Scuffle
by Dave Hutchinson

He means to stick around for a while after the group splits up. The house and the hills around it have somehow become a part of his internal landscape. But it turns out he has underestimated just how much the people were a part of that landscape too, and with them gone he's lost. 
After three weeks drifting through empty rooms and down deserted corridors the frosty sound of orphaned wind chimes starts to gnaw around the edges of his mind, the quiet candlelit nights to outline a peculiar madness, like x-rays shining through flesh. 
With the house abandoned, kids from the village start to come up at night on nasal little quad-bikes, to smash windows and fuck drunkenly in the orchards. The group had never been that popular in the village, anyway, even before the Crash—a bunch of hippy drop-outs bashing drums and indulging in free love and dope and tending their goats instead of getting themselves honest jobs. Finding Jimmy still in residence doesn't seem to deter the kids, only makes their vandalism all the sweeter, and night after night he stands at the mullioned windows and watches them dancing about their fires. 
None of which is so bad. Paris was worse. It's only when he finds himself, in full cammo and barely breathing, stalking them through the trees one evening with a knife taken from the kitchens and honed down to an edge you could shave a pig with, that he knows it's over for him here. 

· · · · · 

The spring's slow unwinding of roads and railways sees him drifting vaguely South out of Scotland with the available transport, thumbing lifts on carts and lorries, jumping freightliner trains, doing odd jobs here and there to keep himself in food and running money. 
For a while, he haunts the echoing abandoned steelworks of the South Wales coast. Later, he falls in with a group of lantern-eyed young people travelling, for reasons he never really discovers, from Brecon to York in a ragged convoy of makeshift gasogenes and horse-drawn caravans. 
He thinks for a while that he senses something of what he lost when the group broke up. The kids are dirty and poor and nothing in the convoy ever seems to work quite right, but Jimmy feels a certain hope among them, a certain peace he had been thinking he had lost for ever. They genuinely seem to want an alternative lifestyle, to reject the world that gave them the War and the Crash. There is even a quiet girl with a bead-bedecked flute, snug nights in her caravan while storms bombard the convoy with hail the size of lychees. 
And when they reach York the kids sell their vans, set the horses loose on the moors overlooking Ripon, and go back to their parents. The girl with the flute is spirited away by a middle-aged couple driving a bronze hydrogen-cell Mercedes, who hug and kiss her and tell her her pony is looking forward to seeing her again, and all Jimmy can do is stand there and stare as the kids leave one by one, until he's standing alone on the grass verge again. 

· · · · · 

The unwinding of roads sets him down in an old methane-conversion coach, where he spends a stormy night's breakdown at the roadside somewhere in Northamptonshire. While the other passengers snore and fidget and fart, Jimmy sits and stares at his reflection in the streaming window, until the growing pressure of his bladder forces him out into the dark and the rain. 
When he comes back, jacket over his head to try and keep himself vaguely dry, one of the passengers is at the front arguing with the driver. As Jimmy stops in the doorway to shake rain off his coat, he hears the passenger demanding to know how long they'll have to wait here. The driver, who just wants to sleep, is saying that the mechanics have to come down from Lincoln, and with the roads the way they are there's no telling how long it might take them to arrive. 
"I've got an appointment in Cambridge tomorrow morning," the passenger says. He's a tall, gaunt-faced man, wearing a wrinkled suit. 
"You should've got the fucking train, then, mate," the driver tells him. But he says it quietly, so the other passengers don't hear. 
The passenger looks out through the windscreen. "There must be a garage out there somewhere." 
The driver snorts. "If you think I'm going out there to look for a garage, mate, you must be crazy. I've radioed my base and there's a mechanic coming. Now do us all a favour and go back and get some sleep, eh?" And he gives Jimmy a wink as he comes back up the steps into the bus. 
The passenger reaches into an inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out his wallet, and flips it open. As Jimmy squeezes past into the aisle, he catches just a glimpse of a laminated card inside the wallet, and the eagle-and-sickle of the Rykov-Forsythe Commission embossed on it. 
He finds his seat more or less by touch, breathing hard. Sits staring at his reflection again, imagining it staring back at him from the bulletproof glass of the dock in some Tallinn courtroom. He glances up at his rucksack in the overhead rack, mentally rehearsing the moves necessary to get at the Heckler in an emergency. Just bad luck, he keeps telling himself. Just bad luck. 
He watches the Commission cop return muttering to his seat. Quite why the man is travelling by coach, when in most of the old Union they travel in heavily-armed air-conditioned comfort, will just have to remain a mystery. He's also alone, which is unusual to say the least. But that too will have to remain a mystery. 
Jimmy sits very still for a very long time. The storm passes eastwards. Stars show themselves between racing rags of cloud. 
Finally, when he's a certain as he can be that everybody else on the bus is asleep, Jimmy stands and takes his rucksack down from the rack and walks up the aisle. The driver is slumped back in his seat, mouth open, eyes shut, snoring. Jimmy leans forward and presses a fat red button on the dashboard. 
The hiss of the door's hydraulics seems terribly loud to him, but it's probably not much louder that the driver's snoring. Jimmy steps down into a smell of rain-wet grass and trees, pushes the door closed behind him, and takes off at a right-angle to the road, along the line of a hedge marking the edge of an immense grassy field. 

