In the end Axl settled for some kind of fermented barley mess called chang that came out of a big copper pot, looked like molasses mixed with water and tasted of rained-out bonfires. It was what the three men sat silently in the corner were drinking too. Only they all used long wooden straws and drank straight from a smaller pot that a dark-haired Tibetan boy had carried over to their table. The boy didn’t seem to have a name. Leon just called him you.

The behaviour of the other customers ran the full gamut from A to B and back again. From staring into the chang to glaring at Axl with undisguised suspicion as he tossed three years of therapy and two twelve-point plans straight down his gullet in choking gulps of thin, yeast-sour ditch water. It was five years since he’d last touched alcohol and, given what the chang tasted like, not a day of it had been wasted.

He was really getting on their wick and the only problem was he had less than no idea why. If he had, he might have been able to work on it a bit more. Make push come to shove, because that’s what it had to do. Axl didn’t have time to blend it, become accepted, put up the usual smokescreen.

Outside in the street a door slammed loudly and everyone in the bar tried not to look at each other, but that was okay because Axl was busy looking at all of them. No one looked back.

‘Rotten night,’ said Axl, nodding towards the noise. There was no reply to that either, but Axl was starting to enjoy filling the sullen silences. His words were slurred far more than four small bowls of chang warranted, especially as one of those was still soaking into the earthen floor at his feet.

On the other side of the inn wall, wind was ripping needles from thin pines while hail thudded into the wet ground like endless shot. In all the newsfeeds he’d seen about Samsara none had mentioned that the weather was buggered. Mind you, he hadn’t seen many and those he had always concentrated on Vajrayana and life in that city.

Samsara was silly season stuff. Every time the Jihad in North Africa declared a brief peace or the Russian Tsar who was holed up at Yekaterinburg summoned Marshal Sukarov to play wargames instead of letting the marshal lead his troops from what could loosely be called the Sino-Russian war front, given it was fought by proxies and much of it was information-based anyway—every time Cy Sat ran out of hard news they sent some photogenic, freelance Ishie off to Samsara to record her impressions.

Mostly these were of the Vajrayana’s quaint, wonderful and why can’t we manage this on Earth variety. But maybe, Axl decided, that was because in reality the wheelworld was freezing, with fucked weather and villages full of traumatised basket cases with killer PTS. Somehow that side of the experiment didn’t make it to the screen.

He couldn’t imagine why.

‘Another beer,’ Axl demanded, banging down his wooden bowl so that what was left slopped across the table before dripping slowly onto the floor. Behind his bar, Leon scowled into his beard but told the boy to take Axl a fresh bowl anyway. The bowl was small, hand-lathed from oak and decorated with five poor-quality cracked turquoises. The boy carried it like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.

‘Your room’s ready,’ Leon said pointedly.

‘But I’m not,’ said Axl as he slammed the new bowl back onto the table, spilling some more. ‘I’m going for a walk…’

And you’re welcome to come after me, he told the three men in his head, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Fingers touched the brass hilt of his hunting knife where its bare blade was surgically taped to his side, handle down for ease of use.

Outside was bitter, which wasn’t a surprise: nor was the wind that drove along the valley into Axl’s face, though the night air was so cold it took him a few seconds to catch his breath, and longer still for his eye to adjust to the darkness. What would have surprised Axl, if he hadn’t just been sitting in the inn listening carefully to the noises outside, was the figure frozen animal-still between the stables and an open-ended shed beyond. If in doubt freeze, but not when you’re alone on open ground. Someone should have told the person that. Mind you, someone should have told him that all those years ago, not left him to find out for himself.

Axl didn’t hurry after the ghost figure. Mainly because hurrying wasn’t something he’d been taught. When he ran it was hard and fast, accelerating like an animal and preferably wired up on cooking sulphate. The rest of the time he walked slowly, head up and shoulders loose. As stances went, it didn’t say look at me, but it didn’t say walk through me either. It said, here’s a man going about his business, let’s leave it that way…

Axl could do hard eye without thinking about it and he could tap into psychotic on whim just by taking the filter off his memories, but like his old sergeant used to stress, the main sign of success was not needing to. Getting left alone was a primary skill, one Axl had long since picked up on the street, and beside it all that other shit about slowing down heartbeat, dropping brain rhythms from beta to alpha and hitting a neurological low of ten cycles per second was just that, so much shit.

You couldn’t turn on a teen newsfeed without seeing some bug-eyed drone making a living recycling memes from StreetSemantics 101, but what Axl knew he’d learned direct on the streets of Alphabet by watching who survived and who got razzed.

And he learned fast from his mistakes.

Axl laughed as he wiped rain out of his hollow eye socket. At least he had learned fast back then. Back at the start when the Cardinal did occasional pro bono out of a small basement office in a block at the back of St Patrick’s and Axl was the street kid stood in front of some fancy desk that once belonged to a guy called Frick, or so Axl got told while he was protesting that he didn’t do all that Hail Mary shit.

God was that enamel baby the Spic gangs glued to their Uzi's. He didn’t know what the Nation called their god, only that he wasn’t allowed in pictures so they wore his name on gold pinkie lings or etched into the barrels of those tiny matt-black H&Ks they wore clipped to their belts like Sony Walkwears. Axl didn’t buy into any of that shit, like he didn’t punk for protection.

Mind you, he didn’t need to. Axl had learnt to get out of the way of the kids he couldn’t go through and to do it so no one noticed. He didn’t need protection and he didn’t need God.

Atheist wasn’t a word Axl learnt until later. At the time he got pulled in, he had a vocabulary of maybe 150 words and he didn’t use ninety percent of those. But then he was ten and si, no and chinga tu madre covered most situations. Still, the tall priest promised Axl that he didn’t have to believe in God to take his money so finally the boy did what he was paid to do, follow a fat man out cruising in Central Park.

Besides it was cold and he was hungry. He’d thought the marshmallow heat of his first summer on the streets was bad enough. That was before he reached the winters.

Mostly the man cruised a large courtyard of old paving stones used by the skate gangs. The courtyard was sunk into the ground like a small mall with no ceiling. Around the mall’s edge were blank-eyed statues and at one end stood an empty fountain. In the middle of that fountain—her wings spread wide—stood the Angel of the Waters erected in 1842 to celebrate the arrival of clean water to New York. Not that Axl knew any of that. He just followed the fat man, keeping hidden as the man stopped and talked to skateboys who mostly laughed or kept walking like he wasn’t there.

On the third night, while a shivering Axl was edging round the spread-winged angel, his target vanished. And, scared that he was about to blow it, Axl raced into an underpass that headed back towards Central Park South in search of his target. Which was how Axl found himself frozen in the dark with a blade to his neck.