reMix

Chapter Thirty-One Death Incarnate

LizAlec was lost. At least, she figured she was. She’d been tumbling very slowly through space, cocooned in the neoprene chair of a LockMart escape pod: which sounded much more dramatic than it was, since LizAlec had almost no sense of movement at all.

Until the pod stopped suddenly, of its own accord, retro boosters hissing like an angry swan. The stars that had looped around her as trails of light, like the neural axons that ran jewelled and glistening through bioClay, suddenly reappeared as pricks of light. Only to vanish back into a tight encirclement of threads as the pod began to spin along its axis.

But all that movement was outside the pod and LizAlec couldn’t see the stars anyway. Not for herself. The pod was stub-winged, windowless, radiation-proof, relying for vision on bug-eyed cams mounted in a ring around its middle like a studded belt.

The AI controlling the pod was so moronic that LizAlec wasn’t even sure it qualified as semi. It was a joke among hardware, not so much conscious, more driven: functioning on some cut-down digital version of instinct. LizAlec hoped to fuck it knew what it was doing, because she certainly didn’t.

And now it had stopped moving altogether.

She was free-floating in space, trapped in a glorified coffin about the size of a MaBell vidbooth: not one of the head-only jobs, obviously, but a full-length one, like the box on the corner of André des Arts, the one with the imaginative holoporn stickers crawling all over the inside.

Hanging in space wasn’t the safest she’d ever been but then, blasting herself away from the slow-spinning silver grandeur of The Arc back towards Earth hadn’t exactly been a risk-free option, either. Even LizAlec could work the numbers on that. The pod was stabilizing now, no longer spinning. If LizAlec hadn’t known it was too unlikely, she’d have thought the escape pod was slowly, methodically putting itself into reverse, with much disgusted digital sucking of teeth.

In front of LizAlec, the Earth showed large and clear on her screen, cameras scanning through thick cloud to the ground below. Some primitive bioSoft kept imposing national boundaries as fluorescent red lines over the far, far distant landscape and edging up the coastlines in blue.

Somewhere on the unmarked panel in front of her would be a hot key to turn off the fluorescent overlay, but LizAlec couldn’t find it. Not that she’d tried too hard. Hitting strange keys at random in a stationary escape pod didn’t have much to recommend it. Not even to a girl who prided herself on living dangerously.

“Shit.” LizAlec tried to brush something off her face and found she couldn’t. Her hands had just thoughtfully been fastened to her side. It was a mediSoft spider, scrambling out of hiding to repair her face and making a neat job of it too, LizAlec realized, looking at the tiny arachnid reflected in her screen. Mind you, the pod’s medical software was as sophisticated as the AI was basic. Military-grade full-capability stuff. The rapid scan it had given her battered body in those first few seconds after the blast had been as thorough as anything she’d ever had done in Paris.

The spider clung to her cheek while infinitely articulated metal legs sewed shut a cut below her eye and pricked rapidly into the bruising on her cheek to suck away tiny droplets of blood. Blood from the surface had already undergone cell-salvage and been recycled straight back into her body.

This was just a tidy-up operation. The big stuff had been done right back at the beginning, when the girl had thought she was still going to die. Now she had an intravenous feed plugged direct into her wrist, feeding through a ceramic socket the mediSoft had punched into place before LizAlec even knew what the pod had in mind.

LizAlec suspected the glucose solution being dripped into her wrist contained high-level seratonin-uptake inhibitors. She certainly felt a hell of a lot more calm than she had any right to be. The pinpricks from a spider perched on her throat were small doses of erythropoietin blasted straight through her skin to boost her red cell count, but they were so minor and happened so infrequently, that LizAlec hardly noticed them.

The only bit of the deal LizAlec objected to was the colonics plug which the pod had inserted of its own accord. Now she had a strange gurgling in her stomach as liquid was trickled in and waste pumped out. LizAlec had a nasty feeling that the water flowing around her colon and the chilled tasteless water being offered every few minutes through a self-sealing straw weren’t entirely separate.

She’d seen programmes about closed-loop life-support systems. If she didn’t get to wherever the pod was attempting to take her real soon, the machine would probably shut her down to let mediSoft spiders insert thousands of tiny catheters through her skin to drain her faltering lymph system. LizAlec wasn’t sure how she was going to stop the pod doing that, if it suddenly decided that shutting LizAlec down was the girl’s most viable long-term option. Still, just being alive was pretty miraculous, which was fitting since she’d been standing in a cathedral when the Big Black came in.

LizAlec hadn’t intended to make a run for it, of course, not at the beginning. She certainly hadn’t intended to leave the freaky little sandrat behind either. But she’d been left with no other option. Not after Brother Michael had called her up to the vestry. The other girls had looked at her as she sat finishing her breakfast and muttered to themselves, though not one of them had tried to warn her. Not that she needed warning. She’d been able to work out what went on for herself. Sara’s downcast eyes and shuffling walk would have told her, even if Rachel hadn’t cried herself to sleep every night — or at least on those nights when she been called to Brother Michael’s vestry to pray.

