“So what do we do now?” Fixx asked. His voice was dry as dust and so was the twist to his mouth.
“We do nothing,” Shiori said. “You go that way.” She pointed straight down the slope towards the bare metal. “I’m going... well, somewhere else.” Shiori didn’t bother to mention that, as she’d been operating in stealth mode, the tiny eyeSat had only got a clear view of Fixx. If Fixx couldn’t work that out for himself, well that was his problem.
“We’ll meet up later,” said Shiori, already walking away from him.
Yeah, right...
-=*=-
He didn’t go the way Shiori said, but he didn’t follow her, not at first. And it was letting Shiori go ahead that saved Fixx’s life, though the musician didn’t realize it until much later. He watched the blurred nothingness of her suit move away from him and saw the not-there shadow flick nimbly down the gravel slope in five easy jumps to land on a rock slab. He was meant to be keeping to the middle of the valley but he didn’t. The Arc was bad enough without being on his own. He might not like Shiori. No, wipe that, she might be an untrustworthy, psychotic little shit, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her go off without him.
Apart from anything else, he didn’t trust her not to hunt down whatever she was really up here for and make a run for the Shockwave Rider. The last thing Fixx needed was to be trapped on a two-thirds-finished ring colony with a goat boy, half a dozen chattering meerkats and a psychotic transsexual drug-designer named Sister Aaron who might, or might not, be in cold storage.
Three hours later, Fixx gave up skulking between long strips of shoulder-high polycrete that spliced into each other like wormcasts and decided to catch up with Shiori. But he never got the chance. Luck got in his way.
Ahead of him, the polycrete ducts had begun to be buried beneath a rising tide of black rock that rose rapidly and kept climbing until it became the slopes of a small mountain. Fist-sized gaps showed in the rock where bubbles had popped and it was obvious that the whole mountain was made of expanded ‘crete, pressure-treated to increase its surface density.
The fist-sized pockmarks occurred every few yards up to where the ground level would be. Above that Fixx saw none at all, just the perfect sheen of black basalt. Everything was grown, Fixx realized suddenly. The wormcast service tunnels, this half-finished mountain, even the shimmering metal of the Ring’s skin, it was all grown to order.
So much for the Brotherhood’s hatred of nanetics.
Ahead of him, Shiori slipped out of sight as she reached the top, clambering hand over hand with easy confidence as Fixx struggled unseen behind her to find each grip. And as Shiori launched herself over the edge, the sky winked out and every siren in the ring sounded.
“Sweet fuck!” Fixx made it to the top faster than he’d thought possible, his human hand scraped raw from the effort. Rolling over the top in a breathless heap, Fixx heard a low whine and the sky relit, miles of central filament igniting at once.
“Holy shit.” Fixx crouched low, watching Shiori. The Japanese woman looked worried and Fixx didn’t blame her. In Shiori’s place he’d have been bricking it.
Standing in front of Shiori, dressed in a simple white sarong, was the most beautiful woman who’d ever lived. Behind the woman stood a vast block of obsidian that rippled lightly across its clean-cut surface as if little wavelets were running over a black-glass mirror. Ash-white hair flowed across perfect shoulders. Full breasts nuzzled against the silk of her sarong which stopped above her knee to reveal flawless legs.
Fixx took a deep breath.
“Ah,” said Sister Aaron happily, “this must be your partner...”
Shiori turned slightly, saw Fixx and scowled.
“Now,” said Sister Aaron, “that’s not nice, is it?” She had the smile of an angel and the body of one, too. They went with her voice. Almost sadly, the woman shook her head at Shiori and then smiled again at Fixx, showing perfectly white, perfectly formed teeth.
Completely fucking barking, Fixx realized as he looked deep into her clear blue eyes. Absolutely off the scale.
“You shouldn’t be here, you know...” Sister Aaron spoke only to Shiori, as if Fixx wasn’t really there. Or rather, as if he existed for her only when she was staring directly at him. Fixx wasn’t big on being ignored, but looking again into the burning clarity of her eyes Fixx decided he could live with it just this once.
“I don’t have it,” Sister Aaron said lightly.
“Have what?” The words were out of Fixx’s mouth before he remembered he was planning to stay silent.
