Keeping It Real (20 page)

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.'

T 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.'

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. T 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
Hie
force dragged the staff cleanly around to the left, saving her arms and

sparing Dar much of the blow's potentially lethal 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!'

A flicker of something hot ran across her hands, a tiny flame, but she was already letting him go. He

nodded. Lila saw his
andalune
body clearly then. The dust glittered inside it and was spun around as