reMix

Chapter Thirty-Seven RingCycle

Swallows skimmed in low over the blue lake like combat aircraft, their tails spread in perfect vees as they slammed through hatching pupae, intercepting struggling mayfly before the insects had time to pull free from the surface tension of the water and begin their first precarious flight.

Fat bulrushes grew at the water’s edge, thin stems rising up to bulbous heads the texture and hue of rotting brown velvet. There was damp meadow grass underfoot and shimmering pink cranberry flowers that looked delicate when set against the tougher white of common daisies. Only the fact that the small lake curved up towards the horizon told Fixx that he stood within the ring.

The grass felt good beneath his feet, springy and pressing up hard. Somewhere around five-sixths G, Fixx reckoned, though it was hard to tell. After a couple of weeks off-planet it was only too easy to forget what real Earth gravity felt like.

Beneath him was rock and soil, about two metres’ worth. And buried under that were stunted tunnels filled with fat snakes of fibreoptix and long black powerlines. The metal floors of the tunnel had rung beneath their boots like a steel drum beaten with sticks. But looking at the lake, Fixx found it hard to believe he wasn’t back on Earth, in some rich untroubled place like Norway. Only, that horizon...

“Move it,” Shiori ordered, standing up from the water’s edge and flipping down the top on a bubble flask. Until a minute before her flask had been a flat strip of silver polymer, rolled tight and stuck to the belt of her chameleon suit. Now it bulged like the swim bladder of some fish, supplies for the trip ahead.

“Here,” she said, tossing Fixx the flask. “You carry it.”

Fixx fumbled his catch on purpose and watched the shimmering silver bladder bounce football-like across the grass. It didn’t burst or leak but then, organically woven polymer was designed to be tough.

To say Shiori had been getting on his nerves was a serious understatement. Of course, Fixx was an understated kind of guy in an overstated sort of way, but even he was getting close to saying something. All that stopped him was cowardice. Well, the hard cold expression on her face, which amounted to the same thing. That and the way Shiori kept stopping to read-off data from her Walkwear. As if the little grey box taped to her hip contained all of life’s answers.

Maybe it did, but somehow Fixx doubted it.

Their relationship would have been easier if Shiori had bothered to tell him what was going on. But the Japanese woman no longer seemed even to hear his questions, as if somewhere inside her head a switch had been thrown.

Fixx was beginning to wonder if Shiori was entirely human. She obviously wasn’t a straight off-the-peg clone, but there was something unnatural about the way she moved shadow-like across the rough grass, balanced on the balls of her feet, like a...

Fixx sighed. Like a fucking ballerina — where did he think that term came from?

Picking up Shiori’s flask, Fixx took a long look round him. It was daylight up ahead and daylight behind, but there had to be night at some point to let all this vegetation breathe out and he couldn’t see from where night might come. Unless some central AI just clicked off the overhead luminescent strip and shut down the whole Arc at one go...

He’d come into the ring maybe ten miles back, trailing after Shiori through an airlock. A long claustrophobic crawl on hands and knees through a service duct had led them to a dust-strewn polycrete bunker, where Shiori had casually slid in a wafer-thin knocker and blown the plastic door out of its frame, leaving Fixx half deaf with concussion. On the other side of the blown door was a narrow cave and beyond that daylight, or what passed for daylight on The Arc.

And now he was following Shiori’s flickering migraine-inducing camouflage suit around the fringes of a lake, skirting the lower slopes of a small mountain. Though up ahead some design program had dictated that the lake’s marshy edge should give way to small cliffs...

It was an illusion, but a clever one. Cut The Arc anywhere through its huge silver doughnut and you got a circle: the half-circle at the bottom was a valley, rising up to mountains on both sides, and the half-circle above was sky, painted electric blue... Except that the need to simulate gravity meant the landlocked bottom of the circle was actually the Arc’s outer edge. It was better not to think about it.

Stamping after the Japanese woman, Fixx didn’t notice at first that the vegetation was changing. But when maquis and blue-leafed hyssop began to replace meadow grass the change became impossible to ignore, even for Fixx. The fauna was different, too. Wild hopi called from rough-barked cork and stunted wild oak while feral cats pressed themselves to the ground, ears back as Shiori and Fixx strode by. There were twisted olive trunks, so fat and so badly split with age it was hard not to believe the trees had been there for hundreds of years.

