Behind him a thin mist clung to the grey slopes of the Sierra, those final foothills of the Baetic Cordillera that had once plunged into the Mediterranean at Cape La Nao to reappear miles later as the island of Ibiza. Now, of course, the cities of Alicante and Valencia were landlocked, the new coastline a product of General Que’s decision to lower the Mediterranean.

Between the brothel and the sierra were huertas, heavily-irrigated orange groves thriving in the alluvial soil of the Levant littoral. But it was the bare mountain beyond that which people really noticed, the puig, its hard-edged grey slope rising sharp as pain. Not high but jagged like broken teeth and fringed around the bottom with a white-walled hill village that clung tight to its base.

Father Sylvester didn’t even turn to look at it. Priest and girl, they walked down the grey stone steps together towards the waiting Honda, the girl picking her way carefully across damp gravel, bare feet moving over sharp stones as if undertaking complicated ballet steps, to a score that only she could hear.

‘Ready to move, Monsignor?’

The man nodded, remembered his car wasn’t running on visual and brusquely told the Honda to unlock its door. The Honda did, both front doors opening in a gentle hiss of well-damped hydraulics.

‘I’ll drive,’ the priest told the car, daring it to disagree. And then he had the hover up on its skirt and spinning in a neat circle before the semiAI even had time to remind him about his seat belt.

‘The girl too,’ said the Honda, and Father Sylvester nodded to Mai to strap herself in, which she did in bland silence.

Experienced in the ways of the world though he was, Father Sylvester didn’t realise the girl was thinking precisely nothing. That Mai’s head was empty of thought, fear or hope. She had long since discarded all three, learning first to retreat into a corner of her mind and then-later-once she’d reached twelve and the lessons got harder, to leave her body altogether. To hover at the edge of existence, in the far corner of every room while clients beat or abused her empty body.

There was a clinical name for disengagement, for the fracture of psyche from pain, but the girl didn’t know that. She thought she’d invented the technique: that it was hers alone. A way to keep sane while other children retreated into suicide or the fixed brightness of crystalMeth.

‘Ready?’ Father Sylvester asked, half thinking about his wallet and already regretting its loss. Fat with its stolen credit cards and bank bonds, he’d left the thing on top of Madame Sotto’s marble table, just inside the viewing room.

How long before the Madame noticed? How long before she picked it up and opened it, not to take anything of course, but just to take a look at the possessions of a priest who’d woken her up at 2 a.m. on a Friday demanding to be shown all her girls? Three minutes, maybe four... If he’d been a betting man that’s what Father Sylvester would have gambled on. But she didn’t even wait until his car was out of the drive.

The ball of fire expanded outwards from white through gold to red, flames licking up for the briefest second before black smoke followed them skywards and the twisted olive trees around the edge of the brothel began to catch, leaves shrivelling like singed paper.

But it wasn’t the explosion that broke the habits of Mai’s short lifetime and shocked the girl into screaming ... It was the aftershock that hurled down the red-earth path behind the car and caught the Honda, twisting it sideways towards a rock-strewn bank.

She needn’t have bothered. Without hesitation, the semiAI overrode manual and slid the silver Honda up the steep bank and down the other side into a field of orange trees. The brothel was a mess of flames behind them. Its grey stucco walls already flaking with heat, red roof tiles falling into the inferno below through gaping holes in the broken rafters. Whole olive trees were aflame, smoke spiralling up like a plume of black feathers into the early morning sky. Father Sylvester had been right, Madame Sotto’s brothel was a giant fire risk.

So simple and so Efféctive. All it took to prime the trigger was to remove a credit card from the wallet. Opening the wallet again ignited the core and after that everything was a mathematical certainty.

If he hadn’t been dying, Father Sylvester would have been proud of himself. As it was, he didn’t have the time or energy left for pride, foolish or otherwise. On a plane to Mexico was where he was meant to be. Not killing brothel keepers, buying children or stealing souls.

He turned to the girl and gripped her podgy face in one hand, looking deep into her eyes while the Honda steered itself between rows of orange trees and back onto a narrow road.

‘Your name…’ he began but got no further before Mai interrupted, trying to tell him who she was.

‘No,’ said Father Sylvester, holding her face a little harder between his hands, his eyes never leaving hers. ‘Your name is Joan, do you understand me?’

Mai looked uncertain, unhappy. They were sliding down a slip road now towards a battered, cracked four-lane blacktop and behind them, what she had loosely called home for the last five years was burning up in flames.

‘You have a new name,’ the priest told her fiercely, ‘a new life. Now tell me, who are you?’

‘Joan…’ The girl stumbled over the unfamiliar name.

Father Sylvester let go of the girl’s face and collapsed back into the black ultrasuede of his ergonomically-perfect driver’s seat. He was shaking. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your name is Joan. You’re the new Pope.’

Axl could hear, that wasn’t his problem. Axl’s problem was his life lacked a coherent sound track, at least it did these days. When doors shut they just slammed, with no kick-back loop of drums. Cars collided on the freeway and no hi-haus/low-fi chords crashed. Not like back when…

He was blind to the music.

Axl still had a Korg sound system installed in his head, at least he figured he did, just not connected. After fifteen years Axl still couldn’t get used to it.

He had the negative algorhythm blues. He had…

Shit, Axl knew exactly what he had, a sucking black hole where the music used to loop and feed inside his head, sound-tracking everything.

‘You look like death ...”

The mirror wanted to say like shit, but it was too mealy-mouthed.

‘Yeah.’ Axl pushed one thin arm through the sleeve of an old biker’s jacket. He had a job to do and he was in a hurry. Plus, there was something he was meant to remember and crystalMeth from the night before was making him forget.

The jacket was PaulSmith with silver ceramic elbowpads, relined years back in spider’s silk and Axl liked it. The mirror didn’t…

Wedged into the mirror’s frame was Axl’s driving licence which showed a round-faced, vaguely European male with spiky, peroxide-blond hair. Years of not sleeping had left him with the dissolute look of a drunken Welsh poet, which was odd because his mother was originally Irish Catholic. Axl had no idea who his father was, the police never caught the man.

Age 29, height 6’ 1”, weight 152 lb, name Axl Borja, status human. It lied about everything except his height, and that was only true if Axl wore Cuban heels. There was other shit crypted onto it, like a DNA profile and medical record but that was also fake.

Besides he was using another name these days too. Which one didn’t matter. He changed them as regularly as swopped his dead-end jobs flipping hamburgers.

Axl shrugged, checked his looks in the glass and then took another glance at his eyes. Nineteen years back they’d been advertised as ‘clear and sparkling, like early daybreak peeping through a clear night sky.’ And at $4500 a pop on the open market that’s what they should have stayed. Right around now they looked more like the sodium headlights of a dumptruck refracted through smog. And he could have moved house using the bags under them, if only he could raise enough credit to relocate…