She liked the house too. There were no swathes of watered silk to line the walls, no naked marble nymphs, no heavy chandeliers or gold leaf highlights to the ornate ceiling rose, because there was no ceiling rose, no architectural decoration at all. The walls just ended at the top and then the ceiling began… And best of all, at least for Mai, there were no huge mirrors to reflect her back at herself. Mai liked the house, liked it a lot.

‘You live here?’

‘We all live here… Joan.’

Kate said the name like she was tasting it. And from the expression on the woman’s face, she found the taste strange.

‘Joan is your sister?’ That was what the woman had said, wasn’t it?

‘Sweet, lovely, innocent, stupid Joan.’

The tall woman was crying, Mai realised. Not loudly but softly, almost as if she hadn’t quite realised it herself.

‘Hey, you okay?’

‘Of course I’m…’ Kate stopped and bent to pick a white towel from the grey slate floor and when she straightened up again her face was calm.

‘It’s time to get out.’ Kate held up the towel and blushed as Mai scrambled up to stand there, suds sliding down her soft stomach and legs. Then Kate suddenly stepped forward to wrap the Japanese girl in the towel, steadying Mai as she stepped out of her bath onto the tiles.

‘Time you slept.’ Strong arms, surprisingly strong arms, gripped Mai in a quick hug and then Kate was fussing with the clothes she’d carried in earlier, holding up simple cotton nightdresses one after the other, eyeing them for size.

‘This one, I think.’ She held it out, stopped and laughed when she saw the naked girl wasn’t yet dry. A laugh was so brief it sounded like a sob. ‘Joan never could dry herself properly either.’ Kate took the towel and tossed it over Mai’s head, rubbing hard to dry the girl’s hair before patting dry her shoulders and back.

‘The rest you can do yourself,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute to show you your room.’

Mai watched her go, wondering. About Kate and about the others. But mostly about sticking around for a day or two. She’d liked the way the hot bath water flowed over her body like waves. She’d never had a bath before, only used a sonic cubicle or rubbed on skin crawlers to get rid of sweat and dead skin. The bath was nice and so far the woman was nice, in a fussy sort of way. Even the huge house wasn’t bad, though it had almost no furniture and was so dirty it looked like only animals had lived in it for years.

All the same, nice bath and house or not, Mai knew she couldn’t stay there long term. They were all too freaky. Besides when was she ever going to get a better opportunity to set up on her own?

Commission, food and bed space at Madame Sotto’s had taken ninety-five percent of her earnings and now that Madame Sotto was burnt toast, Mai planned to do without an agent. And there was bound to be room for a hard-working ex-kinderwhore, in wherever the hell it was she was…

The sun overhead on the Cancun coast was blistering but it was the wet-sponge humidity that really got to Colonel Emilio. That and the 1500-klick journey from Day Effé, through Veracruz, Campeche and Valladolid to Cancun.

‘You know the real problem with Mexico?’ Axl said loudly as he looked round at the uniforms filling the long corridor of the Villa Carlotta with a clash of primary colours and handfuls of gold braid.

The walls of the corridor were salmon pink, the floor white marble and all the windows were trompe l’oeil… Florid Rousseausque gardens painted directly onto cracking plaster. Axl had worked McDonald's kitchens that were less humid and he wasn’t even dressed in a green cavalry tunic buttoned to the neck.

‘Well, do you?’ he asked the sweating Colonel.

Colonel Emilio didn’t know and—what’s more—he didn’t want to know either; but that wasn’t going to stop Axl Borja telling him.

‘Most of the fuck-wits in this government can’t tell the difference between history and nostalgia.’ Which was probably true.

Unfortunately it was also slander against the state, a fact obvious to all those stood around them. So it was a relief to the Colonel when he finally reached the huge double doors that led into the Cardinal’s anteroom.

‘Colonel Emilio to see His Excellency,’ announced the Colonel. It had taken three hours to navigate the corridor. And all that time he’d been unable to sit down or relieve himself for fear of losing his place in the vast and restless queue.

He didn’t bother to give the waiting usher the name of his prisoner. The red cuffs that bound Axl’s hands made clear his position in the equation, and if the cuffs didn’t, the blackened eye and cut lip certainly did.

The usher consulted a list and nodded, running one finger over Colonel Emilio’s name so that it changed from blue to red on his pad. There had been no need for the Colonel to announce himself, just as there had been no real need for the man stood at the door to check his list. FaceSoft would already have pulled up names plus a bullet-point list of their careers to date.

In fact, neither would have got that far if the Villa’s AI hadn’t already authorised their presence. Cameras were everywhere in the corridor, tiny pin-lenses wired into a spider’s web of optic that ran behind the priceless 19th-century frescoes.

‘If you would wait in here…’ The usher nodded to the door which creaked open, struggling under its weight.

They found themselves in a pre-anteroom. Ornate, gilded, impossibly baroque but a holding pen all the same. Axl looked approvingly at the tall window that made up one side of the tiny room.

A real window this time, glazed with crystal polymer. Running through each huge pane, invisible to the naked eye, was spider’s web woven into a mesh that was tougher than military-grade steel and more forgiving than thermal polymer.

And if that wasn’t enough, the window had semiAI fast-action shutters, lead-lined against radiation, while the heavy brocade curtains were woven from charcoal-bearing silk to protect against biologicals. The window couldn’t fight back but as passive defence systems went this one defined ‘top of the range’.

Mind you, it should have done… Axl had served under the woman who drew up the original specification and he was willing to bet Colonel Emilio didn’t know that either.

‘Come on man, move,’ the Colonel hissed and Axl gave a twisted smile.

‘LockMart-designed doors,’ Axl announced, tapping what looked like wood, ‘alternate layers of titanium alloy and blast-proof ceramic micromesh, sourced in Paris from the Imperial Armouries. The windows were grown in Prague around spider’s web woven in Beijing. I‘d tell you where the curtains came from, but His Excellency doesn’t want anyone to know…’

Colonel Emilio looked at the usher, who very carefully didn’t return his gaze. If there was going to be trouble, the flunky didn’t want any part of it.

‘Through there,’ he told the Colonel politely, nodding his head towards the next door and went back to examining his list. It ran for screen after screen, but anyone seeing the queue built up in the corridor behind would have known that.

Axl stepped through the door ahead of the Colonel and, following after, the Colonel found himself facing not the Cardinal as he’d expected but a grand room, lined down the sides and in the middle with wooden benches, all occupied. Towering brick-red walls were hung with gold-framed mirrors and antique portraits. The mirrors were neo Venetian and the vast pictures showed Hispanic men in armour with beards and jutting chins or woman with jutting breasts and dishevelled hair. The only black figures in the paintings were kneeling or stood discreetly in the background.

Not one of the paintings was religious. The first time Axl had stayed at Villa Carlotta, back when he was a boy he’d decided the Cardinal didn’t want to get religion and politics mixed. Now he knew you could no more separate religion from politics in Mexico than you could separate a person from their past.