“Have the kidnappers made contact?” Fixx asked her at last.

“No.” Lady Clare lied without thinking about it. Fixx knew nothing of foreign policy and, for all she knew, probably cared even less. Her world wasn’t his, thank God. Besides, the situation was difficult enough without letting two separate parts of her life collide.

“But you’re worried?”

Lady Clare thought about nodding, then rejected the idea — too many tears were backed up in her eyes for them not to spill down her cheeks if she did.

“For what it’s worth, it wasn’t me.” Fixx said, but she knew that already

Lady Clare had a question to ask him. No, she had dozens, each darker than the one before. Starting with, Why my daughter? What had he got out of corrupting some defenceless kid? She wasn’t beautiful or even that rich, just intelligent and too strong-willed for her own good. Why? Why? Why? But instead, Lady Clare decided to ask just one question, the question that mattered. The only problem was that Lady Clare didn’t know which one it was, never mind how to ask it.

She didn’t need to.

“I loved her,” Fixx said baldly and dared her to deny it, to disagree. For a second, sitting there on the stumps of his legs, the steam-driven Samurai, the man who was once Sony’s most famous reMixer, looked almost sad. “Not at first,” he said “I didn’t really know her at first. She was just someone who hung about Schrödinger’s Kaff. You know, one of the street kids...”

Clare didn’t know. She didn’t know at all.

“Lady Elizabeth a street kid?”

Lady Clare was so busy being shocked she nearly missed the disbelief that flicked across Fixx’s battered face.

LizAlec? Lady Elizabeth...?

James Begley, mostly known as Fixx Valmont, stared at Lady Clare Fabio, who stared straight back. He really hadn’t known who LizAlec was, Lady Clare realized. Which meant LizAlec hadn’t told him. And that said more about LizAlec than it could ever say about Fixx.

Lady Clare sighed. “You used to meet her at Schrödinger’s Kaff?” Stupid question, hadn’t he just said he did...

Fixx nodded, thinking of their two-up battles against the Dragon and the incongruous glass tent he’d coded her for Fistful, patching it onto scrub in the Sierra Madre. Her home, LizAlec had called it, the one she didn’t have. Broken home, single-parent syndrome, a mother who was always out at work, he could remember almost everything she told him: if that wasn’t love, what was?

“St Lucius,” he said at last. “She’s not there on a scholarship, right?”

Lady Clare thought about the obscenely high fees and tried not to feel hurt. “No,” she said, “she’s not.”

Fixx was going to tell Lady Clare how LizAlec had followed him from Schrödinger’s Kaff to the Crash&Burn one night, hung at a nearby table until he’d had to take notice, but now didn’t seem the right moment.

“Right,” said Fixx. “So where do I come into this?”

“I want LizAlec back. And you get to take this with you, if you still want it.” She held up his Ted Brewer violin.

Of course he did: it was his, for a start. Of course, if the electricity supply died for good then the violin was useless, but Fixx didn’t reckon that would happen, not gone forever.

“Any idea where she is?” Fixx kept his voice so neutral he might have been discussing the weather, except no one was neutral where that was concerned, not with storms ripping apart buildings from Salzburg to the Atlantic coast.

“Darkside, maybe,” said Lady Clare. “Or one of the burbs. If it was LunaWorld or Planetside, I’d have noticed.”

Fixx didn’t actually ask his question but the woman answered it anyway. “Reciprocal security treaty. Besides, she was tagged,” said Lady Clare, her voice defensive.

“But the trace was removed,” Fixx finished for her, running what data he had through his mind and adding in what his old minder Albrecht would have done. “Probably got a cortex bomb too by now, if they bothered to keep her alive.”

Lady Clare looked at him and then shook her head. “LizAlec is alive.”

“Yeah?” Fixx had no doubt she meant it, he just wasn’t so sure she was right. Either that, or there was a lot she wasn’t telling him. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” said Lady Clare. “Put it down to a mother’s intuition.”

If she could call herself a mother, which was doubtful. But then Fixx still called himself a musician and five years had gone walkabout since he’d fixxed anything worth releasing, and even that had just been a tarted-up remix of KrystalKrash, featuring clips by Coppola and classic samples from Roni Size and Wagner.

Even so, the man was on the other edge of genius. An IQ of over 160 matched to the EQ of an amoral infant, Lady Clare knew that, or she did now. According to Fixx, what drove humanity wasn’t the usual troika of lust, greed and fear, it was vacuum. Whether people knew it or not, everything they did was about hiding from the void.

It wasn’t hipness that made artists gut the past for designer role models: fashion was really just another need to feed. All anyone had left to ransack for inspiration was history, and there was still plenty of that to go round.

Fixx didn’t deny that it was cheap, cut-price nihilism or that outside half a dozen minor academics he was probably one of the few people alive who could tell you who Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus had been. Certainly the only person who might care.

All the same, Lady Clare wasn’t sure what to make of a man who’d had one leg blown off in an organitskaya car bomb explosion and then promptly had the other one surgically removed to ensure symmetry...

Chapter Thirteen

CasaNegro

The bar sucked her in through its wide adobe door, the way CasaNegro always vacuumed up those with no place to go. Inside Jude’s place, the music was stripHop/cheezy-listening, stuff LizAlec hadn’t heard in years. Original edits, too, but the tunes went with the heat, the slight edge of sweat and the mix of unshaven locals and bare-armed, stained-top backpackers.

Over the bar itself was a neon sign advertising Electric Soup. It flashed two pictures, one of a bikini-clad cowgirl, the other of the same girl with her clothes off. LizAlec wasn’t to know, but as an original and still-functioning bit of Dallas kitsch it was one of Fracture’s best-known sights. LizAlec wasn’t sure what the girl advertised but she ordered a couple anyway, stuffing ice-cold tubes into the side pocket of Laughing Boy’s oversized jumpsuit. The problems only started when LizAlec offered the woman behind the bar her gold HKS card in payment.

It would be a lie to say everyone froze, LizAlec decided. But shoulders definitely stiffened all the way along the scuffed and cracked oak plank that made do as a bartop. Chinoed men who’d clocked her entrance began to watch more openly and one or two were actually grinning. Still, not an enhanced canine in sight, LizAlec realized with relief. Not a vampire, not a wolfBoy or sandrat. Just straight human, even if most of them did look like spares from Fistful, that opening bit where you got offed by a rug-wearing psycho if you insulted his mule.

As for the blonde woman behind the bar, she looked tougher than most of the men. She was certainly taller. “¿Tú tienes alguna cósa persona que puedes usar?”

LizAlec looked blank.

“Nihon?”

The girl shook her head. St Lucius didn’t teach Japanese, they taught Latin instead. She’d always thought it was a bloody stupid decision.

“Inglés?”

“Yes,” said LizAlec, smiling with relief. She could do English.

“Honey, you got anything anyone can actually use?” The woman was thirty going on three hundred and then some. Her blue eyes were washed out with enough background to plot-line a thousand newsfeed novelas.