The green slopes were giving way to endless tiny terraces cut into the olive-grey hillside and held in place by drystone walls. There were even dark wells, circled by pumice-hued brick and covered with flat roofs made from rough planks. Though Fixx knew that, on the lower slopes at least, the well shafts couldn’t go down more than three or four metres at the most.

Fixx saw the goat boy, loping down a slope. Shiori didn’t. Shiori was too busy staring moodily into the distance, following the floating-focus map that unrolled in front of her grey eyes. Both Walkwear and wraprounds were so hot from overuse they stank of burning electrics but she didn’t even notice. Discomfort was something Shiori regarded as a luxury, her nervous system viral-rewired so that most pain didn’t even register until it hit the middle reaches.

Pain was a distraction for working ballerinas. Most, things were.

Shiori sighed and kept climbing across scrub, edging round a granite bolder flecked with mica. The huge stone was probably treated polycrete unless Sister Aaron had found a way to crystallize stone, and where that bitch was concerned anything was possible.

Shiori wasn’t worried about meeting Sister Aaron: iga-training ensured her heart beat stayed at a steady sixty-five and her blood pressure kept to a balanced 100/80, but somewhere at the back of her mind, banished beyond consciousness, Shiori still allowed herself to be aware of the other woman’s reputation.

Psionics was a dangerous art, not least because apart of Shiori’s mind refused to admit it had a right to exist. The General needed his shrine back and it was Shiori’s job to get it — swiftly, cleanly, neatly. The only problem so far was that the shrine wasn’t showing up clearly on her screen — though it was here all right, she was getting a positive on that. But then, most of what was on file for Sister Aaron had be the product of trickery, so maybe she was keeping it hidden.

Sleight of hand and hypnotism... mekuramashi and kawarimi, both of those Shiori respected, they were core to the kunoichi tradition. Her tradition. But what the General kept on file for Sister Aaron wasn’t sleight of hand, at least it didn’t seem so. And so, if not actually worried, Shiori wasn’t as rested as she would have liked.

“Keep up,” Shiori snapped over her shoulder, but Fixx just muttered something offensive.

Had she looked back, Shiori would have seen Fixx come face to face with the goat boy, who slid to a halt on the scree, scrawny goats jostling round his bare legs like dogs round their master. Though it was the boy who looked dog-like, his heavy jaw protruding from below a slack mouth.

“Hi,” said Fixx.

The boy just looked at him. Brown eyes flicked between Fixx and the shadow that still strode on, waist-deep in scrub, muttering to itself.

“These your goats?”

All Fixx got was a suspicious nod.

“They look really happy,” said Fixx. “They must like you.”

The boy smiled, showing sharp canines.

Fixx sketched a line level with his shoulder. “You seen a girl, ‘bout this high, wavy black hair and weird violet eyes? She can be...” Fixx searched for the right word and gave up. LizAlec could be a fucking pain in the arse, but as descriptions went that didn’t seem appropriate.

The goat boy had seen her. Fixx could see it in his wide face and Fixx didn’t know what LizAlec had done to him, but the goat boy wasn’t happy with her. Except it turned out that it wasn’t what she’d done that had upset Lars, it was where LizAlec had gone.

“Girl not here,” he said simply. “Brother Michael not here either.” The goat boy wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, sweat smearing into dirt. Fixx offered him the bubble flask and Lars took a pull, gathering his thoughts. “Gone,” he said at last. “Brother Michael dead, girl gone...”

“Shiori,” Fixx shouted and the shadow stopped climbing, one grey hand reaching up towards a grey boulder, her weight taken on her left leg, the right already raised to find a new foothold. A human climbing machine, Fixx thought. Though she had a great arse, he reminded himself: even if it was impossible to see properly now she was wearing that bloody chameleon suit.

“Down here,” Fixx shouted.

She came back down the slope, mouth hard, eyes hidden behind the wraprounds.

“This better be good.”

Fixx turned to Lars but the boy was gone and the goats with him. All Fixx could hear was the distant tinkle of bells behind a ridge in the distance. “There was a dogboy,” Fixx began...

“Yeah,” said Shiori as she looked at the trodden-down scrub and pellet-like goat droppings. “LizAlec’s sandrat. Something was said about it... That fat woman in the bar. Remember?”

Fixx did, vaguely. As much as he was likely to remember anything through the haze of long-vanished Electric Soup and the trauma of nearly having his skull cracked open by a clone. Yeah, sometime after Fixx had got truly mashed, Jude had been saying something about some sandrat... Fixx didn’t like Shiori calling Jude fat, though.

