“What just happened?” Lila asked, of herself as much as Zal. She kicked her leg over the front of the bike and sat down in a familiar gesture that mirrored Zal's mount-up action over the back. They sat down at the same moment and the engine vibrated briefly into its warm-up sequence until there was no sound left but a feathery whisper that was the opposite of the noise Lila thought bikes should make. Internally she edited that part of the world's soundtrack and replaced it with a properly throaty snarl. On the plus side, it meant they could actually talk to each other at low speeds without having to scream.
Zal just shook his head. “If you have to ask…”
“All I need,” Lila said, backing them up with dainty pushes of her toes into the rough gravel. She was grateful Zal was so light. In spite of the fact that she felt the girl was in control of everything that had just happened, she found that she didn't mind. That in itself rang warning bells, but they fell on ears that had become strangely deaf. She suspected magic, and then the suspicion ran out of her mind and into the same place where unwanted appointments and obligations usually drained away. No matter how she tried she couldn't grip the notion.
“You protest too much,” Zal said mildly, next to her ear, another short form. “Don't you feel better?”
“Maybe.” She let the bike drift forward and put her feet on the pegs, feeling the minidress start to ripple in the wind. She did feel better. And that was odd too.
“Blood,” Zal said. “Stone.”
“Fiddlededee,” Lila replied. She wasn't like him, taking happiness where it could be found as if it were pennies on the street. But now that she thought of it, that wasn't a good trait. She did what she always did in moments of self-doubt and accelerated.
You could do a ton on these little backwoods roads, leaning over, a split inch from losing your knees, sliding out on the corners towards the drop-offs into the dark woods with the slow drift of a surfer on the face of a massive wave. It was fun, when the numbers about survival went uncertain and the red flashed and the elf was sufficiently exhilarated so that he didn't speak, just squeezed her tight and laughed. She felt like she was flying, like she was free. It was how they were meant to be.
Unfortunately a ton brought the slowed-up, crunched-down flatness of normality back that much faster. There was a limit to the number of speeding tickets she could avoid and not appear to be taking the piss, so she was forced to slow down as they reached the suburban expressway and began the long wind south to Solomon's Folly on the other side of the city. The bike ought to fly, she was convinced of it. Something she had to work on. For now though it was weaving through the lanes and finding the best, cleanest, most beautiful path through the traffic that had to satisfy her will.
“Cyborg thing?” she said as they slid, fishlike, between cars on the avenue at the heart of the fashion district—a place she'd never set foot to pavement. “Harmless?”
“Yeah,” Zal said, ignoring all the attention he was attracting from the promenading Pretty People who adorned the streets and the drifting two-storey-high show cars. They didn't know who he was, but he still made a sight in the human world. There was a noticeable lack of genuine fey and hundreds of human wannabes. Lila counted.
Among the ranks of the more ordinary mortals, demons walked in perfect guises. She knew them only because of the way they stared at her, fixated. They knew already about Teazle, she thought. They knew she was deposed, and Zal too. If they hadn't been together, she would have expected an attack. Perhaps her reputation as a killer would be enough to stop a bloodbath on the streets. She'd have to hope so.
“Do you think I look harmless to them?” she spoke Demonic, so that Zal would know what she meant.
Her own outfit was getting noted. Not for any good reasons. She was gratified to find she couldn't care less. A flashboy weaving on a floatboard, camera welded to his face, shifted close, taking pictures. She cut her face out of them all even as they arrived on his hard drive and felt a slight unease at her own virtuosity. There'd been a time when even she hadn't had the connection speed and ability to hack like that. Maybe technology had improved. Maybe she had, when she wasn't looking.
“I don't think,” he said. “That's the road to hell.”
“We're already on that,” Lila said, seeing the lights change, the cars and floats piling up into stacks on all sides, grateful passengers ogling and preening as they stopped to check each other out at the halfway point of the promenade.
“It's all twaddle,” Zal said, referring to the road and its sights with only a trace of envy. “But it impresses people.”
“Got that right.” Lila was forced to slow even more. She squeezed them between a limousine transporting several hot tubs filled with bathing-suited models and a long, low-deck car featuring various celebrities surrounded by posing dancers. There were a few real fey among those, looking as vainly glamorous as ever, although carefully toned so as not to draw too much attention from their paying hosts.
