The drake they finally obtained was as promised, a large, ominous-looking creature with green fire burning behind the sealed skin of its eyesockets and a strange, mottled hide of cadaverous purple, which was lit from within as though by glowing globes rising to its surface and falling back. It touched down on the Manse roof with barely a whisper of claws on the stone and immediately angled its ugly saurian head towards Zal.

“It speaks,” Zal said faintly, so that only Lila could hear. “This is the one they call Unloyal and it knows and keeps the name.”

Sikarza servants fussed around, fixing the drake's harnesses and rigging Zal's seat between the shoulder blades. An image appeared in the centre of Lila's mind, a thought without words of someone who would not throw their lot in with anybody, for any price. It was the drake's introduction, she realised. She knew how to speak that way in return; it was like forming composite patterns for another cyborg.

She asked it what it was doing as the servant of a drake trader and its reply was an inscrutable smooth blank. At the same time, she saw Zal frowning and guessed he was talking to it as well. How the signal passed from one to another she couldn't detect. Her wondering about this became a question, and the answers returned as fast as deflected shots—Unloyal had been getting fatter at the trader's expense while he waited for an interesting opportunity to appear and was content for the demon to act as his agent. The thought sharing was transmitted because Unloyal was a telepath, not because she was.

And what was telepathy? Lila wanted to know a scientific explanation.

Two-way aetheric radio, Unloyal returned. In her case the drake was powering both sides of the operation, since she had no aetheric body of note. The transmission medium was the aether itself, clearly, and the packet rate was unimpeded by physical constraints and virtually instantaneous and as wide as the world.

Lila told it she would stick with her clone and the old quantum transmission she understood, and the drake glanced at Zal's harness, made an equalisation, and said they were the same thing.

She objected—surely aether and matter were not the same? Yes, it said, they were the same, but they were not simultaneously expanded in the most material types of universe. Then its interest wandered and she felt it turning to Zal, leaving her sitting in her sun lounger in the dark, looking at the gaudy pulsing lights of the dirigibles as her mind turned this new factlet over and over like prayer beads. She had begun to have an inkling of who might play games with Titans.

Meanwhile Teazle returned, appearing like a white genie out of nowhere. He assumed his natural form and prowled across the roof to the two of them.

“This is where we part ways again,” he said. “There is news of strange events in the Uathtan Wilderness and a sudden silence from the City-States of Zrae, which lie on its borders. Rumours fly of a demon horde from the wastes, and in the Elusive Sanctum mages pack their bags and flee. They have sealed all portals into and out of Bathshebat.”

Lila frowned. “Same thing as Alfheim?”

“I am sure,” Teazle said with great, pleased confidence. He was sparkling with anticipation. She could see she only warranted a part of his attention. “Zal, can you ride?”

Zal got up and reeled slightly though he kept his feet. With a steady motion he eased the joints in his neck and shook out his arms. “I'll survive it.” He bent and picked up a light elvish pack that had been brought and laid at the side of his chair, went through it quickly, and then slung it over his shoulder. “Don't forget if they come to sack the place that you need to save the instruments from the Opera House. Put them away in one of your vaults or something. You'll never be able to replace them.”

Teazle's bright gaze flicked briefly over Zal. “I intend to defend the city,” he said, almost hurt. “It might be the last bastion of demon culture.”

Zal nodded. “If I don't hear from you, I won't come back here.”

“I'll find you,” Lila said to Teazle.

“The elf is right,” Teazle replied. “You should consider Demonia closed from now on. Much as we may feast and party, it is no time to let loose our wild brothers on foreign soils. All entry points shall be sealed as my first duty. I will do any finding that must be done.”

“You're really enjoying this, aren't you?” She got up herself and finally conceded that the beery happiness must go. Within moments it was reconfigured to sugar and water in her system.

“Why not?” Teazle said. “It is interesting.” With that he sprang up into the air on his own, white wings. Beside the looming bulk of the drake he was small, a lithe figure of beaming brilliance that flicked itself quickly up and over the observatory tower and then stooped with the speed of a falling dagger and was lost to sight somewhere in the night streets below.