LizAlec hadn’t been called up there to pray, though, whatever the others thought. LizAlec could replay that conversation in her head, word for fucking word, so perfect that her eidetic memory could have been verified in a court of law. But before all that she’d have to get there.

She’d reached the cathedral by taking the Otis, feeling sick as the lift blasted down from the women’s dorm, losing gravity as it approached the centre of the hub. And then it had swung itself out of the arm — feeling almost in free fall as it jumped the gap into the spindle — and turned through ninety degrees to rise rapidly towards Brother Michael’s yttrium-glass cathedral. There had been a hiss of air and then the door had slid back to reveal an aquarium-like gloom lit only by Earthlight below and the tallow brightness of the moon above.

Brother Michael was waiting for her, sitting in a huge steel chair below the altar. Steel pillars rose to a crystal ceiling and the whole dark sky was revealed above his head, so that from where she stood in the Otis doorway LizAlec could see all the way through to eternity. If eternity was what was really out there beyond the dust and the space junk. She left the crystalMeth-fuelled cosmic ramblings to Fixx.

“You wanted to see me?” LizAlec demanded, staring at the seated man. No way was she praying with him. She’d decided that before the lift even blasted off from her level.

The man didn’t answer. Instead, he just clicked his fingers twice and the lift door shut behind her, vanishing down the spindle with a low hiss.

LizAlec shrugged. If that was meant to impress her, she wasn’t impressed. She’d trained a fridge at school to open its ice-cream compartment automatically every time LizAlec picked up a teaspoon. And as for Anchee, she had a whole set of self-opening LV luggage. LizAlec waited in silence. Waiting in silence was something she was good at. In fact, she’d got silent waiting down to something of an art form.

But then the door of the Otis opened again behind her. Thumbs dug into the flesh of her inner arms, trapping a peripheral nerve, and LizAlec screamed, her hands flash-frozen as pain raced back along nerve paths to her brain. He hadn’t wanted to pray with her anyway. She’d been set up.

Some people got off on fear, LizAlec knew that. She knew also she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t get off on pain either, though there’d been a time she’d thought maybe Fixx did, until she realized what Fixx really got off on was cerebral self-flagellation, which wasn’t at all the same. But her relationship with pain and fear wasn’t quite normal, she knew that too. They clarified things, like hunger did. Pain especially heightened her senses, tightened her thoughts. Most of all, it crystallized her mind.

There was no effect Fixx could ascribe to his chemicals that LizAlec couldn’t pull up inside her head. The glass-edged clarity of meth. That sense of flash-vidding each moment so it imprinted forever on memory. She got that, and more...

Much to Fixx’s jealous disgust. He reckoned she came naturally wired. Either that or sometime before her birth Sabine Industries had strung in extra dopamine enhancers, uptake inhibitors and the rest of the whole insane pharmacopoeia. And maybe bundled in some heightened reflexes for luck. It wasn’t impossible.

“So,” said Brother Michael, pushing himself out of his metal chair. “What do we have here? At least, what do we really have?” He stopped in front of LizAlec, his ReeGravs creaking on the floor. LizAlec could feel the seconds stretch out inside her head.

She was meant to break the silence. It was her role to ask what was wrong or maybe just ‘fess to whatever it was — but she wasn’t going to. If she’d learnt only one thing from Fixx other than that crystalMeth fucked you up — it was not to give away her leverage. Never confess, always fight back. It made for great sex and a lousy relationship.

Fixx could have got her out of going back to St Lucius. She would have done it, too, even if it meant cutting her ties with Lady Clare, but he never asked... Not once. Lady Clare, that was how she’d started to think of the woman now, as someone else, someone not her mother. When LizAlec got back, if she got back, finding out about Razz was going to come top of LizAlec’s hit list. Not the myth, but the real stuff, what kind of CySat she had liked, what she ate, who she listened to.

Fuck it, maybe she’d collected sims by Fixx. That would be nicely ironic. Maybe that whole fucking Bastille kick of hers was Oedipal and the beat-meister was just some sad daddy-substitute. Maybe it was and maybe he knew. That could be why he kept refusing to fuck her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Brother Michael.

I doubt it, thought LizAlec, but she didn’t say that aloud. Instead she just scowled at the preacher, then cut him out of her thoughts... When LizAlec got back. No, make that if. If she got back she was going to find out about her dad, too. What was the point of being the daughter of a living god if you couldn’t trade on it? Let’s see Anchee try to top that at school.

“You’re thinking, why is Brother Michael cross with me?”

“Like I give a fuck,” said LizAlec and yelped as the preacher backhanded her, hard enough to flip her head sideways.

“Fuck you, shithead...” LizAlec spun sideways and tried to grind her boot down the preacher’s shin. But the person behind LizAlec just yanked her backwards and dug both thumbs even harder into her upper arm, so that her whole body shuddered with pain.

