Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  As the minutes passed she became able to sense more, through what remained of her human organs. It began to dawn on her with a creeping, stomach-churning horror that she could feel the breeze blowing a light, flappy fabric against her skin. It told her she was wearing a robe with very possibly nothing underneath it. No, surely a swimsuit? Or something. But that hardly mattered. The bare fact of her cyborg change, which she had wished to hide completely until some unspecified future of confidence and acceptability, when she might be able to reveal it to someone trusted, was on full show. Shame and fear flooded her, but even they could not make her move. Only her breathing and her heart were active and they didn’t respond to her feelings at all, as though she really had slept the sleep of a thousand years.

  Then a shadow fell across her—bliss for her eyes at last. She smelt a bright, mineral fragrance like bath salts.

  Poppy leaned over her and carefully pushed a pair of sunglasses onto Lila’s nose, settling their arms carefully over her ears. “There,” she said, with the playful voice of somebody dressing a doll. “Nobody from the house will ever know you’re not out here just taking some rays.” She dabbed the tear from Lila’s face with the tip of her finger. Lila heard her straighten up and the edge of Poppy’s fragile robe brushed across her bare hand. It was agonising to be able to feel everything but be able to do nothing. Lila was desperate to know what had happened, but she didn’t have to wait.

  “Hey!” Poppy called out across the pool. “Zal, how long will this take?”

  No, no, no, Lila was moaning, somewhere deep inside. Just when she thought it couldn’t be any worse—it was. Part of the reason she’d been sent to this assignment was because Incon suspected that extremists from Elfland had picked Zal as a target through which to get some publicity for their cause. Their real motivations however, far from being directly related to rock stars or even dissident elves, were set against the furtherance of Otopian technologies, particularly nuclear reactors and cyborg systems, which they saw as abominations. Their views were the sharp end of a general trend among elves against high technology. There was no more repellent vision for an elf than a natural being invaded by inert machinery, except possibly something Undead. Although her pride and the shreds of her vanity surely burned at the idea of Zal now having a good reason to loathe her, Lila was sick with the realisation that her cover was almost certainly blown. So much for her great spy skills.

  The sun came back full force as Poppy moved away. The light was like a lance straight into her brain. Lila wished herself asleep again—for a million years.

  Zal’s voice spoke from somewhere slightly below them both and to her right. “The counteragent should take it off in a day or so.”

  A day! Lila cringed. She could not, would not even let herself think about being Poppy’s new lifesize robo-Barbie for an entire day, though before she could squash the idea she had already seen herself dressed and re-dressed and stood up as a piece of living statuary somewhere embarrassing while Poppy talked the entire time about what great fun it all was. The only possible mercy was that faeries in their human forms were generally so congenial that they wouldn’t let her come to any harm. Even so, it was unbearable, but Zal hadn’t finished…

  “I can speed things up, probably.” She heard him get out of the pool and then he moved into her field of vision as he stood up. He was a lithe silhouette, dripping with diamonds.

  “She’s gonna be so mad,” Poppy whispered, close to him.

  Lila could see Poppy as a green-tinged shadow surrounded by diaphanous cloth that floated on the air. She was so close to Zal that there was only a tiny strip of light between them. Poppy’s outline jittered and she sounded strung out.

  “Please Zal,” she said. “You can talk to her. She likes you. She’ll be cool. I’m so tired. I have to get some sleep. Oh come on, don’t look at me like that. You already forgave me, remember? Pretty please? I’d do it for you.”

  Zal snorted with laughter and folded his arms across his chest.

  Poppy’s tone changed from pleading to pretended anger, the kind that only very good friends can exert with one another. “You are so bloody High Elfy sometimes, you bastard. Come on.”

  “Only if you swear you won’t take any more pixie dust until the tour’s over. That’s why you can never sleep. And fixing it gives me a headache.”

  “I swear, I swear!” Poppy danced from foot to foot.

  “And no more enchanted knives and midnight assassination attempts with school-age conspirators? Making me rescue my own bodyguard? Wiping the mess off your face?”

  “No, no, no! Come on, Zal. I’ll do anything, anything, baby, cross my heart, pleeze! This is the last time. I promise. I’ll be so good.”

  “You’re full of it,” he said wearily, and took her in his arms and kissed her. He picked her up and they moved out of sight.

  The sun blasted Lila, although the glasses cut the worst of it. She fought just to move one finger. Nothing.

  “Mmmnn,” she heard Poppy sigh. “That’s perfect. One more time till I can’t hear the sea…”

  Lila remembered Poppy yawning in the same tone the night before, at a very un-yawny moment, when the other elf, the cousin, had touched her.

  “My reverse prince…” she heard Poppy sigh.

  “Pixie shit,” Zal muttered, almost beneath hearing.

  Wood creaked. The trees soughed in the wind. Lila’s robe flapped and her hair moved. Heavy fabric rustled not far away. Lila wondered—she thought Poppy and Zal were going to do something else, but had he put her to sleep? Was it a feature of elf/faery interaction she’d never known about before? If only she could see…

  Zal’s shadow fell across Lila’s face. She tried to close her eye, but it didn’t.

