Keeping It Real Read online

  She’d never seen them cluster and work together so fiercely before. Although it hurt and made life difficult, once she realised what it was she was able to stand up and step back to the path to clear her eyes. When she had she was able to look into the shadows.

  Earth, air and stone spirits clustered thickly beneath the trees protection, shifting restlessly from form to form, from mist to nothing and back again. Eyes that were empty spaces in nebulous bodies glared at her, ballooned and vanished only to reappear a moment later. Somewhere close by a wood ghost clattered its flutelike bones against living treetrunks. Lila heard an eagle cry out from far above her, alarmed by the presence of so much primordial force in one spot.

  She put her foot off the path and immediately they came together again, all the small spirits rushing to create the semi-material body of a giant elk, its rack of antlers lowered against her. Lila could only think that Zal was getting away from her and her chances of catching him up or even finding him must be vanishing with every second.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re in my way.” She stepped forward, braced her arms against the peculiar sponginess of the elk’s form and pushed.

  The resistance was ferocious. Lila had no idea that flitting things like elementals could band together and create something so physically strong, not in Otopia anyway. She dug her feet into the ground for more purchase but the soil began to shift under her as it was pulled apart from below. In a few more moments she’d have nothing to stand on.

  Lila engaged full power and shoved. Pain like raw fire flared along her spine and in her hips as the elk’s insubstance held for an instant and trapped her in a vice between implacable machine and immovable energy. Then all resistance vanished as the elk form fell into pieces. Lila fell forward with a surge, tripping and sliding on the turbulent ground, feeling like a rider on an uncontrollable horse. She just managed to keep her footing and weave between the trees, moving fast enough to keep the elementals from coalescing again, although they harried her as best they could. They tore her hair, threw leaves, sticks and small branches at her, tried to move the stones under her feet as she ran.

  Zal must have been tiring, because there were clues for Lila to see: a snapped twig, a footprint in flattened grass… And then she came out into a little glade very unexpectedly. She slid down a short embankment and into the low point of a dip in the ground, stopping just in front of Zal. He was sitting with his head thrown back, gasping for breath, sweat running off him. There was a strange silence and stillness—Lila realised it was because the elementals had stopped their pestering.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She’d finally come to the end of her patience. Her vision was covered in red warning readouts which were completely unnecessary because she could feel the damage the run had done to her.

  Zal glanced at her, slightly grey beneath the flush of effort. For the first time she saw his cool crack at the edges. “I have to be here,” he said shortly. “I’m not going anywhere else. I suppose you can hang around and watch if you want to, but I’d prefer it if you stood outside the circle. I’m sure you would too.” He got up and brushed himself down with something like self-consciousness. Then, without asking her again, he started talking elvish. Or rather, he didn’t speak it, he sang it, as though it was demonic, and the lilting peculiar harmonics of the two combined to make the hair on Lila’s neck stand up. Suddenly she had no problem at all getting out of the way—none of her flesh and bone wanted to be inside the space he was creating with his spell.

  Outside the range of his influence, the elementals returned in force, but although they crawled and clawed over her with semi-solid fingers their real interest lay beyond the heat shimmer of the magical barrier Zal had sketched around himself. Like her, they watched with avid curiosity.

  The peculiarity of it didn’t strike her immediately—Lila was not familiar with magic in a user’s way—but then it dawned on her that probably, if he were going to do anything important, she should have been inside the circle, surely, and not outside where she was unprotected. But on the heels of that thought she realised that she was protected after all, because he’d reversed the normal order of things. The circle that Zal had cast put the world inside it. He was the one outside.

  “Hey!” she said, moving automatically into a state where what weaponry she had was armed. “I say again—what the hell?”

