Lila was still reeling over the revelation an hour later. She had communicated with Sarasilien about it and to begin with he had not believed her. He said that it must be some publicity stunt. But Sorcha insisted it was true. The conversation had taken them out of the party room and up to Zal's, where they continued talking as he packed.

“Don't you have opposed magical…I mean aetheric…I mean, aren't you antibodies or something? Elf and demon…like…?”

“Angel and demon?” Sorcha laughed and snarled at the same time, quite a feat. It showed her pointed little teeth. “They can't be blood related like you mean by the word brother and sister, no. For sure not.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head at the idea, laughing and snorting. “No.”

“So he isn't your brother.”

“Yeah he is so, and anyone who says otherwise or treats him like he isn't of our estimable kin incurs my family's eternal vengeance.” Her tone left no doubt that she meant it quite literally.

“Family of choice?” Lila suggested, not beginning to imagine what choice that was from Zal's point of view.

“Hell no. How could some elf live with demons and what demon would want to claim relation to one of them?” Sorcha stared at her as if Lila had suggested bestiality. “How could we have kinship? Are you out of your mind?”

“That's what I'm asking you,” Lila said patiently. “I never heard of anyone being…adopted…across species. Especially not across your two.”

Sorcha grinned and a little steam rolled off her. “Well, I ain't gonna tell you, sister. You have to find it out for your bad self. It's not something that can be told. Only known. See?”

Lila did not see. “It's a secret, then?”

Sorcha shook her head and narrowly missed igniting the curtains with a dismissive flick of her hand that sent small jets of fire from the tips of her fingers.

Lila nodded and sent her findings back to Sarasilien. Finally, rather desperately, she asked, “So, are you going to be…are you an elf sister, then?” The demon froze and Lila braced herself, eyes squinting, in case she was about to be barbecued.

Sorcha peered at her with blazing eyes. “Do I LOOK like an elf to you, baby?” Then, relenting, she shook herself and laughed. “Me, get into all that health food and macramé? You have to be joking. I'd sooner cut off my left tit.” She jerked upwards with one talon of a thumbnail and made a slicing action, snorted, and stamped her foot. A fine tremor ran through the floorboards and the carpet suddenly gave off a singed smell. Sorcha hummed a little tune to herself, chuckling, “What demon would ever want to do that? In fact, what living being of any soul at all? Hah!”

“So, it's rare,” Lila said.

“Far as I know, sugar, he's the only one,” Sorcha said. “Only one with any brains at all but that don't mean he has many.” She sighed. “I'm so into him. Isn't he great?” After this point Lila was only there to listen, as Sorcha didn't seem to need responses and had no intention of returning to their subject. “I love Mode-X. So dark and bad. So funky. I might do some of it myself. Hey what is taking you so long, Legolas? Is all this stuff going with you?” Sorcha gestured at the room's furnishings.

“None of it's mine,” Zal said, placing some worn-looking clothes into a carryall. “Except the painting.”

“Oh, “Titia gave you that? Hah. Pity she's a faery.” Sorcha paused and confided to Lila, “Elves put faeries to sleep in close contact. It's the aura thing, y'know?” Then she continued to Zal, “And all your girls here the same, it's like a freakin' nunnery. Are you getting rootsy for Alfheim now you've left home? Going puritan on me?” She kept darting little glances at Lila as she spoke, full of mischief. That was in between the time she spent opening drawers and sniffing around the room, trailing her perfectly manicured fingers along the surfaces, restlessly moving. Finally, she seemed contented and curled up like a cat in the middle of the bed.

Zal ignored her with filial contempt and went into the long, walkin dressing room, closing the doors after himself.

Sorcha instantly turned to Lila, rolling over onto her stomach. “There's a Game between you two, isn't there?” Her hair waved around her face in tendrils of living fire that was only prevented from burning the house down by careful enchantments.

Lila refused to confirm or deny it. She was trying to retain a professional detachment with which she could vaguely impress Sorcha, but it was a pointless effort since demons were known for their affinity to wild magic. They couldn't control it any more than anybody else, but they could sense and read it with unmatched aplomb.

