Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five

by Justina Robson

  Lila sat up and rubbed sleep out of her face. ‘How many elves you know of here?’

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘Teazle mentioned they’d caught a few in Demonia but I haven’t seen him since you have. Then again, I’m going on what you told me from memory and I haven’t been anywhere without you so it’s not worth asking.’

  She unpicked the sense of his statement after a minute. ‘There are some on the immigration and city tracking nets, thirteen to be exact, including Arie. Plus the mad one in the Agency basement. And you.’

  He stretched and resettled himself, waking up like she was, slowly and with reluctance. ‘Just cut to the chase; I don’t need to verify your reasoning and the longer you take the more sure I get that the news is bad.’

  ‘Alfheim’s gone dark,’ she said, aware that the sounds of teenage exploration in the kitchen had stopped. ‘Sarasilien says that only an elf would be able to go back and find out what’s happening, although he’s lying-by-omission-his-ass-off and knows perfectly well what’s going down if you ask me, and he’s playing for time.’

  Zal opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a few moments. ‘I thought you were assigned to undead duty.’ His tone was disapproving and she felt the bite of his disappointment. He thought she’d enough for the humans, and with the Diner incident no doubt more than enough.

  ‘Triage,’ Lila said. ‘Sarasilien and his droid think this is global-catastrophe duty, and that outweighs undead issues since they aren’t world threatening. The worst part about it is, I kinda agree, while at the same time the desire to smash his face in with the nearest blunt object is almost overwhelming. And I feel like I’m towing you for the ride. And then he springs this and says he wants you to go. And I just got you back. I totally fucking hate the idea. I hate it all. But if the only way it’ll go away and leave us in peace is to deal with it, then I’m going to deal.’

  She was able to place Sassy just around the corner from the open door quite easily. On his back beside her Zal continued his stare at the ceiling. ‘Zal?’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Good question, I—’

  ‘No, I mean, why doesn’t he go? Why does he ask for me?’

  ‘Because you’re demon in part and he thinks that will make you immune to whatever it is that he apparently doesn’t know anything about.’

  ‘So he’s probably right about that.’

  ‘I guess there’s a good chance.’ Lila hesitated; the girl was a wild card in her mind, allegiances unknown.

  ‘You could come with me.’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ she said, almost at the same moment so they spoke over each other. She was the one to continue. ‘If I go with you then there won’t be any contact with him here, and I wouldn’t be here to keep Xavi under wraps. He could do anything.’

  ‘There is the whole of the Otopian Agency—’

  ‘Not capable of dealing. Malachi is their only powerful aetheric operative still on active duty and I wouldn’t give him ten seconds against Sar. Besides which, he has his own problems and crossing Sar wouldn’t be on his list. Plus I pissed him off yesterday and we aren’t talking. Bentley’s good and the other cyborgs are fine but they’re all human mechanoid, not an ounce of aether between them. And I don’t like the idea of leaving Xavi off radar either, even if she is doing a faultless line in helpful repentance. She’s got to be nearly as old as Sar is and executing her revenger’s tragedy took several hundred lifetimes’ worth of hard intent. Giving it up on the turn of one little psychological screw doesn’t strike me as all that plausible.’

  ‘So, what were you going to do?’ Zal was amused. He rolled onto his side and propped his head on one hand, putting the other one on her knee.

  ‘I’m going to see Ilya. I was going to anyway, but Malachi said something about him having changed. Plus, now that we’re not talking I don’t know how I’m going to see him.’

  ‘Ah, so I go to Alfheim and single-handedly save it, and you go across the threshold of the spirit world and figure out the dead problem and then we’re home free?’

  She frowned and aimed a play punch at his arm. ‘Why d’you put it like that? Makes it sound like I’m an idiot.’

  ‘I know the way your mind works, is all,’ he said, making his index and middle finger work out a few tango steps on the inside of her knee. ‘Mine used to work like that.’

  ‘You’re saying it doesn’t now?’

  ‘Now it doesn’t work at all, which is a merciful release.’