“Brother Michael’s dead,” said Fixx and stopped... Half of Shiori’s expression swung between pity and amusement, the rest just registered open contempt.

“Of course he’s dead,” Shiori said shortly, “You saw his cathedral. No one survives being vacuum-trashed. Not even self-proclaimed little Christian messiahs.”

Fixx nodded and raised his hand to wipe his lips. Which was when he realized the vanishing goat boy had taken not just his animals but the silver water flask too. More or less guaranteed to piss Shiori off, except Fixx was getting to the point where he no longer cared what the Japanese woman thought. Bigger problems were crowding in.

“If Brother Michael’s dead...”

“Then maybe LizAlec is, too,” Shiori finished for him. “Well done.” Her voice was so brittle, so bleakly ironic that Fixx had clenched his metal hand before he realized. Only Fixx never got near to throwing the punch. Shiori just stepped in close, one hand flicking up towards his chin. The razor-sharp point of her biente-neube slid a quarter of an inch into his flesh and then stopped dead as blood beaded around the tiny wound.

“Next time...”

There were threats and there were promises, and Fixx knew the difference. She would kill him too and without hesitation if it came to it, if he got in the way. Maybe Shiori didn’t trash colleagues unless forced, but Fixx wasn’t non-com any more than she was, not up here on The Arc. Shiori needed that shrine and she intended to get it. Impatiently, the Japanese woman tapped the Sony Walkwear on her belt with the fingers of her left hand, the butterfly knife in her other hand never leaving Fixx’s throat.

Sweet Jesus, thought Fixx. When am I going to learn that just because I’ve fucked some woman it doesn’t mean she isn’t still dangerous? I mean, I could type up a list... Still, the waves from this one were going to splatter the surface of a dozen lives like buckshot. There was Lady Clare, Anchee, kids at that stupid school, then there was him. Inside his head, Fixx was already lighting a candle for LizAlec before he remembered he wasn’t Catholic. And there was another thought, coming at him out of the back of his head. If Shiori already knew LizAlec was dead, then what the fuck was she looking for as she scrambled about like a fool inside The Arc?

The kid’s body?

Or maybe he was the one who was a fool... For a start, he was here, wasn’t he? And he’d been the one getting beaten up, patronized and ignored while he chased around Strat and Planetside, and then hightailed it out to The Arc to trudge some toy wilderness, looking for a girl Shiori took for granted might already be dead.

Purple maquis gave way to desert scrub as cliffs edging a second lake shrunk until they were just shingle banks. The lake turned to mud shallows and then dried up altogether. Rough earth turned to grit and pebbles beneath his feet.

Fixx shook his head crossly. Shedding tears in this heat was just a waste of body water and he was losing enough of that in sweat. Gravel crunched under his feet as he concentrated on following Shiori’s track. She’d moved ahead of Fixx about five minutes back, fed up with his stumbling walk and his muttered litany of curses that no amount of her threats could stop. The slab-grown skin on his ankles was coming away in strips, trailing behind him like tattered ribbon as he walked, but that wasn’t what he was swearing about. He just couldn’t believe LizAlec could fuck off and die like that, not this far down the line.

The only animals Fixx had seen in the last two hours were a pack of chattering meerkats, which he recognized from the way they stood high on their back legs. The cliffs he’d seen earlier had been there to separate temperate wildlife from Mediterranean, Fixx realized, but no physical boundary was needed to keep wildlife out of the desert. The blistering overhead light was enough to do that.

From what he could remember, given The Arc’s radius, it should take no more than two days to walk right round the ring. Which was fine as a theory, except it didn’t take into account that the ground wasn’t level. Instead the desert rose and fell in sweeping crescent-shaped dunes.

Up ahead, Shiori had stopped. Though all Fixx could see was the shimmering changing outline of her chameleon suit. Fixx kept his pace steady, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. If Shiori was waiting for him to catch up with her, then she could do just that: wait.

He was tired and hot and fucked-off, and most of his attention was taken up with thoughts of LizAlec, memories peeling back inside his mind like layers of dermis being stripped from a twitching body. Chemical self-abuse he could handle, this self-torture was something else. If he’d wanted shit like this, Fixx thought in disgust, he’d have swapped places with his old guitarist Lenny Sacher-Masoch.