· · · · · 

The Crash, the end of the War, caught Jimmy in a Paris straight out of a Bosch painting, civilisation entirely broken down, the city walled off from the rest of France by Occupation forces stationed in the suburbs. 
Jimmy had been slipped through the roadblocks early one drizzly morning with nothing but a knife and a length of razor-fine wire and instructions to hunt down and kill a certain woman. 
He never found out who the woman was, or why the Alliance wanted her dead. He never found her at all. The Crash and its attendant chaos drove the last fragile vestiges of law and order from Paris. Jimmy didn't even bother to make contact with his control in the outer suburbs; once he was out of the city he just kept going. 
Sometime later he wound up in a kickboxing parlour in Cologne. For a time he made a tidy living for himself and for Rudi, the dark unsmiling Polish boy who had blown in one night and appointed himself his manager, but the gunslinger ethic of it all started to bother Jimmy. Kids were coming from all over Europe, gaunt and hollow-eyed, for a crack at the little New Zealander. And by then the Rykov-Forsythe cops had got their act together and the Hanseatic Trials were starting, and it was only a matter of time before someone performed the simple equation which identified him as a war criminal, and turned him in for the reward or to settle an old score. 
One gritty morning at the end of March, he dug his nest-egg out of the wall of a bombed-out office building and drifted away without saying goodbye to Rudi. He spent three weeks hitching unhurriedly towards Hamburg, lost among the armies of refugees washing back and forth across Europe, then another week working his way carefully to Sopot, and stowed away on a coal carrier bound for Harwich, no plan in his head but escape from the war zone. 

· · · · · 

Jimmy's op cost New Zealand Special Forces a fortune; his night-vision is abnormally good, even on a rainy moonless night. He runs flat-out for sixteen or seventeen kilometres. Probably the Commission cop is so pissed-off at having missed his meeting that he won't notice one less passenger on the coach when it sets off again, but best safe than sorry. 
Dawn catches him on a low hill overlooking a shallow valley of gently-steaming woodland. Beyond the valley, panes of mist drift gently away towards the uncertain horizon across a nearly flat chessboard of immense hedgeless fields and Forestry Commission reforestation projects, new Wildwoods planted to balance the huge expanses of scientifically-plotted crops stretching away across the drained Fens to the Anglian coast. Now the robot harvesting machinery is useless, the fields are growing mostly wild. Some corners have been ploughed and replanted, but most seem to be sinking gently back into a vaguely mediaeval state. 
Perfectly peaceful, save for a great granular cloud of crows bursting into the air to the orchestration of two shots from a 12-gauge shotgun. 

· · · · · 

As far as he can judge—and he can judge very well—the shots came from the vicinity of a Hans Christian Andersen cottage deep in the woods, in a clearing at the far end of a straight forestry road. He approaches it cautiously, picking his way anglewise from tree to tree until he has a good view. 
The cottage sits quiet and still, a thread of smoke twirling up from the chimney. At one side of the clearing an old Honda Landmaster stands on at least two flat tyres, bonnet up and passenger door open. He can't see any people; on his approach, he thought he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of one of the cottage windows, but no one has shown themselves. From the cover of the trees, he watches a squirrel come up over the peak of the thatched roof, stand on its hind legs to sniff the morning, and drop back out of sight. 
Then everything slows down. 
He feels rather than hears it, a high breathy rushing sigh like a reflex sparking along his nerves, somersaulting him backwards from a standing start as the arrow buries itself throat-high in the tree he was standing against. 
The moment of landing is an orderly mind's joy, like a jigsaw box spilling on a table and all the pieces spontaneously falling into place. Everything is just where it should be, suddenly in focus, every noise crisp and sharp, bare feet snapping a twig somewhere out of sight to his left, faint creak of tension in the body of the bow … 
The released string makes hardly any sound at all. He cartwheels away from the arrow, flickflacks once and tumbles into the air. 
And then something is whistling towards him while he's still off the ground. He tries to twist away from it but a small solid mass whips up and strikes him behind the ear. 
It's no good. He's too rusty; those long Winter nights with the group have taken the edge off him, eroded his concentration. He stumbles as he lands, and barely has time to raise his head to see an incredibly fast grey something rushing towards him between the trees … singing … 
"Fucker!" The roar of the shotgun is horribly loud, terribly precise. "Leave him alone, you fucking bastard!" And another shot, exploding twigs and leaves off the ground barely a metre from his foot. 
And the grey thing is gone, whispering bare footsteps flittering away into the dimness under the trees as the pain approaches him out of the same grey musty distance. 

