Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Read online

  Lila nodded. ‘Okay. And what about us?’

  The girl sighed through her nose. ‘I want a family-size veggie pizza with extra cheese and hot peppers and a large vanilla milkshake and a spinach lasagna with hot sauce and a large portion of angel cake with the faery flumsie on the side and a filter coffee, decaf, extra sugar.’

  Zal sat down and looped his arms around his raised knees. He sighed with resignation. ‘She’s going to be expensive. Elephant-sized orders. Private schooling . . . ponies . . .’

  Lila frowned her own frown in return. ‘Jalapenos or the kind you shake on?’

  ‘Both,’ the girl said. She looked at Zal with an almost comical high flip of her eyebrows. ‘Ain’t nothing going on in his head.’

  Then she fixed her gaze on Lila and it was back to scowling. ‘You’re like a town on Friday night, though. But it’s distant, and it’s fast. So fast. Sounds like the wind.’

  ‘How many bedrooms are there?’ Zal asked her.

  ‘Two,’ the girl said, not moving an inch. ‘A king size and a twin. Just one bathroom though.’

  Lila sighed. She felt like she was doing the right thing, even though she had no idea what she was doing except tagging after Zal. ‘Okay. Go and stick your hand on the door and it’ll log you as a keyholder. The pizza’ll be here in ten minutes. I tipped them so you don’t need to. They’ll leave it on the porch and go. And the biggest bed is mine.’

  ‘Ours,’ Zal objected.

  ‘Eww,’ the eyes rolled again.

  ‘What shall we call you?’ Lila asked. ‘Beanbag Girl?’

  ‘Emmy.’

  ‘Is that your name?’ She couldn’t resist it.

  ‘It’s what you’re getting.’

  ‘Sassy,’ Lila said. ‘Definitely a Sassy. Well, so long, Sassy. While you’re up here you could open up the windows and sweep the leaves off the deck. We’ll be back later tonight. Don’t stay up past ten.’

  ‘You’re not my Mom.’

  Zal glanced at Lila for the first time since they’d started talking and got to his feet. ‘We should go find Mr Head.’

  Lila nodded and gave a last look at the beanbag and its fierce eyes. ‘Windows,’ she said firmly. ‘Deck.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘What just happened?’ Lila asked, of herself as much as Zal. She kicked her leg over the front of the bike and sat down in a familiar gesture that mirrored Zal’s mount-up action over the back. They sat down at the same moment and the engine vibrated briefly into its warm-up sequence until there was no sound left but a feathery whisper that was the opposite of the noise Lila thought bikes should make. Internally she edited that part of the world’s soundtrack and replaced it with a properly throaty snarl. On the plus side it meant they could actually talk to each other at low speeds without having to scream.

  Zal just shook his head. ‘If you have to ask . . .’

  ‘All I need,’ Lila said, backing them up with dainty pushes of her toes into the rough gravel. She was grateful Zal was so light. In spite of the fact that she felt the girl was in control of everything that had just happened she found that she didn’t mind. That in itself rang warning bells, but they fell on ears that had become strangely deaf. She suspected magic, and then the suspicion ran out of her mind and into the same place where unwanted appointments and obligations usually drained away. No matter how she tried she couldn’t grip the notion.

  ‘You protest too much,’ Zal said mildly, next to her ear, another short form. ‘Don’t you feel better?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She let the bike drift forward and put her feet on the pegs, feeling the minidress start to ripple in the wind. She did feel better. And that was odd too.

  ‘Blood,’ Zal said. ‘Stone.’

  ‘Fiddlededee,’ Lila replied. She wasn’t like him, taking happiness where it could be found as if it were pennies on the street. But now that she thought of it, that wasn’t a good trait. She did what she always did in moments of self-doubt and accelerated.

  You could do a ton on these little backwoods roads, leaning over, a split inch from losing your knees, sliding out on the corners towards the drop-offs into the dark woods with the slow drift of a surfer on the face of a massive wave. It was fun, when the numbers about survival went uncertain and the red flashed and the elf was sufficiently exhilarated so that he didn’t speak, just squeezed her tight and laughed. She felt like she was flying, like she was free. It was how they were meant to be.

