reMix

Chapter Thirty-Eight White light/White heat

“You could always kill her,” Sister Aaron told Fixx. “If you think that would be kind.”

The woman reached down and ripped free a standard-issue combat knife taped to Shiori’s ankle. The one Shiori had never even come close to using on her.

“Or you could always kill me instead. If you think you can...” The blonde woman tossed Fixx the lethal zytel blade, smiling as Fixx fumbled the catch and almost sliced his own fingers. “Alternatively, we could think of something else...”

Blue eyes held his and Fixx almost heard the waterfall-roar as blood rushed through his body and inside his head synapses exploded, firing and re-firing as they completed a fluorescent and familiar web of addiction. Waves of absolute need rolled over him... Sister Aaron nodded to herself, quietly amused. “So tell me,” she said, “what do you want to do?”

“Fuck you, probably,” said a girl’s voice behind her. “Fixx always did think with his dick.”

In that brief silent second before Sister Aaron turned round — while her eyes were still locked to those of Fixx — the musician saw real shock cross her face. And then the shock was gone, along with all other emotions, as Sister Aaron’s perfect Helen-of-Troy mask slid safely back into place.

“Blind-sided,” said Liz Alec contemptuously, from her position high on the obsidian block. She was breathing heavily from the climb, but her words were confident. “You should learn to concentrate.”

Jumping down, she landed in a crouch, not even looking at Fixx. And if LizAlec noticed Shiori’s blood drying like glazed black enamel on the parched ground then she didn’t let it show.

Someone else slid out onto the edge of the obsidian block, looking a lot less certain than LizAlec. But he jumped down anyway to stand beside the girl. Leon still wore a black T-shirt and stupid hair, but a fractal blade was held firm in his hand like he knew how to use it. And, looking at the way the boy flicked the blade from side to side, Fixx decided that maybe he did. Except that even the sharpest mono-molecular edge was going to be no use against Sister Aaron. Fixx could have told them that for free.

“You want to do it now?” LizAlec asked Sister Aaron, casually waving the boy to one side. Leon almost refused to move but then shuffled sideways, his eyes suddenly dark... Oh, the anger of youth, thought Fixx enviously. On a good day he could still remember what that felt like.

“Well, do you?” LizAlec demanded.

The ash-blonde woman remained silent, almost unmoving.

“No,” said LizAlec, “I didn’t think so.” She stepped neatly round Sister Aaron’s frozen form and knelt by Shiori. It looked, for a second, as if LizAlec intended to comfort the Japanese woman. But all LizAlec did was reach down and touch the black bracelet on Shiori’s wrist.

Sister Aaron winced.

There’s a point just before lead melts when it swells outwards and then splits through its own papery skin. That’s what Shiori’s bracelet did, coalescing into mirrored liquid that flowed up around LizAlec’s wrist, solidifying into a heavy bangle. And then, as LizAlec emptied her mind, she knew what Shiori’s bracelet was and how much more important the other one must be.

How much Anchee’s bracelet might offer.

LizAlec smiled sourly. “You know, if I hadn’t met your other half I wouldn’t know how to do that.” There was something about the way she said it that made Fixx’s skin crawl.

“You’re the little rich kid,” Sister Aaron said. It wasn’t a question.

“And you’re the clone Brother Michael had made with cells from his own rib. So he could fuck himself. Only you didn’t like sex, did you?” LizAlec looked at the woman’s unnerving perfection and shrugged. “You must have been such a disappointment.”

Pain flared inside LizAlec’s head, growing like cancer. But the waves never had time to overwhelm her. Wrapping her thoughts round with a stuttering barrier of noise, LizAlec pushed the other woman out of her head and pumped up the volume until white noise, white heat echoed round the inside of her skull.

Leon would be proud of her, LizAlec decided with a grin. And, despite herself, she glanced at the boy, taking in his serious scowl and black Voidoid3 T-shirt but most of all the blade held rock-steady in his hand. He’d insisted on coming along to cover her back. Except LizAlec didn’t know who Leon might have to guard it against, apart from Sister Aaron. And LizAlec intended to take care of Sister Aaron herself.

She could do it, too. LizAlec was increasingly certain of that. Put LizAlec’s life in danger and she had the power. At least, she did now... It came from being dead. That’s how the girl thought of it. She’d been killed up there in the cathedral, Brother Michael’s hands squeezing the life out of her as certainly as she now breathed.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...