“Stop feeling my tits,” LizAlec’s voice was raw with anger.

“I’m not doing...”

“Yes, you are,” LizAlec said savagely. “If you’re that fucking desperate to cop a feel,” she shot over her shoulder, “go and play with the animals.”

Thumbs closed again on her arms, only this time an order from Brother Michael cut short the pain.

“Leonie, leave us.”

Leonie? LizAlec turned to find herself looking into the impassive face of one of Brother Michael’s crop-haired bodyguards.

“I wasn’t...” the woman began, staring at Brother Michael over LizAlec’s shoulder. But the preacher just waved her away. The black woman thought better of protesting and went. Given the weird light that burned in Brother Michael’s eyes it was probably a wise decision. Anyone who didn’t know the brethren were teetotal drug abstainers might have thought the man was wired out of his skull.

“Wait,” demanded Brother Michael as the woman reached the lift door. He pointed at a smooth glass pulpit. “Secure her first.” Viciously, the bodyguard did so, yanking first one and then the other of LizAlec’s arms over her head, securing each wrist to a ring set high on the front of the pulpit. LizAlec had wondered what the rings were for.

The cuffs slid around her wrists like bindweed and tied her tightly to the glass rings. LizAlec didn’t bother pulling against the cuffs: she’d watched enough episodes of NYPD Extreme to know how soft restraints worked.

Keeping her bulk between Brother Michael and LizAlec, the woman checked both cuffs one last time, then ran her hands down LizAlec’s upstretched arms, heavy fingers smoothing briefly across the girl’s pulled-up breasts.

LizAlec spat and enjoyed the blind fury that exploded across the woman’s face. To hit LizAlec back was to admit what she’d been doing but to ignore LizAlec was to admit she’d won, at least briefly. Putting her hand over LizAlec’s mouth, the woman sucker-punched LizAlec in the kidneys, keeping her fingers in place as the girl fought for breath.

“Finished?” Brother Michael asked. He had his back to the pulpit, rustling through papers on a side table. An ornate Murano paperweight, inset with a tiny magnet and full of exploded blue and red flowers, rested on top of the pile to stop them floating away. “I have now,” said the woman.

“What did you say your name was?” Brother Michael asked, his voice soft. He had LizAlec’s face between his fingers, squeezing gently. His beard was oiled and trim, his mouth youthful and full, not yet thinned-down by age or slightly puffed-up at the edge with collagen enhancers. There were no worry lines anywhere on his forehead, and only the merest suggestion of crow’s feet edged eyes that were the deepest brown. Staring at his face was like looking into a very beautiful vacuum.

Cold, dangerous, untrustworthy... Mind you, he didn’t like her either. Not if the way his fingers kept tightening on her face was anything to go by. And where things went from here was anyone’s guess.

She could keep to her original lie, try a new one or tell the truth, though the last option didn’t really appeal to LizAlec. Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth was a habit she’d ditched early on. Having Lady Clare Fabio as a mother didn’t instil a strong desire to leave yourself vulnerable. A fact LizAlec had finally learnt to turn to her advantage when she realized her S3 shadow would be too worried about losing LizAlec to admit she’d flicked down some alley in the Marais and given him the slip.

Her bodyguard’s fear of failure had worked for months. Until it half-yearly medical finally threw up bruising on LizAlec’s thighs that her S3 shadow couldn’t explain — and LizAlec wasn’t prepared to. More than anything else, the girl was too embarrassed to admit the blotches were where Fixx’s fingertips had dug into her. But she didn’t have to.

The really scary thing was that Lady Clare knew exactly what the marks were: that much was clear from the ice-cold expression in her eyes. Though LizAlec was too naive and too young to recognize the expression not as anger but buried memory. Her shadow was gone that morning. Reassigned to some border that the Black Hundreds were due to cross on their unstoppable sweep west. LizAlec had felt guilty about that, briefly anyway.

His replacement was an S3 blackbird called Per, one of the Third Section’s most handsome. The new shadow was as tall as Fixx, but with broad Scandinavian shoulders and hardened lizard-skin grafts that spread like speckled grey leather across his shoulders and down his spine. His hair was ash-blond and his eyes were light blue. Few heroes had nobler jaws or faces so perfect that LizAlec would have killed for their bone structure. But it was when Per announced that — like LizAlec — he scoured the flea markets for antique paperbacks that LizAlec knew she was meant to fall safely in love with him. But she didn’t. Clean-cut and Aryan wasn’t her type.

“Are you listening?” Brother Michael demanded furiously.