  Lila began to reply but then a fresh awareness of Sassy sneaking around outside the door broke in on her again and she hesitated. Part of her wanted to damn the situation and to hell with any consequences, she was sick and tired of sharing every moment with Zal with some other person as well, no matter how passively. Another part of her said that they had no idea what Sassy’s agenda was, if she had one, and it would be wiser to keep her mouth shut. And then, having turned this way, her thoughts trotted down the path that suggested Sassy might have run here lost and lonely and was in need of help herself. She felt some empathy, but then again, she felt like screaming too.

  Zal grinned and picked his fingers up, tracing circles around on the inside of her knee like a lazy ice dancer. ‘But . . .’ His white teeth shone clearly against the dark of his skin, taken down many shades by both the low light and his aetherial body’s emergence.

  ‘But . . .’ she said and let it hang there. ‘If I don’t do this, who will? I’m the only cyborg with a hotline to the dead.’

  Zal’s hand slid all the way up her leg. Lila rolled her eyes vividly in the direction of the door. He grabbed hold of the sheet and cover and pulled them up over both their heads. ‘We can hide in here.’ He moved in close, warm and delicious, and kissed her. She slid next to him until they were pressed against each other as closely as they could be. The strength of his aetheric body around her made her nerves tingle with a faint, just detectable resonance that spread comfort and pleasure through every part of her. She bathed in him and felt him hum with delight. She traced his face and the long lines and narrow, ragged edge of his ears.

  ‘Contrary to popular belief, the ears are not the best erotic organ on an elf,’ he murmured.

  ‘Really?’ she altered the structure of her palms and fingertips and began to emit ultrasound, tuning the frequencies by his reactions. She travelled over pressure points and along energy channels. When, a moment later, she touched the two points of his ears with an exact vibration and depth, he was wordless.

  It was an old technique, one she learned by accident when she’d been forced into performing emergency surgery on Dar and accidentally triggered an energetic total body response in him that had swept both of them into an intimate melding that was as much pleasure as surprise. There was also the enormous gratification of using sound to play Zal, rock star, elf and demon, like a musical instrument.

  Their relationship had been stupidly brief but the honeymoon long enough to experiment with sonics a great deal and she knew what she was doing now. She understood exactly why Zal had got such an enormous kick out of rock music – it hit him on a mental, emotional, aetheric and physical level. By tuning her own body and creating points of transmission she could create ecstasy in him. It delighted her, more than any other toy she’d ever known and it made her shy and careful with him because it was so powerful and he was putty in her hands when she used it.

  When she woke up for the second time her mind snapped to attention. She looked around and found that Zal was already gone, the bedsheets tangled in his wake and the sun shining in at a late-morning slant through a crack in the shutters. The door was closed and beyond it she heard his voice and the girl’s talking in the kitchen. Music radio played in the background.

  Lila stretched her legs and toes out. The novelty of this, the novelty of making love with a full body again, was not lost for a second and she wanted to stretch them out, aware that her chances of feeling so good again soon were very short. Surely, surely now she ought to g
lory in her abilities but in spite of all the positives in the changes her feelings were slow to catch up. Before she even reached the shower she was already engaged in a fantasy of seizing Zal, leaving town, finding a place outside Otopia, away from Alfheim, far from Demonia’s mad cities. It was a bland and impossible dream, safe to indulge because it wouldn’t happen.

  Lila turned her soaped face up into the streaming water. What did that song Zal wrote years ago say? End of the line and no way out. Run in circles, scream and shout. Other poets had put it better, but none of them had his basslines.

  Because she was used to it and didn’t know what else to do she armed herself with her black leathers, boots to vest, and tried not to watch the change. It felt warm and comfortable, nothing more.

  Zal was standing in the kitchen, half dancing to the radio and eating from a bowl. Small packets of opened cereal were scattered everywhere around on the worktops, mostly full, showing they had been tried and found wanting.

  Sassy was crouched on a high stool at one end of the breakfast bar, a cup of tea in her hands. They made quite an odd sight against the kitchen’s clean lines and design. Zal’s clothes were still bloodstained and dusty and Sassy looked as though she’d dragged herself out of a dumpster, wadded in several layers of ill-fitting clothes that bore the marks of sleeping rough in the forest. She hunched over her mug as if it was the last tea on earth and gave Lila a cautious once-over, flicking her eyebrow as if she was the one in the odd costume. Lila was pretty used to this so she ignored it and started peering to see if Zal had left any of his cereal.

