Keeping It Real (7 page)

'Can't
we forget it? Just between us. Don't tell him. Please, Lila. There's nobody else. Just the two of us.

It was her and me. We're the only ones in on it.'

'Who was your friend?' Now Lila could feel a trickle of blood on her skin. She felt unreasonably,

unexpectedly tired.

'Nobody.'

'Consider yourself under arrest.'

'All right, all right!' Poppy rubbed her face and stamped her foot in pique. 'It was his cousin. Okay? His

cousin from Alfheim. She doesn't want him dead either - only one of his family that doesn't
.
You'd better

leave her out of it, please, Lila, she's only twelve
.
' The faery looked at
Lila with desperate, beseeching

eyes.

'Twelve!'

'Please,
Lila.' Poppy was floating two feet
over the floor with anxiety. Her hands were together,

begging.

Lila was suddenly too exhausted to move. Even her anger wasn't enough to keep her awake. 'Poppy,'

she managed to say, slurring her words. 'Help me.' And then she fell over, her eyes closing of their own

accord, and she knew no more.

It
was sunny. The sky was blue with streaks of high cloud. The warm air was full of the sound of

splashing and the smell of freshwater and seawater alike. Lila was awake but could barely open her eyes.

She was lying down on some padded kind of flat couch, and couldn't move. She could feel her body, but

only the human parts. The robotics were utterly dead. There was no reaction to her thoughts to summon

it to life. She struggled to make a connection, wishing she could rouse it as effortlessly as it
roused her but

she realised that
the power was out. What she could feel was heavy, the way she felt during the worst

attack of 'flu she'd ever had. The only reason she could see anything was because one of her eyelids was

slightly open. The blinding glare hurt because the apertures on her irises were set wide-open, where

they'd been when the sleep charm had taken effect. There was nothing she could do. A tear formed and

ran down her temple
.
Compared to the clinic it wasn't so bad though. And miraculously there had been

no dreams. Water was running nearby.

After a minute or two she gathered that
she was lying on a sun lounger beside the large, unevenly

shaped swimming pool at the front of the house, not
far from where it
was fed by streamwater from a

little forest cascade. The light was very warm but the air was full of the forest cool, so it was still early in

the morning, perhaps before seven. Lila tried moving, nothing happened.

As the minutes passed she became able to sense more, through what
remained of her human organs. It

began to dawn on her with a creeping, stomach-churning horror that she could feel the breeze blowing a

light, flappy fabric against
her skin. It
told her she was wearing a robe with very possibly nothing

underneath it. No, surely a swimsuit? Or something. But that hardly mattered. The bare fact of her

cyborg change, which she had wished to hide completely until some unspecified future of confidence and

acceptability, when she might
be able to reveal it
to someone trusted, was on full show
.
Shame and fear

flooded her, but even they could not make her move. Only her breath-ing and her heart were active and

they didn't respond to her feelings at all, as though she really had slept the sleep of a thousand years.

Then a shadow fell across her - bliss for her eyes at last. She smelt a bright, mineral fragrance like bath

salts.

Poppy leaned over her and carefully pushed a pair of sunglasses onto Lila's nose, settling their arms

carefully over her ears. 'There,' she said, with the playful voice of somebody dressing a doll. 'Nobody

from the house will ever know you're not out here just taking some rays.' She dabbed the tear from Lila's

face with the tip of her finger
.
Lila heard her straighten up and the edge of Poppy's fragile robe brushed

across her bare hand
.
It was agonising to be able to feel everything but be able to do nothing. Lila was

desperate to know what had happened, but she didn't have to wait.

'Hey!' Poppy called out across the pool. 'Zal, how long will this take?'

No, no, no, Lila was moaning, somewhere deep inside. Just when she thought it couldn't be any worse

- it was. Part of the reason she'd been sent to this assignment was because Incon suspected that

extremists from Elfland had picked Zal as a target through which to get some publicity for their cause.

Their real motivations however, far from being directly related to rock stars or even dissident elves, were

set against the furtherance of Otopian technologies, particularly nuclear reactors and cyborg systems,

which they saw as abominations. Their views were the sharp end of a general trend among elves against

high technology. There was no more repellent
vision for an elf than a natural being invaded by inert

machinery, except possibly something Undead. Although her pride and the shreds of her vanity surely

burned at
the idea of Zal now having a good reason to loathe her, Lila was sick with the realisation that

her cover was almost certainly blown. So much for her great spy skills.

The sun came back full force as Poppy moved away. The light was like a lance straight into her brain.

Lila wished herself asleep again -for a million years.

Zal's voice spoke from somewhere slightly below them both and to her right. "The counteragent should

take it off in a day or so.'

A day! Lila cringed. She could not, would not
even let
herself think about being Poppy's new lifesize

robo-Barbie for an entire day, though before she could squash the idea she had already seen herself

dressed and re-dressed and stood up as a piece of living statuary somewhere embarrassing while Poppy

talked the entire time about
what
great
fun it all was. The only possible mercy was that
faeries in their

human forms were generally so congenial that
they wouldn't let her come to any harm. Even so, it was

unbearable, but Zal hadn't finished . . .

'I can speed things up, probably.' She heard him get
out
of the pool and then he moved into her field of

vision as he stood up. He was a lithe silhouette, dripping with diamonds.

'She's gonna be
so
mad,' Poppy whispered, close to him.

Lila could see Poppy as a green-tinged shadow surrounded by diaphanous cloth that
floated on the air.