“Yeah, sure,” said LizAlec, smiling sweetly. Well, as sweetly as she could smile with Brother Michael’s hands gripped round her jaw. She was listening, too, just not to him. LizAlec went back inside her head where she could listen to the hum of the air-scrubbers, the rustle of spiderplant leaves and the low thud of her heart. Somewhere down inside she was afraid, but not yet as afraid as she should be. The trouble was, she’d never had anything between blind panic and total indifference and just recently only the indifference ever reached her violet eyes. The cool exterior, the social armour fitted her body like a carapace: both kept her removed, which was the way she liked it.

Stepping back was a way not to get hurt. And if not getting hurt meant not getting involved either, then so be it. Her mother did that: signed away people’s lives, ruined their careers, imposed cold order on warm chaos, but always smoothly, with no rough edges showing.

“Well? Brother Michael said.

“Well what?” LizAlec hadn’t the remotest idea which question he wanted answered. Was it, was she listening? Or were they back to, who was she really? Was she listening LizAlec could handle, because the answer was, Yeah, kind of... But as to who she was, she needed notice of that question, it was way more difficult.

“Are you listening to me?” Brother Michael demanded.

“Oh, yeah,” said LizAlec, “though I’m not hearing anything yet...”

Brother Michael frowned at that, as LizAlec knew he would. So she jutted her chin forward and tried to look dangerous. Pretty hard with your hands high up over your head and next to impossible when all you’re wearing is a cotton smock that looks like a washed-out nightie, even if you don’t have some maniac gripping your face and swinging it slowly from side to side like he was trying to check how much movement you had in your neck.

“You know who I am,” LizAlec hissed through gritted teeth, “I told you when I arrived...”

“So you did,” said Brother Michael, releasing her face from his grip and running one finger softly down the side of her bruised cheek. “But it wasn’t true, was it? In fact, you told me a lie...” He slid his finger down her jaw and drew it slowly across her throat, just below her jaw line. It might have been a lover’s caress, except it felt more like someone mimicking a knife blade.

Either way, LizAlec knew she was in deep shit.

Brother Michael nodded, pleased to have got a reaction. “Time to turn off the cameras, I think,” he said lightly and clapped his hands twice. A tiny black K19 fell from the vaulted roof and landed on his lectern with a soft click. It had been so small and dark against the sky that LizAlec hadn’t even known it was there.

And it couldn’t have fallen, not really, because the cathedral had no gravity, which meant the vidSat was probably holding itself against the lectern by means of tiny retrorockets. Either that, or the lectern was metal and the camera could induce its own magnetic field.

“No cameras, no witnesses... But then, confession’s a very private thing.” The tall preacher shrugged himself out of his long coat and threaded it through the back of his metal chair. Beneath the black coat he wore a white shirt, the kind with little pearl buttons up the front and no collar.

“So,” said Brother Michael, “You’re a liar and maybe a thief, but you’re not Anchee... You know how I know you’re not Anchee?”

LizAlec shook her head. She didn’t mean to, in fact she meant not to, it just happened. Brother Michael sometimes had that effect on people.

“Because this is Anchee,” said Brother Michael, thrusting a paper printout in front of her face. It quivered in his hand, like seaweed under water.

It was Anchee, too. A bad, fuzzy long-distance camera grab. Even digitally enhanced and resampled, the scan had that tell-tale telephoto flatness and paparazzi blur. But, equally obviously, it wasn’t LizAlec. The young girl in the picture was smaller, neater and much more obviously Chinese. Not that LizAlec was obviously anything much, she thought to herself bitterly.

“Yeah,” said LizAlec, shrugging. “That’s Anchee. Except these days she’s got less teeth.”

The man suddenly looked interested. “So you really know her, she’s not just some name you grabbed from a rerun of My Fortune?”

LizAlec grinned, and if her hands hadn’t been cuffed to the front of the pulpit she’d have spread them, street-style. “Know Anchee? Hell, we’re sisters...”

It wasn’t what Brother Michael wanted to hear. He gripped LizAlec’s face, fingers pressing hard into her left cheek, his thumb hooked so hard into her right cheekbone LizAlec thought her jaw would break.

“I want the truth,” demanded Brother Michael.

“Really,” hissed LizAlec. “I thought you’d already settled for religion.” Brother Michael didn’t like that one either, but then he wasn’t meant to.

“You can tell me who you are,” said the preacher, “or I can toss you out of an airlock. Do you know what happens in a vacuum?” His voice was cold and his brown eyes were glass-hard, glittering.

Insane, LizAlec decided suddenly, straightening up. Everything made sense once you accepted the man was insane. “No,” LizAlec said coldly. “I don’t know. Why don’t you step into the airlock and show me?” She nodded at a heavy glass door. Behind it was a titanium grid, then a space, then another grid and then a steel door. Beyond that was nothing but vacuum and blackness.

Why it was there and just who Brother Michael expected to turn up and hear him preach LizAlec didn’t know: angels, probably. They looked at each other. LizAlec knew Brother Michael had the advantage. Pretty obvious, really, while she was chained to a pulpit like some... LizAlec finally remembered what being fastened there reminded her of — a vast painting in the Prince Imperial’s bedroom, a picture that showed a fat girl chained naked to a windswept rock, waiting to be rescued. Except there was no way LizAlec carried that amount of weight and as for waiting to be rescued, no chance. She was going to have to get out of this herself. There was no one else around to do it for her.