  ‘Your habit of mixing everything hasn’t been lost then,’ she remarked.

  ‘I pride myself that only the worst of me made it through,’ he said, moving with faultless rhythm as he sidled out of her way. ‘Couldn’t find the cocaine though. Do they still have cocaine?’

  ‘At the store?’ Sassy said with a rising tone at the end that suggested he was being wantonly stupid. ‘But everyone does Voraxin these days.’

  ‘Is that at the store?’ Zal asked between spoonfuls, eyes half closed as he paid most of his attention to the music.

  ‘No,’ she sighed and put her head to one side before spelling it out. ‘It’s street only. Why do you think Cedars is so rich? Got their own police force.’

  ‘You’re not on it though,’ Lila said, finding a box of Rice Pops and starting to hunt down a bowl.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ the girl said with contempt, implying that this was true of only one person in the room.

  ‘No,’ Lila agreed, opening drawers. ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘Like I said, found it,’ came the reply. ‘You want me to go?’

  ‘You said I was in trouble and left it hanging.’ She located the spoons after Zal tapped the right place with his hand, still lost in his tunes, only half there.

  ‘You were the one didn’t want to talk.’

  Lila had to concede that one. ‘This is all getting off on the wrong foot,’ she said, opening a thing she presumed was a refrigerator but seeing only an empty boxlike thing and a control panel beaming full of coloured pictograms instead. ‘Can we start again?’

  She stared at the machine blankly, peering at the images, which seemed to be an entire market’s worth of items, some of them flashing, some of them blued out. Zal’s hand reached over her shoulder and touched a milk carton, tapped a red circle twice that registered the fat content, and ran his finger up the image of a jug that appeared until it was a quarter full.

  ‘Open the cover,’ he said, flicking his thumb in the direction of the box front. She opened it and took out her milk.

  When she turned around Sassy was giving her a long, wide-eyed stare of disbelief.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ Lila said, frowning as she poured.

  ‘She’s a bit slow,’ Zal added to Sassy as he went back to his position at the sink.

  That got the ghost of a smile so Lila didn’t say anything for a moment or two. She didn’t need to eat the cereal but she wanted to. It tasted better than she expected. As she looked up from her bowl she saw that Zal was also looking expectantly at Sassy and guessed they’d done some talking the night before.

  Sassy made a giving-in face and looked into her tea. ‘I ran away,’ she said. ‘Like you didn’t know that.’

  ‘No record of it,’ Lila said.

  Sassy narrowed her eyes. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m the girl who is plugged in,’ Lila said. ‘My job to know.’

  ‘That explains something.’ Suddenly she wasn’t an awkward teenager confessing something she’d rather not. The confidence of a much older person took command of her and Lila found herself looking into eyes that were more than capable of dealing with whatever they saw.

  ‘You’re a machine. The ones looking for you must be the same. I have trouble hearing them. I thought it was a block but it must just be the speed.’

  ‘I’m easy to find,’ Lila said, but as she said it she knew there was one category of people that wouldn’t find her easy to locate – machines. Thanks to her rogue-jacking habits she was sufficiently able to mask herself on the networks and she wasn’t plugged in to anything that was capable of hacking her. This meant she was closed to the other cyborgs. The only place she could be aware of them was inside the Signal, and that was too fast and complex even for her to track through it.

  Sassy shrugged. ‘I just know what I hear and see.’ She stared into her tea mug, swirling the contents. Her face was tense. Then she sighed and set the mug aside. As she looked up all traces of the teenage attitude were gone. Without it she looked even younger although it had also taken all her vulnerability with it.

  Zal lowered his bowl and glanced at Lila.

  ‘It’s easier when I pretend,’ the girl said. ‘Sort of. I mean, it’s easier for everyone else and it distracts them.’ She straightened her back. ‘It’s not an accident that I’m here, you’re right. I came before you, to clear the way and make sure the house was safe for the time being. But you got here a bit soon. I’d have been gone myself only you caught me in the act . . .’ She glanced at Zal meaningfully. ‘I didn’t think you’d be so quick or so sharp. When you cornered me I realised I’d never outrun you and I panicked and did what I do best. Afterwards it seemed like a good idea. I could keep up the old act and watch over you at the same time.’

