Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 8

  He began to open his mouth again, but saw the look on her face and apparently thought better of it.

  Lila didn’t know if he was the only one involved or the prime mover; it didn’t matter. She didn’t trust herself to listen now. She wanted to get away from him before she had to kill him. The visions in her mind of a puppet master, pulling his invisible strings, was overpowering. Also, he was a liar, so there was no point even asking or trying to know what the extent of his influence was. No point in talking at all.

  She met his reddish-amber eyes with a gaze of her own, blinkless and silver. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ she said, deliberately using the phrase so often doled out to unsuccessful actors at auditions. The touch of bravado almost made her wince, but the new electric connection joining up the dots inside her was pleased. It wanted to have any upper hand, to hurt in any way it could. She knew its name. It was hate.

  Lila flicked her gaze to Lane. ‘Blip me all you know, or you’ll be the late Sandra Lane one more time.’

  She wasn’t sure she could beat Lane in a straight fight, but she was sure she’d be glad to go down trying, and she let Lane know it in no uncertain terms, coding it direct so there could be no room for misinterpretation of her intent.

  ‘Once was enough, thank you,’ Lane said. ‘Besides, the sooner you know, the sooner you can agree to help.’

  Lila assimilated the data, allowing none of it access to her conscious, which was more than fully occupied just getting her out of the room before she did something infinitely regrettable. She thought to herself that agreeing to help would mark one cold day in hell, and then, against all her instincts, turned her back on both of them and walked out, leaving the doors wide open behind her.

  The same, pointless recitation spun through her thoughts: leave without a word, come back when you feel like it, dump everything on me, start whining when things get tough, lie and lie and lie about everything and then have the nerve, the sheer fucking nerve to come and do puppy-dog paternity angle. Did he even know that Xaviendra was here? Did he know she was alive? Did he care? Not likely.

  But as the storm of loathing subsided she kept the useful parts and placed them carefully into the cold locker of her brain.

  One thing she did know was that whatever came out of their mouths was a lot of calculated crap whether it was true or not, so the less she heard it the better. To think she’d had moments of regret for slaughtering the ‘original’ Sandra Lane in a moment of instinctual self-preservation! It was an obvious truth that nobody came into her office without wanting something big, and never did they come offering help or payment, recompense or anything like that; especially the ones who came in without using the doors.

  Especially the ones who were dead.

  Lila didn’t buy a goddamned word of it, and she wanted nothing to do with them although that looked like it was going to be tough to ensure. No, the only way to avoid them would be to leave the Agency right now, detach from all wireless connections and move out of Bay City, probably Otopia, possibly further.

  She longed to do it, and knew she wouldn’t. Everyone she knew (not so many) or cared about (fewer) were connected heavily to everything that the loathsome Sandra had said. Besides, she was tired of the pretence that one day she’d run free. There wasn’t any freedom for people like her. Nor from them.

  She returned to Malachi’s yurt and closed her connections to the Agency and Worlddata networks. It occurred to her that Lane’s attempt to hack her might have been just for show. Lila didn’t think this was honour between machines however, only that both of them were running systems that were too resilient and automatically on the offensive. As for hacking Lane – touching via the medium of short-wave radio was more than enough.

  The yurt interior had been tidied. Of the ocean of empties there was no sign, and the icebox had its lid back in place; the faeries had been in and cleaned up. Zal was sitting on the rug where she had left him, his fingers moving on the pattern in a piano action. He was wearing his headphones and his eyes were closed.

  Lila sat down beside him, without disturbing him. The headphones tracked his hands. She guessed from the movements that he was playing a replica of Mozart’s piano – a favourite of his recently – though he hated using the virtual instruments as there was no feedback to his hands. After a moment he opened one eye and slid the ’phones off one ear.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Yes, of course, what else?’ she said. ‘Xaviendra’s father’s back. With a robot sidekick. And a conspiracy theory. At least, I think that’s what it was.’

