redRobe

Chapter Thirty-Two Forgiveness Comes Xtra

The silver monkey wasn’t keen to leave, claiming it was now Axl’s bodyguard. But it went after Axl threatened to rip its wings out at the shoulder if it didn’t take itself elsewhere. Both Axl and Rinpoche knew he couldn’t make good on that threat, but the silver monkey went anyway, sucking at its teeth in disgust as it clambered onto a PaxForce 4track to give itself a better take-off.

The night was getting late in more ways than one. And the wind that ripped down the narrow valley brought them cordite and the sound of shooting as drunken conscripts lit the dark sky with tracer. A wooden house was being noisily demolished for kindling. Off behind the village, a woman’s scream got chopped off, abruptly.

And behind it all, the heavy beat of some kid knitting up Tokyo Techno, all looped snare-fills and Korg samples stolen from ad jingles for products so old no one remembered what they were. The deck was UN-issue. But then it had long been accepted that you couldn’t go to war without a decent soundtrack. Though Axl still thought it was cheap not to provide the kids with their own inbuilt sound systems.

You got better results that way, too—and it didn’t upset the neighbours.

Rinpoche didn’t go far, of course. Just high enough to hang out of sight in the darkness, not so far it let Axl out of sound range. Both Axl and the silver monkey knew that was how it was going to be. Kate didn’t, but shock had wound her so tight she couldn’t have watched her words even if she’d known.

Shock at seeing Axl remade. Shock at getting herself trapped in that inn. But most of all, her face was sucked hollow by the shock of suddenly thinking she knew where the memory beads were, then discovering Clone was wrong and she didn’t.

‘I could have killed you, you moron.’ Fury coated each word with acid.

Axl shrugged like he didn’t care. Actually, he didn’t but that wasn’t why he shrugged. He still hadn’t forgiven Kate for Mai or what she’d said.

‘I saved your life,’ said Axl, ‘back there in the Inn…’

‘Did I ask you to interfere?’

‘No,’ Axl’s words were matter of fact. ‘You thought I was dead.’

Kate looked up at that. Face suddenly still. She’d told Clone to take Axl across the plateau. She hadn’t wondered too hard about whether he’d actually do it.

‘Tae kwon do isn’t enough,’ said Axl. ‘You get into a stand-up, knock-down with PaxForce and you’ve lost before it starts. Mai might have fronted them out, but you ... If I hadn’t got you out of there, you might not have ended up dead but you’d have wished you were.

‘You owe me,’ Axl said, when Kate glared at him. ‘Deal with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.

In fact, she sounded worried and scared. Somewhere up the side of that valley, in a shambling monastery was an underage Japanese whore who’d fuck anyone to get away from the woman stood in front of him, even the PaxForce.

It made Axl want to know why.

‘Why didn’t you send Mai to look for the beads?’ Axl asked, though he already knew the answer. Because Mai would have run away. That’s what all of the kid’s night trips to Cocheforet were about. And that other stuff in Kate’s bedroom. Axl wasn’t stupid enough to think Mai had been at all interested in him. Okay, maybe he had been at the time, but not afterwards. Kate was holding Mai at Escondido against her will and the kid wanted out.

‘She your servant?’ Axl asked. The reformistas didn’t believe in servitude.

‘No,’ Kate said coldly, ‘she’s not indentured.’

‘But she’s not free, is she?’

The shake of the woman’s head was so small as to be almost imperceptible. She made no attempt to hide the fact that the truth tasted bitter. Her eyes were hollow, unblinking. Her chin jutted forward but her cheeks were sunken with increasing worry and lack of sleep. She looked older and much less certain than she had twenty-four hours before.

What Axl didn’t know about REM sleep, alpha-states and conscious dreaming hadn’t yet been discovered. He knew when someone was staying awake because going to sleep was worse. And he could spot all the signals in her face, like someone had erected a neon sign above her head saying ‘Empty’

Unwelcome thoughts guttered behind her dark eyes like candle flame, as ready to go out as to flare… Kate needed those memory beads, and yet there was no clone readied to take Joan’s memories. No shrine already formatted and waiting; there couldn’t be, because Cocheforet had no power. That much Axl knew.

Which meant Mai was the key.

Joan might have suddenly gone on CySat to declare herself Pope of the hollow people, but she was still CEO of UnitedVatican, whether she had liked it or not. And until recently UnitedVatican’s core statement had included the fact that clones were without souls.

Joan couldn’t have ordered herself a clone anymore than she could have announced a sudden conversion to Islam. Some things just couldn’t be done, not even by a Pope. Although not understanding that point was regarded by the reformistas as Joan’s greatest strength.