Sorcha's grin of delight intensified, “Oh, my, you have it bad! What is it?”

Lila shrugged, suitably ignorant for a human.

“Ah, you don't know yet. Want me to find out for you?” Sorcha's long, pointed tongue was out, licking her glossy lips in anticipation. “Go on, before he comes back. It might give you an advantage. I'm really good at these things. Quick, give me something of yours.” She bounced across the bed to Lila and held her hand out.

Although Lila could think of a hundred reasons why not, she found Sorcha's enthusiasm and personal charisma impossible to withstand. Worse than an elvish glamour. And her care for Zal was indisputable, oddly, for demons and elves generally were well known as having no time for one another. So, despite her misgivings, Lila found herself opening a zipper on her jacket.

Sorcha was dancing with excitement as Lila handed her a flechette round from her pocket. “I like you so much!” she exclaimed, turning the bullet over in her fingers. “Personal weapons of grisly death! And now something of Zal's. Oh!” She leapt over and touched the round to the painting and hummed a note. A faint werelight grew between the two objects. As it strengthened into wavelengths even Lila could see Sorcha gently move the round away from the picture frame. A fragile skein of near invisible tendrils stretched out in the air between, and the spider's web of lines briefly moved into letters of the demonic language before they vanished.

“Aaah!” Sorcha squealed. “Zal you bad, bad dog!” To Lila she turned around and gathered herself and came and sat down, pulling Lila close to her. Her red eyes zipped with glee. “Girl, didn't your Momma ever tell you never play with the elves?” Her changes of mood made Lila feel dizzy. Sorcha was now as concerned and intent as a kind mother herself. “This is the oldest Game there is, honey. You know what I mean?”

Lila didn't know how to respond at all. She was out of her depth. She kept a thoughtful silence. This increased Sorcha's pity, which Lila could have done without.

“Let's see what the Victory condition is.” The succubus slowly turned the round in her hand and sang a few notes to it. She listened, her blazing eyes closed for a moment. “Ah. Not too bad,” she gave Lila a wink. “The loser is the one who cracks first and begs the other one to end the Game. The oldest ones are the best. Now the Forfeit.”

“Forfeit. Isn't that it, when somebody wins?”

“You really washed in on the last tide,” Sorcha said. “There's always a Forfeit, though most humans don't know that until it's too late.” She went to the painting. “I can even tell you who started it. D'you want to know that too?”

“No,” Lila said. “That's enough already.” She was wondering what the Forfeit had been on the other Game, and if it had been avoided. Surely Sarasilien would have told her of it? Was there a compulsion lying on her now that she didn't know about? She couldn't believe he would cross her like that.

“Honey don't be down.” Sorcha pressed the round gently into Lila's hand. “People are playing this stuff all the time, it's no big. What? What's the matter? You're not thinking of quitting are you?”

Lila glanced at the dressing room but there was no sign of Zal. She decided, on an impulse she might well regret, to take Sorcha at face value. She told her about the letters. “I'm obliged to lose,” she said. “It's in the way. So, if all I have to do is…”

“No no no no,” Sorcha rapped smartly. “You have to mean it. That's the condition. It has to be genuine lust that makes him beg for your favour, lust over sense with every last shred of personal pride biting the dirt. Otherwise it isn't worth the entry charge, is it? Trust me. I've played this before a hundred times. Loser cracks first and then the Forfeit—well, no, then the rooty, unless you're playing a real bastard, and then the Forfeit. Forfeit could be anything. You have to watch those.”

“Doesn't matter,” Lila said, biting down irritation at the wretched binding rules of the magic and her ignorance of them. “Can you lift the Game?”

Sorcha waved her hand dismissively. “No. Don't look so worried. I have four or five on all the time. Life's no fun at all without them. Sometimes I can't even remember who's playin' what on whom. Look though, before you lose, if you could lose even, don't you think you're better off knowing the Forfeit at least? No sense in suffering agony over a tin of kitty food, and no sense giving in sight-unseen on eternal banishment to Zoomenon or something. Here, let me.” And before Lila could stop her Sorcha stood up and spat onto the polished wooden chest of drawers beneath the painting. She sang a complicated melody and extended one of her fingernails into a claw. With this she scratched a mark into the saliva. It shaped itself and froze into a tiny lens like a magnifying glass. Beneath it the forfeit could be read, as though it was stamped into the wood in clear letters. Lila bent close.

