Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  She held up the palm of her hand, displaying the lit Agency emblem and amplified her voice, almost to the point of pain.

  ‘Your gathering and assault is illegal and you will disperse or be arrested. Lay down your arms. Surrender the shooters. They are under arrest. Any obstruction to my authority will be considered an act of assault.’ Which covered her, not that she expected it to work.

  The faces looking at her were a real picture with their comic mixture of disbelief, bloodthirst, hate and incredulity. They really weren’t in any shape for thinking straight. She longed to kill them.

  Around her the robes shifted, tightening, drawing in, threads moving of their own accord, making new designs, new words. Across her chest a red cross appeared, tangled in a spiral of red like a spider’s web, a white flower at its apex as the faery declared its colours.

  And is this what it had come to at last, she thought as she surveyed the crowd, wondering which one was going to shoot first, or if they’d shout first and gather their nerves, wait for the ones at the back to signal they were in position. For surely they didn’t look uncertain, no, they had decided there would be no prisoners, no innocents here. Lila against the humans, not human any more, a monster worthy of hate? She despised her own drama even as she felt it catch and flame inside. But she stood and stared at them, judging their willing greed for blood and suffering, their righteous, ugly determination. She saw the promise of being crushed in the narrow vices of their eyes, she heard once more the burst of the machine guns in her mind and heard the silence of the despairing undead who had got what they wanted here on this luckless, lucky day, and she hated them more still.

  Then a slow drawl interrupted her moment. ‘Well now, who the fuck are you dressed as?’

  Their leader, a worked-out man, handsome, in construction-worker overalls and holding a shotgun, gestured at her with the double finger of the barrels. It was a contemptuous, lingering kind of move, the sort that men make in sleazy nightclubs when they’re sizing up the girls on the poles. It gave the crowd confidence and their stunned moment of immobility departed in a ripple of sneers and laughter. They moved forward until his languid arm movement stopped them. The fact that she’d kicked an entire door into their front line seemed to have slipped their notice as they slid together into a pack.

  Lila’s attention sharpened to a point. She heard the group around the back talking, saying something about sending news round to the front, there was a brief argument, then a messenger came running around the side. The people in front of her stopped for a gawk when they saw the situation, then trotted forward to whisper in the leader’s ear. Meanwhile Lila could see Zal inside the diner, clear on infrared despite his cloak of shadow. He was shepherding people into the kitchen area. They were almost all inside. She waited until the messenger had delivered his news, a whisper she heard clearly, and then said, ‘You’re all under arrest. Put down your weapons.’

  In reply the construction guy primed his shotgun with the flashy one-arm style of a movie star and pointed the business end at her. ‘People who get in our way get killed. We came for the undead abominations. Stand aside.’

  ‘What’s the petrol for then?’ Lila asked, making her final calculations as she mapped the location of all the people and weapons.

  ‘Tainted ground,’ he said, grinning. ‘Has to be cleansed. And places like this that harbour the filth, have to be razed.’

  ‘There are innocent people and kids in there,’ Lila said, stalling, though she sensed a fresh urgency as some of the mob checked the time and realised they were going to run into police trouble soon. She read them the full records, her conviction absolute. ‘And I don’t take assurances from people who already made three similar raids in the last month all over the southern-states area. Fifty-six casualties. Twenty-one dead. Fifteen of them ordinary human citizens, four teenagers, one child of seven. You are under arrest for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause civil disturbance, riot, incitement to hate, incitement to riot, causing a disturbance of the peace, destruction of property, arson, illegal possession of weapons, membership of an illegal organisation, resisting arrest and obstructing the path of justice.’

  Her litany had the desired mesmerising effect on the front rows even as some members were cautiously peeling themselves off the back of the crowd and sidling away. She wasn’t done with the last word before she was already moving.

