The conversation with Sarasilien took place at ordinary speeds. The one with Sandra Lane went by in less than a human blink, but that didn't mean it played any shorter. In real-time terms however it was over before the other one even began.

“I am not the same Sandra Lane whom you murdered,” said the rogue in their shared bubble of expanded time. She used abbreviated digital codes to communicate with Lila. They were the machine equivalent of text shortforms where a simple two- or three-digit string acted as the symbol for entire philosophies of thought or vast net works of memes. Any cyborg could have burst-broadcast the entire written language output of Otopia in less time than it takes to sigh by using them, which left plenty of room to add details about feelings and opinions that would usually be left to facial expressions and posture in an ordinary human conversation.

Sandra Lane added nothing, however. Her speech, save for her choice of words, was devoid of personality.

“Uh-huh,” Lila said, holding her aim.

All her attention was free to be fixed on the creature, since at their shared rate of time compression Sarasilien wasn't moving worth a damn. Lane's lack of affect was a gulf between them, one that Lila was sure was intentional. It acted as a political statement of their core difference. Lane was stating how much she identified with the machine by withholding all information about her emotions, supposing she still had them. Lila didn't understand how Lane could kid herself that this was a superior model or that her stand was anything other than a pose. But Lane had a lot more to add.

“We're holographic,” Lane said, spelling it out so slowly that Lila thought she might be genuinely afraid of getting a faceful of bullet. “Any part of us could be cut off and, given sufficient matter and energy, regrow our entire structure, complete with memories up to the point of excision. Additional memories from the primary identity could be added later, if required, or the alternate could be left to run an individual time-and-life-path of evolution. I am an alternate of Sandra Lane.”

Lila took a few picoseconds to assimilate this and draw her conclusions. She remembered the sight of Lane's beheaded corpse sliding into the flat world of the sword's surface, eaten all up. Where the sword had been in her hand the gun pointed bluntly. Lila felt the trigger in her mind, caressed it lovingly. “And when did your river of memories dry up?”

“When the primary was destroyed,” Lane replied. “At the moment of decapitation there was no loss of transmission, but immediately afterwards the signal failed.” True to her avowed machine principles, she betrayed only a kind of mild professional interest.

Lila didn't entirely buy it, however. One didn't use the word murder without reason. Lane Prime was the dead one then. And apparently the most important one. Why that should be so remained a mystery.

She matched the cool for cool, although her anger was rising. “Well, since you were there, so to speak, you know what happened. Nothing's changed since then. I still don't want to talk to you, but you insist on invading my space. The only reason you're not dead now is that you're standing next to him. I asked you then and I ask you one more time, for the last time, what do you want, Miss Lane?”

The plastic mouth moved. “I need to explain at some length.”

Lila gave a static fuzz burst, the equivalent of a shrug. “I gave you two seconds, we're still in the first half of number one. Knock yourself out.”

She was aware of the other cyborg's sensors and transmitters searching for inroads through which they could upload or read her systems—it was a constant storm of electromagnetic tentacles—but even if the Lane cyborg was a later, better model, it wasn't finding any openings. Lila guessed that was the only reason they were having a conversation at all. That and some residual, inconvenient trace of guilt on her part.

“The rogue and submissive population of cyborgs made in the human world are all now a half century in advance of you in terms of real-time ageing and process,” Lane began. “We have learned, as you have, that our existence is the result of a migration of the Akashic Record from the dimension of the nonmaterial into the material planes. Yet the Akashic Record itself is not an entity as we understand ourselves to be. It is pure data, the sum of all changes of state taking place over time since the beginning of this universe to the end. As such, it extends beyond the general assumption of the Akashic Record as being merely the sum of human knowledge and activities. It would more correctly be understood as the universe itself from a purely informational point of view.” She paused, waiting for Lila to signal comprehension.

Lila knew that to the aetheric races, the Akashic Record was the sum of their own histories and lore. It was encoded in an elemental form of raw aether that could be read, if you were a powerful mystic with a will and education strong enough to attempt a reading. So the stories went. She'd yet to find anyone who had experience of its actual existence, and none of them, she was sure, would accept a vision of it as mere data written in time—as the sum total of events in the universe. This is what Lane meant, however.

She was saying that Time was the book of record, every quantifiable instant a single page upon which a complete snapshot of everything in existence could be seen. In her version there was no need for aether. But that wasn't her problem. Lila guessed where this was going, because nobody would talk to a cyborg about the Record unless they were going to talk about how cyborg technologies came into existence. But Lila wanted to know exactly what Lane's motive was before she joined in, so she took an oblique angle for her reply, hoping to lure Lane out a bit more.

“Some say that's god you're talking about,” Lila said.