· · · · · 

"It's been out there about a fortnight. It won't let me go anywhere. There's almost no food in the house; we keep having brownouts, I can't freeze anything." 
Jimmy's still a little high after the fight. Her movements are too sloppy and imprecise in the still landscape of the kitchen. Everything is too correct, the big Aga stove, the pine table, the dark oak cupboards. Everything in its correct place, planes of mass across the room. He could go through here blindfolded, at a full run, and still not bump into anything. 
"This might hurt," she warns, tipping a bottle of clear fluid against a cotton-wool ball. Jimmy smells the high clean sweetness of pure alcohol, winces slightly as she touches it to the bruised spot behind his ear. "Sorry," she says. 
He shakes his head. "It's okay." 
"The skin's not broken, but you're going to have a really bad bruise here." 
"Fine." In the circumstances, he should think himself fortunate just to have a really bad bruise. 
She crosses to the sink, drops the cotton-wool ball into a fliptop bin, sets the bottle on the stainless-steel draining board, beside the shotgun. Her name is Bethany. She has long brown hair and tired eyes, and she never lets the twelve-gauge out of her arm's reach. 
"You're Australian," she says. 
"New Zealand." 
She leans back against the worktop. "The Americans were here. In Peterborough and Northampton. And everywhere else, I suppose. Rest and recuperation, they called it." 
He'd forgotten that, after seceding from the Union, Britain had, after a fashion, become an Occupied country. "I don't imagine they had much rest," he says, thinking of France and what they had done there. 
"My Gran said it was just like the Second World War," Bethany says. "Overpaid, oversexed and over here, she said. The Americans." She goes over to the Aga and picks up the kettle. "I mean, she wasn't old enough to have lived through the Second World War. I suppose she read about it in a book or saw a film about it or something. Would you like a cup of tea?" 
"I beg your pardon?" 
"Tea." She holds up the kettle and waggles it gently. "A cup of tea. My Gran said it's the best thing for shock." 
"Fine," says Jimmy. "Whatever." He looks over at the kitchen's third occupant, sitting in the corner by the Aga, a little boy, maybe eight or nine years old, almost overwhelmed by a chunky white fishing sweater. The boy's eyes flick from Jimmy to Bethany as they speak, but so far he himself hasn't said a word. 
Bethany fills the kettle, brings it back to the Aga. "We ran out of tea bags last week. I've been drying out the old ones and reusing them. I hope you don't mind." 
Jimmy shakes his head. 
"It makes the tea a bit weak, but it still tastes all right." 
"It'll be fine, I'm sure." 
"And we haven't got any milk or sugar." 
"I don't use them." Although he'll have to have something soon, to make up for the calories he burned outside, or he'll get hypoglycemic. He feels vaguely light-headed, and he doesn't know whether it's an approaching hypo, or the sheer disjointedness of the situation. Less than an hour ago, he was running across Northamptonshire, free as a bird. Now he's locked in a cottage with a little boy and a crazy woman. 
He bows his head and looks down at the tabletop, on which is resting an arrow. It's perfectly straight, pencil-thin, over a metre long, and flighted with grey goose-feathers. At the business end is a beautiful little leaf-shape chipped from bottle-green glass, sharper than a scalpel and bound to the shaft with leather thonging as fine as cat-gut. 
"You said it won't let you go anywhere," he says, looking up at Bethany. She just looks back at him, expressionless. "So, what's happening here?" 
All of a sudden she scoops the shotgun off the draining board. "I've got to go to the loo," she tells him. "Won't be a minute." And she disappears through the door into the hall. 
Jimmy watches her go, then he looks at the boy. "Well," he says. "What's it like, having a mad mum?" The boy just stares at him, wide-eyed. Possibly that's answer enough. 
Also on the table is the thing that made the bruise behind his ear. It's a form of bolas, three small heavy wooden balls attached to a common centre by strands of razor-wire. The balls are knobby with lovely little carvings of birds, fish, foxes, and at the point where the strands of wire meet is a little wooden handle, similarly carved. The thing had wrapped itself around a tree after almost braining Jimmy, and it had taken him fifteen nervous nitpicking minutes to get it off, Bethany keeping watch with the shotgun. 
The kettle's jetting a thick plume of steam. Jimmy gets up and takes it off the heat. In a little tin on the windowsill are the dried teabags. Jimmy selects four of the least mangy-looking and drops them into a teapot and pours water onto them. Then he stands looking out of the window above the sink and stares at the screen of trees beyond the clearing, thinking about that momentary grey rushing thing. 
"It's got yellow eyes," Bethany says from the kitchen doorway. "Corn-yellow. I saw it up close once." 
He looks round. "What's going on, Bethany?" 
"It's an elf," she says calmly and matter-of-factly. 
"It's a what?" 
"An elf," she says. "An Earth Spirit. Don't you have them in Australia?" 

