His own fingers fumbled as they found the waist of her leggings and began to push them down over her hips.

Beneath the black leggings she wore a rainbow thong, so out of place on Samsara that Axl looked twice at the tiny triangle of thermo-reactive material that pulsed with her body heat, its silk so tight against her flesh that Axl could make out the soft mound of her naked mons and the flame orange outline of her labia.

Mai grinned and Axl briefly wondered if this was planned in advance. Either way, he didn’t really care too much about anything except the feeling of her breasts squashed tight against his bare chest and her back tensed beneath his hand as he pulled her against him.

Soon that wasn’t enough and so Axl slid one hand down the girl’s leg to caress her thigh and then moved it slowly up to cup the curve of her behind. Mai giggled, softly biting Axl’s shoulder as he slid his hand up again to edge one finger under the strap of her thong until his finger vanished between the cheeks of her arse. Any lower and Axl could reach the puckered black rose of her anus or the waiting lips below that but Axl stayed where he was.

Thinking nothing.

Remembering nothing.

Just inhaling the musk that rose off Mai’s body like smoke.

One of them was holding their breath and Axl had a feeling it was probably him. He didn’t see the Clone, Louis or Kate struggling up the path from the village, just as they didn’t see him even though the shutters to Kate’s bedroom window were wide open.

Axl didn’t hear them enter Kate’s room either. All he knew was that Mai froze in his arms and then a vast man with a shaved head and a knife scar that circled his thick throat like a necklace stood beside the bed. And behind the man, almost hidden by his wide shoulders, stood Kate, her eyes wide with shock and bitter with fury.

Two facts saved Axl’s life. The first was that everyone from Kate to Clone was too busy searching for the missing bits of the dead Pope’s mind to want the added complication of killing him.

Axl didn’t know that, just as he had no idea he was the person with Pope Joan’s missing memory stuffed deep in the piss-drenched pocket of his greatcoat. But then splitting Joan’s senses into five and stringing the memory beads on the wires of a kid’s dreamcatcher had been Father Sylvester’s way of keeping them not just safe but also anonymous.

The second thing that prevented Clone slitting Axl’s throat was that Mai still wore a thong. True, the scrap of smart-silk was all she did wear, but it was enough to save him. Axl had few-to-no illusions about that as Clone herded him down the kitchen stairs, never quite touching Axl. As if to touch him might trigger violence the huge man wouldn’t know how to control.

Not until Axl reached the bottom stair did he hear the first ringing slap and Mai’s loud four-letter reply. Axl wanted to go back for the kid but Clone crowded right behind him, fingers clenched into vast fists as if the ox-like man was fighting his need to use them. It took a minute for Mai’s swearing to subside and then even her sobs faded to leave only slaps that came hard and rhythmic, meted out in absolute silence as if the woman delivering them was too furious to speak.

‘Poisonous little bitch, isn’t she?’ Axl said. Not surprisingly the mute didn’t answer. So Axl took down his coat from a peg and shrugged himself into it, PaxForce piss and all. He had a feeling Kate wasn’t going to want him staying at Escondido any more.

When the woman finally came downstairs Axl got a chance to swear at her to her face, but he might have been as mute as Clone for all the response his insults got. When she spoke it was to dismiss him.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ Kate’s voice was glacial, colder even than her face. ‘But you’re a coward and a liar. I don’t believe you were ever one of us. To abuse Juanita like that, a child…’

‘Her name’s Mai,’ said Axl hotly, ‘and the kid’s a whore.’ He wanted to add, and what’s with this us? But it was already too late.

Kate gave Clone an abrupt nod and the huge man bundled Axl outside into the ever present, early-evening drizzle that was such a feature of Cocheforet’s microclimate. It took the Clone and Axl forty minutes to reach the inn and the Clone didn’t take his knife point out of Axl’s back the whole way.

And now the drizzle was gone, the air was thinner, Cocheforet was a morning’s ride behind him and Axl still wasn’t sure which cut deepest, being accused of abusing a kid or being told he was a coward and liar. And he had no intention of stopping to wonder why both insults hurt so badly.

Somewhere ahead was the carrion ground. Which, given the Clone’s permanent snarl as he rode beside Axl, wasn’t a reassuring thought. The man’s wide face was set hard like concrete and Axl had a nasty feeling that if Clone got his way, he’d be joining those other bodies. And the crude-looking revolver that Tukten, the Tibetan boy from the Inn, carried in one hand was the weapon for the job.

The sullen Tibetan brat did nothing but look at the revolver and whistle tunelessly. That Tukten distrusted Clone was obvious, but the boy made it clear he liked Axl even less. And from the way Tukten stared around him, nervously scanning the sky or peering ahead of him across the high plateau it was equally obvious the boy would rather be anywhere than where he was and doing anything except whatever it was he was doing.

But it wasn’t until the three riders were far enough onto the bleak plateau for the swirling black specks in the grey sky ahead to be identifiable as vultures that Axl worked out that Tukten was terrified of the scavenging ground. Which explained all that tuneless whistling.

A couple of hours was what it took Axl to reach that conclusion. A couple of hours during which his bladder grew tight as a drum, cold wind leached warmth from his face and the air got thinner and the vegetation ever more sparse, if that was possible. But still they rode a narrow track, in silence except for Axl’s abortive attempts to talk to the boy. It would have been easier to empathise with a stone.

Empathising with the Clone wasn’t an option. Clones didn’t do empathy any more than they acknowledged blood ties. How could they, without getting landed with sending 3000 birthday vid-mails every month? And if you were a clone of a clone, what was the relationship to whoever held the ur-genetic template? Axl didn’t know ... He made a point of not watching the daytime newsfeeds.

You’re wandering, Axl told himself. No surprise really. Too much chang maybe or the after-effects of poppy potion, those were the options that looped through Axl’s mind. That it was lack of oxygen meeting exhaustion and exertion didn’t occur to him. And as for last night’s vision. That was seriously somewhere Axl wasn’t allowing himself to go.

His own mare was struggling to draw breath. Yet the other two rode animals unaffected by the thin air. Small dirt-grey ponies with thick coconut-matting coats that stank of oil. He’d half expected them to be riding yaks.

‘I need to stop,’ Axl told Clone who said nothing, just wrapped his huge hand tighter round the bridle of Axl’s mare and yanked so hard the animal almost stumbled.

‘Can’t you do something,’ Axl asked Tukten. ‘I have to stop.’

Axl couldn’t manage the boy’s trick of standing in the saddle, unbuttoning and pissing against his horse’s neck so steam sprang from its skin, but pissing wasn’t the only reason he wanted to dismount. The fact was Axl couldn’t think properly with the mare’s spine banging into his arse with every step. And Axl needed to think and quick, if only because what he was refusing to think about kept pushing itself to the surface.