“Lars,” Brother Michael barked suddenly, stepping away from her. What about the little freak, LizAlec wondered and then realized the preacher was talking into his button mike.

“Bring me a goat.”

Somewhere out in a spar, Lars answered, and asked his own question.

“No,” the preacher said heavily, “I don’t mind which one. Yes, that’s fine, I’m sure Betty will do.” Brother Michael sighed and turned back to LizAlec. “That boy’s got the animal-empathy gene, you know. There were animals on the Moon, at first, but the tourists ate them.”

“Really? How interesting,” said LizAlec. “How really fascinating.”

They waited in cold silence and LizAlec had a good idea what they were waiting for, which didn’t improve her temper one little bit. Though what Brother Michael didn’t appear to have realized was that the slack-tongued little sandrat was going to like his plan even less than she did.

LizAlec gave the cuffs the lightest tug but, light or not, they tightened all the same, closing around her wrists until flesh bulged either side of their undulating red surface. Another pull like that and she’d have them burrowed down to the bone. There was a simple code key to remove them, there was bound to be. LizAlec’s problem was that she didn’t yet know how she was going to get it out of Brother Michael.

But she had to get it, just as she had to ditch that bioSemtex worm at the same time. Only LizAlec liked that idea even less.

Sex was out as a lever. The preacher wasn’t big on commitment. He’d no sooner fuck her than toss her aside, as he’d done with every other disciple. No, what she needed was to get under his skin, get unrestricted access to his mind. Up close and personal was what she had in mind. The only trouble was, getting there meant someone getting hurt and LizAlec just knew it was going to be her. Still, it was time to lose the worm.

“Hey, shit for brains,” LizAlec spat in Brother Michael’s direction. At first the preacher looked like he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard and then he looked like he believed it only too well.

“Yeah,” said LizAlec. “I was talking to you.” She waited, watching. Her arms pulled up above her head, her body open, defenceless. Brother Michael wasn’t going to pass up his chance to hurt her, he wasn’t the type.

“Hey,” LizAlec demanded. “You going to answer me, you dumb fuck?”

He did. The first slap caught her across the face, twisting her off to the side.

Sweet Jesus, LizAlec thought hazily, when she was back in a fit state to think anything. But it was too late to stop now.

“You’re pathetic,” LizAlec told him, through a mouthful of blood. “A pathetic, talentless...”

That was as far as she got before Brother Michael broke her nose with the palm of his hand and LizAlec almost blew everything by passing out with pain. Except she was Lady Elizabeth-fucking-Fabio, or maybe she wasn’t, LizAlec wasn’t sure, but whoever the fuck she was, she had built-in hyperfocus and it was on.

Fully functioning. Like her death wish.

LizAlec inhaled her own blood, as greedily as Fixx had ever sucked up the ice he kept offering her. She inhaled the warm liquid until it flooded her nasal cavity, almost choking as she tried to stop it backing up in her throat. Then she shook her head frantically from side to side and sucked in stale air through her mouth, pulling in dust, low-density sweat molecules, anything that would fill her lungs to bursting. And then, lungs full, she blew out hard, pushing blood and air through her swelling nose in a single snort, red liquid splattering across Brother Michael’s white shirt like buckshot.

The bioSemtex wriggled like a crippled slow-worm as it tumbled slowly across the interior of the cathedral and ricocheted gently off the floor before bouncing off a far wall. Brother Michael had done that for her, shaken the monstrosity loose and filled its hiding place with blood until the worm could no longer keep its grip.

The girl wondered if Brother Michael knew that — as of now — she owed him her life... Not that LizAlec was going to point that out. Especially since she was going to kill the man. And she was, much sooner than he realized.

“Brother Michael,” said a shocked voice. It was Lars, standing in the doorway of the lift, a large nanny goat clutched firmly in his arms. The sandrat was doing his best to look anywhere except at LizAlec. When he finally did, LizAlec grinned at him and Lars went rapidly back to petting his goat, which had been hobbled with polymer wire to stop it struggling.

“You wanted to see Betty?” Lars held out the goat, then thought better of it and started slowly unwinding the wire. When that was finished, he held the goat out again but Brother Michael made no attempt to take the animal. In fact, he made no effort to go near the goat at all.

“Open hatch,” Brother Michael said crossly and the glass door to the airlock swung slowly back, opening until it could go no further. “Grid,” Brother Michael demanded and the metal grille folded in on itself like the tendrils of a plant. Not sideways as LizAlec had expected, but from the bottom, folding up to almost nothing. So much for disapproving of nanetics.

“You,” Brother Michael said to Lars, “Put the goat in the airlock...”

Lars just looked at him.