“Right,” Zal said, blinking as if with a mighty mental effort. “One final thing. It seems to me there's a slight chance of possession by unstoppable phantoms circling about. I didn't want to burst his bubble, but as from now on, all things being equal, we have no way of verifying anybody's identity. I seem to remember something from my days as a spy that in this kind of situation we can't trust one another at all. If you, for instance, got taken over by infernal evil able to copy your every move, how would I know this…” he touched the silver harness, “…was still okay?”

“I won't be in contact with it as long as you're in Alfheim,” she said. “I did think of running it as a simultaneum, but one consciousness is really more than enough to deal with. If you need to contact me, you can instruct a part of it to return to Otopia. It will find a way. Of course, then I won't be able to believe a word of what it has to say, but…you know…” She smiled and put her hands on the front of his shoulders lightly.

“Thought that counts,” he smiled back, and his long, pointed ears fanned out their ragged edges in the way that always made her laugh. He leaned down and kissed her. She stored the moment in full sensory maximum-width capture and smelled lime zest. He wobbled on his feet. “Typical for the bloody charm to work now,” he said and straightened up. “I'll see you soon.”

She watched him walk across the tiles to where the blotched, craggy form of Unloyal, who for some reason she couldn't stop thinking of as Unholy, waited in his own septic light.

Zal had the same easy stride and arrogant swagger he'd had when walking out onto a concert stage. If anything, he looked more convincing now and less like a set extra from a movie. His leap to the high saddle was an effortless bound of the elastic sort only elves could muster. He landed as though weightless and buckled the safety straps over his legs, ignoring the drake's sudden lurch as it got to its four feet and stretched itself out for a shake. He took hold of the saddle bow and then Unloyal turned to her.

Again she felt the sensation of a pause in conversation, but it said nothing. She did not attempt to conceal her conviction that if Unloyal did anything harmful or neglectful to Zal she would hunt it down. A faint amusement came to her that wasn't her own, and then with a swing of its head Unloyal crouched and burst up from the roof. A single flap of its wings sent all the tables and chairs and everything else loose scattering and tumbling across the tiles, servants falling down headlong to save themselves. Only Lila stood fast, her hand lifted to shield her eyes as she watched them take off into the humid murk of the demon night. She felt lonely as she followed their going until they were only a speck against the greater darkness out over the ocean. She tracked the burst of particles that showered their departure through the drake's own portal and then knew them to be as far away as the faint stars overhead.

Then Lila went back the way she had come, to the ruined gangster house and through the portal in the room with the broken window.

The Cedars apartment block was quiet as she came into it. She didn't know much about portal technology, but enough to know how to ruin one. Teazle had taught her. She found the locking crystals and smashed them, then watched the circular time-space distortion decay over a few seconds until its presence was only a piece of history visible to high-end forensics. There were better ways of disposing of the things, less dangerous ways with less risk of blowback, but she didn't care about the other end of the system, only that one more wormhole was shut.

She did the same to the Zoomenon garbage portal in the opposite room, noting that Roxa's blood was still sticky in places on the floor, and then walked back into the apartment proper. There was nobody about. The cushioned area with its two thrones was vacant, although incense still smouldered in a dish on the floor. She heard voices on the floor below. Something about their pitch, a feeling of anxiety, made her open a tentative spy channel into the Otopian networks.

Silence greeted her.

She closed the link and recrypted her operating frequencies, then crossed to the window, opened it, and stepped onto the sill. From there it was a quick leap up to the roof, which was high enough to give a reasonable view over the city and the bay.

From shoreline to hills every road was jammed with cars, every street full of people. Some rushed purposefully; others stood and gaped around them at the incomprehensibility of a world suddenly without its lifeblood of electronic chatter. She was glad she'd lived on the outside of it for so long, self-sufficient because she had the world of information in her head. There was a giddy unpleasant fretfulness to the movements she saw and heard everywhere, a panic not far away in spite of the fact that barkers were already out, moving through lines of stalled traffic to reassure everyone that this was a temporary and relatively unimportant setback. Fine, unless you wanted to buy, or sell, or travel, she thought, watching cars trying painfully to work their way across gridlocked junctions. Going by the activity, she figured the whole network was down, but she could feel local traces of electrochatter here and there, so individual machines were working and there was power.

