“Lady Clare?” The amusement in the man’s voice should have warned LizAlec that the balance was shifting again and not in her favour. Though how much further it could shift against her when she was sodden, kidnapped, shuddering with cold and wrapped in a wet hospital gown LizAlec didn’t know.
“You think Lady Clare is your mother?”
“Of course she is,” LizAlec answered. There was no “think” about it. “You think I’d have anything to do with that bitch if she wasn’t?”
“Lady... Clare... is... not... your... mother.” He left mocking gaps between the words, as if giving LizAlec time for the words to sink in. But they didn’t. However hard she tried she couldn’t pin any meaning on them except the obvious one. And that wasn’t possible.
“Your mother’s dead.” The man’s eyes were bright, coldly amused. But for the briefest second, there was something else there that might just have been pity, but probably wasn’t. It was wiped so fast LizAlec couldn’t be sure.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to touch one hunched shoulder. “I assumed you knew...”
The hell he did.
LizAlec’s fist swung towards his elegant face before even she realized what she was doing. But her punch never landed. Instead the tall man twisted fast sideways, swivelling so LizAlec’s fist slipped uselessly past his face, throwing her off balance. She didn’t fall. She couldn’t. Iron fingers gripped her thin wrist and the cell did a half-spin as he flicked her round and slammed her face first into the rough polycrete wall. She stayed upright, but only because the man had her arm twisted halfway up her back.
I’m going to have to stop this, LizAlec thought when the man finally stopped pulling her arm out of its socket and she got her brain back. Casually, callously, he spun the girl round so she could took at him.
“Lady Clare is French,” he said coldly, “Well bred, European, white...” The man laid the list out in front of her. “You’re black.”
LizAlec looked up at him and frowned. No, she wasn’t. If anything, she was cafe au lait, like most girls at St Lucius. Like most of the world, really. LizAlec started to shake her head.
“She’s pure European,” the man said heavily. “You’re black — how do you think that happened?”
“Maybe she met someone and they fucked,” suggested LizAlec. She placed bitter emphasis on her last word. “Maybe her gynaecologist just mixed me up in a Petri dish. How should I know?”
“Your father wasn’t black, Lady Clare isn’t black...” The iron grip on her wrist tightened further, grinding bones against each other until LizAlec bit her bottom lip but kept silent. Arrogant he might be, and probably psychotic, but it sounded like he held the missing piece to her life, and she wanted to know it. Unless the whole thing was just a mind fuck, which wouldn’t have surprised her.
“How do you know my father wasn’t black?” LizAlec asked. Because if that was all he knew, it was still more than she did. Lady Clare and LizAlec didn’t communicate much, not these days, but they’d never talked about her father at all. Not ever, not even back when she was a kid.
“How do you know?” LizAlec demanded crossly.
“Because I know your father,” said the man.
“He sent you.” LizAlec had the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.
The man actually laughed. “Sent me? I doubt if he even knows you exist. But take it from me, your father’s many things, starting with insane, but he’s not responsible for the melanin coding in your DNA. That shit’s down to Stepping Razor.”
“Razz!”
LizAlec knew Razz. Hell, every retarded Left Bank student and martial arts fetishist knew Razz. Razz was dead but that didn’t mean she didn’t still live on, naked and oiled in endless adolescent-owned tri-D posters, silver skin glinting, lizard-skin and shark-cartilage shoulder-armour polished to a sheen. She was GoreFest wank material, nothing more. Fixx loved her, no matter how much he pretended to despise everything Razz stood for.
LizAlec looked down at her own thin legs, her narrow shoulders and bony hips. It didn’t seem likely. Having Lady Clare for a mother was bad enough. But Razz... LizAlec didn’t think so. It was like discovering she was related to Ronald-fucking-McDonald.
“Razz?” LizAlec said in disbelief.
The man looked at her, then spat pointedly in the dust. The gesture didn’t come naturally, but it made plain his position. “Get used to it. That silver bitch was your mother, you stupid, spoilt, sullen little shit.”
There was a long silence, the kind that reaches out and stills everything except the thud of your heart and the roar of blood in your head. Under the silence, LizAlec could hear the low rumble of a distant pump and the slow hiss of an air-recyc.
“So tell me,” said LizAlec. “Just who did Razz fuck to produce me and where does Lady Clare come into this?”
“Gibson,” the man told her viciously, “That’s who. You’re the by-blow of a hired killer and the world’s only living god. And now look at you...”
Alex Gibson. That didn’t sound bad to LizAlec, in fact it sounded pretty good. Okay, Alex Gibson didn’t own most of Shanghai like Anchee’s dad, but a god? She could live with that... LizAlec straightened up and stared at the man. It was a bad mistake.
She was still sneering, staring him in the eyes when the tall Frenchman pulled back his fist and sucker punched her in the gut, dropping LizAlec to her knees. Breath exploded from her lungs as blackness swirled like dark mist in front of her eyes, eating at the edges of the room.
When LizAlec came to, she was curled up on the ground and above her she could hear the man’s elegant, contemptuous voice, far away down a long tunnel.
“Stupid little cunt.” Somewhere in the background Laughing Boy grunted. LizAlec hadn’t remembered him being there. Maybe he wasn’t. Perhaps he was back in a control room somewhere and it was all being captured on i/red camera so the suit could watch it all again for fun, later on. Except that wasn’t it. LizAlec had just been out for longer than she remembered.
“Okay,” said the tall man. “Let’s deal with this, shall we?” A hand yanked back her hair, reaching for the nape of her neck. LizAlec tensed as fingers expertly ripped away a tiny circle of plastic skin to reveal a minuscule glass chip, half the size of a rice grain. LizAlec couldn’t remember it being fitted, but she felt it being pulled away, blood welling up where tiny electrodes had fed beneath her skin.
“Tracer,” the man said contemptuously, cracking it under his heel. “Okay,” he said to LizAlec. “Get up.”
LizAlec didn’t.
“Get up,” he said crossly and when she still didn’t move he crouched down beside her. LizAlec felt hands brush across her small breasts and then she felt his fingers grip nipples that were already upright with cold. But it wasn’t cheap sex he was interested in. Grasping her nipples between first finger and thumb, the man yanked LizAlec to her feet.
“I say move, you move,” the man said bluntly. “Try anything that stupid again and I’ll break both your arms. Understand me?” He punctuated the last word with a vicious jab to her kidneys that had LizAlec wimpering with pain.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s get this over, okay?” The man produced a tiny Sony camcorder and tossed it gently into the air, waiting while the machine spun up into a corner to steady itself a hand’s breadth below the rough grey ‘crete of the ceiling. When it was stable, a single green diode lit at its base and the lens whirred slightly as the camera clicked into fine focus.