Keeping It Real (49 page)

She was swallowing water, her hands battering lost items, getting tangled in scarves and clothes, hitting

wooden things, hitting dumb flesh limbs. Lila was so tired.

'Battle Standard,' she said and felt the elfin clothing of Tath's be cut
to shreds as all her capacities and

weapons expanded to their max-imum extent. The water boiled around her and the grip on her foot

vanished.

You called Each Uisge
exclaimed, jolted out
of his grief into a breath of hysteria at
her stupidity. Ot
o

p
ia
n
mania!
D
o yo
u k
now no
t
hinq!

Zal's friends,
Lila amended, diving down and boosting power with grim and certain intent. She could

see the two faeries ahead of her, their beautiful black horse forms with their finned feet
and streaming

hair wrapped fatally around Zal's pale body. His hot
blood made a trail that was easy to follow. She had

not known about Poppy and Viridia being deadly hunters but even if she had, they were her only

possible allies.

In human form perhaps. In water or their true body they remember nothing but the hunger. You

are insane! All this, and now they will drown him and rip him to pieces and leave you his liver as

a keepsake.

Like hell they will,
Lila said,
Unless I'm mistaken, you can knock them cold.

In Otopia maybe, Tath said. In Aparastil... n
o Each Uisge h
as
eve
r come her
e. The
y ar
e of

the
wa
t
er, Lila.
T
hey are in
t
heir elemen
t
.

The water horses dived fast but Lila's rocket boots were faster.

As she neared them she noticed that
they were slowing, their easy glide becoming sluggish and dull -

they were falling asleep, just
as they always did around elves when their
andalune
bodies made contact

with faery flesh. It would have been funny if she hadn't been so exhausted, and in some other time and

place.

She caught
the water horses that were once Poppy and Viridia around their fine necks and, as the hair

tried to tangle her arms, wrapped her legs around Zal and swept her hands through their manes, cutting

the hair clean through. The faeries fought and struggled to recapture them both but
they could not
get
a

good enough grip.

This time she took Zal up fast, not
looking or caring what
they hit, not
pausing at
the surface but leaping

up and out into the waning light of late evening. She set them down at
some distance inland, at
the

clearing where she and Dar had stopped before entering Aparastil. There she laid Zal on the sweet

blue-green grass.

The wounds on his arms were all gone, except
the single puncture that
still bled freely. It
was

incongruous there, in the delicious peace of the wooded grove, in the scented twilight Lila tried not to

notice how beautiful Zal was, how his vulnerability made him almost
perfect, that
she wanted him, like this

and here, when he was barely even there. She didn't
want
to be that
person.

How do I fix it?

You cannot. I will
Tath said. Even he was a shadow of his former seltLila regarded with horror the

degree to which he had faded. It
was only with the greatest
effort that he managed to extend his aetherial

presence outward through her. He spoke in the dragon's language. The wound in Zal's arm stopped

flowing. Lila felt
Tath sink lower, lower, shrink down to almost
nothing.

Tath!

He didn't respond.

Songbirds swept across the glade, calling their last
calls of the evening. A soft blue mist
rose among the

grass and there was loveliness everywhere, everywhere
.

'Zal?' Lila said, kneeling beside his head. He was unconscious.

Like she used to do for herself she went through the routines of checking, this time doing it for him.

With ultrasound she located the meridians in his body, scanned and found his deafened ears, some

damage to his heart, peculiar resonances that might have been unique to him, or a kind of ruin - she didn't

know what. Her hands, multi-sensory, glided above the surface of his skin and she willed him well. For

herself, she felt almost perfectly healthy, in a fresh and glowing way, the way she recognised of Sathanor,

that
had never been before she had come here. Her own body was well in itself, for the first
time

perfectly harmonised, biometalloids and flesh seamless, as though they were always meant
to be this way.

Finally she had nothing left that
she could do. She sat
back on her heels and slowly watched her Battle

Armour power down and withdraw into normally sized limbs, ordinary shapes
.
'Please wake up,' she

said to him, in her own voice. But he did not.

After a few moments she heard sounds from the lake
.
Poppy and Viridia, getting out
to come looking .

. .

Lila bent down and picked up Zal in her arms. She held him gently, close to her, and carried him away

into the night
forest, away from hunting faeries and hunting Saaqaa, wherever the path took her, seeing

and avoiding all the soft trails of lemon and lime magic that twisted and danced in the moonlit
air.

'It's all right, Lila
.
Lila, you can put me down
.
' Zal's voice was laced with melodic cadences that
rose

above and sank below the true tone, a curious effect
that
made Lila feel sleepy, as though she'd been

drugged
.
She could barely understand his words, but the music filtered into her limbs and slowed them

down. All her perceptions misted and fogged away from the battle-vision's piercing clarity and she came

to a halt like a heavy horse, one last footfall sinking gently into the soft
earth beneath them.

Lila stood in a silver place underneath a full moon shining, more brilliantly and through less pollution

than any moon in Otopia had ever shone. She glanced at
Zal, realised that he was all right, and that
she

was too, and set him down. The night was very quiet. Around them the trees and bushes soughed gently

in a light breeze
.
Their scents -tobacco flowers and dark jasmine - twined around them both in heady

sweetness. There was no sight or sound of other creatures nearby. Everything was indigo, violet, purple

and royal blue; the grass and the trees reaching high above her with their massive span, the thickets of

broadleaved plants clustering close in the moonlight their two shadows inky on the ground.