Beneath her several gang-coloured cars were gathering, teams moving quickly, arming themselves. She knew a raid forming when she saw it and expected that a thousand other opportunists would be making ready to snatch and run while the systems failure inhibited the police response. Her anger at them was brief, useless. She could only stop them with death or violence close to it, and after them would be more and a billion other unstoppable things. She felt the Signal, its eternal hum of bee-busy knowledge, but whatever she did that hum never altered. It didn't approve or disapprove, it gave no sign that something was gained or lost, if she had won or if she was just another one of the features pushing the numbers of the dead up and up. There was no payback either way.

In the cracked concrete yard, the car doors were sliding shut. Bullets counted themselves into guns, voices swore, laughed, said obscene things with the emphasis of overconfident foolishness riding fear. So alive. So uncertain.

Everything waits to break through.

She ignited her jets and took to the air.

Temple Greer waited for her in the open courtyard—what he called his “ready room” at moments when he couldn't stand to be indoors. Malachi was with him outside the yurt's cream-coloured woollen dome. They were playing quoits. Greer was winning. Bentley sat to the side, a grey statue on the bench where the trees cast the most shade. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked demure, quiet, an android from some period film of social manners. Her face was tilted towards the sky.

As Lila arrived, Bentley turned towards her and half lifted her hand in a wave. Lila waved back, coming in to land on the browned grass, worn almost to its roots by so many feet. Malachi was slow to notice her, because he was hidden behind a clump of shrubbery. As she moved around it, she saw another reason. His graceful figure had broadened so his shoulders split the seam of his coat. His arms protruded far below his cuffs, and they were furry with clawed hands that handled the rope rings of the quoits with a degree of clumsiness. His head was more square, more flat from the back, and when he turned she saw that his face had lengthened. Halfway between a worg and a tiger, he was a hunched aberration in his tailored camel coat—the only clothing he had left. But it was still Malachi. The orange eyes and a way of moving as if the air around him was silk would have given it away.

Greer tossed his final quoit at the post and missed. “Goddamn it.”

She reached them. “They always said the old games were the best.”

Malachi blinked at her. “They?” It was barely distinguishable as words. It was a growl that had a shape like a word, and that's all.

“Chess, shove ha'penny, billiards, dominoes, all that stuff that was good before computers,” she said. “Quoits.”

Malachi held out two rings to her, speared on the bulky, gnarled shape of his index finger. She unhooked one and stepped up to the line as Greer moved aside for her. She looked at the stumpy stick that was the mark and turned the ring in her hand for a moment before tossing it with a flick of her wrist. It spun down and snagged the mark, coming to rest so that it lay centred over it. She stood aside to let Malachi have his last throw. He sighed and made a cast, opening his hand with difficulty. The ring bumped and rolled on its edge, turning away into the rough.

“Quiet around here,” she said as Greer went forward to collect the rings, shucking up his trousers to bend down and gather them all up. “When did all this happen?”

“Two hours ago,” Malachi rumbled. “All systems at first. Then some things came back on. No communication though.”

Greer came back, sorted out the rings marked with orange and the rings with green. “I guess it's the same everywhere.”

“Demonia's out,” she confirmed. “T stayed there. Zal's gone to Alfheim.”

“Well, it's not like we were a big alliance,” Greer said, handing the orange rings to Malachi again. “I mean, we're all cut off. So what? Most people here are over the moon about it.”

“Don't I get any?” Lila asked.

“No,” he said, edging her out of the way so that he could line up to throw again. “You're no fun at this.”

She moved back and stood shoulder to shoulder with Malachi. “Nice coat,” she said to him.

“You're playin' with fire, Black,” he snarled, literally curling his lip to show the size of his big yellow teeth. They were oddly whiter and sharper than she remembered. His gums and tongue were black, with red edges. It was hard not to stare. He lined up his rings on his finger carefully.