LizAlec grinned. She was made flesh again. Only now, somewhere inside her head howled the ghost hordes of her father... She’d thought, while she was cached up in the pod, that maybe that whole incident was brief insanity brought on by oxygen starvation. But that wasn’t it. She hadn’t met angels or even the One True King, may he rock forever. She’d met herself.

“Meet yourself again,” suggested Sister Aaron inside her head and stepped forward, reaching for LizAlec’s wrist. Before Leon could move or LizAlec even scream, the woman threw her against the obsidian block, wing chun-style. Only all Liz Alec felt was cold wind on her face as she rolled blindly through the rock and fell headlong into blackness.

She screamed but there was no echo, her howl swallowed by the dark.

Stars flicked around her except she wasn’t in space: deep space had no significant gravity and she was definitely falling, hard and fast. Landing even harder, as her feet caught on something and her legs buckled upwards to punch LizAlec violently in the chest, winding her.

Stars swung crazily from side to side. And then LizAlec realized the stars themselves weren’t moving, it was the ground beneath her that was lurching backwards and forwards, creaking as it did. Dragging in a breath, LizAlec crawled across ice-cold metal only to hit a surface straight ahead that was hard and flat. It too was speckled with stars.

Glass, thought LizAlec as she brushed a finger across its cold surface. Without even knowing she’d done it, LizAlec retuned her optic nerves, running through infrared and m/wave, rejecting both and finally retuning the 120m rod cells in her retina. The trade-off shift to mute pastels and greys was the price of seeing clearly. It took just long enough for LizAlec to feel it happen and then she was suddenly looking at herself in a vast mirror that just hung there. Between the mirror and the steel grating on which she knelt was a two-feet-wide gap.

Through the gap LizAlec could see a space so vast it would have been impossible to contain within The Arc had it been real. But it wasn’t. Distances multiplied and space doubled and then doubled again as LizAlec looked round at the wilderness of hanging mirrors.

Beside her, behind her, in front...

A thousand frightened, wide-eyed LizAlecs stared back, endlessly reflected. She looked shit, every single one of her. The T-shirt she’d borrowed from Leon was grit-smeared and stained, her cropped hair slick black with sweat. Ugly sweat circles stood out endlessly under her arms and down her gut.

Shit on wheels, no one could be expected to look at themselves looking like that, it was time she got out of there.

LizAlec gripped two freezing rails and slid down a long run of metal stairs, feet not touching the steps. Somewhere down below would be Sister Aaron’s own little clone-zone. And if luck was good that’s where she’d find the shrine everyone seemed to be after, including the lunatic in her head.

The next flight was single rail so she couldn’t slide. Instead, LizAlec took it at a run. Screeching to a halt at the bottom she almost cannoned head-first into herself, the walkway rocking drunkenly from side to side. Glass again... LizAlec edged sideways along the mirror, trying to ignore her reflection as it did the same. Both reaching round the edge of the mirror to look at the back, except there was no back.

The floating glass reflected on both sides. They all did. And the mirrors weren’t floating either, no matter what it looked like. Hair-thin threads of monofilament rose into the blackness up towards the distant ceiling, each one as taut as the string to any violin.

LizAlec reached out and tapped one of the threads, pulling back in shock as the wire sliced into her fingertip. Not monofilament but molywire. Behind LizAlec someone laughed.

“Sharp things cut,” said a voice.

LizAlec spun round and saw only herself reflected in a mirror off to the side.

“It’s a maze,” said Sister Aaron.

“I know that,” LizAlec muttered bitterly, her eyes searching steps and runways, looking for Sister Aaron. “Multi-level 3D.”

“Oh no,” the voice sounded genuinely amused. “Not triD, it’s very definitely quad...”

LizAlec was still trying to track down the voice when her own reflection swirled and faded in every glass LizAlec could see. She felt like someone had kicked her feet out from under her. Staring back was her own face but younger. The hair was neat and tied back into a plait, the violet eyes less hard, more hurt. Her mouth was petulant, over-glossed with black shu uemura.

As for the clothes... embroidered trousers, velvet shirt with pearl buttons: she wouldn’t be seen dead wearing them, not now. But LizAlec recognized herself right enough. That night at the Crash&Burn in Bastille, when Fixx sent her over undrinkable brandy.

“Not far back enough?”

LizAlec swung round but there was no one standing there behind her. The only thing that had changed was the girl in the mirror. It was still LizAlec, looking younger still, more haunted. Ghost-ridden. In place of the sullen fourteen-year-old in a velvet shirt was a naked twelve-year-old, hands crossed tight over her hollow gut, shoulders hunched forward to hide tiny breasts. She was sitting on the edge of a bed, tears streaming down her anguished face, dark shadow hiding her thighs like a swirl of blood.