  Unfortunately a ton brought the slowed up, crunched down flatness of normality back that much faster. There was a limit to the number of speeding tickets she could avoid and not appear to be taking the piss, so she was forced to slow down as they reached the suburban expressway and begin the long wind south to Solomon’s Folly on the other side of the city. The bike ought to fly, she was convinced of it. Something she had to work on. For now though it was weaving through the lanes and finding the best, cleanest, most beautiful path through the traffic that had to satisfy her will.

  ‘Cyborg thing?’ she said as they slid, fishlike, between cars on the Avenue at the heart of the fashion district – a place she’d never set foot to pavement. ‘Harmless?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zal said, ignoring all the attention he was attracting from the promenading Pretty People who adorned the streets and the drifting two-storey high show cars. They didn’t know who he was, but he still made a sight in the human world. There was a noticeable lack of genuine fey and hundreds of human wannabes. Lila counted.

  Among the ranks of the more ordinary mortals, demons walked in perfect guises. She knew them only because of the way they stared at her, fixated. They knew already about Teazle, she thought. They knew she was deposed, and Zal too. If they hadn’t been together she would have expected an attack. Perhaps her reputation as a killer would be enough to stop a bloodbath on the streets. She’d have to hope so.

  ‘Do you think I look harmless to them?’ she spoke Demonic, so that Zal would know what she meant.

  Her own outfit was getting noted. Not for any good reasons. She was gratified to find she couldn’t care less. A flashboy weaving on a floatboard, camera welded to his face, shifted close, taking pictures. She cut her face out of them all even as they arrived on his hard drive and felt a slight unease at her own virtuosity. There’d been a time when even she hadn’t had the connection speed and ability to hack like that. Maybe technology had improved. Maybe she had, when she wasn’t looking.

  ‘I don’t think,’ he said. ‘That’s the road to hell.’

  ‘We’re already on that,’ Lila said, seeing the lights change, the cars and floats piling up into stacks on all sides, grateful passengers ogling and preening as they stopped to check each other out at the halfway point of the promenade.

  ‘It’s all twaddle,’ Zal said, referring to the road and its sights with only a trace of envy. ‘But it impresses people.’

  ‘Got that right.’ Lila was forced to slow even more. She squeezed them between a limousine transporting several hot tubs filled with bathing-suited models and a long, low-deck car featuring various celebrities surrounded by posing dancers. There were a few real fey among those, looking as vainly glamorous as ever, although carefully toned so as not to draw too much attention from their paying hosts.

  She passed and they were nearly clear when a small, fishlike sports car with an open top and an outrageously impractical spoiler cut in front of her with centimetres to spare as it moved to a more prestigious lane. A few kilometres per hour over fifty and the spoiler’s downforce would probably glue the chassis to the road. At these speeds however, it was merely architectural. Its glassine panels ejected a mist of softly scented water vapour, and into this projected what she assumed from the renaissance painting style to be the tastefully arty end of holoporn. The sight was so sudden and arresting that she almost crashed. As it was she missed by fractions of a millimetre, taking the outside, her blood boiling. They drew alongside each other at the red light.

  Lila’s swear words were cut off as well b
y the passenger, who dangled her hand out of the car, showing off diamonds. She shrieked like an hysteric as Lila opened her mouth and then the driver’s voice, rough from too many late nights, said, ‘Hey, isn’t that an elf?’

  Zal turned to the driver. ‘I’m not an elf. There are no elves in Otopia.’

  ‘You look familiar,’ the man said as the light changed. He kept up even as Lila began to accelerate past another limo and its one-car carnival. ‘Are you one of those fey that can be other things, or a Makeover? Yeah, I know, you’re a Makeover, sure, one of those retro ones that looks like that rock guy, what was his name? You know . . .’ He turned to his companion who was sulkily examining the car in front – a large tank filled with mermen and mermaids and enough tropical fish for a minor reef. ‘Whatsisname?’