“Do you know where Tatters is?” She tried to make the question sound casual.

He jerked his head in the direction of the yurt's open door flap. “On the rack.”

“We didn't expect you to cut and run so fast,” Greer said. “But thanks for tidying up that police job. I crossed off one entire line of my to-do list.”

“Sir,” Lila said. “How comprehensive is this isolation?”

He paused in his lengthy stance process and stood back to eye her. “What do you want to know?”

“Are any internal networks functional?”

“Nothing. Individuals and within individuals, yes. Everything else is as quiet as the…what's your point?”

“I think this is a by-product and not an attack. It's like a necessary prequel.”

“It doesn't make sense,” Greer said, recreating his position and leaning forward, ring balanced in his fingertips. “I had a guy up here to explain it and he couldn't.”

“It's aether disruption,” Lila said just as he made his move. The ring tumbled forward, hit wide of the post, and flopped in the dust. “And it does. But not to a pure-matter physicist. My point is that it doesn't look like we can evacuate the city without networks. But I think that at least we should evacuate this building and the surrounding area.”

“The entire army and every officer able to walk is presently supervising contraflows downtown,” Greer said, easing a shoulder as he moved to let Malachi take his place. “Those that are able are distributing themselves to keep order. Why do you want this building turned upside down as well?”

“I think this is all about Sarasilien. Where he is, that's where trouble is coming,” she said.

“He is our only adept advisor, with the exception of Malachi here,” Greer said watching Malachi flick a ring and just edge the post. “And he's the only one with significant powers. The only one, Black. One. In a world of trouble.”

“He is your trouble,” Lila said.

“You've got proof of course.” Greer moved around Malachi and smoothed one side of his moustache with a finger before squinting at the post and adjusting the position of his toe to the scraped line in the dirt.

“There would be no silence without him, no crisis.”

“No cyborgs,” Malachi growled, making the word sound like a beast's curse.

“You see, Black,” Greer fiddled with the shoulders of his jacket and took a deep breath, “Sarasilien is a royal pain in my ass but I have to be grateful, and the rest of us, because we've got you, and you are something that stands on the line between the humans and the rest of the aetherials and their goddamned business. Without you we'd go back to being the wildebeests on the savannah with a lion explosion in process. So while you may be right, I still have to protect his skinny elf butt.”

“Everything you see is just the tip of a much nastier iceberg,” Lila said. “And I believe it's going to try to shove itself right up that skinny elf butt. So the further away everyone else gets, the better.”

Greer tossed his quoit. It thumped solidly over the post, the first one. “How far away?”

“I have no idea. For my money, about one country.”

“I can probably manage a couple of miles. What else?” He walked behind Lila as Malachi moved in front of her to take aim. A smell of hot animal fur and baking minerals pushed out towards her from the folds of the camel coat. She watched him flex his pawlike hands, trying to straighten the knuckles, failing.

“Xavi's got to go,” Lila said. “She's a wild card.”

“Yeah well, that's not a problem. She's gone already. That was what I was going to give you as your next assignment, always assuming you survive this assignment.”

“She's gone?”

“Completely gone. Mal came to sign her out, the comms went down, and she skipped town at the same moment. My guess is she cracked the aether part of the cell a while ago and was waiting for an opportunity.”

Malachi made his turn and watched his quoit thud into the scrappy weeds next to the post. He grunted in disgust. “I picked up traces of her spells. She went to Alfheim.”

“You sure?” Lila was taken aback and puzzled.

The huge cat-beast gave her a baleful orange stare and stepped wearily off the plate. “I'm sure.”

“Who made that cell?” Lila asked. She dreaded the answer.

“Who do you think?”

“Then he knows,” she said. “Crap.” She'd been relying on the information as an ace up her sleeve; now she was back to nothing.

“Maybe not,” Malachi said as they both stood back and watched Greer rerolling his sleeves. Faces came and went in the windows of the surrounding building, but nobody tried to come out and disturb them. “If she was correct about him, then he had no idea she was alive. He will be in shock. Shocked people are not at the top of their form.”

“D'you think she's in touch with them—with the Betrayed?” Lila asked.

