That was the end of his being allowed to wander out on his own, at least until his contract with Sony went the same way as the bodyguard, the Ultraglide and unlimited studio time. But then that was life, or it was his anyway. Fingers gripped his hair and yanked, Fixx rose and kept rising until he was face to face with the same impassive eyes.

“YouNoSeeThisGirl?”

“No,” Fixx said crossly. “NoSeeThisGirl... Okay?”

It wasn’t. The clone released Fixx and sank rigid fingers into Fixx’s solar plexus, fingertips pushing up to shock the heart into silence mid-beat. Fixx looked around once, saw the petrified crowd and then crumpled, his knees hitting the floor before his head did, though it was a close-run thing. The world accelerated away from him down an endless tunnel; as if it had been the roof of a lift and someone had just cut the wire.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Heart of Glass

What saved Fixx was a bio-augmentation he didn’t even remember having fitted. But had he ever bothered to read the subframes of his now long-cancelled contract he’d have realized the bioAug was standard. A fingernail-sized generator stapled to his left collarbone kick-started his heart. It did so by firing a single electric shock along a thin wire that led from the defibrillator down a vein and into the chambers of his heart. When the sensor buried in the heart muscle failed to detect sufficient movement from the first shock, the tiny generator fired up again and then shut down as the heart resumed its beat.

But by then no one in the CasaNegro was watching Fixx. Not even Jude and certainly not the clone, who stood over Fixx’s body blank-eyed and seemingly frozen as he stared at a Japanese woman who’d somehow materialized in the middle of the floor. Since neither bedroom door nor street curtain had been disturbed since Fixx had followed Jude out into the bar, the Japanese woman had to have been there all along. It was just that no one remembered seeing her.

Though it was hard to work out how Jude, Fixx or the clones could have failed to notice a waif-thin Japanese woman dressed in black and holding a long and very dangerous sword. The kind of sword that was all stealth-edged blade with a simple handle bound up in rope, the kind you usually only saw in Samurai tri-Ds.

She was kunoichi. One of the silent killers. And not getting noticed was her job. She’d been doing it for six days, trailing after Fixx like some shadow he thought he’d long since left behind. Only the rules had just changed and, as of now, Shiori was back working for the General.

It wasn’t the deadly looking blade that caught Fixx’s attention when he stuttered back to life, it was the odd way the woman was standing. Twisted round herself, the blade parallel to the ground, hilt held right-handed in front of her narrow face, her left hand pressed flat against the pommel. Danger radiated from her like potential energy from an over-wound spring.

“Stand away from the body,” she said quietly. She was talking about him, Fixx realized with shock. Nobody moved. Though Fixx sensed rather than saw the clone standing over him stiffen slightly.

“You hear me?” The girl spoke perfect English but with a mixed West Coast drawl and Japanese lilt that sounded utterly beautiful to Fixx’s ears. Though he might just have liked her voice because she was busy saving his life. A Japanese ballerina with a stack of Japanese fighting techniques. He was too drunk, Fixx realized, too drunk, too wired and too battered to work it out: so he just lay there on the warm grit floor and watched the ballet unfold.

The real death waltz.

Jude was backing away now. Sliding to safety behind the bar. She glanced once at where Fixx lay curled into a foetal ball and then looked away. If the huge woman was surprised to find him still alive she didn’t let it show; though she smiled and began cleaning up the top of the bar.

Stripped naked, Fixx looked like a bizarre toy — all metal legs, silver eyes and scarred-up body — but the man was a survivor, they both were. That’s what made fucking him so good. All the same, Jude knew he’d be out of there eventually, off to find his pretty little rich girl.

Fuck it all...

Jude was surprised to find how much she minded. Amphetamine, ethanol and endorphin-boosters hit her gut as Jude did what she’d always promised herself she’d never do, take a gulp out of her own profits. The cold Electric Soup bit into the back of her throat like iced novocain, then expanded inside her temples as she hit brainfreeze. Hard edges crystallized around objects in the bar as the world came into hyperfocus.

And then Jude forgot about taking her second gulp as the first clone swivelled Jude’s double-barrelled stungun once, fast-forward round his trigger finger cowboy style, and blasted the Japanese woman. Bottles exploded and ears popped as sound bounced in waves from whitewashed walls like sonic ricochet. Only, when everyone looked, the ballerina wasn’t there any more. Instead there was just an ugly pile of shattered glass from the table behind her and a fat man on his knees, blood oozing slowly from one ear.

Mekuramashi, Fixx thought admiringly. He’d read about it, even coded it as a cheat into his sims, but he’d never seen mekuramashi in action. The art of distraction.

She was across the room now, balanced on her toes, blade still parallel to the floor, except this time she was crouched on top of a bottle-strewn table. All around her the table’s occupants had frozen, shocked into sudden protective silence.

The clone standing over Fixx lifted his Colt, finger tightening round the trigger, thumb flicking the laser sights into action. And as a tiny diode lit to say the automatic was sighted in, Fixx grinned. The one thing you could say for prosthetic limbs was they meant never having to worry about muscles wasting...

His kick caught the clone on the side of his knee, popping its joint in a single tear of gristle. And then Fixx’s metal fingers closed around the fallen clone’s hand, crushing it against the handle of the Colt. Bones inside the hand cracked like twigs then twisted as ball-joints ruptured between palm and fingers, needle-like splinters of metacarpal pushing out through the clone’s skin as Fixx shifted his grip, found the man’s fingers and ground them to bloody pulp.

Fixx couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d last enjoyed himself so much. Twisting the Colt out of the clone’s bleeding hand, he rammed it into the shrieking open mouth. The clone stopped screaming.

Up on the table, the Japanese woman looked irritated. Brief annoyance twisted her lips into a sneer. Though Fixx didn’t know if he or the clone was the target for her contempt. She flipped sideways off the table top, somersaulting over her own blade to land neatly on a deserted patch of floor.

She wasn’t drawing fire away from the crowded table: Fixx could see from the hard certainty in her eyes that the woman didn’t give a fuck about civilians. Why would she? As Fixx always said, “There are no innocent bystanders. What were they doing there in the first place...?”

The woman was clearing herself space to move, the fifteen or so people in the bar falling back, away from the woman and away from the stungun. When the gun fired again, she flipped neatly away from the sonic wave, covering her ears to shield herself from the blast. That she could do both in one-sixthG said she’d been trained for off-planet work, probably in a lowG or free-fall dojo. And what that suggested, Fixx wasn’t too sure. Serious money, maybe.

The essence of Kamui-style was to clear the mind of every distraction: to concentrate only on matching, meeting and defeating each blow. Except Shiori was using basic Kamui mixed with West Coast Two Skies...