Keeping It Real Read online

  Lila took the tape out of the wrecked unit and checked the wiring over for any unusual features. It was simple recording gear. The only addition was the fix that set it to listen in to the old bugging device. She powered the system off a port in her arm and played the tape, stopping at random to try and find anything that might be worth hearing. There was the usual stuff—people in the studio, talking, setting up equipment, playing. Nothing they said seemed important outside of the immediate moment. She speed-listened as the voices came and went and the light in the sky grew stronger, brighter, cloud clearing to the west. She listened as the studio went quiet and everyone left for home,

  Lila heard the static shuffle of the tape wheels turning, and the sounds of the building, soft like dust, and the sound of the tape itself brushing the pickups, and beneath all of that a faint trace, like the imaginary echo of a million-year-old voice talking intently in a language long forgotten before the human race or the quantum bomb had been devised. She remembered what Malachi had said about the possibility of a bomb fault in the area and took the tape herself, leaving the radio on the passenger seat and the door open, so that her break-in resembled a simple theft.

  Her shoulders bothered her less as she walked along to the main street a block away and bought a Krispy Kreme donut and some coffee. She put the donut in the pannier of her bike when she got back to it and drank the coffee there, resting her foot on the kickstand as she called Sarasilien with her discovery.

  “Good work,” he said, as standard. “Send the tape to me and I’ll process it for you. The buses have already arrived in Frisco, according to Malachi and the team, so you can catch up there anytime from now on.”

  “Any more sightings of Dar?” she asked.

  “He left with the rest of the crowd. Our agent lost him after about two hundred metres. I think you can expect to see him again.”

  Lila pulled a face. “Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Could use more sleep like you said, but fine. Gonna blow the webs out of my head now. See you later.”

  “Travel safely,” he said in elvish.

  Lila put the tape into a smartseal pack and rode it across to a local bike courier company to get it taken straight to the Incon Agency drop. Then she put her visor down and made for the coastal highway. The inland freeway was faster, but she wanted some time to herself and to play with her fears as she laid the bike over in the tight corners where the road traced the shore.

  It was lunchtime when she arrived at her destination in the hot, sun-scorched lot outside the Cherry Park Hotel. No tour bus duty for Zal and the others, strictly hotels with security and every luxury money could buy. There couldn’t be a room in the place that didn’t rent for more than an average weekly pay packet.

  Lila left the bike in the shade of the new post-colonial-styled building and met up with Malachi in a tiled courtyard at the heart of the complex, where palm trees and fountains shaded the big outdoor pool. He promised to look into the faultline personally when he got back to town, but then pushed down his trendy fly-eye sunglasses and said, “I did some background checks on the Faery fellowship of song there. Sandy’s all cool but Viridia and Poppy aren’t straight gemstone darlings. My old ash-tree heart tells me that one or both of them are Each-Uisge, but I can’t prove it. That’s one tough act Zal’s got backing him up.”

  “Ek Ooshkah?” Lila repeated quietly, not making the pronunciation of the strange Faery name very well, despite some AI assistance. “What’s that?”

  “Like kelpies, only more so. Kelpies like to drown victims but Each-Uisge are the kind who eat everything but your liver afterwards.” Malachi shrugged, his compatriots’ extreme and varied idiosyncrasies as unremarkable to him as a liking for peanut butter was to Lila. “All faeries have pretty faces and walk wingless in Otopia, but not in every realm. You’d have to see them at home or in their element to be sure.”

  “You got secrets, Malachi?” Lila teased him gently. She was reasonably sure she was not imagining the fact that the plants near to him in the decorative border were leaning in his direction.

  “Many,” he assured her, feet firmly on the ground.

  “You think they’re dangerous?”

  “Hell, no. As long as you don’t show them big lakes or the sea. And even then, you’re probably all right here in Otopia. It’s a pretty juiceless kind of place, y’know?”

  Lila glanced at the pool, remembered Poppy kissing Zal by the last one.

  Malachi shrugged, “Pools won’t do it. Too many chemicals and not enough deep, dark water. Trust me. And in their human forms they’ll be their fey, sweet selves, even on more pixie dust than you can eat.”

  “All right” ^ “Everyone else is doing okay. A few minor drug raps, some parking fines, a bad credit history and a few misspent youthful moments. Nothing to get worked up over. And before you ask, no sign of those Jayon Daga agents, but that means nothing. Unlike most faeries in Otopia, bad news elves stay bad. I gotta go get onto that tape situation. Zal’s all yours again. My tip this time—trip him up before he gets to the door and hold him down.”

  “Thanks,” Lila said, making a gun of her right forefinger and thumb and shooting him for his insolence. She checked in and found Jolene in the reception area, two Berryphones and a Fruitfly commset on the go. With sign language Lila attempted to explain that she was back and was going up to Zal’s suite. Jolene looked irritated, but it could have been from any of the conversations. She handed Lila a security card. Lila picked up the pack Malachi had taken from Solomon’s Folly for her, considered the elevator, and then hauled it up the stairs. She didn’t like having to explain that she and her bag tipped the scales beyond the elevator’s capacity every time she reached a floor.