  He nodded, as if this happened every day. ‘Oh yeah? What do they want?’

  ‘I get the impression they want me to help them against something big and scary. They have a stick, which is that they’re already in my offices pursuing me like a pair of mad aunts. And they have a carrot, which is maybe finding out that Sarasilien’s sticky fingers were in all our pies. And he’s maybe here to create one big pie. For some reason.’

  ‘Carrot pie?’ Zal wrinkled his nose, rabbitish. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  Put like that her analysis sounded crazy. She smiled. ‘I’m glad I learned to analyse so clearly from you, oh master. Anyway. Zal, do you know where Friday is?’

  Now he took the headphones off entirely and looked at her with both eyes.

  Friday was a golem. Zal had created him, accidentally, when he got stranded in Zoomenon, the dimension of the elements. Friday, rudimentary as he was, had saved Zal from disintegration by hauling him through Voidspace to the Fleet. But the reason Lila mentioned him now, the only reason he was important, was because his clay was embedded with the bones of the long dead. They had been murdered in the experiments when the Shadowkin had been created. They were the ones who didn’t survive to become the elves’ weapon against the terror Xavi named as ‘the sleeper within’. Besides the bones Friday held the remnants of their spirits and voices. Ignorant of this at first Zal had brought him to Otopia and used him as a hatstand and general prop. Lila hadn’t seen him since Zal’s last concert when the golem had stood on the stage as part of the set. Since Friday couldn’t be moved against his will she’d assumed it was okay.

  The only other thing Lila remembered about Friday was that the faeries had wanted to lose him. They said he was a chalice, a grail. They had been very interested in that. She would have asked Malachi now but he wasn’t there.

  Zal’s dark aura bloomed suddenly and made the room seem brilliant. It drew shadows towards him, as if they were comforters. Lila had to work for a moment not to start and recoil. This was new to her, new to him; she even saw his own surprise and they shared a look in which each silently acknowledged their discomfort. They were strangers in their own skins these days.

  Zal reached out and took her hand. She watched her fingers darken, her wrist submerge into the blue-black tinge halfway to the elbow. She couldn’t feel it, only the gentle pressure of his fingers and thumb as he stroked her knuckles. ‘I left him behind.’ She knew that he meant he had left Friday in the past, on the day they’d gone to Faeryland and thought they’d be back in under a week. Fifty years ago.

  ‘Yeah, but where?’ She slid close to him and they leaned on each other. She put her head on his shoulder and wriggled until she could rest half across him, ear flat to the top of his chest. He stroked her hair and she listened to the strange sigh of his heart.

  ‘At the Folly,’ he said. ‘In the basement.’

  She shuddered slightly with the mention of the old house. ‘I don’t get it. You didn’t even live there then.’

  ‘The landlord agreed to store a lot of my stuff. When I was touring I’d leave it in the basement or in one of the lockups. The energy sink meant any magical things were pretty much secure. I sent Friday there. It’s an earth energy well. He’d be right at home.’

  There was a moment’s silence as she noticed his defensiveness but didn’t pursue it, and he was relieved. ‘He’s evidence in a genocide,’ she said.


  ‘Yes, one which has never gone to trial,’ Zal said. ‘Nor will I should think. Is that why you want him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Apart from Xavi, Friday’s all there is left. But it occurs to me that there might be a lot more to him than that. I want to talk to the people inside him.’ She meant the spirits of the long-dead elves who had shared Xaviendra’s fate as the subjects of unsuccessful experiments; theirs much less successful than hers.

  ‘Most of them have gone, passed over,’ Zal said but he was uncertain.

  ‘I want to find out. Unless you know of living elves who are contemporaries of Sarasilien’s? The thing is, I used to be convinced that Sarasilien was the one who had left their bones in Zoomenon as evidence; he was the good guy in the war I imagined. But here’s Xavi, and it looks like he wasn’t much good at all. Do you think he could have had a hand in what happened to you?’

