Jon Grimwood - reMix

“You, shithead, shut the fuck—”

Shiori never did get to finish her sentence, because the second she started speaking the clone’s arm whipped down in a blur, the free end of his nanchuku whistling in towards her skull. By all the laws of physics the result should have been like hitting a soft-boiled egg with a hammer. But instead of throwing herself backward and letting the nanchuku drive white cranial splinters deep into the jelly of her cortex, Shiori stepped right into the blow, blade flicking up to the right to halt beside her head. She didn’t even flinch when the wire wrapped itself down the left side of her face and round the back of her skull, the nanchuku’s handle swinging in on itself to clang hard against her upright blade.

No one had time to marvel because the woman was already on the move, her blade severing the nanchuku’s wire then sweeping down and back up in a single stroke that caught the clone in the groin and opened out his front from pubis to breastbone. Still moving, Shiori pivoted her blade in mid-air and swept its razor-like edge across the clone’s throat, cutting a blood-fringed grin below his jaw.

Gurgling more wetly than ever, the suited man stepped forward and slipped on his own guts, falling to his knees. Lack of understanding was written across his shocked face, more powerful even than the agony that pulled his lips back into an animal snarl.

Shrugging, Shiori put her blade to the gash in his throat and slammed the sword’s handle with the flat of her free hand, severing the man’s spinal chord. It was her one kindness, though she doubted he knew that. In all probability he’d already passed understanding anything.

“Neat,” said Fixx, clambering to his feet. He kicked the first clone once in the gut for luck and went to meet his saviour. The other clone was where Shiori left him, gutted open on the bar floor, but victory wasn’t enough to make her happy, not nearly. She shot Fixx the glare a snotty mongoose gives a third-rate cobra and started stalking towards him, only it didn’t look like she wanted to shake hands.

“Hey, wait.” Fixx sounded worried, which was fair enough, he was... Anyone faced with a furious kunoichi wielding a naked sword had a right to be worried, in Fixx’s opinion.

“You won,” he said desperately, backing away. “What’s your problem?” It turned out her problem was him.

“Shithead.” She punched Fixx hard with her left hand. Since her right held the sword, Fixx was glad for small mercies. And her accent might sound quaint but there was no mistaking the anger in her voice. To make doubly sure Fixx got the point, the Japanese woman grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hurled him into a wall. Adobe cracked and behind it ‘creteblocks echoed hollowly.

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.