  Lila eased off the speed, curiosity getting the better of her.

  The passenger turned her lovely head with its perfect skin. She had diamond-enhanced eyes – every gem twinkling in the iris, bent flashes of light to the tips of her long elegant eyebrows where they stuck out in an unreal sweep of multicoloured fibreoptic feathers. ‘Get a mempack, cupcake. Zal. Zal of The No Shows. They were like, regal.’ She inspected Zal thoroughly, with a professional impersonality, used to assessing every tiny angle and relation of a body’s parts and calculating its net beauty in dollars per minute. ‘Super-good copy too. Who’s your surgeon, honey?’

  ‘There’s a copy of me?’ Zal asked, incredulous for a second.

  ‘Seriously,’ said the woman, although she drawled it out so that it sounded more like see-ree-uss-lee. ‘Still rare though. I only ever saw one other. Nice choice. Great value. Tell me, were you tall to start with or was it a whole body stretch? Those are so goddamn painful.’ She shifted her legs – bare except for a fine silvery net – and unconsciously pressed them together.

  ‘I was just like this to start with,’ Zal assured her. Lila heard his tone change and pushed through the lines, taking them across the junction on the cusp of a red light and pushing forward to saner streets.

  ‘Hey, call me! I can get work for you!’ the woman screeched. ‘Or blip me that doctor’s name!’

  Lila pretended she didn’t hear the protests and surprise that followed them as the woman discovered Zal was not connected to the Otopia Tree public internet and didn’t show up on any registry. She routed the messages people were trying to send him into a junkyard address that would shortly return the kind of spamblurts that would take a day to purge. As she did so she felt him lean close again. It occurred to her that her reaction was needless and territorial. She was actually threatened by those vapid, pointless people. She accelerated.

  ‘There’s a copy of me,’ he said proudly.

  ‘At least she knew who you were.’ Lila wasn’t sure if he were pleased or appalled; she thought both.

  ‘Her memory pack knew. It probably even knows who Michael Jackson was.’

  ‘Who?’ she looked it up quickly, turning them away from the rows of opening restaurants and clubs, the glossy frontages of the hotelinos stretching all the way crosstown, and smoothed them up the ramp to the expressway and the glorious illusion of freedom in the fast lane.

  ‘Ha ha. You know I was thinking about making a comeback. Maybe.’

  ‘Hasn’t the world moved on some?’ She had no idea about the state of the music industry, she only knew the population statistics for the undead, the Hunter’s children and the groups who had risen up to hate or champion them. She knew about crime, struggle and two-faced, lying elf scum that she was so angry with she could have burned them to toast. This whole subject change put her off balance. Her snippiness made her even more annoyed.

  There was a copy of Zal. Who? What for?

  ‘Lila,’ he said. ‘What rattled you?’

  ‘Nothing.’ They rose onto the elevated sections that overshot the city’s oldest quarter and tiled roofs flickered past, beneath the wheels. But she didn’t want to lie to him. They’d been far enough apart already. ‘Everything.’ She searched around in the uncomfortable feeling. It was like she was grubbing around a trash sack in the dark, trying to tell what was in there. ‘Everything changed. I want something to stay where it is.’

  ‘Me?’ He was gentle, enquiring. It didn’t justify the outburst that suddenly ripped free of her.

  ‘Do you know that since I met you there hasn’t been a day I haven’t been fighting to save you from – whatever? I mean, I got that job, a temporary assignment, and then it’s just one damn thing after another. When is it going to end? And you want to get out there again? With those – morons? Did you know there are people who specialise in killing outworlders to the tune of eight or twelve a week in this city alone? The morgue is filled to bursting with corpses awaiting repatriation. And you want to get up in lights and shout out that you’re here again? When a dozen conspiracy sites even name you as a primary cause of the Hunter’s Reign because you vanish and hey presto, he appears and ruins the whole human world for them in one little year. And what, after fifty years of trouble, could possibly top that? I’ll tell you what. The returning dead. And you. Returning. Dead or not dead. Who cares?’ Only the fact that she was able to run a counter-vibration stopped the fact that she was shaking from disrupting the bike’s effortless float. ‘Oh, what the hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Do what you like.’

