Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  A woman wearing a gloriously expensive dress, very understated, and antique Jimmy Choo shoes came to greet her. “I’m Jolene, Zal’s PA” she said and Lila shook hands with her. Jolene was the kind of human Lila associated with elf groupiedom; smart, in control, stylish. It was difficult not to feel inferior, especially without a slick manicure. Lila put her hands behind her back and reminded herself she wasn’t here to look great, only to carry out her job. Jolene seemed content with her authentication documents and barely raised an eyebrow at either Lila’s gender or her size, so perhaps she wasn’t all bad.

  “Would you like to see the house first?” Jolene offered, glancing at her watch.

  “No thanks,” Lila said. “I know the layout.”

  “And the staff and the grounds and what they eat for breakfast, I suppose,” Jolene said, smiling. “In that case I understand it’s time you were at work. Is that bike the only vehicle you brought?” She peered anxiously across the vast hallway and through the door at Lila’s Kawasaki.

  “Elves won’t travel in Faraday cages,” Lila said, “so that rules out cars, trains and planes. I don’t travel on horseback, and it beats walking.”

  “So, you have done some homework,” Jolene nodded, satisfied. “I’ll go and get him.”

  “It’s okay, I’ll go,” Lila said, stepping around her. As Jolene looked puzzled she added, “Our offices sent you a ring, which you gave him to wear. It’s connected to our private network through secure branches not connected to the Otopia Tree. I could find him in the middle of a Bears game at Alton Park. Not that he’d be caught dead there.” She hesitated but Jolene didn’t smile at this efficient sidestepping of Otopia’s global internet. Instead the woman’s nervousness returned.

  “I really wish this wasn’t necessary Ms Black,” she said, “I hope you don’t take these threats as lightly as you speak of them.”

  “I don’t,” Lila said. She regretted her tone as she walked away. Showing some small weakness in front of Jolene would have gained her more sympathy. Now the woman was faintly antagonised by her.

  The hall gave way to several corridors and stairways. Lila went up to the second floor and through a maze of meandering ways to where a room the size of her entire apartment looked out through a glass wall to the ocean, giving a superb view. She couldn’t see anybody in it, only a set of pale sofas, a seemingly random assortment of plants in pots, and a coat laid over a straight-backed chair. Very faintly from somewhere she could hear Stevie Wonder singing “Blame It On The Sun”. Otherwise the house was silent.

  She walked to where her augmented and automated senses told her Zal was. The Doublesafe ring was on the chair, beside the coat. Lila glanced at it with annoyance, verging on anger, but curbed the feeling quickly and concentrated instead on the beauty of the coat. It was elvish-made, of tightly woven raw silk, sparely decorated with magical sigils that were so old they no longer bore any scent or colour of their own. The coat had been bleached by the sun. Only the inside showed its once true shade of crimson. The outside was a dull reddish clay, worn to white in places.

  Lila touched the hem of one sleeve as she looked around more carefully. The fabric softened between her fingers and she let it go quickly, only then realising the fact that the feeling that was nibbling away at her insides was fear. She hadn’t seen anything elvish since the day she was last completely human. She had gone to some lengths to avoid hearing Zal and his band, or any other elvish sound. She would have been content never to know anything of them ever again. She was glad of the processor that filtered her dreams. She did not want to meet the near-immortal she was charged to preserve with her brief life. She didn’t want to touch his coat.

  It was at this moment that the fineness of her hearing became more highly attuned. It was not Stevie singing his old song. It was somebody preternaturally quiet who was standing in the shadows, not more than a body’s length from her. It was Zal.

  Lila made herself turn very slowly, lest she look surprised. Her heart almost burst beneath the control of her Al-self’s attempt to regulate it. “There you are,” she said lightly. “I’m Lila Black, your bodyguard.” And she realised as soon as she spoke that she had foolishly given her real name, not the pretend name of the identity she had been meant to assume.

