Had he lain there, she’d probably just have kicked him and left it at that. But Fixx had other ideas. He always had other ideas, that had long been part of his problem.

Time to fight back, Fixx decided. And as her slender hand reached down to yank him off the floor, Fixx went slack and as Shiori stumbled under his unexpected weight, he jabbed his left hand in under her ribs hard, servo-motors running full tilt as his metal fingers punched into her liver.

Brown eyes widened first with pain, then shock. But as Fixx pulled back his hand to punch again, Shiori was already busy controlling her pain. And before Fixx could land a finishing blow, the Japanese woman beat him to it, whipping her hand down, driving the hilt of her sword into the nerves of his shoulder, freezing his metal arm mid-movement. A blow to the shoulder, a blow to the face. He hit the ground, flat on his back.

Any normal person would have given up but Fixx never had been normal, even he admitted that. And besides, he was drunk on Electric Soup, with his aggression levels wired to fuck, and she was still groggy. In reply, Fixx kicked up with the sole of his foot, his heel catching Shiori hard between the legs. Men weren’t the only ones to have nerve endings there, Fixx reminded himself as he watched her body go rigid with shock.

Scrambling up, Fixx stepped away from her and dropped into a fighter’s crouch, pulling reflexes out of memory. The only problem was that it was the memory of a series he’d been in briefly, maybe twenty years before. When it came to the real thing he was so far out of his depth he didn’t even know he was swimming. Fixx was still thinking that one through when the razor-edged blade vanished from the Japanese woman’s hand. Not got sheathed or folded away like some oversized biente neube. The blade just shrank before his eyes like a candle flame denied oxygen.

She was back in control and what little advantage Fixx’s low blow had given him was gone, that much was obvious. Shiori feinted and Fixx jumped back, then back again as she kept coming. Two hands reached for his throat and threw Fixx backwards, into the wall behind him. Adobe shattered, polycrete blocks splintered and Fixx found himself on his back on a grit-strewn floor. Around him was a dark, dusty cupboard, three walls of bare ‘creteblock and one of steel. The small room stank of damp, the air thick with microspore thrown up when Fixx landed in the dirt.

There were other smells as well, sweet putrefaction and something low-level and sour like escaped gas, but Fixx didn’t have time to consider them. The Japanese girl was standing over him, raising her heel to stamp down on his chest. Rolling sideways, Fixx desperately hooked up his knee and caught the girl behind her ankle. For a second she staggered, and that gave Fixx time enough to clamber painfully to his feet, facing her.

He was tired, breath dragging noisily through his throat, but the tiredness was worse in his head than in his lactic-laden, oxygen-starved muscles. And worst of all, he was empty. The song he’d been weaving was gone, broken beyond repair into fragments of memory by her punches. All gone. Pulling the sound back together would take as long as starting the track afresh.

Not that he could be bothered. Blood still ran from his gashed head, falling in slo/mo into the dirt to congeal into pointless, meaningless Rorschach blots. And what was he meant to see in them anyway, what was he ever meant to have seen?

His wasted life?

His missing love?

LizAlec was a sweet kid... Actually scratch that, Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio was a brittle, spoilt little brat, though she was still good to have around... All the same, Fixx was beginning to wonder what he was doing standing in a bar in Fracture, with a female ninja about to take his throat out. And try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a good answer. Actually, he couldn’t come up with any real answer at all.

“I’m going to kill you,” the Japanese girl said between gasps. The blade was growing in her hand again, only this time Fixx could see that it came from a bracelet around her right wrist, metal flowing through her grip to recreate the razor-edged sword.

Fixx shrugged. “So get the fuck on with it,” he said and turned his back on her. No more than a second passed between turning his back and walking away, but all the while he could feel that cold edge waiting to cut. When it didn’t, Fixx forced one leg in front of the other until he reached the shattered wall, ducking through it to reach the bar. Without looking back he pulled a Soup tube from Jude’s Braun icebox.

“Honey, you had enough.”

Yeah, Fixx thought, looking at the tall woman who’d materialized at his elbow, her cheap cotton dress still not properly buttoned over heavy breasts: he’d had way more than enough.

“Thought you were going to die out there...”

Fixx nodded. Yeah, so did he. And the grip that instinct was meant to keep on survival was less than he’d imagined, less than he’d expected.

The Japanese girl was back in the bar now, her face turned ostentatiously away from Fixx. But she was watching him all the same, catching his reflection in the polished polyglass dome of the Cadillac jukebox.

“Here.” Jude slammed a first-aid box in front of him and pulled out a small stapler. Taking a half full bottle of Stoli out of an icebox, she tipped what was left of its contents down the side of his face and then wiped at the crusted blood with an old bar towel.

“Hey, you...” Jude’s fingers closed on his jerking head, holding it immobile as she cleaned up the cut. “Keep still.” It was all Fixx could do not to shout with pain, but he couldn’t, not with Jude and the Japanese girl listening.

“Okay, here goes.” Jude pinched together the gash on Fixx’s temple and stapled it fast, before he had time to protest.

It took four staples to close the gash and then Jude was done. The instant skin she stuck in strips across the gash, instead of along it as the manufacturers recommended. He didn’t ask her why, though Fixx knew without looking in a glass that he was going to need a skin graft when he got home. Always assuming the Reich left him a home to return to.

“You?” Jude asked the Japanese woman, who shook her head. “Suit yourself.” Jude turned back to Fixx, slipped her first-aid box under the bar and came up holding the tattered Kodak of LizAlec. She looked at Fixx, long and slow, and then she glanced down at the piece of card in her hand, pale blue eyes gazing at LizAlec’s intense face staring back.

“You like the girl?”

Fixx nodded.

“You fuck her?”

They looked at each other and Fixx remembered Jude kneeling over him, her hips pushing down hard as she bit her own bottom lip in concentration. He shook his head.

“You tried?”

Fixx thought about answering. But there was a lot of shit swirling around in his head that couldn’t stand too good a look. Why the fuck else did Jude think he spent as much time as he could going AWOL inside his head, skipping reality’s bail bonds?

In the end he just shrugged.

Jude nodded, half to herself. “That girl was real afraid.” She jerked her chin at the dead clone sliced open on her bar floor. “You think that shit was what scared her?”

No, Fixx didn’t. “Fresh hatched,” he said, having thought about it. “Couldn’t even talk properly yet...” But why the fuck ask him? Fixx wondered crossly. He didn’t know what the fuck had scared LizAlec, who the fuck was after her, and he certainly didn’t know where the fuck she was.

Jude looked at Fixx. “You heard of The Arc?”

The tall musician nodded — everyone had heard of The Arc — and then he realized exactly what Jude was trying to say. LizAlec was out at the—

“Honey,” said Jude crossly, “that kid was real frightened. I had to send her somewhere she couldn’t get into trouble.”