State of Grace, Scene 1, Take 1. It's not as though you didn't all see this coming.

"Never start with a white room."
—The Turkey City Lexicon (paraphrase)

A white room, innocent of shadow or topography. No angles: that's crucial. No corners or intrusions of furniture, no directional lighting, no geometry of light and shadow whose intersection, from any viewpoint, might call forth the Sign of the Cross. The walls — wall, rather — was a single curved surface, softly bioluminescent, a spheroid enclosure flattened at the bottom in grudging deference to biped convention. It was a giant womb three meters across, right down to the whimpering thing curled up on the floor.

A womb, with all the blood on the outside.

Her name was Sachita Bhar and all that blood was in her head, too. They'd cut the CCTV but it was still with her, pooling and glistening on every channel: the lounge, the Histo lab, even the broom closet for Chrissakes, a grungy little cubby on the third floor where Gregor had tried to hide. Sachie had been on a different channel when they'd found him, her inlays frantically scanning for life but finding only the dead, their insides all out now. By the time she'd cycled through to the closet feed the monsters had already been and gone.

Greg, who loved that stupid ferret of his. She'd shared an elevator with him that morning. She remembered the stripes on his shirt. Otherwise she'd have had no idea what the mess in that closet had once been named.

She'd seen some fraction of the carnage before the cameras went down: friends and colleagues and rivals, cut down without remorse or favoritism, their gutted remains sprawled across lab benches and work stations and toilet stalls. And with all that RF running through the circuitry in her head — with all her access to all that ubiquitous surveillance — Sachita Bhar had not caught so much as a glimps of the creatures who'd done this. Shadows, at most. A flicker of darkness cast by some solitary stalker from a blind spot in the camera's eye. They'd done it all without ever being seen, without ever seeing each other. And yet they were working together, somehow. At least half a dozen, from what Sachie could tell: isolated one from another, scrupulously confined, yet acting in sudden precise concert. Every system hacked, every alarm silenced, every opponent defeated. They'd done it all without ever meeting face to face— and even at the height of the slaughter, in those last moments before the cameras died, they had remained invisible. A massacre in progress, barely seen from the corner of the eye.

How did they do it? How did they survive the angles?

Someone else might have enjoyed the irony; she hid in a refuge for monsters, one of the few places in the whole damn building where they could open their eyes without risking a death sentence. Right angles were verboten here. This was where Achilles' heels were put to the test, a cross-free zone where geometry was precisely controlled and neurological leashes optimized. Elsewhere, civilised geometry threatened on all sides: tabletops, windowpanes, a million intersections of appliance and architecture just waiting for the right viewpoint to send monsters into convulsions. Out there, a vampire wouldn't—

—shouldn't—

—last an hour without the antiEuclideans that suppressed the Crucifix Glitch. Only here, in the white room — where poor, stupid Sachita Bhar had run when the lights went out — could vampires dare to open unprotected eyes.

And now one of them was in here with her.

She couldn't see it: her own eyes were shut, squeezed tight against the butchery flashburned into her head. She heard no sound but the endless animal keening in her own throat. But something drank a little of the light falling on her face. The swirling red darkness inside her eyelids dimmed some infinitesimal, telltale fraction, and she knew.

"Hello," it said.

She opened her eyes. It was one of the females: Valerie, they'd named her, after some departmental chairman who'd retired the year before. Val the Vampire.

Valerie's eyes redshifted the light and threw it back at her, blood-orange stars in a face flushed with aftermath. She towered over Sachie like an insectile statue, motionless, even her breathing imperceptible. Moments from death and with nothing better to do, some autonomous subroutine in Sachie's head ticked off the diagnostic morphometrics: such inhumanly long limbs, the attenuate heat-dissipating allometry of a metabolic engine running hot. Prognathous mandible big enough for all those teeth, lupine as a hominid's could be. Stupid turquoise smock, smart-paper/telemetry composite weave: Valerie must have been scheduled for treadmill physio today. Ruddy complexion, the blood-suffused flash-flood vasodilation of the predator in hunting mode. And the eyes, those terrifying luminous pinpoints—

Finally, it registered: Contracted pupils.

She's not on antiEuclideans...

Suddenly Sachie's cross was out, last-ditch kill switch, the talisman everyone got on Day One along with their ID: empirically tested, proven in the crunch, redeemed by Science after uncounted centuries slumming it as a religious fetish. Sachie held it up with sudden desperate bravado, thumbed the stud. Springloaded extensions shot from each tip and her little pocket totem was suddenly a meter on a side.

Thirty degrees of visual arc, Sachie. Maybe forty for the tough ones. Make sure it's perpendicular to line-of-sight, the angles only work when they're close to ninety degrees, but once this little baby covers enough arc the visual cortex fries like a Roomba in a rainstorm...

Greg's words.

The monster cocked its head and studied the artefact. Any second now it would collapse in a twitching mass of tetany and shorting synapses. This wasn't faith; this was neurology.

The vampire leaned close, and didn't even shiver. Sachita Bhar pissed herself.

"Please," she sobbed. The vampire said nothing.

Suddenly her words were a flood: "I'm sorry, I was never really part of it you know, I'm just a research associate, I'm just doing it for my degree that's all, I know it's wrong, I know it's like, like slavery almost, I know that and it's a shitty system, it's a shitty thing we did to you but it wasn't really me, do you understand? I didn't make any of those decisions, I just came in afterwards, I'm barely involved, it was just for my degree. And I, I can understand how you must feel, I can understand why you'd hate us and want revenge I would too probably but please please, I'm just...I'm just a student..."

After a while, still alive, she dared to look up again. The vampire was staring at some point just to the left of her. It seemed distracted. But then they always seemed distracted, their minds running a dozen parallel threads simultaneously, a dozen perceptual realities, each every bit as real as the one mere humans occupied.

Valerie cocked its head as if listening to faint music. It almost smiled.

"Please..." Sachie whispered.

"Not angry," it said. "Don't want revenge. You don't matter."

"You don't... but why..." Bodies. Blood. A building full of corpses and the monsters who'd made them. "What do you want, then? Anything, please, I'll—"

"Want you to imagine something," the vampire said softly: "Christ on the Cross."

And of course, once the image had been incanted it was impossible not to imagine. Sachita Bhar had a few moments to wonder at the sudden spasms that seized her limbs, at the way her jaw locked into startling dislocation, at the feel of a thousand blood-hot strokes exploding like pinpricks across the back of her skull. She tried to close her eyes but it doesn't matter what kind of light falls on the retina; that's not vision. The mind generates its own images, much further upstream, and there's no way to shut those out.

"Yes." Valerie clicked thoughtfully to itself. "We learn."

Sachie managed to speak. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done, but she knew that was fitting; it was also the last thing she would ever do. And so she summoned all her willpower, every shred of every reserve, every synapse that hadn't already been commandeered for self-destruction— and she spoke. Because nothing else mattered any more, and she really wanted to know:

"Ler... wha..."

She couldn't quite get it out. But Valerie understood. And its answer formed the last piece of insight that the short-circuiting brain of Sachita Bhar ever experienced, before going offline forever:

"Judo," Valerie said.