Keeping It Real (14 page)

heavyweight like Lila would have no chance of following. She was lithe and trained. Lila was

nuclear-powered. She matched the jump and grabbed hold of the elf's shoulders without making any

effort to remain in the tree. As they fell back down they wrestled fiercely, but Lila was much stronger and

when they hit the soft forest
floor Lila ended up on top. She heard the breath whoosh out
of the elf's

narrow frame with satisfaction. The woman struggled to get out from under, but gave it up when she

realised she couldn't budge Lila's mass.

'What are you going to do?' she hissed. 'Sit on me all night?'

Lila didn't feel like talking. Part of her attention was focused on tracking the other elf and it
was very

close to the circle glade. She had no way of seeing magic, so she didn't know what was happening to

Zal. She had no ropes on her. Although she felt
something like a qualm it
was shortlived
.
She extended a

needle from her right thumb and injected the elf at the vein in her neck with a short-term shot of a

gengineered knockout. It was the kind of technological weapon elves despised the most, but
Lila didn't

care about
the woman's honour at
this moment
.

She ran back towards the glade and then began to notice other, peculiar changes in the wood
.
It
was

becoming misty and a new breeze from the sea had come up in the last few minutes. Gulls shrieked

overhead, although she couldn't see them with ordinary eyes. Then, aside from her new target and to her

left, she saw an animal spirit in the shadows
.
The elf she was fixated on saw it
too. It moved around and

put the circle between itself and Lila. Lila knew Zal wasn't out yet. She could see him, lying on his back,

laughing in the delirious way of people who don't know if they're happy or sad, or are much too much of

both.

The animal spirit, not of any of the Seven Kingdoms, a curious, Interstitial being from the gaps where

ghosts and other lost traces lingered, approached the circle
.
It
was huge, a Megaceros, with a rack

of antlers so large that
it could not have moved in any ordinary wood, but the trees and rocks presented

no obstacle to its passage. It didn't truly walk in the space and time of any of the realms. A thick forestal

mist
was emanating from its flanks in huge, stately billows
.
Rain fell from its antlers. Its eye sockets, like

those of all ghosts, were black and empty.

Lila was more worried about
it than the elf now. Ghosts had the cold breath that killed everything it

touched, if they chose to exhale. There was no scientific nor magical ward against it. There was no way

to talk to a ghost - it was supposed they were beyond time. There was no way to know what ghosts

wanted, or needed, or what might turn them aside from the things which came to interest them. Although

the elf and its weapons could not
cross the circle that protected the world from Zal, the ghost
could.

It
moved with a stately progress. Its head tilted to one side as it listened closely, although if Zal were

still singing it was a song Lila couldn't hear. She ran as fast as she could, breaking small branches that

were in her way and vaporising a stand of elder that stood between her and the circle wall with a

light-pulse charge, crashing through the remains in a dust
of black particles and smoke. She threw herself

headlong at the magical barrier, not knowing if she could get through it, or what spells made it. At the last

instant she flung her arms up, elbows forward, to protect
her face, picked up her feet
and relied on her

weight
and momentum to do the rest. As she closed her eyes the last image she'd seen remained

impressed on her. She could see the elf on the other side of the circle. His face was distorted by the hazy

water effects of the aetheric wall, but
she rather thought that improved it a great deal, as did the

expression it wore - a mixture of dismay and surprise - which she would have given anything to see two

years ago, before its porcelain beauty became a regular feature of her nightmares
.

Then Zal's forcefield caught her and she felt the struggle between its grip on her flesh and the robotics

that
it
couldn't command, because they weren't alive. It began to tear her apart. Her head filled with a

scream of light and pain but she was too heavy and too much metal. The elf magic was repelled by the

metal and silicon and coiled away through skin and bone, fleeing back to its place in the wall as she

hurtled through in slow time.

She felt like it had skinned her, but when she landed and rolled up next to Zal's twitching body she

could still move and most systems,

even though they were all redlined, were still working. She fetched up on the edge of Zal's hollow, and

lifted her face out
of the dry ground, feeling steam rising from the earth under her face, smelling the

healthy, mouldy odour of the soil. Sensors on her back relayed the cause - she was under another sun

and it
was beating down, hot
as hell, baking her under an indigo sky.

She looked up. The animal spirit
was moving close, the barrier visible through its aethereal form as it

passed through. She saw the sweat
on Zal's skin beginning to freeze where his hand was flung out close

to the wet nostrils of its muzzle as it put its head down towards him, ears cocked, replying to some

demand he was making as the elemental rainbow coruscated in and out
of his open mouth. He was

smiling, and his eyes were shut, but she didn't think he was unconscious.

Lila tried to get
to her feet. Pain seared her back and legs so badly she couldn't. She issued silent

commands to her med units to numb her but
they didn't respond. The muscles in her torso were useless,

but they hadn't the strength to lift the prosthetics of her legs and arm by themselves anyway. Only the

motor systems that
controlled her limbs could do that, and they weren't
reacting. She looked down,

unable to make sense of the peculiar readouts that flashed in her mind, and saw that
she was covered in

silvery metal elementals. They were consuming her power, revelling in the taste of the alloys and pure

metals, undoing the energy locked in their crystal form. They were rotting her. She could only lie there

and watch the ghost
place its unself beside Zal, into Zal's hand where streams of elementals were still

pouring forth.

