Lila admitted their execution and assimilation with a nod. ‘They paid you too?”
She shook her head. ‘I heard them, that’s all.’
‘You must have a good memory,’ Zal said, wistfully.
‘I learned to remember what’s important,’ she replied. ‘We don’t commit anything to a record. It’s unprofessional.’
‘We?’
‘Readers,’ she said and grinned, talking as if what she said was entirely old hat. ‘Readers don’t write stuff down where anyone can see it. Bad for business.’
‘You’re not just a reader.’
‘I am, far as business is concerned,’ the girl said firmly and there was a clear note of warning in her voice. ‘That’s all I am.’
‘So how did we get to be your business?’ Lila asked, leaning on the counter, still trying to figure out how Malachi and Greer had steered her to what she thought was her choice of where to live.
‘Because I’m not just a reader,’ she said, and then she added awkwardly, ‘and because nobody ever offered to buy me a pony before, which probably seems like dick to you, but mostly people fear me or want rid of me even when they think I’m only a reader, even when they think I’m only a changeling, or just a street kid.’
She took a deep breath. ‘I’m not any of those things either, except the street kid part is kind of right. I lost a lot of my abilities a time ago. Deal went bad, I got burned . . .’ She shrugged her tough little shrug. ‘Since I’ve been in Cedars I’ve been hanging with one of their gangs. Didn’t want to. Mostly I had to. They don’t let you go easy. Mal got me out. I don’t want to go back. They do nasty stuff to people, including their own. I’m sure you don’t need a list.’
Lila had been paying attention acutely, but she got no sense that the girl was lying. She glanced at Zal, who seemed more bemused than concerned although he was frowning and his shadow body had extended, diffusing to a fine haze around him. It didn’t try to touch the girl, although he easily could have. He looked back at Lila and she was reminded of how much she hated the thought of separating from him again so soon. She turned back.
‘I don’t like being watched,’ Lila said.
‘I don’t mean any harm,’ the girl replied quickly. ‘Never have.’
‘But you’re short of a name and a backstory,’ Zal said, ‘and we’re too old to fool around.’
‘I can’t give you my name,’ she said equally quickly. ‘It’s too much of a risk.’
‘Oh, so we’re supposed to trust you with knowing everything about us but you won’t extend even half the favour?’ Lila shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’re not the only one who doesn’t like being supervised,’ came the retort, then, feeling clear anxiety she shook her hands in front of herself to erase the attacking force of her statement – a faery gesture if ever there was one. ‘Look, the fact is, I already know everything about you whether I like to know it or not. I know a lot about other people too. I can tell you whatever you like, if you just let me stay here. I can hide you from the spirits, if they come here. They’ll never see you here as long as I stay.’
Zal folded his arms thoughtfully and lowered his chin. ‘But the catch is that you’re on someone’s wanted list.’
Anguished eyes flicked towards him and remained looking at him firmly. ‘Yes. But we’re all on one of those.’
‘Might we know who’s buying your ticket?’ Lila asked.
The girl turned towards her and considered for a moment. ‘Sara-silien,’ she said very quietly. ‘I saw something, you see, in someone, and he knows I saw it. It must be very important. Those rogues I mentioned looking for you, they were looking for me too. He sent them, through Sandra Lane.’
‘The clone, right?’
‘Not at the time. It was twenty-two years ago. There were no clones then.’
‘How many does she have now?’ Lila was really wondering aloud and was surprised when the girl said promptly,
‘At least three I have seen. There are other cyborgs with clones too, of various kinds. Most of the old ones have at least one. Rogues habitually scatter clones over big areas – across continents. They’re the reason I stayed so long in Cedars. There’s a lot of old fey there, some demons in the gangmasters. They have enough strength to hold the rogues off. Nobody else does. And they can’t do it off their own turf. I managed to get myself disappeared from the networks so they can’t track me. It won’t be long before they know I’ve gone though. My gangmaster has no reason to help me once he realises I’m not coming back.’
‘Was Malachi the one to get you out of trouble with Sarasilien?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded solemnly. ‘It was a big risk for him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it interferes in a Long Game. The older forces, the long-lived ones, operate at timescales measured in centuries, perhaps ages. Malachi is the middle kind – centuries, millennia maybe. But these others are older ones. They are fewer. At least, they are now. In the past many more existed, but they got killed as the games went on. Sarasilien is one of the older sort and what I saw is something concerning a Long Game that he has in progress. He is easily able to kill Malachi if he knew. I am only telling you because I know you don’t wish him harm, even though you are angry with him at the moment.’
Lila stared down at the countertop, considering. She looked at the motes of quartz, stuck fast in the resin of the fake stone, at the way their many different angles caught the light, or blocked it. She read between the lines and came up with an answer that surprised her.
‘I suppose that locking someone away in Under for a few thousand years might be a move in such a game?’ Lila glanced up as she finished, watching the girl’s reaction closely. She didn’t expect much. She’d already concluded that whoever and whatever the girl was, she was an expert at showing only what she wished someone to see. From the side of her vision she kept Zal in close check – he had senses that could bypass lying and concealment even better than her ability to read the microresponses in other people’s skin that unerringly betrayed the depth of their concern about what they said or did.
