Chasing the Dragon (4 page)

She didn't know what to think about Mal's story. She briefly imagined becoming the mistress of Demonia and only then felt the faint
tingle of a feeling that might have driven Teazle to attempt it: let's
leave it all when we can't deal with it. Let's tempt death one more
juicy, fatal time and stand on that edge, daring everything to bring it
on. Such a thing was demon glory.

That made her remember Zal. Zal had literally and figuratively
run into the dark without a backward glance. It hurt to think of it.
She wanted him so badly it stopped her in midflight. Zal would
never have tried to rule Demonia, and not just because he was an elf
by genesis. Tempted as they were by their natural wonts to sink into
emotional festivals of angst, elves were corruptible and able to sacrifice themselves in the name of some cause relatively easily. But Teazle was all demon, and he didn't do sacrifice unless it was of
someone else.

For some reason she'd never figured out yet, neither did she, but
she was much more bored with reasons than she used to be. All that
mattered now was what idiots did and what she was going to do about
it. There was only one thing on her mind these days-a desire that
burned her and drove her crazy and didn't need reasons, but she was
stuck fast with it because the last she'd seen of her love was a stain on
Destiny's petticoat and damned if she knew what to do about that.

Thankfully Malachi had turned up with this shitload of nonsense
and she did know what to do with it. She flew on over the city another
mile or so, avoiding the tiny one-person flitters that zipped over the
tops of the skyscrapers. Great flower heads of idling rotor blades made
the air shimmer over the tallest buildings, where power sinks in the
form of minimaks sent out narrow tendrils to each tiny car and
pumped their miraculous batteries full of aetherically charged electricity. They said charge, but she knew it wasn't: the science was still
in the mumbo jumbo stages while the engineering had merrily forged
ahead. So now they had almost limitless energy, and limitless gadgets
to absorb them. Go humans. Lila just thought it looked like a takeover
bid by the aetherials-distract the majority, give them something
serious to worry about, meanwhile rip the rug quietly out from
under-it was a standard faery tactic, but who could blame them?
And at least the existence of relatively planet-friendly energy gave
something positive to point at when the fey-bashing got intense.

She descended, emerging into clearer air and sputtering drops of
rain. She shook herself out as she stopped and stared down at the buildings below her: Otopian Security Services, disguised as a bland corporate office block and giving off the ordinary power signatures of a bunch
of medium-level computers and a few air conditioners. Not much to
look at considering that inside it, some ten metres belowground in a
bio-bunker, was the cradle where she'd been processed and reborn half human, half-machine. One glance at the three tall square blocks of concrete was enough to know that she was completely and finally done with
what they represented and what they housed. They could hang themselves with their own rope after all they'd done for her.

She listened. The ever-present whisper of the machines was the
merest vibration, and for so long it had made no more sense than
random static. For weeks she had been effectively listening to a dead
station. But although now she couldn't have decoded the whispers into
words or even concepts, she knew that they informed her of things all
the time, about the state of the physical world, about themselves. She
knew, for example, that there were six agents below her in the building
who had also started out their second lives as cyborgs, and had ended
up as an advanced version of what she was now-a replica of a human
being, her every cell mimicked to perfection in matter slightly other
than flesh and bone. She was slightly more metal, more crystalline;
more suited for the passage of light.

She waited, patient as the grave, until she saw Malachi's blue Caddy
circle the block and slide into the black mouth of the underground
entry like a slow fish gliding into the mouth of a shark. Malachi was
still "in" with Security, in spite of being the cause of their greatest
malaise-the Mothkin invasion that had torn humanity from its mundane roots and spread aetheric talents like a contagion. Not that
anyone called them that or recognised it officially. The newly psychic
humans might be a genuine underclass out in the real world, but in the
bureaucracy of Otopian Government they were just people who had
suffered delusions under the effects of too much faery moth dust.

When enough time had passed that she reckoned Mal was back in
the building proper, she descended to the roof, jammed her fingers into
the tiny gap between the security door and its housing, and wrenched it off its hinges. Nerve gas pumped quickly into the narrow corridor
space beyond and fogged the treacherous steep stairs, but Lila didn't
need to breathe like an ordinary person. She walked through it, feeling
a slight headiness, and addressed the steel shutter that had come slamming down in her face. Getting through sheet steel was never easy, but
in her months of solitude she hadn't managed the quiet contemplation
and Zen retreat thing all that well. She'd spent most of it fooling
around in scrapyards and empty warehouses, testing herself, figuring
out what she could do so that when a reckoning came, as it surely
must, she'd be ready. Lila didn't have magic herself and as machine and
human was doubly useless in that respect, but metal elementals were
a part of her structure now, and they had no such trouble.

Being part of her structure meant being part of her mind. She
wanted the door open and placed her hands out upon it. Tendrils of
glimmering white light began to rise and crawl across her skin as the
metal elementals rose and gathered energy from the matter around
them, constructing themselves a nebulous kind of form. It was far from
the forms of their true actualisation, she understood from Zal, but it
was form nonetheless and capable of occupying and reconfiguring any
metallic object. It took a long time in resolutely un-aetheric Otopia,
where the laws of physical matter held firmest sway, but it was still
more than possible. Beneath her hands the door became hot. She traced
a line from top to bottom and side to side, drawing her arm steadily as
if pulling the zipper of a tent. The metal separated, not visibly, but at
the molecular level, and then she was able to use simple force to bend
the four leaves of it and curl them back so that she was able to step
through the hole she'd made and stand in the room beyond.