“Still wanna lose?” Sorcha asked, clearly surprised.

The spit window frosted, and deliquesced to nothing with a few greyish flickers. The Forfeit it had shown her was etched in Lila's mind: the loser will live a lifetime never being able to love anybody else.

Curiously, she found the idea almost comforting. She might have to suffer a brief and difficult short-term period of fixation on Zal, true, but he'd leave as soon as the Game was done, and she was used to living far away from people she cared about. Very used to it. It wouldn't be so hard to put another picture in her pocket and, after that, have the security of knowing that she'd be in no emotional danger ever again.

Sorcha was staring at her. “You scarin' me now,” she said. “You can't be serious.”

“Oh come on,” Lila retorted. “The alternative is having your brother love me for the rest of his life, and he's going to live for centuries, and then…gods know what.”

Sorcha made a warding sign at the mention of gods. “You listen to me, Metal Molly. I've seen a hundred girls looking for the right angle or minute or chance with him, and I never liked one of them as sister material. But there's something about a human girl who's been made over into a death machine with the fires of hell driving her…” She gave Lila a long glance and Lila knew that Sorcha was talking about the reactor—something she shouldn't have known anything about at all. It was one of the many things she would have questioned her on, but Sorcha hadn't paused to let a word in. “And that makes me feel for you, makes me like you, and I can think of worse fates that might be riding much closer to him than that, can't you?”

Lila almost gaped with astonishment, but managed to turn it into talking. “What do you know?”

“I know that you're supposed to protect my brother from these maniacs and I want you to do that job and I think that this Game is working well for me, honey.” Sorcha's delicate, supple body rose up and her tail coiled suddenly. Venom formed into a drop at its dartlike tip. She put her face right into Lila's and Lila smelled fire on her breath and felt a sudden, blistering instant of heat. Sorcha's voice was the quiet sound of a distant furnace roaring, “And I'll tell you this for nothing. If you fail, then I'll hunt you down with every demon this side of Tartarus and eat your head.”

Lila simply stood there, astonished and slightly singed.

Sorcha was already off, sitting down playfully on the bed again. She flicked a slender golden card out of the narrow belt that was all that held her bodynet in place. “Anyway, ten million dollars for you if he loses.” She grinned, reached out, and tucked the card down the front of Lila's armoured vest. “I like seeing him squirm. He gets all High Elf and sanctimonious, and his ears get right back like they're welded to his head, and he gets really intense and kinda mad. Still as a statue, just frozen with rage, can't do a damn thing.” She laughed at the thought. “Never tire of that. And trust me, he's so gonna lose.”

“Don't be ridic—” But Lila bit her words back because Zal returned, gave them both a dark look, and threw his bag at the bed where it thumped against Sorcha's side.

“Ship out, Sorcha,” he suggested. “My shadow and I have stuff to argue about.”

“Don't I know it.” Sorcha got up and gave Lila a wink as she moved to the door. She looked at Zal over her shoulder and said something in demonic to him. Lila could hear it but, unlike other languages of the Realms, demonic sounded like music instead of words to ears it wasn't meant for and she had no idea what was said.

Sorcha blew him a kiss with a flicker of yellow fire between her lips and left the door open after her.

Zal walked across and shut it with a kick before turning to Lila. “I'm not leaving here tonight.”

“You have to,” Lila said primly. “It's all arranged.”

“Un-arrange it.”

“I'll carry you out if I have to.”

“You will not.” He folded his arms and planted his feet.

“I will so.” She found herself copying his stance.

He dodged her, jumping across the bed and out through the adjoining door into her room. Lila was so taken aback by his speed, and so grounded in the posture, that she didn't even move for a good couple of seconds. As she ran after him she could hardly believe it had come to this.

