Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  The elf waited. She could feel his attention all on her, for the first time, a cautious, careful attention. She thought that was a very bad sign. But she didn’t need it.

  “Do you really hate me?”

  There was a pause. No.

  “Oh,” Lila said, lightly, she felt, considering. A fragment of imp slid down her face like a piece of wet cake. She brushed it away absently and flicked it to the ground. “Then it must be me.”

  Lila . . .

  “Not now,” she said. “There’s a good boy.”

  But the elf was unwinding. She felt his spirit body unfold and spread with liquid slowness through her chest, her guts, and into her limbs. He left her head alone but he could still hear her. Thanks to the metal elementals fused into her once-mundane prosthetics he could even reach through them without being nullified by the anti-aetheric properties of electromagnetic fields. It had been a long time since he had done anything but crouch inside her and hide. The last time he had been out was the day he ate the soul of Teazle’s brother.

  She couldn’t help but cringe inside when she remembered, but the shrinking wasn’t from him alone. He was more than she ever realised. His presence was steady, and alive, as she shrank away from her own body, and tried to do what he did, and wall herself off somewhere deep within that had never been touched by magic or engineering. Tath unfurled. They might share physical space and one another’s thoughts and senses, but they were nothing like the same. To Lila he felt old, full of secrets, and young and full of unused potentials. He reminded her painfully of Zal and the facts of his unknown agendas, history, and abilities wore at her. She could go nowhere and do nothing without his witness.

  These people are savages, Tath said, lying calm like a smooth lime river in her veins and circuits. You must understand their culture is nothing like yours. They hold life so high, but they throw it away in an instant. It is their pride. His tone left no doubt in Lila’s mind that he despised this attitude, but also held a grudging admiration for it. The dead woman isn’t someone cherished and lost to them, she’s a bargaining piece in an endless game. They will not judge you like humans. You should not either.

  “What are you talking about?” Lila snapped.

  Lila, do you know what this Hell is that they speak of? He sounded less chiding now.

  “Self-doubt or something,” she said. “I was never that great at analysis and the spirit stuff. I like to just,” she drew a line in the air with one fingertip, between her head and a distant spot, “let the doctor suck it out and see what she says.”

  She felt Tath’s disturbance grow but he remained calm. I know what it is, he said. And I only know one useful thing about it. Once you start to go through Hell, keep going. Lila, you are beginning to stop. But you carry me with you. I am in Hell too and I will not stop.

  “Talk sense or shut up,” she said. “I’m sick of it already.” She felt wretched. She should go in, do something, report, write a paper . . . She sat on the stone bench.

  You must stop pretending, Tath said.

  “Pah!” Lila spat, standing before she knew what she was doing, head down, stance ready. “How dare you of all people say that to me. We agreed to stay out of one another’s way. You’d keep your lying little secrets and I’d let you live. Or did you forget that deal?”

  You cannot answer every challenge with death, Lila, the elf said, for the first time in a tone that she could have sworn was laced with concern that wasn’t entirely for himself. Will you shoot everything in the world that comes to tell you that you are running out of time? And I am not speaking of your job as spy or your personal need to discover Zal’s story or anything like that.

  “I don’t eat people’s souls,” she retorted, not even sure how that was supposed to make sense except that she hated being taken to task by someone worse than she was. “And you’re not my conscience so shut up or . . .”

  Or what? A tendril of green andalune wound slowly out from the side of her right arm and enveloped a piece of imp flesh that lay seeping beside her on the seat.

  Flesh without the spirit is such a strange thing, Tath said. It has everything needed for life, but life. And the aether decays instantly . . . gone. The shadowkin would have consumed him by now. To her it would be a crime to waste what is no longer needed. They eat their dead, you know. The dead offer themselves to be consumed, and some of their memories pass with the substances of their being.