“Whatever she’s looking for,” said Sister Aaron. “I’d ask if one of you killed my brother, but there’s no point. Neither of you killed Michael, did you? You’re just the hired help...” Her blue eyes were ice-cold, inhuman.
Behind her the obsidian slab bubbled and roiled across its surface. She turned towards it as it opened to reveal steps leading down into darkness. Nanetics, Fixx told himself hurriedly, nothing more.
“Wait,” Shiori demanded, moving purposefully towards the ash-haired woman, “Tell me where Brother Michael hid the shrine.”
“Shrine?” The two women looked at each other, Fixx already forgotten, which was fine with him. “I don’t have your shrine and nor did my brother,” said Sister Aaron but Shiori just kept moving forwards on the balls of her feet, backing Sister Aaron towards the steps.
It was a bad move.
Noise exploded inside Fixx’s skull and, as he buckled, he saw Shiori struggle to stay upright as she desperately tried to protect her ears with her hands. She was exposed, vulnerable, completely open, everything a ballerina was meant not to be.
Fixx didn’t see the kick coming but then nor did Shiori or it wouldn’t have broken her neck. Spinning to a stop, Sister Aaron looked down at the Japanese woman’s twitching body and frowned.
“That was just too easy,” she said sadly. Bending over Shiori’s body, Sister Aaron twisted the woman’s head until it was straight again. Her hands rippled as they touched Shiori’s skin and then Sister Aaron reached deep inside Shiori’s flesh, clicking vertebrae back into place.
Fixx vomited.
Ignoring him, Sister Aaron pulled the Japanese girl upright and stepped back, leaving Shiori standing there, arms hanging loose at her side. “Let’s try that again,” said Sister Aaron, “shall we?”
The pale woman moved in a circle around Shiori, silent and impassive, coming in close and then dancing back but never quite touching the Japanese ballerina. She moved like this until Shiori finally stopped trembling and began to concentrate, dropping into a fighter’s crouch. Beginning to turn, not circling in the same way as Sister Aaron, but counter-clockwise so that she spun slowly in the opposite direction.
As she turned, Shiori bent slightly at the knees, alternately pushing her shoulders forward and then pulling them back, gathering power. Not letting herself attack until her mind was empty of all emotion. When Shiori’s attack came it was breathtakingly fast, a flip that took the Japanese woman high over Sister Aaron’s head and then kasumigiri as Shiori fell, the sword slash the ballerina had made her own.
Except there was no sword and Sister Aaron still stood, smiling happily.
Staring first at Sister Aaron and then at her own wrist, Shiori’s disbelief slid into horror as she realized the bracelet on her wrist had remained just that, a narrow black bracelet, no more. For the first time since she moved up from street samurai to ballerina, kasumigiri had failed. She’d lost without striking a single blow.
Sister Aaron spun once, fingers flicking out to stroke Shiori’s shoulder. A six-inch gash opened up in Shiori’s combat suit as its top streaked with a vivid red that owed nothing to environment-sensitive spider’s silk.
Before Shiori could react, Sister Aaron was moving again, a slight frown catching her empty, impossibly beautiful face. For a second, feeling Fixx’s horrified gaze, Sister Aaron stopped dead, her frown dissolving as she gave Fixx her sweetest smile. And then she went back
to tormenting Shiori.
She was hardwired, Fixx realized, her reaction times virally chopped, her nerves pulled taut on some methamphet derivative. But there was more to it than that. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said the woman was reading Shiori’s moves ahead of the Japanese woman making them. The bitch was scanning Shiori’s cortex and his, pulling out whatever amused her. That she could do both and fend off Shiori at the same time was what made it really frightening.
“Oh,” said Sister Aaron sourly, “this is nothing.” Her left hand flicked forward, forcing Shiori to throw up a guard. And as Shiori blocked the move, Sister Aaron reached out with her right hand, touching Shiori. It looked briefly like Sister Aaron was trying to fondle the Japanese woman’s breast. But when Sister Aaron took her fingers away, her nails were covered with blood and Shiori was staggering backwards, red oozing from a semicircular cut that gaped to show sick white flashes of naked rib.