  The flare of her anger fizzed with a curious tang like the citrus twist in a sparkling drink as she acknowledged her mistake. Oh wait, that couldn’t have been the zing of wild magic, could it? Couldn’t have been the onset of a Game? Elves, humans and Games were notorious… the idea chilled her, but it was too late now. No, it was too faint. It couldn’t be anything more than her imagination.

  Zal had stopped singing as she noticed him standing there in plain view. He was exactly her height so they stood eye to eye as her anger stung her. She thought he looked slightly surprised but Lila couldn’t think straight. She was dismayed at how unprepared she was. It wasn’t his looks or his rock star status that made her feel sick with nervous tension. It was the sense of his otherness, the combination of how nearly human he appeared and how inhuman he really was.

  He’d made no effort to hide, but she hadn’t seen him. His natural magical aura had concealed him from her attention and now her technologically-assisted senses could feel the slight charge of it as he stepped closer. This elvish aetherial body, larger than his physical body and moving independently of it, reached out ahead of him and touched her with slippery, invisible coils. His andalune, after which the great bridge of Bay City was named, was as natural to him as her own skin was to her. Its curious touch was another kind of glance, nothing more, but the unwanted investigation made her back away one step even under her tightest control and she had to look away. Lila remembered other andalune touches like this one that were neither kind nor merely indifferent. And then, almost before it was there, it had gone away, satisfied that it knew everything it wanted to know about her. She could still taste a snap of lime in the air and some half-remembered warning tried to rise in her mind, though she was so slugged on adrenal suppressants it had nowhere to go. Her body wanted to run. Her mind was frozen. She gave him a casual nod of recognition with a dip of her chin, as though she couldn’t be more comfortable.

  For a second she thought he looked surprised. She saw a moment of curiosity burning in the slight widening of his large, slanted eyes.

  “Hello, Lila,” Zal said. He didn’t have an ordinary elf voice. Their normal speaking tones were very like human voices with subtle harmonies buried inside but this one was smoky rather than bell-like. He didn’t exactly fit the mould of serene snottiness she had been braced for either, although his long ash-blond hair and attenuated, pointy ears were exactly on theme. Lila had never seen an elf with dark eyes before. Zal’s were chestnut brown with darker rings around the iris. She was staring into them like any fool for a good half a second before she composed herself. She turned aside and felt her face heat. The feeling she was experiencing was startling, and nothing like loathing.

  Zal arched one dark eyebrow at her in a laconic expression of amusement at her clear efforts to repel all his natural glamour and Lila seethed with annoyance.

  “I don’t require your services,” he informed her. He took his coat up and put it on with insouciant ease, then tilted his head, waiting for her to do something.

  They always wait, Lila recalled, all trace of blush gone. They have the time. They like to watch and see what silly things humans will do, given the opportunity. He could stand there till Christmas with that false pretend-polite expression on his face.

  Lila picked up the ring. It was a stupid thing to have given him in the first place, but Doublesafe hadn’t thought past their human security procedures with any imagination. There was no way he would wear it. “Yeah well, you’re not paying the bill,” she said calmly. She wished she could take the ring and stuff it down his throat, but that would be only a short-term solution. Instead she put it in her jacket pocket and hoped she’d think of something. “It won’t make any difference. Unti
l Jelly is happy that all threats on your life are gone, then where you go, I go.”

  “Until you die?” he asked, both brows up for a second, taunting.

  “Or until you do.”

  Lila saw the ghost of a smile cross his face as he walked past her. His gait was deceptively slow to look at, but he was fast. It was all she could do not to trot in order to keep up.

  At the bike he didn’t pause, put his hands on the beautiful sunrise paintwork of the gas tank and swung his leg over into the riding position. So much for the legendary elf aversion to machinery.

  Lila knew that this was the moment when she had to take some control if she were ever going to stand a chance. She didn’t hesitate: walked up, put her hands on his waist and lifted him off her place and onto the pillion seat. Then she kicked her leg high over the handlebars without waiting to see if her strength had caused any surprises and sat down very hard and towards the back of her seat, rather hoping to do him some minor damage.