  But Zal wasn’t able to hear her, or more likely didn’t care. Then, one by one, the elementals of the forest began to slip past Lila, into his space. From their touches she could sense their eagerness to obey the summons of his song. Once they passed the barrier their manifestation changed. On Lila’s human Earth, the fifth world of Otopia, elemental beings had wispy and ethereal presences. But Zal had taken his circle out of Earth’s domain. It was part of the elemental’s home system now—a part of First Realm: Zoomenon.

  The elementals came into their true form and power. Wood, metal, earth, water, air, fire. From her studies Lila knew that these beings didn’t exist as separated entities in Zoomenon and this was true, she saw now. They united instantly into a multicoloured rainbow haze of energy, which pulsed and danced like the Northern Lights on a dark winter night. She saw Zal through the brilliant light, bathing in it, his head thrown back in abandonment, and belatedly recognised that what she was looking at was the junkie’s hit.

  The elemental forces coiled over him eagerly and poured in through his nostrils, mouth, eyes and ears, exiting through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet to circle around and fly at him again. Zal shook where he stood, fell to his knees, and then over onto his face.

  Lila was numb with shock when she heard the arrow whip past her ear, saw it rebound from the magical field of the circle and fall at her feet. As it touched the ground it became a snake, yellow and black striped, and coiled swiftly away from her into the undergrowth. Then her radar found the elf assassins, one coming through the treetops, the other, who had shot, making its way along the ground.

  She cancelled all her fright readouts and set out for the ground walker at a dead run, flechette clips arming, switching her body’s gross and fine motor controls over to her Al-self’s superior communications speeds: it could outdo her natural neurons by a factor of two. Her reactor increased output and she became instantly faster and stronger, so when the arrow that was meant for her came flying towards her she was able to bat it aside without losing momentum. The enchanted flight turned back to search for her, but found the armour on her back suddenly too hard, too electromagnetically polarised for its magical fields to penetrate. It blew into dust as Lila saw her quarry step forth casually into full view with the aloof poise of every miserable High Elf she’d ever known. Cold fear drenched her inside, but the machine parts of her didn’t care about that; they gave her more power than she could handle.

  At least, she consoled herself, she didn’t know this one personally. The elf woman’s long ears were pierced and decorated with hawk-feathers and her hair had been tamed with dark wax and braided tightly into a queue that hung across her shoulder. Her earth-toned clothes flickered with the shadows of forests that grew in Alfheim, not the Otopian woodland she stood in now.

  “Lila Black,” said this monstrosity, as though announcing the name of a new and particularly unsavoury insect species she had just discovered.

  “Haven’t got time,” Lila said, breaking the conversational charm. She knew that this one intended to distract her while the other waited for Zal’s circle to break down. That would happen if he lost consciousness and, having seen what he was doing, she didn’t hold out much hope of that being anything other than a matter of time.

  The elf agent’s blue eyes flashed disdainfully, and with insouciant ease she crouched and made a six-metre vertical jump, making for the higher branches of the tree she stood beneath, where a heavyweight like Lila would have no chance of following. She was lithe and trained. Lila was nuclear-powered. She matched the jump and grabbed hold of the elf’s shoulder
s without making any effort to remain in the tree. As they fell back down they wrestled fiercely, but Lila was much stronger and when they hit the soft forest floor Lila ended up on top. She heard the breath whoosh out of the elf’s narrow frame with satisfaction. The woman struggled to get out from under, but gave it up when she realised she couldn’t budge Lila’s mass.

  “What are you going to do?” she hissed. “Sit on me all night?”

  Lila didn’t feel like talking. Part of her attention was focused on tracking the other elf and it was very close to the circle glade. She had no way of seeing magic, so she didn’t know what was happening to Zal. She had no ropes on her. Although she felt something like a qualm it was shortlived. She extended a needle from her right thumb and injected the elf at the vein in her neck with a short-term shot of a gengineered knockout. It was the kind of technological weapon elves despised the most, but Lila didn’t care about the woman’s honour at this moment.

