Zal tried composing songs in his head. Music used to come to him so easily, but where it had been inside him there was now a soft, woolly deadness like the kind of snowfall that mutes every sound. He could only remember melodies he had recently learned, and other people's songs that he had heard. The notes didn't run together for him. He remembered that they used to, but not what the experience felt like. There had been music in his head, and now there wasn't.

He was sad, but not as sad as he might have been because of that. Worse than the dead music was a sudden lack of purpose. Even as a plaything of the faeries he had had the purpose of survival, the focus on an end to his imprisonment. Before that had been music. Before that his political passions, a zest for living, the world itself calling with its million wonders. Now he groped around for any of them, fumbling across the strangely flat zones of his inner world.

Traces here and there, like the crumbs left over from a feast, were all he found. Their taste was almost undetectable and instantly gone. Jack the Giantkiller had purged him of almost everything he had ever done, and the Three Sisters had sifted what was left and taken some of that. He remembered the middle sister saying it was for his own good. He wished he could remember what she'd taken, but he had no idea at all. He had been robbed, but what of? Fifty years, she said, you'll never manage it if you remember everything. But that hadn't prompted her to restore it when his time was up.

Only Lila was sharp and clear. He felt a continuity with her. From the first second he laid eyes on her, he hadn't forgotten that. It had been the strangest and most unexpected thing he had ever encountered in his long life; a young human woman, barely a fifth his age, mostly made of metal, powered by a nuclear reactor, staring at him with disapproval from the top of her regulation Agency suit and him at the height of his fame, a demigod of the media, adored by millions and hated by a few hundred key players within interglobal politics. He elf, she robot, love at first sight.

Hardly plain sailing, however. Lila didn't take well to love. She preferred antagonism. Zal hadn't minded. Antagonism meant she cared and he could live with that. It also made his demon side happy. He knew these things, and he remembered the red splash in her hair and her strange, cyberpunk mirror eyes, which he always thought of as blue, in spite of the fact he could only see his own eyes reflected in them; brown and earthen and full of self-mockery.

Now Lila Black snored softly against him, the strange alloy of her body barely heavier than an ordinary human being, but as far from that as you could possibly be and still qualify for the term. Then he felt a strange sensation on his chest and realised his skin was wet, and that she was crying. The tears were silent and her breathing hadn't changed, so she was trying to hide it.

“What is it?” he said.

Her voice was very small but controlled when she answered. “I'm not sure, I feel…like I want someone to look after me. Isn't that stupid? I think about going home, and I don't want to. But I do want to. I long to go. I can't go.”

He knew then that she was speaking of her sister. Max had died in Lila's absence, but returned and lived again in their family home. She was a Returner. Maybe the first. Certainly not the last. “You don't have to see her.”

Lila took a deep breath, “She wants to see me. She keeps calling to ask when I'm coming over. She wants to make me chicken pot pie. She says she's still got some of Mom and Dad's old stuff and I should check to see if I want anything.”

By the end of the final sentence her tone had started to rise and fade. She snatched another breath through her teeth and forced herself into control.

“In my lifetime they died months ago. She died weeks ago. I haven't stopped once to think. There hasn't been time. There hasn't been a funeral, not for me. And now we're at chicken pot pie and Mom's poker books and Dad's crystal collection and what to do about the leaking roof. I'm not there yet. I don't think I'm even out of the front door on the day I last left home, 'cause that never ended like it was supposed to. I'm way behind. Or like I sidestepped into another world and I don't want to go back to the old one. Can't. Don't want to.

“Cause it feels like if I don't go then all that still hasn't happened yet. And I wish it was her. I'd love to see her. I want to see her so badly. But it isn't her, Zal, is it? How could it be? And if it isn't her, then what do I do? Do I kill her? Should I? What is she?” She took another breath. “I just don't think I can face it.”

Zal stroked her shoulder and then let his hand press down firmly. He didn't say anything because there wasn't any need. She was talking to herself; he was only the catalyst.

She snuggled closer to him, wrapping her legs around his. “They haven't decided if killing a Returner is a crime or not, you know. There are squads of faith killers out to scrub the world clean of the undead, vigilantes hunting the half fey, and hackers trying to grab control of cyborgs. My inbox is bursting with them. Not to mention the Hunter's children still out there who are as close to were-creatures as I've ever heard of. I get letters from people complaining that their fortune-tellers are holding out on them, and I get complaints inside the Agency from people wanting to know if we should make any more cyborgs or not, because there're always candidates coming up, interesting candidates, ones who are half human or not human at all. And I know that if I say no, don't make any more of us, you idiots, then that's as good as saying let them die instead.”