“Children today,” Sister Aaron said crossly. “You know,” she almost spat the words at Shiori, “it’s a bad mistake to rely on just one weapon. Particularly when it doesn’t work.”
The Japanese woman was breathing heavily, pulling sour gasps through her open mouth. One hand held shut the gash in her right shoulder, the other was trying to staunch blood flowing from beneath her heart. Shiori still kept to her fighter’s crouch, and she still turned in a slow circle, claiming space around her; but her grey eyes were bleak and her bottom lip jutted forward slightly in a child’s pout.
Defeat clung to Shiori’s overheated body like sweat. Even Fixx could smell it. She’d been the best because she’d never met anyone better. Wasn’t it always the way? Horrified, Fixx sucked at his teeth, watching Sister Aaron move in for the kill.
The final cut was rapid and deep, starting above Shiori’s left hip and sweeping in a semicircle across her gut, flesh peeling open under Sister Aaron’s fingers. Shiori toppled forwards, hands scrabbling at her stomach as she tried to shovel her own pulsing, twitching intestines back inside her body.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
White light/White heat
“You could always kill her,” Sister Aaron told Fixx. “If you think that would be kind.”
The woman reached down and ripped free a standard-issue combat knife taped to Shiori’s ankle. The one Shiori had never even come close to using on her.
“Or you could always kill me instead. If you think you can...” The blonde woman tossed Fixx the lethal zytel blade, smiling as Fixx fumbled the catch and almost sliced his own fingers. “Alternatively, we could think of something else...”
Blue eyes held his and Fixx almost heard the waterfall-roar as blood rushed through his body and inside his head synapses exploded, firing and re-firing as they completed a fluorescent and familiar web of addiction. Waves of absolute need rolled over him... Sister Aaron nodded to herself, quietly amused. “So tell me,” she said, “what do you want to do?”
“Fuck you, probably,” said a girl’s voice behind her. “Fixx always did think with his dick.”
In that brief silent second before Sister Aaron turned round — while her eyes were still locked to those of Fixx — the musician saw real shock cross her face. And then the shock was gone, along with all other emotions, as Sister Aaron’s perfect Helen-of-Troy mask slid safely back into place.
“Blind-sided,” said Liz Alec contemptuously, from her position high on the obsidian block. She was breathing heavily from the climb, but her words were confident. “You should learn to concentrate.”
Jumping down, she landed in a crouch, not even looking at Fixx. And if LizAlec noticed Shiori’s blood drying like glazed black enamel on the parched ground then she didn’t let it show.
Someone else slid out onto the edge of the obsidian block, looking a lot less certain than LizAlec. But he jumped down anyway to stand beside the girl. Leon still wore a black T-shirt and stupid hair, but a fractal blade was held firm in his hand like he knew how to use it. And, looking at the way the boy flicked the blade from side to side, Fixx decided that maybe he did. Except that even the sharpest mono-molecular edge was going to be no use against Sister Aaron. Fixx could have told them that for free.
“You want to do it now?” LizAlec asked Sister Aaron, casually waving the boy to one side. Leon almost refused to move but then shuffled sideways, his eyes suddenly dark... Oh, the anger of youth, thought Fixx enviously. On a good day he could still remember what that felt like.
“Well, do you?” LizAlec demanded.
The ash-blonde woman remained silent, almost unmoving.
“No,” said LizAlec, “I didn’t think so.” She stepped neatly round Sister Aaron’s frozen form and knelt by Shiori. It looked, for a second, as if LizAlec intended to comfort the Japanese woman. But all LizAlec did was reach down and touch the black bracelet on Shiori’s wrist.
Sister Aaron winced.
There’s a point just before lead melts when it swells outwards and then splits through its own papery skin. That’s what Shiori’s bracelet did, coalescing into mirrored liquid that flowed up around LizAlec’s wrist, solidifying into a heavy bangle. And then, as LizAlec emptied her mind, she knew what Shiori’s bracelet was and how much more important the other one must be.
How much Anchee’s bracelet might offer.
LizAlec smiled sourly. “You know, if I hadn’t met your other half I wouldn’t know how to do that.” There was something about the way she said it that made Fixx’s skin crawl.