She could have been the model for Edvard Munch’s Puberty.

Or for Felician Rops’s engraving of Don Juan’s Greatest Conquest.

But she was neither.

And the old man in the background struggling into a dressing gown woven from silk genetically engineered to contain pure gold was not an artist. LizAlec knew his face, every child did. It was the face on all the medals, on the holograms used to emboss cartes blanches and nobliques. The Prince Imperial looked thoughtful, even slightly sad, but there was no regret in his smoke-grey eyes.

No remorse.

No uncertainty.

“You owe Lady Clare nothing,” said a voice. And this time when LizAlec turned round, Sister Aaron was standing right behind her. “Lady Clare’s not even your real mother. You’re a clone like me. And not even her clone.”

“No,” LizAlec shook her head frantically. She’d have known if she was a clone, LizAlec was certain of it.

“You belong here,” Sister Aaron said and the child in the mirror vanished as Sister Aaron gave LizAlec back her reflection. Except now they both knew exactly what flaws were hidden inside. Which didn’t make LizAlec feel good about herself — and it didn’t make LizAlec feel good about Sister Aaron, either.

Emotional manipulation, the girl thought bitterly, that’s all this was. Nothing more. She stopped looking at the mirrors and stared instead at the woman in front of her. In most ways Sister Aaron was way too exotic for LizAlec to understand, but in one way she wasn’t... LizAlec figured Sister Aaron had to have the same circuitry inside her head. Apparently that was something she shouldn’t have thought.

“Make your choice,” said Sister Aaron abruptly, and every mirror around LizAlec reverted to the crying child. “Be this, or be us. While you still can...” Her voice was cold and contemptuous, as if LizAlec had failed some test.

Maybe I have, LizAlec thought, but that changed nothing. Looking at Sister Aaron, LizAlec knew just what she intended to do. She was going to take back Anchee’s shrine, even if she had to kill Sister Aaron to get it. And then, when she got back to Paris, she was going to face down the bitch she’d thought was her mother and ask the questions no child was meant to ask.

Why?

Who gave you the right?

Why me?

The two women stared at each other, a hand’s breadth apart. And then LizAlec moved, spinning not at Sister Aaron but towards a mirror, hands flicking out in front of her. Shiori’s razor-sharp katana was in LizAlec’s hand before she was even conscious of it, metal flowing from between her fingers into a black blade that swung in a dazzling arc.

Katana hit molywire but it was the wire that snapped, whipping roofwards to smash another mirror on its way. A second stroke and another mirror broke free, falling a hundred metres to smash against the steel floor below.

Hove the sound of breaking—

That was Fixx for you, still polluting her head with soundbites even when she was trying to save his life. Actually, if Alex Gibson was right, it was everybody’s life, more or less. Lady-fucking-Clare included.

“Last chance,” said Sister Aaron.

LizAlec shook her head. No, her last chance was long gone. “Give me Anchee’s shrine,” LizAlec demanded and Sister Aaron laughed. Sharp as broken glass and cold as wind through an attic.

Bringing up the blade of her katana, LizAlec swirled towards another mirror and high-tension molywire ricocheted up into the distance as another sobbing child crashed to fragments on a walkway three levels beneath. Suddenly, there were mirrors everywhere, what looked like thousands of them, edging walkways at every level, reflecting LizAlec back at herself until she was being buried under her own memories.

LizAlec swung the blade in a clumsy arc around her head and turned to face Sister Aaron. “Stop it,” said LizAlec. “Stop it now.”

The face that smiled back was more beautiful than any LizAlec had seen, more beautiful even than Anchee. But the curve to her perfect lips was cold in the way that a Big Black was cold and her blue eyes were hard, inhuman.

“Walk away,” Sister Aaron offered. “Leave The Arc. Take that ship and your friends...” For a second LizAlec saw Fixx and Leon through the eyes of Sister Aaron. A washed-up, has-been tetsuo and a would-be street punk. “Take them and go.”

“No,” said LizAlec and knew she was saying the word three years too late and that no one would have listened to her back then anyway. But that wasn’t the point. Even late can be better than never learning to say it at all.

“Get out of my head.”

LizAlec made her blade sweep an infinity spiral in front of her, tracing its figure of eight faster than human eye could see. Both LizAlec’s feet were placed correctly, one forward for advance, one back and half turned to balance LizAlec on the rocking walkway... It wouldn’t convince the St Lucius sensei but it still felt pretty neat to LizAlec.