Zal stared at the yurt roof. He could see very well in the near darkness, almost better than in the light. It reminded him of being in his father's hut, long ago. His father could move easily in pitch blackness, just by sensing the energy patterns of objects. He'd never mastered that himself, and had had the bruises to prove it. He just hadn't been shadow enough.

Lila wiped her face on his chest and absently rubbed his skin dry with the sleeve of his shirt where she found it beside them. “I don't know what to do with this job. And I don't know what I'd do without it either.”

“We should get another place,” he said. “Somewhere that you like.” He felt that she was slightly taken aback.

“What, you mean not sleep at the office?”

He heard the smile in her voice. “Yes. It probably won't vanish if you're not here all the time.”

“I don't believe it.”

He nodded, honest-faced. “Temple Greer goes home at weekends.”

She snorted. “That's just a story to frighten children.”

Zal smiled. “We could take a drive up the coast and maybe pick up Friday and a condo on the way.”

She hesitated. “I'm afraid,” she said and then added with difficulty, “anything that feels like roots makes me frightened.” The last words were hesitant and they sounded like it was a thought she'd carried for a long time, but only just realised.

“Then we can just rent.”

“Can't afford it,” she said, but without much resistance.

“I can. I was a rock god once, and even dead rock gods make money. Besides, aren't you owed fifty years' back pay? That must come to a lot.”

She opened and closed her mouth once without speaking before she said, “That never occurred to me. Can we, really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Anywhere you like.”

She got up with a sudden burst of energy. “Let's go right now!”

“You have to get dressed first,” he said, grabbing for his clothes.

“I am dressed,” she said with only the faintest hint of discomfort and he saw she was right.

Her leather gauntlets and boots stood out sharply against her tanned skin and where there had been nothing a second before a silk bias-cut lilac minidress swirled its luxurious skirts around her thighs.

The faery, he realised. Lila had no clothes now, not like he did. She could be human or machine, leather or flesh, and all she wore was the faery, who had made everything else redundant. It gave him a shiver as he pulled his shirt over his head and flicked the long tails of his hair free of the collar, all the while watching the dress's apparently ordinary movement. Vague, half-realised runes wove themselves through the fey cloth like waves moving idly on an ocean, speaking of realities unseen. They didn't make sense to him, but he had never studied the written forms of energy very hard, only music, and much of what they were saying was lost on him.

Glancing at Lila's face, he was sure she wasn't even aware of the dress's conversation with itself. He wondered if she was so used to wearing it she'd forgotten it was a living fey. Maybe she was resigned to it. Was it a battle she had lost? He felt unable to ask outright. Something in the self-conscious way she wore it made him feel she wouldn't have told him the truth.

They left Malachi's room, closing the doorflap behind them. As dawn started to creep slowly along the line of the ocean, it found them on the coast highway, their knees skimming the tarmac as Lila's bike bent over into the curves of the hills. She took them out of the city archipelagos, across the small breakwaters and lagoons, beside the endless quarrelling streams that formed the shining net of the Bay proper and held its thousands of islets together like a shoal of fish. Slowly they climbed away from the water. The land grew firmer and taller as they topped the cliffs that looked out over the Pacific Reach towards the invisible volcanic island chain of the Jewelfires. If the wind was right, a streak of smoke marked their evolution, but this dawn was misty and they could only see a few tens of metres beyond the land.

On the rocks below them the tide was high and filled with the soft, luminous green of seagleam—the remnants of moth dust that had fallen into water and been taken up by algae. It painted the cliffs with a weak, spectral light of its own. Into Zal's head ran news reports of talking fish, of mermaids, of leviathan spotted from deep ocean trawlers, scaring crews into early retirements.

They were alone on the road. Lila pulled on the brakes and slid them towards the edge of the cliff, stopping a half a metre from disaster. Loose chippings scattered into the air, fell and fell. Dust settled around them. Zal put his foot down beside hers.

“Do you believe in that dragon stuff?” Lila said, staring out into the water and the cloud above it. From this viewpoint the effect of the dust in the sea was clearly visible. “I mean,” she said, “look at all that dust. Touching everything, changing everything, making the world magical. See it and believe it. I don't know why I find the dragon stuff so hard to believe. It doesn't make sense. Look at you, at me. You'd think I could believe anything now. But I don't.”

