Sunday morning.
Axl groaned loudly. The taste in his mouth was salt and sweet, blindly primitive. For the briefest second he figured that what he could taste was Ketzia and then Axl realised it was his own blood.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ said a woman’s voice crossly. ‘You bit your tongue and it’s slow to heal. So stay silent.’ The words weren’t a suggestion, they were an order.
The hand that pushed Axl back into the pillow was firm and the pillow was soft, so Axl stayed where he was and slowly opened his eye instead, letting life drift slowly into focus.
As rooms went, this one was vast, its right wall almost beyond the edge of his vision. High overhead the ceiling was cracked and crazed until it looked like a dangerous map, a map that might send continents tumbling in on him at any moment. Huge plaster chunks were missing from the middle of the ceiling, as was any suggestion of architrave that might once have softened the line where ceiling met wall.
And as for the walls… Axl squinted. The tapestries were long and red, decorated with life-sized women. Not one of them had less than four arms and all were round-breasted and topless.
‘Where am I?’
‘El Escondido,’ the woman sounded resigned. ‘Now be quiet. . .’
‘But this room…’
‘Grew itself like that. Apparently, some people like to live in reproduction monasteries.’ It was obvious from her voice that she wasn’t one of them and she had better things to do than repair a building that needn’t have been broken in the first place.
‘I was out in the storm,’ said Axl.
The woman nodded, suddenly nervous. ‘Did you see who… ?’ Hard eyes examined him. ‘Did you spot anything, well, odd?’
Odd, like momaDef and defMoma? Or... Axl thought of the young girl creeping into the stable then jumping to the rafters, odd like that? Hell, this was Samsara.. Nothing was odd. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’
‘And you didn’t find anything?’
Find anything?
Like what?
The room drifted into darkness, wrapping him in warm silence. And Axl smiled to himself. Silence was good, he could live with that.
‘Who are you?’ Axl asked, although he already knew. At least, Axl hoped he did.
‘Me… ?’ The tall woman wrapped in the shahtoosh hesitated for a moment, but when she spoke her words were angry. As if she was furious with herself for hesitating. ‘I’m Katherine Mercarderes.’
She said it like he should know. And even if she hadn’t been the person he’d been looking for he would have done, Axl realised, just from the way she held her head. Maybe Kate Mercarderes had never had her own show syndicated on CySat, but there were whole months when that was what it felt like. Her show was called the News.
And now, without any real skill on his part, he was where he needed to be. Inside her house. All he had to do was find Father Sylvester. Either that, or learn from Kate where the Vatican dosh was stashed. Axl doubted if the Cardinal would care that much either way.
How hard could it be?
She pushed Axl back into his pillow with a tut of irritation as if she didn’t know why Axl couldn’t just be sensible. And the thing was, her wrist bones would snap like dead twigs if he flipped in the right direction. Even half-conscious Axl knew that. But the thought obviously hadn’t occurred to Kate. Which said a lot about where she came from.
Axl looked at Kate again, more closely. Tall but not beautiful. Thin rather than slim. She had heavy black hair scraped back into a knot at the nape of her neck and dark eyes that watched from beneath too-heavy brows. Her chin was strong and her cheekbones high. No one could have looked at her and not know she had Latino blood. Only her too-narrow hips let her down, and that could have been solved with a simple rebuild.
‘Seen enough?’ She demanded.
‘You look different. . .’
‘I am,’ said Kate baldly. She didn’t point out that the last time he’d seen her, she’d probably been on CySat fighting to get Joan airlifted out of Northern Mexico. There’d been talk about the UN stabilising the area north of Torreon. The need for PaxForce intervention. It all came to nothing. But there were 50,000 major feeds and for twenty-four hours it seemed like she’d been pleading for Joan’s life on all of them.
Maybe if he’d had a sister, thought Axl, he’d have been changed too. But Axl didn’t have a sister, not that he knew of anyway. And given where he came from, somehow he doubted they’d have been close even if he had. Too busy fighting each other for food probably… Axl didn’t buy into that novela ‘he ain’t heavy he’s my brother’ shit. Filial feeling was something else life gave to those who already had…
‘It’s the poppy,’ she told him crossly.
Axl looked up.
‘It makes you cry.’
She came back later, wearing just a shirt and chinos, her grey shahtoosh discarded. The bowl of soup she carried tasted of heavily salted butter and little else. And it wasn’t until Axl finished it that he remembered to ask Kate how he got there.
Apparently he been clubbed into unconsciousness outside the stables. That he wasn’t dead Kate put down to good luck but Axl privately figured was more than that. momaDef wanted him alive for some reason: or else she didn’t want him dead yet, which maybe wasn’t the same thing at all.
He’d been found with his face matted with blood, which was standard. What wasn’t was his coat had been sodden with other people’s piss. Which was the point Axl began to worry. They did that, PaxForce grunts. It was about marking territory. Only any grunts were so far off-territory on Samsara that Axl couldn’t help but wonder what level of deniability they had built into their mission.
Unless they were about to go legitimate. Which would explain why Kate was jumpier than a roo on speed. If she knew who they were.
‘You shouldn’t go upsetting outlaws.’ The woman said furiously.
Outlaws?
‘Why not?’ Axl asked. Upsetting people was something he specialised in. And if Kate didn’t know that yet, well, she’d find out. As for her ‘outlaws’, it was obvious the Cardinal would be running back-up, but momaDef wasn’t it, she just didn’t feel right. Too full of herself. And somehow Axl couldn’t see His Eminence subcontracting anything to PaxForce.
‘How long have the outlaws been around?’
The woman sucked at her olive cheeks as if thinking hard. ‘It’s the first time they’ve been to Cocheforet, I think. But I hear the bastards ride from village to village, looting, thieving ...' Her dark eyes were seeing things that weren’t there.
‘Still,’ said Kate tightly, ‘it could be weeks before we see them again. If we get lucky.’ There was real anger in her voice.
‘Well,’ said a girl’s voice from the doorway. ‘Is the idiot awake yet?’
‘Yeah,’ said Axl, pushing himself up on one elbow to peer round Kate. ‘He is. And feeling shit.’
The kid from the stables grunted.
‘This is…’ Kate hesitated too long to recover gracefully.
‘I’m Juanita and I found you,’ the half-Japanese girl said smoothing a grey cotton smock across small breasts, as if brushing away crumbs. She looked suddenly furious but Axl found it hard to tell what about.
‘Juanita?’
‘Apparently that’s my name.’
Mai didn’t acknowledge the hard-eyed glance Kate shot her, at least not openly. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she told Axl, 'I belong in the kitchen.’ There was such contempt in her voice that Axl thought Kate was about to say something. Instead she just ignored the girl. To Axl it was obvious there was some kind of war going on and he was flat on his back in the middle of it.