Something about it didn’t convince Sister Aaron either. Instead of backing away she stepped straight into the path of the blade, instinct making LizAlec throw wide her blow. Sister Aaron smiled.

“Sweet, aren’t you?” The voice had gone back to being amused. Elegant fingers reached out to caress LizAlec’s smooth cheek and the girl screamed. When Sister Aaron stepped back her immaculate fingers were lacquered in Mood.

Sister Aaron moved in again. Only this time LizAlec stepped back and swung her blade hard at Sister Aaron’s face, blinking as the woman spun effortlessly away. Fight or flight? There was no contest really. LizAlec turned tail and fled, sliding down to the next walkway, slamming into the bottom so hard that mirrors around the walkway rang like wind chimes.

Three directions, out to each side and straight ahead — and she didn’t have the faintest which one to choose. LizAlec went ahead — it was easier than trying to throw a turn on a walkway that rocked like a badly-built house of cards.

Ice dragged at her throat as LizAlec pulled frozen air into her lungs and jumped another flight of steps, hanging a right because that was all there was. She jumped again and instinct saved her — pure, animal, unmissable — as she threw up her sword in front of her and promptly catapulted onto her back as her blade slammed into molywire strung throat-high across the walkway.

Scrambling to her feet, LizAlec hacked at the molywire, severing it in a flash of sparks. She took the next landing at a lope, sword in front of her this time. In one way, every walkway she reached was the same. Mirrors overlapped mirrors, everywhere, in all directions, and all of them showed her...

There were gaps between the mirrors, spaces a body might slide through to reach walkways behind. But there was no way for LizAlec to find the gaps, short of running her hands over the face of every mirror she met, looking for where it ended and space began.

So instead LizAlec cut down her reflections, shattering the memories she’d worked so hard to forget. LizAlec as a small child, crying on her first day at the Lycee; the morning she lost her best friend; the Imperial ball, LizAlec sitting on a gilded chair on the edge while the Prince Imperial’s bastard son Louis danced with someone else; that first time Fixx got drunk at the club and walked out on her. Small hurts and bigger ones, all ripped out of her head.

LizAlec slammed the razor-edged katana into molywire, sending memory after memory crashing into shards onto the walkways below. However many mirrors she cut there were always more behind, more walkways, more steps... LizAlec took the next flight at a run, blade in front of her — no wires — and slid right to find herself face to face with Sister Aaron.

LizAlec’s blade swung for the woman’s throat and glass shattered.

“You can run, but you can’t hide...” Framed in another mirror, the ash-blonde woman adjusted her hair. Not a strand of it was out of place: no sweat patches stained her white sarong, the bitch’s hairline wasn’t even damp.

LizAlec shattered that mirror too and behind her Sister Aaron laughed, the real Sister Aaron this time.

“God, I love this game,” she told a breathless LizAlec. “I can’t tell you when I last had this much fun.” Fingers reached for LizAlec’s face and the girl ducked back, sword flicked up in front of her.

“Back off,” LizAlec hissed, really meaning it, and swung, hard as hell, straight at Sister Aaron’s head. But the woman just stepped sideways, elusive on her feet. “Temper, temper...”

LizAlec attacked again, swinging viciously towards Sister Aaron’s head and when that missed, she cut down hard towards the woman’s bare legs. Let her walk on stumps... Neither blow came close.

“Honey,” snapped a voice deep inside her, “Don’t waste your energy.” LizAlec froze, then jerked back as Sister Aaron’s hooked fingers whistled past her eyes, so close that LizAlec could feel the breeze.

“Alex?”

“Alex!” Outrage filled LizAlec’s head. “You know what Alex-fucking-Gibson knows about close combat? Fuck all... Get down,” snapped the voice and LizAlec did, Sister Aaron’s clawed nails whistling over her head. “Rule one, don’t let the bitch make you fight on her territory.” The voice sighed. “Well, you’ve blown that. Rule two, find solid ground...”

LizAlec hesitated.

“That means fucking jump,” the voice said irritably so LizAlec did, clearing a short run of steps and stumbling on the walkway below. “Jump again,” snapped the voice. And LizAlec ran straight into a mirror.

“Sweet fucking Nazarene. Can’t you do anything right?”

“No,” LizAlec shook her head and pulled herself unsteadily to her feet. It seemed she couldn’t, not properly.