All the other intervening doors were open. She saw him hurdle the one sofa that stood in his way as he crossed the ocean-view room and then he was onto the balcony and over the rail before she had time to shout out. If there had been a Severed Realms Olympiad the elves would win all the running events, Lila reflected as she watched Zal land with cat-precision, roll, and keep running in a leap that would have broken the legs of any ordinary human being. As she landed from her drop she felt a sharp and sudden pain and heard the whine and grind of machinery as motors worked to protect her. Darts and needles seemed to be pricking the inside of her legs and along the inner surface of her spine. She realised her mistake in not ditching the armouring of her legs, though it wasn't so bad yet, she could run.

But Zal was fast over the track into the hill woodland and Lila felt her new pain increase steadily as she pursued him. Her AI-self implored her to stop, informed her that an increased effort could result in serious tearing between the new layers of flesh and system. But Zal's training had obviously worked well for him and she could see that if she even slowed down he would lose her. Lila ran on, burdened by the excess weight of her weapons.

Slowly she gained on him until they reached the summit of the hill when she lost sight of the flag of his pale hair. He had turned off the path and into the dense woodland there. Lila turned at the same spot.

A blast of icy air and wind suddenly hit her in the face. Leaves and earth pelted her skin and went in her eyes, blinding her. She couldn't stop fast enough and her left shoulder struck the stiff trunk of a young oak tree, spinning her around and knocking the breath out of her. Invisible hands pushed her down towards the ground and she was off balance and fell beneath them as earth elementals tried to bury her.

She'd never seen them cluster and work together so fiercely before. Although it hurt and made life difficult, once she realised what it was she was able to stand up and step back to the path to clear her eyes. When she had she was able to look into the shadows.

Earth, air, and stone spirits clustered thickly beneath the trees' protection, shifting restlessly from form to form, from mist to nothing and back again. Eyes that were empty spaces in nebulous bodies glared at her, ballooned, and vanished only to reappear a moment later. Somewhere close by a wood ghost clattered its flutelike bones against living tree trunks. Lila heard an eagle cry out from far above her, alarmed by the presence of so much primordial force in one spot.

She put her foot off the path and immediately they came together again, all the small spirits rushing to create the semimaterial body of a giant elk, its rack of antlers lowered against her. Lila could only think that Zal was getting away from her and her chances of catching him up or even finding him must be vanishing with every second.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “But you're in my way.” She stepped forward, braced her arms against the peculiar sponginess of the elk's form, and pushed.

The resistance was ferocious. Lila had no idea that flitting things like elementals could band together and create something so physically strong, not in Otopia anyway. She dug her feet into the ground for more purchase, but the soil began to shift under her as it was pulled apart from below. In a few more moments she'd have nothing to stand on.

Lila engaged full power and shoved. Pain like raw fire flared along her spine and in her hips as the elk's insubstance held for an instant and trapped her in a vice between implacable machine and immovable energy. Then all resistance vanished as the elk form fell into pieces. Lila fell forward with a surge, tripping and sliding on the turbulent ground, feeling like a rider on an uncontrollable horse. She just managed to keep her footing and weave between the trees, moving fast enough to keep the elementals from coalescing again, although they harried her as best they could. They tore her hair, threw leaves, sticks, and small branches at her, tried to move the stones under her feet as she ran.

Zal must have been tiring, because there were clues for Lila to see: a snapped twig, a footprint in flattened grass…And then she came out into a little glade very unexpectedly. She slid down a short embankment and into the low point of a dip in the ground, stopping just in front of Zal. He was sitting with his head thrown back, gasping for breath, sweat running off him. There was a strange silence and stillness—Lila realised it was because the elementals had stopped their pestering.

“What the hell are you doing?” She'd finally come to the end of her patience. Her vision was covered in red warning readouts which were completely unnecessary because she could feel the damage the run had done to her.

