“Computer...”

The screen lit to show the bioAI was listening.

“The dome’s about to blow out.”

Diodes flared all along the eagle’s wing as the system ran emergency checks and came up with nothing. The bioAI was about to explain to LizAlec that she was in error, when LizAlec strode into the middle of the transept, stood below the pulpit and spread her arms.

Strung between metal pillars, the glass walls rose all around her and hung overhead in the ceiling vault of the vast cathedral. What they were built from was marketed as SlowGlass, but was really a radiation-resistant polymer designed to play back on one side anything it saw on the other. But LizAlec didn’t know that — at least not consciously — and what she saw was so close to what there was outside it made no difference.

Besides, she was too busy concentrating.

Closing her violet eyes, LizAlec felt the crystal walls as sound, echo-locating her new senses against each constricting wall, feeling the walls hold solid as she pushed her mind against them. The cathedral was built to retain pressure far greater than the single atmosphere it now contained. Ribs of titanium alloy ran outside the glass walls, like fluid Art Nouveau pillars, as if Gaudi had started designing in liquid metal. Except the elegant metal tracery didn’t hold the cathedral up, it held it in, safely containing the glass walls.

“Just do it,” said the voice of Alex. “Don’t think about it. Do it...”

Reaching up to grip the rings to which she’d been bound only half an hour before, LizAlec did, punching out a harmonic so high that even she couldn’t hear it, throwing the notes in all directions, feeling the internal lattice of the crystal walls scream under the vibration until cracks appeared and molecular bonds broke.

Vast sections of wall spun like oversized shrapnel into the void, almost taking LizAlec with them. All the warmth, all the air, everything that made space briefly human went in a single gulp as void and vacuum ripped out pews and prayer books, pulled the lectern from the floor. Banners, the simple altar, a fish tank, Brother Michael’s metal chair, everything exploded away into space as the void tried and failed to pull LizAlec after them. Her shoulders burnt with agony as she clung to the rings. Sheer will power held her feet to the floor.

“Welcome to insanity,” said the voice in her head. “You’ll find it runs in the family.”

Bitter cold ripped warmth from LizAlec’s body, a cold so absolute it was almost literally beyond her imagining. Breath was dragged from her lungs, her chest tightened in agony. LizAlec could feel Death waiting.

So she let go. Of the rings that held her to the pulpit, of her identity, of her mind.

For a second, as the dying wind pulled at her body, LizAlec thought she was about to join the vanishing detritus; but even as she was pulled off her feet, the pulpit cracked open and metal tentacles caught LizAlec and dragged her towards an opening pod.

Nine seconds from grab to go was the safety margin LockMart allowed, but the pod had her bundled into a chair and was sealing itself within two. By the time LizAlec’s pod had cleared the shattered cathedral, another pod was already in position, rising from the floor. But there was no one else to rescue so it remained resolutely shut.

“Heat,” LizAlec told herself. That was what the sensors keyed i iv on, body heat. Set against the cold black of the vacuum she must have burned in their vision like a flame. All the same, she’d have liked to see how The Arc’s AI was going to assimilate that little episode to its learning curve. She was still wondering about it when the little metal spiders came and began cutting away the spider’s skin covering most of her face.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Shanghai Surprise

There were a number of things that Lady Clare Fabio expected to happen after she cut her deal with Lazlo. That Lazlo would send his goons after her anyway; that her beautiful Ile St-Louis house would soon be washed away by flood water; and that — deal or not — she’d probably still die without ever knowing if Lazlo had lied about LizAlec.

What she wasn’t expecting was to find a Chinese general in her study, sitting at her escritoire, flipping though a leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe, her leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe. A book so valuable that Lady Clare kept it locked behind glass in a cupboard.

Lady Clare glanced across at the cupboard and was shocked to discover that the General had forced its tiny brass lock. Not crudely enough to damage the door’s ivory inlay, but forced it all the same.

“That was Florentine,” Lady Clare protested, nodding towards the cupboard.

“Milanese,” the man corrected her, picking up a lit candelabra and walking over to look at the forced-open door. “A post-Risorgimento copy, but not a bad one...”

For once in her life, Lady Clare was speechless. So General Que used the brief silence to introduce himself as Anchee’s father. He took it for granted that she would already know him as a major industrialist. Standing in front of Lady Clare and bowing slightly before putting out his manicured hand, the man announced that he’d briefly been a warlord but was now a private citizen from Shanghai.

Lady Clare met his surprisingly gentle handshake and then sat quickly in her chair, before he had time to reclaim it. The General smiled.

“Are you hungry?”

It was such a stupid question that all Lady Clare could manage was a blank stare. Of course she was hungry. Everyone in Paris was starving, even the Prince Imperial. People didn’t eat grass or tree bark unless there was no alternative. “What do you think?”

“Then let’s eat,” suggested the General. He took a packet of hard tack from the pocket of his trench coat and tore open the foil. “Old rations,” he apologized, “but they have a high protein/carbohydrate mix, plus six minerals and four vitamins. I designed the formula myself.”

The General took a biscuit and bit into it, catching the falling crumbs neatly in his upturned hand. Given the mildew that stained the wet floor, Lady Clare was surprised he bothered. But then, from the creases in his cavalry-twill trousers, she imagined the General was as meticulous about his table manners as he was about his dress. Old-fashioned, her own father would have called it. Though she was intelligent enough to accept that, even back then, others had regarded such behaviour as outdated, even obsessive or neurotic.

There was a time she’d been like that: it just seemed so long ago.

“Take one,” the General said, offering Lady Clare the packet.

She did. It was salt rather than sweet and crumbled against the roof of her mouth. The taste was good but the biscuit was still difficult to get down.

“Water,” suggested the General, dipping his hand into a poacher’s pocket inside his coat and pulling out a plastic flask of Canadian Spring. After two months of making do with grime-flecked rain collected from her roof, Lady Clare was shocked at how clear the water looked.

By the time Lady Clare had drunk half the bottle and finished a second biscuit she felt exhausted.

“Long-term hunger does that,” said the General. “Strips away the essential you. Not just your capacity to make decisions. Everything. Strength and alertness... your nerve. Why else are prisoners starved?” He spoke from experience, but she didn’t know that.

When Lady Clare had eventually eaten a third biscuit and drunk all the water, she sat back in her Napoleon III desk chair and rested her elbows on its green-leather arms. For someone who’d spent more than half a lifetime intentionally trying to starve herself, Lady Clare found it ironic that getting three dry biscuits could make such a difference to her life. And then she realized the General’s biscuits contained more than just minerals and vitamins. Something in there was neuronal, chosen to cause hyperpolarization of her post-synaptic neurons. All across her skull, carefully selected neurons weren’t firing...