She was so close to Zal that
there was only a tiny strip of light
between them. Poppy's outline jittered and

she sounded strung out.

'Please Zal,' she said. 'You can talk to her. She likes you. She'll be cool. I'm so tired. I have to get

some sleep. Oh come on, don't look at me like that. You already forgave me, remember? Pretty please?

I'd do it
for you.'

Zal snorted with laughter and folded his arms across his chest.

Poppy's tone changed from pleading to pretended anger, the kind that only very good friends can

exert with one another. 'You are so bloody High Elfy sometimes, you bastard. Come on.'

'Only if you swear you won't take any more pixie dust until the tour's over. That's why you can never

sleep. And fixing it gives me a headache.'

T swear, I swear!' Poppy danced from foot to foot.

'And no more enchanted knives and midnight assassination attempts with school-age conspirators?

Making me rescue my own bodyguard? Wiping the mess off your face?'

'No, no, no! Come on, Zal. I'll do anything, anything, baby, cross my heart, pleeze! This is the last

time. I promise. I'll be so good.'

'You're full of it,' he said wearily, and took her in his arms and kissed her. He picked her up and they

moved out of sight.

The sun blasted Lila, although the glasses cut the worst
of it. She fought
just
to move one finger.

Nothing.

'Mmmnn,' she heard Poppy sigh. "That's perfect. One more time till I can't hear the sea . . .'

Lila remembered Poppy yawning in the same tone the night before, at a very un-yawny moment, when

the other elf, the cousin, had touched her.

'My reverse prince . . .' she heard Poppy sigh.

'Pixie shit,' Zal muttered, almost beneath hearing.

Wood creaked. The trees soughed in the wind. Lila's robe flapped and her hair moved. Heavy fabric

rustled not
far away. Lila wondered - she thought
Poppy and Zal were going to do something else, but

had he put
her to sleep? Was it a feature of elf/faery interaction she'd never known about before? If only

she could see . . .

Zal's shadow fell across Lila's face. She tried to close her eye, but it didn't.

He sat down next to her and she felt something brushing over her forehead - a feather
.
Zal hummed

something wordless, tuneless, a mesmer that seemed to circle as the feather circled, and a tingling

sensation spread down from her forehead and all through her. Occa-sionally he stopped and flicked the

feather away from them both, as though shaking water off it. The tingling stopped.

Then he got up and stood astride her lounger, feet on the floor. She blinked and could see a little better

.

Zal bent
down so that
his face was only a short distance from hers, his hands on his knees
.
His long

wet hair fell across her chest and the water from it spread out, suddenly cold, through her robe.

'I know you can hear me,' he said, and she thought he was smiling. 'I have to do this last part to wash

the charm right
out' He held up the black feather. 'I want
you to know that it's perfectly justified and that

I'm not just feeling you up, although I am doing that too.' He reached down and separated the front of her

gown.

A fury, alternately cold and hot, started burning in Lila. She priv-ately promised herself that she would

make him pay for this, and soon. How dare he?

He slid his hand down softly across her breast, over her ribs and pressed the feather against the place

where she was cut
by the knife. It suddenly stung with agonising sharpness and Lila felt new tears spring

into her eyes. Zal said something in a language she didn't catch, though she was reasonably sure it
wasn't

elvish. She could feel his
andalune
aethereal body suddenly concentrate itself around the place. The

touch of it was more intimate even than his skin on hers and it made different tears rise and replace the

angiy ones, though she didn't

like that
it
had that
power and she still fiercely resented his invasion, even if it was so wretchedly

caressing and kind.

Then Zal took the feather off. Lila saw it
crumple into dust and be swept away on the breeze as he put

his finger on the bridge of her shades and slid them down her nose. Lila glared into his dark, slanting

eyes. He grinned at her. 'You should have let those two idiots have their fun,' he said. "The day I get

sneaked up on by a twelve-year-old is the day you can drown me and throw me in a dumpster.'

Lila ran a startup on main power. It
responded perfectly
.
The tokamak was a second sun, deep in her

belly, vivid with raw energies.

He sighed
.
'Poppy wanted me to tell you that
your secrets are all safe with her, so long as she's not

under arrest
.
'

'And you?' Lila found her voice fully functional.

'I'm sure we'll come to some arrangement, Agent Black.'

Lila opened her eyes wide. Zal blinked and flinched as the sun reflected off her silver irises and in that

instant she put her hands on his chest and threw him backwards into the pool, It was a good throw -five

metres. Nothing wrong with the machine. She stood up and belted the ridiculous faery robe.

Zal surfaced and shook the water out
of his hair. He glided away from her on his back towards the far

side, watching her with that maddening catlike calm. She saw his eyes trail her up and down quite slowly.

Lila looked down. The prosthetics of her legs and the way they had been grown into her made them

look like chrome stockings. The robe was obviously one of Poppy's - it didn't so much conceal anything

as hint at concealment, but then give it up as a pointless effort. She saw her own arms, where they were

real skin, crisscrossed with pink and silver scars, stained with red like splashes of paint. She glared

across at the faery but Poppy was asleep, all but entirely hidden under an outsize bathtowel.

Zal got out of the pool. 'Don't thank me,' he said to her as he walked past, almost
but
not
quite

brushing her arm. He didn't
glance at her.

'
T
hank
you,' Lila said through gritted teeth. She followed him back into the house.

Zal went
into his room and shut the door on her. She guessed he was going to go back to bed.

She found all her armour and clothing laid on the floor of her room. Nothing was missing. There was a