“Hey, who you b’n practising this with?” Jude demanded, rocking her hips, vulva tightening round the base of his thumb every time his ringer trailed gently over her anus.
Fixx grinned, kept quiet. The true answer was that he’d learnt it so far back he couldn’t remember. Keeping his hand there, Fixx lifted his lips from her soft mouth and smoothed them down her body, stopping to bite softly into the underside of a breast, tasting sweat, before reaching round to close his teeth on her nipple.
Jude shuddered.
“And this you didn’t learn with anyone either?” Her voice was warm, but something in it said she didn’t believe him and she was right not to. That one he’d been taught by a woman twelve years older than him. She taught music at Juilliard and at twenty-eight she’d seemed so adult to Fixx he couldn’t imagine ever getting that old. Couldn’t imagine what it was like to be that grown-up. Now he was older than she’d been then — and he still didn’t know.
Slipping his mouth down from Jude’s heavy breast, Fixx traced a line with his tongue back to her stomach and down between her opening legs. If there was one thing the music mistress at Juilliard had taught Fixx, it was to taste his partners full on, head buried deep between their thighs, not lap at them sideways like some nervous cat at the cream. That was what she’d told him and no one since had contradicted her. Shifting himself on Jude’s vast wooden bed, he sunk his head between her thighs, pushing her knees back to open her out to him.
She tasted of salt, acid and alkaline at the same time — sex cocktail — her juices and his mixed from their earlier bouts.
Fixx used his tongue to trace up one side of her vulva, tongue just missing her swollen clitoris before tracing down through the sodden fur of the other lip. Jude pushed her hips up crossly, but Fixx kept the circle going, never quite touching her clitoris. He knew just what she wanted. It was what he wanted, too. To thrust his tongue deep inside her, so far that his jaw hurt and his lips got bruised as she ground up against him. But he wasn’t going to, not yet.
Instead Fixx licked gently one more time around the outer lips and then used his tongue to peel aside her inner labia, finishing with the lightest flick of his tongue. Jude jumped and grabbed his head, pulling it hard against her. She was opened right out, vulva swollen with hunger.
Fixx sunk his finger deep into her anus. Jude stopped dead, so Fixx brushed his lower lip up across the exposed pink pearl of her clitoris and Jude jerked back into life again as Fixx sunk his thumb slowly into her cunt, squeezing the floor of her vagina against the walls of her anus, feeling the hard thud of her pulse in the flesh trapped between his finger and thumb.
“Sweet Jesus,” Jude said plaintively
Fixx smiled and then he was pulling finger and thumb out of her and kneeling between her knees and kissing her hard, all the while knowing she could taste herself on his lips. And as Jude’s arms came up to lock round his shoulders, he sunk slowly into her and then pulled out. Going in again harder, for the pleasure of feeling her tighten.
Jude’s legs snaked over the back of his legs, locking her hips against his. It was hard and vicious, her arms wrapped so tight around him that the pressure squashed her breasts almost flat as she rolled her full hips up into him, time and again. She was gasping with the effort, growling in his ear. And then she was done, tipped over the edge in a muffled groan, her vagina rippling in a long roll that tailed away into an after-echo of sudden jerks and tiny spasms.
“All done?” Fixx asked Jude as she unlocked her arms and sprawled back on the bed’s grey foam slab. The woman grinned, her face, breasts and stomach varnished with sweat. She stank of everything he liked. They should have used latex, but Fixx didn’t have any spray and Jude hadn’t volunteered any of her own.
“Yeah,” said Jude, looking up at him. “I’m finished.” Her smile twisted slightly and the expression that crossed her wide face was half resigned, half sad. “Now I s’pose you want to talk about where t’girl went...?”
“No,” said Fixx, pulling out of Jude. “Not yet, I got something to finish.”
He rolled Jude over so she lay face down on the mattress. Her blonde hair splayed forward on the bed, her breasts bulging taut at the side, light though her weight was in one-sixth G.
Pulling himself up on his arms, Fixx positioned himself above Jude’s buttocks and reached down to guide himself. Jude went utterly still, gecko-like and watchful. She didn’t push her bum up against him as he pushed gently against her, and she didn’t twist away: she just waited. For a second, Fixx considered it and then decided not. After all, this was more or less a first date.
