He presses the button. The explosives wrapped around his chest ignite. The shockwave liquefies his internal organs almost as instantly as it begins to propel the screws, nails, wires, and other improvised shrapnel outward toward the market crowd.

"Hold," Lizel says. "Back up three-tenths."

The shrapnel closes back in. The explosion reduces to nothing. The thumb lifts off the trigger. 

"Stop!" Lizel walks around the scene, examining the angles. "Yes, this is it. Take thirty meters, but rotate it so you can see the children being hit. Focus on that boy there, with the apple."

"Yes, Mearti."

Lizel walks away as the timeslicers get to work. Her assistant scrambles to catch up to her fast pace. He is tall, thin, and grey; clearly modded for the outer belt. "We have only days until opening, Mearti. You must complete the finale."

"Yes yes," Lizel dismisses his concerns with an exaggerated flick of her tail feathers. "I already selected it long ago."

"But you must still frame it, My Artiste!" 

"All in good time." She chuffs lightly at her own pun, then saunters back through the kilometers-long hall. She favors the earlier slices here, near the start of the show. A man in crude metal plates, caving in the head of another with mace; another tearing the bowels of a woman out with a curved blade; a third, hairy, with a sloped forehead, crushing an infant with a large rock outside a primitive cave.

Lizel steps forward, into the selection of frozen time. "Can we shift this one forward a quarter-sec?"

"Apologies, Mearti, but we already began the transposition with the duplicate."

Shaking her head, Lizel grunts. She'd now prefer the moment start with the cracking skull, as the audience, rushing by on their rolling bleachers, might just be able to hear the mother's scream before focusing on the next event. But covert timeslicing is an arduous process. Swapping the duplicate scene with the chrono-locked actual is hard enough. Keeping the lock in place as the excision is brought into the present is even more difficult. She realizes she'll have to do without the scream, and let the splatter of early hominid brain-matter be enough for this particular second of the exhibit. She has 3,539 others to work with after all.

"Mearti, I beg you..."

"Yes, fine," the artiste sighs.

The pair board the gallery. Lizel sets the controls to presentation speed, picturing in her mind each exhibit's chrono-lock releasing just as the audience passes. An hour long show, one exhibit per second, death after glorious, vivid death.

"Mearti..."

Her claw reluctantly hits the control and they speed up.

----

Opening day. The guests board the moving gallery. It rushes through the hall. The clock ticks down. Explosions, blood, carnage, and more, just as promised. More death than any sapient has seen since the start of the age a thousand years ago, and all brought here, real, visceral, just for the privileged few that could afford—and appreciate—true art.

The track comes to an end. Guests look at the scene, excited, but confused. Sixty seconds remain. There is only a teenage girl, saurian-mod, kneeling, head rested atop a wooden box, seemingly in some form of prayer.

A guest snaps. The others were primitives, ancients, dead long ago. But this, this is a gene-mod just like them. It's not history, it's murder.

"Why?" he screams. "She still lives! Why not save her in her moment of prayer?"

Lizel steps forward. "If I did that," she says. "Then it wouldn't be art."

Then they see it. There, high above the girl, a hinged blade.

Not a prayer.

A sacrifice.

Oohs and ahhs ripple through the crowd as interpretation dawns.

Lizel smiles.

A single clap begins, and builds to a wave of applause for the brilliant artiste. It is barbaric, a nightmare that will haunt them always, but they are willing to suffer that, to sacrifice their comfort for true art.

The scene moves. The blade drops.

Twelve seconds.

The girl stands.

The crowd gasps.

Blood begins to pour from the box. A body falls out. A young boy, his torso severed. He twitches for a moment then lies still.

Lizel grins. Her words echo over the crowd: "Art requires Sacrifice!" 

Hesitant nods.

"And that," she continues. "Was my first."

Confusion.

Lizel joins her younger self. They stand in the blood.

Shock.

The younger looks to the crowd. "But you," she says, pulling out the remote trigger. "Will not be my last."

She presses the button.