Keeping It Real (8 page)

small tear in the vest
where the

knife tip had punctured it. The knife itself was on her mahogany side table. She was examining it when

there was a knock at the adjoining door.

'Lila?' It
was Zal.

She waited until she was fully dressed in her fatigues and then opened it.

He was still standing there, dry and fully clothed. He didn't
seem angry or upset. He handed her an

envelope and she recognised the faery vellum with a sinking feeling.

'Another letter?'

'They're not big on email in the magical nations,' Zal said, watching her take the sheet
of paper out
and

open it.

It was in the highly cursive Elvish script but she could read it. She could not read the magical

symbolism that wavered in the air above it, crackling with static electricity that
made the connectors in

her fingers tingle. 'Thanks,' she said, betraying none of her dismay at its vitriol. 'I'm going to send it in for

a complete analysis.'

'You needn't bother,' he said. 'It's from the Jayon Daga, the Elvish Secret Service. The usual. Go back

where you came from or die.
With the added charm of their special seal.'

He wasn't
mentioning the chain of curses that circled the edge of the page, nor the hatred directed at

him through the charms which he must
have felt as soon as he touched it. Lila was grateful she only had to

see the words.

'The seal means this is the last warning,' Lila said with dismay. She knew about Daga seals. She'd

hoped never to see one again. 'I need to talk to Jolene and,' she hesitated - yes, he'd said Agent Black,

no, she wasn't ready to admit everything, 'and to my bosses. I don't think we can carry on.'

'We are carrying on,' Zal said with complete confidence. He reached for the letter but
Lila twitched it

away from him.

'It's not worth dying for,' Lila said, stating what she thought was the obvious
.

'Compared with what?' Zal stepped back suddenly, and beckoned her in
.
She hesitated, still smarting

from the events earlier, but
swallowed her feelings and obeyed
.
He made a vague gesture that she should

take a seat
anywhere. She didn't want to risk making prolonged eye contact because she knew that

would only tend to make her agree with what
-
ever he said, so she walked around instead and made a

minute search

of the entire room, wondering at
what
had prompted him to make this concession
.

She found out
nothing, only that
he was tidy and that
everything was elven-made including his regular

clothing and stage clothes
.
On the wall opposite the bed was a huge larger-than-lifesize original painting

of a dramatically sprawled female demon. It
was by Laetitia, the faery artist. About
the demon other

figures seemed to hover in forms that might be of any of the Severed Realms, but
they could have been

steam rising from the demon's crimson skin. The erotic charge was a bit
of a shock amid the leaf tones

and neutrals of the rest
of the place. Lila tried not to stare, although it was very beautiful
.
She sat down

on the edge of the bed and waited.

Zal leaned against the table beneath the painting and said, 'I'll spare you the speech about not fitting in.

I'm sure you can imagine what it's like to be different to everyone else, never meeting their expectations.

I'll be surprised if they're the only ones out to stop me. But they're not going to. You can help me, or you

can leave.'

'It's not that simple
.
There was only a vague threat until today. If they stick to their usual ways there are

now a pair of elvish assassins out to get you who think they have a free shot
any time after midnight

tonight.' She made herself face him. 'I want
to report and check back with my office team and then go

back to the studio and check something there. I don't
think there's anything here to worry about
until the

clock strikes twelve, not
from them at least. JD are very rule-oriented. I need to get some more gear too.

In the circumstances, I think you should leave here by this afternoon and stay in separate locations from

the rest
of the band unless you're on stage. I'll be back for you in two hours. Until then, do nothing, go

nowhere.'

He nodded, 'And if I say no?'

"Then I quit.'

'I don't
think that's up to you now, is it?'

'It's up to me,' Lila said. "There are other agents who'll do it'

Zal smiled when she made herself break with his gaze. 'Well, I want
the girl secret agent who looks like

a million dollars. No, it's probably several billion dollars, isn't it?'

'More than you can afford,' she retorted.

He gave her a glance that left her in no doubt he was mentally undressing her. 'So, if the Jayon Daga

are coming, and I only have sixteen hours left to live, how do you feel about charity?'

'Ask me in fifteen hours and fifty-eight
minutes,' Lila said sweetly and walked out, cursing herself this

time because she could not
or would not
- she wasn't
sure which - stop playing the cursed stupid Game.

Lila rode up to the studio building, passed it
and parked a couple of blocks away
.
She walked back and

introduced herself to the reception-ist, explaining that
Zal had left something behind and she'd come to

collect
it
.
The man let her in without a comment, and gave her a guest badge to let her through the inside

doors unescorted
.
It never ceased to surprise her how easy it was to get most places
.
She would have

sacked him on the spot.

Yesterday the actual studio where the musicians worked had been so full of people and instruments

she'd had no chance to do a proper scrub search for spying devices or other things. Now it was briefly

empty during a lunchbreak and she let herself in and allowed power to run through her specialised

sensors. She could clearly see and hear the bug upstairs, its radio signals and the electromagnetic

frequencies of its small operations converging to a focused point. There were no other electronics out
of

place. Temporarily satisfied, because there were no plans to come back here soon, and so no reason to

be particularly worried, Lila went back to her bike and called for assistance from the office. She could

not dislodge the nagging feeling that
she had missed something important
and she wasn't about to let it go

- the reception-ist's attitude had been the cap on a slowly filling bottle of discontent -but if there was

something it must be magical, not physical, and she couldn't detect it. As she waited for one of her

colleagues she walked the local streets, looking for any devices that might be responding to the bug.

