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.”
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