Greer picked up his remaining rings and skimmed one low, too low. It hit Malachi's previous throw and fell over, making a little Venn diagram of near misses. “From what she's told us, I doubt it, but then, she might be a good liar. Mal here thinks your diary charm made her unwittingly honest, so I'm gonna make a bet and go with him. Say she hasn't, but she still is more like them than not. She could be in touch. Who knows if they're in cahoots or not?”

“I have a taped interview.” The voice was Bentley's, carrying clearly from her spot on the bench where she was beyond human hearing distance but obviously not beyond cyborg pickup. “Would you like to see it?”

“Yeah,” Lila said, watching Malachi miss again. He groaned and rolled his heavy head, easing the massive neck muscles under their thick ruff of coal-black hair. She excused herself from the game with a slight bow and backed away from her position, going to join Bentley in the shade.

The grey woman greeted her with a smile and as Lila sat down reached out and took hold of her hand. With the contact established, passing across the files was as simple as usual. Lila unpacked the compressions and closed her eyes, keeping hold of Bentley's hand even though there was no need anymore as she watched the recording.

Bentley and Xaviendra were sitting in Xavi's holding cell. It was a single room with an adjoining bathroom, and in the weeks that she had been there Xavi had furnished and decorated it extensively—this at Lila's expense—creating a pretty, well-lit sitting room complete with a work area in which a huge array of painting materials lay ordered with two canvases up on easels, although they were turned from the camera. It was hard to say who looked more unreal in the situation, Bentley with her uniformly grey plastic exterior or Xavi's purple-and blue-toned elf skin with its mane of black hair hanging almost to her ankles and her blue, saurian tail coiled neatly around her hoofed feet. They sat with an ease that spoke of their familiarity with the situation. Lila knew there were dozens of recordings of Xavi. She had taken many of them herself, but by far the most had been patiently undertaken by Bentley.

This one was partway through. Bentley was speaking.

“…did you ever know about any successes in the experiments?”

“Yes,” Xavi said in her immaculate, accented Otopian. “There were three.”

“But you weren't on the site anymore at that time.”

“No, I had escaped, but I stayed close by—I didn't know where to go. I didn't want to go anywhere.” She sighed. “I heard them, you might say. I felt them. They had a presence in that…place…where I was.”

“Was this place physical?”

“No. It was shadows. The place of the undead. I don't know its name. I don't know if it has a name. Nobody speaks there. There are things without names, without bodies. I didn't understand how I could be there. I was very frightened. When they came, I knew them because they felt like me and not like the other things there. We could touch each other and I knew their thoughts.”

“Who were they?”

Xaviendra's hooves flexed and her tail wound itself more tightly about her ankles. “It doesn't matter. Who they were didn't exist any more. Nor me. We chose new names there, so that we wouldn't get lost.”

There was an expectant pause and then Xavi said, “I cannot use them here. It is not right for you to know them. Magical naming. I am sure you know of this.”

Bentley nodded. They had never tried to coerce anything out of Xaviendra. She had been a broken creature and readily forthcoming with anything they asked, so it hadn't been necessary to push. Having her withhold something was new.

“You must understand I wouldn't ask for them unless we had a strong belief that we would need them,” Bentley said.

“I would not give them to you unless I was certain it was necessary,” Xaviendra countered. “You do not know the three.”

“And do you?”

“We suffered the same fates. In that I know them. When it became clear that they were much more able than was I, and that they were bound in a way that I was not, then we had to separate. They went to their duty and I stayed in case any others came that way. But as time passed, I knew that I was losing myself there. If I stayed, I would decay and be as dead as I was supposed to be, as undone as the elements. In that place there is no time, nothing to see, it is dark, an eternity of darkness, a space without limit. The three suffered no loss there. But I had to return to one of the heavier planes. I tried to go to Alfheim, but I…was barred.” She became straighter, taller, narrower in her chair with the effort of holding back her feelings. “My father's magic kept me out. I was dead to them all.”

Bentley was the soul of compassion, her expression gentle as the turn of the subject. “Did you encounter the thing of which they were afraid?”

