Selling Out (2 page)

Lila was their instrument. No, all right, she meant a bit more than that, but she’d come to realise very recently (about the time she’d knifed her friend, the elven agent Dar, in the chest), that fifty billion dollars of research and engineering and the knife edge of interdimensional relations had bought parts of her she didn’t even know were for sale. So she was sitting here, part employee, part volunteer, part slave, part friend, a little bit of daughter and a whole shitload of resentment, explaining to their quiet, experienced faces the grim details of how she had fulfilled her last mission.

Lila did her best to tell it in her own way, even though they all had the benefit of the download.

It had been a success in its central cause—Zal had been saved from a fate worse than death and was now playing stadium concerts in the midlantic states. But the peripheral discoveries and events were less than great.

Zal turned out to not just be a freak elf who liked playing mode-X rock. If he had been that would have been enough, because Alfheim saw that alone as sufficiently treacherous and defiant of their core beliefs to exile him forever. But Zal was much more than that. During his work for the Jayon Daga as an agent in Demonia he had somehow changed his aetheric allegiance and was now—well, even Lila didn’t know what he was. An elf with demonic tendencies? Not quite half and half, but definitely changed in radical ways so that the oppositional magics of Alfheim and Demonia were both available to him. As a result of that, and his subsequent defection to the Otopian music scene, he had become one of those magical items most prized by people with really big ambitions.

One such person was Arië, a ruler in Alfheim’s arcane monarchic government, who had taken it upon herself to use him in a spell to sever the realms altogether. In saving Zal, Lila had caused the destruction of a large part of the Alfheim ruling classes, indirectly caused the death of Arië herself, and now Alfheim was in open civil war.

Still, it was even worse than that.

She had killed one friend to save another. She hadn’t mentioned that.

She didn’t plan to.

She had a dead elf necromancer living inside her chest.

She didn’t plan to mention that either.

She felt no loyalty, sitting there. She didn’t know what she felt, but it wasn’t good. She had hoped, thought—well, she had had some stupid idea that coming here and debriefing would be like a confession which would absolve her. It wasn’t. Didn’t. She longed to go back forty-eight hours and to be in bed with the curtains closed, Zal’s naked, sleeping body in her arms—when she hadn’t had a care in the world and every fuse in the place was blown dead so that nothing and nobody could find her.

“Lila?” Dr. Williams asked her.

“Oh. Well. Arië was eaten by the water dragon and then . . .”

“What did it do next?” Sarasilien asked.

“I didn’t see,” Lila said, honestly. “It could still be in the lake for all I know. So, chomp. Which was lucky, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here. Chomp. Then we fell into the lake—everything fell. The whole palace collapsed when she died. Lots of people drowned and I caught hold of Zal and got him back to the surface okay and we made our way back out of Sathanor and then, here. Arië—there was a moment when I thought her whole spell to sever the realms was working but I don’t know if that was true.”

Cara flipped through the notes on her lap. “Extensive earth tremors were reported at that hour here in Otopia. It has been put down to crucial tectonic pressure shifts as several conjoined plates moved at once. Nothing too bad. Small tidal waves. Only a few hundred dead. Nothing since you came back.”

Lila stared at her, wondering what kind of statistics Cara was used to dealing with that these seemed such small beer to her. “Arië was helped by necromancers from all the other realms, including this one.”

Cara nodded. “A specialist team has been dispatched to attempt to reclaim or otherwise prove the deaths of those Otopians involved.”

“Right,” Lila said. “We were about two hundred metres down. It was very messy. They almost certainly drowned. I don’t believe they could have survived.”

“There was an aetheric shockwave,” Sarasilien said. “Congruent with your descriptions. It was—difficult—to avoid.” He winced. “All the other realms have sent us intelligence about the effects they have perceived. We are convinced Arië’s efforts would have been reasonably successful if Zal had continued to function as the spell’s axis. You are to be congratulated on a most successful outcome.”

“Thanks,” Lila said, wondering if she’d have sounded any more enthusiastic if he’d been inviting her to a funeral. Yes, she’d have been much more enthusiastic about funerals.