“You're always looking for a reason,” Zal said. He put his hand out gently onto her back, where the thin straps of the dress exposed the black leather of her, and caressed her. He felt muscle under his fingers and worked at the tension there. “You think there's another order behind everything you find, and that if you see what it is then you'll escape.”

“If there is I don't even care,” she said, looking out to sea. “I think that's awful. But I don't care.”

“Yeah, yeah, that's why we're having this conversation,” Zal said easily. He leaned forward and kissed her neck where the wind had blown her hair away from it. “There's no getting out of it, Lila. Not dead, and not alive. Doesn't matter who pulls the strings. Doesn't matter.”

She kicked down the bike's stand, levered it up easily, and settled it. Then she spun around on the saddle and kicked her leg up high over his head until she was sitting facing him. She rested her legs over his thighs and put her hands on his face gently. They were cold but gentle.

“I hunted down all the rogues,” she said. “Every last one. Lane knows it. She's not the only one who had a clone, but there aren't many and those that there are have gone silent.” Her lips were white, they were so bitten together as she paused.

He waited, knowing there was more, and put his hand up to brush the hard line out of her mouth with his thumb. Her steady lilac gaze, that faked human look, faded away to the hard mirror-shine of her true machine eyes in which he saw himself, the road, the cliffs, and the sky all bent and curved in perfect detail.

“I thought they would know something I didn't,” she said. Her leather hands flexed very slightly and he felt how easily she could have broken his neck. Her fingertips pressed his skull with precision and he knew that this is how she'd hacked their systems, straight through the head.

Zal kissed her nose.

Lila let her hands drop down into her lap. “Nothing,” she said. “They didn't know anything.” She looked down. “It's strange to have a battle fought in less than a second. Almost like nothing happened.”

Zal kissed her forehead.

“I didn't kill them,” she said quietly. “But I might as well have. They couldn't understand how I beat them. It was almost funny.” She gave a hollow laugh that died as soon as it came out of her mouth. “The elementals. Reconfigured them. Just a few electrons is all it takes, in the right place at the right moment. They're the only reason Lane couldn't rip everything she wanted out of me in the first place. I realised that.”

She paused and took a deep breath. It shuddered and he knew she was trying not to cry. When she looked up at him, her face was set and angry with a refusal of pain. “Zal, do you think that if Max is back, or, if she's gone and something else lives in her place, outside her time, will they all be coming?”

He knew who she was talking about. Dar, who had healed her from her body's original rejection of the machine technology and fused her with the metal elementals in the first place. She had killed him in cold blood, to save Zal's life. “I don't know.”

Tears filled her eyes. They lensed the mirrors and the world reflected there shimmered, wavered, fell apart. “I have to tell him I'm sorry.”

Zal leaned his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes. He took her hands in his. “I'm sure there's no need. He would have known.”

“Would he? I judged him for doing the same thing. And Zal, what if they all come back?” She swallowed and gritted her teeth briefly, sniffing as tears ran down her nose and dripped off onto their joined hands. “It feels all wrong to me. I'm scared of it. I don't know what it means. It's wrong. They shouldn't be here. When I look at this part of the world in the Signal, it's like looking at a series of mistakes. I don't know how to explain it better than that. It doesn't add up. The numbers eventually all fall apart and where the potentials ought to drop out they just keep on shifting values. At the farthest edge there's chaos. Nothing remains. Nothing adds up anymore.”

Zal stroked her fingers with his thumbs. “We'll ride it out,” he said.

“You idiot,” she said, without rancour. “I tell you the world is ending and that's all you can say?”

Zal thought before he answered and said, “There's a book in one of the Elven libraries about dragons. I didn't read it myself.” He hesitated. “I only heard about it. It's the lore of the dragon. Very short. It says that dragons are emergent beings, formed out of the energy of living, conscious beings and gaining a separated existence of their own after they reach a critical level. They can arise in the wild, accidentally, if a culture has a common purpose or need, spoken or unspoken, or even many of those. They can manifest in dragon form.”

“Sounds like that theory of ghosts,” Lila said.

“Yes it does,” he said. “But these have enough directed intent to make a transition from energetic to material form, to have independent life and consciousness. They are astral, but also material. They are immanent but also evident. And once they have matter, a body, then they become subject to the law of Flesh and Blood.”

“All usual rules apply…” Lila said, echoing Xaviendra's recounting. “What's that?”