  The penthouse was rented for the band for the duration of their stay even though two of the members both had homes in town. It had four suites, and Zal got his own. Lila’s card opened the door but after testing that she knocked and held it closed. Poppy answered it with a dazzling green smile and a squeal of delight, standing back to examine Lila’s new biker clothes.

  “You’re all back, Li! Like the leathers.” Poppy ushered her in and offered her a glass of some cocktail from a big jar on one of the tables where several brightly coloured pitchers lay in ice water.

  “Hey,” Lila said, glad to see her, whatever Malachi’s suspicions were. “You were great last night.”

  “Yeah, yeah, just warming up,” Poppy hummed. “Heard you had a bad fall. Okay now?”

  “Sure.” Lila hung onto the strap of her bag to show it was heavy.

  “Sorry, sugar,” Poppy said and pointed. “Go right in there. I’ll get you something cold.”

  “Thanks, nothing strong,” Lila said and went where she was told.

  It was the master bedroom. The bed was messed up and she could hear water running. Trust Poppy, Lila thought, getting some sharp words ready and starting to lift her bag back up when the water stopped. She didn’t mean to exactly, but she found she was still standing there when Zal appeared, wet and naked except for the short towel around his waist.

  “Agent Black, don’t you people ever knock?”

  “Poppy told me this was my room. And you can knock off the Agent Black stuff. I think we deserve first-name terms, don’t you?” Lila surprised even herself with her tart response.

  Zal grinned. “You’re so bolshy. I like that. I should thank you for this too.” He turned and showed her the dark blue-black bruises on the backs of his legs and under his shoulders where she’d gripped him so hard for so long. But although they were bad they didn’t catch her attention at all compared to the liquid fire tattoo that covered the back of his shoulders. It fanned out in demon licks and tapered along the length of his spine until the tail of it vanished into the green band of the towel. It looked like it was a clear window of living skin beneath which burned a yellow and orange fire.

  “What is that?”


  “Oh that.” He made a slight shrug. “It’s a demon thing.”

  She got the clear impression it was so familiar to him that he’d forgotten about it, and that he wouldn’t have shown her if he’d been thinking more clearly.

  He seemed annoyed with himself as he lay back on the bed and turned the TV on with the remote control. “So,” he said. “Not your room. Next door.”

  His hands looked normal. Both of them.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, letting the bag slide down to the floor. She went forward to see for herself.

  “Fine.” He held them both out for her to see. “Apart from my hangover. How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, keeping a polite distance. “Tired.”

  “Want to sleep with me?” He gestured with one hand at the massive expanse of linen and pillows beside him. “I mean sleep too. Sleep. Switch off. Although that biker gear is nice. I like leather and big zips on a woman.”

  “Zo na kinkirien,” Lila said, glancing at the towel. “But you and I have some talking to do.”

  “We have all kinds of things to do,” Zal said. “But if you don’t mind I’m going to do mine horizontally. My head hurts.” He slid down into the sheets and pulled the towel off, throwing it onto the floor.

  “It can wait a couple of hours,” Lila said. She felt the noose of the Game around her neck tugging with all this back-and-forth play, and hated it. She would have liked to stay, so she made herself pick up the bag and go out into the smaller room that waited for her. She gave Poppy a glare on her way through but the Faery simply smiled and shrugged.

  “What? I pointed to where you wanted to go.”

  “You’re in trouble,” Lila told her. She closed the door and changed out of her bike gear into casual clothes. A message icon arrived in the upper right quadrant of her vision to tell her that the tape had arrived safely in the audio lab. Lila took a deep breath and a few minutes to look through her personal effects and check them—everything was in place and somebody had put the silver framed photo of Okie in the bag as well, assuming it was hers. She took the picture out, placing it in between clothes in her bag, and put the frame into one of the empty drawers on her dresser, then called the pet resort to find out how Okie was doing in her absence. He was fine. She felt slightly disappointed, and to get back her self-control after that and Zal she made herself go through a full and unnecessary systems-check.

  Dr Williams called her in the middle of it. “You shouldn’t be back out there,” she said wearily. “I recommended against it. But you heard all this as you were leaving me in a cloud of exhaust fumes early this morning. How are you?”

  “Perfectly well.”

  “Never worse news to my ears,” the old woman said with a sigh. “Sarasilien told me that you encountered Dar again. How was that?”

  “He shot me.” Lila could say it without a single flinch. She smiled, proud of herself.

  “Is that all? My my, how disappointing for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it says on the tin. How is Zal?”

  “The usual obnoxious two-tone reactions.”

  “To which you haven’t reacted a bit.”

  “I’m keeping everything professional.”

  “Lila.” Dr Williams became kind. “Could you tell me about what happened in the forest, please?”

  “I did a report. And you downloaded the rest from my Al-self. It’s all in there.”

  “My eyes are old and tired, my neurons weary of the cool logics of AI analysis—indulge me.”

  “Indulge me indulge me, or, you’re busted fool, now indulge me?”

  “That kind of thing.”

