“Meet yourself again,” suggested Sister Aaron inside her head and stepped forward, reaching for LizAlec’s wrist. Before Leon could move or LizAlec even scream, the woman threw her against the obsidian block, wing chun-style. Only all Liz Alec felt was cold wind on her face as she rolled blindly through the rock and fell headlong into blackness.
She screamed but there was no echo, her howl swallowed by the dark.
Stars flicked around her except she wasn’t in space: deep space had no significant gravity and she was definitely falling, hard and fast. Landing even harder, as her feet caught on something and her legs buckled upwards to punch LizAlec violently in the chest, winding her.
Stars swung crazily from side to side. And then LizAlec realized the stars themselves weren’t moving, it was the ground beneath her that was lurching backwards and forwards, creaking as it did. Dragging in a breath, LizAlec crawled across ice-cold metal only to hit a surface straight ahead that was hard and flat. It too was speckled with stars.
Glass, thought LizAlec as she brushed a finger across its cold surface. Without even knowing she’d done it, LizAlec retuned her optic nerves, running through infrared and m/wave, rejecting both and finally retuning the 120m rod cells in her retina. The trade-off shift to mute pastels and greys was the price of seeing clearly. It took just long enough for LizAlec to feel it happen and then she was suddenly looking at herself in a vast mirror that just hung there. Between the mirror and the steel grating on which she knelt was a two-feet-wide gap.
Through the gap LizAlec could see a space so vast it would have been impossible to contain within The Arc had it been real. But it wasn’t. Distances multiplied and space doubled and then doubled again as LizAlec looked round at the wilderness of hanging mirrors.
Beside her, behind her, in front...
A thousand frightened, wide-eyed LizAlecs stared back, endlessly reflected. She looked shit, every single one of her. The T-shirt she’d borrowed from Leon was grit-smeared and stained, her cropped hair slick black with sweat. Ugly sweat circles stood out endlessly under her arms and down her gut.
Shit on wheels, no one could be expected to look at themselves looking like that, it was time she got out of there.
LizAlec gripped two freezing rails and slid down a long run of metal stairs, feet not touching the steps. Somewhere down below would be Sister Aaron’s own little clone-zone. And if luck was good that’s where she’d find the shrine everyone seemed to be after, including the lunatic in her head.
The next flight was single rail so she couldn’t slide. Instead, LizAlec took it at a run. Screeching to a halt at the bottom she almost cannoned head-first into herself, the walkway rocking drunkenly from side to side. Glass again... LizAlec edged sideways along the mirror, trying to ignore her reflection as it did the same. Both reaching round the edge of the mirror to look at the back, except there was no back.
The floating glass reflected on both sides. They all did. And the mirrors weren’t floating either, no matter what it looked like. Hair-thin threads of monofilament rose into the blackness up towards the distant ceiling, each one as taut as the string to any violin.
LizAlec reached out and tapped one of the threads, pulling back in shock as the wire sliced into her fingertip. Not monofilament but molywire. Behind LizAlec someone laughed.
“Sharp things cut,” said a voice.
LizAlec spun round and saw only herself reflected in a mirror off to the side.
“It’s a maze,” said Sister Aaron.
“I know that,” LizAlec muttered bitterly, her eyes searching steps and runways, looking for Sister Aaron. “Multi-level 3D.”
“Oh no,” the voice sounded genuinely amused. “Not triD, it’s very definitely quad...”
LizAlec was still trying to track down the voice when her own reflection swirled and faded in every glass LizAlec could see. She felt like someone had kicked her feet out from under her. Staring back was her own face but younger. The hair was neat and tied back into a plait, the violet eyes less hard, more hurt. Her mouth was petulant, over-glossed with black shu uemura.
As for the clothes... embroidered trousers, velvet shirt with pearl buttons: she wouldn’t be seen dead wearing them, not now. But LizAlec recognized herself right enough. That night at the Crash&Burn in Bastille, when Fixx sent her over undrinkable brandy.
“Not far back enough?”
LizAlec swung round but there was no one standing there behind her. The only thing that had changed was the girl in the mirror. It was still LizAlec, looking younger still, more haunted. Ghost-ridden. In place of the sullen fourteen-year-old in a velvet shirt was a naked twelve-year-old, hands crossed tight over her hollow gut, shoulders hunched forward to hide tiny breasts. She was sitting on the edge of a bed, tears streaming down her anguished face, dark shadow hiding her thighs like a swirl of blood.
She could have been the model for Edvard Munch’s Puberty.
Or for Felician Rops’s engraving of Don Juan’s Greatest Conquest.
But she was neither.
And the old man in the background struggling into a dressing gown woven from silk genetically engineered to contain pure gold was not an artist. LizAlec knew his face, every child did. It was the face on all the medals, on the holograms used to emboss cartes blanches and nobliques. The Prince Imperial looked thoughtful, even slightly sad, but there was no regret in his smoke-grey eyes.
No remorse.
No uncertainty.
“You owe Lady Clare nothing,” said a voice. And this time when LizAlec turned round, Sister Aaron was standing right behind her. “Lady Clare’s not even your real mother. You’re a clone like me. And not even her clone.”
“No,” LizAlec shook her head frantically. She’d have known if she was a clone, LizAlec was certain of it.
“You belong here,” Sister Aaron said and the child in the mirror vanished as Sister Aaron gave LizAlec back her reflection. Except now they both knew exactly what flaws were hidden inside. Which didn’t make LizAlec feel good about herself — and it didn’t make LizAlec feel good about Sister Aaron, either.
Emotional manipulation, the girl thought bitterly, that’s all this was. Nothing more. She stopped looking at the mirrors and stared instead at the woman in front of her. In most ways Sister Aaron was way too exotic for LizAlec to understand, but in one way she wasn’t... LizAlec figured Sister Aaron had to have the same circuitry inside her head. Apparently that was something she shouldn’t have thought.
“Make your choice,” said Sister Aaron abruptly, and every mirror around LizAlec reverted to the crying child. “Be this, or be us. While you still can...” Her voice was cold and contemptuous, as if LizAlec had failed some test.
Maybe I have, LizAlec thought, but that changed nothing. Looking at Sister Aaron, LizAlec knew just what she intended to do. She was going to take back Anchee’s shrine, even if she had to kill Sister Aaron to get it. And then, when she got back to Paris, she was going to face down the bitch she’d thought was her mother and ask the questions no child was meant to ask.
Why?
Who gave you the right?
Why me?
The two women stared at each other, a hand’s breadth apart. And then LizAlec moved, spinning not at Sister Aaron but towards a mirror, hands flicking out in front of her. Shiori’s razor-sharp katana was in LizAlec’s hand before she was even conscious of it, metal flowing from between her fingers into a black blade that swung in a dazzling arc.