Standing off from both sides of the ring was Samsara’s lighting system, a thick cluster of Znayrna flowers spread through space like daisies, each 480-metre petal a huge light-reflecting mirror constructed from aluminium-coated plastic film.

It was obvious enough how the flowers worked, but the Colt was impressed all the same. Light from the sun was reflected through the sides of the wheelworld, but whether straight down to the ground or to central mirrors floating high in the big black of the circle’s centre the Colt didn’t know.

Many of the million or so strips of cloth attached to Samsara’s outer shell were woven through with solar-powered cells threaded to random-frequency broadcast chips, so that they endlessly chanted mantras that overfilled the Colt’s mind with waves of digital scribble.

The Colt felt warmth upon its back and turned, facing into solarlight that blazed across the cold wastes of space. Then it paused and ran that sequence again, thinking about it this time. The Colt felt warmth upon its back… The compressed AI intelligence which still regarded itself as the ghost of a gun that lay, hollow and empty in the study of a Roman Catholic Cardinal in a pale blue stucco villa that faced the burnished sea of the Mexican gulf, took a look at who it had become.

Rinpoche. Beloved.

Wings spread out from the shoulder blades of a small monkey. Featherless and boneless, the wings were as vast as the new simian frame was small. They stretched nine metres across and were as thin as the tissue in a cell wall. Not for flying then, that much was obvious. Rinpoche tracked a data flow across the wing and understood immediately.

Where better to use solar power than when riding the solar winds? As for its new body, leaving aside the crude effects of vacuum, it would have dehydrated in the heat of direct light or frozen within the fall of Samsara’s shadow had it been made from flesh. But it was beaten silver inlaid with rubies, pearls and turquoises.

He was the eyes of the world. Dawn’s harvester. A watcher at the gates of space… Rinpoche sighed. Whichever geek had originally programmed the monkey’s identity module, he’d inserted a serious God complex, either that or Seattle Pomp Rock wasn’t dead. It was hard to know which was most worrying.

‘Crazy wisdom ...'

The last thing the Colt heard before it began to skim Samsara’s upper atmosphere was the old man’s voice crackling at it suddenly out of a snow-blinding maelstrom of data.

‘You’ve sure as shit come to the right place.’ The old man was laughing.

When Axl awoke he was right where he wanted to be. And he’d got there unconscious and almost by accident. Which was a better route than most. Somewhere in the distance there was a bell ringing without stop, just the one and erratic enough for it to be rung by hand.

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.