  Lila closed down her shooting array and watched the guns vanish to their places inside her leg cavities. She rolled her sleeves back down over the scars on the remaining flesh of her arms as the synthetic skin reassembled itself over the hidden components beneath. Although it didn’t hurt she massaged her shoulder which had become stiff, though it was well healed from the arrow. “All right. Zal ran off into the woods. I followed him. He drew a lot of elemental forces to try and stop me, or, well, maybe they tried to stop me on their own but I passed them okay. He made a circle and got high on elemental action somehow. I don’t know how or what that was about. Dar and his partner were hunting us down. I neutralised her. A ghost came and threatened Zal so I broke the circle and—”

  “That’s enough of that,” Dr Williams said. “Could you tell me about the elf agent?”

  “Oh, she was Jayon Daga’s usual. Red hair, blue eyes, full of contempt, hated me for all the obvious reasons.”

  “And you did what to her?”

  “I shot her full of gengineered Pentothal and left her all asleep in a shady grove. She’ll be fine.”

  “And Dar shot you?”

  “I think he meant to hit Zal,” but Lila wavered as she stated the obvious. She started to doubt whether Dar was that bad a shot, even in the circumstances—or else it was the only shot he could get, and he took it no matter that she was in the way. It occurred to her that perhaps Dar had deliberately shot through her. A shiver ran across her skin, real and synthetic.

  “Are you sure it was Dar?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’d know him anywhere,” Lila said shortly.

  “And then you carried Zal away.”

  “He was unconscious, or something like that. I…” But she didn’t really remember anything other than a blur. “There was a… I went down along what I thought was the house track and I…” Unaccountably, Lila felt that she was about to cry. She didn’t know why, only that she had this feeling when she remembered flashes of clarity about running down the hillside. She tried again. “You can get across country to the NSA Incon building because it backs onto the Wildlife Reserve on the edge of town, so I went all the way around because I couldn’t be seen.”

  “You went thirty klicks out of your way,” Dr Williams said. “You carried Zal for thirty-nine kilometres, with an arrow through your shoulder as your body tore itself apart.”

  “It was the stupid program,” Lila said. “It wouldn’t reset itself. I would have gone back to the house otherwise,”

  “Yes, of course.”

  But now Lila wasn’t sure about that. “I won’t be using it again,” she said.

  “Would you like to know the status of the debugging report, Lila?”

  “No,” she said. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I want you to come back alive and I want Zal to survive you,” Dr Williams said. “And as long as you think everything else is at fault, that gets less likely.”

  Lila cut the connection and sat, listening to Poppy and Viridia talking in the main room, the clink of their glasses and their easy laughter. She was insulted, frankly, that Dr Williams thought that she was in the grip of some big psychological trauma that could drive her to do something as crazy as take Zal on a cross-country run in the middle of a fight. The woman was obsessed. How could she make a last remark about Zal surviving her? That was ridiculous.

  Lila contemplated making an official complaint about the devious manipulation of psychologists, but of course that would only go through Dr Williams, so what was the point?

  An elegant full-length mirror with a gold Baroque border standing in the corner of the room showed her sitting bold upright, rigid as a post. The magical stain in her hair and skin looked like a splash of blood. Lila’s own silver eyes stared at her, reflecting the mirror’s reflection into an infinite regress. She got up and covered the mirror with a towel from the bathroom, unable to suppress a shudder—she was an idiot to think that Zal flirted with her. A cold, noxious feeling ran through her and she felt ugly and angry.

  She walked back into Zal’s room and snapped the TV off.

  “What’s the matter now?” he said, rolling from his side onto his back. “I thought you’d done the decent thing and left me to suffer in peace.”

  “I have drugs that can fix that,”
she said and sat down on the opposite side of the bed to the one he was on. She held up her hand and showed him the hypodermic which she’d used on Dar’s partner, glad to see him look quickly away. “I want my answers.”

  “Do you? About what?” He put one hand behind his head. His flaxen hair was drying. It was longer than she’d thought and his skin was paler, although it had some hints of Otopian tan about it on the face and hands. His large, dark eyes ignored her effort to engage them and stared up into the princess canopy which draped and belled over the bedhead. She felt no hint of glamour from him at all. He did a pretty good impression of being utterly uninterested. She had never seen anyone more attractive than Zal at that moment, and it felt like a punch in the face.

  “Let’s start with why you ran off to the woods.”

  “Let’s say I’m not going to explain it. Perhaps I think it’s enough that you see me in all my weaknesses without having to label them for you so that you can put them into your case file and think you know me, Agent.”

  “Well, will you be doing it again? Can I expect to get shot more times because you put us both in positions of needless danger?”

  “No doubt,” he said. “And no doubt I will be lying here thanking you for saving me more times. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? And after a few more sessions you can pity me and fall in love with me, and I can feel grateful and emasculated and throw myself into further extremes to prove my virility.”

  “You know the whole script,” Lila said, well aware that he was diverting her effortlessly. She felt as though she was a runaway train and at the same time was trying to change the points on her own tracks. The Game magic wanted to trip her up every which way. She had to think twice about every word she said. “We can change it. Let’s finish the Game for a start.”