  She ran back towards the glade and then began to notice other, peculiar changes in the wood. It was becoming misty and a new breeze from the sea had come up in the last few minutes. Gulls shrieked overhead, although she couldn’t see them with ordinary eyes. Then, aside from her new target and to her left, she saw an animal spirit in the shadows. The elf she was fixated on saw it too. It moved around and put the circle between itself and Lila. Lila knew Zal wasn’t out yet. She could see him, lying on his back, laughing in the delirious way of people who don’t know if they’re happy or sad, or are much too much of both.

  The animal spirit, not of any of the Seven Kingdoms, a curious, Interstitial being from the gaps where ghosts and other lost traces lingered, approached the circle. It was huge, a Megaceros, with a rack of antlers so large that it could not have moved in any ordinary wood, but the trees and rocks presented no obstacle to its passage. It didn’t truly walk in the space and time of any of the realms. A thick forestal mist was emanating from its flanks in huge, stately billows. Rain fell from its antlers. Its eye sockets, like those of all ghosts, were black and empty.

  Lila was more worried about it than the elf now. Ghosts had the cold breath that killed everything it touched, if they chose to exhale. There was no scientific nor magical ward against it. There was no way to talk to a ghost—it was supposed they were beyond time. There was no way to know what ghosts wanted, or needed, or what might turn them aside from the things which came to interest them. Although the elf and its weapons could not cross the circle that protected the world from Zal, the ghost could.

  It moved with a stately progress. Its head tilted to one side as it listened closely, although if Zal were still singing it was a song Lila couldn’t hear. She ran as fast as she could, breaking small branches that were in her way and vaporising a stand of elder that stood between her and the circle wall with a light-pulse charge, crashing through the remains in a dust of black particles and smoke. She threw herself headlong at the magical barrier, not knowing if she could get through it, or what spells made it. At the last instant she flung her arms up, elbows forward, to protect her face, picked up her feet and relied on her weight and momentum to do the rest. As she closed her eyes the last image she’d seen remained impressed on her. She could see the elf on the other side of the circle. His face was distorted by the hazy water effects of the aetheric wall, but she rather thought that improved it a great deal, as did the expression it wore—a mixture of dismay and surprise—which she would have given anything to see two years ago, before its porcelain beauty became a regular feature of her nightmares.

  Then Zal’s forcefield caught her and she felt the struggle between its grip on her flesh and the robotics that it couldn’t command, because they weren’t alive. It began to tear her apart. Her head filled with a scream of light and pain but she was too heavy and too much metal. The elf magic was repelled by the metal and silicon and coiled away through skin and bone, fleeing back to its place in the wall as she hurtled through in slow time.

  She felt like it had skinned her, but when she landed and rolled up next to Zal’s twitching body she could still move and most systems, even though they were all redlined, were still working. She fetched up on the edge of Zal’s hollow, and lifted her face out of the dry ground, feeling steam rising from the earth under her face, smelling the healthy, mouldy odour of the soil. Sensors on her back relayed the cause—she was under another sun and it was beating down, hot as hell, baking her under an indigo sky.

  She looked up. The animal spirit was moving close, the barrier visible through its aethereal form as it passed through. She saw the sweat on Zal’s skin beginning to freeze where his hand was flung out close to the wet nostrils of its muzzle as it put its head down towards him, ears cocked, replying to some demand he was making as the elemental rainbow coruscated in and out of his open mouth. He was smiling, and his eyes were shut, but she didn’t think he was unconscious.

  Lila tried to get to her feet. Pain seared her back and legs so badly she couldn’t. She issued silent commands to her med units to numb her but they didn’t respond. The muscles in her torso were useless, but they hadn’t the strength to lift the prosthetics of her legs and arm by themselves anyway. Only the motor systems that controlled her limbs could do that, and they weren’t reacting. She looked down, unable to make sense of the peculiar readouts that flashed in her mind, and saw that she was covered in silvery metal elementals. They were consuming her power, revelling in the taste of the alloys and pure metals, undoing the energy locked in their crystal form. They were rotting her. She could only lie there and watch the ghost place its unself beside Zal, into Zal’s hand where streams of elementals were still pouring forth.