  She saw the leader’s finger on the trigger pulling steadily, but she was on him before they’d moved more than a few millimetres. Even his blink of surprise was a slow, clumsy piece of shutterwork to her as she took the gun away from him, popped out the shells and manacled his wrists together with the twisted barrels. It was a tight fit. She broke a bone in his wrist doing it and then she broke a few more as she pressed the figure eight all the way closed. They snapped like twigs and she felt every pop as a bubble of cold glee. As she stepped back, moving into human time, the plastic shell cases fell at her feet. Most of the bystanders were too surprised by her speed to do anything but stand and stare but some, the hardcore who had come wired and been frothing during the conversation period, were liberated by the burst of action. Their minds weren’t on realism and whatever odd danger Lila represented, they were focused on violence.

  Their liberation was hers too. She picked up the closest agitator, crushing his hand around the grip of his stun gun where it was trying to shock her into jelly, and lifted him off his feet. With a short spin and a burst of energy robbed from the gun that was meant to incapacitate her, she flung him across ten heads into the chest of a middle-aged grizzler brandishing a minigun. The stun gun, clamped by broken fingers, was still fizzing at maximum battery power. It connected with the other man as they both went down onto the tarmac, scattering several others and pushing their part of the crowd back. As they jolted around together Lila was already airborne in a leap that took her in the other direction to where a woman was lighting up the pilot on her flamethrower – a homemade but serious object that reeked of leaking kerosene and was almost as much danger to the holder as anyone else.

  With her fingers edging into blades, Lila cut the tank off its old rucksack-strap moorings on the woman’s denimed shoulders and swung it around hard. The woman, still holding the gun end firmly, was yanked off balance as the hoses dragged on her arms, then she let go in surprise and got a spray of paraffin into her eyes as the loose end of the hose whipped around, sprinkling everyone in range. Tatterdemalion took her share, Lila could smell it, but she wasn’t bothered by such small irritations as fire. She twisted and crushed the crude metal kerosene tank and flung it in a low arc across the thin strip of ground between the diner and the crowd, then directed her own burst of intense narrow-band microwave heat from the palm of her hand at the flying metal.

  Liquid sprayed wildly out through the splits in the tank as it expanded, dousing the ground. The steel tank itself sparked violently, contorting as it tumbled to a halt. Mobmen scattered instinctively around it, most backing off. The pilot light, dying but still going, finally landed near enough to ignite the vapour and with a burst of hot yellow and a wave of fresh heat the entire left side of the building had been cut off from the assault by a low wall of flame. It wouldn’t deter maniacs but it was bad enough that anyone with doubts wasn’t going that way.

  However, in spite of her quick thinking the diner door was open now and attackers were shouldering their way inside, ignoring the bellowing of those who had been downed, and spurred on by a sense of thwarted righteousness. Torches had been flung onto the roof. This above all convinced Lila that Deadkill were a bunch of amateur hate-suckers. The roof was tiled and, like all city buildings, it would take a lot more than a piece of burning wood to set it alight. She wasn’t justified in killing even one of them on grounds of stupidity alone.

  She blasted the outside crowd with a burst of infrasound that sent most of them grabbing for their pants as their bowels dropped everything without warning and then ran for the door.r />
  She didn’t trust herself to punch anyone without dealing a killing blow so she kept the violence down to some light slaps that cannoned skulls together in pairs with enough force to yield temporary unconsciousness and mild concussion. As they slumped in the gangways she bent to collect their weapons and destroyed them with a few casual wrenches of her hands before dropping them on the bodies. She sniffed the air. Something was burning.

  In the kitchen a couple of meat patties and a bacon strip had become char. Lila turned off the burners and looked through to the store-room door. It was shut. A terrified silence like a held breath made the room feel as though it might burst. She wondered where Zal had gone but her answer was soon discovered as she steeled herself and walked out through the emergency exit.

  A pall of intense gloom hung over the open door and its steps. It didn’t block out the sight of the dead girls. Pooling blood from their fallen bodies dripped down the open iron slats of the stairs onto the hardtop. Zal was crouched on the handrail above them like a great black crow.