  Necromancers use similar techniques, but we do not eat the aetheric body. We mine it for its unique organisation—for the soul. Souls are our mounts that we ride into death. Time stamps. Constellations. Compasses. We cannot get there without one. Only the dead may cross over. Or those shrouded in the mantle of a soul fleeing into death. But you have to pick the moment. Dar, for example. I could have gone with him. But I did not.

  He had nobody to offer himself to when we took his life. All his line and their moments, wasted with him. Fifteen thousand years of brave and defiant continuity in the face of chaos and destruction, gone with the blow of our blade, as if they were nothing. But you were human. I was light born. And everyone else there was a bastard he wouldn’t give breath to. Who had he?

  I would not make him my horse and save him, like I saved the demon I yet contain, for when I need an energy ride into the hidden land. But I have that demon. One ace in my hand. His tone had become soft, but she could feel its spite as strongly as ever. Once I was a boy who dreamed of other things.

  As he said this last Lila found her mind suddenly suffused with soft pictures of incredibly high trees, their leaves a billion shades of green beneath the sun. She was running in the dappled glade beneath, watching her hands catch the golden coins of the light as it fell through the slowly moving foliage. There was an animal beside her, running too. Their spirits were joined in friendship and they were lost in the moment. Not far away others were around, higher in the branches, and their animal companions were with them; all kinds of beasts were there, each of them vivid to her. With no more effort than thought she could see through their eyes, feel the beat of their hearts. They were part of a special tribe. They were free and it was good to be alive.

  Then the little montage of Tath’s lost dreams faded and she was left seated on the cold stone, the demon night around her, the forest replaced by the hoots and whistles and shrieks of endless struggle.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Lila had felt herself slowly frozen during the revelation, all her resentful fire replaced by cold uncertainties and a sense of being so far from home. She was slow and calm.

  The elf was still and silent, just spoke the words quietly to her, no rancour left. I wanted to share one moment of my Hell with you. We are all alone in Hell. But we are not alone in being there.

  Lila looked out into the night. “I don’t know why everyone else but me is so confident of that analysis. I don’t feel like I’m in Hell. I’m in Demonia on some assignment that got out of hand. Probably it’s no worse than what most demons face every day, I mean, look at them! I just screwed up a bit. I can fix it. I can do . . . things . . .” She realised she was scrubbing her hands against her leather leggings and stopped. She felt sympathy. It wasn’t hers.

  “Don’t you dare fucking pity me!” she screamed out, leaping to her feet. It shocked her almost as much as it shocked Sorcha, who reappeared at the door, her hair blazing as she looked around for trouble.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Tath diminished, swift and subtle. Lila stood staring out at nothing. “Nobody.”

  Sorcha looked baffled for a moment, then shrugged. “Someone here to see you.”

  Lila stared at her. She glanced down at the shackle.

  “A friend,” Sorcha said.

  “But I don’t . . .” Lila began and stopped. She took a deep breath and nodded. “Here?”

  Sorcha stepped aside. Lila was astonished to see Malachi walk past her onto the terrace. He was the last person she had thought to see here . . . nearly the last anyway.
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  She felt a confusing surge of gladness and anxiety and then a moment of awe as he emerged fully from the dim interior into the torchlight. Malachi just looked like a jet black human being in Otopia. A jet black human with yellow eyes and a style not far short of the 1940s, suits and shoes always perfect, walking slightly off the ground sometimes, like walking on air. In Otopia she never saw the wings but here, like the elven andalune bodies, here they were.

  Lila had never seen him in his natural fey form before. Malachi looked much more like a cat than she remembered. He had whiskers on his top lip that spanned out in ebon arches, shining, as wide as his shoulders. His hair was softer and more furry, it tufted at the sides as though he had ears like a cat. He had wings that transected his jacket and camel-coloured raincoat without damaging them; transparent, floating wings like the thinnest gossamer, veined with ink black lines so fine they seemed to draw the outline of wings on the air, two sets of them, butterfly shaped with ragged edges and glittering with rich grey anthracite dust, twinkling and soft.