Zal glanced at her, slightly grey beneath the flush of effort. For the first time she saw his cool crack at the edges. “I have to be here,” he said shortly. “I'm not going anywhere else. I suppose you can hang around and watch if you want to, but I'd prefer it if you stood outside the circle. I'm sure you would too.” He got up and brushed himself down with something like self-consciousness. Then, without asking her again, he started talking elvish. Or rather, he didn't speak it, he sang it, as though it was demonic, and the lilting peculiar harmonics of the two combined to make the hair on Lila's neck stand up. Suddenly she had no problem at all getting out of the way—none of her flesh and bone wanted to be inside the space he was creating with his spell.

Outside the range of his influence, the elementals returned in force, but although they crawled and clawed over her with semisolid fingers, their real interest lay beyond the heat shimmer of the magical barrier Zal had sketched around himself. Like her, they watched with avid curiosity.

The peculiarity of it didn't strike her immediately—Lila was not familiar with magic in a user's way—but then it dawned on her that probably, if he were going to do anything important, she should have been inside the circle, surely, and not outside where she was unprotected. But on the heels of that thought she realised that she was protected after all, because he'd reversed the normal order of things. The circle that Zal had cast put the world inside it. He was the one outside.

“Hey!” she said, moving automatically into a state where what weaponry she had was armed. “I say again—what the hell?”

But Zal wasn't able to hear her, or more likely didn't care. Then, one by one, the elementals of the forest began to slip past Lila, into his space. From their touches she could sense their eagerness to obey the summons of his song. Once they passed the barrier their manifestation changed. On Lila's human Earth, the fifth world of Otopia, elemental beings had wispy and ethereal presences. But Zal had taken his circle out of Earth's domain. It was part of the elemental's home system now—a part of First Realm: Zoomenon.

The elementals came into their true form and power. Wood, metal, earth, water, air, fire. From her studies Lila knew that these beings didn't exist as separated entities in Zoomenon and this was true, she saw now. They united instantly into a multicoloured rainbow haze of energy, which pulsed and danced like the Northern Lights on a dark winter night. She saw Zal through the brilliant light, bathing in it, his head thrown back in abandonment, and belatedly recognised that what she was looking at was the junkie's hit.

The elemental forces coiled over him eagerly and poured in through his nostrils, mouth, eyes, and ears, exiting through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet to circle around and fly at him again. Zal shook where he stood, fell to his knees, and then over onto his face.

Lila was numb with shock when she heard the arrow whip past her ear, saw it rebound from the magical field of the circle and fall at her feet. As it touched the ground it became a snake, yellow and black striped, and coiled swiftly away from her into the undergrowth. Then her radar found the elf assassins, one coming through the treetops, the other, who had shot, making its way along the ground.

She cancelled all her fright readouts and set out for the ground walker at a dead run, flechette clips arming, switching her body's gross and fine motor controls over to her AI-self's superior communications speeds: it could outdo her natural neurons by a factor of two. Her reactor increased output and she became instantly faster and stronger, so when the arrow that was meant for her came flying towards her she was able to bat it aside without losing momentum. The enchanted flight turned back to search for her, but found the armour on her back suddenly too hard, too electromagnetically polarised for its magical fields to penetrate. It blew into dust as Lila saw her quarry step forth casually into full view with the aloof poise of every miserable High Elf she'd ever known. Cold fear drenched her inside, but the machine parts of her didn't care about that; they gave her more power than she could handle.

At least, she consoled herself, she didn't know this one personally. The elf woman's long ears were pierced and decorated with hawk-feathers and her hair had been tamed with dark wax and braided tightly into a queue that hung across her shoulder. Her earth-toned clothes flickered with the shadows of forests that grew in Alfheim, not the Otopian woodland she stood in now.

“Lila Black,” said this monstrosity, as though announcing the name of a new and particularly unsavoury insect species she had just discovered.

“Haven't got time,” Lila said, breaking the conversational charm. She knew that this one intended to distract her while the other waited for Zal's circle to break down. That would happen if he lost consciousness and, having seen what he was doing, she didn't hold out much hope of that being anything other than a matter of time.