She passed and they were nearly clear when a small, fishlike sports car with an open top and an outrageously impractical spoiler cut in front of her with centimetres to spare as it moved to a more prestigious lane. A few kilometres per hour over fifty and the spoiler's downforce would probably glue the chassis to the road. At these speeds, however, it was merely architectural. Its glassine panels ejected a mist of softly scented water vapour, and into this projected what she assumed from the renaissance painting style to be the tastefully arty end of holoporn. The sight was so sudden and arresting that she almost crashed. As it was, she missed by fractions of a millimetre, taking the outside, her blood boiling. They drew alongside each other at the red light.
Lila's swear words were cut off as well by the passenger, who dangled her hand out of the car, showing off diamonds. She shrieked like a hysteric as Lila opened her mouth and then the driver's voice, rough from too many late nights, said, “Hey, isn't that an elf?”
Zal turned to the driver. “I'm not an elf. There are no elves in Otopia.”
“You look familiar,” the man said as the light changed. He kept up even as Lila began to accelerate past another limo and its one-car carnival. “Are you one of those fey that can be other things, or a Makeover? Yeah, I know, you're a Makeover, sure, one of those retro ones that looks like that rock guy, what was his name? You know…” He turned to his companion, who was sulkily examining the car in front—a large tank filled with mermen and mermaids and enough tropical fish for a minor reef. “Whatsisname?”
Lila eased off the speed, curiosity getting the better of her.
The passenger turned her lovely head with its perfect skin. She had diamond-enhanced eyes—every gem twinkling in the iris, bent flashes of light to the tips of her long elegant eyebrows where they stuck out in an unreal sweep of multicoloured fibreoptic feathers. “Get a mempack, cupcake. Zal. Zal of The No Shows. They were like, regal.” She inspected Zal thoroughly, with a professional impersonality, used to assessing every tiny angle and relation of a body's parts and calculating its net beauty in dollars per minute. “Super-good copy too. Who's your surgeon, honey?”
“There's a copy of me?” Zal asked, incredulous for a second.
“Seriously,” said the woman, although she drawled it out so that it sounded more like see-ree-uss-lee. “Still rare though. I only ever saw one other. Nice choice. Great value. Tell me, were you tall to start with or was it a whole body stretch? Those are so goddamn painful.” She shifted her legs—bare except for a fine silvery net—and unconsciously pressed them together.
“I was just like this to start with,” Zal assured her. Lila heard his tone change and pushed through the lines, taking them across the junction on the cusp of a red light and pushing forward to saner streets.
“Hey, call me! I can get work for you!” the woman screeched. “Or blip me that doctor's name!”
Lila pretended she didn't hear the protests and surprise that followed them as the woman discovered Zal was not connected to the Otopia Tree public internet and didn't show up on any registry. She routed the messages people were trying to send him into a junkyard address that would shortly return the kind of spamblurts that would take a day to purge. As she did so, she felt him lean close again. It occurred to her that her reaction was needless and territorial. She was actually threatened by those vapid, pointless people. She accelerated.
“There's a copy of me,” he said proudly.
“At least she knew who you were.” Lila wasn't sure if he were pleased or appalled; she thought both.
“Her memory pack knew. It probably even knows who Michael Jackson was.”
“Who?” she looked it up quickly, turning them away from the rows of opening restaurants and clubs, the glossy frontages of the hotelinos stretching all the way crosstown, and smoothed them up the ramp to the expressway and the glorious illusion of freedom in the fast lane.
“Ha ha. You know I was thinking about making a comeback. Maybe.”
“Hasn't the world moved on some?” She had no idea about the state of the music industry, she only knew the population statistics for the undead, the Hunter's children, and the groups who had risen up to hate or champion them. She knew about crime, struggle, and two-faced, lying elf scum that she was so angry with she could have burned them to toast. This whole subject change put her off balance. Her snippiness made her even more annoyed.
There was a copy of Zal. Who? What for?
“Lila,” he said. “What rattled you?”
“Nothing.” They rose onto the elevated sections that overshot the city's oldest quarter and tiled roofs flickered past, beneath the wheels. But she didn't want to lie to him. They'd been far enough apart already. “Everything.” She searched around in the uncomfortable feeling. It was like she was grubbing around a trash sack in the dark, trying to tell what was in there. “Everything changed. I want something to stay where it is.”
“Me?” He was gentle, enquiring. It didn't justify the outburst that suddenly ripped free of her.
