Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  She looked at her internal pharmacy registry. There must be something here that wouldn’t hurt to take; something that would do what her silly song-lyric game with Zal had been meant to do and leave her feeling like she was in control. Nothing too strong, nothing that would slow her down or make her mad—she looked at the CNS stimulants, an array provided for Full Armour situations when she had to drive her human self to the limit to keep up with the machine. She could take those.

  “Hey Lila,” Poppy said from the door. “We’re gonna order takeout. You want some?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean. Yes. Sure. Whatever.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m glad you came in,” Lila sat up and swiped at her face, clearing it of tears.

  “Bad news?” the faery said, tentatively coming closer.

  “Just work stuff. Really. Nothing to worry about. I’m tired. You know.”

  “Sure, honey,” Poppy said. “He’s difficult.”

  For once Lila didn’t bother trying to correct her. “You have a soundcheck in an hour.”

  “I know. We’re gonna eat and go. Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “Water.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Lila used the time to wash and fix her face. She felt a strange kind of high after all that, because she hadn’t taken anything and was still functional. She avoided Zal for the rest of the day, accompanying him with her dark visor on like every other idiot bodyguard, keeping people at a distance and doing the dull things with Jolene that had to be done; scheduling, cars, bike, green rooms, backstage vetting, meeting up with the rest of the security for the site and making sure they were all briefed on the kinds of negative attention that the band could get and who to look out for.

  Lila handed out pictures of Dar and the other known elf agents in Otopia, some straight and others with them made up as human. “If you think you see any of these people, you need to call me straight away.”

  “Are they like, dangerous?” asked one.

  “Yes,” Lila said. “But they won’t give you any trouble if you don’t approach them directly. They want to get in. They don’t want to attract attention to themselves.”

  “I heard this band were having trouble with extremists,” another added. “Are these the ones?”

  “Maybe,” Lila said.” You’ll see that in The Herald this morning they reported on the kind of hate mail that Zal’s been getting. Humans, demons, faeries and elves; all send it in various kinds. The loud ones, in my experience, aren’t the ones you need to worry about. If you see the people pictured, don’t try to stop them, just call me.”

  “Man I hate this shit,” she heard one guard mutter. “Stupid race-hate bigots. Ruin the whole fucking world.”

  “Amen,” Lila said under her breath. She found herself looking through the stadium camera systems, looking for Dar. She didn’t see him.

  She located the other NSA agents and went through the call signs with them for the evening show and then caught up with Zal, taking a seat in the front row of the auditorium as they walked a rehearsal with sound and light cues. She practised tuning her ears to block out the band sound so that she could hear around it, picking frequencies and neutralising them. They messed about with dance beats and silly covers of other people’s songs. She envied their easy virtuosity.

  As they finished up, Lila checked everything she could think of that might matter; weather reports, police radio, traffic, communications. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Then Malachi called her from Sarasilien’s office.

  “I got some early forecasts on your tape,” he said once the security encryption on their link had authenticated. “That sub-audible signal is definitely coming from a bomb fault that runs under the studio.”

  “So, not band-related at all?”

  “Could be bootlegs with this other thing piggybacking by accident, can’t say. Anyway, the ‘leggers have legged it, so I’m going to go back and see if I can find out more about the noise trace by taking better samples. The lab monkeys think it sounds like some library recordings of theirs which go back to the Fallout. Someone mentioned the words Seventh Realm, but they always say that when they find stuff they don’t understand.”

  “Okay. If it’s not directly Zal-related then I’m going to have to leave it with you,” Lila said. “We’re good here so far. But I’ve got a bad feeling. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the stadium architecture. There’s a lot of hiding places around here for anyone with an ounce of magic”

  “You’ll have to wear the full kit then,” Malachi said cheerfully.

  “I intend to.” She hung up and stretched. The work had done her good. She felt tired and wrung-out, but no longer out of control.

  She shepherded the band back to the hotel and took only enough time out to open her bag and install the remaining armour that she’d checked out days ago. She treated her skin where it hurt, swallowed the nasty, slimy goop that contained the nanocytes to maintain her integration with her machine body, and took the doses of drugs that were marked up in her system-vision to support the extra load of the arsenal she was carrying. Her exhaustion paled and her attention sharpened.

  There was a knock on her open door.

  “Yeah,” she said, zipping the bag closed.

  “Cool suit,” Zal said. He did not come in. “And didn’t you used to be shorter than me?”

  “Maybe,” Lila said, at eye level with him. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” He held out a can of Coke. “Thought you might want this.”

  “I have a fridge full of Coke.”

  He reached through the door and put it down on the sideboard where an unnecessarily large and ostentatious display of flowers used up almost all the space. His tone was dry and ironic. “I know. I understand that the offering of a dead badger is a more traditional symbol when apologising to mere humans, but hell, there aren’t many badgers left in Frisco. The elves have insulted their way out of this town.”

  “What are you apologising for?”

  “Ah see, now you’re pushing me too far.” He walked forward, fully dressed up in his ordinary elf clothes, as handsome as the sun in spring. “Nice room. Bit small.”