The elf agent's blue eyes flashed disdainfully, and with insouciant ease she crouched and made a six-metre vertical jump, making for the higher branches of the tree she stood beneath, where a heavyweight like Lila would have no chance of following. She was lithe and trained. Lila was nuclear-powered. She matched the jump and grabbed hold of the elf's shoulders without making any effort to remain in the tree. As they fell back down they wrestled fiercely, but Lila was much stronger and when they hit the soft forest floor Lila ended up on top. She heard the breath whoosh out of the elf's narrow frame with satisfaction. The woman struggled to get out from under, but gave it up when she realised she couldn't budge Lila's mass.

“What are you going to do?” she hissed. “Sit on me all night?”

Lila didn't feel like talking. Part of her attention was focused on tracking the other elf and it was very close to the circle glade. She had no way of seeing magic, so she didn't know what was happening to Zal. She had no ropes on her. Although she felt something like a qualm it was short lived. She extended a needle from her right thumb and injected the elf at the vein in her neck with a short-term shot of a gengineered knockout. It was the kind of technological weapon elves despised the most, but Lila didn't care about the woman's honour at this moment.

She ran back towards the glade and then began to notice other, peculiar changes in the wood. It was becoming misty and a new breeze from the sea had come up in the last few minutes. Gulls shrieked overhead, although she couldn't see them with ordinary eyes. Then, aside from her new target and to her left, she saw an animal spirit in the shadows. The elf she was fixated on saw it too. It moved around and put the circle between itself and Lila. Lila knew Zal wasn't out yet. She could see him, lying on his back, laughing in the delirious way of people who don't know if they're happy or sad, or are much too much of both.

The animal spirit, not of any of the Seven Kingdoms, a curious, Interstitial being from the gaps where ghosts and other lost traces lingered, approached the circle. It was huge, a Megaceros, with a rack of antlers so large that it could not have moved in any ordinary wood, but the trees and rocks presented no obstacle to its passage. It didn't truly walk in the space and time of any of the realms. A thick forestal mist was emanating from its flanks in huge, stately billows. Rain fell from its antlers. Its eye sockets, like those of all ghosts, were black and empty.

Lila was more worried about it than the elf now. Ghosts had the cold breath that killed everything it touched, if they chose to exhale. There was no scientific nor magical ward against it. There was no way to talk to a ghost—it was supposed they were beyond time. There was no way to know what ghosts wanted, or needed, or what might turn them aside from the things which came to interest them. Although the elf and its weapons could not cross the circle that protected the world from Zal, the ghost could.

It moved with a stately progress. Its head tilted to one side as it listened closely, although if Zal were still singing it was a song Lila couldn't hear. She ran as fast as she could, breaking small branches that were in her way and vaporising a stand of elder that stood between her and the circle wall with a light-pulse charge, crashing through the remains in a dust of black particles and smoke. She threw herself headlong at the magical barrier, not knowing if she could get through it, or what spells made it. At the last instant she flung her arms up, elbows forward, to protect her face, picked up her feet, and relied on her weight and momentum to do the rest. As she closed her eyes the last image she'd seen remained impressed on her. She could see the elf on the other side of the circle. His face was distorted by the hazy water effects of the aetheric wall, but she rather thought that improved it a great deal, as did the expression it wore—a mixture of dismay and surprise—which she would have given anything to see two years ago, before its porcelain beauty became a regular feature of her nightmares.

Then Zal's forcefield caught her and she felt the struggle between its grip on her flesh and the robotics that it couldn't command, because they weren't alive. It began to tear her apart. Her head filled with a scream of light and pain but she was too heavy and too much metal. The elf magic was repelled by the metal and silicon and coiled away through skin and bone, fleeing back to its place in the wall as she hurtled through in slow time.

She felt like it had skinned her, but when she landed and rolled up next to Zal's twitching body she could still move and most systems, even though they were all redlined, were still working. She fetched up on the edge of Zal's hollow, and lifted her face out of the dry ground, feeling steam rising from the earth under her face, smelling the healthy, mouldy odour of the soil. Sensors on her back relayed the cause—she was under another sun and it was beating down, hot as hell, baking her under an indigo sky.