Zal stood very shakily on his own and rested for a moment
with his hands on his knees. His breath was

quick as though he was the one who'd been running. 'You need to rest.'

'Me?' Lila said. 'No.'

Without
motion she felt empty, like a jug that
had been poured out
and cleaned and set
aside. Without

direction she did not
know what
was important
in this scene she was in. It
was so strangely quiet
without

the shrieking, screaming elves swimming amid the palace ruins, scrabbling to gather themselves on the

lakeshore, staggering

around like crazy people, fighting one another in panic. The fury of their grief and recriminations was

written on her eardrums in a precise, pretty language that
had burned her inside
.

Yes, now it
was very quiet, Lila thought
appreciatively, and her body sang with the vitality of Sathanor

and with raw power from the reactor core, machine and flesh indistinguishable to her now
.
Everything

was running smoothly, though things did seem to be at
a remove from her. She liked that. She liked it
a

lot. She liked her cool mind. 'I'm fine. Been in the health farm pool. You know, I'm just fine.'

Zal straightened up and drew a deep breath, T know. Me too. But
let's pretend.'

Lila shrugged. His words made sense enough though he was speak-ing in a rather exaggerated way.

Still, she took no offence - thinking he must perhaps have PTSD or another related issue, particularly

after what
had just
occurred
.
Why not? She had nothing else to do, no mission goal left, though she

would have expected there to be some orders about
returning home
.
There were none however. Pretend

to rest Even so, the sense of something being wrong niggled at her. 'Here?'

'Why not here?' he said.

She looked around automatically and then, finding no dangers, folded her legs and sat
down.

'Flatter,' the elf said, sitting beside her. His voice was very quiet, as if he was speaking to a frightened

animal - a thing she almost
resented, or rather, got the impression she would have resented, in another

life. 'Lie down.'

'I'm perfectly fine. I'm not
scared. I'm not
tired. I don't
need to.'

'I know. But
I do, and it would make me feel much better if you did too. So, do you mind?'

'No, I don't mind.' It was pleasant and easy to have a direct, simple instruction, much nicer than having

no instruction at all, Lila thought as she complied. The ground gave gently under her weight
and the grass

bent
under her skin, cool and faintly prickly. The soil was damp and there was a gathering of misty

vapour among the tiny leaves which chilled her a little, condensing on her metals
.
She liked it here, but
it

was difficult
to lie this way with all her weapons in assault
mode
.
Her armaments scored and cut the

earth and separated her from its welcome. Lila downgraded her defensive conditions and listened to the

soft
whirr and snicker of a billion perfect
metal parts shifting back

into her civilian body, smoothing her skin, making her comfortable. If only the nagging sensation in her

mind would be quiet she could sleep here.

'On your side,' Zal said perfunctorily, and she obeyed without thinking - having once accepted his

instructions, she found herself glad for more. It was a relief to be told what to do.

He lay behind her and matched his long tall body to the shape of hers, knees bent; spoons. He

negotiated a position for his arm around her carefully, avoiding the hard metals of her forearm and outer

hip on the upward side. Carefully he undid the front
of the elvish jerkin she wore and slid his hand

underneath its tatters. She felt his fingers work to push her vest up a few inches, so that he had skin to

skin contact with her at her waist and then the soft, warm touch of his
andalune
spread out from there,

covering her over in seconds like the world's softest, most intelligent smart blanket
.
It was curiously

asexual, this contact, kind and concerned but
no more than that
and it
made her smile just
a little. She

predicted its likely motivations, recalled her previous encounter with this, and began to explain that
she

was quite healthy and in no need of medical assistance,

'You don't need to . . .'

'Just shut up, Lila. This is my home town and I'm going to look after you here,' he said, back in his

most normal voice, elf in sound, human in word, demon in temper. 'Elven hospitality, if it still works after

that hook-up with unreality
.
Here's hoping.'

Unreality? Her AI mind didn't
know how to process that. Everything was real that could be perceived

and there were no immediate threats
.
She responded to the part
she did understand. 'I don't need to be

looked after. I'm looking after you. That's my assignment and that's what I'm doing.'

'Yeah, I got that,' he drawled as if he didn't believe a word she was saying.

The gentle, downy sensation of the
andalune
presence began to sink down into her as though it was

melting through her skin like butter. There was something weird about it - more weird than usual even, as

though Zal was connected to Sathanor, as though all of Alfheim was holding her through him, or more

like he and it were temporarily concurrent, like two solutions to a single equation
.
She didn't like it It was

too big. It
was too elfy. Magic ran through it and magic was both untouchable and unpredictable. She

didn't want to be there now.

'Stop

'Stick a sock in it,' he said patiently. 'And turn off whatever Ninja Assassin program you've got
running

that's making you act
like GI Jane on acid. Do you want that treacherous little shit
to live, or don't
you?'

For a split second Lila had no idea who he was talking about. Then what
he said sunk in and she

realised that
Battle Standard was operational
.
She'd forgotten it was on, didn't even remember cueing it.

With numb efficiency she executed the commands to disable it.