Fixx slid Shiori’s jeans and thong carefully down to her ankles, moving back to let her step lazily out of them. The Levis were lined with some kind of polymer micromesh bonded to the inner surface. It looked like the vat-grown fabric DuPont produced to bomb-proof hover windows.

“Where’d you train?” Shiori’s question came out of nowhere. At least nowhere Fixx knew about.

“Juilliard, Lincoln Center Plaza,” said Fixx, remembering the best six months of his life. Not that he’d thought that back then.

It was Shiori’s turn to look blank.

“Music school in New York.”

“You’re not...”

“Trained in all this?” Fixx nodded towards the lavatory door that had been shut on the tortured clone, “No,” said Fixx, “strictly fucking amateur.”

Shiori was about to say something else but Fixx stepped in close to stop it and cupped his hand around her mons, his fingers closing over fine body hair. This was the point he loved most, always had done. The split second before his fingertips found her labia. He could feel Shiori go tense as she waited for his fingers to slide into her. She wanted to push forward, to hurry him, but wasn’t going to allow herself the indulgence.

Leaning forward, Fixx gripped the back of Shiori’s head with his free hand and pulled her face roughly towards him. As she twisted her mouth away, Fixx let his fingers find her clit. Shiori arched backwards, mouth opening, and Fixx kissed her hard.

That was when Shiori bit into his lower lip, breaking skin: blood and saliva mixing between them. It was enough to give any sexual-health assessor a heart attack, not that Fixx had health insurance these days: some risks were just not good.

Fixx grinned and slicked his wet fingers up over her body, finding one breast. It was swollen like ripe fruit, the nipple gorged and purple, but it was still smaller and more elegant than even LizAlec’s breasts had been. Clutching Shiori’s nipple between his fingers, Fixx tugged gently, watching the dark circle around it pucker and tighten.

There’d been a time when he’d been proud of his capacity for empty sex and pointless drugs, when staying wasted was an end in itself, something that required real ingenuity. And given the Sony-trained bodyguards, therapists and minders who had glued themselves to him like leeches, that wasn’t even an understatement. There’d been a period back there when getting the wherewithal to get wasted had turned into a full-time job.

Fixx dipped his head, tugging again at Shiori’s left nipple and curling his tongue around it. Slick with her own juices, her nipple tasted tart and sour. Sliding his hand back between her legs, Fixx opened the Japanese woman’s swollen vulva with his fingers and then took his hand back to his mouth, sucking his fingers one after the other.

Not quite up there with crystalMeth, but close enough.

Fixx dropped his other hand and closed thumb and first finger over her full lips, squeezing until Shiori moaned through gritted teeth and closed her hand tight around his penis, so hard Fixx thought he’d burst.

It was a straight stand-off.

The girl was younger than he’d first thought. Fixx realized that as soon as he got close to her table. She was holding the bottle he’d sent over, looking doubtfully at a label etched into its bubble-blown green glass. Fixx didn’t blame her. The contents described on the label were cheap enough as it was, and the bar they were in was notorious for refilling empty bottles with crude ethanol brewed up by étudiants from the Sorbonne nearby. He wouldn’t have wanted to touch it at her age either.

She drank all the same. Twisting off the top and swallowing two huge gulps before her throat closed in protest. By the bar, the rent boy was grinning. Phillipe didn’t like girls, especially not little rich ones who were out slumming.

As he thumped the girl between her thin shoulder blades, Fixx tossed the words “rich” and “slumming” around in his head. And then he handed her his own glass.

“Drink this.”

“Water...” LizAlec sounded surprised, which marked her out as a newcomer to the bar. Everyone else knew Fixx’s routine, even if most of the younger ones didn’t know his name. Monday drunk, Tuesday hung-over, Wednesday sober, Thursday drunk, Friday hung-over, Saturday and Sunday sober. Fixx resented having to stay sober over the whole weekend, but when God designed the week he hadn’t allowed for drunks running a six-day cycle. Although maybe he had, when he let someone discover freebase...

“Shit,” said Fixx as the Japanese woman dropped to her knees. Instinctively, Fixx tried to jerk backwards, remembered in time where Shiori was holding him and fell on top of her instead. They landed on the polyfoam in a tangle of limbs. Grabbing her wrist, Fixx slammed it hard against the floor, knocking free her blade which skittered out of reach.

Fixx held tight to her wrist as she scrabbled in vain for the handle, slowly forcing her arms up over her head, until she was stretched naked beneath him. Fear was what he should have felt — but his brain was too busy being aroused by the way her tits pushed up towards him.

He was out of his head, Fixx knew that, but she wasn’t just out of her skull on amyl, she was like some predator on heat.

Gripping Shiori by the wrists — his bloody mouth pressed down hard on hers, not quite knowing who was doing the biting and who was being bit — Fixx eased himself into her twisting body, feeling her cunt open slowly around him. There was that tiny familiar jerk as his glans cleared the muscles at her entrance and then Fixx was into her, sliding slowly up inside. Pushing in only slightly and then pulling out.

Ignoring Shiori’s protest and the lurch of her hips as she thrust up towards him, Fixx rested just outside her swollen vulva. And then he slid back in, a little further, feeling her tighten around him, hot and ready.

Indescribable.

Very slowly, Fixx released her wrists, his eyes watching Shiori’s face, seeing her bruised mouth twist into a slight smile. Balancing himself over her, Fixx smiled back and then drove into her, as hard as he could. Shiori gasped, half in surprise and half from having the breath knocked from her body; and then her legs locked over his ankles.

“LizAlec,” Lady Elizabeth Alexandra said, taking his offered hand. Fixx shook politely as behind LizAlec the rent boy sneered on his way to the restroom and a hooker with bleached-blonde hair slid off her barstool and hit the floor kneeling, ideally placed to vomit.

LizAlec looked bemused and a little sick herself. It might have been the marc, but most probably it was his handshake. She’d drunk from his water glass and now she’d touched his skin, unshielded. Another kid might have hit the restroom in search of a viralwipe, but LizAlec didn’t. There was a price to being cool and LizAlec was just learning it.

Gently, incredibly gently Shiori raised her head to kiss his neck and Fixx shivered. Except that when she kissed his neck again he realized she wasn’t kissing him at all, she was very gently lapping the blood that flowed from a bite in his throat he didn’t even remember happening.

She kissed, he shivered. He shivered, she kissed and then her grey eyes flicked open just as orgasm hit, her pupils expanded with nitrate and blind as a kitten. “Fuck... fuck... fuck...”

Fixx didn’t know if she was pleading or swearing, but from the ferocious intensity of her face she was some place he’d never get to, not even wired right out of his skull.

Sixtieth woman he’d fucked, six hundredth? Fixx had lost count of the number of women he’d slept with. Not because it was so high... Well, not for a superannuated rock git with a bad ice habit, but because he’d finally got old enough to think that keeping count was kind of childish. Though that could just have been because his memory wasn’t what it was.