· · · · · 

"It killed my husband. Out on the forestry road. I found him." She swallows, looks away. "His head was gone." 
Jimmy looks into the fire. The living room is small and dark, the furniture covered in clean but faded Laura Ashley fabric. The boy has followed them from the kitchen, sits on a cushion in a corner, watches them with a rapt expression on his face, as if he's watching them composing scriptures. 
"Didn't you call for help?" Jimmy asks. 
Bethany sniffs, runs the back of her hand under her nose. "The phones still don't work. They haven't got around to debugging the local exchange. Christ only knows when they'll get the mobile network up and running again." She looks at the window. "After I found Tom I just ran straight back here and bolted the door. I didn't dare come out again for two days. When I did step outside, it was out there waiting. Out at the edge of the wood." 
"And it's kept you here ever since." 
She nods. "If I go outside it shoots arrows at me. Sometimes it tries to get into the house." 
Jimmy sips his recycled tea. It tastes awful, but he's drunk worse. "What does it want?" 
She stands up and walks over to the window. "Sometimes I think it wants to fuck me." 
He stares at her. Then, to cover his surprise, he says, "I thought elves were supposed to be good guys. Little people with pointed ears. Not ninja assassins." 
Bethany turns and sighs. Sloppy technique, that, framing herself in the window. He has to fight the urge to rugby-tackle her and drag her down out of sight. 
"I think," she says with the gravity of someone who has thought about this a great deal, "that we've had the elves all wrong." 
"No shit." 
She nods. "I think this is what the elves turned into. What we turned them into when we cut down the forests, ploughed the land, poisoned the water, drove them into smaller and smaller corners. They never had a chance, really. I think some of them adapted to the cities, lived in the sewers, grubbed in dustbins for food. They're probably all completely insane by now." 
Jimmy looks into the fire again, at the logs spitting in the flames, and he can't help wondering who cut the logs, who brought them into the cottage, why … whatever it is that's out there let them do it. 
Bethany finally moves away from the window. "Come on," she says. "I want to show you something." 

