‘Proud of yourself?’ Axl asked Kate, hauling in on his reins and pulling Mai’s pony to an abrupt halt in front of Kate. The woman slid forward on her saddle, pain hissing from between clenched teeth. If her thighs were as raw as Axl’s then she really hurt. And she was without the remains of defMoma’s sulphate he’d used to deaden the pain.
* * * *
Kate didn’t have to ask, proud of what? She didn’t answer either, although her eyes flicked across to where Mai sat, oblivious to the drizzle, mountains and thinning air. What was going on in there? That was the real question and she couldn’t answer that any more than Axl.
Everyone had a ghost inside their head to watch what they did.
Waiting and questioning. Not necessarily the ghost of someone dead, sometimes just a memory of someone no longer powerful to anyone except the child hidden inside the head of the adult, still seeking approval that would never be given or love that could only be withheld. Maybe childhoods fed on approval didn’t have ghosts; Kate wasn’t certain, but she didn’t quite believe it. Everyone had to have ghosts. Judges hardwired inside their heads to criticise or praise the actions they took, judging even those others no longer dared to judge.
For Kate, it was Joan. For Mai… ? Kate didn’t know, but it probably wasn’t a memory of her mother either. After all, most people’s ghost was provided by their mother. As for Axl, Kate knew he thought his ghost was the Cardinal. But she believed it was someone earlier. The woman he’d talked about that night. . .
Axl had protested he carried no values from back then, nothing hardwired inside his head. Then he’d mentioned that outside-in what passed for the real world-those values he didn’t carry from back then had earned the matron fifteen to twenty in the State pen.
The Lucky-Strike burns on his arms hadn’t healed when they pulled her in and the NYPD figured they’d have no trouble getting the children to testify. The way Axl told it, they were wrong. Not one child at the home would give evidence. The woman was as close as they had come to a mother. And besides none of them believed she wouldn’t be out inside a week. They might have lived dangerously but they weren’t stupid.
* * * *
Twilight came in slowly, the whole-world finally falling into a night far darker than back on earth. The notes in his head grew softer, questioning. Almost sad.
‘We’ll camp down there,’ announced Axl.
There were stars, of course, just not overhead where a band of intense black stretched across the sky, like some hand had ripped out the Milky Way and replaced each star with a negative image. Stars could be seen as cold flickering dots, heavenly Braille written away to the edges of the dark scar in that gap of sky between the black band overhead and the impossibly high, distant edge of the mountain wall.
What little latent heat the rocks held soon leached away into the vicious cold of night. But the group didn’t stop until it cleared the high pass and began a descent down bleak rocky scree towards the high plateau. And then the wind changed direction and they were walking into the sudden smell of death.
‘Peg out the horses,’ Axl ordered when they at last reached the patch of flat ground he’d been pointing to. ‘And drive the pegs deep.’ No one answered but Ketzia and Kate still did as he suggested, hobbling their ponies and using rocks to drive shackle pegs far into the poor earth.
‘Why doesn’t the stink go away?’ Mai’s flat whisper contained the first, the only intelligible words she’d uttered since leaving her bedroom at Escondido.
Because the pass was steep, bleak and treacherous, much like life, thought Axl. No sooner do we get past the corpse of one fallen animal than there’s another. But he said nothing and her question went unanswered. Not that it would take even Mai long to work that out for herself.
‘Find some wood,’ Axl ordered Tukten, but the dark-haired boy just stared sullenly in Axl’s direction and started to shuffle backwards into the darkness. ‘Or don’t you want to protect Mai?’
Tukten stopped shuffling.
‘There are wolves and snow leopards,’ Axl said as he clambered slowly from his own mare and forced himself to hammer a hobble peg into the ground. ‘Ice hyenas, wild dogs, kites… You want Mai to stay awake all night shitting herself with fright at every breaking twig, that’s fine ... It makes no difference to me. I’ve got this.’
Axl hefted his snubPup into view.