“You’re the little rich kid,” Sister Aaron said. It wasn’t a question.
“And you’re the clone Brother Michael had made with cells from his own rib. So he could fuck himself. Only you didn’t like sex, did you?” LizAlec looked at the woman’s unnerving perfection and shrugged. “You must have been such a disappointment.”
Pain flared inside LizAlec’s head, growing like cancer. But the waves never had time to overwhelm her. Wrapping her thoughts round with a stuttering barrier of noise, LizAlec pushed the other woman out of her head and pumped up the volume until white noise, white heat echoed round the inside of her skull.
Leon would be proud of her, LizAlec decided with a grin. And, despite herself, she glanced at the boy, taking in his serious scowl and black Voidoid3 T-shirt but most of all the blade held rock-steady in his hand. He’d insisted on coming along to cover her back. Except LizAlec didn’t know who Leon might have to guard it against, apart from Sister Aaron. And LizAlec intended to take care of Sister Aaron herself.
She could do it, too. LizAlec was increasingly certain of that. Put LizAlec’s life in danger and she had the power. At least, she did now... It came from being dead. That’s how the girl thought of it. She’d been killed up there in the cathedral, Brother Michael’s hands squeezing the life out of her as certainly as she now breathed.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...
LizAlec grinned. She was made flesh again. Only now, somewhere inside her head howled the ghost hordes of her father... She’d thought, while she was cached up in the pod, that maybe that whole incident was brief insanity brought on by oxygen starvation. But that wasn’t it. She hadn’t met angels or even the One True King, may he rock forever. She’d met herself.
“Meet yourself again,” suggested Sister Aaron inside her head and stepped forward, reaching for LizAlec’s wrist. Before Leon could move or LizAlec even scream, the woman threw her against the obsidian block, wing chun-style. Only all Liz Alec felt was cold wind on her face as she rolled blindly through the rock and fell headlong into blackness.
She screamed but there was no echo, her howl swallowed by the dark.
Stars flicked around her except she wasn’t in space: deep space had no significant gravity and she was definitely falling, hard and fast. Landing even harder, as her feet caught on something and her legs buckled upwards to punch LizAlec violently in the chest, winding her.
Stars swung crazily from side to side. And then LizAlec realized the stars themselves weren’t moving, it w
as the ground beneath her that was lurching backwards and forwards, creaking as it did. Dragging in a breath, LizAlec crawled across ice-cold metal only to hit a surface straight ahead that was hard and flat. It too was speckled with stars.
Glass, thought LizAlec as she brushed a finger across its cold surface. Without even knowing she’d done it, LizAlec retuned her optic nerves, running through infrared and m/wave, rejecting both and finally retuning the 120m rod cells in her retina. The trade-off shift to mute pastels and greys was the price of seeing clearly. It took just long enough for LizAlec to feel it happen and then she was suddenly looking at herself in a vast mirror that just hung there. Between the mirror and the steel grating on which she knelt was a two-feet-wide gap.
Through the gap LizAlec could see a space so vast it would have been impossible to contain within The Arc had it been real. But it wasn’t. Distances multiplied and space doubled and then doubled again as LizAlec looked round at the wilderness of hanging mirrors.
Beside her, behind her, in front...
A thousand frightened, wide-eyed LizAlecs stared back, endlessly reflected. She looked shit, every single one of her. The T-shirt she’d borrowed from Leon was grit-smeared and stained, her cropped hair slick black with sweat. Ugly sweat circles stood out endlessly under her arms and down her gut.
Shit on wheels, no one could be expected to look at themselves looking like that, it was time she got out of there.
LizAlec gripped two freezing rails and slid down a long run of metal stairs, feet not touching the steps. Somewhere down below would be Sister Aaron’s own little clone-zone. And if luck was good that’s where she’d find the shrine everyone seemed to be after, including the lunatic in her head.
The next flight was single rail so she couldn’t slide. Instead, LizAlec took it at a run. Screeching to a halt at the bottom she almost cannoned head-first into herself, the walkway rocking drunkenly from side to side. Glass again... LizAlec edged sideways along the mirror, trying to ignore her reflection as it did the same. Both reaching round the edge of the mirror to look at the back, except there was no back.
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