“Do you know that since I met you there hasn't been a day I haven't been fighting to save you from—whatever? I mean, I got that job, a temporary assignment, and then it's just one damn thing after another. When is it going to end? And you want to get out there again? With those—morons? Did you know there are people who specialise in killing outworlders to the tune of eight or twelve a week in this city alone? The morgue is filled to bursting with corpses awaiting repatriation. And you want to get up in lights and shout out that you're here again? When a dozen conspiracy sites even name you as a primary cause of the Hunter's Reign because you vanish and, hey presto, he appears and ruins the whole human world for them in one little year. And what, after fifty years of trouble, could possibly top that? I'll tell you what. The returning dead. And you. Returning. Dead or not dead. Who cares?” Only the fact that she was able to run a counter-vibration stopped the fact that she was shaking from disrupting the bike's effortless float. “Oh, what the hell, I don't know what I'm talking about. Do what you like.”
After that, to top everything, she felt ashamed of herself. Rather than cause any more damage, she shut her mouth firmly and kept her gaze on the road, marking the miles, checking the route, watching the map rotate and move their position closer and closer to that bloody awful house. Zal didn't say anything in response, but he didn't hug her any less. After they had crossed the river and most of the tributaries between the city and the coastal parks he said, “It's not that I don't feel afraid of things. But if I give in, then I lose, they win, and I get to die in the other way, the worse way. A demon can't be otherwise.”
“It isn't the demon,” she said, sorry and resigned. “It's just you. And me. Don't quit, don't give up, don't give in, don't give a shit. Die on your feet and take 'em all with you if they don't like it. I guess I thought that after all that there'd be an end to it. We'd go home and there'd be this peace. It'd be over.”
“The fat lady would sing songs from the shows.”
“Yeah, and then we'd go crazy with boredom and chew our own legs off.”
They had reached the turn. Silently they drifted into the deep shadows of the lane where the overhanging trees blotted out most of the sky. The brief lift of spirits Lila had felt a moment before vanished as she looked into the overgrown woodlands. An air of neglect and forgetting that had been there previously had matured into sullen hostility and a deep stillness she didn't remember. The last time she'd been on this road was in Malachi's car, and they'd burnt rubber to escape the incomprehensible, malevolent intentions of the elemental creatures that had filled the woodland. She looked now for the stag, for signs of a huge body made of mud and branches, but there was no sign of any kind of life, even the wrong kind. Only the bike tires whispered and hummed on the cracked asphalt, spitting gravel.
“Stop,” Zal said. He was whispering but she heard him. As she pulled the brake levers she saw a film of darkness cover her hands—Zal's andalune body, spreading out. He was including her to enhance her pitiful aetheric senses. They slowed and came to a halt. She put her feet down and waited, wishing the damn bike had a sound again, so that it could at least feel alive and that they were not suddenly abandoned.
“What?” she prompted, hoping this stop would be short.
She didn't like to think about how spooked the place made her. Compared to human normal she was almost invulnerable, but here she felt very vulnerable, out of her depth. She looked up at the sky for reassurance, but between the heavy foliage the little chinks of blue and white were coated with a brownish green taint. Much as she attempted to formulate a proof of the phenomenon in physical terms, she failed. The forest was cutting down the light, increasing the shadows under its branches. Now that she looked more closely she saw that what plants remained on the ground were dying or dead. The only place they flourished was beside the road where there was still a channel of sunlight. There was a profound sensation of being utterly adrift from civilisation, even though the expressway wasn't even a mile distant, and the city itself just beyond. They could have been in the wilderness. Also, her signalling systems were having major connection problems reaching outside links and she knew for certain there was a support mast on the hill behind them relaying traffic at maximum width for the southern half of the city. Part of it was due to Zal—whereas he used to be dampened by metals, aetherically neutered, now he had the power to seriously dampen their effects in return—but mostly, she knew, it was the damn woods.
Zal leaned back away from her and turned, looking all around them. “That's so strange,” he said, quietly, his words swallowed instantly by the swamp of silence. They sounded deadened even as they came out of his mouth. “When I was here before I felt the earth element, though it always had this tinge of something unusual about it. I didn't really care at the time. Now that's much stronger, and the secondary elements are here in force: wood, a lot of wood, and that's tainted too, with the same thing.”
“I don't see the ghosts.” She scanned on maximum detection levels, all frequencies. Ghosts could sometimes register on extreme electromagnetic spectra and occasionally traces of their passing could be perceived as absence of information, gaps in the signals. But unless you were almost inside one or happened to catch it against a background of some strong radiation, you'd be lucky to notice a thing.