Shifting slightly, he slid himself into her vulva instead, feeling her buttocks push up to meet him. The force of his hips as they came down on her curved bottom rocked Jude forward on her bed, sending tiny Shockwaves up the skin of her back. And then Fixx was pounding into her, all subtlety forgotten as he ploughed himself against her behind, driving Jude further and further up the mat, until at last she reached out her hands and pressed them flat against the wall, holding herself in place.
Fixx could feel his heartbeat spiral up over 120bpm, basic techno, as sweat ran down the inside of his arms. Reaching under her with both hands, Fixx worked his fingers between mattress and flesh until he rested on his knuckles, his fingers twisted hard around her soft nipples.
Blood pumped like thunder in his ears as Jude shook and moaned under his thrusts, her whole back stiff with shock each time he entered her. And then Fixx got lucky. Because it certainly wasn’t judgement that timed his spasm just as he’d buried himself to the hilt in her sweat-slicked body. Hands that had been grasping her breasts ripped free and Fixx grabbed her shoulders tight, still pulling himself into her long after the spasms were gone.
“Honey,” Jude’s voice was wondering, “You sure did need that...”
Collapsed along her broad back, Fixx nodded. Yeah, he had, it was years, maybe even a decade since he’d had a straightforward, no-holds-barred animal fuck. It wasn’t bought, it wasn’t earned and it certainly hadn’t been down to who he was or even who he’d once been. It was just sex.
The first Fixx knew something was wrong was when Jude stiffened. Her face tightened and Fixx realized she was no longer there in the room with him. Every scrap of her attention was focused on the other side of that bar room door.
“What is it?” Fixx asked. He was whispering, without even knowing why.
“Listen,” said Jude and Fixx did, unable to hear anything. A split second later he realized that was the point, but by then Jude was already pulling a cotton dress over her head, smoothing the creased material down round her bare hips.
“Wait,” said Jude and was gone, shutting the door on Fixx before he had time to protest. He could hear her outside, giving someone heavy grief, and then there was silence. Not a shot, then silence. Nor a scream, then silence. Just silence, like she’d suddenly decided to stop talking.
Fixx jacked up his hearing, pulling on his jeans and pushing himself into a T-shirt. But even with his skull implant turned right up he could hear nothing but a little heavy breathing and the creak of a cheap polycrete chair as someone shifted uneasily in their seat.
Not even the Cadillac jukebox was working. That in itself would have worried Fixx if he’d known more about the CasaNegro. Fixx quietly opened the heavy wooden door and tried to slip into the bar unnoticed, earning himself a few seconds’ reaction time.
But that wasn’t how things worked out.
A hand reached out to grab his throat, pulling Fixx through the door and tossing him into the centre of the room. Footsteps followed fast behind and then someone in a suit asked him a question.
“WhoYou? The words were swallowed, elided together into a single wet hiss. Only Fixx didn’t have time to notice the suit’s strange diction. He was too busy concentrating on the gun thrust hard against his throat.
An old-fashioned floating-breech Colt, with thirteen-shot magazine and ceramic barrel. Built-in silencer and primitive l
aser sight. At least, that was what it looked like on first glance: it was difficult to tell for sure when all you could see was a bit of the breech and the top of the handle, where the suit’s hand wasn’t. It was an official-issue Colt, though. Even with the muzzle pushed hard into his larynx, Fixx could see that.
“Me? I’m Fixx,” Fixx Valmont said. There didn’t seem much point in lying. Not that he needed to bother: the clone’s dark eyes remained as impassive as when Fixx first looked into them.
“YouSeenThisGirl?”
Fixx found himself staring at a cheap tri-D of LizAlec with her school shirt undone, her white bra pushed down to show small bare breasts. Behind her head was a poster of Tranquillity and a strapline that read Welcome to Planetside. She was crying.
“No,” Fixx said firmly, but he couldn’t drag his eyes from her face, not even when the gun was pushed even harder against his throat.
