“Speak for yourself, darling,” said Sister Aaron, climbing up the stairs that LizAlec had been intending to go down. She still wore the white silk sarong fastened under her arms, her legs were still bare and her face was as empty and beautiful as ever, but that wasn’t what LizAlec noticed. In Sister Aaron’s hand was a sword, black with a silver cutting edge and a gently curving blade.
The woman swung the blade lightly in front of her and inside her mind LizAlec felt the ghost grow suddenly tense. Then the tension seeped away to leave nothing but whistling waste-like emptiness.
“Close down,” whispered the voice in her head. LizAlec tried, but didn’t know what she was trying to do.
“Think hollow,” said the voice.
Sister Aaron smiled, still swinging the blade lazily. “Relying on the hired help again, are we, darlings?” The woman’s wrist flicked lightly sideways and her blade skimmed up towards LizAlec’s unprotected throat.
It never came close to connecting. Inside the same split second, LizAlec blocked the incoming blade in a crash of sparks and pivoted her own sword around Sister Aaron’s, pushing it to one side. Without stopping, LizAlec sliced sideways at waist level to open a rip in the blonde woman’s white sarong that beaded with blood along its edges.
“Little bitch.”
The mind pushing at the outside edge of LizAlec’s faded slightly as Sister Aaron drew back into herself, fingers touching the cut on her hip, as if she couldn’t believe the wound was there.
“Okay,” said the voice, sounding tentatively relieved. As if what it had feared would happen just maybe wasn’t going to. The walkway still rocked below LizAlec’s feet as she circled Sister Aaron, but this time LizAlec had no trouble keeping her balance. She had the blade held in front of her, angled off-centre, ready to block any slice Sister Aaron might throw.
Left.
Right.
The tall woman’s sword curved in, only to thud into LizAlec’s silver blade, sparks flying, shock waves numbing the nerves in both their arms. Block, cut, block — fighting got easier once you got the empty rhythm of the moves.
“Finish her,” said the voice in LizAlec’s head, but the girl only stepped back, raised her blade and began to circle again. She could do block and parry, at least she could now. Doing death was something else again. LizAlec didn’t do death. She’d never even killed an insect, except by accident.
“What about Brother Michael?” The voice in her head sounded exasperated.
That was different. Anyway, she hadn’t killed him, that had been left to the Big Black.
“Get real,” the voice told her. LizAlec didn’t want to. She very seriously, very definitely didn’t want to get real at all. She was just about coping with the idea that this wasn’t real, that maybe she was merely insane.
“Honey,” said the voice. “If we don’t fucking finish this, she will...”
And that looked to be true, too. Sister Aaron was closing in, pushing LizAlec back towards a glass behind her, until the girl had no more room to retreat.
“Fall,” the voice snapped and LizAlec fell, hearing Sister Aaron’s sword explode into the glass above, showering LizAlec with razor-sharp splinters. In front of LizAlec, her own sword was changing shape, its blade shrinking down to dagger length.
“Now. Roll,” said the voice and LizAlec rolled in through Sister Aaron’s legs, stabbing upwards as she did, hearing a wet sucking sound as metal severed flesh and then ground noisily against bone.
LizAlec didn’t need the second blow, the one that would reach back and snap the hamstring of Sister Aaron’s left ankle because the woman’s bowels were already voiding, but LizAlec cut the hamstring anyway and the screaming woman buckled sideways, blue eyes already blank with shock, her blade retracting into itself, melting to a silver puddle next to her twitching hand.
“Finish it, honey,” demanded the voice. “You have to.”
Unfortunately for LizAlec that was true. Kneeling over Sister Aaron, LizAlec felt for the woman’s heart and found its beat erratic and weak beneath one perfectly denned breast. Closing her own eyes, the girl positioned her blade between two thin ribs and pushed.
“Now get that fucking shrine and get out of here, okay? No tears, no hanging about, no shit.”
Not even bothering to take one last look at the corpse behind her, LizAlec flipped down some stairs with speed she didn’t know she had, rolled into the gap between a mirror and the walkway and dropped into space, landing lightly twenty feet below. She was moving again almost before she was aware she’d landed, spinning sideways, cutting a wire she didn’t even know she’d seen and then taking the next flight of steps at a single jump.
If she stopped now she’d never start again. LizAlec didn’t know how she knew, she just did. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was the person looking out of her eyes who knew. Landing with another roll, LizAlec came face to face with herself in the mirror and saw a half-naked silver exotic looking back. Shark cartilage overlaid with lizard skin protected her shoulders, her eyes were silver and her fingers flexed and unflexed to show wicked molyglass nails that sprang out and retracted like those of a cat. Her exotic’s top was covered with an open silver Issaki Mashui quilted jacket but from the hips down she was bare, her body hair depilated, pudenda sealed with three gold labia rings.
“What the...”
“Razz,” said Razz, and LizAlec felt herself flip sideways, then run for another flight of stairs. “See me while you can.”
“My mother.”
“If you say so, honey.” The voice sounded surprised but cool about it all the same. LizAlec needed to stop, to slow down and talk but the presence behind her eyes wouldn’t let up, hurrying her ruthlessly down towards ground level. Making LizAlec ignore her mirrored reflection that changed with each drop, each new walkway. She’d long since ditched her own past, bleak though scraps of it were, and traded up to worse possibilities. The mirrors gave form to fears LizAlec had fought to keep nameless. All that had been locked inside her head was reflected endlessly in the surrounding, suffocating reflections. Infinity and horror stuffed into boxes.
“Okay, honey, this is it...”
LizAlec skidded to a halt on the final walkway and looked around. It was a shit move. The face staring back had its lips pulled up into a rictus snarl. She was stripped naked, not bare but flayed, her epidermis stripped back to reveal pulpy, blood-sweating flesh. Just looking at it hurt.
As LizAlec watched, horrified, her flayed skin shrivelled away like melting wax to reveal yellow fat-pustuled layers of hypodermis beneath. And, beneath that, striated muscle and tapeworm-like strips of tendon, and a pulsing, crawling pink-and-purple web of arteries and veins.
“Honey, get up.”
LizAlec was on her knees despite the shouting in her head. She needed to move, but she couldn’t. She was coming apart in front of her own eyes. Shock-frozen as the upper muscle layer of her face flayed back, the jaw-closing bands of purple muscle rotting away to reveal her bare skull. Not white — as she somehow imagined — but glistening a tallow-wax yellow. Lidless pain-wrecked eyeballs stared at her from hollow sockets and then glazed ever, like the eyes of a bludgeoned fish.
LizAlec vomited, spewing Leon’s chocolate onto the metal floor.
“Move, fuck it.” The voice in her head was loud, vicious: pain blossoming through LizAlec’s skull until she fought to stand upright just to make it go away. Standing took more will than LizAlec knew she had. To move away from that last glass took even more. But LizAlec did it, glancing back only once, to see the flesh on her chest and shoulders flay down to the bone.