Low, rhythmic. A chant so faint she couldn’t hear the words. If LizAlec hadn’t known better, she’d have thought it was someone muttering, but softly, under their breath.
Maybe she was having that fully fledged near-death experience after all. Either that, or she was mad. Whichever it was, there’d be a CySat show more than happy to talk to her. If she over got back to safety, wherever the fuck that was.
“Who are you?” LizAlec demanded hoarsely, her own lips moving at the question, though she’d meant to ask it in her head.
Brother Michael spun round in disbelief. “What the...?”
And suddenly LizAlec saw herself as Brother Michael saw her. Chained to the base of the glass pulpit, hands pulled high above her head. She looked a wreck, No, more than that, she looked like death incarnate. Weird eyes burned out of a wide scowling face. She had good cheekbones and a strong jaw. What she could see of her skin was light brown, but her lip was split and her chin was black with dried blood.
“Razz?”
It was the voice in her head.
“No,” said LizAlec, “Not Razz. Razz was my mother...”
“Your mother?” The voice smiled.
Impossible, LizAlec knew, but it happened just the same. An overwhelming sense of amusement, almost happiness swept through her mind. Brother Michael was watching her, slack-faced and frozen.
“You’re doing that,” said the voice in her head. Inside its echo LizAlec got a sense of ghosts and howling wastelands that curled in on themselves, like folds in time or wormholes in space, except that no one had yet proved either of those existed.
“You’re Elizabeth Alexandra?”
LizAlec nodded.
“Yeah, I heard you’d been born. At least I think I did. Maybe. It gets hard to remember...” The voice was soft as wind through an empty attic, as brittle as dried grass. LizAlec didn’t yet know if the words were real or if she had imagined them. That both could be true hadn’t yet occurred to her.
“Who are you?” LizAlec asked. And when the answer came the girl wondered if she’d always known, because she felt no sense of surprise.
“I’m Alex,” said the voice. “Or maybe not. The real me is locked in a cell at San Lorenzo. The Church Geneticist will never let him go, you know... Not while he can spin DNA like that.”
“What are you really?” LizAlec asked.
The voice smiled again. “You mean, am I a real ghost? Yes, I suppose so, in a ghost-like sort of way. Alex put me in here before you were born. Well, the neural framework, anyway. It’s amazing what can be knitted out of little stretches of junk DNA.”
“The framework?” LizAlec said. “What else is there?”
“Oh, a bit of naturally grown bioClay, a neat bridge between hemispheres, a little optic enhancement... Nothing clumsy enough to set off an m/wave sensor.”
LizAlec took a look inside her skull, seeing blood swirling through the Willis circle. There were more arteries and veins than she could ever imagine. Beneath and between were folds of tissue, rich with thread-like nerves. More stars fluoresced inside her head than LizAlec could see through the glass walls of the cathedral. The problem was, LizAlec didn’t know what was meant to be there and what wasn’t.
“Am I really looking inside myself?” LizAlec demanded.
For a second the voice seemed to hesitate. “No, not really. But it’s a perfect construct of exactly what you would see if you did.” There didn’t seem to be much answer to that.
“No wonder I felt so odd,” LizAlec said bitterly, her voice loud enough to make Lars stop fussing over his goat and look up.
“The fury, the paranoia, that sense of standing outside looking in?”
LizAlec nodded.
“No,” said the voice. “That’s not odd, that’s just the way it goes.”
“Yeah,” said LizAlec. “Well, it’s still shit.” She looked across to where Brother Michael stood frozen, then abruptly jerked herself out of his head. The preacher took two clanking steps towards her before she went back inside his mind and he froze as muscles knotted up and he almost stumbled sideways.
LizAlec pulled herself out of his head again and then went back in, repelled and fascinated. There were dark memories of other girls. On their knees or on their backs. A few were cuffed below the pulpit as she was, but unlike LizAlec they were naked. Some she knew, many she didn’t. Unless she did and the change from fresh-faced disciple to silent shuffling slave was too great for even LizAlec to make the connection.
She was inside Brother Michael’s head. Not physically among the blood and veins she’d found in her own skull, but feeding off dark memories remembered only as fixed neural patterns. He could feel her in there, pillaging his mind, and LizAlec was glad of it.
She thought pain and felt him stumble.
She told him to move and watched his disjointed steps.
“Key,” LizAlec demanded and Brother Michael winced, throwing up his hands to protect himself from something he couldn’t see but could only feel.
She had her answer before Brother Michael could even get his fear-frozen lips to frame the code. LizAlec spoke the word aloud and felt the cuffs slither from her wrists and hang lifeless like laces over the rings fixed to the glass pulpit.
Two strides took LizAlec close enough to Brother Michael for her to be able to pull back her boot and kick him hard in the crotch. Which she did, enthusiastically. His scream echoed around the vast cathedral. LizAlec hadn’t needed to kick him, she understood that. Any pain she wanted to inflict she could post straight through to his thalamus, jack up his limbic system. Pain only existed as electrical impulses anyway.
But LizAlec didn’t want agony’s simulacrum, at least not where Brother Michael was concerned. When you came down to it, she was an old-fashioned girl at heart. LizAlec took one last look at herself through his eyes. She looked insane. Maybe she was. Wild-eyed and staring, wired up on emotions even Fixx couldn’t begin to imagine. Well, maybe he could, LizAlec admitted, but only with a little chemical help. And even then he couldn’t do the things she could. Fixx needed music to make people do what he wanted: she just had to think about it.
LizAlec looked at the open airlock and then at Brother Michael.
“No...” The preacher was staring at her, aghast, his face weak with fear. He had his hands twisted together in front of him in a mockery of prayer. LizAlec didn’t know if it was conscious or not, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t a believer anyway. It had taken three weeks of bullying from Lady Clare to get her to agree to get confirmed with all those other little corps noblique girls at Notre-Dame.
LizAlec fed Brother Michael back his own memories, Sarah again and then Rachel, sobbing for forgiveness, begging him to stop. LizAlec looped that memory and left it playing, an unending circle of blows and bitten-back moans.
“Get inside,” she told him and watched Brother Michael fight himself, then lose. Every sinew in his legs strained against her order, so tight that his knees were close to rupture, but still he put one foot in front of the other, like a dead man walking. Only stopping when he was inside the airlock.
“Please...” There were tears beading from his eyes like pearls that floated away into the stark empty beauty of the cathedral. He was shivering, begging, crying. LizAlec didn’t bother to answer. There was nothing she wanted to say.
“You ever killed anyone before?” It was the neural construct of the father she’d never met and probably never would, the ghost in her head. She hadn’t, and he knew she hadn’t. There was nothing about her he didn’t know.
But she answered all the same.
“You sure you want to do this?”
She was sure, but then LizAlec remembered why she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to operate an airlock. Fuck it. LizAlec cut off the endless loop inside Brother Michael’s head and as he stopped, suddenly, blindly hopeful, LizAlec pulled out of his mind instructions on using the airlock, and then let him know exactly what she’d just taken.