Zal did his best to translate what was an aetheric and esoteric theory into terms she would better understand. He interlaced his fingers with hers and, through her gloved exterior, felt the hard grip of her bones on his.

“Flesh and blood are living memory, but memory being refined, being changed, being forged anew every day, being tested. Flesh and blood are no longer potentials, like aetherial potentials, they are much more massive and have much greater inertia. Once you have a body, once there is a ‘you‘ then you can't be subject to the laws that brought you into being as an energetic form. You have your own life, your own personality, your own thoughts. You are alone. You are yourself. Dragons have awesome powers at cosmic scales, which they inherited from their genesis, as a kind of waking dream, but they keep them when they are bound to flesh, and that flesh and bone makes them like the rest of us.”

“Do they really exist like that?”

Zal thought of Mr. V, the dwarf, smoking his long pipe, his darned, stripey socks hanging over the ends of his toes. “Yes. They're alive like us.”

“And do you think they'd want to make us—you, me, Teazle? For what? Into what?”

“I don't know,” Zal said honestly, although it did occur to him as it must have to her that they were, in their own way, dragonish, the three of them together. “Look at what humans do for entertainment, though. Maybe that's what they do too.”

Lila nodded. She clasped and reclasped his fingers, still sniffing. She turned her head so that her whole forehead pressed flat to his as though she wished to push through the bone. “And what's the sleeper within? Is that something else again?”

“I knew you'd ask that,” Zal said. “I don't know, but I know who would. Ilya would know. His magic is from the tradition of which the sleeper was a part. He's bound to know.” He felt his face tighten as he spoke the next bit, knowing it for the truth. The venom in his own tone was no surprise to him.

“Arie wouldn't have wasted a good elf for each of the deadly sorceries; she was a conservationist. She'd have wasted one and made him learn all of the dark arts so she could keep the badness in one spot ready to be wiped clean when it had served out its regrettable usefulness. I'd bet against the Hoodoo that he knows.”

They shared a quick glance at the mention of the Hoodoo, though they said nothing. It wasn't something that could be spoken of directly. The glance alone spoke the volumes of their unease about the Hoodoo's absolute power, it's unknown nature.

Lila gave a half-smile, a small sniff of false cheer. “That's good, 'cause I was hoping he'd help me out with Project Death anyway.”

Zal grinned, his spirits lifting at her girlish manner. “Project Death?”

“To find out how and why all these dead people keep coming back.”

“Is that the name you gave it?”

“Had to have some name,” she said defensively.

“Mmn,” he smiled at her and pushed awkwardly at her until she lifted her face up and let him kiss her properly. He put his arms around her and slid her up his thighs until he could hold her fully against him. This put her higher than he was so that when she broke the kiss she was able to pull his head against her chest as she talked. He heard the words through the wall of her body, resonating in frequencies that almost made him swoon so that what she said in her fast-as-thought worrying came across like a kind of dream.

“Anyway, stop getting off the point. Aren't ghosts and dragons and all that other stuff the same somehow? I can't see what the difference is. Some intent causes a reaction in the fundamental energy goo of the Void or wherever it hangs out—Wait, no, aetherial energy and the kind of energy you mean when you talk about people vibrating with joy or whatever, are those things the same?”

Zal pushed his face into her neck, cheek on the leather of her collar, lips against her skin.

“If they're the same, why is there some load of it hanging out in the Void? Is that like energy spontaneously bursting into empty space? Is the Void the aetheric or astral equivalent of outer space? Is there such a thing as outer space or is that just a term meaning not-right-in-our-backyard-which-is-pretty-chock-full-of-matter?”

Zal kissed her, feeling the dull thud of her arteries below his tongue; ten-ton hammers.

“If there's an astral equivalent of the material and an energetic astral equivalent to…shit, no, that won't work because the energy of a person with intent and the energy released through fission surely isn't the same thing and that would make three energy things and only two types of plane. Is the personal energy even real in the same way that matter is real?”

Zal opened his mouth as wide as he could in a simulated vampire bite and pulled her hips hard into his own.

“Could we not say that it was a feature of the inner world and not the outer world or…no, that would mean there had to be some kind of method for it to affect both, which would be consciousness or mind or whatever, probably, right? But if it comes from the inner world of the individual, it vibrates somehow with the fundamentals of both aether and the baryonic material?”

Zal sucked gently on her neck. She tasted faintly of sugar, and violets. His hand gripped the back of the silky sundress in a threatening fist, warning it to back off. Her hands caressed his head, pulling him to her as she continued.

