Going Under (22 page)

Unless it was with them and she was its prisoner. In that case, she was the one who wasn't going to make it. It and the other humans might be in cahoots, the experiments all part of a planned series with various deals done. But she couldn't see beyond this chance. And then again, she would never know if it fooled her or not. Never. But she had to try.

She sent her signal, at a very limited range. As she had calculated, two controllers were there in the research facility. Alongside their replies she detected others-and realised that more of the devices existed, tuned to different frequencies and readings. There was only one reason for that.

She adjusted her progress and ignored two technicians who paused to ask her what she was doing there. As they were talking she took one of their security passes from the clip at their collar and pushed them aside to reach the doors beyond.

"You can't go in there ..."

"... restricted ... biohazard ... medically secure ..

They tried to stop her physically, but she brushed them aside and opened the doors to the airlock. An alarm cued but she was into the system and cut it off. She wasn't sure if that was her Al on her side. Anyway, it did as she wanted, even if she didn't know how.

From tanks and gurneys, jars and bottles, bits and pieces of things turned gently to look at her, recognising her. For a moment she was back in the Souk, looking at withered creatures twitching in thick fluid, but then she moved on-machine treading where she dared not-and was through the second and third doors into a room like her own.

There they were, wired up, laid flat, their open and empty eyes staring at the ceiling as a fine mist fell in on their faces, keeping them sedated. A woman and a man. Both cyborgs. Like her.

Lila felt something look down from her eyes upon them with great interest. At the back of her mind the awareness of a huge universe of barely differentiated machines drifted, fine as spider silk on the wind. Their threads all tangled. They had no true boundaries. Yet they knew progressions when they saw it, tasted it, listened to it across the wires. A voice in her mouth said, "Children."

And she knew her enemy.

She felt the machine's surprise.

So, this is life, said her voice that wasn't her voice.

Yes, she replied inside.

Separation, said the voice. Instantiation.

"Protect and Serve," whispered the woman from her bed.

"Protect and Survive," agreed the man's blue lips.

Did I say that when I was here? Lila wondered, and immediately knew that she hadn't.

Two security guards came in and tried to shoot her with tasers. She ducked and snatched the guns from their hands, crushed them to bent metal, and tossed them to the floor.

She gave them a hurt look as they stood openmouthed and braced. "What are you doing? I'm not going to damage anything."

"You're not allowed in here."

"Too bad. I'm just going anyway." She straightened up and walked out between them, sparing neither a glance. She felt them cower slightly and smiled.

For the show of the thing and to vent her feelings she broke into the control systems offices and melted the control devices that were tuned to her. As she did so she said to the terrified technicians, "It's not personal. And don't touch this for a while. It's very hot. You'll burn your fingers." She put the useless things down and watched them create a smouldering pattern on the wooden workbench.

"Should I call ..." one of them nervously began to ask the other.

"Oh for godsake don't bother," Lila snapped. "As if Williams doesn't know I'm here and what I'm doing already but here, here, if it makes you feel better, I'll call her for you." She held out her hand to the shrinking figure of the man and he looked down at it, his fingers moving forwards and then stopping because he wanted to take the handset except that it was also her hand. Lila rolled her eyes and pointed to his lapel where a neat phone unit was woven into the material of his lab coat. "Just pick up the extension." He fumbled about with the button.

She took her hand back and shook it-it hurt.

The phone said, "Dr. Williams is engaged at present but will respond to your urgent call within three minutes, would you like to hold?"

The staff looked at her, not moving.

"Yeah, they wanna hold ..." she said and hung up her part of the call as she turned and left them to it.

The voice in her head whispered. We.

We three, we happy fuckin' three, Lila said in return.

Tath turned, cool, green. His presence was oddly comforting.

She made her way to Williams's rooms, ignoring the looks she got along the way from alarmed staffers who had already heard about her strange behaviour. Inside Williams was still fast asleep. Lila cut off the phone call she'd made and its automated alarm and took a seat across from her. She felt like a moment to herself, and she passed two minutes by playing a thousand games of solitaire. She wished she'd brought a coat. In spite of the air-conditioning she felt cold. She cued up and scanned the celebrity magazines from the World Treecarefully avoiding any mention of Sorcha. She read up on the fashions and the latest retreats where famous people went to avoid any traces of Mothkin and have their immaculate skins refitted. Finally she read the dailies, with their terror headlines and realwrite columns of turgid, grim suburban anxiety. She called Max, but there was no answer. Her sister was out. Out where? It was four Ant. Maybe asleep, she thought, belatedly noting that most people didn't function twenty-four/seven and Max's chef duties tended to leave her wasted after cleanup at two Am.

She cued some music for herself and found some old tracks of Zal's-in the days before he was famous he'd played around extensively with various genres. She'd never managed to take in the whole back catalog because he was damned prolific. When the hard rock sound and pure vocal of dark romantic fusion hit her she wondered why he hadn't done more of it. She put the volume up high and watched Williams's face.

Maybe it was the music's implicit charm or maybe lack of sleep was getting to her or maybe it was the grief starting to kick in but as she sat there a growing pressure seemed to come creeping up behind her. It felt slow and sticky, thick as treacle but without any sweetness. A chill flitted across her neck. Zal's multitracked voice flickered in her brain; ten tormented souls shifting their melodies in and out of resonant harmony. She eased her shoulders but the feeling remained.

