‘Taekyon,’ Rinpoche said, dropping from the night sky. Adding, ‘tae kwon do,’ when Axl looked blank, though that could be reverb howing inside his head. ‘Sweet Jesus. Can’t you even duck?’

‘Rinpoche,’ said the silver monkey offering Kate its paw. ‘And you’re Katherine Mercarderes. Aged twenty-seven years, four months, five days. Born Mount Olive hospital in Rome. Natural carriage, natural birth, no artificial womb. No foetal augmentations/genetic rewrites. Confirmed hereditary predisposition to stress, anger and depression. Forty-three percent chance of developing breast cancer by the age of forty. Educated from six to eighteen at the Vatican by Jesuit tutor Father Sylvester. Currently in protected exile on the island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily...

‘. . . yeah right.’ The monkey’s face lost its distant look as it peered deep into her eyes. Whatever it was looking for, it found in there.

‘Retinal match,’ it stated firmly. ‘Unless those are new, of course?’

Kate slowly shook her head and the monkey sighed.

‘That was irony.’

‘So,’ said Rinpoche turning to where Axl still sat in the mud, ‘You found Kate Mercarderes, who wasn’t on Lampedusa. Now what? Planning to keep her?’

‘No chance.’ Kate came uncoiled like a spring, pivoting again as she drew back one foot to kick Axl in the head.

Axl needn’t have bothered ducking. Rinpoche came up fast and hard, his paw closing round her ankle, locking it solid. No restraints could have held Kate that tight.

‘Later,’ snapped the monkey. ‘You can kick him later.’

‘I should have let Clone kill you.’ Kate spat the words at Axl. ‘Back at Escondido when he wanted to.’

‘Yeah,’ said Axl coldly, climbing to his feet. ‘Maybe you should. While you had the chance. Because, fuck knows, your family’s been responsible for enough killing.’ He put up one hand and lightly touched Kate’s face the way visitors used to touch his when he was a kid, the way he really used to hate.

She flinched. He used to do that too.

‘So what’s one more,’ Axl asked as he reached behind him to pull the revolver from his belt, ‘I mean, after all those others… ?’

The gun was loaded, unfired. There wasn’t a safety catch to release because the model wasn’t that sophisticated and Rinpoche hadn’t bothered to create one while giving the gun a make-over because Axl never used them anyway.

Axl spun the revolver once round his finger, fast forward so the handle snapped back into his hand with a satisfying slap and the muzzle finished up pointing straight at Kate’s stomach. The soundtrack died, kicked mute by significance override.

Even Rinpoche stopped breathing.

‘Did you enjoy hitting Mai?’ Axl asked the frozen woman. ‘Did it help your stress? Make you feel all gooey inside?’

‘I apologised to Mai, afterwards…’ Kate said softly.

Gun still to her gut, Axl patted Kate’s cheek softly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘bet that made her face less sore.’ Kate had tears in her eyes and she was biting the inside of her lip without knowing it. He’d gone out from Cocheforet nearly blind and returned with someone else’s eyes. She was afraid of him.

Been there, felt that. . .

Axl casually reversed the revolver and held it handle first to the silent woman: standing there until she finally reached over and took the weapon from his grip.

‘Well,’ he said, as he lent hard into the muzzle of the revolver, ‘you going to shoot me…’

How else was he going to get that bloody timecode to stop?

The problem, Axl decided watching Kate’s haunted face was that she really didn’t know whether she was going to or not. Kate had been running on empty for so long she didn’t even know it. And she needed another decision to make about as much as she needed the gun Axl had put in her shaking hand.

Saying he’d been there was glib, but it was also true.

She stared at him in the night-time darkness of a small ‘fugee village in a high valley on the edge of an immeasurably large hollowed-out wheel at some Lagrange off the edge of Earth. While around the outer rim of that wheel spun strips of prayer cloth that streamed out through the void, endlessly chanting.

She had a gun pointed at his gut finger tightening on the trigger, and all he wanted from her was an apology. How stupid was that… His thoughts were shredded, fractured like glass. Added to which he was cold, his spine hurt and his thighs were raw from a whole day in the saddle.

‘Look,’ said Axl as a clicktrack fed back in, thin as a baby’s heartbeat. ‘Do you want to shoot me or not?’

The silver monkey wasn’t keen to leave, claiming it was now Axl’s bodyguard. But it went after Axl threatened to rip its wings out at the shoulder if it didn’t take itself elsewhere. Both Axl and Rinpoche knew he couldn’t make good on that threat, but the silver monkey went anyway, sucking at its teeth in disgust as it clambered onto a PaxForce 4track to give itself a better take-off.

The night was getting late in more ways than one. And the wind that ripped down the narrow valley brought them cordite and the sound of shooting as drunken conscripts lit the dark sky with tracer. A wooden house was being noisily demolished for kindling. Off behind the village, a woman’s scream got chopped off, abruptly.

And behind it all, the heavy beat of some kid knitting up Tokyo Techno, all looped snare-fills and Korg samples stolen from ad jingles for products so old no one remembered what they were. The deck was UN-issue. But then it had long been accepted that you couldn’t go to war without a decent soundtrack. Though Axl still thought it was cheap not to provide the kids with their own inbuilt sound systems.

You got better results that way, too—and it didn’t upset the neighbours.

Rinpoche didn’t go far, of course. Just high enough to hang out of sight in the darkness, not so far it let Axl out of sound range. Both Axl and the silver monkey knew that was how it was going to be. Kate didn’t, but shock had wound her so tight she couldn’t have watched her words even if she’d known.

Shock at seeing Axl remade. Shock at getting herself trapped in that inn. But most of all, her face was sucked hollow by the shock of suddenly thinking she knew where the memory beads were, then discovering Clone was wrong and she didn’t.

‘I could have killed you, you moron.’ Fury coated each word with acid.

Axl shrugged like he didn’t care. Actually, he didn’t but that wasn’t why he shrugged. He still hadn’t forgiven Kate for Mai or what she’d said.

‘I saved your life,’ said Axl, ‘back there in the Inn…’

‘Did I ask you to interfere?’

‘No,’ Axl’s words were matter of fact. ‘You thought I was dead.’

Kate looked up at that. Face suddenly still. She’d told Clone to take Axl across the plateau. She hadn’t wondered too hard about whether he’d actually do it.

‘Tae kwon do isn’t enough,’ said Axl. ‘You get into a stand-up, knock-down with PaxForce and you’ve lost before it starts. Mai might have fronted them out, but you ... If I hadn’t got you out of there, you might not have ended up dead but you’d have wished you were.

‘You owe me,’ Axl said, when Kate glared at him. ‘Deal with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.

In fact, she sounded worried and scared. Somewhere up the side of that valley, in a shambling monastery was an underage Japanese whore who’d fuck anyone to get away from the woman stood in front of him, even the PaxForce.

It made Axl want to know why.

‘Why didn’t you send Mai to look for the beads?’ Axl asked, though he already knew the answer. Because Mai would have run away. That’s what all of the kid’s night trips to Cocheforet were about. And that other stuff in Kate’s bedroom. Axl wasn’t stupid enough to think Mai had been at all interested in him. Okay, maybe he had been at the time, but not afterwards. Kate was holding Mai at Escondido against her will and the kid wanted out.