· · · · · 

Bethany's workroom used to be a pantry or a scullery or something. Now its walls are painted white and lined with benches of matt-black consoles, wafer-screens, alphanumeric tapboards. Behind the door on a plastic hook hangs a white Polhemus analog-feedback suit, its opaque bubble-helmet lolling forward and draping a brightly-coloured braid of optical ribbon over one shoulder. 
"I'm a programmer," says Bethany. Then she shrugs. "Used to be, anyway." She sits in a swivel chair in the middle of the room and cradles the shotgun in her arms. The boy watches them from the doorway. "I watched it happen. The Crash. Do you know how the suit works?" 
Jimmy shakes his head. 
She swivels and looks at the empty mylar figure hanging from the door. "It generates a graphic analog of the program you're working on. The feedback loops let you move data about with your hands." She shrugs. "It wasn't much more than program assembly, really. Other people wrote the clever bits in modules, and the big software firms contracted the assembly work out to people like me; all I did was put them together. But it was some extra money." She smiles, and a chill goes down Jimmy's back. He's never seen a smile like that before, bright and cheerful and completely, quietly, insane. "A cottage industry, you see?" 
Jimmy finds himself nodding, just to stop her smiling like that. He never wants anyone to smile at him like that again. 
"Usually I use a construction-set analog," Bethany tells him, relaxing back in the chair. "Bricks, beams, nuts and bolts. The company emails you the bits and pieces, and you put them together. I saw it come in. It was like a swarm of flies. Millions and millions of tiny little orange flies. I'd never seen anything like it. It ate the program I was assembling. Then it took out the graphics engine. Then it took out the satellite link I was connected to. Then it took out the control system at the power station. All before I could move." 
"A virus," says Jimmy, repeating old rumour. 
She shrugs. "It could have come from anywhere. It was probably military, but these days who knows? Personally, I think it was just tasked to attack one particular system, but someone was using the wrong satcom link or the wrong landline at the wrong moment and it got out somehow. It was really good, whatever it was. It took about fifteen minutes to end the War." She smiles again, but this time it isn't nearly as scary. "Of course, it buggered up every on-line computer system on Earth while it was doing it, but that's progress for you, eh?" 
"So what's all this got to do with … " He gestures outside. 
"Ah." She looks sad, which if anything is more scary than when she smiles. "We're vulnerable now. All our clever toys are dead." 
"So that thing outside suddenly decided it was the right time to kill your husband and pen you up in here?" 
She stands and walks up to him. "This is just a scuffle in the corner of the playground. They're so patient. They know we're weak now, they know we've lost faith in our technology. They're picking us off, one by one, testing our strength." She walks past him and out of the door. "And when they're ready they'll come out of hiding and put the Industrial Revolution to the sword." 

· · · · · 

Back in the kitchen, Jimmy stands at the window again. If he cranes his head to the right, he can just see one corner of the abandoned Landmaster. "What happened to the truck?" 
"I don't know," says Bethany. "It was like that when I tried to get away. The elf must have tried to wreck it. The tyres are self-sealing, so the punctures will have healed. They just need reinflating. I don't know what else it's done." 
He stands thinking for a long time. Then he goes over to his rucksack, unlaces it, and lifts out the Heckler & Koch. 
Bethany's eyes go wide when she sees the fletcher. "What are you going to do?" 
"I'm going to have a look at the truck," he says, snapping an ammunition cassette under the pistol's barrel and putting another couple in his jacket pockets. "Maybe we can drive it out of here." 
"The elf won't let you." 
He looks at her. "And you have a better idea?" 
She thinks about it. Shakes her head. "It'll kill you," she says dully. 
"It can try," he tells her. "Is there a toolkit for the truck?" 
Bethany nods. "In the back. There's a panel in the floor." 
"Okay. Stay away from the windows, right?" 
"Right." 
"Right." Jimmy goes over to the door, turns the handle, opens it slowly, the first rush of awareness rising in him as he scans the clearing. Shadows become sharp, panes of sunlight shatter down under the trees to illuminate wickerworks of twigs and leafs on the ground, fractal geometries of fern bushes, browned rhododenrons. He searches the clearing for anomalous shadows, finds none, takes a step outside. 
One step. Two step. Three step. The air tightens on his face, the skin becomes a drumhead conducting every vibration. Every step crisp and precise. 
Around the back of the truck to the open tailgate. He searches the luggage compartment and finds a ring recessed into the floor. A tug brings up a hinged trapdoor covering a shallow compartment filled with racked tools. There are gaps where some of the tools should be. Jimmy carries on around to the open bonnet. 
As he does so, he sees a tree at the edge of the clearing which appears to be festooned with Christmas decorations. He steps cautiously over to it, head tilted to one side. 
It's a small tree, not much more than a sapling. Hanging from the branches, apparently at random, are all manner of objects. Here a flower, there an arrow, elsewhere a lock of straight black hair. 
He walks slowly round the tree, seeing three small birds hanging upside down, each suspended by its right leg with a length of fine thonging. Shiny components, nuts and bolts, a little ring-spanner that might have come from the Landmaster, scrap of grey cloth, bit of string with some red and green beads strung on it, strands of grass and razor-wire twined together, bits of an old manual typewriter … 
His body acts of itself, cartwheeling him to the left. The arrow passes through his jacket under the armpit, between arm and body. At the top of the cartwheel he springs up and fires at the grey figure crouching on the ridge of the cottage's roof. The Heckler fills the clearing with the sound of a swarm of bees and a thousand flechettes chop a neat arc of sky out of the thatch, but the grey figure is already gone and he can hear its bare footsteps receding into the woods behind the cottage … receding … gone … 