  ‘No,’ Zal said. ‘I’m not sure he had much of a hand in what happened to you either.’ He held up a hand as she started to interrupt. ‘Not that he couldn’t have been involved. Just that it violates every principle of the world that I hold to for anyone to succeed in having so much control.’

  Lila thought it over. ‘That’s just your theory though.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And if you prove otherwise I’ll be very upset.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘Are you going to prove otherwise?’

  ‘For my own satisfaction I’ll prove something,’ she said.

  Zal looked at the sand clock on Malachi’s vast and expensive banker’s desk. ‘Four a.m., still early. Let’s go dancing.’

  Lila rubbed her cheek against his own. ‘Let’s dance right here.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, pretending to be disappointed. ‘I suppose so, if we must.’

  Later, as they lay naked under the strew of their clothes she said, ‘Did you have a beer vision?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  He didn’t mention the odd sensation he had experienced while she was gone. He felt that he’d nodded off as he was playing the piano, just for an instant, and as he’d faded out there was something else, most definitely not asleep, which was looking out at the room through his eyes. It had felt very real, but he had known it was the beer. Like it said on the Dark bottles: any hallucinations, visionary experiences or out-of-body journeys resulting from consumption of our ale will be accompanied by our illusory guarantee – it ain’t real, so don’t fix it!

  Now that he thought about it, that was less comforting than it seemed.

  Lila fell asleep for a moment, her head back on his chest, then she gave a small start. ‘Teazle. What happens now? He’s alone. They’ll kill him.’

  Zal put his arms around her. ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘It felt better the other way, when we were married.’ She went back to sleep. He could feel the drop of her energy into stillness like a fall. It almost pulled him with it but he didn’t want to sleep. He stayed awake until well after dawn thinking about the dragons he’d met.

  First there was the water dragon who had eaten Arie, and now spat her up again without apparently digesting any of her more repulsive aspects. When he was her prisoner it had talked to him, after a fashion, but he’d thought it only remarked on his strange dual nature. Now he wondered if it had only been waiting for her.

  The other one was the green dragon that had been a prisoner of the three sisters and their Mirror. He knew next to nothing about that one either even though he’d spent half a century living with its aspect – a dwarf who spent all his time looking after the littlest sister, doing her cooking and cleaning while Zal had ferried her yarns from one end of the world to the other. Zal had no idea at the time that Mr V, who smoked a pipe and snored in an armchair for most of every day, was a dragon. If it hadn’t been for a competitive spirit between the three sisters that had allowed him to free Mr V from his prison he would never have known. He had no idea why they had kept Mr V in the Mirror at the endbeginning of the world, but probably there was a good reason. He’d never even found out what V stood for, though he’d tried to guess. A true name was as good as a soul-bond for the ancient creatures, so maybe it was just as well he couldn’t divine it. Even so, he wished he knew it now.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zal tried composing songs in his head. Music used to come to him so easily, but where it had been inside him there was now a soft, woolly deadness like the kind of snowfall that mutes every sound. He could only remember melodies he had recently learned, and other people’s songs that he had heard. The notes didn’t run together for him. He remembered that they used to, but not what the experience felt like. There had been music in his head, and now there wasn’t.

  He was sad, but not as sad as he might have been because of that. Worse than the dead music was a sudden lack of purpose. Even as a plaything of the faeries he had had the purpose of survival, the focus on an end to his imprisonment. Before that had been music. Before that his political passions, a zest for living, the world itself calling with its million wonders. Now he groped around for any of them, fumbling across the strangely flat zones of his inner world.

  Traces here and there, like the crumbs left over from a feast, were all he found. Their taste was almost undetectable and instantly gone. Jack the giantkiller had purged him of almost everything he had ever done, and the Three Sisters had sifted what was left and taken some of that. He remembered the middle sister saying it was for his own good. He wished he could remember what she’d taken, but he had no idea at all. He had been robbed, but what of? Fifty years, she said, you’ll never manage it if you remember everything. But that hadn’t prompted her to restore it when his time was up.

