Chasing the Dragon (9 page)

The ink was incredibly dark and opaque. It wasn't like a liquid.
Simply where the nib passed went utterly black. It was a strange
colour. When she looked at it against the flowers and the ground it
seemed too dark, unnatural, so she folded the card over the words and
put the pen away.

"You know you're supposed to clear up when they've died," a sharp
voice said from a short distance behind her.

She sensed disapproval of multiple kinds as she turned and found
the park attendant on his small motorised scooter looking at her with
a scowl through his visor. After a minute she realised he was talking
about the flowers.

"Yeah I will," she said.

He gave her a nod that indicated he didn't think that was likely.
"Well I have all the contacts for these memorials and I will pursue it."

"You do that," she said.

He stared at her dress. "This your bike?"

"Yes."

"It should be in the parking lot. This is a tow zone. I can't tow it
because I don't have the equipment, but I-"

"I was just going," Lila said, and marched forwards, yanking up
yards of water-spotted silk as she did so before throwing her leg over
the bike and jamming the dress in around her.

"-can issue you with this ticket." The official did something with
his phone unit, and she registered an official complaint against her in the
city administration data. "So you can ride it to be impounded yourself."

Lila, who had been about to ride off, sat back and took her hands off
the bars. "Let me get this straight: you want me to ride my bike to the
pound so it can be locked up and then I can pay to have it unlocked?"

"It is officially within my authority-"

"After you interrupt me on the site of my sister's grave memorial."

"You'd been here some time, and you come here every day. You
have never, as far as I can see, tidied up. It's not like she died yesterday,
now is it?" Then he hesitated and his brows beetled together. "Your
sister?" It was his turn to get puzzled.

Her amazement at his attitude was almost refreshing in a way.
"Well, here's my official response," she said, and gave him the finger
before driving off.

At the beach she parked carefully, simmering with rage, and
ripped the side of the dress in getting off the bike too forcefully. She
felt its bodice tighten with reproach and the train hissed at her, but she
refused to take the responsibility. The gaggle of youth converged on
the region went quiet on seeing her, although this time it lasted longer
than usual, and the man at the coffee stand was placing her cup at maximum distance from himself even before she'd reached it.

She picked up the cup, already able to taste the contents just by
coming into contact with the steam. "This," she said, holding it aloft
and pointing at it for the stallholder's benefit, "is the worst coffee I
have ever tasted." She took one, obligatory sip, and dropped the cup
directly into the bin.

He stared at her and then blurted. "Don't put a frog in the onions."

Lila looked at him for a long minute, during which she parsed the
sentence a few hundred times. She decided she didn't want to know and
turned around, lining the four boys and three girls up under her stare.

"You should all be in college. I am reporting your whereabouts to the
educational system and the student benefits' office. You can still make
your ten o'clock classes if you run. There'll be an extra fine if you miss it,
and if you miss even one more hour of school or drop below a C average,
you will have your travel permits removed for six months." The vitriol
with which she delivered this was stinging. They sat openmouthed and
then started as, one by one, their personal organisers all began to ring,
pip, and sing shrilly at maximum volume to confirm the bad news.

She decided not to walk on the beach or hang around for the grisly
aftermath. She'd had it with that place, and anyway, stay much longer
and who knew what she might do, or think? She might start
screaming or crying or trying to kill someone who probably didn't
deserve it just because things hadn't worked out for her, because Max
was dead and gone, Zal was lost, because she hurt and the world had
moved on without her and become a place she could never be at home
in and there was no going back.

For the benefit of the kids still trying to curse her and hit her with
loose stones she rode out of the parking lot backwards and gave them
the finger as well before taking the freeway to her date with the dust
sheets of abandonment. All the way she held her breath and kept her
mouth shut. Her chest felt like it was going to burst, but she had to
keep everything in. She felt nuclear, atomic, like her rage would
destroy the world, or worse, that it wouldn't. It wouldn't do anything, just explode and then trickle away and there'd be nothing left. If there
was nothing, what would she do then? What would she be?

The bike tires screamed on the asphalt. She fishtailed wildly. The
speedometer reached its limit and the battering of the air froze her face
and shoulders. There was a point somewhere on the highway when a
stone or something caught the tires. She felt the bike judder faintly,
and then it was airborne. It skimmed the ground for seventeen metres
and struck a concrete abutment where two lanes divided. She was
thrown free of it, but not far. Beige slabs flew up to meet her.

Lila got to her feet without knowing where she was or what was happening. The clear memories and miss-nothing processing of her
machine body wasn't able to penetrate the daze that slamming headfirst into a solid bridge support had brought upon her. She had the
vaguest of notions about what had just happened, but it seemed no
more than imaginary. Somewhere behind her traffic was stopped,
people were talking, exclaiming, but she only saw the concrete wall
she had hit and the pattern of cracks she'd made in it that matched
the pattern of lines she felt in herself. She moved cautiously, in case
she fell apart.

