“Here,” she said, tossing Fixx the flask. “You carry it.”

Fixx fumbled his catch on purpose and watched the shimmering silver bladder bounce football-like across the grass. It didn’t burst or leak but then, organically woven polymer was designed to be tough.

To say Shiori had been getting on his nerves was a serious understatement. Of course, Fixx was an understated kind of guy in an overstated sort of way, but even he was getting close to saying something. All that stopped him was cowardice. Well, the hard cold expression on her face, which amounted to the same thing. That and the way Shiori kept stopping to read-off data from her Walkwear. As if the little grey box taped to her hip contained all of life’s answers.

Maybe it did, but somehow Fixx doubted it.

Their relationship would have been easier if Shiori had bothered to tell him what was going on. But the Japanese woman no longer seemed even to hear his questions, as if somewhere inside her head a switch had been thrown.

Fixx was beginning to wonder if Shiori was entirely human. She obviously wasn’t a straight off-the-peg clone, but there was something unnatural about the way she moved shadow-like across the rough grass, balanced on the balls of her feet, like a...

Fixx sighed. Like a fucking ballerina — where did he think that term came from?

Picking up Shiori’s flask, Fixx took a long look round him. It was daylight up ahead and daylight behind, but there had to be night at some point to let all this vegetation breathe out and he couldn’t see from where night might come. Unless some central AI just clicked off the overhead luminescent strip and shut down the whole Arc at one go...

He’d come into the ring maybe ten miles back, trailing after Shiori through an airlock. A long claustrophobic crawl on hands and knees through a service duct had led them to a dust-strewn polycrete bunker, where Shiori had casually slid in a wafer-thin knocker and blown the plastic door out of its frame, leaving Fixx half deaf with concussion. On the other side of the blown door was a narrow cave and beyond that daylight, or what passed for daylight on The Arc.

And now he was following Shiori’s flickering migraine-inducing camouflage suit around the fringes of a lake, skirting the lower slopes of a small mountain. Though up ahead some design program had dictated that the lake’s marshy edge should give way to small cliffs...

It was an illusion, but a clever one. Cut The Arc anywhere through its huge silver doughnut and you got a circle: the half-circle at the bottom was a valley, rising up to mountains on both sides, and the half-circle above was sky, painted electric blue... Except that the need to simulate gravity meant the landlocked bottom of the circle was actually the Arc’s outer edge. It was better not to think about it.

Stamping after the Japanese woman, Fixx didn’t notice at first that the vegetation was changing. But when maquis and blue-leafed hyssop began to replace meadow grass the change became impossible to ignore, even for Fixx. The fauna was different, too. Wild hopi called from rough-barked cork and stunted wild oak while feral cats pressed themselves to the ground, ears back as Shiori and Fixx strode by. There were twisted olive trunks, so fat and so badly split with age it was hard not to believe the trees had been there for hundreds of years.

The green slopes were giving way to endless tiny terraces cut into the olive-grey hillside and held in place by drystone walls. There were even dark wells, circled by pumice-hued brick and covered with flat roofs made from rough planks. Though Fixx knew that, on the lower slopes at least, the well shafts couldn’t go down more than three or four metres at the most.

Fixx saw the goat boy, loping down a slope. Shiori didn’t. Shiori was too busy staring moodily into the distance, following the floating-focus map that unrolled in front of her grey eyes. Both Walkwear and wraprounds were so hot from overuse they stank of burning electrics but she didn’t even notice. Discomfort was something Shiori regarded as a luxury, her nervous system viral-rewired so that most pain didn’t even register until it hit the middle reaches.

Pain was a distraction for working ballerinas. Most, things were.

Shiori sighed and kept climbing across scrub, edging round a granite bolder flecked with mica. The huge stone was probably treated polycrete unless Sister Aaron had found a way to crystallize stone, and where that bitch was concerned anything was possible.

Shiori wasn’t worried about meeting Sister Aaron: iga-training ensured her heart beat stayed at a steady sixty-five and her blood pressure kept to a balanced 100/80, but somewhere at the back of her mind, banished beyond consciousness, Shiori still allowed herself to be aware of the other woman’s reputation.

Psionics was a dangerous art, not least because apart of Shiori’s mind refused to admit it had a right to exist. The General needed his shrine back and it was Shiori’s job to get it — swiftly, cleanly, neatly. The only problem so far was that the shrine wasn’t showing up clearly on her screen — though it was here all right, she was getting a positive on that. But then, most of what was on file for Sister Aaron had be the product of trickery, so maybe she was keeping it hidden.

Sleight of hand and hypnotism... mekuramashi and kawarimi, both of those Shiori respected, they were core to the kunoichi tradition. Her tradition. But what the General kept on file for Sister Aaron wasn’t sleight of hand, at least it didn’t seem so. And so, if not actually worried, Shiori wasn’t as rested as she would have liked.

“Keep up,” Shiori snapped over her shoulder, but Fixx just muttered something offensive.

Had she looked back, Shiori would have seen Fixx come face to face with the goat boy, who slid to a halt on the scree, scrawny goats jostling round his bare legs like dogs round their master. Though it was the boy who looked dog-like, his heavy jaw protruding from below a slack mouth.

“Hi,” said Fixx.

The boy just looked at him. Brown eyes flicked between Fixx and the shadow that still strode on, waist-deep in scrub, muttering to itself.

“These your goats?”

All Fixx got was a suspicious nod.

“They look really happy,” said Fixx. “They must like you.”

The boy smiled, showing sharp canines.

Fixx sketched a line level with his shoulder. “You seen a girl, ‘bout this high, wavy black hair and weird violet eyes? She can be...” Fixx searched for the right word and gave up. LizAlec could be a fucking pain in the arse, but as descriptions went that didn’t seem appropriate.

The goat boy had seen her. Fixx could see it in his wide face and Fixx didn’t know what LizAlec had done to him, but the goat boy wasn’t happy with her. Except it turned out that it wasn’t what she’d done that had upset Lars, it was where LizAlec had gone.

“Girl not here,” he said simply. “Brother Michael not here either.” The goat boy wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, sweat smearing into dirt. Fixx offered him the bubble flask and Lars took a pull, gathering his thoughts. “Gone,” he said at last. “Brother Michael dead, girl gone...”

“Shiori,” Fixx shouted and the shadow stopped climbing, one grey hand reaching up towards a grey boulder, her weight taken on her left leg, the right already raised to find a new foothold. A human climbing machine, Fixx thought. Though she had a great arse, he reminded himself: even if it was impossible to see properly now she was wearing that bloody chameleon suit.

“Down here,” Fixx shouted.

She came back down the slope, mouth hard, eyes hidden behind the wraprounds.

“This better be good.”

Fixx turned to Lars but the boy was gone and the goats with him. All Fixx could hear was the distant tinkle of bells behind a ridge in the distance. “There was a dogboy,” Fixx began...