“The cause of the atrocity? No. After all I had been told, I expected to face a monster of perfect horrors, a hell of vileness beyond my imaginings. That is why I was lost for so long there. I thought it was a mistake. There was nothing there except the spirits, and they were neither kind nor useful. They were malignant, but nothing at the same time. They were fond of my misery but they were…of no consequence. There was nothing there.” She sounded puzzled now and spread out her hands on her knees. Bright paint covered her fingers, and she absently scratched some of it off.

“Where did the three go?”

“To search,” she said.

“Did you meet them again?”

“No.” She shook her head, and her curling, thick black hair moved like a waterfall, rippling its full length. “Never. They had to search until it was found. They went far beyond any place I came to. Mages tried to guide them from without, they said. I did look of course. I was lonely. But I hated it there. And I never found any trace of them. Nothing.”

“You didn't call their names?”

Xavi shook her head. “When I understood that they might never find their quarry, I knew I couldn't wait. I decided I would be revenged for us all. That decision saved my sanity. And I pursued it. The rest you know.”

Bentley nodded. “Do you think they may have come to the same decision?”

“I suppose you think that because the mages died,” Xaviendra said, smoothing paint flakes off her skirt. “No. They were bound to the duty.”

“Interesting that the attacks and the sickness stopped when the three were trapped Under,” Bentley said.

Xaviendra frowned slightly. “I don't have an explanation for you. Perhaps the Sleeper was bound to the mages, and their attacks on it killed them instead. Such things are not uncommon among magekind and their creatures.”

Bentley smiled. “What do you mean, creatures?”

“They can make mirrors of themselves, like clones, or creatures of other dimensional natures, which are linked by sharing spirit. A mage creature has most of the powers of the master mage. A mage always has control of their creations; they have the same will. The Sleeper consumed all.”

“An anti-magic?”

“Something like that. A mage vampire perhaps, but without mind. Nothing they did could touch it. I believed their actions to be evil and unforgivable, but at the same time I witnessed their fear. It was overwhelming. They were provoked by terror of annihilation and guilt, because if they had not opened their way to this place, they would not have attracted the creature's attention. I did not see it myself. As I said. I saw them and what they did.”

The recording ended. Lila opened her eyes and looked at Bentley. Quite aside from the obvious information was an implication it was impossible to ignore. Cyborgs weren't the only ones with clones. “She's been out the whole bloody time.”

The android moved as if it sighed. “It is possible.”

Lila ground her teeth. Just as it seemed there could be no more complication, one presented itself, fait accompli, right beneath her nose. “Where's Sarasilien?”

“I believe he is still here.”

“Doing what, I wonder?”

Bentley made an equivocal face and shrugged.

“What bothers me the most about all of this is that I can't reconcile him with this monster that history paints him as,” Lila said. “I don't know what to believe about him anymore and I don't trust him to tell the truth because he kept too much back.”

Bentley nodded. “When I first decided to take this form on, I thought it would liberate me from the weaker parts of my humanity. It was a sign of the war, of my loss of so much of myself, I thought. I was a walking testament to the horror of a kind of murder. I thought I'd search the Signal and find the truth there—of who I was and would have been, of what was stolen and what could have been changed without harm. But the Signal is everything, all information that could be. Yeah, the world and everything that ever happened is in it, but among all the possibilities it's so hard to find. The past is there, and the present, and the future, and all the never-was too. I thought it would have all the answers. I'd mine them out. I'd mine myself out. I'd be…”

“Saved,” Lila said, feeling the word as Bentley said it too.

“Yeah. Knowledge would have the answers. How could it be wrong?” Bentley laughed gently. “And you know what? I bet you do know…”

“Tell me,” Lila said.

“The more I saw and looked at it from every angle, the more I saw that it was meaningless. I was trying to find the end of a story and I was looking at numbers. I was looking for the happy ending, but there's no ending except the terminal numbers and then after them an emptiness. There's no meaning, unless I make one by the path I follow through the numbers, my pattern. That's the sum total of everything. It is truth, but it has no meaning at all. How can that be? I wondered at it and I tried to make that into a meaning as well.” She laughed harder this time and slapped her knee. “I think you are heading the same way.”