“All right, let’s try this...” Neurons exploded within LizAlec’s cortex, burning into a double matrix of endlessly swirling impulses as axons and dendritic nerves sparked off each other, hollow as ghost fire. All LizAlec felt was a lurch in perception, no stronger than the beginning of an ice run, and then someone else was looking out through her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” the someone said, using LizAlec’s voice. “Everyone’s more than one person.”

“Speak for yourself, darling,” said Sister Aaron, climbing up the stairs that LizAlec had been intending to go down. She still wore the white silk sarong fastened under her arms, her legs were still bare and her face was as empty and beautiful as ever, but that wasn’t what LizAlec noticed. In Sister Aaron’s hand was a sword, black with a silver cutting edge and a gently curving blade.

The woman swung the blade lightly in front of her and inside her mind LizAlec felt the ghost grow suddenly tense. Then the tension seeped away to leave nothing but whistling waste-like emptiness.

“Close down,” whispered the voice in her head. LizAlec tried, but didn’t know what she was trying to do.

“Think hollow,” said the voice.

Sister Aaron smiled, still swinging the blade lazily. “Relying on the hired help again, are we, darlings?” The woman’s wrist flicked lightly sideways and her blade skimmed up towards LizAlec’s unprotected throat.

It never came close to connecting. Inside the same split second, LizAlec blocked the incoming blade in a crash of sparks and pivoted her own sword around Sister Aaron’s, pushing it to one side. Without stopping, LizAlec sliced sideways at waist level to open a rip in the blonde woman’s white sarong that beaded with blood along its edges.

“Little bitch.”

The mind pushing at the outside edge of LizAlec’s faded slightly as Sister Aaron drew back into herself, fingers touching the cut on her hip, as if she couldn’t believe the wound was there.

“Okay,” said the voice, sounding tentatively relieved. As if what it had feared would happen just maybe wasn’t going to. The walkway still rocked below LizAlec’s feet as she circled Sister Aaron, but this time LizAlec had no trouble keeping her balance. She had the blade held in front of her, angled off-centre, ready to block any slice Sister Aaron might throw.

Left.

Right.

The tall woman’s sword curved in, only to thud into LizAlec’s silver blade, sparks flying, shock waves numbing the nerves in both their arms. Block, cut, block — fighting got easier once you got the empty rhythm of the moves.

“Finish her,” said the voice in LizAlec’s head, but the girl only stepped back, raised her blade and began to circle again. She could do block and parry, at least she could now. Doing death was something else again. LizAlec didn’t do death. She’d never even killed an insect, except by accident.

“What about Brother Michael?” The voice in her head sounded exasperated.

That was different. Anyway, she hadn’t killed him, that had been left to the Big Black.

“Get real,” the voice told her. LizAlec didn’t want to. She very seriously, very definitely didn’t want to get real at all. She was just about coping with the idea that this wasn’t real, that maybe she was merely insane.

“Honey,” said the voice. “If we don’t fucking finish this, she will...”

And that looked to be true, too. Sister Aaron was closing in, pushing LizAlec back towards a glass behind her, until the girl had no more room to retreat.

“Fall,” the voice snapped and LizAlec fell, hearing Sister Aaron’s sword explode into the glass above, showering LizAlec with razor-sharp splinters. In front of LizAlec, her own sword was changing shape, its blade shrinking down to dagger length.

“Now. Roll,” said the voice and LizAlec rolled in through Sister Aaron’s legs, stabbing upwards as she did, hearing a wet sucking sound as metal severed flesh and then ground noisily against bone.

LizAlec didn’t need the second blow, the one that would reach back and snap the hamstring of Sister Aaron’s left ankle because the woman’s bowels were already voiding, but LizAlec cut the hamstring anyway and the screaming woman buckled sideways, blue eyes already blank with shock, her blade retracting into itself, melting to a silver puddle next to her twitching hand.

“Finish it, honey,” demanded the voice. “You have to.”

Unfortunately for LizAlec that was true. Kneeling over Sister Aaron, LizAlec felt for the woman’s heart and found its beat erratic and weak beneath one perfectly denned breast. Closing her own eyes, the girl positioned her blade between two thin ribs and pushed.

“Now get that fucking shrine and get out of here, okay? No tears, no hanging about, no shit.”

Not even bothering to take one last look at the corpse behind her, LizAlec flipped down some stairs with speed she didn’t know she had, rolled into the gap between a mirror and the walkway and dropped into space, landing lightly twenty feet below. She was moving again almost before she was aware she’d landed, spinning sideways, cutting a wire she didn’t even know she’d seen and then taking the next flight of steps at a single jump.

