Keeping It Real (22 page)

compromised them in Otopia, though we could not stop the Lady's eagles. Unlike her party we wish to

keep the Severed Realms attached to one another, for the interests of Alfheim will not be served by

separation. Time runs short. You must decide. Go with Dar and take a chance at saving Zal, or go on

your own and be lost in Sathanor, hunted by the Daga, consumed by the dangers of the land, or

vanquished by our common enemy, for the Lady is mighty and in H Alfheim none of your strength can

match her power. You did not K match it
here.'

Lila glanced again at
Dar and he met
her eyes. It
took all her resolve not
to break first. He took a

desperate, difficult breath and his voice was full of whistles and bubbles,

'I apologise to you, Lila Black, for causing your present incarceration in metal. Be assured it was no

choice of mine.'

T remember who chose what,' Lila hissed. 'I was there, and there was nothing wrong with my mind.'

'No. You are far too clever for your own good,' he whispered and closed his eyes, unable to speak

any more.

Abruptly his partner sank to her knees and supported him before he fell. Her eyes were narrow and

dark with anger as she stared at Lila, 'He will soon die here. Go now. This bike will take two, but
not

three.'

'We're not
going to make the Alfheim gate on a dirt bike,' Lila said. 'It's two counties away, back in

Bayside.'

'There are other ratholes to fit through,' the elf said. 'He will tell you where to go. You can make it

easily. Once you are there, other means will come to you.'

'I can get my own means here,' Lila insisted. 'My field team is on its way as we speak.' She hated the

idea of saving Dar, in any way. She couldn't stand the idea of having him so close to her, even as

vulnerable as he was.

'Do not waste more time!' the elf pleaded with her, and Lila saw tears form in her long eyes. 'Dar

cannot
wait.' She took a breath as if she would beg more but then held herself back. Pride and anger

fought to take control of her features. She was fierce, Lila thought, and she was desperate. It was not

good to be the object of that gaze and it made her feel like a total jerk.

Lila went forward, sun shining off her metal armour into her eyes, and knelt on one knee beside Dar.

She moved slowly and gently in spite of her reservations, and made herself touch his shoulder
.
The

andalune
body she had been dreading had either subsided or was contained
.
She felt
nothing but
the

cloth of his jacket. She glanced up at the female elf, 'What's your name?'

'Gwil,' the elf said, almost
spitting in her haste and frustration.

'Okay, Gwil. I'll lift him on the bike in front of me. You have to tie him to me so that
I don't lose him on

the way, yeah?' Unwittingly, Lila found herself gazing longingly at
the lump of tarry machinery that had

been her bike. The rockracer that Gwil gave her instead was pitiful by

comparison
.
Still, even though they taxed its suspension and power to the limits, it would do.

Lila turned her attention back to Dar and crouched down with his back to her chest. She took hold of

him under his strapped arms, bracing against
the lower part
of his ribcage, but
getting his elbows involved

anyway
.
She felt the faint
judder of broken bones shifting as she lifted and he made a pitiful sound, a soft

shriek, that would have been a scream to anybody who could breathe. He made no resistance or effort

to support
his own weight, because he couldn't. As she released his weight
onto the bike, things must

have got
worse for him because his contained
andalune
released. Its unique touch was exactly the same

flavour as it had been in the moment
he had maimed her years ago, but
now she could sense only

weakness and suffering where it
seeped against
her human body. It was fragile and evaporating rapidly.

To her surprise and chagrin Lila felt sick at the thought of the pain she was causing him and in that
instant

her hate for him left
her. He became simply a casualty, and she his ambulance driver.

'A moment.' Gwill put
her hand on Lila's as Lila kicked the engine into life. She spoke over the sputter

and fizz. Tf he is not conscious when the Daga find you they will not believe your story, given who and

what you are. Tell them that
Gwilaren Amanita of Lyrien has sent you.'

'Amanita?' Lila said, surprised by the name's connection to deadly poison.

The elf grinned mirthlessly, 'Not
all elves are lovely in name and aspect,' she said, stepping back. Dar

slumped against
Lila's chest, his head on her shoulder.

Lila glanced back once, 'Gwilaren Amanita, I will get
him to Alfheim.'

'Do more, Lila Black. Your ambition insults us.' Gwil shouted after her, with uncanny acuity. 'Finish

your Game with Zal, and discover the truth of your own making.'

Lila's ears burned at the elf's words. How could
she
know about the Game? Or did she mean

something else altogether? Her embarrassment shamed her, and her responsibility for Dar's state did

also, in spite of all the rational rules of combat
that she tried to deploy against the feeling. But she soon

forgot it as she felt the touch of his
andalune
focus where it touched the exposed skin of her shoulders.

Through its agency she found herself able to hear Dar's voice in her mind, soft but clear, as he

directed her into the wilderness beyond any roads, deeper and deeper, until they were quite alone among

the rocks and the brush and the strange, small plants that
lived in the desert
.

There, where a wind-scoured archway of old tufa framed the blazing midday sky, Lila rode up

confidently across a plain of ascending rock towards thin air which looked to be nothing more than a leap

to certain death.

They passed through a strange and silent sheet, a moment of liquid potential, and emerged instead into

a thick, rich, dripping green forest. The bike snarled to a halt in a narrow glade, spraying mud and water

up over Lila's legs and splattering her arms and face.