  Behind him, in the walls, a string of bullet holes peppered an uninterrupted line telling her that they’d already shot him. Beyond the darkness that he was maintaining she heard confused talk, complaints and angry voices as people blundered around. It became clear to her that they weren’t only lost in the murk he’d created, they were weak and sleepy too. She heard them fall over each other, mumbling as though drugged.

  On the rail Zal was utterly still with concentration. She recognised the vampiric embrace of a shadowkin at work very late, with surprise at her own horror. The golden boy she’d first met had shown no sign of this. Zal the vampire was something that just didn’t want to compute and she couldn’t help drawing back. It was a microscopic movement, halted before it got underway, but it was still there.

  Her dress didn’t feel the same way about his activity however. It swirled richly, panels lifting through the twilight miasma, their threads unravelling to reach the air that sweltered with the energy that Zal was drawing out of the living bodies. They also, she was disgusted to see, eagerly reached down into the coagulating mass of blood from the slaughtered girls.

  Her hem reddened, darkened. Confused embarrassment at her own moment of flinching from Zal and now from this fresh minor horror caught her off guard. Words died in her throat. She turned away and went back through the building. Tables and chairs got in her way. She threw them aside, hearing them smash and break against the walls, halting only once she reached the open door.

  The forecourt was a mess of furious, humiliated people but their focus was gone, their purpose lost. At the sound of distant police sirens gravel kicked and dust rose in clouds as vehicles swerved onto the road and away.

  Lila crossed to where Deadkill’s local leader lay, conscious and moaning with pain, in a heap of his own faeces. The bloody hems of the skirt panels around her ankles tapped him like the fingers of naughty children trying to annoy. She looked down at his spit-flecked face and saw pure hatred staring back at her. She knew she looked the same.

  ‘They’re not different to you,’ she said. ‘They came back and they didn’t even want to. It’s not up to you to destroy them.’ She didn’t know if she believed her own line.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he growled. ‘Dead stays dead. What fuckin’ human thinks otherwise? Even the demons want them gone. Bible says—’

  But she put her bloody, gravel-crusted boot on his mouth. ‘You aren’t fit to say the words. You aren’t the law.’

  With an effort that must have cost a lot of pain he wrenched free, twisting to the side and spat. His mouth and cheek was smeared with red. ‘You ain’t either.’

  She glanced down at her crusader’s garb and its new crimson hem. ‘I’m a law,’ she said. ‘And if I see you again, you’re a dead man.’

  Police cars wheeled into the lot with silent grace, their blue and starred sides sliding back to allow armoured officers to jump out. She went forward to complete formalities with them. A strange coldness, a kind of emptiness filled her with only one thing standing in its vast space: Max. She felt the pain of that loss again, sharp and cruel, and then on top of it the longing and the fear, the hope and the hopelessness engendered by the messages she could not bring herself to delete: come see me, I’m here, I’m home again . . .

  The officers’ amusement at her roundup washed over her in a tide that felt completely out of synch with the day. She cross-referenced with their networks, was discharged, picked up the ton of summonses from Greer, her boss, that she’d also been avoiding, and slowly made her way back to the diner’s emergency exit on autopilot.

  Zal was standing in the shade at the end of the building, almost invisible. He ignored and was ignored by the bustle of the diner’s staff and customers as they restored themselves after the scare and emerged to watch the last of their assailants cuffed and driven away in blind-sided vans. Some of them were already talking into their lapel phones as the trial lawyers got underway. By the time the vans reached the courthouses there would be a case waiting and a judge to hear it. This burst of efficiency soothed Lila a little, though the sight of Zal, standing so still as he leaned on the diner wall, arms crossed, slouched and withdrawn, did not.

  She made her way up to him and pulled off her crusader’s mask, tucking it under her arm. The cool air felt like water as it washed through her sweaty hair and over her face. ‘You okay?’