And the stupid thing was, he’d never told LizAlec he loved her, not even back at the beginning when maybe he had. Oh, he’d talked about being proud of her, sure. Respecting her arrogance. Even wanting her until he was hollow-eyed with lust, but never love, not really. He wasn’t big on admitting to love, and besides, they were too alike. One of him was enough.

But he was missing her already. In a warped kind of way.

Grit crunched underfoot as Fixx pushed his human hand into the pocket of his jumpsuit and, for the tenth time, dragged his nail around the seam looking for wizz he already knew wasn’t there. All Fixx scraped up was cotton fluff, but he sucked at it anyway, just in case. But the grey fluff was just that, no more. There was no crunch as tiny crystals fractured along fault lines, no matching spark of neurons igniting in his brain. He was on his own, chemically speaking, stuck in a toytown Planet Earth theme park with some Japanese psychopath.

He’d blown it big time, as a successful musician, as a lover, even as a human... Maybe especially as a human. It was time he accepted the fact. Hell, it was time he accepted a dozen facts: he just wasn’t very good at recognising the big picture. That writ from Sony had been his very own Galileo, the instrument that ripped him from the centre of the firmament and broke the old astrolabe, so no amount of spin could put him back in balance.

Fame wasn’t just about banking credit, it was about holding back what passed for the real world while pretending that was where you came from. Banking street value without the effort of being street real. Fixx shook his head. Even as a kid he’d wanted to get away from the concrete, dog shit and more concrete. The hollow-chested horses kept on tower block rooftops and distempered guard dogs chained up on thirteenth-floor balconies.

He’d come from that world, but he’d never really belonged, not even when that was all he had. Not even when he was running with a gang and getting by in one of the Adamstown estates north of Dublin, one of those up-ended crumbling coffins where even life in the soaps looked glamorous. The kind of place where the loan shark knew more about you than your ma did. Where no victim ever went to the gardai, but dobbing you in for a punishment beating counted as community spirit.

Everyone who could get out, got out. Coming up out of Adamstown had been part of the Fixx Valmont mystique. To tell the truth, he’d been embarrassed by his beginnings but the publicist assigned to him had loved it. All that shit leaked to the pirate newsfeeds about Fixx leaning back against the office wall, cleaning his nails with a pearl-handled switchblade while Bernie, his new manager, argued his first contract.

Jesus fuck, no way would he have carried a blade back in Adamstown: just owning a gravity knife was worth two broken knees. Bernie had handed Fixx the switchblade just before they both went to meet the suits.

And besides, no one got heavy around Sony: it wasn’t worth the grief.

Fixx wasn’t tough, or pretty, or even that bright, not like LizAlec. He was a fixer, just a kid who mended broken tek and could bypass the utilities to get you power for free. ReMix was something he did on the side, a safeguard: the smartboys looked kindly if you mixed hard, got them drunk and pumped up and crying, if you scratched deck or played electric fiddle at their births, weddings or wakes. Other kids in the gang cooked up chemicals or did banks the hard way, with shotguns. He mixed and remixed. And later he got to be a rhythm doctor. If you had a fucked-up tune his bedroom studio was where you took it to get a fixx.

He wouldn’t mind getting back to all that. In fact, if he ever got out of there he was going to pick up a deck and maybe go back to the CasaNegro to see if Jude needed a little regular help round the bar. No, Fixx shook his head. Make that maybe a definitely. He had to go back, the woman still had his bloody cat.

Shiori was right ahead of him now, down on one knee, blended into the crest of a dune. Even so, by squinting Fixx could see she had one hand up, shading her eyes against the brightness overhead. Fixx clambered up the steep dune behind her and stopped dead, shock clearing his head when he saw what the ballerina was looking at.

The desert ended.

Not turned into jungle or savannah, just ended. They were standing on the last dune and ahead of them the desert fell away not to bedrock but to shimmering metal overlaid with polycrete ducts and corridors. The metal curved up into the distance and vanished away into a rising smoke-grey horizon that eventually faded into blue. That was when Fixx noticed a satellite, tiny and distant, hanging silently in the air.

“Hey...”

“Seen it,” Shiori snapped. “K11, non-combat model, unknown modifications. It’s been with us since we arrived.”

Now she tells me, Fixx thought crossly. He squinted hard at the spinning globe and wondered what it showed. A couple of exhausted deadbeats, probably. Great, his last recorded performance and he looked like shit... Still, as Bernie used to say, why change the habits of a lifetime?

“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.