“Or is it all the same energy arising in different places by different means but mixing together naturally because of being the same thing? Is it the same, but manifesting differently across different spatiotemporal realities? Is the astral world purely internal or a nonbaryonic zone accessible by certain energy patterns from here? And now that Alfheim and Demonia and Faery all have some kind of definable spatiotemporal existence following relatively normal physical laws…mmmfmmmfmmfffffmmmm!”

Zal had put his hand over her mouth. “You've exceeded my short-term memory buffer,” he said gently but firmly. “I think the answer is probably yes. I don't see where you're going though. So, can you tell me?” He eased up a finger at a time.

Lila caught and kissed his hand as she spoke. “Human beings,” she said. “They must be aethero-active. Have to be. If all that's true. They're not the dullards everyone says. Yes, magic doesn't work here like it does in your world, but that doesn't mean nothing's going on. The Burgis Hypothesis says that we created you, your worlds, and all the other things, and the energy reaction of the bomb made you quasi-material. It didn't explode. It imploded. On us. Everything that isn't human was once just a figment of our imagination.”

She waited for his answer, looking at him with a pert expectancy that only made him laugh harder once he started.

“Zally!” she slapped his shoulder lightly, pouting. “It's not funny. It's real.”

He bounced her gently on his lap so that she could easily feel how hard he was through all their clothing. “I'm real. And so what?”

“What do you mean, so what?” Her pout had turned sultry although she still had a way to go before she was prepared to give up her outburst of intellectual defence.

Zal played around, trying to catch the zipper-pull of her biker jacket between his teeth as he spoke. “If it's true, does it matter? Does it change anything?”

She thought about it.

On the rocks below, the glowing algae sloshed like weak paint, gathering in the crannies until the stones looked as if they were cracking open to reveal green molten cores.

“If the humans believed it, then it might matter,” she said. “Look at how they treat us now. But if they thought we were all creatures they made, who weren't as real as they were, then they'd think they could do what they liked, that they were first, better. Is what I think.” She began to comb through his hair with her fingers in an absent way.

“That's what the elves would think,” he said, the zip-pull caught firmly between his front teeth. He began to nudge it downwards as he talked, the strange, zinging sensation of the metal and its odd taste covering his tongue, “Or I should say, what they think anyway. To them humans are an upstart race lacking in most interesting skills, living in an impoverished world they don't appreciate, like starving beggars in the middle of paradise. Undeserving savages.”

She gave up on the wild tangles in his hair and pulled it into three roughly equal parts, beginning to wrap it into a rough braid. “It doesn't matter anyway, does it, because everything has gone wild and become its own thing now, hasn't it?”

“The Law of Flesh and Blood,” Zal said, coming to the point where his neck couldn't go any further and the lilac dress was stretched taut, blocking the way anyway. “Once real, then free.”

“But freedom doesn't necessarily mean happy, or even able.”

He nosed his way between the sharp metal teeth of the jacket and kissed the warm body underneath. “Did you think it did?”

“Yes,” she said. She tied off the braid and let it fall against his back.

“Ah, Lila,” he said sadly and hugged her close, webbing them both in a sheen of darkness.

The sound of the water endlessly washing the shore surrounded them. The mist thickened, tinging at first rosy, then orange as the sun struggled to break through.

“I don't want to live by the sea,” she said suddenly. “Not this close.”

Zal bent low and kissed her over her heart. “Doesn't matter to me,” he said.

“I don't know how to go on,” she said, her hands tight on his shoulders. “I don't know what to do. Or why.”

He kissed his way back up to her neck and then went back for the zipper to pull it up again.

“Welcome to the club,” he said. “I find if you just keep breathing and deal with one minute at a time, that's usually enough.” He poked her in the ribs. “You're not breathing.”

She forced herself to exhale. “I don't actually have to breathe.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do. It's important. Only machines and the undead don't breathe, and look what happens to them.”

“What happens to them?”

“Nobody asks them to parties,” Zal said, lifting her up and helping her to turn back around on the saddle. He put his hands on her waist and saw the dress was looking at him with embroidered flower eyes. They were frowning, but they weren't mean. He stuck his tongue out at them and they unstitched themselves into ordinary pansies.

“Now are we going to look at some houses or not?”

She grabbed a portfolio of rentals off the local hub and displayed them on the upper back of her jacket so that he could see them.

As she pushed them off the stand and spun back onto the road, she wondered who was going to sign off real estate to her at six in the morning outside of town.