Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Axl sighed. He could pretend he just hadn’t recognised the boy who’d ridden out with Clone from Cocheforet when he had been their prisoner. Or he could admit that he hadn’t wanted to recognise the Tibetan boy.

Which was less stupid? Axl didn’t know. The thin notes continued, climbing higher, but going precisely nowhere.

That was the way they trooped into Cocheforet, the hoofs of the Colonel’s horse splashing freckles of mud onto a thin crowd of Tibetan and ‘fugee kids who’d gathered behind him as he rode towards the Inn.

Adults watched from open doorways or from the safety of upstairs windows. None of them came out onto the muddy street except for Kate who stood alone on open ground in front of the Inn, her arms folded and face furious.

‘You can’t arrest Mai,’ Kate protested.

Colonel Emilio looked down at the woman blocking his way and smiled. Soon the man would have a double chin to go with his heavy jowls and neat salt and pepper moustache, but for the moment most women still counted him as handsome and the Colonel knew it.

‘I can’t?’ Fussily he pushed back a streak of greying hair that had flopped forward. Only a sudden twist of his thin mouth revealed that he’d just started to enjoy himself.

‘No,’ said Kate fiercely. ‘You can’t.’

‘I haven’t…’ Colonel Emilio said. Hope flared in Kate’s eyes, so palpable that even those watching from the windows could see it.

‘. . . though, I must admit,’ added the Colonel, ‘I did intend to.’

‘But you haven’t?’ Kate said it like she couldn’t quite believe it.

‘No,’ said Colonel Emilio, signalling to his troops to move away from Axl, ‘he has.’ And the man pointed smugly to where Axl stood at the back, near Tukten.

Kate refused to look at Axl, even when she put the bowl of tsampa on the table in front of him and carefully, silently put a narrow bronze spoon beside it. And not just because it had taken Axl sticking a gun to Louis’s head to get Kate to give him the soulcatcher back.

‘Why do this to yourself?’ Axl asked. She hadn’t answered his other questions either last night or so far this morning, and had turned away when he tried to talk about Mai so Axl wasn’t quite sure why he expected her to answer this one, but she did.

‘Because Louis refused.’

No one needed to tell Axl what that meant. Obedient little Louis had been with Kate since she was born. Louis had watched her grow up and gone into exile with her on the inside of some half-arsed stone bicycle wheel. He refused her nothing.

But he wouldn’t serve Axl breakfast. And nor it seemed would anyone else at Escondido except Kate. So now she was putting a wooden bowl of buttered tea beside his plate while he sat there feeling sick, and not just because nearly three weeks of life on Samsara had left him hating the tea’s oil-slick taste and the acid etch of tannin it left behind his teeth. But if Kate could bring herself to serve him food then, tiredness or not, he could eat it—and in silence if necessary—while she watched.

The lack of a door slamming or even closing softly behind him showed that Kate remained in the room. What there wasn’t, was any sense of the woman’s presence. Where she stood was empty space, colder than the dawn chill that sucked what little heat Escondido possessed out through the dining room’s open window.

Axl had opened it and Kate had done nothing but shiver slightly and then force her body not even to do that. She wasn’t going to close the window and nothing would have brought her to ask him to do so. Kate was teaching herself to live with the ice core that was growing like cancer inside her.

Logged somewhere in Tsongkhapa’s memory would be a grab of the sequence where Kate had to be dragged off Axl, screaming and still trying to rip open his face. And before Ketzia pulled her away, Kate managed to land one good blow. A vicious punch that had Axl spitting bits of broken back tooth into the mud.

Even the Peruvian conscripts cheered. Only Mai still looked blank as if she really couldn’t believe what was happening to her. And it was only late yesterday evening, after he’d padlocked both Mai and himself into her room, that Axl realised the Japanese kid thought it was all a mistake. She had no memory of being implanted with Joan’s dreams. And if it hadn’t been for Axl's bleak expression, Mai would have kept on believing he was lying, or deluded or both.

Instead, Mai now knew that everyone she had met on Samsara who’d offered to help intended to betray her, if not in one way then in another. She was an object to all of them, to be sold, bought or traded.

She was upstairs in her room now, lying fully dressed on her bed and staring at the ceiling. Which was what she’d been doing all night. Axl knew that for a fact, most of his night had been spent trying to stay awake as he sat guard on his prisoner. Quite who’d ended up most tired was hard to say.

Just once, when the sulphate had burned out to a dull headache, Axl had blanked for about five minutes; but when consciousness snapped back in, his gun was still in his hand and Mai was still there, staring at her darkened ceiling with eyes that he recognised. There been a kid in New York who used to watch the night go past like that, but that wasn’t a memory Axl planned to crack open.

Axl asked, turning round to look at Kate.

‘Is Mai ready?’ He meant was Mai packed.

‘Ready for what?’ Kate shot back. ‘To be tortured, raped… Why don’t you tell her what you’ve got planned and I’ll ask her?’ Her words were as sharp as whip cracks and as loud.

Axl winced. Combat readiness had never been a problem, but Axl hated loud. Those kind of shouting arguments left him knotted up inside, his mouth sour with rising vomit like some drunk. He pretended it was training; speak softly, carry a big gun… But it was an emotional cowardice that the dregs of life in that home had enamelled to the inside of his mind.

In Manhattan one broad daylight afternoon in April, he’d put a blade into the guts of an Italian grandfather rather than shout back. It was on the corner of 12th and Sixth, outside a derelict Mongolian Bar-B-Q.

A small-time Don had promised the new owners his men would rid the place of vermin before they arrived, and Axl was one of the rats. His knife went into the man’s gut because at ten Axl was too short to reach his heart.

‘I wasn’t the one who purchased some kid to use as a memory dump,’ Axl said coldly

Kate flushed. ‘It wasn’t a memory dump,’

‘No,’ said Axl bitterly, ‘just dreams, that’s different, isn’t it?’ He yawned, though only half of it was pretence.

‘At least I didn’t lie my way in here.’

‘It’s me or Emilio,’ said Axl. ‘You want me to give her to PaxForce?’ Axl would die rather then let that happen, probably literally, but Kate wasn’t to know that.

‘Could they be any worse?’

Jesus fuck. ‘Could it’. . .’

That was the point when anger became irrelevant, at least to Axl. Just a cheap adrenaline high that was helping him keep awake. If Kate didn’t know the difference between PaxForce and what he was doing ...

‘And where did you find her?’ Axl asked, voice hard.

Kate opened her mouth to shout, then paused.

‘Did Mai volunteer?’ Axl said into Kate’s sudden silence. ‘Or maybe she’s getting paid to babysit your lover’s bad dreams?’ Without giving Kate a chance to answer, Axl picked his revolver off the table and pushed it into the back of his belt. Then he reached out for the snubPup he’d taken from defMoma and no one in paxForce had dared to demand back.

‘Well…’ he asked Kate. ‘Did she volunteer?’ Like we both don’t know the answer to that, Axl thought bitterly. ‘You took someone off the streets. Me, I’m just putting them back.’