“Synth,” Jude said curtly. “Still, better than t’shit they feed you up at LunaWorld.”

Fixx washed away the almonds’ salt taste with another tube, then shook his head when Jude offered a fourth.

“You seen her?” Fixx asked. He tried to keep his voice casual, but he wasn’t fooling either of them. If she hadn’t seen LizAlec then Fixx wouldn’t have been there. And if Jude really had seen LizAlec then the girl was in trouble. Bad trouble. LizAlec was many things, but spoilt was the big one. When she slummed it was for a reason and CasaNegro wasn’t her style.

LizAlec liked the Crash&Burn back in Bastille for the black clothes and the anorexic amphetamined-out would-be Warhols who hung out there in silence, touting old Thai RomReaders loaded up with Rambeau. Where LizAlec was concerned, not even terminal irony could excuse CasaNegro’s white-washed adobe walls, its chrome jukebox and kitsch neon stripper. Hacienda Hispanic definitely wasn’t her thing. Nothing but dire need would have put LizAlec through that bead-curtained door.

Of course, the real irony was that, Bastille bars apart, LizAlec’s concept of living dangerously probably ended where Jude’s idea of normality began.

“And the boy...?” Fixx said.

Jude smiled, sketched a height line just about level with her shoulders. “So high, matted hair, dog jaw, smelt...” She racked her memory for other clues. “One lung,” she said, finally.

Fixx just looked.

“One lung,” Jude repeated. “And a steel bottle, ‘bout here.” She sketched in an imaginary shape at her side, a little above her hip. “Sandrat, see. One flesh lung for air, one bottle for empty tunnels...”

“Real san’rats all dead,” interrupted a boy in combats, leaning himself against Jude’s bar. Jude frowned, but said nothing. “They’re all dead,” the boy told Fixx. “That freak was just pretending. He had two good lungs.”

Imperceptibly, Jude shook her head, disagreeing.

“And the girl with him?” Fixx asked. “You saw her?”

The boy grinned. “Yeah, pretty, or would be if her face was mended.” He glanced knowingly at the bruises stained yellow down one side of Fixx’s face.

Fixx shook his head. “Police,” he said, lightly touching his cheek.

The boy nodded. That was something he understood. For a second he glanced at Jude, as if wondering how far he dared go. “I saw police this morning,” he said hesitantly. “Looking for her...”

Jude was wide awake now, her lazy boredom gone the way of the act it was. “You didn’t tell me,” she said crossly.

The boy shrugged. “You didn’t ask.” That was when Fixx finally realized that Jude was the combat kid’s mother.

“What did they look like?” demanded Fixx, getting his question in before Jude and Leon could start quarrelling for real. “Japanese?”

“Nah,” the boy helped himself to a handful of dried almonds from a saucer. “Thin guys, weird voices, both wearing...” He ran his hand across his front, indicating lapels.

“A suit,” said Fixx.

“If you say so...” Leon shrugged. “Nasty-looking people,” he added, scooping the rest of the nuts into his filthy palm. “Not good. They had...” His hands indicated a bulge under one armpit. Fixx got the message.

Chapter Twenty

Running the Loop of Redemption

“...QueCorps,” LizAlec was saying, her head bowed as she walked beside Brother Michael, the scarf still wrapped round her head. On her feet she now wore a pair of ReeGravs, small electromagnets turning on and off with the flex of each foot.

She still clanked as she walked, which Brother Michael didn’t, but it was less undignified than hauling herself round corridors in free fall, which was what she’d been doing until Brother Michael told someone to find her proper shoes.

The shuttle didn’t have artificial gravity.

“The holding company for Shanghai Orbital and Ford eeAsia. My father also has shares in CySat Beijing, Petronas 2Towers in KL. Oh...” LizAlec said, tossing in something else she remembered Anchee saying, “and he’s planning to build a health spa on Io.”

Brother Michael kept silent, but LizAlec could tell by the way he kept his step in time with hers as she clanked slowly along the corridor that she had his full attention. “We’re going to The Arc, aren’t we?” LizAlec said.

“Is that where you want to go?”

She nodded, enthusiastically. For the briefest second, she considered telling Brother Michael everything. About the kidnapping and beating. That all she really wanted to do was get back to Paris and Fixx. But instinct told her that wasn’t what the priest wanted to hear.

And the best way to handle grown-ups was to give them what they wanted: then duck and weave before they could suss out they’d been had. It worked with her mother. Actually... LizAlec paused in her stride, thinking about it: no, it didn’t. Otherwise she wouldn’t have ended up at St Lucius again. She’d still be hanging out at the Crash&Burn or Schrödinger’s Kaff trying to scam her way into Fixx’s bed.

LizAlec snorted. She didn’t buy into Lady Clare’s reasoning that she was getting shipped out to the new St Lucius for her own safety. It was for her mother’s convenience — that and to get her away from Fixx — and it didn’t have to be the Moon either, there was a perfectly good St Lucius in New York.

She could have got out on a Corps Noblique passport. True, the Reich had been closing in but even they wouldn’t have dared arrest a young girl travelling under a safe pass. Not if it was done in front of enough cameras.

Face it, no one had shot down the Paris-St Lucius shuttle, had they? Not after C3N had pre-broadcast its launch, stressing it was stuffed full of kids.

“Has Paris fallen?” LizAlec demanded without thinking, her question out of her mouth before she realized. “A friend at school...” LizAlec said hurriedly. The rest of her sentence trailed away into embarrassed silence.

“No, not yet.” The tall priest looked thoughtful, one arm sliding sympathetically round the girl’s thin shoulders. “You have family in Paris?”

LizAlec shook her head hastily. “No, my father’s in Shanghai.”

“And your mother?”

LizAlec froze, suddenly realizing she knew less than nothing about Anchee’s mother. Which, when LizAlec thought about it, told her all she needed to know. “I don’t know my mother.”

Brother Michael’s smile was compassionate. “Such is the world...”

From the way his voice trailed away, LizAlec wasn’t sure if he assumed her mother was dead or just divorced. Mind you, the Family were fundamentalist, so to Brother Michael they were probably interchangeable.

“The boy...?” Brother Michael nodded over his shoulder at Lars, who was turning somersaults along the corridor ceiling and giggling to himself. He was dribbling, too, pearl-like drops of spittle strung out from his mouth.

“He’s...” LizAlec shrugged. She was unwilling to commit to anything Lars might later contradict but, more than that, she didn’t want Brother Michael separating the two of them, not while she had that bioSemtex worm curled up inside her face.

“Lars relies on me,” LizAlec said. It was meant to sound smooth, but it came out clumsy, childlike.

The tall priest shrugged. The Arc didn’t really need a goat boy: every simple-minded Bible-belt fanatic in the US wanted a place on board. And even Brother Michael was shocked by the number of lottery tickets the Family had sold. Humbled was the word he used, but it translated the same.

Heiresses were something different. The primal couple might be chosen by lottery to go and reclaim Eden but there was always room for another suitable handmaiden. Though it obviously depended on how the trusts were set up. It was a waste of his time to fawn over some kid who couldn’t buy a set of powerblades without getting written agreement from at least two trustees.