Mostly, what he needed to get his head round was what Kate, Clone and Louis had been looking for. And not just them. Ketzia, too, she’d been looking. He’d stumbled down the valley track from Escondido into Cocheforet, passing under dark tangles of rhododendron grown so thick that there was only just room for one person to pass at a time and the path was black as night. The Clone was behind him as always. And when the man’s eyes weren’t boring into the back of Axl’s neck they were scanning the gravel as if the key to everything might just be lying there.

And then there was the ‘vision’. Axl didn’t believe in real visions, his own or those seen by others. Schizophrenia, B-alvarius specials, fucked-up levels of serotonin, neural flares that flamed the fern-like structure of the cerebellum with dazzling corona, faulty REM. mechanisms that overlaid real life with narcoleptic fantasies. Those he believed in. And then there were the mechanical kind…

Delivered by Clone to the inn, Axl had slammed his way through the front door, pushed past the bearded landlord and stamped up the rickety steps to his attic room, slamming the door behind him so hard that plaster flaked off the damp chimney breast.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

The shutter was open, the fire was out and his mattress was soaked with drizzle that had come in through the unprotected window. A maggot-white lump of dried yak cheese stood crusted on a plate by the bed, his uneaten supper from days before. The bread that went with it was already spored green with mould.

Axl wouldn’t miss Cocheforet but life wasn’t as simple as just leaving. The Cardinal would have spies on Samsara. It wouldn’t be that long before the hip and run of rumour told him Axl had failed. Not long enough, anyway. Not nearly long enough…

Aware just how close he was to screwing up big-time, Axl stood in his attic room and kicked the two main problems round in his head. No hint that Kate knew anything about the missing money or was planning to set up some little papal court in exile. Nothing worthwhile to offer His Excellency as a counterweight to failure.

Added to which, he was hungry, cold and in deep shit with the villagers. Not a good place to be. And the only problem he could deal with immediately was hunger. Axl dug into his pocket for his knife, planning to scrape mould from the bread. Only its blade caught on Mai’s soulcatcher, scratching one of the memory beads.

And Axl found salvation.

The shock threw him across the room so hard Axl slammed sideways into the far wall, almost dislocating his shoulder. Invisible bands bound his chest so tight he couldn't draw breath and his heart froze with shock. He was dropped into darkness so cold that every muscle locked solid.

The woman had skin that shone white and her head was thrown right back, nostrils flared wide, her mouth open in prayer or ecstasy. Blank eyes turned blindly to some gilt heaven. She was…

St Teresa d’Avila.

A statue which didn’t really rate approval, no matter that it was famous.

And then the marble figure and the knowledge were gone.

He stood in a city at the top of a flight of stone steps and the air was heavy with incense and honeysuckle. And the world was briefly in colour again.

‘Michaelangelo was so kitsch,’ said the voice in his head. ‘Or maybe it was Paul Three.’

Behind was the empty floor of del Campidaglio, a circular Renaissance piazza paved in marble. A white wolf in a gold cage stood to the left, the symbol of Rome, shaded by a myrtle bush. And below the steps, stretching so far the eyes he was looking through couldn’t focus on the far edge, a silent crowd waited expectantly. The little silver insect hovering near his mouth wasn’t an insect, Axl realised. It was a microphone.

And again, that feeling of waiting for death. Watching the edges of the crowd as if the bullet might somehow be visible. Expecting it but knowing that here was not the place. Now was not the time.

‘What is there left to say?’

‘Everything,’ said a voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Tell them the truth. That’s all you ever…’

And then all Axl had were cold echoes in his head and a sense of loss.

Victory out of defeat, or some such shit. Sitting on the floor of the attic Axl had known exactly what Kate, Louis and Clone had lost. Exactly what he had to offer His Excellency. For the first time in days, Axl grinned.

Sure Joan was dead, ripped apart on camera. The death that had been digitised and cast out into the Web to be diced and spliced, cute-cut and mixed to music, backdrop to synth loops and sound-grabs, textured with cheap space echoes and fed back at everything from slowburn to 280bmp, was for real. Joan really got ripped apart, no faking. That really had been her blood running back into the cracked earth. Her face flash-frozen by history.

Mimetic.

Iconographic.

She’d be selling dermaPeel face creams and high-phenethylamine chocolate within five years.

But that was all the Army of God got, her body. When the soulcatcher chips had been inserted Axl didn’t know or care. Maybe only when Joan announced she intended to negotiate an end to the children’s crusade, or maybe back when she was first elected Pope. The Vatican might not approve of cloning but it had medical AIs like nobody’s business, answerable to the Congregation for Causes of Saints, better known as the Devil’s Advocates, the conclave that existed to disprove miracles.

It wasn’t novel to get wired. If anything it was a bit passé, almost retrograde. But she’d been augmented all right and he had the chips. Not augmented like an exotic, no ultra-fast reactions or night sight, nothing too obvious. Just five-sense neural backup. Each bodily sense captured in a tiny bead, not glass but crystal bioSoft, memory layered like time.

Exact emotions couldn’t be backed-up—not yet anyway, maybe never—but reactions created emotions and reactions could be stored, along with sights, smells and memories of what they were reactions to. The math was simple. Splice the senses through a transparent back-up. Putting the baby back in the bottle was more difficult, but it happened and, like most things that take place regularly enough, everyone figured if it happened that often it must be easy.

It wasn’t. A decade and a half back, Axl had flushed his own life down the tube, literally. The most satisfying data dump of his life. Two and a half years was how long he’d been beaded and central accounts for CySat’s WarChild had charged him five percent of his earnings for the privilege, even though he hadn’t wanted beads in the first place. Keep extra memories? He didn’t want the ones he had.

Those marble steps with the open-faced crowd staring up at him. Thousands of them. He’d seen that image before, from right back when it all began and Washington and Paris were rubbing their hands at the thought of a young woman in the Vatican.

Someone unworldly.

A recluse they could use.

Except they couldn’t. Because the woman who stood up to address the UN was the one thing no one had been expecting. Someone who really believed. In telling the truth. In doing what was right because it was the right thing to do. At no matter what political cost.

She was a fucking nightmare. And when she used New York to announce that killing civilians was a sin, no matter what their religion or politics ...

There’d never been a time when the victims of war were just those who fought, when wearing a uniform was an invitation to Death and being a civilian meant Death rode by. But that had been the ideal, destroyed by the balkanisation of conflict and the new crusades, not over water shortages as CIA Langley had warned but over religion, between Islam and Christianity, those followers of the Book.