If she stopped now she’d never start again. LizAlec didn’t know how she knew, she just did. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was the person looking out of her eyes who knew. Landing with another roll, LizAlec came face to face with herself in the mirror and saw a half-naked silver exotic looking back. Shark cartilage overlaid with lizard skin protected her shoulders, her eyes were silver and her fingers flexed and unflexed to show wicked molyglass nails that sprang out and retracted like those of a cat. Her exotic’s top was covered with an open silver Issaki Mashui quilted jacket but from the hips down she was bare, her body hair depilated, pudenda sealed with three gold labia rings.

“What the...”

“Razz,” said Razz, and LizAlec felt herself flip sideways, then run for another flight of stairs. “See me while you can.”

“My mother.”

“If you say so, honey.” The voice sounded surprised but cool about it all the same. LizAlec needed to stop, to slow down and talk but the presence behind her eyes wouldn’t let up, hurrying her ruthlessly down towards ground level. Making LizAlec ignore her mirrored reflection that changed with each drop, each new walkway. She’d long since ditched her own past, bleak though scraps of it were, and traded up to worse possibilities. The mirrors gave form to fears LizAlec had fought to keep nameless. All that had been locked inside her head was reflected endlessly in the surrounding, suffocating reflections. Infinity and horror stuffed into boxes.

“Okay, honey, this is it...”

LizAlec skidded to a halt on the final walkway and looked around. It was a shit move. The face staring back had its lips pulled up into a rictus snarl. She was stripped naked, not bare but flayed, her epidermis stripped back to reveal pulpy, blood-sweating flesh. Just looking at it hurt.

As LizAlec watched, horrified, her flayed skin shrivelled away like melting wax to reveal yellow fat-pustuled layers of hypodermis beneath. And, beneath that, striated muscle and tapeworm-like strips of tendon, and a pulsing, crawling pink-and-purple web of arteries and veins.

“Honey, get up.”

LizAlec was on her knees despite the shouting in her head. She needed to move, but she couldn’t. She was coming apart in front of her own eyes. Shock-frozen as the upper muscle layer of her face flayed back, the jaw-closing bands of purple muscle rotting away to reveal her bare skull. Not white — as she somehow imagined — but glistening a tallow-wax yellow. Lidless pain-wrecked eyeballs stared at her from hollow sockets and then glazed ever, like the eyes of a bludgeoned fish.

LizAlec vomited, spewing Leon’s chocolate onto the metal floor.

“Move, fuck it.” The voice in her head was loud, vicious: pain blossoming through LizAlec’s skull until she fought to stand upright just to make it go away. Standing took more will than LizAlec knew she had. To move away from that last glass took even more. But LizAlec did it, glancing back only once, to see the flesh on her chest and shoulders flay down to the bone.

“Not bad, honey. Not bad at all...” The words were softer, amused, almost impressed. And for the first time in days, LizAlec smiled as she walked towards a polycrete prefab thrown up in the middle of a vast curving floor littered with smashed glass.

High above her, like corrupted raytracing, walkways and stairs floated in frozen darkness, held in place by strands of molywire so thin as to be invisible. All around those, like antique circuit boards slotted into transparent mountings, hung endless mirrors suspended in mid-air. The whole structure still swayed slightly with the after-effects of her passing. LizAlec had just completed the Brotherhood’s highest mystery, without ever intending to.

LizAlec opened the door of the prefab, fingers sticking briefly to the frozen handle, and then she found herself inside a simple windowless laboratory lit by halogen lights. It looked like something from St Lucius. Elements were stored down one wall, arranged according to the periodic table, radioactive materials clearly marked. On the opposite wall, racked in a cryo unit, were embryos and freeze-dried amino acids. There was a black Drexler Box in one corner and next to the matter compiler was a semi-AI fume cupboard. A greybox stuffed with parallel RISC processors sat on the floor, stripped back to its frame, lumps of oily bioClay stuck to it like cancer. Above it, a vast Tosh flatscreen was running endlessly through some fractal sequence.

At one end of a long plastic table sat a DNA polymerase reactor cum enzyme cutter, at the other an IBM nanite coder was on standby: between them was a molybdenum flask, a clay pot planted with valerian and a half-empty glass of water. Discarded by the plant was a simple silver bangle.

“Get the shrine,” said the voice in her head. “And then let’s get out of here.”

LizAlec did.