Chasing the Dragon (2 page)

He shouted after her, "Pookah scum!" in his breaking teenage
voice, and his mates laughed in excited, ugly tones. She paid no attention. In such a public place they weren't likely to follow her far. But
she felt the wicked spike of their attention snake out and touch her
energy field, testing it for weaknesses. Time was she'd never have noticed that, and time was she'd never have given it credence if she
had. Even if it had hurt her. Times had changed though.

Lila hardened herself against their hate and quickened the pace.
Better to avoid any conflicts or scenes. She never lingered. They might
find her interesting enough to take a picture of, send it across the
'Tree. Then anyone looking would know where she was.

In another world she would have had their heads for it.

The few people-fellow beach bums-who knew her figure from
her daily walks were the only people she didn't mind looking at or
being seen by. Most of them had the wits to notice her expression and
left her alone whether or not they were curious about her. Many of
them were the same as she was, outsiders for whom a nod and a glance
is enough of a daily contact with others, and some of them were even
demi-fey, she was sure. They were a little club of look-but-don't-touch
people, nod-but-don't-speak people; allies as long as anonymity was
maintained. But they were in the minority. Bay City was a social hub.

The city was a cosmopolitan, confident place these days, with few
fey and fewer other foreign creatures. It had learned its lesson about
romancing weird things the hard way, and nobody wanted to risk
whatever wrath she or another nonhuman might be able to bring down
on them. This made some people friendly, but it made more of them
hostile. There were many faeries hidden in the world, many more than
the openly fey. Demons and even elves had come in larger numbers in
the last twenty years; in the elf case that meant nearly double figures.
The children of their first human matches were adults now, and in
spite of a repatriation epidemic Otopia was hardly the pure human
place many wanted to believe. The teenagers who'd tried to insult her
were examples of a deep schism; half the world was glad and half the
world was furious at the changes. Lila had no time for any of them, but
it wasn't possible to ignore the daily and awful evidence that the solid
identity humans had felt for themselves had fallen apart and many of
them weren't able to deal with the results in anything but negative ways. So they thought she was a faery. It wasn't entirely false. She was
sure they'd have been much less glad with the truth and she felt grim
satisfaction in that. She was worse. It was like an ace in the sleeve. It
protected her from spite.

The man at the coffee stand watched her go, fingering the rabbit's foot
he kept in his pocket. When she'd vanished into the drizzle beyond the
boardwalk entertainments, he quickly recounted his money and
checked the onions steaming in their steel tray. Faeries could turn
things bad. He'd had a frog in the onion pan before now, and no
knowing where it came from, but it had shown up not long after she'd
been there for her one black coffee of the day, always at ten a.m. She'd
made a face at the coffee. She often did that. But maybe that time it
had been worse than usual. Supplies were short. He couldn't help what
the wholesaler had, could he? He poked around the onions, but they
were frogless.

"Get out of it," he said to the teenage idiot and his friends, watching them watch her go, their voices lewd and sniggering. "Go on.,,

"He's afraid of her," the insulting one said with contempt. "Maybe
she'll turn the milk bad or something. Stupid old man." But the fuse
on their malevolence wouldn't light. It was too wet and cold to start
the revolution. They huddled together and sloped off to enjoy their
alienation closer to the glittery lights of the pier.

Sometimes he wished the Hunter would come back for a day, to
show these arrogant young bastards a thing or two. But then he
remembered, and unwished it quickly, whistling and turning widdershins and throwing salt over both shoulders to undo his silliness.
When he was finished he made another wish, the usual one, but he had
no doubt that in spite of it she'd be back tomorrow.

Malachi also knew where to find Lila on a regular basis. He'd visited
her every day for the last two months. Their conversations ranged from
idle gossip to raging arguments, but he was the only one to do any
talking. The most she ever contributed was a smile or a nod, a frown
or a contemptuous wave of one hand to dismiss him or his point. Or
both. Usually he managed to stick with her from the top end of the
beach to where a fence cut off the public land from the expensive private homes two miles away. Even if they were just doing a silent vigil
he made it that far, but then he had to go. His official lunch break
lasted just an hour and the commute back and forth to the parking lot
out here at the end of the sands meant he had twenty minutes to do
whatever he had to do, tops.

Yesterday had been a breakthrough day, he reminded himself as he
parked. He switched his beautifully soft suede pumps for running
shoes and rolled up the cuffs of his heavyweight silk suit trousers, pinning them with hairgrips so there was no danger of them being ruined
by sand or surf. He put the roll of his silk and wool socks into his top
pocket and scrunched his toes where they were slumming it inside a
pair of all-cotton footsies to protect them from the trainers. Then he
got out of the car, wrestled briefly with his umbrella, locked the car,
checked it, locked it again, looked around at the dull day and the sulky
youths hanging around, and renewed the protective charms on the
ancient Cadillac with a gentle caress to the hood that looked as if he
might be checking for scratches.