· · · · · 

Jimmy was eight when he discovered the Outside World. 
Up till then, his world had been a sodden, misty valley in the South Island, where his father tried to manage a sheep station, an enterprise which had been doomed from the start but had somehow not failed altogether, marooning the family at the bitter end of an unpaved road kilometres from their nearest neighbours. 
Jimmy's was a world bounded by the hills which rose out of the wet valley floor, a world of dying trees, wild dogs, three sullen Maoris with blue-tattooed faces who increasingly took over the day-to-day running of the station while Jimmy's father spent longer and longer locked in the study reading the accounts over and over again, looking for the occult conjunction of figures by which the station would either succeed and save him, or go bust and release him. 
Even when Jimmy's mother left, the old man refused to quit until he had resolved his dilemma. But the station would not make him money, and it would not let him go. It just fell victim to a peculiar creeping entropy, and carried him with it. 
The entropy extended to enclose the valley. It was littered with sheep skeletons, half-buried skulls, ribcages curving up out of scummy puddles. It was also, for some inexplicable reason, littered with dead cars. 
This fascinated Jimmy. He never heard or saw them arrive; they were just there, one by one, sitting on their wheelrims, tipped on their sides or entirely over on their roofs, being eroded by the weather. One day he discovered a nearly-new Volvo, still not significantly rusted, half-buried nose-first in a shallow pond, as if a great hand had reached down from the sky and just poked it into the ground. 
Mostly the junked cars had been stripped of everything saleable before they were dumped, but one drizzly day out exploring, Jimmy discovered a late-model Korean Jeep which seemed simply to have been driven into the valley and abandoned whole. 
Everything worked. The keys were in the ignition, the engine turned over, the lights came on. The radio … 
The face of the radio deck lit up as he touched the power stud, and the Outside World sprang from the Jeep's quad speakers. 
The first thing he heard was a news report about worsening relations between the European Union and the United States. He was too young, and the issues involved too complex, for him to understand the finer details, but there seemed an awful lot of tough talking, an awful lot of threats, complicated by the fact that many of the European nations still seemed to be allied to the United States by old treaties. He changed the channel, listened to a comedy show being broadcast from a little pirate station in Dunedin. 
The Jeep became his greatest secret and he piled dead branches and soggy bits of bush over it until it lurked under a sodden tumulus, and every day, when work permitted, he returned to sit in the warm dry interior, his face lit by the LEDs of the radio, enthralled as the World laughed and sang around him, invisible and glorious. 
Finally he listened the Jeep's battery flat, but by that time the valley's entropy had carried his father entirely away. The Maoris found him face-down in a pond on the far side of the station, one hand still clutching the calculator he had tried vainly to bend towards salvation. 
The Outside World came to Jimmy then. Aunt Phil and Uncle Charlie with their hard eyes and their crumbling house on the outskirts of Christchurch, and Jimmy never saw the valley again, or the Maoris or the Jeep. All had been erased, the space redrawn with late nights working in Uncle Charlie's convenience store, and a school where even the teachers mocked his country-boy accent. 
Those were the early days of augmentation, artificially jacking up the human machine to inhuman levels. First it was astronauts, warped beyond recognition to labour in orbit. Then it began to filter down through civilisation, a limited augmentation for manual workers, promise of augmentation for all eventually. Jimmy watched science shows, watched hyped amateurs make fools of Kung Fu masters, Zen knights, ninja assassins. He watched, and his eyes began to shine. He took odd-jobs, worked double and treble shifts at the store at weekends, stumbled into school on Mondays as if the real world was a dream and his dream was the only real world. 
He worked with a sentence on his head; augmentation had to take place within a year of the onset of puberty, or it killed the subject. 
The year Jimmy's voice broke was the year hyped athletes were banned from the Auckland Olympics. He withdrew from the bank what money he had been able to scrape together, and one warm night climbed out of his bedroom window and was gone. 