“The airlock,” said Brother Michael tiredly.

Lars did nothing.

“Is there a problem?” The tall preacher gave up trying to clean blood off his shirt and stared hard at the boy.

“That’s an airlock,” Lars said.

“I know what it is,” said Brother Michael crossly.

“You want me to put Betty in there?” Lars sounded puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard the order correctly.

“Yes,” said Brother Michael. “I want you to put the goat in the airlock.” He could have been giving instructions to an idiot. From the pained expression on Brother Michael’s face it was obvious that was indeed how he saw it.

“Betty will die,” said Lars. “Vacuums kill...” He said it as if, maybe, Brother Michael hadn’t realized that. And in her head, LizAlec felt a blaze of eidetic memory. Lars and Ben. Vacuum. Death. The sandrat’s own memories, stolen from him on Darkside that time he had tried to rape her.

Most people LizAlec could read but Lars was something else. Trying to second guess the sandrat was like looking into a paint-spattered screen: something was undoubtedly going on behind it but no one knew what.

“He wants to kill Betty,” LizAlec told Lars.

“Shut up,” Brother Michael ordered, but LizAlec didn’t.

“He wants to put her in a vacuum... watch her eyes pop out. You wouldn’t want him to do that, would you?”

“Shut it,” said Brother Michael, wrapping one huge hand over her mouth. But the damage was already done.

“You can’t kill Betty,” Lars said suddenly. He stepped forward, looking intently at LizAlec’s face for a second as she struggled against Brother Michael’s grip, and then headed back towards the Otis, the goat wrapped protectively in his arms. “I’m putting Betty back...”

“You’re what?” Brother Michael was stunned. Not pretending, but the real thing. It was as though a lift door had turned round and answered him back.

“That’s right,” said LizAlec quickly, getting her comment in before Brother Michael remembered he was supposed to be smothering her. She bit down hard on his thumb, earning herself another slap. Next time round, Brother Michael kept his fingers away from her teeth, manoeuvring his palm firmly over her swollen mouth, using its edge to block off her nostrils as well.

Behind Brother Michael, Lars was looking badly worried, but he wouldn’t put down his bloody goat, he couldn’t... There was nowhere to put it and Lars couldn’t bring himself to let the animal float off in zero G, he knew goats hated that.

So instead he just looked on as Brother Michael slowly and certainly began to choke the life out of LizAlec. The man was smiling now, cold brown eyes hungrily staring into hers as he watched LizAlec go down into the rapidly approaching darkness.

“Shit,” LizAlec thought, as the glass cathedral around her began to fade. She was being murdered and there was nothing she could do to stop it happening. Nothing conscious.

Nothing human.

“He means it.”

LizAlec never knew exactly what woke her, but whatever it was she jerked awake to gulp down a breath that sank like melt water into her burning lungs. She could feel her heart kick-start into a steady reassuring beat as its right ventricle pumped sluggish blood to her lungs, where the blood took up oxygen and returned heartwards, haemoglobin-red, to be pumped through her arteries, releasing the gathered oxygen.

It was a beautiful, simple, inherently efficient system — and she was impressed. LizAlec didn’t as yet understand the mechanics, any more than she really understood how an explosion of synaptic fire could translate into shock at still being alive.

She wasn’t dead, that much was obvious, but LizAlec couldn’t work out whether or not she had been. And if this was a standard near-death experience, where were the sympathetic angels and strange aliens? All that shit that qualified her to go on Soulderado? No. She was alive, watching Brother Michael walk towards Lars who was busily backing away, still holding his bloody goat. She was unquestionably alive. It was just that she wasn’t expecting to be.

Her throat hurt.

That was so great an understatement that even Lady Clare would have been proud of her. Every breath burnt on the way down and then caught fire again on the way back up. Pain she could live with, it was how much pain she could live with that was beginning to surprise LizAlec. But what ripped her attention away from the hurt in her throat was not Brother Michael’s approach towards Lars but the steady chanting that started up in the back of her head.

Low, rhythmic. A chant so faint she couldn’t hear the words. If LizAlec hadn’t known better, she’d have thought it was someone muttering, but softly, under their breath.

Maybe she was having that fully fledged near-death experience after all. Either that, or she was mad. Whichever it was, there’d be a CySat show more than happy to talk to her. If she over got back to safety, wherever the fuck that was.

“Who are you?” LizAlec demanded hoarsely, her own lips moving at the question, though she’d meant to ask it in her head.

Brother Michael spun round in disbelief. “What the...?”

And suddenly LizAlec saw herself as Brother Michael saw her. Chained to the base of the glass pulpit, hands pulled high above her head. She looked a wreck, No, more than that, she looked like death incarnate. Weird eyes burned out of a wide scowling face. She had good cheekbones and a strong jaw. What she could see of her skin was light brown, but her lip was split and her chin was black with dried blood.

“Razz?”

It was the voice in her head.