The face of her opponent, the other elf agent, appeared close to the window of the magical wall and

watched too.

Lila saw the ghost
draw breath in Zoomenon. It
inhaled the elements from Zal's unprotected hand. She

saw the Jayon Daga agent's face looking down at her, not even contemptuous, not even curious,

wait-ing. And all the time Zal lay there like an idiot, grinning, out of it, as happy as a sand boy as the

ghost breathed in and left his hand empty at the end of his wrist, as transparent as glass.

There was only one thing left to do, though she felt
no sense of hope in doing it. She didn't trust it. She

didn't like it. She never wanted to use it. All her ambivalent feelings about the people who had made her

tried to stop her.

'Battle Standard,' Lila whispered. She mentally apologised to the

metal elementals who were temporarily blasted apart by her body's response to the command as it

switched current phase from her reactor. But she thanked Sarasilien for having the wit to add such a

defensive capability to her Al-self in the first place. Field tests had proved BS, as Lila called it, to be

anything but reliable, barely even functional, crammed as it was with knowledge her superiors wanted

kept even from her, but it
was all she had that might work before the damned ghost
breathed out
and

finished them both. The command re-set her Al-self into a new mode. Her armour reconfigured.

Processes that
kept
her alive switched over their power to defensive units. A cocktail of drugs and

hormones surged into her system and her pains and worries vanished as neural connections were closed

down and everything redirected according to the strategies of her defensive programming
.

She was on her feet before she had time to think, aware very dimly of horrible things happening to her

body but not caring now, not able to feel it except at a distance, as though pain was only a notion, like an

idea, which carried no weight and made no difference to the physical world
.
Lila was distant, soaring like

an eagle, strong as a lion, a centre to a storm. She saw herself pull Zal towards her by an ankle, away

from the ghost, pick him up, and put her gauntlet over his nose and mouth, pinching them tightly shut. His

eyes opened wide and a stream of multicoloured fire poured out over her and ran harmlessly off her,

unable to do anything about the phase shifts she was able to perpetu-ate. The circle disintegrated

abruptly and Zoomenon vanished as the elf Lila knew as Dar, barely five metres away, loosed his arrow.

Lila turned and ducked. She was faster than the dreamy speed of the ghost, but not faster than the

arrow. It
thudded into her shoulder, through her shield and her armour. The point
emerged just
below her

armpit
like a reproving finger, bound with magic that even now fizzed and sparked on its point. She

looked down in anger and saw the silver tip scratch the skin of Zal's shoulder whereupon it instantly

vanished as though made of moonlight. Dar was already away, dodging into the trees, racing to his fallen

companion. Whatever his mission was he had completed it, Battle Standard concluded, and therefore

she made no move to counter his action.

Zal slumped in her grasp, a completely dead weight.

Things became blurry to Lila, fuzzy, as though the world and her thoughts were all radio stations that

couldn't be tuned in. Nothing matched up. She thought she might be dying, but as long as she was

still moving the best thing must
be to get back home, to where she was safe
.
Yes, she would go to

where there was help or someone who could, if not
fix her, at
least
switch her off. She would like to be

off because everything was very very bad indeed. She went
home.

'Let go, Lila,' said a kind voice she recognised, but Lila couldn't
.

'Bloody BS system,' said another voice wearily, from someone trying to plug a jack into a port on her

leg
.
'Locked again on the exit clause. I'm going to purge it and debug.
Again.'

'Can you hear me, Lila?'

Yes,
she thought, from very far away. J t
hink so.
But it wasn't important
.
She had Zal, and she had

come to a safe place
.
There were no more combatants. There was no zone of fire, no defence necessary.

Everything was in order with the system. The mission was complete
.

'She can't hear me,' said the kind voice somewhere out in the light
beyond Lila. 'Maybe she'll let
go if

he wakes up.'

'He's been out
twelve hours. Nothing wakes him up.'

'If she doesn't let
go soon he could lose one of his feet. The circulation's going, and what's wrong with

his hand?'

'Some kind of magical thing. You hit with a magic bullet, eh Lila?'

'What's his real name, d'you know? That might work.'

'Haven't a clue.'

'Call his agent.'

'No need. Who do you think that schmuck in the purple fur coat
is? Malachi brought
him in and told

him this is a private hospital
.
He bought it, if you can believe that. Guy with him is the producer.

Apparently they're surgically attached or something.'

'Get him in here. He might know something worth knowing.'

'You're kidding.'

Lila listened and smiled inside. She had Zal and everything was concluded to her satisfaction. Then

Buddy Ritz came in, and Jelly Sakamoto with him, who started shouting in a high voice.

'What
the hell you doing to my motherfuckin' star, freak girl? Put

him down! What
you think you're paid for . .
.
' It
went
on a great
deal, like a fit
in a word factory, expletives building up like explosives. But
Jelly didn't get too close.

Now that
Lila looked at him from her beautiful distance she could see herself reflected on his

eyeballs, and she could see his point. Her fully activated battle armour made her a steel colossus with

a woman growing out of its torso. Blood had run out of her eyes, mouth, ears and nose, and from

the places where she joined the metal. She was naked and coated in mud. Her arms and face were