  His large eyes, orange, slit pupilled, took in detail and narrowed as he sensed the degree of disturbance in the scene. Above his eyebrows two long delicate lines she had taken for other whiskers revealed themselves mobile, questing through the air. They were mothlike antennae. After a moment they folded back and were lost in his hair. “Seems like you get in trouble everywhere you go,” he said, though he wasn’t entirely lighthearted about it. His face was taut.

  Lila restrained herself from moving forward to greet him, because his hesitancy made her self-conscious. She brushed at something wet on her arm and then let her shoulders slump, “Ain’t that the truth,” she said.

  Behind Malachi, Sorcha signalled a servant to go get something, or do something, but she didn’t leave. Malachi looked at Lila’s shackle and made an awkward hunching motion with his own shoulders, “I . . . Can we go somewhere?”

  Lila gritted her teeth, “I don’t want to go out. People everywhere.” She prayed that Malachi would understand how it was when you were new and strange in town here. He seemed to, because after a second he moved towards her, his expression resigned but determined to offer her a sign of friendly affection. He put his hand on her shoulder and set to give her his customary kiss on the cheek but as he leaned in he was suddenly yawning instead. Lila felt awkward and did nothing. As usual fey proximity had a slight fogging effect in her circuits. He leaned back and covered his mouth with one hand, nails long and clawed upon it.

  “Must have taken more out of me than I thought,” he muttered, mostly to himself and smiled at Lila with a smile that soon faded until his mouth was as thinly drawn as a wire.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “Problems?”

  “I came to . . .” His hesitancy and seriousness were uncharacteristic, and it was a relief when he gave up the effort of making a show and said simply, “I have to tell you some bad news.” He looked over his shoulder at Sorcha, who smiled at him with a cold elegance that said she wasn’t going anywhere. Malachi shrugged it off and turned back to Lila, walking forward to take her arm—pointedly avoiding a smear—and leading her to the very end of the terrace where date palms in giant pots provided a nominal kind of shelter. Behind them the summoned servants appeared and began cleaning with great haste and efficiency. Sorcha brooded and skulked around them, trying to listen in.

  Lila was strangely grateful for the distraction, no matter how bad it was, but Malachi hesitated again and washed his face with the back of one hand—something Lila had never seen him do before. “You’re going feral?” she asked, trying to make him smile. He liked silly jokes.

  “Are you going to sit down?” he asked impatiently.

  “No,” she said. “Are you going to stop stalling and start talking?”

  “Lila, your parents are dead.”

  She saw Sorcha jerk slightly in the background. A moment later, in the long quiet, Thingamajig bounced back up onto the terrace railing and looked around for her; it opened its mouth and received Sorcha’s tail in it at something slightly less than a hundred miles an hour. It vanished over the edge again with a muffled cry.

  “How?” she asked. She felt so calm it was really quite odd. She felt like a big space opened up inside her, around her, and what had just been important was receding on the perimeter.

  “Car accident.”

  “Really?” She wanted it to be that. She looked at him desperately, hoping it was not the overspill from what she had done. Praying . . . and distantly aware that it was odd to pray for death for people you loved.

  His burning orange eyes fixed their gaze on hers steadily. “I didn’t see that.”

  Oh. Something the agency were covering . . . that was . . . “Demons?”

  He shrugged—he really didn’t know. His wings shed a little dust and it sparkled in the air, a cloud of almost weightless magical matter, soon borne off on the breeze. “Later,” he said in a low voice. “Not here.”

  “Are you sure . . . I mean . . . there couldn’t have been some mistake . . .”

  “I have a picture of the scene,” he said in clipped, near silent syllables and gave a slight shake of his head.

  Lila swallowed hard. “Can I see it?”

  The faery backed off a step.

  She held out her hand, “I mean it. I can handle it. I need to see it. I have about thirty vendettas out on me and I want to know . . .”

  “It’s probably not a good idea,” he said. “Don’t you think . . .”

  “Show me,” Lila demanded, losing all patience. “Give it to me! I have a right to know!”