“No,” said LizAlec, “Not Razz. Razz was my mother...”

“Your mother?” The voice smiled.

Impossible, LizAlec knew, but it happened just the same. An overwhelming sense of amusement, almost happiness swept through her mind. Brother Michael was watching her, slack-faced and frozen.

“You’re doing that,” said the voice in her head. Inside its echo LizAlec got a sense of ghosts and howling wastelands that curled in on themselves, like folds in time or wormholes in space, except that no one had yet proved either of those existed.

“You’re Elizabeth Alexandra?”

LizAlec nodded.

“Yeah, I heard you’d been born. At least I think I did. Maybe. It gets hard to remember...” The voice was soft as wind through an empty attic, as brittle as dried grass. LizAlec didn’t yet know if the words were real or if she had imagined them. That both could be true hadn’t yet occurred to her.

“Who are you?” LizAlec asked. And when the answer came the girl wondered if she’d always known, because she felt no sense of surprise.

“I’m Alex,” said the voice. “Or maybe not. The real me is locked in a cell at San Lorenzo. The Church Geneticist will never let him go, you know... Not while he can spin DNA like that.”

“What are you really?” LizAlec asked.

The voice smiled again. “You mean, am I a real ghost? Yes, I suppose so, in a ghost-like sort of way. Alex put me in here before you were born. Well, the neural framework, anyway. It’s amazing what can be knitted out of little stretches of junk DNA.”

“The framework?” LizAlec said. “What else is there?”

“Oh, a bit of naturally grown bioClay, a neat bridge between hemispheres, a little optic enhancement... Nothing clumsy enough to set off an m/wave sensor.”

LizAlec took a look inside her skull, seeing blood swirling through the Willis circle. There were more arteries and veins than she could ever imagine. Beneath and between were folds of tissue, rich with thread-like nerves. More stars fluoresced inside her head than LizAlec could see through the glass walls of the cathedral. The problem was, LizAlec didn’t know what was meant to be there and what wasn’t.

“Am I really looking inside myself?” LizAlec demanded.

For a second the voice seemed to hesitate. “No, not really. But it’s a perfect construct of exactly what you would see if you did.” There didn’t seem to be much answer to that.

“No wonder I felt so odd,” LizAlec said bitterly, her voice loud enough to make Lars stop fussing over his goat and look up.

“The fury, the paranoia, that sense of standing outside looking in?”

LizAlec nodded.

“No,” said the voice. “That’s not odd, that’s just the way it goes.”

“Yeah,” said LizAlec. “Well, it’s still shit.” She looked across to where Brother Michael stood frozen, then abruptly jerked herself out of his head. The preacher took two clanking steps towards her before she went back inside his mind and he froze as muscles knotted up and he almost stumbled sideways.

LizAlec pulled herself out of his head again and then went back in, repelled and fascinated. There were dark memories of other girls. On their knees or on their backs. A few were cuffed below the pulpit as she was, but unlike LizAlec they were naked. Some she knew, many she didn’t. Unless she did and the change from fresh-faced disciple to silent shuffling slave was too great for even LizAlec to make the connection.

She was inside Brother Michael’s head. Not physically among the blood and veins she’d found in her own skull, but feeding off dark memories remembered only as fixed neural patterns. He could feel her in there, pillaging his mind, and LizAlec was glad of it.

She thought pain and felt him stumble.

She told him to move and watched his disjointed steps.

“Key,” LizAlec demanded and Brother Michael winced, throwing up his hands to protect himself from something he couldn’t see but could only feel.

She had her answer before Brother Michael could even get his fear-frozen lips to frame the code. LizAlec spoke the word aloud and felt the cuffs slither from her wrists and hang lifeless like laces over the rings fixed to the glass pulpit.

Two strides took LizAlec close enough to Brother Michael for her to be able to pull back her boot and kick him hard in the crotch. Which she did, enthusiastically. His scream echoed around the vast cathedral. LizAlec hadn’t needed to kick him, she understood that. Any pain she wanted to inflict she could post straight through to his thalamus, jack up his limbic system. Pain only existed as electrical impulses anyway.

But LizAlec didn’t want agony’s simulacrum, at least not where Brother Michael was concerned. When you came down to it, she was an old-fashioned girl at heart. LizAlec took one last look at herself through his eyes. She looked insane. Maybe she was. Wild-eyed and staring, wired up on emotions even Fixx couldn’t begin to imagine. Well, maybe he could, LizAlec admitted, but only with a little chemical help. And even then he couldn’t do the things she could. Fixx needed music to make people do what he wanted: she just had to think about it.

LizAlec looked at the open airlock and then at Brother Michael.

“No...” The preacher was staring at her, aghast, his face weak with fear. He had his hands twisted together in front of him in a mockery of prayer. LizAlec didn’t know if it was conscious or not, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t a believer anyway. It had taken three weeks of bullying from Lady Clare to get her to agree to get confirmed with all those other little corps noblique girls at Notre-Dame.