‘Yes, of course,’ the girl said, shrugging it off in a way that neither confirmed nor denied Lila’s suspicion about her identity. ‘Listen, I know that the more I say the less you want to trust me, yeah? And not without reason. I know what happened to you, both of you. But every game has its pieces and you must realise that you are those pieces, as I am. The players are not the gods, cold and on high, as you might imagine. Nor the Fates. They’re just ones who live long and have power and like to play.’
Zal’s eyes narrowed and the misty shadow of his aetheric body condensed and withdrew beneath his skin. He was solid as Lila and the girl, waited for their replies. When they were both silent Sassy moved uneasily on her barstool and drew her lips into her mouth, biting both of them between her teeth until a white line appeared at their joining.
‘I always hated the idea of being a puppet,’ he said, with slow and exacting conviction. ‘But I have been one and it was every bit as awful as I imagined. But in the scheme of the universe, however it stands, however weak it looks like it might be becoming I don’t buy what you’re selling.’
‘No. You’re a demon. You wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘And I am not saying that your every move is pushed by unseen hands from on high. I’m not saying that! I’m saying there are those who like to play and they have liked to play with you. No more. Their age and their powers is all that makes them different. It makes them see things differently. They pick people up, see what happens; they don’t take your will, they don’t take your life away. They push a little bit here, pull a little bit there, see what happens. They lose some, they win some, they play short and they play long.’
‘They’re gamblers,’ Lila said, feeling the solid click of pieces falling into place inside her. They made a shape that was certain, a definite form, something she knew all about.
‘Yes,’ the girl nodded. ‘That’s
it.’
‘So what’s your part?’ Zal said, glancing back and forth between her and Lila.
The girl looked each of them in the eye, first Zal, then Lila. ‘Everyone’s got their price.’ She waited until both of them nodded to show they understood her, and agreed, in principle. ‘For some it’s money, a little or a lot. For some it’s honour, shame, vengeance – all the currencies of pride. You,’ she pinned Lila with a direct gaze of impossible clarity, ‘you played for pride. That’s a deadly mortal game. I’ve never understood why anyone would want it, but that was your game, wasn’t it?’
Lila lowered her eyelids, unable to nod but unable to say no. She had thought, early on when Sorcha had showed her the nature of her game with Zal, that it was a love game, perhaps even a sex game. But this girl, whoever she was, had it right. It was a pride game. And so was the one she’d played with her family. ‘I wouldn’t play it that way again.’
‘That is why it lost its power. You changed,’ the girl said. ‘Games themselves can change in time, make new rules, lose old ones. Ah, you didn’t know that, well, they can. Haven’t you ever watched faeries play cards?’
Lila had. It was completely baffling, apparently random. She’d never figured out what was going on or how they knew who had won.
Sassy nodded. ‘Now your game has become only that – a lovers’ game, a toy. If either of you decided to end it now by meeting its victory condition that would be voluntary, a choice, and so you cannot meet the condition. A condition that can’t be met is unplayable, so the rule changes. In this case it has become the spice to a foregone conclusion. It is worn out. You knew this.’
Lila blinked; the girl had put her finger on feelings she hadn’t been able to articulate herself. She glanced at Zal and found him looking at her with a glowing warmth she hadn’t expected, his eyes amused, his expression a little knowing, a little bit sad. But before she could react the girl was talking again, her intensity begging and getting their attention.
‘Zal, you played for your soul time and again. You always bet everything on it, and it always came up. That’s a pirate’s game, a free man’s game, the stakes of angels.’
Zal grinned and his nostrils flared for a moment as he bowed his head.
‘I’ve been instrumental in all kinds of games,’ the girl said, knotting her hands together around her knees, balancing on her narrow bottom on the high chair. Her feet pointed elegantly at the floor as she darted teasing looks at them now. ‘Win or lose, it was never my hand that mattered, I had nothing to play for and freedom was impossible. When you’ve got my gifts you can’t breathe before someone grabs you round the throat. But I’ve seen a lot, heard a lot.’ She let go of her knees and unfolded with grace, sliding off the seat to stand on her feet. On contact with the ground she suddenly gained a strength that both of them could feel as if it were a force pushing at them. Energy surged up through her small frame and gathered in her gaze.
Lila felt her skin suddenly react, surging with a chill over her back. She saw Zal move unconsciously into a defensive stance, poised on the balls of his feet.
The girl nodded in acknowledgement. ‘You’re like me. Sure you played some small-time business for yourselves but in terms of the Long Game you’re in over your heads because you don’t see the big picture. Well, I see it – the players, the moves, the stakes and I’m tired of watching. On my own I’ve got nothing. I can’t get in by myself. But you two – you three, four, five whatever: you’ve got serious leverage, know what I’m sayin’?’