  “And I have a business to protect you right now,” Malachi countered, polite but unshakeable, his chin lowering with determination. “You’ll get to know when the time is right.”

  He has a . . . Tath began.

  You shut up, Lila snarled inwardly. To Malachi she kept her hand out and balled the other one into a fist. “Give me what you got, partner.”

  Malachi didn’t miss the load on the last word. She saw him flinch. He wrestled visibly with his conscience for a second, then slowly reached into his inside pocket and withdrew his Berry. He flipped it open and cued the screen before holding it out to her.

  All her conviction left. She didn’t want to take it because it was going to hurt, only, she didn’t know how bad. Everything was suspended, until the second she saw and it was true. She was okay, until she looked. She was aware of Sorcha staring at her, of the world being still and silent, of Malachi waiting. She wanted to live in this moment forever.

  She took the Berry and turned it towards herself. The AI in her skull offered to take away everything but the facts; it could detach her from emotion and even deal with all the deductions. At all costs she had to remain a functional, capable agent, responsible for her awesome power, her duty foremost in her mind. It was there to help when that was too hard for an ordinary person. It wouldn’t be cheating. It was essential. It had protected her from the impact of so many things since she was Made. The only time she’d ever cut it off completely was the night and day she spent with Zal in his hotel room.

  The prospect of using it again made her feel weak, grey, and flat. Empty; she was the robot girl who never had to deal, who downloaded her passions, who bypassed her pain, who had infinite energy and the strength of a thousand men and the heart of a zombie. And no change, not ever, always the smile of the medicated mind and the comfort of the hot guns. And nobody asked her. They saved her. Oh . . .

  She shut it down.

  Lila . . . Tath was afraid for her. She knew it was real concern and she was glad of it, no matter what fucked up shit else he was keeping back for another day.

  No. You’re right. I thought when you said lying you meant to you, and to other people. I didn’t think about me. I have, ever since . . . since Vincent died, or even before. Yeah, maybe before that, before the bomb even came. (She thought of weddings and school and a feeling she had never named, a deep dissatisfaction with the prospect of a norm
al adult life, her parents’ visions of what it held in store. Within her shock, was there not just a tinge of . . . relief? Yes. She felt herself fragmenting, almost grateful that her missing limbs and pieces were not here to see what she had come to because she did not feel like a horrified, upset, dutiful child. At last, said some old, old voice in her mind. We can stop now. An exhaustion came over her so profound that she had to lock her limb mechanics to hold her up. She thought she could lie down right there and sleep for a thousand years.) I’m so tired, she said and looked at the image in her hand.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Her mother was seated on the sofa—a new sofa, all beautiful hand-tooled leather and Italian design like she’d wanted for so many years, but when Lila was at home it had been an old divan set—she was relaxed and slumped. Her mouth hung slackly. Her eyes were wide open and rolled up, just the bottom part of the iris showing. Her dad was the same, but he half lay on the sofa, like he’d been draped there. A string of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth.

  They didn’t look dead, just passed out. On the table in front of them was a box and a lot of silver and white wrapping paper, ribbon and tape, scissors, and a card tucked into the fold of its envelope. It bore a picture of two bears holding hands, one in a tux and one in a veil—“Congratu lations!” Next to it was a half-finished bottle of vodka and her mother’s chunky glass, leaded crystal. Ice cubes in it had melted almost down to nothing and the glass ran with water on the outside. A deck of her mother’s trademark Lucifera casino playing cards had spilled off the corner and lay in a scatter on the carpet next to two unopened packs, their crumpled cellophane wrapper beside them. In the corner of the image she could see the curve of the white baby grand piano her sister played, covered with silver-framed photographs of the family that always used to ring faintly whenever someone hit a high F. They were dusty.

  “How did you get there so fast?” Lila’s voice didn’t sound like her own. She was barely aware of speaking.

  “I didn’t. I got the picture from Delaware. A neighbour called the police. She heard screaming.”