  He sat down next to her and she felt something brushing over her forehead—a feather. Zal hummed something wordless, tuneless, a mesmer that seemed to circle as the feather circled, and a tingling sensation spread down from her forehead and all through her. Occasionally he stopped and flicked the feather away from them both, as though shaking water off it. The tingling stopped.

  Then he got up and stood astride her lounger, feet on the floor. She blinked and could see a little better.

  Zal bent down so that his face was only a short distance from hers, his hands on his knees. His long wet hair fell across her chest and the water from it spread out, suddenly cold, through her robe.

  “I know you can hear me,” he said, and she thought he was smiling. “I have to do this last part to wash the charm right out” He held up the black feather. “I want you to know that it’s perfectly justified and that I’m not just feeling you up, although I am doing that too.” He reached down and separated the front of her gown.

  A fury, alternately cold and hot, started burning in Lila. She privately promised herself that she would make him pay for this, and soon. How dare he?

  He slid his hand down softly across her breast, over her ribs and pressed the feather against the place where she was cut by the knife. It suddenly stung with agonising sharpness and Lila felt new tears spring into her eyes. Zal said something in a language she didn’t catch, though she was reasonably sure it wasn’t elvish. She could feel his andalune aethereal body suddenly concentrate itself around the place. The touch of it was more intimate even than his skin on hers and it made different tears rise and replace the angiy ones, though she didn’t like that it had that power and she still fiercely resented his invasion, even if it was so wretchedly caressing and kind.

  Then Zal took the feather off. Lila saw it crumple into dust and be swept away on the breeze as he put his finger on the bridge of her shades and slid them down her nose. Lila glared into his dark, slanting eyes. He grinned at her. “You should have let those two idiots have their fun,” he said. “The day I get sneaked up on by a twelve-year-old is the day you can drown me and throw me in a dumpster.”

  Lila ran a startup on main power. It responded perfectly. The tokamak was a second sun, deep in her bell
y, vivid with raw energies.

  He sighed. “Poppy wanted me to tell you that your secrets are all safe with her, so long as she’s not under arrest.”

  “And you?” Lila found her voice fully functional.

  “I’m sure we’ll come to some arrangement, Agent Black.”

  Lila opened her eyes wide. Zal blinked and flinched as the sun reflected off her silver irises and in that instant she put her hands on his chest and threw him backwards into the pool, It was a good throw—five metres. Nothing wrong with the machine. She stood up and belted the ridiculous faery robe.

  Zal surfaced and shook the water out of his hair. He glided away from her on his back towards the far side, watching her with that maddening catlike calm. She saw his eyes trail her up and down quite slowly.

  Lila looked down. The prosthetics of her legs and the way they had been grown into her made them look like chrome stockings. The robe was obviously one of Poppy’s—it didn’t so much conceal anything as hint at concealment, but then give it up as a pointless effort. She saw her own arms, where they were real skin, crisscrossed with pink and silver scars, stained with red like splashes of paint. She glared across at the faery but Poppy was asleep, all but entirely hidden under an outsize bathtowel.

  Zal got out of the pool. “Don’t thank me,” he said to her as he walked past, almost but not quite brushing her arm. He didn’t glance at her.

  “Thank you,” Lila said through gritted teeth. She followed him back into the house.

  Zal went into his room and shut the door on her. She guessed he was going to go back to bed.

  She found all her armour and clothing laid on the floor of her room. Nothing was missing. There was a small tear in the vest where the knife tip had punctured it. The knife itself was on her mahogany side table. She was examining it when there was a knock at the adjoining door.

  “Lila?” It was Zal.

  She waited until she was fully dressed in her fatigues and then opened it.

  He was still standing there, dry and fully clothed. He didn’t seem angry or upset. He handed her an envelope and she recognised the faery vellum with a sinking feeling.

  “Another letter?”

  “They’re not big on email in the magical nations,” Zal said, watching her take the sheet of paper out and open it.

  It was in the highly cursive Elvish script but she could read it. She could not read the magical symbolism that wavered in the air above it, crackling with static electricity that made the connectors in her fingers tingle. “Thanks,” she said, betraying none of her dismay at its vitriol. “I’m going to send it in for a complete analysis.”

  “You needn’t bother,” he said. “It’s from the Jayon Daga, the Elvish Secret Service. The usual. Go back where you came from or die. With the added charm of their special seal.”

  He wasn’t mentioning the chain of curses that circled the edge of the page, nor the hatred directed at him through the charms which he must have felt as soon as he touched it. Lila was grateful she only had to see the words.

  “The seal means this is the last warning,” Lila said with dismay. She knew about Daga seals. She’d hoped never to see one again. “I need to talk to Jolene and,” she hesitated—yes, he’d said Agent Black, no, she wasn’t ready to admit everything, “and to my bosses. I don’t think we can carry on.”

  “We are carrying on,” Zal said with complete confidence. He reached for the letter but Lila twitched it away from him.

  “It’s not worth dying for,” Lila said, stating what she thought was the obvious.