Dr. Williams made yet another note on her clipboard. Lila zoomed in on what she was writing but it was all in wretchedly tiny shorthand and on intelligent paper too, which concealed messages until it was cued to display them, so she could read nothing. Dr. Williams noticed her attempt, and made a note about that too. Lila frowned.

“As it stands,” Cara said, “what interests us the most now is the connection between Zal’s kidnap and the evidence concerning the Quantum Bomb fault underlying Bay City, which you and Malachi have uncovered.”

“There’s a link?” Lila said. She felt a tremor in her chest as Tath stirred with interest at the news. The quiescent, green shimmer of his presence opened out: alien spring.

“We believe that Arië was not alone in wanting to achieve fundamental separation of the realms. The recordings you found near the studios in Bay City were being taken by faery agents for their intelligence-gathering moot. Though our relations with them are somewhat hampered by the fact that we are all new to one another and have much to learn, they were willing enough to admit that they have been pursuing similar research in all the realms. They would not say what they were looking for but we believe it is closely related to the faultlines in Otopia which were created by the Quantum Bomb. As you know, faeries deny the Bomb as a fact, as do the other realms.”

“Weird that they’re so interested in evidence about it then?” Lila asked, recalling that it was faeries who had been key to Zal’s kidnap in the first place.

“Yes. It is also known to us that Zal’s own efforts are hardly limited to making money or music in Otopia. As you said in your report, your Jayon Daga informant . . .”

“Dar. He was called Dar.”

“Yes. Said that it was not an accident where or what Zal sang. That he was one of Alfheim’s principal defenders until he ‘went native’ in Demonia.”

“Elf and demon aetheric usage is very different,” Sarasilien said quietly. “Their cultures are built around those differences. Elves use language to mobilise and shape aetheric energy. Demons use music. We suspect that Zal is adept in a new, hybrid form of aetheric control. It is possible that he was made so by demon agencies and acts for them, or that he was deliberately involved in this spell of Arië’s . . .”

“No way,” Lila said.

“We are assigning you to discover exactly what happened to Zal in Demonia,” Cara told her. “We need to know how, when, and why he was changed, and what it means to the demons, the elves, and everyone else on the aetheric block.”

Sarasilien winced—Lila knew it was because of Cara’s words. Clumsiness or imprecision of speaking were almost physically painful to elves. She was surprised that Delaware didn’t notice. “Zal is no innocent bystander,” Sarasilien said and Lila wanted to kill him, even though, of course, he was right and she knew that.

Dr. Williams made a note.

“You will go into Demonia under a scholarship ticket,” Delaware was saying. “You have diplomatic immunity but you are there to study demon culture and lore, to covertly discover Zal’s heritage and to bring back as much information as you can on whether or not the demons are also interested in Bomb faults or whatever they call them. Sarasilien has organised your entry with a friend of yours who is native. He will brief you before you leave.” Delaware got up, looking at her watchface where it was scrolling with bright charts and schedules. “If you’ll excuse me, I have other meetings . . .” She shook Lila’s hand with formal vigour. “Feels just like the real thing,” she said, with an encouraging smile.

“Yeah.” Lila blinked, releasing the woman from her synthetic skin’s grip. Since she had been in Alfheim she’d forgotten to keep remembering that her arms and legs were mostly prosthetics. They had started to seem her own, until now. “From the other side too.”

Delaware glanced at her, revealing more sharp intelligence in that moment than she had all day. Lila shook her head, letting the matter go. “Good luck,” Delaware said.

Sarasilien stood when she had gone. “I too must depart and prepare to meet with you this afternoon when our demon guest will be with us.” He held his hand out to Lila and she shook it, feeling really stupid now until she realised he was only doing it as an excuse to touch her. His
andalune
body ran across her hand and arm. He held her hand in both of his and lifted one eyebrow in a very uncharacteristic invitation to complicity. “I look forward,” he looked down at her chest, “to hearing more details of your visit to my beautiful homeland later.”

Tath cursed.

