“Yeah,” said LizAlec. “I was talking to you.” She waited, watching. Her arms pulled up above her head, her body open, defenceless. Brother Michael wasn’t going to pass up his chance to hurt her, he wasn’t the type.
“Hey,” LizAlec demanded. “You going to answer me, you dumb fuck?”
He did. The first slap caught her across the face, twisting her off to the side.
Sweet Jesus, LizAlec thought hazily, when she was back in a fit state to think anything. But it was too late to stop now.
“You’re pathetic,” LizAlec told him, through a mouthful of blood. “A pathetic, talentless...”
That was as far as she got before Brother Michael broke her nose with the palm of his hand and LizAlec almost blew everything by passing out with pain. Except she was Lady Elizabeth-fucking-Fabio, or maybe she wasn’t, LizAlec wasn’t sure, but whoever the fuck she was, she had built-in hyperfocus and it was on.
Fully functioning. Like her death wish.
LizAlec inhaled her own blood, as greedily as Fixx had ever sucked up the ice he kept offering her. She inhaled the warm liquid until it flooded her nasal cavity, almost choking as she tried to stop it backing up in her throat. Then she shook her head frantically from side to side and sucked in stale air through her mouth, pulling in dust, low-density sweat molecules, anything that would fill her lungs to bursting. And then, lungs full, she blew out hard, pushing blood and air through her swelling nose in a single snort, red liquid splattering across Brother Michael’s white shirt like buckshot.
The bioSemtex wriggled like a crippled slow-worm as it tumbled slowly across the interior of the cathedral and ricocheted gently off the floor before bouncing off a far wall. Brother Michael had done that for her, shaken the monstrosity loose and filled its hiding place with blood until the worm could no longer keep its grip.
The girl wondered if Brother Michael knew that — as of now — she owed him her life... Not that LizAlec was going to point that out. Especially since she was going to kill the man. And she was, much sooner than he realized.
“Brother Michael,” said a shocked voice. It was Lars, standing in the doorway of the lift, a large nanny goat clutched firmly in his arms. The sandrat was doing his best to look anywhere except at LizAlec. When he finally did, LizAlec grinned at him and Lars went rapidly back to petting his goat, which had been hobbled with polymer wire to stop it struggling.
“You wanted to see Betty?” Lars held out the goat, then thought better of it and started slowly unwinding the wire. When that was finished, he held the goat out again but Brother Michael made no attempt to take the animal. In fact, he made no effort to go near the goat at all.
“Open hatch,” Brother Michael said crossly and the glass door to the airlock swung slowly back, opening until it could go no further. “Grid,” Brother Michael demanded and the metal grille folded in on itself like the tendrils of a plant. Not sideways as LizAlec had expected, but from the bottom, folding up to almost nothing. So much for disapproving of nanetics.
“You,” Brother Michael said to Lars, “Put the goat in the airlock...”
Lars just looked at him.
“The airlock,” said Brother Michael tiredly.
Lars did nothing.
“Is there a problem?” The tall preacher gave up trying to clean blood off his shirt and stared hard at the boy.
“That’s an airlock,” Lars said.
“I know what it is,” said Brother Michael crossly.
“You want me to put Betty in there?” Lars sounded puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard the order correctly.
“Yes,” said Brother Michael. “I want you to put the goat in the airlock.” He could have been giving instructions to an idiot. From the pained expression on Brother Michael’s face it was obvious that was indeed how he saw it.
“Betty will die,” said Lars. “Vacuums kill...” He said it as if, maybe, Brother Michael hadn’t realized that. And in her head, LizAlec felt a blaze of eidetic memory. Lars and Ben. Vacuum. Death. The sandrat’s own memories, stolen from him on Darkside that time he had tried to rape her.
Most people LizAlec could read but Lars was something else. Trying to second guess the sandrat was like looking into a paint-spattered screen: something was undoubtedly going on behind it but no one knew what.
“He wants to kill Betty,” LizAlec told Lars.
“Shut up,” Brother Michael ordered, but LizAlec didn’t.
“He wants to put her in a vacuum... watch her eyes pop out. You wouldn’t want him to do that, would you?”
“Shut it,” said Brother Michael, wrapping one huge hand over her mouth. But the damage was already done.
“You can’t kill Betty,” Lars said suddenly. He stepped forward, looking intently at LizAlec’s face for a second as she struggled against Brother Michael’s grip, and then headed back towards the Otis, the goat wrapped protectively in his arms. “I’m putting Betty back...”
“You’re what?” Brother Michael was stunned. Not pretending, but the real thing. It was as though a lift door had turned round and answered him back.
“That’s right,” said LizAlec quickly, getting her comment in before Brother Michael remembered he was supposed to be smothering her. She bit down hard on his thumb, earning herself another slap. Next time round, Brother Michael kept his fingers away from her teeth, manoeuvring his palm firmly over her swollen mouth, using its edge to block off her nostrils as well.
Behind Brother Michael, Lars was looking badly worried, but he wouldn’t put down his bloody goat, he couldn’t... There was nowhere to put it and Lars couldn’t bring himself to let the animal float off in zero G, he knew goats hated that.
So instead he just looked on as Brother Michael slowly and certainly began to choke the life out of LizAlec. The man was smiling now, cold brown eyes hungrily staring into hers as he watched LizAlec go down into the rapidly approaching darkness.
“Shit,” LizAlec thought, as the glass cathedral around her began to fade. She was being murdered and there was nothing she could do to stop it happening. Nothing conscious.
Nothing human.
“He means it.”
LizAlec never knew exactly what woke her, but whatever it was she jerked awake to gulp down a breath that sank like melt water into her burning lungs. She could feel her heart kick-start into a steady reassuring beat as its right ventricle pumped sluggish blood to her lungs, where the blood took up oxygen and returned heartwards, haemoglobin-red, to be pumped through her arteries, releasing the gathered oxygen.
It was a beautiful, simple, inherently efficient system — and she was impressed. LizAlec didn’t as yet understand the mechanics, any more than she really understood how an explosion of synaptic fire could translate into shock at still being alive.
She wasn’t dead, that much was obvious, but LizAlec couldn’t work out whether or not she had been. And if this was a standard near-death experience, where were the sympathetic angels and strange aliens? All that shit that qualified her to go on Soulderado? No. She was alive, watching Brother Michael walk towards Lars who was busily backing away, still holding his bloody goat. She was unquestionably alive. It was just that she wasn’t expecting to be.
Her throat hurt.
That was so great an understatement that even Lady Clare would have been proud of her. Every breath burnt on the way down and then caught fire again on the way back up. Pain she could live with, it was how much pain she could live with that was beginning to surprise LizAlec. But what ripped her attention away from the hurt in her throat was not Brother Michael’s approach towards Lars but the steady chanting that started up in the back of her head.