LizAlec fed Brother Michael back his own memories, Sarah again and then Rachel, sobbing for forgiveness, begging him to stop. LizAlec looped that memory and left it playing, an unending circle of blows and bitten-back moans.

“Get inside,” she told him and watched Brother Michael fight himself, then lose. Every sinew in his legs strained against her order, so tight that his knees were close to rupture, but still he put one foot in front of the other, like a dead man walking. Only stopping when he was inside the airlock.

“Please...” There were tears beading from his eyes like pearls that floated away into the stark empty beauty of the cathedral. He was shivering, begging, crying. LizAlec didn’t bother to answer. There was nothing she wanted to say.

“You ever killed anyone before?” It was the neural construct of the father she’d never met and probably never would, the ghost in her head. She hadn’t, and he knew she hadn’t. There was nothing about her he didn’t know.

But she answered all the same.

“You sure you want to do this?”

She was sure, but then LizAlec remembered why she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to operate an airlock. Fuck it. LizAlec cut off the endless loop inside Brother Michael’s head and as he stopped, suddenly, blindly hopeful, LizAlec pulled out of his mind instructions on using the airlock, and then let him know exactly what she’d just taken.

It was enough to sink him back to his knees. Though it wasn’t prayer that kept the preacher there but one gravity boot and abject fear. He was shivering like an injured animal, slipping between panic and his own approaching insanity, reaching for that refuge but never quite making it. LizAlec made damn sure of that. She didn’t take kindly to having been killed and she wanted Brother Michael to know exactly what was happening to him, as it happened.

Every bursting vein, every ruptured internal organ.

LizAlec walked over to the gold eagle-winged lectern and waved her hand across its surface to awaken the keypad. Keys materialized on the surface, or rather the black glass reading surface swirled clear to show keys resting beneath. Brother Michael might claim not to approve of unfettered technology but he’d still bought the best deck Microsoft could supply.

Fingers flicking over the keys, never quite touching, LizAlec recreated the inner grille to the airlock, then closed the recessed door, checking its seal. Not that she needed to, the glass was machined to a four-micron tolerance. Even unbolted, it was designed to seal itself under pressure. And the opening servo couldn’t kick in unless atmospheric pressure inside the lock stood at .52 and rising.

None of which was high on Brother Michael’s worry list. With the door shut, LizAlec pulled herself from his mind, leaving him naked with terror. Now he was on the other side of the glass door, beating at the grille with his fists, his screams of abuse mixed with pleas for his life.

LizAlec shut down her mind and when that didn’t work scrabbled at the keyboard until she found a way to kill the sound. Now he just looked like some character from a tri-D, one where the audio card had crashed.

“You really going to kill him?” It was the first thing Lars had said to her since he arrived with the goat. In fact, LizAlec had got round to wondering if he even recognized her. But of course he did. There weren’t that many fifteen-year-olds aboard The Arc with English, African and Uzbek DNA in them, especially not ones he’d tried to rape.

“No,” said LizAlec, “I’m going to blow him into space.” Like there was a difference...

Lars grunted and when she looked again he’d gone back to rubbing his chin in the fur of the goat’s neck. The sandrat didn’t even look up when she toggled the key to depress the chamber and open the airlock’s space-side door. Brother Michael exploded into the Big Black on a rush of air, his arms and legs flailing like those of a puppet. His heart flared in blind panic, and his mouth opened as its final scream was ripped out of his lungs by the vacuum.

“Welcome to hell,” LizAlec said softly and those were the last words Brother Michael ever heard. Twelve to thirteen seconds is what it usually takes for a vacuum victim to black out. Though small children often only manage five. And there’s a ninety-second window during which it’s theoretically possible to pull someone back into a pressurized environment and revive them, with a medium-to-good chance they’ll recover fully.

But there was no one to pull Brother Michael back — and there was no way LizAlec was going to let him die that quickly.

At plus thirteen seconds he was paralysed, but still conscious: the outward rush of water vapour was already freezing his nose and lips. Traumatic convulsions racked his body at plus-fifteen seconds and then paralysis set in again, seconds later. Inside the soft tissues of Brother Michael’s flesh and inside his veins water vapour began to form, distorting his flesh. LizAlec couldn’t have kept him alive beyond this, not even if she had wanted to. But she was going to keep him conscious until death. And that’s what she did.

A spider’s-silk overskin might have prevented embolism, but Brother Michael didn’t have one, so instead water vapour pooled inside him until his skin distended to bursting. He was panic-stricken, beyond thought. Already his heart rate was in decline. At plus-forty seconds his blood pressure plummeted until pressure in his veins matched that of his arteries. Brother Michael’s heart still tried desperately to beat, but blood could no longer flow.

LizAlec never felt Brother Michael rupture open, because that was the point she let go of his terrified, gibbering mind — and felt it scrabble gratefully out of existence.