She was sure that Lane was as atheist as you got. The idea of god as everything that existed was also as secular an idea of god as you were likely to find: god as a collective noun. Lila would have wanted her gods distinct, carrying their own load, with everyone free to heed them or not as they liked, if there had been gods. But at least if she were god in the making then she wasn't expected to serve greater purposes than her own, so she didn't mind this version of deity. She wondered what Lane's take was.

“I do not say that,” Lane replied. “I say only that this perspective on the cosmos shows no need for an animistic sentience of any kind, creative or generated as an emergence of the continual process of entropy. But,” and she paused for several milliseconds, “our existence and the discovery in Otopian space of the original information that gave rise to our present state as hybrid beings that are living but able to actualise the Akasha itself: that does require an explanation that only a directed-sentient will seems to answer.”

“Intelligent design,” Lila said. But although the world and its works didn't to her mind require a designer, there was no doubt that her own and Lane's existence did. Lila knew that someone had to be implicated in the Otopian cyborg development and now here was Lane, all but confirming it. There were only two theories in Otopia about this and Lila subscribed to neither.

“Why Sandra, you've come to me with a crisis of faith.”

“No,” Lane said in the same, evenly measured tone. “I have come to you to request a truce between us for the duration of a different kind of crisis, one which exists in the material and aetheric planes; one that binds our origins to this moment and its workings. Though the discovery of our maker would be satisfying to me and, I assume, to you, it is a secondary consideration. Of primary importance is the discovery of a defence against what I can best describe in purely mathematical terms as a possibility storm. A Mightquake. Perhaps it is the final consequence of the Quantum Bomb. I am unable to say. However, I am certain of one thing. Neither your manufacture nor the creation of other hybrid agents and planewalkers is the product of chance, circumstance, and, as you might have it, Fortune—the play of all potentials falling into the one manifest world.”

She paused here, in what Lila interpreted as a grace moment in which she was meant to make a leap of implication and she did, and it toppled like this: Teazle says nothing is an accident; Lane says nothing is an accident; Malachi says there are unseen forces at work; making a cyborg means you have pulled knowledge directly from the Akashic Records; the only people capable of that are angels, dragons, or elf mages of the kind wiped out in recent history; Lane is standing next to him and that can't be an accident.

Lila felt all the pieces suddenly snap together with a sharp pain like a slap in the face. Sarasilien made us all.

It took her a long time to work through her shock, so long in fact that Sarasilien was drawing breath to speak by the time she released the comms protocol with Lane and turned to him with the aeon-slow deliberation of human speed. She pointed both her guns at the ceiling and let them become her hands again. For a machine day she stared into his fox-brown eyes and remembered all of his kind words, the feeling of his aura bathing her in analgesic, wholesome rays. And all the time he'd known. He'd done it. He made her. Not the Otopians. They were only his instruments.

“Don't,” she said, staring at him. “Just don't bother. I don't want to hear it. We've got a lot of talking to do, but it ain't gonna be now.”

Humiliation and shame layered with rage until she couldn't think at all, and didn't want to. More than anything she wanted to let rip with those guns and see his lying, scheming face blown into plasma—a condition from which she was pretty sure not even he would return. As she looked at him, at his solemn, fatherly elven expression, his air of grace and sadness, she felt a twinge of a feeling that was all new as it zigzagged through her, arc lightning, joining up her life, Zal's life, Teazle's life, Xaviendra's life. The jolt almost made her stagger as it shot from the present into the past. Yes, why else would he be here and now? Not to help or comfort her. To use her because some part of this scheme was coming to fruition.

It must be a big scheme. From abstract nothing he had made the machines.

He began to open his mouth again, but saw the look on her face and apparently thought better of it.

Lila didn't know if he was the only one involved or the prime mover; it didn't matter. She didn't trust herself to listen now. She wanted to get away from him before she had to kill him. The visions in her mind of a puppet master, pulling his invisible strings, was overpowering. Also, he was a liar, so there was no point even asking or trying to know what the extent of his influence was. No point in talking at all.

She met his reddish-amber eyes with a gaze of her own, blinkless and silver. “Don't call us, we'll call you,” she said, deliberately using the phrase so often doled out to unsuccessful actors at auditions. The touch of bravado almost made her wince, but the new electric connection joining up the dots inside her was pleased. It wanted to have any upper hand, to hurt in any way it could. She knew its name. It was hate.

Lila flicked her gaze to Lane. “Blip me all you know, or you'll be the late Sandra Lane one more time.”

She wasn't sure she could beat Lane in a straight fight, but she was sure she'd be glad to go down trying, and she let Lane know it in no uncertain terms, coding it direct so there could be no room for misinterpretation of her intent.