  The bike reacted immediately to her touch, reading her intent from the tension in her body, the speed of her movements and its trace readings from her Al-self. As she took hold of the grips it was already moving forward, and as soon as her feet were off the ground it accelerated rapidly, bending them low as it curved around the tight turns into the woodland.

  She felt Zal adjust to the movements easily. He did not grab her, as she’d hoped he might have to because he was off balance. He waited until they were stopped at the gates and then slid up against her and put his hands on her hips.

  “Don’t be mad, honey,” he said, so close to her ear that she could feel his breath warm the long curls of her hair. “I thought you wanted me where you could see me.”

  “I can see you all I want from here,” she said and took them down the last slope at speed, necessitating a heavy sideslide into the road which almost took both their knees out on the hardtop. She was almost certain that he would be able to feel where her real body and the intelligent metal prosthetics grew into one another and that was horrible, more than she expected, but, much more than that, what most concerned her was that despite all her training it had taken barely seconds before she was playing a Game with him when the first rule of engagement with elves, like dragons, is that you never play Games with them. The smart one-liners were a dead giveaway. That lime and lemon zap—had he started it deliberately? No doubt… but her brooding was cut short.

  As she straightened them into line she saw shadows shifting on her right, where the trees clung to a steep bank. She glanced there and saw the uncertain, stag-like form of a large wood elemental looking at them from the shade, branches its bones and leaves its flesh. Such creatures were incredibly rare in Otopia,

  The bike was too fast. She caught no more than that glimpse.

  Zal didn’t say or do any more but he didn’t move away either. All the way into town she could feel his body and the almost-skin contact of his andalune, warm against her back. She found herself mentally reviewing a still shot of the first moment she’d walked into the room with the ocean view. He’d been watching her, the whole time she’d been in the room, long before she saw him. Looking at what her Al-self could analyse from the images now she thought his look at her was disturbingly acute.

  I will not be attracted to him, it’s only a ridiculous magical trick, this Game, she told herself sternly. The entire thing is just one big easy weapon they use to get whatever they want out of humans. Most can’t do anything about it, can’t even feel it when it takes hold, but I can, and I’m not falling for that old trick. Magical bonds do not count as reality and they don’t stand up in court. Anyway, all elves stare acutely. It’s a species-trait, like the ears and the supercharged nervous system. My job is to find out all about him, to guard him and to find out who’s after him, and that’s all.

  Which was all true. But it felt truer when they arrived in the studio parking lot and he got off and ignored her completely. This time she had to stride at her fastest to catch up as he vanished into the dim, air-conditioned interior.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lila ignored the ride and her various disquiets by forcing them into temporary storage in her Al-memory system. She concentrated as she met the rest of the band, the support crew, the studio execs, the sound engineers and the various hangers-on who had accumulated to listen to the recording. As she shook their hands she took readings and compared them with the files she had on them already. Data ran like water in her mind, showing her their names and every other known statistic under the sun.

  The three backing singers were faery; two of Emerald Nation with beautiful green skins, and one Chalcedonite who was striped like a tiger in tones of dusk and gold.

  “He’s a Mojave Blue,” one of the Emerald girls, the ultra-dark Viridia, told Lila proudly, because he was her boyfriend. He introduced himself as Sand, Sandy for long.

  The other faery woman was even more lovely than Viridia, with spiky natural lime hair in a punk style and a slender, willowy shape. Her face was all delicate features, boosted with extraordinary silver and turquoise makeup in the faery equivalent of Goth. “I’m Poppy,” she said, with a dazzling smile. “Hey, how are ya? Nice to see more girls around. This place is strictly over-testosteroned, if ya know what I mean. Did you see Zal’s letters? They’re utterly hideoso. Hey Zal,” and she took his arm as he passed her and air-kissed him in the direction of his lips—a gesture he matched with an elegant mwa, millimetres from contact. “Catch ya later.”