Lila looked around her into a muggy twilight, filled with the soft-falling cool rain that she remembered

from the low hills of Lyrien, the second kingdom of Alfheim; a signature weather mark, like a

trade-stamp. Her skin drank it
greedily after the burning dryness of the phoenix and the scouring of the

sands, and she felt
Dar shudder in agony and heard the rasping gurgle as he took a breath. A short

distance away a wooden shelter stood between two pines on a clearly elven-made area of elevated and

flat dry ground
.
Massive trees of every type crowded the little clearing, covering all but the tiniest chinks

of sky from view with their massive leaves. It
was extremely quiet, and Lila realised this was because of

the sudden loss of Otopia Tree, and all her network connections. There was no Incon now, no contact

with Otopia at
all, and in Alfheim, nobody listening or broadcasting a single thing; not in the

electromagnetic spectrum anyway
.

She switched off the engine and, enveloped in the sonic caress of falling water, dancing leaves and

drinking roots, she lifted Dar off the machine and carried him towards the A-frame building. The door

was only on a latch. Inside it
was dry and quiet, big enough for up to eight, with cots and mattresses set

out. She placed Dar on one of these. He was deathly pale and finding his pulse was mostly a matter of

good imagination. Where Lila had felt
his
andalune
hands guiding hers on the bike, she could find no

trace of that
body now. She ignored all thoughts of pursuing Zal and demanded only professionalism as

she undid the tight strapping of ripped-up shirt that bound his arms across his chest, in the hope that this

might
help him breathe. It didn't.

As she had suspected from the impact
of the bar, both his upper arms were cleanly broken but these,

although nasty, weren't life-threatening injuries. His ribcage was another story. Lila didn't bother

searching out

the elf first
aid. She didn't
have any confidence that she'd apply it properly. But she could do a

reasonable job herself, in spite of a small reservation that Dar would no doubt heavily object to what she

was about to do.

Her Al-self had only the scantiest of information on the elf response to X-ray radiation, but she

guessed that would be too dangerous to try. Lila quickly pulled her own field kit out of the inner

compartments in her thighs and stripped the backing off an ECG sensor, opening Dar's tunic and shirt to

place it
gently on the skin of his chest, over his heart. She tuned her Al-senses into the instruments and

immediately the spike and sine of muscular electrical activity flowed into her sight
- a blue line over the

top of her ordinary vision. She didn't know what was normal for elves but she could see that, if nothing

else, it
was regular
.
Far too regular for her liking
.
In humans and all Otopian mammals a signal like that

meant death was very near,

'Shit!' She didn't
understand
.
Where was the great healing power of the wretched land now? Gwil had

suggested simply being here in Alfheim was enough, but it clearly wasn't.

Lila recalibrated the sensors in her left hand and opened a sachet of lubricant gel with her teeth. She

spread this over her hand and Dar's chest, where the dark marks of superficial bruising showed red and

black. No sign of deeper damage had risen. That
was another bad sign. She ran her hand across him,

and switched her vision and hearing entirely into her hand.

Echocardiogram, then ultrasound.

It was now clear what crushing damage the bar had done. Dar's sternum was broken and several ribs

fractured more than once, creat
-
ing what
was medically known as a flail ribcage, where a whole section

had become completely detached and ineffective, moved only by his slight
breaths but not aiding

breathing. There was serious bleeding around his lungs, and also into the pericardium surrounding his

heart, hence its regularity and weakness. Lila blood-tested him as fast as she could but she wasn't even

sure she could wait or should wait for the gas analysis. She looked under his eyelids - almost white,

becoming blueish. He was cyanotic. He needed more oxygen.

'Jesus Christ!' she said, several times, rather loudly, to nerve herself as she broke open sealed packs,

hunting down the really big needles
.
On its prompt she allowed her Al-self to activate a cortical shunt that

bypassed her emotional responses, leaving them as a minimal

experience that
could thoroughly inform but
not hamper her physical precision. Now her Al-self could

cue its surgical procedures and run them effectively. Although she'd never done what she was about to

do, the hands of hundreds of expert surgeons informed the movement of her own fingers and thumbs
.

She watched herself from a quiet meditative state as her left hand guided and her right hand punched

the chest drain into the wall of Dar's body between two ribs
.
Her hands could see what they were doing

with their own intricate sensors
.
They positioned the needle tip in the cavity full of blood surrounding

Dar's heart
and switched on one of the minor motors in Lila's arm to power a small negative pressure

pump at
the other end of the drain tube
.
Dark, russet-coloured blood began to flow. Unfortunately, Lila

had nowhere for it
to go, so it
began to spatter and pool on the pretty hardwood floor.

Moving with care she inserted another drain for his left lung and attached that
to a secondary pump

with a minor power line feeding from one of her weapon ports. And there they were, she thought, tied

neatly to one another, blood trickling around them, rain falling outside in the quiet, quiet
forest. The idea

made her smile.

Mercifully, she saw the ECG readout begin to break its rhythm into the less distressing irregularity of

tachycardia as his heart
began to recover
.
She felt his pulse strengthen at the same time
.
The blood gas

response came up finally - low ox, high carbon dioxide, high nitro-gen
.
. . whatever. Anyway, she'd

done the right
thing and she sat
back on her heels now to pick out
a suitable painkiller with a sense of

satisfaction. She administered several shots, placed as accurately as possible, so that
there wouldn't be