Lila nodded. “Sure. Later.” She wanted to hug him, to warn him, to tell him not to say a damn word about whatever he could see, but as she met the strong gaze in his slanted blue eyes she knew that he wasn’t about to give her away. Not yet at least. The pointed tip of his right ear twitched—something like a silent smile. “Sure.”

He left her alone with Dr. Williams, the one person that Lila really, really, didn’t want to be talking to right now, though since all the formal information-gathering had been done there was no way she could put it off a minute more.

“Hello Lila,” said the doctor with a gentle smile. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

Dr. Williams sighed and turned her clipboard around. She tapped the paper with the end of her pen, activating it. It showed Lila that what she had taken for shorthand were a lot of drawings of little stick figures. They were standing in groups, shouting, and in the middle was one with robot arms and legs which had its hands pressed against its head. It was surrounded by a large scribbled circle of darkness. “Anything you want to tell me about in particular?”

Lila thought about it. “Dar, the elf agent who almost killed me, the one who was hunting Zal. Well, I nearly killed him, but then I saved him—in Alfheim. He saved me. I was having a bad time with all my metal. Like last time you saw me, it was all too powerful for my bones. I kept getting hurt. But after we did this healing in Alfheim I was fine. Better than fine. Zal said I have elementals fused into me now and Dar must have done that. I don’t know. We . . . Dar and I . . . we worked together . . .”

“Not as enemies?”

“No! No, not at all. We worked together to get Zal free. But our cover got blown and I had to kill him just to stay in with a chance of finishing the . . . of getting Zal out and stopping Arië. He’s dead. I think he was a true friend although there were lots of times when he . . .” She paused. She wanted to explain how the loyalties to state and friend, to family and self were so mixed up. But that wouldn’t be the right thing to say now, perhaps ever, in her position, since it could only be seen as a weakness in her. “Funny how we always end up talking about Dar.”

“Not really. If it weren’t for Dar you wouldn’t be here at all.”

“No,” Lila said. “I’d still be a desk cowboy in Foreign Affairs with all my arms and legs and family and I’d never have met him, or Zal, or you. Can I go?”

“Yes, if you answer me just one question.”

Lila looked at Dr. Williams’s gentle, sympathetic face. “What?”

“Was what you did in Alfheim right, or wrong?”

CHAPTER TWO

L
ila looked at the doctor. “Everything I did was right.”

Williams nodded, encouraging her to go on.

“At the moment I did it,” Lila said, and loathed the qualification.

“I advised Delaware not to send you out immediately,” the doctor said wearily. “But she doesn’t like to listen to me. No doubt the rest of today is already scheduled up to its eyeballs with briefings and any number of other necessary checks and balances before you leave. So, you’d better spill the rest of it in the next five minutes.”

“There is no rest of it,” Lila said.

“You overused your Voluntary Emotional Override shunt so much that the logistics here advises me that you should have it removed for your own mental health.”

Lila shrugged. “So remove it.”

“I see that the Automatic Warrior setting or whatever ridiculous name it goes by these days functioned as it ought to.”

“Yeah. The off switch actually worked this time.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Tell me about Zal.”

Lila was almost caught out by the sudden shift of topic, which was not accompanied by any change in tone or delivery. She hesitated. “He’s very annoying.”

“Are you involved with him? As they like to say when they mean, Do you love him?”

“None of your goddamned business.”

“Congratulations. You may go.”

“You know,” Lila said, standing up. “You may think you know all about me, but you don’t.” The childishness of it surprised her.

Shut up when you’re losing
, Tath said, with a twinge of smugness.

“Call me,” Williams said kindly.

Lila walked out. She was so angry she didn’t know what else to do. Outside, in the warmly lit corridors of power, her colleagues and fellow agents greeted her with varying mixtures of friendliness, respect, and condescension that marked out very clearly to what extent each of them thought they knew something about her recent mission. She cued up the Voluntary Emotional Override and met them with interested politeness. Once she’d reached the women’s toilets she uncued the VEO, vomited up her rage in one of the cubicles, and washed her mouth out at the sink.

She looked in the mirror as she dried her face on a paper towel. Scarlet hair, silver eyes. She watched her hands screw the towel up and throw it away. Their synthetic skin looked normal. She considered stripping it off.