Keeping It Real (51 page)

perfection of talking to him in this way. She watched his body become her instrument, listened to him cry

out, made him do it again, learned how to play. She never wanted to stop, never, wanted only to be lost,

but there came a point
where she heard him pleading in whispered elvish. A crackle of wild energy

rushed up both her arms like lightning and earthed out through his
andalune
body.

He came, pulsing strongly against
her tongue, repeating her name amid syllables that were both elven

and demonic
.
Lila drank him, she didn't
want
to let
him go. Zal ran his hands down the length of her arms

where they were planted against
the earth on either side of his hips and, when he couldn't
move her, slid

himself along the ground underneath her and caught
hold of her head. His tongue was long and hot
as he

kissed her, mouth savage and hungry as he pulled her down to him, arms locked around her neck.

'I weigh enough to crush you,' she warned him, poised with machine precision on her elbows either

side of his head, her knees against the outside of his hips.

'Shut
up, Plutonium Girl.' He slid his hands down, opening the rest
of Tath's old clothes where they

hung on her. Defeated by the strong elastic of her remorseless military vest he kissed her harder and used

fingers that
were entirely energy to slide under it
and caress her breasts while his ordinary hands moved

downwards.

Being touched by him was an even more intense pleasure than touching him. Where his hands lingered

Lila burned, almost as if he had touched chilli and brushed the oil on her skin, and when his fingers

crossed over the biometal surfaces of her skin they created strange electricity that replicated the surge

and tide of his
andalune.

When he reached the rags of Tath's leggings, now little more than shorts where her active armour had

ripped them to bits, he simply took the remains in both hands and tore them off
.
The delicate touch he

had employed on her face now teased down across her belly and buttocks and up the inside of her long

steel thighs.

Zal's angular face lay completely open below her, sometimes kissing her, sometimes not, every flicker

of emotion visible; delight and arousal their only two forms. She felt
supremely beautiful and power-ful as

he slid his fingers, warm in contrast to the cool damp air, across her lips and then inside her. She saw him

smile at
her wide eyes when he used his ethereal body at
the same location, licking her with multiple small

tongues of alternating heat and cool. They teased her as mercilessly as she had teased him, and his

fingers, sometimes one, then two or three, penetrated her in agonising counterpoint
that would not settle

into the necessary rhythm. Lila wanted him so much she lost her mind, 'Azrazal Ahriman . . .'

Zal slammed his hand across her mouth. His eyes glittered. 'No names. No pack drill.' With a strength

and energy she had never expected he could possess he flipped them both over. His
andalune
coated

him in a faint red coat of plastic energy, making him moment-arily as strong or stronger than any of her

machine counterparts, fed as it
was with Sathanor's endless, absolute fuel. He burned.

Lila wrapped her elegant
chrome legs around his waist
and buried her hands in the heavy mess of his

hair, touching the long tips of his ears with her thumbs. He made her wait, holding her just
out
of reach

until she lay still on the ground and stared up at
him with seriously murderous intent. Then he gave a

wicked grin, slid his arms around her and pulled them both upright, chest to chest. He sat back on his

heels, his energy body giving him much more than ordinary power, and then he let her go, very, very

slowly
.

The sensation of sliding down onto him was purely perfect and exquisite. She heard her own voice

shouting out in joy.

His hands slid up across her back and took hold over her shoulders, pulling her down onto him with

rough power. They devoured one another's mouths with abandon. Cold red fire and swift
green heat

flashed as winding, twisting skeins of wild magic curled through Lila's hair, through her ears and eyes and

nose, mixing with the charged envelope of Zal's aether and crackling as it
met antagonist charges. Heavy

ionisation made the air as freshly primed as the ocean wind. Lila

breathed it, drank it, dimly aware of herself changing with its tides in ways she didn't
understand or care

about
because all she wanted was right
there in the sinuous flex of Zal's hips, the drive of his pelvis and

the deep, repeating thrill of his body moving inside hers.

His
andalune
tongues passed through her flesh and into the bone, vibrating on multiple wavelengths

that effortlessly tipped her over the edge. She looked into Zal's eyes and they were weeping flame like

tears. Pale yellow and white petals of fire flecked the surface of his tongue and his passion-slackened

mouth. He looked faintly surprised, gazed deeply into her eyes and then a column of white fire rushed up

the length of her alloy and bone spine and out the top of her head. Lila was surprised too, and then she

was unconscious.

When Lila woke up it
was daylight
.
She was lying on her back, and above her she could see the azure of

the Sathanor sky through dancing green leaves. The first
thing she noticed was that she was alone. Zal

was nowhere to be seen.

She rolled over and looked at
the ground. Apart
from the flattened area where they had slept
she was

able to pick up their incoming trail, and see that
he'd retraced her steps. With the exception of her vest

she was naked. Tath's shirt lay where it
had been put
under her head. She picked it
up and put
it on, its

stained white linen draping her from neck to a third of the way down her thighs. Tearing off the sleeves to

use as a belt to hold the thin material close around her hips helped slightly on the modesty front, but
that

was it.

She climbed up the small rise, looking back towards Aparastil, and expanded her hearing acuity as

much as she could. Once the environ-ment
had been cleaned from the signals she could hear elven

voices, and Zal's among them. They were about
two kilometres distant, almost
back at the lake itself,

and it
was very difficult
to pick out
words but she gathered from the snatches she managed to hear that

Zal had found sympathetic company. One of the others had a voiceprint
that
matched Tath's sister's
.