“Once was enough, thank you,” Lane said. “Besides, the sooner you know, the sooner you can agree to help.”

Lila assimilated the data, allowing none of it access to her conscious, which was more than fully occupied just getting her out of the room before she did something infinitely regrettable. She thought to herself that agreeing to help would mark one cold day in hell, and then, against all her instincts, she turned her back on both of them and walked out, leaving the doors wide open behind her.

The same, pointless recitation spun through her thoughts: leave without a word, come back when you feel like it, dump everything on me, start whining when things get tough, lie and lie and lie about everything, and then have the nerve, the sheer fucking nerve to come and do puppy-dog paternity angle. Did he even know that Xaviendra was here? Did he know she was alive? Did he care? Not likely.

But as the storm of loathing subsided, she kept the useful parts and placed them carefully into the cold locker of her brain.

One thing she did know was that whatever came out of their mouths was a lot of calculated crap whether it was true or not, so the less she heard it the better. To think she'd had moments of regret for slaughtering the “original” Sandra Lane in a moment of instinctual self-preservation! It was an obvious truth that nobody came into her office without wanting something big, and never did they come offering help or payment, recompense or anything like that; especially the ones who came in without using the doors.

Especially the ones who were dead.

Lila didn't buy a goddamned word of it, and she wanted nothing to do with them although that looked like it was going to be tough to ensure. No, the only way to avoid them would be to leave the Agency right now, detach from all wireless connections, and move out of Bay City, probably Otopia, possibly further.

She longed to do it, and knew she wouldn't. Everyone she knew (not so many) or cared about (fewer) were connected heavily to everything that the loathsome Sandra had said. Besides, she was tired of the pretence that one day she'd run free. There wasn't any freedom for people like her. Nor from them.

She returned to Malachi's yurt and closed her connections to the Agency and Worlddata networks. It occurred to her that Lane's attempt to hack her might have been just for show. Lila didn't think this was honour between machines, however, only that both of them were running systems that were too resilient and automatically on the offensive. As for hacking Lane—touching via the medium of shortwave radio was more than enough.

The yurt interior had been tidied. Of the ocean of empties there was no sign, and the icebox had its lid back in place; the faeries had been in and cleaned up. Zal was sitting on the rug where she had left him, his fingers moving on the pattern in a piano action. He was wearing his headphones and his eyes were closed.

Lila sat down beside him, without disturbing him. The headphones tracked his hands. She guessed from the movements that he was playing a replica of Mozart's piano—a favourite of his recently—though he hated using the virtual instruments as there was no feedback to his hands. After a moment he opened one eye and slid the 'phones off one ear.

“Trouble?”

“Yes, of course, what else?” she said. “Xaviendra's father's back. With a robot sidekick. And a conspiracy theory. At least, I think that's what it was.”

He nodded, as if this happened every day. “Oh yeah? What do they want?”

“I get the impression they want me to help them against something big and scary. They have a stick, which is that they're already in my offices pursuing me like a pair of mad aunts. And they have a carrot, which is maybe finding out that Sarasilien's sticky fingers were in all our pies. And he's maybe here to create one big pie. For some reason.”

“Carrot pie?” Zal wrinkled his nose, rabbitish. “I don't like the sound of that.”

Put like that, her analysis sounded crazy. She smiled. “I'm glad I learned to analyse so clearly from you, oh master. Anyway. Zal, do you know where Friday is?”

Now he took the headphones off entirely and looked at her with both eyes.

Friday was a golem. Zal had created him, accidentally, when he got stranded in Zoomenon, the dimension of the elements. Friday, rudimentary as he was, had saved Zal from disintegration by hauling him through Voidspace to the Fleet. But the reason Lila mentioned him now, the only reason he was important, was because his clay was embedded with the bones of the long dead. They had been murdered in the experiments when the Shadowkin had been created. They were the ones who didn't survive to become the elves' weapon against the terror Xavi named as “the sleeper within.” Besides the bones Friday held the remnants of their spirits and voices. Ignorant of this at first, Zal had brought him to Otopia and used him as a hatstand and general prop. Lila hadn't seen him since Zal's last concert when the golem had stood on the stage as part of the set. Since Friday couldn't be moved against his will, she'd assumed it was okay.

The only other thing Lila remembered about Friday was that the faeries had wanted to lose him. They said he was a chalice, a grail. They had been very interested in that. She would have asked Malachi now but he wasn't there.

Zal's dark aura bloomed suddenly and made the room seem brilliant. It drew shadows towards him, as if they were comforters. Lila had to work for a moment not to start and recoil. This was new to her, new to him; she even saw his own surprise and they shared a look in which each silently acknowledged their discomfort. They were strangers in their own skins these days.