  “You don’t care about my room.”

  “No.” He closed the door behind him and locked it.

  Lila looked at him questioningly.

  “About the elementals,” he said. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You have a very intimidating stance, has anyone ever told you that? All right. It is what it looks like, but it’s not an addiction like heroin. It’s part of the way I learned to survive Demonia. Zoomenon is like ultra-Sathanor, you must realise that from being there, right? And I haven’t been in Alfheim for a very long time. I’ve been in Demonia, and in Faerie and in Otopia, and all of those places are fine but they’re not… me. It’s like you said, I was born elf, and I need to be in Alfheim sometimes. Do you understand?”

  “So, why don’t you just go there?”

  He glanced down to the right and adjusted the position of an orange gerbera in the flower arrangement. “I don’t like other elves that much these days, and they rarely like me. I enjoy not being strip-searched and interned for two weeks while they try to get their heads around me not wanting to live in Alfheim like a good forest-loving, mountain-running, pole-up-the-ass son of the trees. Anyway, there’s nobody there I want to see.”

  Lila watched the flowers behind him open to their fullest. Zal didn’t seem to notice or care. He glanced at her, “You must wish you could live a normal life, now and again.”

  “I do live a normal life,” she said.

  “Sure you do, Princess Zirconium.” He grinned this time and gave her a mock bow. “Your every word is iron-clad with truth.”

  “Haven’t you got an exciting crowd of fans to wave to?”

  He placed a hand over his heart. “Ouch. She dismisses me and throws my badger in my face.” He backed up to
the door and opened it. “Until later, mighty metal maiden.”

  The door closed with a quiet snick.

  Lila glanced at her reflection in the mirror. “Stop smiling,” she told it sternly. “You are at work.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The show ripped at midnight but by then the buses were already on their way north along the coast in a land train with the equipment trucks. Lila waited behind for Zal, who wouldn’t travel on the buses even if it meant arriving too late to party anywhere new. Zal had hung around with Luke, drinking Mimosas, until Luke had reluctantly dragged himself off to his appointment with a Winnebago Xpress. He had still not appeared when Lila and Buddy Ritz were left alone in the backstage area, with the security guards who wanted to lock up.

  Zal’s agent rubbed his face and kept checking his phone. “I have to get back to Bay City for morning,” he kept saying. “I just wanna be sure, you know, that he leaves here okay at least, and then you’re all on your…” The phone rang. “Hey Jolene. Yeah. Real soon.” He hung up. “What the hell is he doing?” He strode forward to the door but Lila blocked his way.

  “Leave it.”

  “I was only going to say hurry up,” Ritz objected, pushing her hand away from the collar of his purple fur coat with a squeamish flick. She recognised that coat from the other night, last night, and let him go.

  “I’ll make sure he arrives on time,” Lila said. “You can go.”

  “I can go, can I?” he blustered, although she could see he was itching to get gone. Then the door opened and Zal stood there, much the same as always, a little too High for any fashion this side of Lyrien, a little too cool for any celebrity off duty.

  “Hey Buddy,” he said casually. “Sony to keep you waiting. They put that glitter on my face and it wouldn’t come off.”

  Lila could see some of it now, caught in his long, carefully braided hair. “Mr Ritz is anxious for us to leave now.”

  “Sure,” Zal said, as ordinary as you please. “Let’s go.” He did cast a slight glance sideways at Lila when he saw that she’d brought the bike right up inside the access corridor, but he got on the back without another comment.

  “He should really wear some kind of head protection,” Buddy started. “The insurance…”

  The bike started as it felt her stride across it, legkick forwards. The engine’s throaty growl in the confined space drowned out every other sound in creation. Lila cued the security system to open the artistes’ access door and took them forward in a smooth glide of ever-increasing speed. There was a curious, perfect moment, just before they burst into the night, when she felt that everything on earth was balanced and whole and true and that the pieces of life slotted together neatly inside her, a puzzle finished and done, a charm completed, a talisman charged. Then the light was gone and they were in the cool wind on the road. Zal slid forward and put his chin on her shoulder,

  “Did you feel that?”

  “What was it?”

  “Don’t know. Ride faster.” His head pressed against hers and her hand turned gently on the throttle in the movement of a dance and her foot tapped for a higher gear and her fingers released and they flew, dodging cars like kids on a stolen ride because she wanted to and it was all her, the bike, the dark, it was all him.

  They leaned and glided out of town and onto the coast road, Lila taking it for the bends, for the hills, for the giddy hit of barely making it over loose stones in the tight anti-camber on the heights of a cliff where moonlight shattered on the surface of the sea and shone like jewellery. She could smell the ocean, mixed with the scent of little, low-growing night-blooming flowers, and petrol. She did notice when Zal rested his head on her back, and that his arms went around her. It was part of the great ride and the machine.

  They caught up with the landtrain and passed it in the quiet traffic of early morning. Dawn met them as they reached the most deserted part of the road, where it ran far from civilisation, along the edges of beachfront parks and the remote edges of millionaire’s estates, beside the rough grass of preservation districts where nobody was allowed to build or wander except the animals and birds.

