redRobe

Chapter Thirty-Five Zazen/Sunyata

Ice grated over rock, reversed and looped into digital fuzz. Sonars blipped under bleak overlays of dolphin funeral cries. Every note was degraded, flat. Emptiness within emptiness. There was no chord he recognised. Nothing that he’d ever heard before. Even the snare line was gone, the noise ugly and a-rhythmic. This was what you got if you fed anger and disgust through a backing track. A meshing of cognitive and aural dissonance.

The Colonel’s question had eaten away what little chance Axl had of sleeping. Crawling through the back of his mind like a king snake, it had disturbed cerebral undergrowth better left untouched, leaving behind its trail of slime.

There was a bed still made up for him on the first floor. A mattress and a blanket but, unlike the Inn this time both were clean. All the same, Axl chose to spend that night sat on a wooden chair in the monastery dining room, watching his spinning timecode count itself down and keeping one eye on the overgrown slope down to the village.

All the doors into Escondido were locked. Windows that had shutters were closed and bolted, Axl knew, he’d done it himself watched by a suspicious Clone. Only the window in the dining room by which he sat and brooded was still open.

He would kill the Colonel. The man was as good as dead…

Axl was still silently raging-at himself, at Colonel Emilio and at the Cardinal when Kate gave a tentative knock and pushed her way into the huge room to find Axl slumped in a chair, the cold barrel of his revolver resting parallel to his face. Salt tears ran unnoticed down his cheeks as he stared at mist that filled the valley and hid the pitiful village below.

‘The last of them just left.’ Kate said it like she couldn’t believe her own words, which she couldn’t. ‘They’ve set up a new HQ in the village.

‘How did you do it? I mean, why did you… ?’ She wanted to reach out and take away his gun if he’d let her. Touch his hand or shoulder, anything to stop the track of tears etched like acid into the dirt on his face. But she was afraid of Axl; and she knew he was afraid of himself.

So instead Kate just pulled up another chair and folded her arms, tucking her restless hands into the grey shahtoosh she wore over shirt and chinos. A cold breeze blew in through the open window to make the wall tapestries of multi-armed gods ripple and sway. She hardly noticed. Nothing that had happened made sense. First the man had given her back the lost memory beads, then he’d driven PaxForce out of her house and now he was crying like a desolate, child, his face so bleak it could have been cut from ice. But if his hollow face was cold, his voice was empty of everything, even echo.

‘You want to know why?’ He asked. Inside his head the king snake was stirring and Axl was too tired to face it down.

Kate nodded. Yes, she did. She didn’t operate well in the dark. Besides beyond that, she needed to know. Kate was coming to believe he really was on her side, whichever side that was. She just didn’t know why.

‘There was a man…’ He told her, then stopped his story before he even really got started, correcting himself. The person hadn’t really been a man, more a boy. Except that wasn’t relevant, not really.

Axl ran through different ways of telling Kate why the Colonel had left quietly and decided events only made sense if he went back to the WarChild. Everything he’d become came out of that.

The shit that went down before WarChild wasn’t part of the story, or even him. Not now. That chapter had just been about another wrong kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Killer Kid. The moniker was chosen by a machine. Though the CySat PR who plucked it out of air laden with cigar smoke gave the impression it was just another flash of brilliance which had dropped into his mind. This was around the time Axl decided, he was going to take the psych tests and that if he passed he was going to sign their contract.

‘Do you remember WarChild?’

She did, though she’d probably only seen it on repeats. And Axl didn’t expect her to approve.

‘Remember the round-faced blond kid with the Russian gun?’

‘The Killer?’

Of course he was a killer, Axl thought. That was what the child was trained for. No one had told him it was wrong. So when his CO was shot on IMF orders, the kid didn’t go after the eleven-year old Guatemalan who pulled the trigger, he hit the officers of the local IMF committee that processed the order.

It wasn’t an official WarChild response, but Axl was wired for sight and sound so 163 million viewers looked through his baby-blues as he crippled two WeGuard and then gunned down fourteen suits sat round a table made from endangered hardwood. WarChild retired him after that. He was thirteen.

She knew who he meant, because about the only thing you could say for CySat, C3N and the other feeds that hovered round war like flies on a corpse, was that it meant everyone shared the same heroes and villains, give or take Jihad leaders and kooks like the Montana militia.

‘Joan said Cardinal Santo Ducque once gave him confession.’

‘Really?’ Axl’s smile was so thin his mouth was no more than a knife wound slashed into his jaw. Absolution was about the one choice the Cardinal had never offered—and just about the last thing Axl would have asked for. God didn’t exist for him, not the Cardinal’s or anyone else’s, come to that.

‘You’ve heard that the kid was a clone ...' Axl said.

Kate looked so shocked that Axl almost smiled properly.

‘It isn’t true.’

‘How about, that he was the Cardinal’s bastard?’

That wasn’t true either. Axl had stolen a hair from the old man’s comb and sent it with fifty dollars to a clinic in Sante Fe. The kind of place that hijacked links from genetics’ websites. He got the result two days later. No genetic pointers in common.

‘That one’s bullshit, too,’ Axl assured her. ‘But you know who I’m talking about?’ He paused to check she did. ‘Well, I’m the kid.’

The pupils of Kate’s eyes exploded with shock, only to pinprick immediately with fear, as if blinded by light. And the gasp she swallowed almost choked her. He was waiting and there was nothing she could say.

Within her silence, Kate could hear the call of circling kites and the mutter that running water makes as it slides over gravel. The air reaching her outside was cold and fresh, but oxygen-poor and stretched gossamer thin. The world, this world, felt very new and fragile.

Axl watch faint goosebumps spreading along the inside of her wrist, while she held one hand to her mouth, knuckles pressed hard against her lips. A strand of black hair curled down her forehead where it had escaped from a steel barrette keeping the rest of her hair in place.

Low down to the side of her neck, and just above the briefest glimpse of breastbone seen through the open collar of her shirt, beat an artery that slowed even as Axl watched it.

She was getting her courage back. And the slow butterfly beat of her blood told him something that Kate was working her body hard not to let him know. She was afraid of him, but there was no way she going to admit it.

Instinct told her to step back. And she was fighting her instinct. Axl found himself being impressed by that. Stamping down gut reactions took training or tight self-control.

‘You are Axl Borja?’

Axl nodded. And watched as Kate tried to make sense of something that didn’t, could never make sense.

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘And Hell was flipping burgers,’ said Axl, nodding again. ‘So did I.’

Sad songs. Not ersatz, but real.

‘I killed someone,’ Axl added after a while, when the notes were gone. ‘People say you should never go back. Well I did. I ended up here.’

‘Mexico has the death penalty.’ It wasn’t quite an accusation but it was definitely a question. One that wasn’t too difficult to answer.

‘I have friends…’

‘The Cardinal?’

Axl thought of the old bastard, probably still sat in his octagonal study. Staring longingly out of that stone window at tiny butterfly boats dotted like dust on the silver surface of the Caribbean, while thousands of petitioners waited for his attention in the sweltering anterooms, dressed in their best clothes.

Friends in high places…

This time Kate did comfort him, with a feather-light brush of her fingers against his shoulder. He wanted to tell her everything then. To warn her against himself, against what he would do in the old bastard’s name to her life and her world.