  Only Lila was sharp and clear. He felt a continuity with her. From the first second he laid eyes on her he hadn’t forgotten that. It had been the strangest and most unexpected thing he had ever encountered in his long life; a young human woman, barely a fifth his age, mostly made of metal, powered by a nuclear reactor, staring at him with disapproval from the top of her regulation Agency suit and him at the height of his fame, a demigod of the media, adored by millions and hated by a few hundred key players within interglobal politics. He elf, she robot, love at first sight.

  Hardly plain sailing, however. Lila didn’t take well to love. She preferred antagonism. Zal hadn’t minded. Antagonism meant she cared and he could live with that. It also made his demon side happy. He knew these things, and he remembered the red splash in her hair and her strange, cyberpunk mirror eyes, which he always thought of as blue, in spite of the fact he could only see his own eyes reflected in them; brown and earthen and full of self-mockery.

  Now Lila Black snored softly against him, the strange alloy of her body barely heavier than an ordinary human being, but as far from that as you could possibly be and still qualify for the term. Then he felt a strange sensation on his chest and realised his skin was wet, and that she was crying. The tears were silent and her breathing hadn’t changed, so she was trying to hide it.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Her voice was very small but controlled when she answered. ‘I’m not sure, I feel . . . like I want someone to look after me. Isn’t that stupid? I think about going home, and I don’t want to. But I do want to. I long to go. I can’t go.’

  He knew then that she was speaking of her sister. Max had died in Lila’s absence, but returned and lived again in their family home. She was a Returner. Maybe the first. Certainly not the last. ‘You don’t have to see her.’

  Lila took a deep breath, ‘She wants to see me. She keeps calling to ask when I’m coming over. She wants to make me chicken pot pie. She says she’s still got some of Mom and Dad’s old stuff and I should check to see if I want anything.’

  By the end of the final sentence her tone had started to rise and fade. She snatched another breath through her teeth and forced herself into control.

  ‘In my lifetime they died months ago. She died weeks ago. I haven’t stopped once to think. There hasn’t been time. There h
asn’t been a funeral, not for me. And now we’re at chicken pot pie and Mom’s poker books and Dad’s crystal collection and what to do about the leaking roof. I’m not there yet. I don’t think I’m even out of the front door on the day I last left home, ’cause that never ended like it was supposed to. I’m way behind. Or like I sidestepped into another world and I don’t want to go back to the old one. Can’t. Don’t want to. ’Cause it feels like if I don’t go then all that still hasn’t happened yet. And I wish it was her. I’d love to see her. I want to see her so badly. But it isn’t her, Zal, is it? How could it be? And if it isn’t her then what do I do? Do I kill her? Should I? What is she?’ She took another breath. ‘I just don’t think I can face it.’

  Zal stroked her shoulder and then let his hand press down firmly. He didn’t say anything because there wasn’t any need. She was talking to herself, he was only the catalyst.

  She snuggled closer to him, wrapping her legs around his. ‘They haven’t decided if killing a Returner is a crime or not, you know. There are squads of faith killers out to scrub the world clean of the undead, vigilantes hunting the half fey and hackers trying to grab control of cyborgs. My inbox is bursting with them. Not to mention the Hunter’s children still out there who are as close to were-creatures as I’ve ever heard of. I get letters from people complaining that their fortune tellers are holding out on them, and I get complaints inside the Agency from people wanting to know if we should make any more cyborgs or not, because there’re always candidates coming up, interesting candidates, ones who are half human or not human at all. And I know that if I say no, don’t make any more of us, you idiots, then that’s as good as saying let them die instead.’

  Zal stared at the yurt roof. He could see very well in the near darkness, almost better than in the light. It reminded him of being in his father’s hut, long ago. His father could move easily in pitch blackness, just by sensing the energy patterns of objects. He’d never mastered that himself, and had had the bruises to prove it. He just hadn’t been shadow enough.