They were working hard to help survivors of the lake implosion but
were insisting that
Zal leave them

quickly.

'It
is too soon . . .' Lila heard Astar say. 'Go back to Otopia and we will contact
you there.'

One of her male companions agreed. 'We will mend matters here as best
we can but
it
will... a long

time . . . government weakened . . . worse to come. Take . ..'

But
then they must
have turned away. Their sounds became too weak to decipher. She waited and

began to pick up the vibration of

running feet
coming her way; just
the one pair. She was more relieved than she liked to admit when Zal

returned, He was fully dressed and carrying light packs in both hands.

'Clothes,' he said, throwing her the first
one. 'Food,' he added as he sat
down beside her and started

delving into the other pack. He handed her a birch-bark packet
.

Lila tore it open and found the contents waterlogged and squashed but edible. They didn't speak for

several minutes, only ate.

'Thanks,' she said when she had a moment that her stomach allowed her to stop and talk.

Zal swallowed. 'We have to get back to Otopia as fast as possible. Arie has a lot of friends who are

recovered and on the look-out for us, and the only reason they haven't found us is that you flew most of

the way here. The resistance are trying to hinder them but they have to maintain their covers so we can't

expect
much.'

Lila opened the clothing bag and pulled out wet elven clothing -trousers, jerkin
.
She didn't
ask where

they'd come from, only shook them out
and started to put them on. She saw Zal watching her as he ate,

his gaze lingering until he noticed her noticing and glanced down.

'Everything should have changed,' she said, referring obliquely to the night
before but allowing herself

to include the whole of the day before, because it
seemed safer.

'Nah,' Zal replied. 'It
just
feels like it
because you're a liminal being, like me, not one thing or another,

able to go anywhere and be anything, without knowing where you're headed. And then it fades away and

there you are again, much as before.'

'Much, but
not
exactly.'

'Not
exactly.'

From beyond the rise of the hill which sat
between them and the long descent
to Aparastil they could

just
hear voices. Some of them were very distressed, grieving and panicking. They were not
coming to

hunt
Lila and Zal. They were looking for medicine in the rich under-growth of Sathanor. She heard one

shout
out
when they found the plant
they needed
.

'We should go back and help them,' she said, thinking it
was the right thing to do.

Zal shook his head. 'We can't
help them. They'd only want
to kill us. The only people we have to

worry about
down there are Poppy and 'Dia and with any luck they'll already have had enough of trying

to drown

her tenth-level zerg mages and be back in Otopia washing their hair,' Zal said. He had stopped eating,

the pack of food half empty beside him. He rolled onto his stomach and lay, propped on his elbows,

plucking fine stems from just below his face and eating the lower inch of them with many dissatisfied

micro-expressions. 'Grass?'

'I'm through my horsey phase.' Lila felt
the tension between them stretch taut
like a strange polymer.

Her confession preyed on her mind. For the sake of her job - for the sake of her mind - she wanted to

know why he'd killed someone and she wanted to find a reason why she'd done it so that
she didn't have

to feel sick.

Zal flicked an eyebrow and twirled one long strand between his tongue and top lip before spitting it

out.

'So, who did you kill?' she asked, dissatisfied with him, disappointed in his lack of heroic help, and her

own.

Zal shrugged. 'A faery man and a human woman. Both duty murders, in the days when I was more

able to do that kind of thing.'

Lila waited for him to flip back the question, but he didn't
.
He glanced at her in silence. She said the

words to herself in her mind before she spoke them aloud, to try them out, see if she even could say

them. 'I killed Dar.'

'Ah shit!' Zal said softly and dropped his head forwards until it almost rested on the ground, hair

sweeping forwards to hide his face. His body hung on the bony axis of his shoulders like wet paper. He

bent the crown of his head into his hands and she saw his fingers drag through his hair and pull it hard,

tight.

Lila was shaking with remorse and misery. 'Who was he to you?' she whispered, dreading the answer.

'My friend. One of the only, in spite of our differences. What
a fucking waste.' He groaned and

collapsed flat, his hands over the back of his head, face buried in the grass.

'I didn't
mean to . . . that is, I was doing my ... I didn't want to do it.' Lila felt more anguish suddenly

than she had even in the moment she had pressed the knife home, and her voice tightened to silence
.

'Yeah, I know how it gets,' he said, muffled by the green.

'You were an agent,' she pursued him, going back to safer ground, fighting to control her urge to beg

his forgiveness.

'You don't have to explain,' he said quietly. T understand.'

Lila picked up the empty clothing bag and flung it away from her. 'Well I ... I hate how we're just

talking about these things as if they're

all part
of a great
and noble job that somehow excuses them and makes them less than murder and less

than people!'

Zal lifted his head and looked at
her a long minute. 'It's a necessary skill. Push everything under until

you can let it out somewhere else, more useful, where it can do some good. Just because you don't see

me crying doesn't mean I won't. We're still in hostile territory, and this is far from over. If you want to

validate yourself then get
up. We both have to.' He got
to his feet.

'Spoken like a true agent!' she snapped.

'I regret
you dislike me because I will not say the words you long to hear. They are not
mine to give