  After that, to top everything, she felt ashamed of herself. Rather than cause any more damage, she shut her mouth firmly and kept her gaze on the road, marking the miles, checking the route, watching the map rotate and move their position closer and closer to that bloody awful house. Zal didn’t say anything in response but he didn’t hug her any less. After they had crossed the river and most of the tributaries between the city and the coastal parks he said, ‘It’s not that I don’t feel afraid of things. But if I give in, then I lose, they win and I get to die in the other way, the worse way. A demon can’t be otherwise.’

  ‘It isn’t the demon,’ she said, sorry and resigned. ‘It’s just you. And me. Don’t quit, don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give a shit. Die on your feet and take ’em all with you if they don’t like it. I guess I thought that after all that there’d be an end to it. We’d go home and there’d be this peace. It’d be over.’

  ‘The fat lady would sing songs from the shows.’

  ‘Yeah, and then we’d go crazy with boredom and chew our own legs off.’

  They had reached the turn. Silently they drifted into the deep shadows of the lane where the overhanging trees blotted out most of the sky. The brief lift of spirits Lila had felt a moment before vanished as she looked into the overgrown woodlands. An air of neglect and forgetting that had been there previously had matured into sullen hostility and a deep stillness she didn’t remember. The last time she’d been on this road was in Malachi’s car, and they’d burnt rubber to escape the incomprehensible, malevolent intentions of the elemental creatures that had filled the woodland. She looked now for the stag, for signs of a huge body made of mud and branches, but there was no sign of any kind of life, even the wrong kind. Only the bike tyres whispered and hummed on the cracked asphalt, spitting gravel.

  ‘Stop,’ Zal said. He was whispering but she heard him. As she pulled the brake levers she saw a film of darkness cover her hands – Zal’s andalune body, spreading out. He was including her to enhance her pitiful aetheric senses. They slowed and came to a halt. She put her feet down and waited, wishing the damn bike had a sound again, so that it could at least feel alive and that they were not suddenly abandoned.

  ‘What?’ she prompted, hoping this stop would be short.

  She didn’t like to think about how spooked the place made her. Compared to human normal she was almost invulnerable, but here she felt very vulnerable, out of her depth. She looked up at the sky for reassurance, but between the heavy foliage the little chinks of blue and white were coated with a brownish green taint. Much as she attempted to formulate a proof of the phenomenon in physical terms, she failed
. The forest was cutting down the light, increasing the shadows under its branches. Now that she looked more closely she saw that what plants remained on the ground were dying or dead. The only place they flourished was beside the road where there was still a channel of sunlight. There was a profound sensation of being utterly adrift from civilisation, even though the expressway wasn’t even a mile distant, and the city itself just beyond. They could have been in the wilderness. Also, her signalling systems were having major connection problems reaching outside links and she knew for certain there was a support mast on the hill behind them relaying traffic at maximum width for the southern half of the city. Part of it was due to Zal – whereas he used to be dampened by metals, aetherically neutered, now he had the power to seriously dampen their effects in return – but mostly, she knew, it was the damn woods.

  Zal leaned back away from her and turned, looking all around them. ‘That’s so strange,’ he said, quietly, his words swallowed instantly by the swamp of silence. They sounded deadened even as they came out of his mouth. ‘When I was here before I felt the earth element, though it always had this tinge of something unusual about it. I didn’t really care at the time. Now that’s much stronger, and the secondary elements are here in force: wood, a lot of wood, and that’s tainted too, with the same thing.’

  ‘I don’t see the ghosts.’ She scanned on maximum detection levels, all frequencies. Ghosts could sometimes register on extreme electromagnetic spectra and occasionally traces of their passing could be perceived as absence of information, gaps in the signals. But unless you were almost inside one or happened to catch it against a background of some strong radiation, you’d be lucky to notice a thing.