She looked up. The animal spirit was moving close, the barrier visible through its aethereal form as it passed through. She saw the sweat on Zal's skin beginning to freeze where his hand was flung out close to the wet nostrils of its muzzle as it put its head down towards him, ears cocked, replying to some demand he was making as the elemental rainbow coruscated in and out of his open mouth. He was smiling, and his eyes were shut, but she didn't think he was unconscious.

Lila tried to get to her feet. Pain seared her back and legs so badly she couldn't. She issued silent commands to her med units to numb her but they didn't respond. The muscles in her torso were useless, but they hadn't the strength to lift the prosthetics of her legs and arm by themselves anyway. Only the motor systems that controlled her limbs could do that, and they weren't reacting. She looked down, unable to make sense of the peculiar readouts that flashed in her mind, and saw that she was covered in silvery metal elementals. They were consuming her power, revelling in the taste of the alloys and pure metals, undoing the energy locked in their crystal form. They were rotting her. She could only lie there and watch the ghost place its unself beside Zal, into Zal's hand where streams of elementals were still pouring forth.

The face of her opponent, the other elf agent, appeared close to the window of the magical wall and watched too.

Lila saw the ghost draw breath in Zoomenon. It inhaled the elements from Zal's unprotected hand. She saw the Jayon Daga agent's face looking down at her, not even contemptuous, not even curious, waiting. And all the time Zal lay there like an idiot, grinning, out of it, as happy as a sand boy, as the ghost breathed in and left his hand empty at the end of his wrist, as transparent as glass.

There was only one thing left to do, though she felt no sense of hope in doing it. She didn't trust it. She didn't like it. She never wanted to use it. All her ambivalent feelings about the people who had made her tried to stop her.

“Battle Standard,” Lila whispered. She mentally apologised to the metal elementals who were temporarily blasted apart by her body's response to the command as it switched current phase from her reactor. But she thanked Sarasilien for having the wit to add such a defensive capability to her AI-self in the first place. Field tests had proved BS, as Lila called it, to be anything but reliable, barely even functional, crammed as it was with knowledge her superiors wanted kept even from her, but it was all she had that might work before the damned ghost breathed out and finished them both. The command reset her AI-self into a new mode. Her armour reconfigured. Processes that kept her alive switched over their power to defensive units. A cocktail of drugs and hormones surged into her system and her pains and worries vanished as neural connections were closed down and everything redirected according to the strategies of her defensive programming.

She was on her feet before she had time to think, aware very dimly of horrible things happening to her body but not caring now, not able to feel it except at a distance, as though pain was only a notion, like an idea, which carried no weight and made no difference to the physical world. Lila was distant, soaring like an eagle, strong as a lion, a centre to a storm. She saw herself pull Zal towards her by an ankle, away from the ghost, pick him up, and put her gauntlet over his nose and mouth, pinching them tightly shut. His eyes opened wide and a stream of multicoloured fire poured out over her and ran harmlessly off her, unable to do anything about the phase shifts she was able to perpetuate. The circle disintegrated abruptly and Zoomenon vanished as the elf Lila knew as Dar, barely five metres away, loosed his arrow.

Lila turned and ducked. She was faster than the dreamy speed of the ghost, but not faster than the arrow. It thudded into her shoulder, through her shield and her armour. The point emerged just below her armpit like a reproving finger, bound with magic that even now fizzed and sparked on its point. She looked down in anger and saw the silver tip scratch the skin of Zal's shoulder whereupon it instantly vanished as though made of moonlight. Dar was already away, dodging into the trees, racing to his fallen companion. Whatever his mission was he had completed it, Battle Standard concluded, and therefore she made no move to counter his action.

Zal slumped in her grasp, a completely dead weight.

Things became blurry to Lila, fuzzy, as though the world and her thoughts were all radio stations that couldn't be tuned in. Nothing matched up. She thought she might be dying, but as long as she was still moving the best thing must be to get back home, to where she was safe. Yes, she would go to where there was help or someone who could, if not fix her, at least switch her off. She would like to be off because everything was very very bad indeed.

She went home.