  The face of her opponent, the other elf agent, appeared close to the window of the magical wall and watched too.

  Lila saw the ghost draw breath in Zoomenon. It inhaled the elements from Zal’s unprotected hand. She saw the Jayon Daga agent’s face looking down at her, not even contemptuous, not even curious, waiting. And all the time Zal lay there like an idiot, grinning, out of it, as happy as a sand boy as the ghost breathed in and left his hand empty at the end of his wrist, as transparent as glass.

  There was only one thing left to do, though she felt no sense of hope in doing it. She didn’t trust it. She didn’t like it. She never wanted to use it. All her ambivalent feelings about the people who had made her tried to stop her.

  “Battle Standard,” Lila whispered. She mentally apologised to the metal elementals who were temporarily blasted apart by her body’s response to the command as it switched current phase from her reactor. But she thanked Sarasilien for having the wit to add such a defensive capability to her Al-self in the first place. Field tests had proved BS, as Lila called it, to be anything but reliable, barely even functional, crammed as it was with knowledge her superiors wanted kept even from her, but it was all she had that might work before the damned ghost breathed out and finished them both. The command re-set her Al-self into a new mode. Her armour reconfigured. Processes that kept her alive switched over their power to defensive units. A cocktail of drugs and hormones surged into her system and her pains and worries vanished as neural connections were closed down and everything redirected according to the strategies of her defensive programming.

  She was on her feet before she had time to think, aware very dimly of horrible things happening to her body but not caring now, not able to feel it except at a distance, as though pain was only a notion, like an idea, which carried no weight and made no difference to the physical world. Lila was distant, soaring like an eagle, strong as a lion, a centre to a storm. She saw herself pull Zal towards her by an ankle, away from the ghost, pick him up, and put her gauntlet over his nose and mouth, pinching them tightly shut. His eyes opened wide and a stream of multicoloured fire poured out over her and ran harmlessly off her, unable to do anything about the phase shifts she was able to perpetuate. The circle disintegrated abruptly and Zoomenon vanished as the elf Lila knew as Dar, barely five metres away, loosed his arrow.

 
; Lila turned and ducked. She was faster than the dreamy speed of the ghost, but not faster than the arrow. It thudded into her shoulder, through her shield and her armour. The point emerged just below her armpit like a reproving finger, bound with magic that even now fizzed and sparked on its point. She looked down in anger and saw the silver tip scratch the skin of Zal’s shoulder whereupon it instantly vanished as though made of moonlight. Dar was already away, dodging into the trees, racing to his fallen companion. Whatever his mission was he had completed it, Battle Standard concluded, and therefore she made no move to counter his action.

  Zal slumped in her grasp, a completely dead weight.

  Things became blurry to Lila, fuzzy, as though the world and her thoughts were all radio stations that couldn’t be tuned in. Nothing matched up. She thought she might be dying, but as long as she was still moving the best thing must be to get back home, to where she was safe. Yes, she would go to where there was help or someone who could, if not fix her, at least switch her off. She would like to be off because everything was very very bad indeed. She went home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Let go, Lila,” said a kind voice she recognised, but Lila couldn’t.

  “Bloody BS system,” said another voice wearily, from someone trying to plug a jack into a port on her leg. “Locked again on the exit clause. I’m going to purge it and debug. Again.”

  “Can you hear me, Lila?”

  Yes, she thought, from very far away. I think so. But it wasn’t important. She had Zal, and she had come to a safe place. There were no more combatants. There was no zone of fire, no defence necessary. Everything was in order with the system. The mission was complete.

  “She can’t hear me,” said the kind voice somewhere out in the light beyond Lila. “Maybe she’ll let go if he wakes up.”