Keeping It Real (6 page)

Julia was getting married ... oh my god . . .

Lila's eyes flashed open. She saw an image of her own memorial, shiny and fresh, black marble

spangled with rain at the summit of the cemetery on Windover Hill.
Here lies Lila Amanda Black . . .

There wasn't
really such a thing, not yet. It was her imagination. Her family believed her missing in

action. Her room at home was still there. They kept it in case she returned, knowing she would if she

could. Agreeing to a contract of silence with Incon had seemed the easy and obvious thing for Lila when

she was lying in bed at the hospital, under heavy sedation
.
Later, during her long, painful rehabilitation at

the clinic, it had seemed less certain. When she realised the extent of her injuries and the consequences of

her Mending, she'd made up this image of the memorial as a way of coping with what she came to see as

her death. She expected, somehow, to be the same Lila, in spite of the fact that she was now a

one-woman walking army, but when she looked inside she didn't find her old self there. Even the pictures

had a strange look to them, like they were things she'd been handed from someone else's life. She could

never walk back into her old world, but there was consolation of a kind in thinking that it hadn't changed

a bit. Except that Julia was getting married and Lila would not
be there.

Julia had been her best
friend all through school and college and they'd kept
in touch through their later

lives. They had planned their weddings and divorce settlements in meticulous, ridiculous detail a thousand

times. All very silly, but now her heart squeezed tightly.

She heard Zal turn the shower on. One of the guards checked in with her to report everything quiet.

Technically she was now permitted to sleep.

Lila took her suit off. When she went to hang it up she found three more the same waiting in plastic

wrappers on their hangers. 'Cute,' she said aloud and left them there. She took a fast
shower and

examined herself carefully where her skin was grafted to the biometallic struc-tures that
had saved her.

Some of them were red and angry where she'd sat too long or where cloth had rubbed them, but nothing

too bad, nothing worth reporting. Her internal medical systems informed her she needed rest. All

adaptations were proceeding at expected pace. Half her body and brain might be metal and synthetics

but that
didn't
change basic requirements.

Lila was used to the routines of self-checking, tending and managing herself. She was fast
and efficient

with the machines stored in her smaller case; a toolkit for self-maintenance. The last one was a power

unit diagnostic that tested her reactor block. It was running sweetly. The fist-sized tokamak would outlast

her, if nobody blew it up.

She brushed her teeth and then, so that
she could sleep properly, checked and cleaned the medical

equipment
that
she carried inside her thigh armour on both sides. Then the guns. Everything moved

silently and smoothly. All her systems greenlighted.

She dressed herself with the measured, gentle movements of Zen ritual in black, close-fitting fatigues

and put
on her upper body armour with its third gun and other supplies, brushed out
her wet
hair and lay

down on top of the hand-painted satin coverlet. Her boots felt clunky and uncomfortable on the soft

surface, but that couldn't be helped
.

She heard Zal get out of the shower - that took ages, she thought; check for elfy fastidiousness - and

then there was silence.

Julia is getting married, Lila said to herself, curling up. She wanted sleep because she longed to escape,

but at the same time, she didn't want to sleep. Sleep meant dreams
.
She lay quietly
.
Her eyes were sore

and tired, so she closed them to let them rest.

Two hours later she heard a tiny, odd noise. She woke hearing it and knowing it was trouble from a

distance, alert and fully able, though

only a split
second before she had been deeply asleep. The jolt
of her heart was the only symptom of her

sudden transition and even that was soon gone into the smooth, cold world of action
.
She was only a

beginner in fighter terms, but her AI was a master and it seamlessly moved her from sleeping to waking

before sliding back to lie in her nerves like an obedient pet. She felt a frisson of anxiety - it
was a

rebellious pet
- but
the AI absorbed that
too.

Lila slid off the bed and crossed to the door, put
her ear to it
and turned up all her sensors
.
The slight

sounds that had disturbed her were very small, very stealthy and far distant. Her Al-self showed her a

plotted location - right
at
the back wall of the building.

There was no reason for Lila to sneak, but she moved quickly and reasonably quietly out of her room

and through the ocean room, where nightlights in recesses close to the floor showed her that there was

nobody there. The sounds had stopped. Perhaps their maker had heard her? But
then they began again

and Lila pinpointed them at
the other end of the house, where the second storey backed into the hillside

and it would be easy to hop onto the flat roofs of the kitchens once the guards had been passed.

She accessed the house controls, using her Doublesafe code, and turned off all interior lights. Instantly

she was plunged into darkness, but she could see relatively well on infra-red, well enough that she could

better a human attacker, and match a magical one. In response to her action another silence ensued,

broken only by the sounds of various sleepers and the natural noises of the night.

Lila checked in with the perimeter guard, but they'd seen nothing. The one at
the back of the house

was a witch, so she shouldn't have missed a trick out
there, even in the thickest
forest
cover. There were

a couple of things that might get past her: an elf, or a faery of one or other kind. Lila hoped it wasn't

either of those as she ran the length of the house, passing through rooms in a blur. She passed the guest

bedrooms which were semi-permanently occupied by the band, but
only DJ Boom had come back so

far. Her door was locked and there were quiet
snores brushing up against it.