IZfa ?

I just got the creeps, she said to Tath in response, but his enquiry wasn't a hundred percent question.

She switched her Al attention to the music, to herself, sure that somehow the effect was a creation of feeling that didn't mean anything more than her own reaction to the music.

Ilk.

She ignored him superficially, but she could feel every nuance of his meaning. He could feel the unpleasant sensation too and he didn't think it was the music, well, not entirely. He would say that nothing was coincidental, like Zal. He'd say she was a creator of her own reality and if she needed a song to help her figure something out then she'd play it, whether conscious of that choice or not. And then things would fall into and out of place in her awareness and she'd see what she had to see. Because that's how magic worked, even in its most weak form here in Otopia. You were your own magus.

She'd always said, "Bullshit."

Behind her, the sticky, slow thing was growing. She wanted to look back, even though she knew there was nothing there but the wall. She actually had to fight the impulse, simultaneously telling herself it was a lot of superstitious crap and also that to turn and look would signal weakness. You never looked back. If you were going to turn, you turned and fought, and if you were going to run, you ran. Well she wasn't going to run, not from things that her human mind told her were merely figments of her imagination. And if they were devils or simply the unformed traces of evil energies drawing near, then she wasn't going to run either. Got enough of those inside already, she thought and briefly missed the imp.

The music track changed but her sense of a growing presence didn't alter.

Hell, she thought, seeing the correlation between the music and her awareness. Zal, you freak. You tune people up. A faint smile touched her mouth and made her face relax.

By the pricking of my thumbs ... The words floated into her mind, not prompted by Tath nor the Al. For an instant she thought it was the thing behind her that had spoken, mocking her.

What is it? Her question to the elf was automatic. She trusted him to know.

Jrimaf ene Jy, he said. J'f it~rout material form or mind. ft is a Cinr-of
elemental, araCa ~iniof ghost.

As with all these kinds of answers Lila found it hard to take. She'd grown up in a world of straight material, no magic, no worlds except the one she lived in with its everyday horrors. Other people had said stuff about feeling or seeing other places and beings but she'd never been sucked into that. Her father said it was a lot of hocus meant to lull gullible people into following superstitious ways so they could be controlled. It was part of the primitive mind that should be left behind. Her mother said it was something to leave alone and to get on with other things that mattered like schoolwork, though now she realised that within the family her mother had been the one to cross the street for black cats and throw salt over her shoulder when she thought nobody would notice. A pang of loss and loneliness touched her and she felt the darkness behind her grow suddenly closer.

Zal's voice had become the chant of tormented monks in midnight cathedrals. His song was full of the deep, minor scale disturbances that signalled imminent doom like the soundtrack to a horror movie, and he was singing made-up words, but she got the impression that the powerful sound was the last thing that opposed the darkness rather than something that called it in.

6ar recognises itt-seJ~f Tath said. ~fyou were not caa6fe ofevilyou zvou i
not Meow what it was. At amore y his best sow 5s, 6ut at feast they are honest.

Lila felt herself criticised but for once it didn't hurt. She looked on Williams's face and saw the tiny movements of dreaming sleep move there. And then, with the shift of a faint breeze that Lila neither felt nor saw with her eyes, the expressions became frowns, hesitations, doubts, suspicion.

Without thinking she leaned forward and snapped her fingers in front of the woman, "Wake up!"

"Whuh ... Lila?" Dr. Williams sat up slowly from her position on the couch and rubbed her face. "Oh, I was having such a strange ... bad dream. Thank you. What time is it?"

"Time I was going," Lila said, putting her music away.

"But you just got here."

"I'm going into Faery to take care of the moths," Lila stood up and waited patiently for Williams to get to her feet and stretch. "You had a call on Line Five, emergency. It's my fault."

"Really?" Williams gave her a sharp glance, midyawn. "What have you done now?"

"I reprioritised your research schedule," Lila said. She waited as the other woman went back around to her desk displays and got up to date, listened to her side of the phone conversation ...

"Thank you. No. There's no need to take further action, I will deal with it myself. Yes. Yes, I understand."

Williams turned her old face to Lila as she cut the call. "That was ill advised. Higher authorities will be notified now."

"You could hide it," Lila said.

"And if I get found out I'll be in prison without a job and you'll be the top of the rogue agent list. I believe the term they like to use in the lab is Terminate. What a charmless bunch they always were." She sighed and raked her hands through her white hair. "You have to realise that my power to protect you is very limited. Your behaviour recently has stretched beyond my ability to mitigate the damage."

"You mean Zal."

"I mean marrying demons, in Demonia. You must realize this was a political act of major consequence, Lila." She looked at Lila closely. "And you bring these demons here and we are all expected to accept your judgement as a feature of our security, when there's nothing about you to suggest your judgement is anything but whimsical. For all anyone here knows you were coerced into it. We know almost nothing about demons, really. Nor the damned elves come to that. And here you are, a further unknown quantity ... understand that the only reason you are alive and still here doing this job is because we are keeping you close to watch you and because you have been our best inroad into those realms. So far." She shook her head grimly. "I wish I could say otherwise and that it was care that made us continue but really-do you understand your situation?"