  ‘Watch over us?’ Lila frowned. ‘Who for?’

  ‘For myself,’ the girl said. ‘You were looking for the one who made you, to whom you were important. You were trying to figure out why anything that has happened to you has happened – was it part of a grand scheme or only a series of incidents without a greater meaning? What you have found seems to point at the mage, Sarasilien, though you wonder if he too is only a lesser player in some even bigger plot, yeah?’ She nodded, seeing Lila’s silent agreement. ‘You see, I didn’t know this until I got here. I was supposed to find the house and clean it, that’s all. But when you got here I realised who you were.’ Her glance included them both. ‘I couldn’t help it. I overheard.’

  ‘You have a bit of a habit there,’ Lila murmured although she didn’t want to interrupt.

  ‘They’re looking for me, and you,’ the girl said, without taking visible offence. ‘You don’t have any guard. You know nothing about the spirit plane, or you’d be much more careful. I was doing containment. And anyway, even if you were half a mile away in a lead box I’d still hear you. I can’t not. Another reason I like it here. Quiet. Like I said.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Zal asked, placing his bowl quietly down in the sink, his gaze never leaving the girl’s face.

  ‘The people who sent me to prep the house or the ones looking out for you now?’

  ‘All of them,’ he said.

  ‘The faery Malachi and Temple Greer sent me to do the house. Malachi and me have history in Cedars, he rescued me from some nasty business twenty-two years ago out in Cooper Bay and we’ve been trading favours ever since. Greer I don’t know personally, though
I see you do,’ she took in Lila’s expression. ‘He wanted me to check you out, see you were levelling with him.’

  ‘Because now they can’t tap me directly for information?’

  ‘I guess. I didn’t ask why, that’s not how business works for me.’

  ‘And the rest?’ Zal asked.

  The girl looked suddenly unhappy. ‘You’ve been gone fifty years, yeah? Well, a lot changed in that time. A real lot. Not on the surface – people still live in houses, still drive around in cars, still watch screens, play games, eat food, piss each other off like usual, yeah? Sure the fashions and some tech has changed, so it seems, there’s a new space program and they’re on Mars and they’re on the Moon and they’re doing this and all that, but on the big scales we haven’t come anywhere since before the pyramids, you see what I’m sayin’?’

  Lila nodded.

  ‘Well, in the last few generations born since the Moths there’s been a population explosion in people with powers – psychics, seers . . . you can stick a bundle of names onto all the combinations of psionics out there right now. On the surface, if you’re in the big social centres of the world, it looks like everyone’s OK with it, yeah? And you haven’t had time to get this, but everywhere else it’s war by another name, not open war, kinda a cold war, a tepid war that keeps the surface okay, keeps the economy okay, keeps everyone more or less in a home and a job, but there’s no real peace for anyone. It’s so widespread now they say that the humans will be extinct in another hundred years. The only reason it isn’t a slaughter is that everyone has someone close who’s a changeling, though ninety per cent of them are barely any different. It’s not like you can pick them out by race or colour or creed. They come everywhere. But the camel’s back broke with the Returners. Like you saw across town, the war’s getting open now. Meantime the rogue cyborgs have been dealing in body parts. Their own. Criminal markets are full of upgraders. There are six chopshops in Cedars will make you over into a machine in two days, for the right price. ’Course they have trouble getting plutonium and such, so they have to use batteries old style but they aren’t so bad these days. And other people have done other things. Your tech is in a lot of gear, Lila. A lot. The chatarazzi call it the Slag Pot – everyone melting down into psionic metal gloop. Some say harmony, but you know people. What do ordinary humans have to offer against those with special abilities, special powers? It’s war. Anyway, the rogues were looking for you. Have been ever since Lane found you and lost you again. For all the talk you’re the only one with metal and aether in working order and none of their experiments at fusing those things have worked. Guess they found you.’ She gave Lila a curious look.