Zal reached out and took her hand. She watched her fingers darken, her wrist submerge into the blue-black tinge halfway to the elbow. She couldn't feel it, only the gentle pressure of his fingers and thumb as he stroked her knuckles. “I left him behind.” She knew that he meant he had left Friday in the past, on the day they'd gone to Faeryland and thought they'd be back in under a week. Fifty years ago.

“Yeah, but where?” She slid close to him and they leaned on each other. She put her head on his shoulder and wriggled until she could rest half across him, ear flat to the top of his chest. He stroked her hair and she listened to the strange sigh of his heart.

“At the Folly,” he said. “In the basement.”

She shuddered slightly with the mention of the old house. “I don't get it. You didn't even live there then.”

“The landlord agreed to store a lot of my stuff. When I was touring, I'd leave it in the basement or in one of the lockups. The energy sink meant any magical things were pretty much secure. I sent Friday there. It's an earth energy well. He'd be right at home.”

There was a moment's silence as she noticed his defensiveness but didn't pursue it, and he was relieved. “He's evidence in a genocide,” she said.

“Yes, one which has never gone to trial,” Zal said. “Nor will I should think. Is that why you want him?”

“Yes,” she said. “Apart from Xavi, Friday's all there is left. But it occurs to me that there might be a lot more to him than that. I want to talk to the people inside him.” She meant the spirits of the long-dead elves who had shared Xaviendra's fate as the subjects of unsuccessful experiments; theirs much less successful than hers.

“Most of them have gone, passed over,” Zal said but he was uncertain.

“I want to find out. Unless you know of living elves who are contemporaries of Sarasilien's? The thing is, I used to be convinced that Sarasilien was the one who had left their bones in Zoomenon as evidence; he was the good guy in the war I imagined. But here's Xavi, and it looks like he wasn't much good at all. Do you think he could have had a hand in what happened to you?”

“No,” Zal said. “I'm not sure he had much of a hand in what happened to you either.” He held up a hand as she started to interrupt. “Not that he couldn't have been involved. Just that it violates every principle of the world that I hold to for anyone to succeed in having so much control.”

Lila thought it over. “That's just your theory though.”

“Yes,” he said. “And if you prove otherwise, I'll be very upset.” He kissed the top of her head. “Are you going to prove otherwise?”

“For my own satisfaction I'll prove something,” she said.

Zal looked at the sand clock on Malachi's vast and expensive banker's desk. “Four a.m., still early. Let's go dancing.”

Lila rubbed her cheek against his own. “Let's dance right here.”

“Oh well,” he said, pretending to be disappointed. “I suppose so, if we must.”

Later, as they lay naked under the strew of their clothes she said, “Did you have a beer vision?”

“Not really,” he said.

He didn't mention the odd sensation he had experienced while she was gone. He felt that he'd nodded off as he was playing the piano, just for an instant, and as he'd faded out there was something else, most definitely not asleep, which was looking out at the room through his eyes. It had felt very real, but he had known it was the beer. Like it said on the Dark bottles: any hallucinations, visionary experiences, or out-of-body journeys resulting from consumption of our ale will be accompanied by our illusory guarantee—it ain't real, so don't fix it!

Now that he thought about it, that was less comforting than it seemed.

Lila fell asleep for a moment, her head back on his chest, then she gave a small start. “Teazle. What happens now? He's alone. They'll kill him.”

Zal put his arms around her. “Doubt it.”

“It felt better the other way, when we were married.” She went back to sleep. He could feel the drop of her energy into stillness like a fall. It almost pulled him with it, but he didn't want to sleep. He stayed awake until well after dawn thinking about the dragons he'd met.

First there was the water dragon who had eaten Arie, and now spat her up again without apparently digesting any of her more repulsive aspects. When he was her prisoner it had talked to him, after a fashion, but he'd thought it only remarked on his strange dual nature. Now he wondered if it had only been waiting for her.

The other one was the green dragon that had been a prisoner of the three sisters and their Mirror. He knew next to nothing about that one either even though he'd spent half a century living with its aspect—a dwarf who spent all his time looking after the littlest sister, doing her cooking and cleaning while Zal had ferried her yarns from one end of the world to the other. Zal had no idea at the time that Mr. V, who smoked a pipe and snored in an armchair for most of every day, was a dragon. If it hadn't been for a competitive spirit between the three sisters that had allowed him to free Mr. V from his prison, he would never have known. He had no idea why they had kept Mr. V in the Mirror at the end-beginning of the world, but probably there was a good reason. He'd never even found out what V stood for, though he'd tried to guess. A true name was as good as a soul-bond for the ancient creatures, so maybe it was just as well he couldn't divine it. Even so, he wished he knew it now.