· · · · · 

He tells her all this as night gathers under the trees and comes across the clearing to lean in against the windows. He tells her of lying about his age to sign up with the Army, of volunteering for Special Forces training, the wildfire pain of the op, nerves and muscles electrochemically modified, gene-tailored neurotransmitters, subtle modifications in the mitochondria. He would never have been able to afford the op himself, he says. The Army was his only chance, but it came with a terrible price. 
He tells her about Paris. A City beyond saving, the Alliance had said. So they hadn't bothered to try, just dumped a couple of tactical nukes on it, battlefield ordinance requisitioned from the Westphalian tank regiments. Like using a grenade to clear out a termite mound. Not the actions of rational men. But even before the Crash the War had been short on rationality. 
And then the Trials. In Estonia, a court was convened to judge the destruction of Paris. Fifteen hundred Alliance commanders and other ranks found guilty, marching five by five out into a Tallinn courtyard and the waiting firing squad. And the trials for all the other atrocities. Bruges. The Catalan Uprising. St. Petersburg. Over a hundred thousand judged and executed so far by the Commission, from both Alliance and Union. 
He starts to cry when he tells her about Scotland, and when he gets himself under control again and looks at her he realises the War doesn't concern her. The only enemy she recognises is the thing out in the woods. 
The child, sitting on the floor at her feet, only stares, and gives no sign of understanding at all. 

· · · · · 

Next morning is better. He wakes to the smell of frying bacon, follows it into the kitchen to find Bethany standing at the Aga manipulating a huge iron frying pan. The boy is in his usual corner, watching everything silently. 
"Morning," says Bethany. 
Jimmy mutters something and sits at the table rubbing a hand through his hair. 
She pours a mug of that appalling tea, sets it in front of him. "Did you sleep all right?" 
"Mm," he says, though he's had almost no sleep at all. He gazes blearily around the kitchen, the sunlit blaze of the window, the child. "Your boy doesn't say much, does he." 
"Oh, he isn't mine," she says, turning to busy herself at the Aga again. 
He looks at the boy again. "Whose is he, then?" he asks, knowing he won't like the answer. 
"Some neighbours of ours, about a mile and a half away," she says while she turns the bacon in the pan. "He was hiding in a wardrobe. I found his parents sitting in their living room, all still and calm, as if they were waiting for someone to come visiting, but the tops of their heads were gone and their brains were missing." 
Oh, fine. Jimmy closes his eyes. 
Bethany dishes the bacon onto two plates and brings it over to the table. "I think that's how it learns about us," she says, sitting down opposite him. "Memory RNA. It eats people's brains." And she commences to fork down her breakfast while Jimmy sits staring at his plate. At one point she looks up and smiles at him, and it makes him shudder. "You're not eating. Aren't you hungry?" 
"No." 
"I'll have yours, then," she says, reaching across for his plate. "I haven't got enough food to let you waste it." 
Without looking at her, he says, "Why did you say you thought that thing out there wanted to fuck you?" 
She's silent for a few moments. "I have this dream," she says quietly. "Over and over again. That's how I know. Sometimes I dream it isn't just one thing that I'm fighting, it's the whole of Nature, and the elf is just a weapon. The warhead." 
Jimmy gets up and goes over to the window. "There's a tree out there. I saw it yesterday. With things hanging off it. What's that all about?" 
She joins him at the window. "I'm not sure what it is. Every morning there's something else there. Some twigs, a flower, a bit of cloth. It keeps growing. I think it's a story. I saw an old Robert Redford Western once where the Indians did something like that." 
"Story about what?" 
She shrugs and turns away. "About itself. About its people. About how fucking awful it's making my life. I don't know." 
"It's hardly likely to have seen any Robert Redford films." 
"Ah, but it might have eaten the brain of someone who had." She hears the snap of an ammo cassette being connected to the flechette pistol, turns to look at him. "What are you doing?" 
He doesn't answer, just sets the Heckler to full auto and opens the door, strides out across the clearing, past the Landmaster, Bethany behind him with the shotgun, the boy at her side, until they reach the tree. 
Today, there's a new part of the story. Hanging from a branch is the corpse of a fox, crucified like a man with its forelegs pulled apart and bound to a cross of two sticks. 
Bethany giggles. "I think it must have a sense of humour, sort of. That's meant to be you." 
He glares at her, not even bothering to ask how she thinks she knows this, then with an inarticulate yell he grabs the fox and tears it down from the branch and hurls it into the wood. "Go back into the house." 
"What?" 
"Both of you. Go back into the house and lock the door." 
"What about you?" 
He half-turns and levels the Heckler at her head. "Do as I say." 
She takes a step backward, holding out her hand for the child. He takes it, and together they retreat towards the cottage. Jimmy turns away from them, their footsteps growing louder and more precise as they go. Finally he hears the cottage door slam shut, hears the grinding of the key being turned in the lock. Then he steps forward into the trees, the secret geometry of the world falling into place around him. 
It almost takes him before he's begun; he barely hears the creak of the bow being drawn overhead, only just jumps out of the way as the arrow snaps down from the foliage above him and vanishes entirely into the earth. 
He fires straight up into the tree, is already moving as shredded leaves and branches shower down. He takes two running steps forward and jumps up into a tree, catching one of the lower branches and hauling himself up out of sight. He crouches there a moment, listening. 
The foot of the bow comes up out of nowhere, from a branch below his, ramming into his groin. He locks the pain down and springs out of the tree, somersaulting across to its neighbour and catching another branch, swinging up, raking the tree he just vacated with a two-second burst from the fletcher. 
Silence again. Then bare footsteps on the twigs below. 
He looks down and sees the elf step from a clump of bushes directly below him. A banner of grey hair, grey skin, stark naked but for a quiver of beaten bark slung over its shoulder, a dozen long straight arrows protruding from it. The precision of its movements is miraculous. Jimmy points the Heckler two-handed. 
And the elf looks up with calm corn-yellow eyes, its expression completely neutral. It looks up into his eyes, and Jimmy's finger freezes on the trigger. 
Without taking its eyes off him, the elf bends slowly and lays the bow down on the ground. Then it unslings the quiver and does the same with that. Then it straightens up, waiting. 
And Jimmy finally understands. 
Slowly, he unsnaps the ammo cassette from the Heckler, and tosses the fletcher down out of the tree, to land alongside the bow and the quiver. 
The elf looks at him a moment longer, then it's in the tree with him. He manages to block a kick, but the momentum knocks him off his perch; he twists as he falls, landing softly on his toes, feints sideways as the elf jumps at him again singing its soft, liquid, savage song. He brings up a foot as it shoots past him, catching it a glancing blow on the shoulder, then both of them are leaping off under the trees in opposite directions, joyously, exulting. 