To her surprise she could see things she'd never noticed before.
There was a river crossing here, for instance, right where the roads
crossed. In fact, the underneath road was the river and the over road
was a covered wooden bridge. She was standing on a small bank beside
it, and there was a boat not far away from her coming against the flow
of the strange grey liquid that lay deep and current ridden beneath the
fragile surface of the ordinary Otopian day. Standing in the boat was a
person dressed in robes, using a long pole to skillfully press the craft
through the least difficult water. It was hard work but they kept at it
patiently and as they came level with her, as she finished noticing all this, they let the boat turn about in the current and beach itself on the
end of the sandy shelf where she was standing.

"Don't move," said the figure. Their voice had no sound, only the
imaginary quality of her accident, but it was quite certain.

She wished to know where this was and with the same certainty
she got her answer.

"This is Last Water, always and everywhere. If you move you will
cross it and not return."

An idea came to her. "This is Thanatopia?"

"It has no name, but you call it that. Be still. Others are watching."

Lila considered this. The grey water reflected almost no light at all,
but it moved vigorously. Above it the concrete highway, its cars and
people were slowed almost to a standstill. "Others?"

"From this place most things can be seen. I have been looking for
you. But I am not the only one." The figure barely moved. Its hands
on the pole had only three fingers, or two and some kind of thumb that
opposed them. The grey was not exactly grey, she decided, looking at
its odd flesh, only colourlessness.

"Am I dead?" She thought not.

"Not enough," it replied in its smooth, silent way. "But if you like
you need only step forward."

"How do I go back?"

"You are already slipping away. The living cannot linger. Give me
a token so I can find you again."

"Who the hell are you?" She had no intention of obeying such a
request.

"I am one who seeks to prevent you from falling into the grasp of
She Who Waits."

"And I believe you because?"

"I am one of Ilyatath's servants."

The use of the correct name for the elf floored her suspicions. She
had a lot more questions, but the river and the bridge were fading away and the bright, brassy colours of Otopia were every moment more
brilliant.

The hooded figure held out its hand and opened it. On its thick,
gigantic palm lay a tiny flower, grey in petal and stem, and a crumpled
piece of soggy cardboard. The flower, she knew, was one that Tath had
carried to show his allegiance to the elven revolutionaries. The card ...
with disbelief she could read enough of the writing on it to know it
was the one she had just left behind. As she watched the card became
dust and the words alone remained, caught in the air, their lines
twisting around one another. They moved like snakes.

"Do you know her?" she cried out. She had nothing on her that
would do. In desperation she tore out a few strands of her own hair and
tried to give it across. To her alarm the words slithered out of the creature's palm and around the strands, coating them in black, before
recoiling to turn and writhe. She saw them snatched away and pocketed. The vision was so flimsy now that it was almost invisible.

"Do not come here again unguarded," the figure said before it was
gone. It held up its fist, shaking with the effort of holding the words
at bay. "Do not give life to the things of this place."

She stood on the burning hot road. A medic was trying to get her attention, spritzing her with something stinky out of an aerosol and patting
her face with a wet swab. She swatted him away irritably and gathered
her bearings. Of course the bike was toast. She hadn't thought her heart
could drop another notch, but at this realisation it did.

The machines buzzed like summer bees in her head, dizzy, drunk,
their pattern grown slower to repeat but no clearer. Lila stooped to
gather the rags of the dress in her hands like an old dowager and began
to walk stiffly towards the exit ramp. A variety of individuals continued to try talking to her or treating her, but eventually they settled for photographing her and insults when she showed no signs of cooperation. Later a smelly, noisy old car drew up beside her and the door
of it opened with a creak.

Malachi leant back in the leather seat, his elbow on the car door,
fingertips at the wheel. He looked through the windscreen, shades flat
to his face. "Get the shit in."

She got the shit in, yanked the dusty dress train around her ankles,
and shut the door. They growled off into the burning heat, wind
dashing over the shield and messing her hair, turning it into a thousand little whips.

Lila flipped down the sunshade and uncovered the small vanity
mirror on the back of it. Ghastly was the word for it. She flipped it
back up again.

"Have you ever met the dead?" she asked. "Or I mean, the people
in Thanatopia who aren't dead." And then after a second of speculation, "Do faeries even die?"

Malachi drove in silence for a minute, but slowly his agitation lessened and finally he said, "We don't die in the way that you do. We
wouldn't go to that place you mentioned." But he didn't sound 100
percent certain.

"It wasn't like the first time I was there," she said. "Nothing like
it. Only there was a boat and water, and there were boats last time."

"Dare I ask what you're talking about?"

"I went to try and save my parents, with Tath," she explained.
"But I couldn't. They crossed the water into Thanatopia proper...."

"No," he corrected. "Thanatopia is the place you were in; you cross
out of it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said. "Faeries can go to Thanatopia but they can't cross.
We call it Uldis, the thing that lies under Under. We're much changed
there, so we never go. Not ..." He glanced at her for the first time.
"What happened to your clothes?"