"If you're happy with this?"

The Vice Questore paused to give Prisoner Zero space to reply. He'd already been warned by Katie Petrov that conversations were unlikely to be two-way events, but it seemed only polite.

"I'm a doctor," he said, "also a police surgeon. I opposed the Berlusconi government and for that I've been awarded a seat in parliament... Only in Italy," he added with a sigh. "Parliament has asked me to report back on your health, the levels of security to which you're subject and the conditions in which you're held. As you can imagine, Colonel Borgenicht is not happy."

The last thing the Vice Questore produced was a small Leica and a roll of 400 ASA Kodak old-fashioned film. "La Stampa is reporting that you've been tortured. Dr. Petrov believes you are being drugged. As Camp Freedom is sited on Italian soil I've been sent to check both."

Prisoner Zero's lungs were fine and his blood pressure surprisingly low for someone of middle age. His pupils reacted to light, his liver was unenlarged and when he blew through a white plastic tube the blue marker moved further than Vice Questore Angelo had expected.

"I'll need a blood sample," said the man, ripping foil from a disposable hypodermic. "And, when that's done, if you could just urinate into this." He handed Prisoner Zero a small plastic container.

When the actual tests were done and Vice Questore Angelo had added some chemical to the blood, dipped strips of paper in still-warm urine and spread a smear of shit over the bottom sheet of a glass slide, examined it under a small brass microscope and made notes in his book, he told Prisoner Zero to stand in front of his cage.

Camera flash lit the room. Only then did the Italian begin his examination for evidence of torture. "What are these?" he asked eventually, pausing at scars on Prisoner Zero's stomach.

Silence was his answer.

"Were they done here?"

The prisoner shook his head.

"Interesting," said Vice Questore Angelo. "Most people in your position would have said yes whatever the truth."

There were five burns in all, three on Prisoner Zero's left thigh and two on his abdomen. All of them less than two weeks old. Nodding to himself, Vice Questore Angelo discounted an old bruise at the base of the prisoner's spine and a pale cicatrix on the inside of one arm. "Who punched you in the kidneys?" he asked suddenly.

As ever Prisoner Zero said nothing.

"You test positive for blood in your urine."

When the prisoner stayed silent, Vice Questore Angelo shrugged, became aware that this was not very professional of him and decided that was too bad. He was getting to the bit covered in Dr. Petrov's off-the-record talk on their way in. "All right," he said, raising his camera, "now show me your hands..."

CHAPTER 28

Razor's Edge, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

Flash/no flash.

Doc Joyce claimed to be the man who'd fixed five miles of diamond-hard neon tube to the far wall of RipJointShuts and he refused to tell anybody how to turn the thing off. So it just sat there and illuminated the darkness with its message.

"Welcome to Tomorrow."

The interesting thing about this, apart from the fact the sign gave visitors something to head for in the gloom of the fourteenth level, was that it spoke to anyone who got close enough, repeating its mantra inside one's head.

A town of about three hundred (barely half of them recognizably human), RJS was old, marginally dangerous and had briefly been famous some years before when the newest emperor manifested in a hut several levels above and Doc Joyce, owner of the local bar and a cut-price splice merchant, went on the feed to announce that he'd birthed the boy, his brother and the mother.

He might even have been telling the truth.

A plaque at Doc Joyce's place (put up so visitors would know that this was the place the Emperor's mother came for advice), announced that RipJointShuts was the oldest inhabited shanty town on Heliconid, a thousand years being mentioned.

Inventive as the dapper little man was, he still got the scale wrong by a factor of four. People had been squatting in RJS for over forty centuries. Pretty impressive for a town that didn't officially exist on a sliver of steel that was meant to be uninhabited.

Near the bottom of the Razor's Edge, that endless tear down the side of Heliconid and a day's hike into the interior of level fourteen, stood an abandoned cargo container, in the shadow of the Tomorrow sign. This was Schwarzschilds, Doc Joyce's bar.

Few tourists came to drink and fewer still came back. Schwarzschilds made it into the guides but most of what was written was third-hand, hearsay taken from hearsay.

A smaller cargo pod, barely a tenth of the size, had been abandoned millennia before at the back of Schwarzschilds. Some of those who described the pod said it looked like a calf following its mother. Others, less whimsical, thought it looked like something the bar had shat.

It was inside this smaller container that a naked fifteen-year-old girl swapped half a kidney for a completely new set of shoulder sinews. Unusually, Tris did this before her own got ripped. She'd seen too many drop queens reduced to shuffling crabs on the level.

As having her shoulders rewired cost less than she'd expected, Tris used the other half to get her arms and legs restrung, ending up with all of her sinews upgraded to full-drop status with the tensile strength of the new sinews making a mockery of those they replaced, obviously enough.

Underestimating the obvious was to give Tris the most terrifying twelve hours of her short life. A week after the operation, with the original scars long since healed, Tris took an updraft to the top of Razor's Edge and dropped the full seventeen levels in a head-whirling handful of minutes, feeling her life zip through her fingers and across her back as she touched only twice, kicking off into nothingness and waiting until the last minute to use her diamond gloves.

The sinews worked perfectly. It was Tris's shoulder muscles which did a really embarrassing first-time-out crackle and pop.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

If Tris had known a worse curse she'd have used it. All she could feel was white pain. A shock so absolute it was more or less indescribable. One that put all her previous experiences of feeling sick to shame.

She was inside her own pain. On the end of a rope.

And so began the longest night and morning of Tris's life. Crawl by crawl she made her way up the rope, knees locked tight and hands gripping on as best they could. It took eight hours to climb three levels and the rest of that day to reach Schwarzschilds.

"Hello, Tristesse," said Doc Joyce, when he finally bothered to look up from the mixing desk. "I wondered when I'd see you." Doc Joyce was the only person to call the skinny Riprat by her full name. The only person ever to stand up when she came into his room.

He'd done that the very first time she appeared in his doorway, wanting to know the prices. Tris had never forgotten. The Doc had still overcharged her but she could forgive him that. Doc Joyce overcharged everyone.

"You busy?"

The Doc snorted. "What does it look like?" he said.

A creature lay on the slab, completely naked but genital-free. All secondary sexual characteristics were also absent. The navel and nipples were gone, as were any breasts that might have supported them, always assuming the patient started out female. A completely smooth, hairless groin showed no sign of labia. In fact, it showed no signs of anything.

Two tiny horns budded from either side of the creature's narrow forehead and, in place of hair, its depilated skull was combed with corn rows of bone plate. It was a look Tris had seen often.