Tukten and Ketzia built a fire while Axl lent back against obsidian black rock and watched. Absentmindedly noting who’d brought matches, who arranged the damp twigs, who did exactly as they were told. As he expected, Kate organised while Ketzia actually did the work of lighting the fire. Louis just sat as far away from Axl as possible, never looking at the man he held responsible for everything that had happened.
What did he see? Axl wondered. But inside himself he already knew ... A yawning thug who had molested the Japanese girl, seduced a grieving woman and betrayed all of them. That wasn’t how Axl saw it, obviously. At least he didn’t think he did.
Mai dropped to a squat beside Axl, her soft face highlighted by the first flames of the fire. Whatever she wanted to say remained unsaid.
The night gripped so cold that Mai’s breath solidified to smoke and spiralled away. Vomit still rose and fell in her throat like mercury in some ancient barometer and Mai finally knew what that smell was, though she couldn’t remember how she knew. But she felt better now the monkey in her head had stopped talking.
All the same her skin was stiff with cold and her gut hurt. Somewhere inside her head a voice was telling her that things could only get better.
‘I’m going to have to shackle you,’ Axl said, reaching into his pocket for a length of twine.
‘Why?’ Mai did a convincing job of looking puzzled. But the sudden unexpected irony in her voice contrasted so strongly with the soft, puppy fat of her fourteen-year-old face that it unnerved Axl. Even more so when he factored a cynicism into her smile which was definitely old before its time.
‘Because,’ said Axl, ‘I can’t afford to let you escape, can I?’
Mai opened her mouth, and choked. . . Until then she’d been breathing as shallowly as possible, despite the cold thinness of the air. The stench saw to that.
‘A body,’ the kid said flatly, when her coughing fit had gone. ‘Or a dead animal.’
Axl nodded. And she nodded back as if he’d only confirmed what she already knew. They weren’t yet near enough the charnel ground to smell it. This was just a foretaste.
‘Where would Mai escape to?’ Mai asked. ‘Back to that village? Down onto the high plateau to get torn apart by wolves? The next town must be fifty miles, maybe a hundred… No one would be that stupid.’
Actually, thought Axl grabbing one of Mai’s ankles and yanking, they would. The kid toppled back onto her arse, her definitely Mai-like swearing only ending when Kate left the fire to fend for itself and came to crouch down beside Mai.
‘How sweet,’ Kate told the Japanese girl as she watched Axl rip laces from the top two rivet holes of Mai’s boots and re-thread them to bind the girl’s ankles tightly together. ‘At least he’s not planning to fuck you.’
‘Kate...'
She shot Axl a look that should have killed and kept talking. ‘Of course,’ she told Mai, ‘that’s probably because you don’t have any secrets he wants to hear…’
There was no answer to that. At least not one that Kate would listen to. Axl knew, he’d tried. The elder woman kept watching as Axl tied one end of his twine to the laces of Mai’s boots and looped the other end to his own wrist.
‘Not afraid someone might cut it in the night?’ Kate asked. There were no prizes for guessing which someone Kate had in mind.
‘That won’t happen,’ said Axl, staring Kate straight in the face.
Kate didn’t want to ask him why not or be the first to look away, but she did both.
‘Because I don’t intend to sleep,’ Axl told her abruptly and pushed Mai softly backward so she tumbled to the ground. �
��Get some rest and don’t even think of running away.’
Mai wouldn’t, rest or sleep. The kid meant it when she said there was nowhere for her to go. ‘As for you,’ Axl stared at Kate, ‘I don’t want to see you anywhere near her.’ He watched Kate stand up slowly and stalk away to the far side of the fire, where she sat with her back to him, staring up into the darkness at the way they’d come.
‘You like her, don’t you?’ Mai said suddenly. The kid was smiling, that sad kind of half-smile that rests somewhere between regret and pity… Which was weird as fuck, Axl decided, because if he’d been Mai the only thing he’d have felt was hatred.
‘Sleep.’ Axl’s order was rougher than he intended but Mai only smiled again. ‘You could always try some yourself,’ she said.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Bending of Starlight
The man with the short-model Browning SLR slept fitfully. Curled up near his feet, with her face to the fire, was a Japanese girl tied by her ankles to his wrist. She was staring into the glowing embers and neither person inside her head liked what she saw. So Tsongkhapa hummed gently and soon the girl slept.