‘I’ll see you back to the house,’ Axl told her as he slid one hand under a reluctant elbow. All it would take to cripple her was a quick and dirty thumb jab into a nerve running up the inside of her arm. And from the way Kate stared ahead it was obvious she knew that. ‘We can talk on the way...'

They didn’t, though. Barefoot and frozen, Kate just stamped on through the drizzle, her feet squelching in the mud. And by the time they’d reached the bridge Axl realised that if he didn’t break her silence it wasn’t going to get broken... So he stopped dead and let go of her arm.

‘Just listen,’ he said.

For a moment it looked as if Kate would storm ahead but she stopped herself, still not looking at Axl. In another world and another time, in someone else’s story, he would have been less than zero to her. At most a peon in the lower reaches of what ever multinational she would have inherited.

But this was Axl’s story and whether she liked that or not he was standing beside her in the darkness. And what he wanted from her was an apology. The problem was, Axl realised, an apology for what? For hitting Mai, a kinderwhore he only thought he knew because he saw too much of himself in the kid? For not trusting him? She was right not to ...

Crunch time. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Axl said, pushing one cold hand deep into his pocket.

Kate shook her head, raindrops running down her neck. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t.’

Closing his fingers around the dreamcatcher, Axl pulled the small circle from his pocket and offered it to her. ‘Are you really telling me you don’t want this?’

The face that looked up at him was frozen with shock. Hope and fear flickering across it as she tried to frame the question Axl knew she needed to ask. There was no attempt to deny the memory beads were hers, that they were what she, Ketzia and Clone had been hunting for so desperately.

She would pay his price, whatever it was. That much went without saying, but she wanted it said anyway.

‘There’s a price?’

Axl smiled. ‘Of course there’s a price.’

‘We’re not rich.’

‘Not now.’ The jibe came out more bitter than Axl had intended but Kate didn’t even notice. She was too busy thinking.

‘What money we have is yours.’

‘I don’t want money. You know perfectly well what I want.’

Axl saw Kate’s chin go up. ‘Mai’s a child,’ said Kate defensively.

‘The kid’s been a whore since she was eleven.’ Axl’s kept his voice cold. ‘She didn’t have childhood. But no, I don’t want her either.’

Kate didn’t wish to ask the next question but Axl made her. He was enjoying himself too much to give Kate any slack.

‘You want me?’

In the darkness Axl grinned, he couldn’t help it. Always answer a question with a question… He might not have picked up as much as he could have done from the Cardinal, but he’d learnt that much.

‘What do you think?’

Kate didn’t know and she didn’t want to think. No, that wasn’t true. Kate shook her head crossly. Actually, she knew exactly what would happen if that was his price. She would agree.

‘Tell me,’ Kate said finally, in little more than a whisper, ‘what is the price?’

‘An apology,’ said Axl.

There was silence. As much as there could be silence with a woman shouting in the distance and drunken conscripts drag-racing unlit dirtbikes down the only street.

Under that and the noise of rain, the muted clicktrack and wind blowing cold inside his own head, Axl could hear the stream rolling over gravel beneath their feet: and under that the drumming of her heart and the silence of a held breath.

‘An apology?’ Kate couldn’t keep the catch out of her voice.

Axl nodded. ‘That’s all ...' He said it as if there was never any question he might have had another price in mind. Taking Kate by the shoulders, he turned her and himself so the faint light from a fire in the village lit his face and she could see his new eyes burning into hers.

‘You called me a coward, a liar. . . All I want is you to admit you were wrong.’

‘And then I get the beads?’

‘You get the memory beads anyway,’ said Axl quietly. ‘Here…’ He held the soulcatcher out to Kate.

She was crying already inside. And when the tears finally spilled out of her, Axl watched them trail down her cold cheeks but didn’t let Kate know that he knew she was crying, just stood and stared up at the darkened valley wall, following the faint line of the foss as white water tumbled down from the high slopes. More PaxForce troops were up there, bivouacked just beneath the snowline. He didn’t think anyone in the village knew that.

And sat closer in, wings folded tight and arms curled round the upper trunk of a fir, was Rinpoche staring back. Axl couldn’t see the expression on the silver monkey’s harrow face but somehow Axl knew he didn’t want to.

High and haunting, a loop of flute came out of the darkness, rich with echo and loss. He knew Kate couldn’t hear it. That it only reflected what he believed she felt. But it tugged strings that rippled like Celtic harp.

He had Kate now, ready and hooked. Axl just wished he felt better about it.