LizAlec never felt Brother Michael rupture open, because that was the point she let go of his terrified, gibbering mind — and felt it scrabble gratefully out of existence.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Welcome to Insanity

What did LizAlec believe in? She believed in herself: at least, she did now. Believed, too, in the voice, low and hollow in her head. The voice that told LizAlec justice wasn’t always just, but it was dangerously satisfying.

Maybe even addictive.

“Get out of here,” LizAlec told Lars, but he just stared at her.

“Go,” she told the sandrat, her feet locked firmly to the steel floor of the cathedral. She could feel the electricity that worked the soles, sense the field emanating from the bottom of her shoes. Come to that, she could feel fields emanating from the lectern, from the altar lights, even from the black-glass pulpit.

The whole cathedral was a mess of shimmering EMFs that conflicted, overlapped, reacted with each other.

“Get out,” LizAlec insisted. “Seal the safety doors on your spar, tell the others but don’t tell the bodyguards, okay?”

The boy looked blank.

“If you don’t lock the doors,” said LizAlec, “the goat will get hurt...”

She should have realized that that was all it would take. Lars folded the bleating animal tightly in his arms and backed towards the Otis. He had no idea what LizAlec was planning to do, and he cared even less. She was a freak, all strange eyes and cropped hair. The girl’s edges were too sharp, the colours around her flashing bright like the skin of an epileptic chameleon. Every time he looked at LizAlec, her outline had changed.

Lars preferred girls like Sara who kept her aura down to a few simple hues. Lars himself kept his Kirlian aura down to one colour only. He was rather proud of that. “Be safe,” said the door and then Lars was gone, safe inside the pressurized Otis, on his way back to the goat pen. Tomorrow the mammals were going out to The Arc itself. Out to the ring where Sister Aaron was making a world for them full of fields, trees, small streams. Ants cleaned up the leaf litter and worms aerated the soil, all twelve feet of it. The Arc wasn’t Eden, old or new, whatever CySat reported, but it was better than Planetside.

Face it, anything was better than that. Time to go, thought LizAlec.

Not that there was any point staying. The next cargo ship wasn’t due for two months, according to the lectern. Paris could have fallen by then, Lady Clare might be dead, put up against a wall by the Black Hundreds. If that hadn’t happened already. And as for Fixx, God only knew the trouble he’d be in.

LizAlec sucked her teeth, ran one shaking hand through the stubble of her hair and wondered about getting another boyfriend, one who wasn’t so high-maintenance. It hurt her to think that Lady Clare might be right about anything, but she might be right about that.

“Escape pod,” LizAlec demanded.

“Situation normal,” announced the cathedral’s bioAI, speaking through a tiny pair of bioVox speakers inset into the eagle’s wings of the lectern. The voice had that irritating coded-by-number kindergarten tone LizAlec remembered from AIs at her first school.

“There is an escape pod?” LizAlec asked crossly and walked back to the lectern to skim frames of safety data, tilting the eagle’s wings herself rather than waiting for the lectern to work out the best angle. Of course there was a pod: it was the bloody pulpit. LizAlec stared at the glass monstrosity rising like a block of black obsidian. She should have guessed from its size, not to mention the EMF field emanating from it.

Now all LizAlec needed was some skin. Not a full balloon suit or even a half-balloon, just some basic skin, the white spider’s-silk kind.

“Pressure skin,” LizAlec demanded and waited while the bioAI weighed up her request. It could find no obvious reason to give her one, but then there seemed no obvious reason to refuse. The skin arrived in a vacuum-sealed foil package, etched with NASA’s hologram and a shiny Tampertell copyright strap. No cheap Korean copies for the Brotherhood.

LizAlec stripped. Not easy in zero G wearing wrong-size ReeGravs, but she managed it, albeit somewhat clumsily. After peeling the cotton smock off over her head, LizAlec lobbed the garment into the air for the pleasure of watching its material balloon out and swirl like a jellyfish. The croptop Jude had thrust at her just over a week before had rotted under the arms with sweat and LizAlec tried not to imagine what she smelt like to others, not that Lars would have noticed. Even the goats smelt cleaner than he did.

Her knickers were vending-machine disposables and went the way of her croptop, into a waste tube. She didn’t bother trying to take them off her over ReeGravs, just ripped them apart at the side seams.

To put on her second skin, LizAlec needed to take one foot out of her boot, push her foot hard into the tight elastic skin and get her foot back into the ReeGrav, all without overbalancing in zero G. Somehow, LizAlec didn’t see how she was going to do it.

“Hold yourself to the floor,” said a voice.

LizAlec jumped, tried to cover herself and then remembered the voice was in her head. Alex couldn’t really see her and even if he could, he was only a neural construct, nothing more.

“Good,” said Alex. “You’re getting a grip on it.”

Yeah, thought LizAlec... For a killer standing naked in a ring colony’s vast glass-walled cathedral talking to the ghost of her father, she was doing brilliantly. It was just a shame Lady Clare wasn’t there to be impressed.

Hold yourself to the floor.

LizAlec tried and failed, miserably. Every time she moved her unweighted leg, it tried floating upwards until she was almost tipped on her side. “It’s impossible,” said LizAlec, “you can’t defeat zero gravity, it’s basic...”

“You reckon?”

LizAlec nodded. Yes, she did reckon.

“Throw that boot across the room,” said Alex.

LizAlec bent to pick up her spare ReeGrav and heard Alex sigh.

“Without touching it,” he insisted, sounding just like Lady Clare at her most patronizing.

Fucking terrific, now she had two of them on her case. Furiously, LizAlec catapulted the heavy boot across the cathedral and was watching it bounce off a grey steel pillar before she even realized what she’d just done.

Shit. She stopped the boot dead so it just hung there.

“Now,” said Alex, “instead of flinging your shoe across the room, throw yourself at the floor, gently.”

LizAlec did and found she was standing steady, her bare unbooted foot planted firmly on the marble tiles. It wasn’t gravity, not really, but it was a good imitation. All it took was, was what...?

“The intelligence not to stand around naked looking for logic.” Alex sounded amused.

“Yeah, right.” LizAlec rolled on the first piece of skin, feeling the spider’s silk tighten up her legs and over her stomach as molecular chains bound themselves around areas of potential stress. The suit fitted neatly up over her breasts and finished under her arms, sealing itself to her skin. The second piece went over her shoulders and down to her wrists, leaving LizAlec to thrust her fingers into gloves and roll them up until they sealed themselves tight.

All that was left was a two-part, full-head face mask, but there was no way LizAlec was going to use both bits, though she knew she should. She’d already suffocated once that morning. The thought of smart silk tightening over her mouth was more than LizAlec could handle. Stupid or not, some prices were too high to pay. In the end, LizAlec compromised with herself by struggling into the balaclava section without first fitting the underlag that sealed off nostrils and eyes.

She was done.