· · · · · 

The spring sun arches up over the woods, burning off the morning mists. Beneath the trees dust and dry spores float in gauzy curtains. The sun creeps overhead; Jimmy and the elf stalk each other in a long slow dance punctuated by moments of extreme violence, meeting, clashing, drawing apart, meeting again. 
At one point Jimmy finds himself on the rim of a little hollow. There are bruises all over his body, one of his fingers is broken, and he's bleeding in a dozen places, none of them life-threatening. 
Down in the hollow, the leaf and twig litter is broken by perhaps half a dozen irregularly-sized humps in the ground. He steps down and looks at the humps. A skeletal forearm, stripped by insects and other predators, the hand completely disarticulated and scattered, is sticking straight up towards the sky. On the surface of another hump he can see the smooth white curve of a skull. 
Vegetation has grown on some of the graves, but the most recent is only covered with soil. He squats and dusts some of the dry earth away, finds himself looking into the face of a middle-aged man, dead maybe a week, maybe a fortnight, no more, with beetles exploring the holes where his eyes used to be and the entire top of his head, from just above his eyebrows, missing completely. 
Something rustles, just beyond the lip of the hollow. Jimmy jumps, crouches a moment on the other side, jumps again, is gone. 

· · · · · 

Finally the sun begins to creep towards the horizon again. The elf comes at him full-on, a grey singing presence brandishing a garotte of braided brambles. Jimmy steps aside, grabs an arm, hurls the creature at the trunk of a tree. It twists in midair, lands lightly, is gone. 
He listens to it go. Stands waiting. It doesn't come back. Night begins to fall beneath the trees. 

· · · · · 

The cottage is silent when he gets back, exhaustion creeping around the edges of his consciousness. He calls for Bethany, but she doesn't answer. He makes his bruised body go through the house, but he feels its abandonment. It feels like the house in Scotland, after the group split up and left. She's seen her chance, and he can't blame her. 
And all the time he can't help but think of those sad incompetent graves out in the woods, hiding the bodies of others who stumbled on Bethany and the boy, who stayed to help, who didn't make the grade. 
A scuffle, she called this. A fight in the corner of the playground. But he's not so sure. She'd said the elf wouldn't let her out of the clearing. But it let her walk a mile and a half through the woods to find the boy. And now it has let them go. Because it has finally got what it wanted. 
The elf, he thinks, has decided to make a stand. It has been looking for someone who can give it a fair fight. He thinks about that for a long time, while he goes through the cottage, opening cupboards and assessing the combat value of their contents. 
He goes back into the kitchen and stares out into the dark, thinking of the tall grey warhead watching him with corn-yellow eyes. A fair fight. Fine. 
After a while, he starts to whistle. Then he does the washing-up and puts the kettle on. 
The End