  Lila watched Poppy glide just above the floor in that floaty faery way, as though she was as light as thistledown. Viridia and Sand made slightly more effort to stay floorbound, but not much. Their wings were not visible in Otopia, but Lila found that they created a slight buzz of interference with her internal comms, as certain kinds of faery often did. She’d have to be careful around them because they’d made her slow to react.

  Zal did some complicated gang-like Hi-Five greeting with the others in the band. From letting Lila make her own way with the guileless bonhomie of the faeries he actually reached back and drew her forward into the studio proper to meet the humans.

  “Guys, this is my new shadow, Lila. Lila doesn’t like rock, and she doesn’t like elves.”

  “Hey,” said the bass player, dark and fresh-faced Luke who was, Lila judged, twenty-five going on fifteen. His rap sheet included two counts of Class B alchemical possession. He gave her a grin and a heavy squeeze on her hand. “Is she like, going everywhere with us?”

  “What does she like?” asked the girl DJ, giving Lila a competitive and warning-off stare from under the brim of her battered top hat.

  “Violence,” Lila said sweetly in her best Swiss-finishing-school voice. She withdrew her hand from Luke’s hold. He winked at her.

  Zal laughed.

  The DJ relaxed and nodded, her stiff-faced initial reaction softening into a smile. “Whatever.”

  Luke said, “Don’t like elves? Are you what, some kind of racist?”

  “I love elves,” Lila said in exactly the same tone as before, her smile fixed. “And I love rock.”

  Jelly’s voice broke in over the intercom. “Can we get on with business before the rental of these fine additional musicians destroys all potential of my third house purchase in New Malibu? Stations people. Instruments. Connections.”

  Lila retreated to Jelly’s side of the glass wall and sat down beside him at the mixing desk. She detected no hidden enmities in the band. Far from it, they were all perfectly easy with one another. A quick surveillance of the rest of the people here gave her no more evidence of any internal rivalries at work. She settled down to watch them do their stuff. They were going to record a Mode-X cover of "The Ace of Spades".

  Lila, like Jelly, had no faith that Zal could ever convincingly sing tracks like that. She’d never heard an elf sing anything other than chant or a peculiarly prissy version of “Silent Night”. She didn’t want to wait around either. Now that she was satisfied that the studio was secure, and with
two other guards on duty at the doors, she made an excuse of visiting the Ladies Room and took her chance to slip out in order to investigate the rest of the building.

  Poppy had been quite right when she said that the letters sent to Zal care of Ozo Records had been hideoso. They were also, as far as Incon were concerned, of possible relevance to national security. Although some of them were crackpot in nature, hating Zal for his race, for his taste in music or for his betrayal of all matters precious to Alfheim, those were easy to deal with: from elves or from humans they went straight in the bin. But the dangerous ones that had sparked Lila’s operation weren’t like that.

  These few were letters that had been delivered on magical vellum, and what they said changed according to who read them. When the manager of the fan club had opened them they read like regular fan mail. The senders had even included cheques to join through special promotional rates promised through an ad in Vanity Fair which had accompanied a big article on Zal. But in Zal’s hands the words and letters spun themselves around. It wasn’t possible for Lila to read what he saw, but she’d been provided with Zal’s brief report on it. The letter read:

  Return by the lost way or not at all, Return by the longest day or not at all: Else be lost and ever wander, Life and limb and spirit squander.

  It was a general kind of magical threat that any of the non-Otopian realms might have employed, but unlike most spellcast items it bore no telltales of its origin that Incon’s aetherial forensics had been able to decipher. Since magic was created through the spirit of the creator, it was technically not possible to have traceless magic. Magic bore the signatures of the maker all through it, like a hallmark. But the letter had proven completely flavourless.

  The lost way part referred to the elf-only gateway out of Otopia to Alfheim. The longest day was easy: that was Midsummer Solstice, two days away. The rest of it seemed to indicate less favourable conditions. Other Incon agents had been dispatched into Alfheim to see if they could find out whether it had come from someone there. Lila, glad to be in Otopia, didn’t know what she was looking for now, so she looked for anything.