  His gaze slid from whatever infinite it had been contemplating and focused on her face. ‘Not so much,’ he said finally, his ears flicking with irritated discomfort. As he stood straight he rolled his shoulders and eased his neck. She saw that his hair, so muddy recently, was bright silver and gold. The black aura of his andalune body lingered here and there but as he became more alert it submerged into the suddenly photoreal colour of his physical body. She realised that he was heavier. He had more mass. They shared a look for a few moments.

  ‘Not hungry any more?’ she asked, as if she were a woman asking a man if he’d had enough dinner and nothing more.

  He shook his head slowly. His expression was grim, making him look dangerous. The tan of his skin shone in the sun, sheened with health. She wanted to touch him but she didn’t even dare reach out with the ultrasound.

  ‘Think you can ride it back home?’ She jerked her head in the direction of the bike.

  He gave her a filthy look.

  ‘I have something I have to do,’ she informed him. ‘I’ll see you there later.’

  His gaze flickered down over her clothes to the hem and his face contorted slightly. Finally he just smiled, a tired smile and leaned down and kissed the top of her head. ‘Don’t be late.’

  ‘Okay,’ she nodded and smiled in return with a reassurance she didn’t feel, then made herself go back to where the bodies of the two girls were being zipped into plastic bags by the medical team.

  They delayed for her to take a look, holding the bags open so she could see the bullet holes. The bodies were quite normal, utterly human, the killing wounds exactly what you would expect from close–range, high-power firearms. They were also quite dead. Lila looked up at the paramedic across the gurney from her. ‘They were Returners.’

  The woman nodded and slowly closed the bag up over the blonde girl’s unmarked head. ‘Yeah, we see a lot of these lately. Don’t worry, they won’t be back again. Corpse is what you see. That’s what you got.’ Unhappiness made her frown lines deepen and she looked back up at Lila when Lila didn’t go. ‘Something else?’

  But there was no data Lila needed she couldn’t get just by reading the records. What she wanted to ask was impossible for this woman to answer.

  ‘No.’ DNA samples, research papers, tests rushed through her mind in a second. There was nothing abnormal about a Returner, except for the fact that they reappeared fully formed, between one moment and the next. Otherwise they were the same as everyone else. She let them wheel the bodies away and watched as their small white vehicle slowly purred across the road and turned for downt
own. Its onboard instructional log rerouted it towards the Agency’s morgue. She wondered if there would be funerals this time but then all her delays were used up. With a gritting of her teeth she turned around and began to walk. It was at least six miles home and she needed time to think, to clear her head, to keep on waiting and not arriving . . .

  Beyond the lines of hills and rooftops in front of her she could see the faint glitter and wispy blue colour of the sea.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Walking, admiring the built-up scenery and whispering traffic, was a pleasure that lasted only a few minutes. Then Lila found herself on the phone to Malachi, hoping he’d gotten back. Bentley answered and explained that Sarasilien had made himself known to everyone, but the tone of her voice didn’t give away a lot. Lila shelved that problem into the official back-burner zone of her mind and as soon as Malachi had been located and connected – faeries didn’t carry all the human technogubbins as routine – she blurted what had been simmering away all day.

  ‘I need to see Tath. Talk to Tath. Whatever. But I don’t want to have to get flatlined to do it. What’s another way?’

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, then Malachi said, ‘I’m not sure there is a way,’ in a tone that promised it was carrying a lot more information than he was prepared to part with over a long-distance connection. That or he was being overheard by someone. ‘Why don’t we meet up? There’s a lot to talk about.’

  ‘You mean Sarasilien?’

  ‘And the rest of it. Plus I’ve been gone longer than you think and I have quite a lot of downloading for you.’

  He spoke gently, as if he hadn’t a care in the world; he was curiosity’s favourite cat and the cat had the cream. She knew it for an old trick, mastered early on during the development of his human glamour. He could pass for a smooth talking, laid back cool guy as easily as crossing the street, and it wasn’t exactly a lie, but she knew he wouldn’t practise it on her unless he was telling her that he was covering something significant.