Fixx looked puzzled. Actually, he looked like shit. His eyes were as empty as some burnt-out tenement block, his cheekbones jutting out of grey skin, but he tried not to mind about that. “Dangerous?” Fixx asked finally, turning his head sideways as he tried to work out if he looked any better in profile. The tall musician had a nasty feeling the answer was probably a big fat no.

“Who do you think keeps Planetside’s Sabatier3 cells functioning?” LISA said, sounding resigned. “You think CO2 just combines with hydrogen by itself? That water just electrolyses for the hell of it?”

Fixx continued to look puzzled. He was getting good at that.

“We’re crowded out with refugees,” said LISA. “Or haven’t you noticed? The whole Planetside system’s going to implode if I don’t come up with something soon.”

“You?” Fixx asked.

“Me, gorgeous... Who do you think fills the tunnels with oxygen? Those Sabatier3s had a ninety-nine-year working life. You know how old they are?”

Fixx shook his head.

“186 years. Half the time I don’t know why I don’t just pack up and let you all die. Life would be so much more peaceful.” The AI was beginning to sound seriously pissed.

“You’d get bored,” said Fixx, with absolute certainty. “You’d get bored out of your skull. If you had one, that is.”

He was right, too. Urban myths of big AIs committing suicide did the rounds but Fixx was pretty sure they were only myths. He’d never come across an actual case and he’d bet LISA hadn’t either. BioAIs, now they were different, but then Fixx wasn’t too sure he’d have wanted to be condemned to eternity as the galactic equivalent of a fridge door either.

“You know what I think, gorgeous? I think you should ditch Shiori and get out of here. Take a hike. Go get LizAlec and if you won’t do that go back to Chrysler. I’ll square it. You know, take the locks off your door, wire you back into a feed... But get out of Planetside before the PSPD catch up with you, and ditch Shiori while you’re at it.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Fixx. But they both knew he wouldn’t. No way was Fixx going to walk away from a woman with a body like that.

“You know what you are?” LISA said sadly.

Fixx didn’t, but he knew she was going to tell him. She always did.

“You’re a dumb fuck,” said LISA and then she was gone.

And he was, too, such a dumb fuck he didn’t see the spike-haired boy in the black T-shirt and combat trousers who started following him the moment he left the bar. But Leon saw Fixx which was all that mattered. Well, it was to Leon. Help the tetsuo — but don’t get into trouble. Jude’s instructions had been clear. And for once Leon was trying to do what he was told.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

You must be out of your tiny mind

Fixx couldn’t be bothered to wait for Shiori to find him, so he found her instead, holed up in a polyfoamed pod she’d hired in the RunNowFun hotel. It was as much a Ripongi fuck joint as LunaWorld’s 49er was a real pioneer bar. For a start Fixx could almost stand up in the pod, which he never could have managed in a real love hotel.

But it did have a traditional grey Togo slab and a time-locked minibar stuffed with vacuum-packed wasabe crackers and tubes of iced Sapporo. It even featured torn strips of rustling paper taped round the air vent to sound like breeze-fingered leaves. Not to mention an assortment of foil-wrapped vibrators and an evil-looking surgical steel speculum in a pink fur-lined box.

There was a tiny toilet cubicle, too. But the clone occupied all of that, its black suit trousers rucked in a heap around its feet. Its ankles were strapped together with the missing belt from the trousers and its hands were fastened tightly behind its neck with a red silk tie. From the blood dripping from a split lower lip and the flowering bruises that covered the clone’s ribs, Shiori and the clone had been in mid-conversation. One that had been about to get much more serious if the short ceramic blade in Shiori’s hand meant anything.

The Japanese girl swung round from where she crouched in the lavatory door. Grey eyes raked over Fixx, giving less than nothing away. But the reptilian part of Fixx didn’t need to look into her eyes to know what was going on or how much Shiori was enjoying it. Mixed in with the stale air of the tiny pod and the sickly-sweet smell of the clone’s blood was something darker, muskier. It wasn’t so much conversation he’d interrupted, Fixx realized, as Shiori’s own private version of foreplay.

Hot though the pod was, the Japanese woman’s nipples stood proud beneath her sweat-stained cotton vest and his mind finally caught up with what his body already knew. He’d got into trouble the last time that happened.

Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio. Fixx hadn’t believed Lady Clare at first Hadn’t believed that the kid with the kohl-rimmed eyes, wearing a crushed purple coat really was corps noblique. He should have known, of course, even back when he first met LizAlec. Her arrogant self-confidence was clue enough. But people assume artists are observers, when most are just self-reflective, self-obsessed...

Fixx had drained his glass of marc, feeling the cheap grape-pip brandy burn in his throat. Fifty people in a filthy bar in Bastille and, because of who he’d once been, all of them respected the cerebral exclusion zone he’d erected around himself. Except her.

There was blood on the ballerina’s blade and this time when he looked Shiori was smiling, her eyes bright with expectation. Punching the button that shut the toilet door, Shiori crossed her hands over her front and in the same elegant move Fixx had watched earlier, stripped off her black vest in a single movement to bare small elegant breasts.

It was the opposite of a striptease, quick and clean, but all the raunchier for its bald matter-of-factness. Unclicking the wall cupboard marked lovedrugs, Fixx grabbed an ampoule of amylNite8 and snapped it under his nose, inhaling its sour chemical stink. Without waiting to be asked, Fixx broke another glass straw under the nostrils of the bare-breasted woman standing opposite him — and watched as her eyes exploded, pupils widening into black holes.

He wanted to suggest Shiori put down her knife, then decided not. The last thing Fixx wanted to do was ruin her mood. Instead he kicked off his boots and scrabbled at his buttons. Getting out of a jumpsuit wasn’t elegant but at least it was fast.

She had the inner stillness of a predator, with eyes to match. And as the Japanese woman watched him, Fixx got the feeling she was putting a value on him. It wasn’t a sensation he liked.

“You’re not really here to find LizAlec, are you?” Fixx kept his voice steady, his eyes on her wide face.

Shiori shook her head, then shrugged. “Maybe it’s LizAlec, maybe it’s someone else. I need to check.”

For a moment, Fixx wanted to take LISA’s advice and walk out of there, do what he should have done instead of coming to find her. Taken a hike, got sensible. But his wasn’t that kind of life and this wasn’t that kind of sex. The twisted smile on her hungry face told him that. Most people needed ice to get that wired, but all Shiori needed was...

Fixx glanced at the ceramic blade still balanced in her narrow fingers and knew exactly what Shiori needed. Hell, just looking at the blade put him on edge. So instead of walking, Fixx reached for her belt and slowly undid the heavy buckle. Unpopping the waist button to her Levis, Fixx ran his fingers down her fly, releasing it.

The kid had been watching him all evening, again. Not out of the corner of her eye, but openly — until he frowned at her and she glanced away or pretended to be looking over his shoulder at one of the faded holoposters on the sand-blasted brick wall behind. As if anyone would be interested in bands that had folded, circuses that had never been more than virtual, in the whole tired Nouveau Bastille theatre of cruelty. Fixx doubted if she even knew Artonin Artaud had existed, never mind which century he’d lived in. But, in the end, he’d sent a drink over, telling the sad-eyed little rent boy behind the bar to take her a bottle of marc.