took some old clothes out of a drawer and tore them up, using them to staunch some of the bleeding and spraying them with something that stank before wiping him quickly. He recognised the procedures of basic sterilisation.
“And what’s that?” she made scalpels and retractors out of her fingers, spat anaesthesia into his open body, cut, picked clean, began to stitch. She was so fast she moved like a hummingbird. He wanted to tell her that with her ragged black and red hair, her strangely blue eyes, her girlish figure in its dress, that she looked just like a faery. It was peculiar to see all the technology she was made up of rise and fall out of that delicious-looking figure. But he didn’t have the energy to say it.
“It’s an aspect of god.” He knew the answer would make her shake her head and it did. He wanted to laugh but it was too painful to move. “The weapon of Intent. It has no form of its own. There’s only one. And you’ve got it.”
“Don’t be stupid.” She finished stitching. The fine metals of her hands moved into strong, soft fingers and palms that checked him with some kind of sonics. She too was caught by their appearance, looking at them as if they didn’t belong to her, and abruptly they changed back to black until she looked as she had before, just her torso the old human form of the Lila he knew—leather biker girl in somebody’s prom gown.
“More like it,” she muttered, putting her arm under his shoulders and lifting him to his feet. “You can walk?”
“Yes.”
She leant him on the wall while she picked up his swords and slid them back in their baldrics on his back. They paused in the hall to get hats and coats to conceal themselves better.
There were quite a lot of neighbours gathered in the street to see what all the shooting had been about. To her surprise they parted to let Lila pass, Teazle staggering as he leaned on her, his white hair peeking out from the brim of his oversize Stetson and over the collar of his coat where the two sword hilts stuck out awkwardly. The scarf over the lower half of his face hid him. Even so, nobody gave them much of a glance.
“Mal will find us,” she said, passing the people without looking at them. They kept staring at the house.
She didn’t know exactly where she was going. There was no car parked in her driveway. Downtown, she was sure, there’d be somewhere to go, even if they had no money, no connections, no anything. She’d find something, and meanwhile the larger number of people would help prevent an ambush assault like the one they’d just survived, so she hoped.
“Should we call the police?” she heard someone ask another as she passed. Their accents were strange.
In the background someone was sobbing hysterically. “Rogues! They were rogues! I saw them, right here in the street. They went in that house…”
Lila kept her head down and kept walking away.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JUSTINA ROBSON was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1968. She studied philosophy and linguistics at University. After only seven years of working as a temporary secretary and 2.5 million words of fiction thrown in the bin, she sold her first novel in 1999.
Since then she has won the 2000 amazon.co.uk Writers’ Bursary Award. She has also been a student (1992) and a teacher (2002, 2006) at the Arvon Foundation, in the UK. Her books have bee
n variously shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Best Novel Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the John W. Campbell Award.
In 2004 Justina was a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, on behalf of the Science Fiction Foundation.
THE NO SHOWS US. CYNIC GURU
Through the agency of arcane powers beyond imagination Zal’s band, the No Shows, have been in collaboration with realworld band Cynic Guru, so that together they are able to bring you a free track for your entertainment. Listen live to “Doom,”* at www.thenoshows.com.
This page is dedicated to Cynic Guru as a thank you for allowing themselves to be temporarily possessed by beings from beyond. They are:
Roland Hartwell (vocals, violin, guitar)
Ricky Korn (bass)
Oli Holm (drums)
Einar Johannsson (lead guitar, vocals)
They also write and record many great songs entirely their own that have nothing to do with channelling the mystical aether of imaginary space-time. More information about them, their tour dates, and their music can be found on their Web sites: www.cynicguru.com and www.myspace.com/CynicGuru.
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