“They weren't ordinary ghosts,” he said. “This isn't an ordinary wood, not even an ordinary energy sink. I kinda knew it was weird when I could go out and find ways into Zoomenon. The gap between the worlds was so thin in places, you could nearly step across without meaning to. But just between Zoo and here. Not to anywhere else.” He hesitated, sniffing. “It's gathering. Did something happen here in Otopia or old Earth?”
Lila filed “gathering” away under “ask later” although she thought she'd guessed what he meant already—the site had formed enough focus by the natural processes of being a sink to move from passive collection to active—and flipped through the historical records. Accessing the city databases was difficult. “I'm getting a lot of signal failure,” she admitted finally. “And the long-term data on this site is in the slow archives. It could take hours to pull it all out.” She sent a message to Bentley, asking for the data to be readied, not confident it would get through.
“Okay.” He moved back into riding position. “Let's roll.”
She eased the throttle and was almost surprised when they moved into a quick glide. With every turn their passage began to feel more and more like an unwelcome intrusion. Boulders that had not been there previously had moved close to the corners of the road, blocking sightlines. Trees near the edges leaned out precipitously, their largest branches stretching towards each other across the gaps. In places the canopy cut out nearly all light and this effect increased as they neared the lowest point of the hollow where the house lay in wait. Lila could hardly believe it was only weeks since she had been there with Malachi. Then it had been spooky and unpleasant. Now it was as though another hundred years had gone by. Once she would never have believed in the literal truth of such an observation.
She pinged the south-city transmitter and noted, with dismay, that there was a significant delay on the line. The reply was late, weak, and decayed, as if it were passing across light-years and around gravity wells, not just a few miles. She requested a time check. There was a ten-minute discrepancy to her internal clock.
“Time's accelerated in here,” she said, to herself as much as to Zal, and then they came to the final curve and she hit the brakes. They slid to a halt on the rough surface. Before them the vast, agglutinated mass of the house slumped in blackened ruin.
Spars of old timbers jutted from it at all angles. Fitful smokes wreathed the air, oozing from crevices all over the crumpled wreckage and rising up towards the open sky only to be shredded by minute gusts of a wind that moved erratically, unpredictably. Lila suspected air elementals and then saw their angular, weightless shapes form and vanish in the darker gouts as they played with the rising billows.
Now she noticed heat, faint at this distance, but certain, radiating onto her skin. And she saw the fire. It was hard not to see it. It was everywhere, blazing in sheeted infernos, jetting sideways from the mouths of the ground-floor windows as if fuelled by pressured gas. But it was not there. Transparent, nebulous, it stormed unceasingly over the dead house whilst the tiny smokes rose through it unheeding; the ghost of fire.
“What the hell is that?”
She felt Zal get off the bike and release her waist. At the same time a sudden slithering pressure ran over her, making her hiss with horror before she realised it was the dress—forgotten Tatterdemalion—changing shape.
From the flimsy straps of the sundress a torrent of heavy cotton jacquard and linen went tumbling to the ground. It swathed her arms and draped her to the floor in panels of perfectly pressed white fabric. Beneath them cream and gold robes came pouring in a flood. They were so heavy she felt herself adjusting to take the weight. Peaks of stiff, stitched cloth constructed themselves into a mantle with curious pagoda-like edging over each shoulder and drew in a close-fitted high collar to the base of her jaw. Undersleeves tautened, oversleeves billowed and edged themselves with silver and gold. Stitching ran like water into the signs and sigils of magical texts Lila had never read and never would understand. She only identified them courtesy of Sarasilien's vast database. The marks predated his knowledge.
There was sudden pressure on her forehead and around her cheeks and nose. She found herself wearing a headdress, with a mask and a veil and a kind of bandit facecloth that hung down in a point to her chest, where it was finished off with a silvered-charm tassel, heavy with miniaturised icons. From the inside the entire effect was stifling but she knew better than to argue with the thing. It must have its reasons, and for once they didn't entirely seem mocking, although she wasn't sure about that. She looked like High Priest meets Samurai inside a wedding cake. It wasn't what she'd have chosen, given a choice. There was no choice, however; there was only Tatters, a faery so ancient that even old faeries had forgotten her.
Through the winsome muslin of the veil and the mesh-covered eyes of the mask underneath, it was hard to see much of anything that Lila had seen two seconds ago. In its place what she saw made her wish she hadn't come at all.
