‘Thought you might want this,’ said a woman’s voice from behind Axl.

Ketzia had a cloak of sorts folded across her forearms. It was badly-made from greased wool and stank worse than a wet ram.

‘Thanks,’ said Axl.

‘No problem.’ The woman stared off into the darkness, head cocked to one side as if listening to the rain. ‘Figured you’d be cold. Not like Colombia, Samsara isn’t. . .’

Not like… Colombia?

Ketzia nodded, something close to doubt in her eyes. ‘Colombia, San Salvador, Whatever. . . It’s good what you speak, but it’s not real Spanish. Not like I speak. I knew you weren’t really one of us the first time you opened your mouth.’ She lent forward and touched the scars on his face. ‘But these are real. And Joan had followers elsewhere…’

‘You tell your husband?’ Axl wasn’t sure what relevance that had to anything but asked it anyway.

‘Did I tell… ?’ She looked into his face as her fingers caressed the edge of the empty pit where his other eye should be. Slowly Ketzia shook her head. ‘What would he know?’ She said dryly. ‘Leon still thinks he can go home someday.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘I don’t know who lives in my house now but it isn’t me. Besides I’m getting to like Samsara strange as that might seem. The valley’s safe. We don’t need guns or armies ... Or killers,’ her glance was suddenly fierce and she rocked on the balls of her feet, as if ready to go.

‘You were a reformista too?’

It was the wrong question. But what stopped Ketzia from swinging on her heels and leaving was a noise nearby, soft as the passing of a cat.

‘Maybe,’ she said loudly. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing.’ Axl smiled, really smiled. He could do friendly when necessary and sometimes even when it wasn’t. Without making it obvious, he took a step sideways to stare over Ketzia’s shoulder into the darkness behind.

‘Well then,’ said the woman as she lent in to lift the cloak out of his hands and drape it round him, so that her fingers rested lightly on his shoulders. ‘You should learn not to ask those questions in Cocheforet’. And then she stepped in closer still.

That was the last talking either of them did for a while. The woman’s mouth tasted of buttered tea, inevitable really. Her lips opening hungrily as her hands locked behind Axl’s head, pulling him to her.

Axl wrapped the edges of his borrowed cloak around Ketzia, swallowing them both inside its warmth. She had her eyes shut. Habit maybe, Axl decided: somehow he doubted if it was real passion. And then he realised that the woman probably couldn’t stand to stare too closely into his battered face. But all the same, Ketzia’s tongue snaked against his and she bit at his bottom lip, suddenly pushing herself against him.

She was kissing all the while, softly now as if unaware that her hips were grinding hard against his. And then Axl bit into her neck and Ketzia shook free, pulling her face away from him. But it wasn’t to stop, only to set the rules.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No blood.’ Very slowly she began to undo buttons to reveal a silk ASui blouse beneath her top’s rough felt.

The blouse had been smart once, self cleaning, but whoever donated it to the ‘fugee clothes fund for Samsara had burnt out its power or done something stupid like wash it in water, because now the silk was stained with dirt and rotted beneath the arms. While the delicate skeins of optic that threaded through the lace were completely lifeless and unlit.

The fastenings worked, though, being minimalist and mother-of-pearl. Not allowed to bite her neck, Axl knelt in the mud and fastened his mouth beneath one full breast instead, biting softly on the underside where it joined her ribcage. And then, while Ketzia was still shivering, Axl’s mouth slid up to close on a dark nipple. The circle around it was puckered with cold and passion, and Axl swallowed the whole circle into his mouth until she was pulling him tight against her.

Her thighs were hard with muscle and her breasts were full, but her body was already losing its fight with gravity. She was, what? Thirty, thirty-five, maybe only late twenties? Axl had no way of knowing except ask. Maybe later… Resting his head against one breast and letting the other overflow his fingers, Axl shut his eye. He couldn’t remember the last woman he’d fucked who hadn’t been a street whore, but there were a lot of things in everybody’s lives they couldn’t be bothered to remember.

So instead Axl stood back up and concentrated on brushing his fingers softly around the puckered aureole of her left breast, never quite touching the taut nipple until her still-clothed hips were grinding into him hard enough to bruise. And then, with her arms locked tight around his neck and her mouth hungry against his, Axl dropped both his hands to her bare breasts and gripped hard, squeezing the swollen flesh.

Ketzia moaned. There was no sublety after that as Axl slid his hands to her hips and yanked up her skirt. She stank of salt and blood, like an animal in rut, but then so did Axl when her fingers finally freed him.

He let her tug roughly at him, dropping his own hand between her open legs, smoothing his fingers down her soft abdomen until he reached damp body hair that was fine like silk.

Axl groaned. The tiny hood of her clitoris peeled back as he dragged his index finger up the sodden line of her vulva, trapping the swollen outer lips between his other fingers.

Then she was biting at Axl’s mouth again as he hooked one hand under her left thigh and scooped that leg off the ground, opening her wide. Ketzia was tight and slippery and swollen and Axl eased back out of her just to get the feeling of sliding in again between her thighs.

But before he could withdraw a second time, she’d hoisted up her other knee and locked both ankles behind his legs, moving down onto him as Axl supported her weight. Anyone who wanted to could have walked up behind him and taken off his head with a rusty length of molywire, but somehow Axl found it hard to care.

‘Deeper. . .’

Faint moan segued into words as her knees locked tighter and her hips swivelled frantically against him. Axl could smell the grease in her long hair, rank like an animal, and it just made him want to fuck her more. Sliding hands down Ketzia’s spine, Axl hooked his fingers into the base of her back, just above her broad buttocks and yanked.

It was enough.

She came against him, hips rocking, her mouth buried in the crook of his neck. A low stream of raw Valenciana was growled out into his ear. He didn’t know some of the words she was using but they still sounded obscene.

Later, after Axl had loosed his grip on her back and Ketzia had lowered her legs, he’d turned the still-panting woman around to position her against the outside wall of a house, waiting while she braced her hands against damp polycrete.

Then he pulled up the back of her skirt, positioned himself carefully and slid into her, his fingers gripping the side of her hips so her buttocks pulled apart enough to let Axl watch himself as he rode her.

She stank. And mixed in with the basic pheromones of sex and body fluid were darker traces of shit and sweat. But as the Cardinal had once told a teenage Axl before buying him his first whore, if there wasn’t shit and sweat, blood and semen at the end of it then you weren’t doing it right.

Ketzia groaned with each thrust, as his thighs slapped hard against her exposed arse and little shock waves ran up her back. And then Axl came, his fingers roughly gripping her waist as he ploughed deep inside her, spasming.

As he slumped over her back and wrapped his arms round her soft gut, Axl knew one thing only. That the figure he’d started out following was long since gone. Vanished cat-like into the night.