  Lila heard their engines before she saw the other bikes racing towards them across the rough terrain of the empty land. Both were light, fast motocross machines, and both riders had the elastic quality and poise she recognised with instant apprehension: Dar and his partner.

  Since when did JD agents get funky enough with machinery to ride bikes?

  They were coming in at angles which would intercept both her past and future course. Lila curled her lip and felt Zal lean forward again.

  “Where’s your input jack?”

  “What?” she shouted back, sure she was mishearing him, then felt him jam an earpiece over her left ear. She heard music—a heavy metal power ballad with a strange dance funk undertone.

  “Never go into battle unaccompanied!” Zal shouted over the wind noise and the riff as Lila pushed her right wrist all the way down and her suspension systems into full sport mode.

  Lila out-accelerated Dar, passed the female elf while she was still fighting her way onto the hardtop from the dirt track, and left them in a cloud of pale dust.

  She felt the curl of magic against her bones and the peculiar inner pressure cast of a magical footprint as someone fixed a spell on them. In the growing light all the colours of the world were blue and grey, but for a moment they went green. Lila took a slow, deep breath and ignored it, focusing entirely on the road, laying the bike down almost flat and praying for a good surface as they rounded a small headland and slid gently and decisively out towards the single metal rail of the safety barrier.

  She righted them with inches to spare and was feeling the first wash of relief when she saw the twin square blocks and eight huge tyres of two heavyloaders blocking both lanes about two hundred metres in front of her. The road had gone into a low-walled canyon. There was no space either side and nowhere to go,

  Lila squeezed the brakes as hard as she dared, to protect herself and Zal from a summary ejection out of the front door. She felt her insides drag her forwards as they bled speed and when the needles looked about right and they were fearfully slow, like snails, she hit the power and the front brake simultaneously and slid around, aiming them both square at the two bikes just coming around the turn-She opened the casing on her lower right leg and bent down to take out a metal baton. As the armour fused shut into unbreakable plate she connected to the pikestaff with the sensitive cells in the palm of her hand and swung the short metal stave in the air to her side, avoiding

  Zal’s leg. The baton telescoped out into a sturdy carbon and alloy quarterstaff almost two metres long.

  “kin hell!” she heard Zal say approvingly.

  Lila smiled in grim satisfaction. She turned all bike controls over to her Al-self to free her hands and, with the staff tucked under her arm, sat more upright. “Hold tight,” she shouted back to Zal and gunned the engine.

  The engine spun the back wheel but the intelligent tyre surfaces changed properties and seized the road with limpet tenacity. They surged forward, Lila pressed back against Zal, and Zal resisting until the acceleration faded sweetly into a ninety kph surge. They met the two riders on a short straight. Lila held the quarterstaff like a medieval lance, across the handlebars, braced against her side, and aimed it at the chest of Dar’s partner as they closed, but at the last second, with both elves starting to move out wide, she flipped the staff around, faster than the eye could see, and braced it across her waist, its single long arm now stabbing out to the left.

  Even Dar’s superhuman reflexes were not enough to take avoiding action. The baton missed the bars of his bike by a millimetre and slammed into his upper arms and chest, knocking him backwards instantly. Lila felt the horrible impact as a soggy crunch that tried to tear the bar out of her hands. She let the right hand side go so that part of his force dragged the staff cleanly around to the left, saving her arms and sparing Dar much of the blow’s potentially l
ethal force. But saving her own arms was more important. She saw him twist in mid-air with catlike desperation and hit the road on his shoulder as his bike went sliding and skidding away. His speed took him rolling in the wake of the other bike, uncontrolled.

  “Fuck!” she heard Zal shout with exhilaration and not a little fear.

  Lila had kept their balance only because she had calculated the forces in advance and compensated during the attack Now she recovered the staff and slid it into short mode, accelerating again without turning around to see what was going on behind them. The wind set her face into a ferocious mask. She didn’t think this was likely to be over and her long-range sensors began to prove her right almost immediately. No sooner had they put a headland between them and the blocked canyon than she picked up a strange heat-signature in the sky.

  A firebird stooped towards them from the haze of twilight blue. It was faster than an animal, as fast as a guided missile, and it tore Earthwards with the accuracy that Lila recognised as signal-oriented. The monster was a kind of missile, and they were locked in as the target. Maybe the earlier spellcast had singled them out … in any case, it hardly mattered. She had only a second in which to decide what to do.

  Lila slammed on the brakes and laid her beautiful bike down on its side for the last time, trusting Zal’s elf smarts to make him copy her move and get his leg out of the way as they went over. He was good enough for that at least, hanging on to her as they rode the machine along and ground it into the dirt, creating a huge plume of billowing dust around them as they finally came to a halt.

  Coughing, Lila got up and hauled Zal to his feet, her hands on his upper arms, finger sensors verifying his physiology as intact even as she shouted, “Cast a circle!” She could barely see him through the falling dust though her helm protected her eyes and nose. “Anywhere! Now!”