The gesture made him scowl, even as he made it. It was pointless
trying to conceal his feyness since he was far too well dressed and mannered to be human in this neighborhood. But he couldn't help trying.
The coal blackness of him-an inhuman shade that sparkled-had
been matted with the powders of glamour into African tones, and his orange eyes were hidden behind five-thousand-dollar shades. In the
early days of his tenure here he'd never needed such things. He didn't
understand how the humans could have gone backwards like they had.
He was disappointed they seemed too weak to handle even the least of
the Gifts and the least that the aetheric worlds had thrown at them.

Malachi was the last full-blood faery in public service in Otopia,
and he was getting mighty sick of it. The only reason he hadn't left long
ago was right now striding along in front of him in the worst rain of
the season looking disturbingly like the previous owner of the dress she
was wearing, as he recalled, another person he had known who had
come to a bad end. Well, that might be premature. She'd never returned
from her banishment in Under, so one couldn't say for sure. Only her
clothes had ever shown up and he had to admit that it was possible,
more than a little, that Tatterdemalion had never really been a girl at
all. He'd started to think that the girl he'd known in the old days with
her plain, forgettable face was maybe no more than a mannequin the
clothes had stitched together out of aether and dream to give themselves transport and a voice. The dress had worn her, and when she was
out of style or no more use, then it had put her away, that girl.

This theory had come to him a few weeks after he and Lila had
made it out of Faery and found themselves fifty years too late by the
Otopian clock, but although he always intended to tell her about it he
never did.

He caught up with her without having to run. His strides could be as
long as he liked without him seeming to hurry. He had to fight the
umbrella against the gusty breezes, holding it out like a shield before him.

Lila acknowledged him with a slight raise of her eyebrows but her
pace continued the same.

Malachi narrowed his eyes against the cold wind and winced automatically as he saw icy flakes hit the surface of her eyes and melt there.
She didn't even blink. Since she'd worn the dress, the irises of her eyes
had become a deep indigo colour, like the fabric's basic hue. Before that those eyes had been a robot's flat mirrors without iris or white, so that
people always assumed she was wearing fancy contacts. She hadn't
been. Most of her then wasn't human, but replacement parts. Now he
didn't entirely know what she was. One thing he did know, she wasn't
living at home, wasn't connected to any networks, and wasn't who she
used to be three months ago. The longer her silence went on, the worse
he hated it. Now he'd come with something she could really worry
about, but he found his irritation emerging first.

"Are you going to keep up this silent act forever?"

"I'm listening," she replied.

He was taken aback. "My god, she speaks!"

Lila didn't say anything. The faintest hint of a smile twitched at
the corners of her mouth.

"Are you messing with me or are you going to talk?"

"You did all the talking," she said.

"I did all the ..." he cut himself off as something struck him. He
didn't want to lose the moment. He even forgot the awful weather and
the conviction it was ruining his coat. "What changed?"

"I've been listening," she repeated.

"I'm overjoyed that my repartee is so ..."

"... to the machines," she said, interrupting him and abruptly
stopping so that he strode past her and had to come back, getting a
face full of rain in the process.

He cocked his head. Her faint smile had become enigmatic.

"I thought if I just listened long enough that eventually it'd begin
to make sense to me," she said. Water ran down her face and arms,
soaked her dress. "They talk all the time. Little whispers. The ones that
aren't here and the ones that are." The wind whipped her rat tail hair
around her neck. "I kept thinking that I'd be able to figure out where
they were by the signals, but even if I couldn't do that at least I'd know
what they were saying. That's why I couldn't talk to you. I had to listen
all the time, as closely as I could. I was determined to wait as long as it took for it all to fall into place." Finally she met his gaze with her own.
She hadn't lied, she'd only omitted to say that she hadn't wanted to speak
to anyone anyway, because she didn't know what to say. What could she
say after what had happened? Zal was missing. She didn't even know if
he was alive. She only spoke now because she knew it couldn't go on.
Not speaking was not holding time still. It was not solving anything.
But she felt she could talk about the least of the worst.

"They all talk, Mal. But it's not for us. I don't mean the rogues talking
or the other agents the agency made. We talk to each other, or could. I
mean the machines talk. More like sing. Or dance," she frowned. "Not
good words for it. The machines talk all by themselves all the time. Here.
There. Everywhere. I can't locate them because they're all here." She
tapped the side of her head with a finger. "I can't separate them because
there's no difference. I can't talk to them, none of us can. We aren't connected for it. I can just hear it, this shiver, this whisper, all the time. I think
it's because I'm all machine now. It's like hearing a beehive, very quiet, full
of meaning you don't understand because you are too big and too slow."

Malachi clutched the umbrella more tightly. Lila had been made
by Otopian Secret Services into a cyborg, using technology obtained
from unknown sources. She had been the first survivor of the process.
The agents she spoke of were later additions, modelled on her own success. The rogues were those of their number who had left the service to
live outside the law. Some were trying to return to a human life and
forget their pasts, and the rest-they weren't human anymore. He
didn't know what they were and they didn't know either. They called
themselves rogues and considered themselves above and beyond
human laws of any kind. They were a damned nuisance, with their
gangland ways, but even though their continued existence was the
Secret Services' fault, the management of their trouble fell to domestic
lawkeepers, so until they started messing with otherworldly business
they weren't his problem. Now here was Lila, telling him she could
hear this stuff. He couldn't keep his own secret any longer.