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.