Tsongkhapa didn’t like the gun and wanted to disable it but the silver monkey he’d co-opted as a pair of eyes argued against it. Apparently the monkey had been a gun before it became Rinpoche and still felt sentimental about them. That wasn’t a stance Tsongkhapa readily identified with, but identifying with dichotamic attitudes was as much a part of his job as anything else, so he lived with contradiction. If that was an acceptable way of explaining it.
The bioClay chip controlling the readout in the man’s eye was manufactured by Seiko, it was a military model at least ten years out of date and wasn’t really in his eye at all. The point at which it would hit count zero was, in one sense at least, entirety arbitrary. But then, as Rinpoche had said while toggling the dip switches, in human terms all recorded time was.
This hadn’t been pointed out to the man. Who would have seen nothing arbitrary in the difference between reaching or not reaching the Nuncio’s cruiser before it left Samsara.
The sleeping man had 80 hours, 48 minutes, 30 seconds to make his connection. Less than three and a half days. The Sony sound system in his head was equally old but featured one or two rather neat, non-standard, modifications.
The Browning was a 148-shot snubPup, US-designed and sub-licensed to a penal factory in Korea. It was, in the words of Rinpoche, thicker than pig shit. The cord was Israeli sisal, genetically modified for strength. The girl was quarter Han Chinese, half Japanese, quarter South East Mediterranean. Her name was Mai, without a surname, at least Mai was what most of her answered to in her dreams. And though a section of her subconscious answered to a different name she was dealing with this.
The man didn’t answer to any name at all, but had set his brain to accept Axl, Berault and Borja as acceptable aliases. There was no record of those names ever having been processed by Samsaran immigration. In fact, neither the sleeping man nor the restless girl was officially on Samsara at all, though they were both quite definitely asleep by the fire.
For a space of time almost infinitely less than a second, Tsongkhapa got a flash of what might, in human terms, have been guilt. But the AI didn’t bother to track Rinpoche’s guilt back to its origin. Tsongkhapa wasn’t worried by how the two got to Samsara because Samsara was where they both definitely belonged. What worried Tsongkhapa was the implications of what they were.
The man was easy enough to categorise. Broken more or less covered it. The girl was more of a problem. And the problem wasn’t really that there were at least three different personas stacked inside her head (the man had five, four of them dead). It was the lack of legitimate connection between the first and third. The first was Mai now, the second was a simple subset, real Mai hiding. The third wasn’t Mai at all, not even Mai solarised, run as a negative or operating with the values reversed.
Tsongkhapa sighed. There was no guarantee she could be mended but he would have Rinpoche try bufo alvarius as a first option: maybe the only option, unless Rinpoche could cut a deal with Axl. And Tsongkhapa didn’t need telling that for this to happen Axl would first have to cut a deal with himself.
Unrolling the dried toad skin, Rinpoche pulled a broken razor blade from where one hadn’t previously existed and did the same for a small square of glass. The silver monkey didn’t need a lighter, it could do flame from its fingers. 5-MEO-DMT, to be taken nightly until cured. Rinpoche shrugged, whatever.
‘Hey,’ the monkey tapped Mai on her shoulder and stepped back hastily as she came awake fast, reaching into her boot for a knife that wasn’t there and hadn’t been for five years, maybe more.
The girl blinked at the animal, then glanced at Axl lent back against a rock and smiled sourly. ‘So much for standing guard.’
‘Methamphetamine,’ the silver monkey said, ‘you’ve no idea how fucking hard it is to unpick. I practically had to disconnect those neurons one at a time.’
‘You put him to sleep?’
‘Well, someone had to,’ Rinpoche said slyly. ‘How else were we going to talk?’
Later, when the giant flowers that caught the sun were beginning to open their petals, Rinpoche gave Mai the glass knife he’d casually picked from Axl’s pocket as he briefly slept and watched her face light like the dawn. Her faith in her abilities shamed him. And as she slipped the knife’s cord over her head and began to unbutton her red jacket to rest the blade between her slight breasts, Rinpoche turned away in embarrassment.