  “Compared with what?” Zal stepped back suddenly, and beckoned her in. She hesitated, still smarting from the events earlier, but swallowed her feelings and obeyed. He made a vague gesture that she should take a seat anywhere. She didn’t want to risk making prolonged eye contact because she knew that would only tend to make her agree with whatever he said, so she walked around instead and made a minute search of the entire room, wondering at what had prompted him to make this concession.

  She found out nothing, only that he was tidy and that everything was elven-made including his regular clothing and stage clothes. On the wall opposite the bed was a huge larger-than-lifesize original painting of a dramatically sprawled female demon. It was by Laetitia, the faery artist. About the demon other figures seemed to hover in forms that might be of any of the Severed Realms, but they could have been steam rising from the demon’s crimson skin. The erotic charge was a bit of a shock amid the leaf tones and neutrals of the rest of the place. Lila tried not to stare, although it was very beautiful. She sat down on the edge of the bed and waited.

  Zal leaned against the table beneath the painting and said, “I’ll spare you the speech about not fitting in. I’m sure you can imagine what it’s like to be different to everyone else, never meeting their expectations. I’ll be surprised if they’re the only ones out to stop me. But they’re not going to. You can help me, or you can leave.”

  “It’s not that simple. There was only a vague threat until today. If they stick to their usual ways there are now a pair of elvish assassins out to get you who think they have a free shot any time after midnight tonight.” She made herself face him. “I want to report and check back with my office team and then go back to the studio and check something there. I don’t think there’s anything here to worry about until the clock strikes twelve, not from them at least. JD are very rule-oriented. I need to get some more gear too. In the circumstances, I think you should leave here by this afternoon and stay in separate locations from the rest of the band unless you’re on stage. I’ll be back for you in two hours. Until then, do nothing, go nowhere.”

  He nodded, “And if I say no?”

  “Then I quit.”

  “I don’t think that’s up to you now, is it?”

  “It’s up to me,” Lila said. “There are other agents who’ll do it”

  Zal smiled when she made herself break with his gaze. “Well, I want the girl secret agent who looks like a million dollars. No, it’s probably several billion dollars, isn’t it?”

  “More than you can afford,” she retorted.

  He gave her a glance that left her in no doubt he was mentally undressing her. “So, if the Jayon Daga are coming, and I only have sixteen hours left to live, how do you feel about charity?”

  “Ask me in fifteen hours and fifty-eight minutes,” Lila said sweetly and walked out, cursing herself this time because she could not or would not—she wasn’t sure which—stop playing the cursed stupid Game.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lila rode up to the studio building, passed it and parked a couple of blocks away. She walked back and introduced herself to the receptionist, explaining that Zal had left something behind and she’d come to collect it. The man let her in without a comment, and gave her a guest badge to let her through the inside doors unescorted. It never ceased to surprise her how easy it was to get most places. She would have sacked him on the spot.

  Yesterday the actual studio where the musicians worked had been so full of people and instruments she’d had no chance to do a proper scrub search for spying devices or other things. Now it was briefly empty during a lunchbreak and she let herself in and allowed power to run through her specialised sensors. She could clearly see and hear the bug upstairs, its radio signals and the electromagnetic frequencies of its small operations converging to a focused point. There were no other electronics out of place. Temporarily satisfied, because there were no plans to come back here soon, and so no reason to be particularly worried, Lila went back to her bike and called for assistance from the office. She could not dislodge the nagging feeling that she had missed something important and she wasn’t about to let it go—the receptionist’s attitude had been the cap on a slowly filling bottle of discontent—but if there was something it must be magical, not physical, and she couldn’t detect it. As she waited for one of her colleagues she walked the local streets, looking for any devices that might be responding to the bug.

 
; Her hopes were soon fulfilled. An old sedan car, slumped across the kerb one block west of the studio, was sending a brief ping response to let the listening device know it was around. Lila walked past it, as though on her way somewhere else, and glanced in casually. It was unoccupied. The receiver was inside the stereo unit. She checked the street and stepped across to the nearest door, sliding her fingers around the handle. The car unlocked itself as the frequency picker in her hand acquired the right signal and she let herself in and sat down in the soggy leather driver’s seat.

  The stereo was of the very old style that were all one with the dash, but closer inspection revealed that it contained a recording unit which even now had a Berrytone installed and running. The Berry’s hard disk was three quarters full and Lila reckoned it could hold at least seventy two hours’ worth of noise. That being so, and given the age of the bug itself, Lila was prepared to bet that the Berries must be collected regularly and the car moved around. It was the kind of gear you used in a lengthy surveillance; human, rather old, rather reliable.

  She quickly searched under the seats, and in the glovebox, but the car was reasonably professionally maintained—there was nothing to find. As a last resort, and in the absence of any signals that might indicate booby traps, she decided to pop the trunk. She got out and walked around to the back of the car. Kids crossed the end of the street, but none came towards her. Explanations for the recordings—anything from tax to blackmail to bootlegs—were running through her mind as she opened the lock and lifted the lid, and so she was completely taken by surprise when a small black shape leaped out at her. It shot out with such desperate velocity that it struck her shoulder a hard blow. She heard claws rip her suit and snag in the armoured jerkin she wore as she whirled to see a cat land easily on the road behind her.