His replacement was an S3 blackbird called Per, one of the Third Section’s most handsome. The new shadow was as tall as Fixx, but with broad Scandinavian shoulders and hardened lizard-skin grafts that spread like speckled grey leather across his shoulders and down his spine. His hair was ash-blond and his eyes were light blue. Few heroes had nobler jaws or faces so perfect that LizAlec would have killed for their bone structure. But it was when Per announced that — like LizAlec — he scoured the flea markets for antique paperbacks that LizAlec knew she was meant to fall safely in love with him. But she didn’t. Clean-cut and Aryan wasn’t her type.
“Are you listening?” Brother Michael demanded furiously.
“Yeah, sure,” said LizAlec, smiling sweetly. Well, as sweetly as she could smile with Brother Michael’s hands gripped round her jaw. She was listening, too, just not to him. LizAlec went back inside her head where she could listen to the hum of the air-scrubbers, the rustle of spiderplant leaves and the low thud of her heart. Somewhere down inside she was afraid, but not yet as afraid as she should be. The trouble was, she’d never had anything between blind panic and total indifference and just recently only the indifference ever reached her violet eyes. The cool exterior, the social armour fitted her body like a carapace: both kept her removed, which was the way she liked it.
Stepping back was a way not to get hurt. And if not getting hurt meant not getting involved either, then so be it. Her mother did that: signed away people’s lives, ruined their careers, imposed cold order on warm chaos, but always smoothly, with no rough edges showing.
“Well? Brother Michael said.
“Well what?” LizAlec hadn’t the remotest idea which question he wanted answered. Was it, was she listening? Or were they back to, who was she really? Was she listening LizAlec could handle, because the answer was, Yeah, kind of... But as to who she was, she needed notice of that question, it was way more difficult.
“Are you listening to me?” Brother Michael demanded.
“Oh, yeah,” said LizAlec, “though I’m not hearing anything yet...”
Brother Michael frowned at that, as LizAlec knew he would. So she jutted her chin forward and tried to look dangerous. Pretty hard with your hands high up over your head and next to impossible when all you’re wearing is a cotton smock that looks like a washed-out nightie, even if you don’t have some maniac gripping your face and swinging it slowly from side to side like he was trying to check how much movement you had in your neck.
“You know who I am,” LizAlec hissed through gritted teeth, “I told you when I arrived...”
“So you did,” said Brother Michael, releasing her face from his grip and running one finger softly down the side of her bruised cheek. “But it wasn’t true, was it? In fact, you told me a lie...” He slid his finger down her jaw and drew it slowly across her throat, just below her jaw line. It might have been a lover’s caress, except it felt more like someone mimicking a knife blade.
Either way, LizAlec knew she was in deep shit.
Brother Michael nodded, pleased to have got a reaction. “Time to turn off the cameras, I think,” he said lightly and clapped his hands twice. A tiny black K19 fell from the vaulted roof and landed on his lectern with a soft click. It had been so small and dark against the sky that LizAlec hadn’t even known it was there.
And it couldn’t have fallen, not really, because the cathedral had no gravity, which meant the vidSat was probably holding itself against the lectern by means of tiny retrorockets. Either that, or the lectern was metal and the camera could induce its own magnetic field.
“No cameras, no witnesses... But then, confession’s a very private thing.” The tall preacher shrugged himself out of his long coat and threaded it through the back of his metal chair. Beneath the black coat he wore a white shirt, the kind with little pearl buttons up the front and no collar.
“So,” said Brother Michael, “You’re a liar and maybe a thief, but you’re not Anchee... You know how I know you’re not Anchee?”
LizAlec shook her head. She didn’t mean to, in fact she meant not to, it just happened. Brother Michael sometimes had that effect on people.
“Because this is Anchee,” said Brother Michael, thrusting a paper printout in front of her face. It quivered in his hand, like seaweed under water.
It was Anchee, too. A bad, fuzzy long-distance camera grab. Even digitally enhanced and resampled, the scan had that tell-tale telephoto flatness and paparazzi blur. But, equally obviously, it wasn’t LizAlec. The young girl in the picture was smaller, neater and much more obviously Chinese. Not that LizAlec was obviously anything much, she thought to herself bitterly.
“Yeah,” said LizAlec, shrugging. “That’s Anchee. Except these days she’s got less teeth.”
The man suddenly looked interested. “So you really know her, she’s not just some name you grabbed from a rerun of My Fortune?”
LizAlec grinned, and if her hands hadn’t been cuffed to the front of the pulpit she’d have spread them, street-style. “Know Anchee? Hell, we’re sisters...”
It wasn’t what Brother Michael wanted to hear. He gripped LizAlec’s face, fingers pressing hard into her left cheek, his thumb hooked so hard into her right cheekbone LizAlec thought her jaw would break.
“I want the truth,” demanded Brother Michael.
“Really,” hissed LizAlec. “I thought you’d already settled for religion.” Brother Michael didn’t like that one either, but then he wasn’t meant to.
“You can tell me who you are,” said the preacher, “or I can toss you out of an airlock. Do you know what happens in a vacuum?” His voice was cold and his brown eyes were glass-hard, glittering.
Insane, LizAlec decided suddenly, straightening up. Everything made sense once you accepted the man was insane. “No,” LizAlec said coldly. “I don’t know. Why don’t you step into the airlock and show me?” She nodded at a heavy glass door. Behind it was a titanium grid, then a space, then another grid and then a steel door. Beyond that was nothing but vacuum and blackness.
Why it was there and just who Brother Michael expected to turn up and hear him preach LizAlec didn’t know: angels, probably. They looked at each other. LizAlec knew Brother Michael had the advantage. Pretty obvious, really, while she was chained to a pulpit like some... LizAlec finally remembered what being fastened there reminded her of — a vast painting in the Prince Imperial’s bedroom, a picture that showed a fat girl chained naked to a windswept rock, waiting to be rescued. Except there was no way LizAlec carried that amount of weight and as for waiting to be rescued, no chance. She was going to have to get out of this herself. There was no one else around to do it for her.
“Lars,” Brother Michael barked suddenly, stepping away from her. What about the little freak, LizAlec wondered and then realized the preacher was talking into his button mike.
“Bring me a goat.”
Somewhere out in a spar, Lars answered, and asked his own question.
“No,” the preacher said heavily, “I don’t mind which one. Yes, that’s fine, I’m sure Betty will do.” Brother Michael sighed and turned back to LizAlec. “That boy’s got the animal-empathy gene, you know. There were animals on the Moon, at first, but the tourists ate them.”
“Really? How interesting,” said LizAlec. “How really fascinating.”
They waited in cold silence and LizAlec had a good idea what they were waiting for, which didn’t improve her temper one little bit. Though what Brother Michael didn’t appear to have realized was that the slack-tongued little sandrat was going to like his plan even less than she did.