She got off the bike, with some difficulty, and faced the intense, confusing maelstrom in front of them with blank incomprehension. She felt that too soon this would turn into horror and distress, but for the time being she could settle for incomprehension. In the distance she could hear Zal say, “Nice frock, Tripitaka.” He was looking at the house, however, and she wondered if he saw what she was seeing with the faery's help.
The building was burning. The flames were furious, yellow and orange. They roared and snapped. The building was drowning. Streams of black light poured from its windows and doors, through the holes in its roofs. They twisted around, consuming smoke. The building was exploding. Every solid piece of it was bursting into motes of colour and light. All of this took place inside the eye of a tornado, focused on the house. Spinning walls of energy sucked the debris—flame, smoke, darkness, colour—towards themselves. They tore them apart and threw them together. The house was imploding. This destruction turned in on itself, as if invisible fists were punching dough down into smaller and smaller rounds. It collapsed, became transdimensional, inverted itself. From this pinprick at the heart of the storm, small as a hydrogen atom, something came leaking, came sneaking, came winding like a thread of smoke. So insubstantial. So almost nothing. It was less than visible to the naked eye, less than a dot. It was not light, not dark. The only reason she knew it was there was because something must be there and yet nothing was. Her AI mapped it and made up something so that there was something to see.
“I say again, what the hell is that?” Her voice bounced back at her, hot, damp, small, scratchy. She snatched up the veil and the mask and looked with her own eyes. The ghostly fire, the ruin was still there, smoking. No sign of any of the other things, just the air elementals gyring slowly, speeded, she now saw, if they touched the places where the tornado whirled. If you removed the complication of so much elemental confusion, of the layers and the temporal abnormalities and the rest, the thing she couldn't see directly looked a lot like a very, very small black hole.
Zal didn't reply for a long time. When she assumed he had nothing to say, he said, “Who was living here? Were there people in there?”
“Azevedo, a worldwalker, and Jones, the same.”
“Calliope Jones, Malachi's contact,” Zal said, filling in for himself. “Two strandlopers.”
“Azevedo was time-lapsed,” Lila said. Reluctantly she replaced the veil and mask and stared at the churning energy forms, trying and failing to deduce a cause.
“Before she came here, or after?”
“I don't know.” It had all happened in the gap of fifty. She trawled the fire-service records, patching the files as they came. Her suspicion was rewarded in part. There had been a real fire here. “There was no callout. The fire service came only after someone reported seeing smoke from the beach. Maybe it was empty when this happened.” She called Azevedo's number, yanking it from Malachi's database. It returned the disconnected tone.
“No, I don't think so.”
She didn't ask why. She couldn't see anything that looked remotely like a human survivor, although the ruin was extensive and they hadn't even begun a search. A few weeks ago she'd been here and it was overgrown, but the house was fine. In part because she wanted to know and in part to stop herself from having to look at the maelstrom anymore, or deal with it, she walked down the path away from the house towards the hillside where the terraced gardens and pool area dropped steadily to the beach.
The vegetation—it couldn't be called a garden anymore—had increased dramatically in the time between her visits. Years of growth bulged and draped on all sides. Kudzu and other vines were consuming the abandoned furniture on the poolside and creeping down into the empty pool itself. Green lines of algae followed a trickle of water where the fountains and bubbling stream used to play. The path was choked with grass, and on the poor ground where stone walls shored up the hillside to stop it falling into the sea, huge glades of knotweed spread their diamond leaves. It made her nervous. She pinged the tower using a tangled quantum signal to get around the local temporal eddies.
The tower said it was three in the afternoon. Six hours in about six minutes, she reckoned. One day every twenty-four minutes. Almost three per hour. Given the growth rates and placing the start time back to her last visit just for theory, that indicated that whatever the time-slip problem was, it was something that had started out slowly and accelerated, was possibly still accelerating. Maintaining a constant signal measure, she began to run. The heavy robes caught on everything. She heard the odd rip but didn't slow down. At least the skirts were more like a fighter's tunic at the bottom and left enough room to move. A few moments later she pushed free of the last knotweed stems and emerged onto the rock-strewn sand of the small cove that stretched to the limits of the Folly's land.
The ghost ship Matilda belonging to Jones was still there. What was left of it had been dragged up above the high-water mark and left to decay. As a structure that wasn't truly material, it ought to have evaporated by now, if ghost research was to be believed. But the frame and remaining platework, though rusted and warped, looked all too material to Lila. However, the liminal blue were-light of ghostly things that had clung to its every edge was no more.