Lila nodded slowly. She knew that look from her mother’s face. ‘You want in.’
‘Damn right!’
‘I’m curious,’ Zal said, though Lila could tell he was interested just by the way his body was moving. ‘What’s your price?’
‘Power,’ the girl said simply. ‘The power to play, that’s all.’
‘What if we say no?’ Lila asked.
The girl looked her in the eye. ‘Yeah, you could do that. Run away from what you want. People do. But whatever you do, wherever you go, whatever happens you know the game’s on, like it or not, and your only choice is play or be played. Take it to heart or don’t give a shit, doesn’t matter. You’ll live and die, that’s for sure, only got a few details to work out here an’ there. You keep trying not to play, eventually your offers are gonna dry up. But the thing about being someone else’s powerful toy is that you got options. Your position is way better than mine right now, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking. Trust me, no options gets old faster than you can believe, makes you ready to slip away, die maybe.’
Lila rubbed her face. ‘And I thought people just lived the best they could and got on with what they could and suffered with what they couldn’t until it was over.’
‘Mostly they do, live and die, never played a move, didn’t notice or didn’t care. Pity them. Or not,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t care for all that. I made my move. It’s your turn now.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lila gave Zal the nod, saying to the girl, ‘We need to talk, in private.’
The girl bowed her head a fraction. ‘Then you’d better go at least two miles out.’
Zal went back for his coat and then joined Lila on the deck where they both paused to look out over the forest down to the first houses and then, much farther away, the city. The air was cool and crisp even though down by the shore and in midtown it would already be warming up to humid.
Lila let her gaze rove across the skyscrapers and distinctive shapes of the skyline that was so new, noticing without caring when some important place went under her scan – the International Bank of Otopia, the Art Museum, the Magisterium, the University – and then she passed those and moved to the dull blocky shapes of apartments and low rises that spanned the gap called Bonville before the last of the major roads vanished into a flurry of little bridges, walkways and snakethrough passes that wound into the massed rises of Cedars like veins into a tumour. She didn’t remember it like that. It had been so pretty.
But now Cedars wasn’t ugly enough, considering what lay inside it, she thought. It had namesake trees in large numbers, breaking up the gaps and shading the goings on, smothering the worst of the neighbourhood in a year-round coverage of deceptively rich green. Cedars was a community park, made in what had been one of the more philanthropic moments of Bay City’s history. It had been opened while she was still a teenager. The mayor had snipped the ribbons across the gaily painted Chinese gates and a hundred paper dragons had taken to the air, dropping an electronic shower of gift vouchers wherever the wind bore them across the city. She and Max had got on their bikes and ridden hell for leather chasing them down. Never got close enough to grab one though.
Her memory of Cedars itself was much hazier. It had been an enclosed place, meant to be self-sufficient, a place of respite and peace within the shambling heart of the city for families who couldn’t have afforded the luxury in ordinary circumstances. It was close enough to midtown for work but far enough out that it wasn’t competing with any substantially prime real estate. Max had an apartment there for a while when she first moved out of home, but soon left it for a place that went with her job at one of the north-end casinos. Even at this time in the morning the flashing lights of the strip by the shore were blazing. Bay City was a good-time paradise, thick with fey and demon interests from the cheapest motel on the strip right down Eighth Avenue to the International Bank. And in the middle of the line that joined those buildings Cedars festered, its aspiring young families long gone.
It reminded her of Solomon’s Folly, an ugly junction of malicious forces.
‘Where’s the bike?’ Zal asked.
‘At the Agency,’ she said, realising how stupidly she’d behaved again thanks to her anger the day before.
‘Come on then.’ He turned and walked down the steps to the dirt driveway. He didn’t take the route towards the road but stepped off the property directly into the woods. Lila followed him, trusting his instincts on both directions
and the forest implicitly. They walked for a few hundred metres, jumping a couple of shallow drainage ditches and crossing a forgotten access road that was overgrown with grass and young shrubs. Beyond this the woods became more dense and progressively wilder. It was clear to her that they were not in line for the Agency.
Zal hiked steadily for another kilometre, then two, then three. They came to a minor clearing where a few trees had keeled over in last winter’s blowhard gales and he sat down on the deadfall, waiting for her to join him. She sat beside him, carefully testing the logs before she let them take her weight. They had moved quite quickly but neither of them were out of breath. It had been good to do nothing but walk and breathe the air.
‘Lila,’ Zal said in the slow way that meant he was coming to say something important. ‘Where’s Tatters?’
‘We’ve parted company,’ Lila said, less confident of her decision now that he seemed to be questioning it. ‘Last night I had a bit of a session.’ He was quiet and she felt more anxious. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I got the feeling you want to buy into this Long Game.’
‘I don’t know that I entirely buy her story—’
‘No but all the same. But I’m sick of those things. I had enough before I left Alfheim – they were the reason that I left. I haven’t been too good at leaving them behind. They follow me and pick me up it seems. But I’m not interested in being a player. I’m done. Even if the world is at stake. Particularly if that’s the stake.’
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 21