“YouSureYouNotSeenHer?”
Fixx shook his head, and then yelped as the Colt punched down on his temple, splitting skin.
“AnswerMyQuestion,” the wet voice hissed. “YouKnowThisGirl?”
“No,” said Fixx sadly, still looking at the tri-D, “I don’t know her at all.” Warm liquid ran sluggishly slow down his face, until he could taste blood, thick and salt, on his tongue. The gash would need a couple of instant stitches but he’d have settled for synthetic skin and a pack of paraDerm.
Behind the clone, Fixx saw Jude reach carefully under the bar, her fingers feeling along the underside of its surface. A taser velcroed into place maybe, or perhaps a little Browning snubPup, it depended how illegal her instincts were. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be enough.
Fixx could tell her that for free.
“Leave it,” Fixx insisted and Jude froze, a scowl on her face.
“WiseManDeadOtherwise...” the clone said wetly, nodding to a second suit who strode over to the bar and pushed Jude out of the way. He came up with a moby and a simple Ruger stungun. It seemed that for all CasaNegro’s chic, Jude’s taste in weapons wasn’t that extreme after all.
Both clones wore classically cut spider’s-silk Italian jackets, narrow lapels shimmering with black fluorescents strung into the cloth’s warp and weft. The effect was flashy but still restrained. Only three social groups still wore such clothes: senior Japanese politicians, CySat executives and Fourth Reich hitmen. And they didn’t look like executives or political animals to Fixx.
“You,” the first suit said softly, lifting Fixx so far upright he had to stand on tiptoe. “WeKnowYouKnowThisGirl.”
The clone hissed because his vocal chords weren’t fully formed, any more than his skin was thick enough to retain moisture. Hang the bastard out in the sun and he’d dehydrate. Whoever had backed out the matrix of genes for this one hadn’t gone for subtlety or form, the clone was designed for pure ruthlessness. Which meant it came out of some bioWarfare complex somewhere. And that made it strictly illegal. Clone soldiers had been banned under the fifth amendment to the European Constitution: and that had been back before Fixx was even born.
“No,” Fixx insisted heavily. “Not biblically, not personally...” The handle of the Colt sent shock waves rocking across his cranial cavity, dropping Fixx to his knees. What he felt as blinding pain was his bruised cortex swelling against the inside of his skull. Too many more blows like that and Fixx wouldn’t be around to not answer the man’s questions: even Fixx realized that.
“Don’t know her,” Fixx said again, adding, “What a way to go.” But by then he was talking to himself. Blood ran between shaking fingers to drip like Rorschach blots onto the dusty floor. He looked at the drips and then he looked again, but nothing in the blots made any sense, they didn’t even look like butterflies.
Jude had troubles of her own, Fixx realized sadly. The other clone had Jude’s moby to her own throat, its two copper electrodes not quite touching her skin, but the little diode on the handle was lit red and Fixx could see the dancing sparks from where he knelt. Throat jobs were about as nasty as it got without getting obscene. One move from the clone and she’d be biting out her own tongue in a convulsing bundle on the floor.
Fixx could feel Jude’s eyes on him, pale and blue. Shit, he could even see the impotent anger that burnt in them, but that wasn’t going to help him none. Of course, he’d looked death in the face before. As a kid out on the estates, surrounded by cheap crumbling concrete and spavined nags tethered fifteen floors up on dung-covered balconies. And the ones that weren’t on the balconies were hobbled with lengths of wire to keep them from wandering off the tissue-sided allotments.
Back then he’d nodded back to a Gardi who was toiling up a piss-stained stairwell in Adamshouse. That night, back of the bar, Crazy Liam put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Even Liam looked surprised when the gun misfired. The second time was later, in Paris, after lighting a candle for his dead mother in Sacré-Coeur. He’d just finished pushing his way through the tourists and had slid off down a side street when he’d been jumped by a mugger armed with molywire, but he’d never even got the lasso over Fixx’s neck.
Two bullets later, the man’s djellaba was stained red and his corpse was being rolled off the sidewalk by Fixx’s irate bodyguard. Not that Fixx was there to see it. He’d already been bundled onto the back of a Honda Ultraglide, all bulletproof back seat and turbo-boosted engine.