“Ghost leaves a body,” she said to herself. She went closer. The metal was iron but it was very thin and broke up when she touched it, crumbling onto the sand where a large reddish stain of similar particles already marked the spot. “Blood of ships.” Aside from that the cove was unmarked—nobody had been here. She took some measurements and left hurriedly, running to start with and then adding power so that her strides almost flew her up the steps and over the pool terrace. The conflagration burned on, half real, half done with, yet to come.
“Zal?” she shouted, though the fire wasn't a loud one, barely a hiss. A sinking feeling accompanied the notion that once again they had become separated, once again…
“I'm here.”
She turned and saw him emerge from the thick foliage just behind her.
“I was checking the woods for elementals.”
“I thought you'd gone inside.” She couldn't conceal the relief in her voice.
“No,” he stared at the house with dislike. “I don't think I can go in there.”
“What about Friday?” She didn't relish the idea of trying to go any closer herself, but she wasn't convinced it was impossible.
“What about him? If he was in there he probably isn't anymore.” He stood and stared at the conflagration, resigned.
“I hate to leave without trying.” But the time slip preyed on her mind. The veil sucked against her mouth as she took a breath. “And what about Azevedo, and Jones?” But she didn't leap forward with enthusiasm. She walked, slowly, inching her way forward and felt a sharp increase in radioactivity as she neared the rubble where the door used to be. Aetheric charges became more powerful. She began to experience the strangest feeling of bursts of deadness in her limbs. At the same time the faery clothes became heavier, the linen a set of leaden plates, the delicate mask a helm. It cut down the trouble but it didn't cut it out. She reckoned she could last maybe two minutes inside the house. Maybe less. And then she didn't know what would happen but she was reasonably certain she wouldn't be coming out.
Reluctantly she backed away. “If they were in there, they'll have to stay. I don't like the look of this. Let's get the hell out of here.”
“We should put a ward around the perimeter of the property.” Zal retreated to the bike. “Stop any accidental trespass.”
She nodded her assent. “So, nothing in the forest?” The bike started on the fourth try. She had to supply extra charge. The battery had run flat.
“Au contraire,” Zal said, helping her to stuff the robes under both of them and out of the way of the wheels. “The forest is nothing but one big ecosystem of elemental power. The only difference is that it isn't manifesting higher forms anymore.”
“And in human-speak?”
“In human-speak, there aren't any more creatures. There's just wood, earth, water, metal, fire, and the rest of it, sitting around in a huge weatherlike arrangement, gathering power. Around conscious beings, the elements behave a bit like ghosts, and accrue features like living beings.”
“Meaning there are no minds around here?”
“Surely not for a long time.”
Implying that very shortly, there would be again.
She couldn't get out of there fast enough but she made herself stop at the turn onto the road. Long afternoon shadows streaked across the hardtop. “Does it stop here? At the property line?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “It's back from the road. And what's with the sun, were we asleep?”
She explained the temporal shift to him, or rather, she stated it, because an explanation was far from her capacity. All she could think about were the two women and Friday—who counted as a couple of hundred in his own right. Had they been in there? What had happened?
“It's bad, isn't it?” she said, feeling the press at her back, the urge to move forward inexorable as she let the brake levers slip.
“Pretty bad,” he said, only the emptiness of tone in his voice giving away the impact it had had on him. “But you still owe me dinner and dancing, and I think we should focus on that, while there still is dinner and dancing.”
“When in danger or in doubt, return to flip-mode and tune out,” Lila said, scornful and envious.
Zal didn't answer.
Her stomach burned. She appeased her need to do the right thing by transmitting everything to Bentley and having a fast, data-only conversation about who should know and what to do. By the time they were on the road the Agency was already mustering its response and she felt she had bought herself a window of redress. If Zal had known what she was doing—but she thought perhaps he did, because he was sharp and knew her—he would be angry, so to deflect that she said, “It might be hard getting a table dressed as Our Lady of the Violent Gateaux.”
He laughed and finally his hands found a way through the layers and rested on her waist. He gave her a squeeze that let her know he did indeed understand that she was already trying to put together a one-woman posse against the problems of the world and that she shouldn't, but since she had, he could only squeeze her warningly in an effort to retransmit his feelings on the subject. He spat a mouthful of veil out. “In this town? You must be kidding.”
Privately she prayed to the dress for mercy. She hated to be noticed, or at least, hated to be noticed for looking like a twinky bishop of the latter-day morons, but as was its habit the faery had assumed a position on the day's events and showed no sign of a change. Today was Apocalypse Lite and Lila was the catwalk model.