Her hopes were soon fulfilled. An old sedan car, slumped across the kerb one block west of the

studio, was sending a brief ping response to let
the listening device know it
was around. Lila walked past

it, as though on her way somewhere else, and glanced in casually. It was

unoccupied. The receiver was inside the stereo unit. She checked the street and stepped across to the

nearest
door, sliding her fingers around the handle
.
The car unlocked itself as the frequency picker in her

hand acquired the right signal and she let herself in and sat down in the soggy leather driver's seat
.

The stereo was of the very old style that
were all one with the dash, but
closer inspection revealed that

it contained a recording unit which even now had a Berrytone installed and running. The Berry's hard

disk was three quarters full and Lila reckoned it could hold at least seventy two hours' worth of noise.

That being so, and given the age of the bug itself, Lila was prepared to bet
that the Berries must be

collected regularly and the car moved around. It was the kind of gear you used in a lengthy surveillance;

human, rather old, rather reliable.

She quickly searched under the seats, and in the glovebox, but the car was reasonably professionally

maintained - there was nothing to find. As a last
resort, and in the absence of any signals that
might

indicate booby traps, she decided to pop the trunk. She got
out and walked around to the back of the

car. Kids crossed the end of the street, but none came towards her. Explanations for the recordings -

anything from tax to blackmail to bootlegs - were running through her mind as she opened the lock and

lifted the lid, and so she was completely taken by surprise when a small black shape leaped out
at
her. It

shot
out
with such desperate velocity that
it
struck her shoulder a hard blow. She heard claws rip her suit

and snag in the armoured jerkin she wore as she whirled to see a cat
land easily on the road behind her.

The beast
turned to hiss at her, and even though it
was noon she could see the faint smokiness of

working magic around it. In the blink of an eye it became more like a weasel than a cat, and then

suddenly more like a rat, changing shapes as it
struggled with its own surprise and the fact that
it
found

itself in daylight
.
Lila made a grab for it, but it was too fast. In a second it had broken up into a watery

slither of shadows and flowed down through the rim of a drain into the comforting blackness of the

sewers.

Back on the underside of the trunk lid Lila could see faint
bloody markings starting to vanish as their

spell was completed
.
Whoever had left the charm would soon be receiving information as to who had

disturbed their gear. Small, dark magics like this one were common in the criminal world. Faeries had no

respect
for law or order and humans bought them from the fey.

Lila's scalp smarted and she realised with annoyance that the creature had managed to snag a few of

her hairs. She had to bite on her frustration that her help hadn't appeared sooner so she could have

caught and traced the charm, but she had no ability with aetherial creations of any kind, being simply

human and simply machine. All she could do was watch the telltales flicker and die in the daylight, shut

the lid and leave the car to continue doing its work.

Back at her bike she met the faery special agent she'd requested. Malachi was a Rowan spirit,

belonging to the Anthracite nation, his skin and hair as blackly sparkling as pure coal, his eyes a

surprising ash-berry red, which meant
he was often mistaken for a demon by humans; something which

always delighted him. He was well used to running around after his human colleagues and seemed

pleased to see her out
of the confines of the office and the medical suites where she'd spent most of the

last year. Lila had always found him trustworthy and kind. They chatted for a few minutes, catching up

before she briefed him.

'Just a feeling? Sure you haven't got the . . .' and he shivered his hand back and forth to indicate a feel

for magic.

'I'm sure. Call it
intuition.'

'If there's nothing to see I'll have to put it down to the usual.'

'Cheese, chocolate, pickles.' Lila smiled, feeling better with the old joke. 'Haven't had any in days.'

Malachi got in and out of the studio on a faked engineer's ticket
and the diversion of his fey charm and

returned in less than twenty minutes. His face was serious and he was almost
trotting, his shiny shoes

clipping the pavement like a tap dancer's as he reached her.

'Your gut
must
have faery sympathies, or something else,' he said. 'There is something there, trouble is,

I can't say what.' His reflective skin and hair seemed to run with sunlight as he gave her a helpless shrug.

'It's very deep and very old and ... I got this feeling off it that -this sounds crazy - that it was there before

the Bomb. Way before the studio.'

Lila stiffened. Before the Quantum Bomb there had been, allegedly, a single world with a single history

.
After the Bomb it
had been divided into the Severed Realms. Each of the new realms lay alongside the

first
world, which had been Earth and was now called Otopia. Each realm had an immediate history as

long as or longer than the Earth's. And experience and archaeological study had taught Lila that the

Bomb had

peppered the time of all realms with fragments of things; the past, the future, objects, persons and above

all, magic or I-space energy
.
Before the Bomb that kind of thing had existed nowhere but in human

imagination
.
But
Before the Bomb was a matter of extreme debate and political difficulty. She could feel

her old diplomatic hackles rise at
the thought of discovering an artefact that would cast doubt on the