By this time a kind of welcome party had managed to get itself
together. Two human guards in full body armour with machine pistols
and one of the legitimate cyborgs she'd never seen before stood just
behind the open flower of the security shutter. Their weapons were all
aimed at her, though they held fire. One of them hadn't been able to fit his gas mask properly and it dangled down the side of a handsome
square-jawed face. She stepped up and put it on for him, clipping the
tag to his helmet and giving it a pat. It bought a moment of surprised
stillness in which she saw herself reflected in the dark shield that covered his eyes; her red hair spiked with rain, her violet eyes beneath that
canny, her dress plastered over her, glittering as she stood taller than
she should in her big black combat boots.

"I'm here to see the gaffer," she said, stepping back and taking a
more critical look at her reflection as if in a vanity mirror. No, there
was nothing to be done about any of it. She was a complete mess.

The more efficient of the two guards radioed down for instructions.
His voice was shaky and he'd gone slightly rigid all over. Lila ignored
him and made herself look at the person she really didn't want to see.

The android was a fifty-years-in-the-future version of herself, or
what she would have been if she'd lived those fifty years and undergone
no aetheric interventions. Clearly human, clearly female, she no longer
bore much resemblance to who she'd once been. She looked like a hairless sculpture of a thickset woman with rudimentary, idealised features. Her skin was dark grey and shiny with the hardness of marble.
Even her eyes were made of the same substance. The gun at the end of
her forearm was a heavy, short weapon, the empty hole at the end of
her finger promising significantly more harm than the humans' guns.
She was wearing a green camo uniform, like the guards, the sleeves and
leg cuffs rolled. It looked like someone had dressed an unpainted
plastic model and posed it for an army shop front. As in Lila's case, the
boots were the feet were the boots. On the breast pocket a name tag
read Bentley. At Bentley's neck a thin nine-carat gold chain lay, with a
small girlish pendant in the shape of a hollow heart hanging from it.
Lila's own heart constricted slightly.

Don't be afraid, Zal'd said. When he'd understood the change was
to be total and permanent, the machine consuming every cell, he
hadn't batted an elfin or demonic eyelash. She was his girl, no matter what she was made of. But then, it had been just a few months. Not
decades.

Lila saw Bentley staring at her feet and looked down. Buckles and
straps and the semblance of leather to the kneecap were real enough to
look 100 percent convincing. Above them pale skin with last year's tan
rose as if it were flesh and disappeared four inches above the knee into
the sopping, tawdry skirt of Tatty's dress. The dress had a mind of its
own, Lila'd discovered, and was able to make itself any way. Today it
wanted to look like crud for some reason. There was not a trace of the
impeccable stitching, the gold, silver, jewels, and scales of its onetime
magnificence, when Zal had given it to her, ignorant of its history.
Then it had been just a gift from a lover, some nice thing to wear
instead of all that boring black-and-camo combat gear. Of course it
was rare, soaked in magic, and the price of a king's ransom, but he
could afford it on rock-star fortunes, and somehow, he'd thought it
might save her.

The dress had saved her ass against the baddest faeries in town.
Truthfully, it was probably the dress that had got the agreement from
the Hunter to hoover up the Mothkin and save all their butts from an
endless sleep. She still didn't know why or even how exactly, and the
thing irritated and spooked her equally. She was never sure if it
belonged to her or the other way around, but it was Zal's gift and that
was the one reason that prevented her taking it off and burying it
under several hundred tons of rock.

The cyborg continued staring at her legs. Lila stared back at those
grey eyes, her jaw starting to jut, and saw the head duck suddenly, as
if ashamed.

Mercifully at that moment a second squad of mixed soldiers and
officials appeared through opening blast doors, and Lila found herself
face-to-face with a person she assumed was the present head of the
Otopian Secret Service. They hadn't met and Lila was permanently disconnected from the World Tree, so she really was just going on the air of authority and the grimly controlled yet thoroughly pissed-off
expression.

The man in the suit was tall and broad shouldered, dark but
greying at the temples, his immaculate and conformist grooming
marked oddly with a surge of upper lip hair-a bandit's moustache.
"Temple Greer," he announced himself, taking a solid stance and
placing his hands together in front of him. He kept his weight back as
he looked her over, and said insouciantly as his gaze flicked back to her
face. "You must be Lila Black."

Lila shrugged and smiled sweetly, as if butter wouldn't melt in her
mouth, admitting it. She'd already decided to give nothing to them,
and that included conversational openers.

"You're under arrest," he said, his face impassive as though she
were not very interesting. Meanwhile, more armed people came into
the room and started to fill up the corridors. She heard something
heavy land on the roof and more feet getting out of that.

The grey-and-black shiny bodies of other androids oiled into the
corners, slipping easily through the crowd. Their guns were bigger.
They all bore the same plastic look of humanoid uniformity, some
male, some female, but without distinctive faces. Each wore fatigues,
some with ammunition belts or other devices attached. Finally she was
surrounded by quite a throng, a space of clear carpet one metre wide
around her. Greer faced her from its twelve o'clock position.

She missed Tath. She missed the imp. She missed Zal. Where someone should have said something sarcastic and smart about the situation,
now she had only the endless windblown susurrus of the Signal.

"It's like you knew I was coming," Lila said, rather too loudly.
"Thanks for all turning out. I feel almost moved."

Greer stared at her with genuine dislike. "You should be grateful
you're not dead."