Lila reached an end wall with an arched window that
overlooked some of the lower roofs and was on

eye level with the forest
canopy some hundred metres away. Above the black line of trees the stars

shone brightly, and the heat rising in vapours from the kitchen vents was almost blinding. Nevertheless

she was just able to see the agile,

small form of a black-clad humanoid figure jump the gap between the kitchen stores and the main

building. There was a soft thump as it landed on a window ledge - so soft it could have been a night bird

alighting. Lila strained to see. It went right on up the wall, climbing swiftly
.
By the quality and speed of

movement, its relative quiet
and the fact that it was hard to see - and therefore contained most of its body

heat because of an aura - Lila guessed it was an elf
.

As she turned to monitor its progress, she heard the front door open and voices talking about the lights

- a guard explaining it
was only temporary, nothing to worry about. Poppy had come back. The sudden

inrush of noise deafened Lila to the sounds on the roof. She did the only thing she could do, and doubled

back towards Zal's room as fast
as she could.

DJ Boom must have heard her. As she reached that
room the door opened. Boom's sleepy shape

turned into the corridor, facing the wrong way. Lila was going too fast. She had to leap through the gap

between Boom's head and the ceiling in order to miss her - a power-assisted dive that cracked the

floorboards when she took off. Lila landed on her hands, flipped once to regain her feet
and was gone

even as she heard Boom calling out
fearfully and then the slam of her door.

In spite of her speed she was not the first person to reach the ocean room. Poppy already stood there

in front of the huge glass wall opening one of the sliding doors which led out onto the broad balcony
.
She

was so occupied with the care of this task that she didn't notice Lila's arrival
.

Lila ducked behind one of the settees as she saw that
Poppy was expecting someone
.
That someone

dropped off the roof and came in quickly. There was a flash of metal that Lila saw as deep blue against

the careless red glare from a chink in the intruder's aetherial self. Poppy showed brilliantly, like a yellow

ghost.

'Are you sure about this?' Lila heard Poppy whisper.

The other put their finger up to the faery's mouth and pressed it there for a moment. To Lila's surprise

Poppy yawned prodigiously and backed away, but there was no time to think on it.

The new figure darted forward suddenly, towards Zal's door, so focused on its purpose that it
barely

flinched aside when Lila stuck her leg out
and tripped it
in mid-flight. There was a gasp and whoever it

was went rolling. Lila jumped, caught a handful of cloth and felt it rip out of her hand as the other sprang

up and turned. It
whipped out
the

knife it
had been carrying and faced her for a second, then looked back and forth in clear indecision. Lila

took her chance at that moment and dived forward at full stretch
.
She landed on top, the attacker's knife

hand trapped between both of hers
.
She dug her reinforced fingers into the narrow wrist
she was holding

with maximum strength, and was rewarded by a gasp of pain
.
The knife fell.

Then Lila felt
Poppy's hands on her shoulders, rather fumbling. The faery's proximity sent
a slow

shudder through her circuits and Lila felt like she was moving through treacle. The body underneath hers

made a great, fishlike effort
and wriggled free. It
caught up the knife again. Lila threw Poppy off

backwards onto one of the sofas and heard her land there with a protesting cry, but
already the

black-robed elf was halfway back to the balcony.

Lila freed a line in the palm of her right hand and made a desperate cast. The coils of thin braid,

weighted at their flight end, wrapped around the figure's waist in a whip action. Lila yanked on half

power and the figure went down on the carpet and began struggling to slash the cord. Before Poppy had

a chance to recover herself, Lila spooled back the line and jumped down across the small body to pin it

flat
with the simple fact of her weight again. The elf stopped trying to cut
the line and instead made a

desperate slash at
Lila's face. Lila leaned back easily only to find Poppy's hands over her eyes suddenly.

The faery tried to pull her sideways, off her prisoner, but only succeeded in hurting herself as Lila was far

too strong for her. As Lila brushed Poppy's hands away the elf made a lunge and she felt
a sharp, fiery

pain score across her side. Lila trapped the offending arm on its retreat, catching it between her own arm

and her damaged ribs and punched the elf hard in the guts. They doubled up with a near-silent
aahh of

agony and released the knife a second time. Then Poppy hit
Lila's head with a plant
pot.

Lila found herself sitting in a scatter of soil and broken crockery, holding the knife. The door to the

balcony stood wide and she could hear the sea. There was no sign of her attacker.

'Oh cat's piss,' she heard Poppy say despairingly from the settee. 'I just
knew
you'd ruin it'

Lila got up, went across and pulled the faery up by one arm. Poppy slowed her down again, but now it

hardly mattered since Poppy had clearly quit
any ideas of further violence.' What
the hell was that?' Lila

hissed at
her.

"That
is
you, Lila?' Poppy said
.
She sounded terrified.

Lila coded the house to put
the lights back on. 'Of course it's me! Who were you expecting? The Lone

Ranger?'

'It's not
what
it
looks like,' Poppy sniffed, frowning and crying at
the same time. She didn't
want
to meet
Lila's gaze and added without any conviction, 'Let me go. You're hurting me.'

Lila tightened her hold and brandished the knife in her other hand. 'What's this for? And who was

that?'

'Oww! Please!' She plucked at
Lila's fingers. 'It
was nothing really. It wasn't going to hurt anybody.

It's a magical weapon, you see? It was charmed to put him to sleep so that he couldn't go on the tour and

they wouldn't
be able to get him. It wouldn't have really hurt him. Now you've spoiled everything.'

Lila let her go. 'I've never heard anything so stupid.'

Poppy rubbed her arm and looked around but nobody had yet come running. 'Please,' she said quietly,