“Please, no...” The tiny Chinese girl, Anchee, stepped forward only to stop dead as the muzzle of the man’s automatic rammed against her mouth in a cold ceramic kiss. Three years of priceless orthodontics went straight down the drain. LizAlec didn’t even blink.

“Well?” LizAlec’s voice carried easily over the head of the silent crowd. She didn’t want her mother to miss a single dramatic moment. Come to that, she didn’t want her to miss how useless her locally hired WeGuard was either.

“You going to do something about this?” LizAlec said to her frozen-faced black bodyguard. Very slowly, the man shook his head.

Typical.

“Get on with it, then,” LizAlec told the man in the mouse-mask and stepped back, giving him space. She counted off the time in fractions, the way she used to do back when she was a kid. He was furious, she knew that. And this wasn’t how hits were meant to go, she knew that, too. But LizAlec didn’t care.

For three whole seconds, it almost seemed like the mouse-man might actually blast a little smart slug straight through her head. But then the gun’s muzzle swept over the frozen crowd and the man fell back on the words he’d been practising earlier, while he was still waiting for LizAlec’s Boeing to land.

“Get down and stay down...”

His words were digital, issuing from a kid’s translation box. The kind Toys ‘R’ Us piled high and sold cheap from wire baskets near the door. At least, that was the last place LizAlec had seen one, at the kiddie boutique right after you came through Sonic Cleaning & Immigration.

LizAlec looked around at the Arrivals Hall. Everyone but her and the frozen bodyguard were busy falling to their knees, like they’d got instant religion — just add fear.

LizAlec felt like asking Anchee what she thought of the blue mosaic on the floor, but now didn’t seem a good time. Anchee was face down on the tiles, sobbing. And from what LizAlec could see of the hand held to Anchee’s mouth, the only colour Anchee could see was red.

So, instead, LizAlec made do with looking at Mickey’s long brown coat. Close up the coat wasn’t as stupid as it looked. Inappropriate, yes. A style insult, undoubtedly. But stupid...? No coat that combined a flame-proof, heat-dispersing outer layer with an anti-shrapnel, spider’s-silk lining could be called stupid.

Maybe the WeGuard at her side wasn’t really a gutless waste of money at all. Maybe the man just recognized a true professional when he met one. For a second LizAlec was tempted to give her bodyguard the benefit of the doubt, but then decided not to bother.

“You,” said the man, pointing at LizAlec. “Come with me.”

LizAlec thought about it for all of one second, and then shook her head, heavy black curls briefly brushing her ears. Her decision was to cost someone their life, but LizAlec was still a full fifteen seconds away from knowing that.

“If you don’t move,” said the man, taking a step towards her, “I will shoot you.” His words were dangerously quiet. Casually he brought the automatic up level with LizAlec’s face. And behind her, LizAlec’s WeGuard chose that moment to make his play. Fat fingers reaching for a 50,000-volt taser velcroed to his wide leather belt.

It was a brave move but a seriously stupid one.

LizAlec caught the flash but didn’t see the .38 ceramic rip through the bodyguard’s Kevlar-lined black shirt, opening a black hole over his heart that grew fist-sized by the time the slug exploded out of his back, showering fragments of spine and shredded lung over the stunned crowd.

Sweet Jesus.

Everyone started screaming at once, but it was Anchee that LizAlec immediately noticed. The tiny Chinese girl was up on her knees screaming so hard no sound came out of her bloodied mouth. “It’s okay,” LizAlec said harshly, crouching down beside the girl. “Hey, it’s okay.” It wasn’t. LizAlec knew that: she’d been there.

Desperately, LizAlec stroked the other girl’s hair. Which wasn’t LizAlec’s style at all, but she was too shocked to remember that. And besides, she was too busy trying to wipe Anchee’s mouth clean of blood and fragments of tooth without letting Anchee know what she was doing.

LizAlec was still wiping red spittle from Anchee’s lips when the Chinese girl blacked out in LizAlec’s arms, her silver flower clattering to the floor. Without thinking, LizAlec grabbed it and waves of darkness immediately swept in over her like someone had just invented the code.

The last thing LizAlec remembered before the man hoisted her onto his shoulder was that Anchee’s silver flower closed itself up and slid over her bloodied fingers, until it locked itself around the outside of LizAlec’s wrist. And then the void came in, amphetamine-fast and twice as unforgiving.

Medical droids carried Anchee to the St Lucius skimmer on a MediSoft stretcher, the Chinese girl’s mouth wide open with shock, blood and spittle dribbling down her once perfect face.

It was classic trauma, announced the stretcher cheerfully, and Ms Gwyneth winced. Classic trauma was almost guaranteed to develop into full-blown post-trauma and cases of PTS got schools like St Lucius sued for billions. Not least because Anchee had been sent to school precisely to keep her away from such incidents.

That Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio had been abducted was a disaster... poor child. By the time they reached the shuttle, Ms Gwyneth had finally trained herself to think of LizAlec as poor child, though it didn’t come naturally, not after hearing about the little brat’s temper tantrums on the flight out.

But, to be brutal about it, Lady Elizabeth’s disappearance wasn’t the disaster it could have been, or even would have been, only three months back... Paris would fall to the Reich, that much was now commonly accepted. And when it did, it would take the whole ossified Napoleonic empire with it, LizAlec’s mother and all.

It was what had happened to Anchee that terrified Ms Gwyneth. Quite simply, if this was handled wrongly, it might mean the end of the school. St Lucius was in the business of education, not moral judgement. The school made it a point of principle not to enquire how parents came by their money. But Ms Gwyneth had heard rumours about Anchee’s father, dark unpleasant rumours. And Ms Gwyneth made a point of listening to rumour: one always heard so much of the truth...

She would have to make contingency plans.

She did.

It took thirty-five per cent of St Lucius’s capital reserve to have ten per cent of Planetside’s m/wave surveillance cameras wiped by a freak bot that somehow bypassed all standard cut-outs and affected only the vids covering what took place in the Arrivals Hall. The old Cray bioAI put in place specifically to see that kind of thing didn’t happen didn’t turn a hair. It had been corrupted years back, and now spent most of its time watching reruns of SpaceHospital: The Final Years.