It was a bad move.

Noise exploded inside Fixx’s skull and, as he buckled, he saw Shiori struggle to stay upright as she desperately tried to protect her ears with her hands. She was exposed, vulnerable, completely open, everything a ballerina was meant not to be.

Fixx didn’t see the kick coming but then nor did Shiori or it wouldn’t have broken her neck. Spinning to a stop, Sister Aaron looked down at the Japanese woman’s twitching body and frowned.

“That was just too easy,” she said sadly. Bending over Shiori’s body, Sister Aaron twisted the woman’s head until it was straight again. Her hands rippled as they touched Shiori’s skin and then Sister Aaron reached deep inside Shiori’s flesh, clicking vertebrae back into place.

Fixx vomited.

Ignoring him, Sister Aaron pulled the Japanese girl upright and stepped back, leaving Shiori standing there, arms hanging loose at her side. “Let’s try that again,” said Sister Aaron, “shall we?”

The pale woman moved in a circle around Shiori, silent and impassive, coming in close and then dancing back but never quite touching the Japanese ballerina. She moved like this until Shiori finally stopped trembling and began to concentrate, dropping into a fighter’s crouch. Beginning to turn, not circling in the same way as Sister Aaron, but counter-clockwise so that she spun slowly in the opposite direction.

As she turned, Shiori bent slightly at the knees, alternately pushing her shoulders forward and then pulling them back, gathering power. Not letting herself attack until her mind was empty of all emotion. When Shiori’s attack came it was breathtakingly fast, a flip that took the Japanese woman high over Sister Aaron’s head and then kasumigiri as Shiori fell, the sword slash the ballerina had made her own.

Except there was no sword and Sister Aaron still stood, smiling happily.

Staring first at Sister Aaron and then at her own wrist, Shiori’s disbelief slid into horror as she realized the bracelet on her wrist had remained just that, a narrow black bracelet, no more. For the first time since she moved up from street samurai to ballerina, kasumigiri had failed. She’d lost without striking a single blow.

Sister Aaron spun once, fingers flicking out to stroke Shiori’s shoulder. A six-inch gash opened up in Shiori’s combat suit as its top streaked with a vivid red that owed nothing to environment-sensitive spider’s silk.

Before Shiori could react, Sister Aaron was moving again, a slight frown catching her empty, impossibly beautiful face. For a second, feeling Fixx’s horrified gaze, Sister Aaron stopped dead, her frown dissolving as she gave Fixx her sweetest smile. And then she went back to tormenting Shiori.

She was hardwired, Fixx realized, her reaction times virally chopped, her nerves pulled taut on some methamphet derivative. But there was more to it than that. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said the woman was reading Shiori’s moves ahead of the Japanese woman making them. The bitch was scanning Shiori’s cortex and his, pulling out whatever amused her. That she could do both and fend off Shiori at the same time was what made it really frightening.

“Oh,” said Sister Aaron sourly, “this is nothing.” Her left hand flicked forward, forcing Shiori to throw up a guard. And as Shiori blocked the move, Sister Aaron reached out with her right hand, touching Shiori. It looked briefly like Sister Aaron was trying to fondle the Japanese woman’s breast. But when Sister Aaron took her fingers away, her nails were covered with blood and Shiori was staggering backwards, red oozing from a semicircular cut that gaped to show sick white flashes of naked rib.

“Children today,” Sister Aaron said crossly. “You know,” she almost spat the words at Shiori, “it’s a bad mistake to rely on just one weapon. Particularly when it doesn’t work.”

The Japanese woman was breathing heavily, pulling sour gasps through her open mouth. One hand held shut the gash in her right shoulder, the other was trying to staunch blood flowing from beneath her heart. Shiori still kept to her fighter’s crouch, and she still turned in a slow circle, claiming space around her; but her grey eyes were bleak and her bottom lip jutted forward slightly in a child’s pout.

Defeat clung to Shiori’s overheated body like sweat. Even Fixx could smell it. She’d been the best because she’d never met anyone better. Wasn’t it always the way? Horrified, Fixx sucked at his teeth, watching Sister Aaron move in for the kill.

The final cut was rapid and deep, starting above Shiori’s left hip and sweeping in a semicircle across her gut, flesh peeling open under Sister Aaron’s fingers. Shiori toppled forwards, hands scrabbling at her stomach as she tried to shovel her own pulsing, twitching intestines back inside her body.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

White light/White heat

“You could always kill her,” Sister Aaron told Fixx. “If you think that would be kind.”

The woman reached down and ripped free a standard-issue combat knife taped to Shiori’s ankle. The one Shiori had never even come close to using on her.

“Or you could always kill me instead. If you think you can...” The blonde woman tossed Fixx the lethal zytel blade, smiling as Fixx fumbled the catch and almost sliced his own fingers. “Alternatively, we could think of something else...”

Blue eyes held his and Fixx almost heard the waterfall-roar as blood rushed through his body and inside his head synapses exploded, firing and re-firing as they completed a fluorescent and familiar web of addiction. Waves of absolute need rolled over him... Sister Aaron nodded to herself, quietly amused. “So tell me,” she said, “what do you want to do?”

“Fuck you, probably,” said a girl’s voice behind her. “Fixx always did think with his dick.”

In that brief silent second before Sister Aaron turned round — while her eyes were still locked to those of Fixx — the musician saw real shock cross her face. And then the shock was gone, along with all other emotions, as Sister Aaron’s perfect Helen-of-Troy mask slid safely back into place.

“Blind-sided,” said Liz Alec contemptuously, from her position high on the obsidian block. She was breathing heavily from the climb, but her words were confident. “You should learn to concentrate.”

Jumping down, she landed in a crouch, not even looking at Fixx. And if LizAlec noticed Shiori’s blood drying like glazed black enamel on the parched ground then she didn’t let it show.

Someone else slid out onto the edge of the obsidian block, looking a lot less certain than LizAlec. But he jumped down anyway to stand beside the girl. Leon still wore a black T-shirt and stupid hair, but a fractal blade was held firm in his hand like he knew how to use it. And, looking at the way the boy flicked the blade from side to side, Fixx decided that maybe he did. Except that even the sharpest mono-molecular edge was going to be no use against Sister Aaron. Fixx could have told them that for free.

“You want to do it now?” LizAlec asked Sister Aaron, casually waving the boy to one side. Leon almost refused to move but then shuffled sideways, his eyes suddenly dark... Oh, the anger of youth, thought Fixx enviously. On a good day he could still remember what that felt like.

“Well, do you?” LizAlec demanded.

The ash-blonde woman remained silent, almost unmoving.

“No,” said LizAlec, “I didn’t think so.” She stepped neatly round Sister Aaron’s frozen form and knelt by Shiori. It looked, for a second, as if LizAlec intended to comfort the Japanese woman. But all LizAlec did was reach down and touch the black bracelet on Shiori’s wrist.

Sister Aaron winced.

There’s a point just before lead melts when it swells outwards and then splits through its own papery skin. That’s what Shiori’s bracelet did, coalescing into mirrored liquid that flowed up around LizAlec’s wrist, solidifying into a heavy bangle. And then, as LizAlec emptied her mind, she knew what Shiori’s bracelet was and how much more important the other one must be.