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.