* * * *
When next Axl awoke, dungchen trumpet filled his head and Mai was sitting next to the cooling embers of the fire, mumbling to herself. Only it wasn’t with the furious, PCP-enhanced intensity of some dustout. Her words were quiet and reasoned, though just too soft for Axl to work out who Mai thought she was talking to.
Axl wasn’t too sure what had been going on inside his own head either, but his body was bathed with sweat and he felt more tired than before he had slept.
Everybody was already awake and watching him. No one had slipped away in the darkness. Even fat little Louis had sat out the stink, the distant howl of wolves heading towards the slaughter ground and the dying down to embers of the small fire that was all there was to keep predators at bay. All of them had survived the night, hovering on the insomniac edge of anxiety-apart from Axl, who felt like sleep had crept up behind him with a cosh.
Maybe they’d been afraid he’d wake before they escaped, or perhaps it was the silver monkey sitting shaking glass straws of amphetamine from a tiny compartment in the zytel butt of his snubPup who’d kept them in order. Axl was sure he’d checked that compartment and the last time he looked it contained a cleaning kit for the Browning.
‘Have a good night?’ Kate asked.
* * * *
A day came and went. Most of the time Axl rode holding Mai’s bridle, Ketzia and Kate riding close behind, like silent shadows. Occasionally they all walked the rocky track that led across the bleak, windswept plateau, leading the exhausted animals behind them.
No one talked. What breath they had was needed for breathing.
All the same, enough water gathered in pools for the ponies to be able to drink. It was grass that was scarce. What little there was looked half-hearted, yellowing and spindly, filling the flat spaces between scrub and moss-covered rock.
They did that next night without fire, Axl and Rinpoche staying awake to keep guard. Mai slept in Kate’s arms and both Tukten and Axl tried not to notice. By morning Rinpoche was gone again and Axl was so exhausted he could hardly ride in a straight line.
* * * *
‘Wolf,’ said Tukten and Axl stopped. The shag-haired boy was pointing to where a grey shadow slunk between altars on the distant charnel ground.
‘And there,’ Axl muttered, ‘and…’ Oh, sweet fuck. Axl was about to point again when a flash of sunlight kicked him suddenly awake, an adrenaline rush snapping his eyes wide open with a squeal of violin. Someone
was watching them from a low wooded hill on the far side of the charnel ground and Axl had a nasty feeling he knew exactly who it was.
‘Problems?’ Kate asked unkindly, drawing alongside. She was holding Mai’s rein, though Tukten still stood at the pony’s head holding its bridle. They’d spent a lot of that morning scowling at each other and pulling the bewildered animal in opposite directions.
Axl shook his head, wondering why anyone would bother with field glasses. But no sooner was the question asked than Axl knew the answer. Samsara didn’t provide PaxForce with GPS, no chain of spySat hung up there running stealth mode. If anyone wanted to track him they weren’t going to squat at some satellite-feeding JCIT deck, focusing in close enough to see if he’d shaved, while their thumb hovered over some floating trackball that picked out options between blind and vaporise.
PaxForce wanted Mai and so did the Cardinal. At least, he wanted Joan and if the kid really did have Joan’s dreams stacked up inside her head…
‘It’s getting messy, isn’t it?’ The voice was amused, kind but a little contemptuous. It was Mai all right, but not really any version he knew. Her clothes were the same, that red jacket, mud-splattered felt trousers. The childish mouth was still both downturned and pouty and her hips soft with puppy-fat but her expression was more intense. And if Axl didn’t know better, he’d say her eyes had changed colour. Or maybe it wasn’t a hue change, just a rearrangement of the fractal dust that made up her iris pattern. Whatever was looking out at him, it wasn’t a fourteen-year-old girl, or not entirely.
Axl found himself nodding. Yeah, messy was one way to put it. If his guess was right, Colonel Emilio and half a dozen conscripts were camped in the other side of the charnel ground.
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