Lila squeezed Bentley's hand for a moment and felt an answering squeeze before they let go. For a second or two they watched Malachi and Greer shuffling around each other and the faces in the windows, anxious, pressing, wondering.

“But,” Lila said, seeing a quoit fly erratically from Malachi's claw and hit the mark nonetheless, “human beings do not exist in the context of the sum total of all possibilities. They are finite and extremely particular. The world of relevance to them is small, much smaller than they like to imagine. They have no aetheric skill. They have short lives. They are primates, social, with extremely limited perception of their environment, which is nonetheless more than good enough for them to live rich, full lives, if only they are able to live in tune with their own nature. But they don't want to recognise their nature, because it is so absolute, so definite, and so inescapable. So they pretend it is something else, that they can be and do everything, anything, and that they are fit to do it. They believe that science and technology has transformed them into masters of the universe, or that surely it will in time, and think they have changed somehow from their foolish, ignorant ancestors who had nothing but sticks and stones. They think I'm different. But I'm just a woman, human, with a lot of sticks and stones to her name. Even if the sticks and stones of my body mean I will not die easily, nothing will prevent it in the end. And nothing, no matter how marvellous, and I have been and seen some marvellous things, truly, nothing will change me from my self. I am human, and that is all. There can be no more for me. I know that you're right. In the lens of everything there is no meaning I could make that is of any use or significance except that I could maybe help someone else to live a more satisfying life, but that's a vain aspiration. The best I can do is live my own life as I feel it is best, as if it mattered more than anything because it's all there is, even though none of it is of the slightest importance.”

Lila grimaced. “Suppose the three Betrayed do come, and can't be stopped, suppose they end the world as it is now, take their vengeance, destroy Sarasilien, break the order in which humans live and die? You know, I try to care, but I can only care for myself, and what matters to me. It really doesn't matter what happens at all. But I can only carry on living if I feel that it does. Action is purposeless, meaningless, but it is demanded of me, because I was made this way to act, not to sit around talking and watching dead people walk and talk while others die, innocent or damned, well or badly, deserving or not.”

“Another go?” Greer looked over and held his rings out towards Lila. “You could play each other. Might be a bit of a long match—”

“I'll sit this one out,” Lila called. Bentley gave him a friendly nod.

He nodded back, clearly wishing he knew what they were talking about but not insisting.

“There is much satisfaction in action,” Bentley said quietly, keeping her voice low.

“It's the consolation of the weak,” Lila said. “Look at Xavi. Look at Sarasilien.”

“You're very angry with him.”

“Yes I am. I prefer to believe that power is given to the strong and deserving. And he spits in the face of that belief. He treads it and smashes it flat and throws it at me. I want him to be worth all that he has spent.”

“Because?”

“Because then there is justice and a happy ending to be found. There's fairness. And I don't have to pity him and destroy him.”

“Destroy?” The whisper was so quiet nobody but Lila could have heard it.

“Surely,” Lila said, gripping the bench with her hands, her feet tucked under it together, her face set like a little girl who has to endure being the outcast in the playground day after day. “But I will look very hard for any reason not to. Very hard. But it will have to be such a good reason I doubt it exists.”

“Revenge?” ventured the android curiously.

“Necessity,” Lila said.

“I don't understand. You're not the kind of person who does that.”

“Yes I am,” Lila said. “I am strong and I will not let evil run wild in weak creatures to spoil the world when I see it happening and have the ability to stop it.”

“Evil?”

But Lila didn't answer Bentley this time. Her jaw was set. She watched Greer hustling through his game and Malachi grumpily keeping pace. They were waiting for her, not the other way around. Slowly she relaxed her hands and let go of the wooden slats. She sat back and rested, turning her face towards the sun and finding a patch of warm light. It shone through her eyelids red, glowing, blood red. When she was a little girl, she had found its colour and brightness so comforting, the heat and the light soothing and calming. It still had that power. In the garden the quoits thumped and the men's voices mumbled.

Lila leaned back and let the sun shine on her.