That was the end of his being allowed to wander out on his own, at least until his contract with Sony went the same way as the bodyguard, the Ultraglide and unlimited studio time. But then that was life, or it was his anyway. Fingers gripped his hair and yanked, Fixx rose and kept rising until he was face to face with the same impassive eyes.
“YouNoSeeThisGirl?”
“No,” Fixx said crossly. “NoSeeThisGirl... Okay?”
It wasn’t. The clone released Fixx and sank rigid fingers into Fixx’s solar plexus, fingertips pushing up to shock the heart into silence mid-beat. Fixx looked around once, saw the petrified crowd and then crumpled, his knees hitting the floor before his head did, though it was a close-run thing. The world accelerated away from him down an endless tunnel; as if it had been the roof of a lift and someone had just cut the wire.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Heart of Glass
What saved Fixx was a bio-augmentation he didn’t even remember having fitted. But had he ever bothered to read the subframes of his now long-cancelled contract he’d have realized the bioAug was standard. A fingernail-sized generator stapled to his left collarbone kick-started his heart. It did so by firing a single electric shock along a thin wire that led from the defibrillator down a vein and into the chambers of his heart. When the sensor buried in the heart muscle failed to detect sufficient movement from the first shock, the tiny generator fired up again and then shut down as the heart resumed its beat.
But by then no one in the CasaNegro was watching Fixx. Not even Jude and certainly not the clone, who stood over Fixx’s body blank-eyed and seemingly frozen as he stared at a Japanese woman who’d somehow materialized in the middle of the floor. Since neither bedroom door nor street curtain had been disturbed since Fixx had followed Jude out into the bar, the Japanese woman had to have been there all along. It was just that no one remembered seeing her.
Though it was hard to work out how Jude, Fixx or the clones could have failed to notice a waif-thin Japanese woman dressed in black and holding a long and very dangerous sword. The kind of sword that was all stealth-edged blade with a simple handle bound up in rope, the kind you usually only saw in Samurai tri-Ds.
She was kunoichi. One of the silent killers. And not getting noticed was her job. She’d been doing it for six days, trailing after Fixx like some shadow he thought he’d long since left behind. Only the rules had just changed and, as of now, Shiori was back working for the General.
It wasn’t the deadly looking blade that caught Fixx’s attention when he stuttered back to life, it was the odd way the woman was standing. Twisted round herself, the blade
parallel to the ground, hilt held right-handed in front of her narrow face, her left hand pressed flat against the pommel. Danger radiated from her like potential energy from an over-wound spring.
“Stand away from the body,” she said quietly. She was talking about him, Fixx realized with shock. Nobody moved. Though Fixx sensed rather than saw the clone standing over him stiffen slightly.
“You hear me?” The girl spoke perfect English but with a mixed West Coast drawl and Japanese lilt that sounded utterly beautiful to Fixx’s ears. Though he might just have liked her voice because she was busy saving his life. A Japanese ballerina with a stack of Japanese fighting techniques. He was too drunk, Fixx realized, too drunk, too wired and too battered to work it out: so he just lay there on the warm grit floor and watched the ballet unfold.
The real death waltz.
Jude was backing away now. Sliding to safety behind the bar. She glanced once at where Fixx lay curled into a foetal ball and then looked away. If the huge woman was surprised to find him still alive she didn’t let it show; though she smiled and began cleaning up the top of the bar.
Stripped naked, Fixx looked like a bizarre toy — all metal legs, silver eyes and scarred-up body — but the man was a survivor, they both were. That’s what made fucking him so good. All the same, Jude knew he’d be out of there eventually, off to find his pretty little rich girl.
Fuck it all...
Jude was surprised to find how much she minded. Amphetamine, ethanol and endorphin-boosters hit her gut as Jude did what she’d always promised herself she’d never do, take a gulp out of her own profits. The cold Electric Soup bit into the back of her throat like iced novocain, then expanded inside her temples as she hit brainfreeze. Hard edges crystallized around objects in the bar as the world came into hyperfocus.
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