Luna: New Moon

FOUR

Two kisses for Adriana Corta, one for each cheek. A small gift, wrapped in Japanese print paper, soft as fabric.

‘What is it?’

Lucas loves to bring his mother gifts when he visits. He is assiduous: at least once a week he takes the tram to Boa Vista and meets his mother in the Santa Barbra pavilion.

‘Open it,’ Lucas Corta says.

He sees delight dawn across his mother’s face as she carefully unwraps the paper and catches the tell-tale perfume of the gift. He loves the management of emotion.

‘Oh Lucas, you shouldn’t have. It’s so expensive.’

Adriana Corta opens the tiny jar and breathes in the full aroma of the coffee. Lucas sees years and hundreds of thousands of kilometres roll across her face.

‘I’m afraid it’s not Brazilian.’ Coffee is more expensive than gold. Gold is cheap on the moon, valued only for its beauty. Coffee is more precious than alkaloids and diamorphines. Printers can synthesise narcotics; no printer has ever produced a coffee that tasted of anything other than shit. Lucas doesn’t have the taste for coffee – too bitter, and it is a liar. It never tastes the way it smells.

‘I will keep it,’ Adriana says, closing the jar and for a moment pressing it to her heart. ‘Something special. I’ll know the time. Thank you, Lucas. Have you called Amanda?’

‘I thought I might pass on it this time.’

Adriana passes no comment, not even a look. Lucas’s marriage to Amanda Sun has been etiquette for years now.

‘And Lucasinho?’

‘I cut off his money. I think Ariel gave him some. Dirty cash. What does it say about the family?’

‘Let him have his head.’

‘At some point the boy will have to take some responsibility.’

‘He’s seventeen. When I was that age I was running around with every boy and girl I could lay my hands on. He needs to run wild. By all means cut his money off – it’s good for him to live on his wits. It showed initiative, that trick with the escape suit.’

‘Wits? He’s not been graced with many of those. He takes after his mother.’

‘Lucas!’

Lucas winces at the rebuke.

‘Amanda is still family. We don’t put the bad mouth on family. And you have no right to be displeased with Ariel. Her seat in the White Hare isn’t even warm, and you’re compromising her position.’

‘We got the Chinese deal. We beat out the Mackenzies.’

‘I enjoyed that very much, Lucas. The handball shirts were a nice touch. We’re indebted to you. But sometimes there are bigger issues than family.’

‘Not to me, Mamãe. Never to me.’

‘You’re your father’s son, Lucas. Your father’s true son.’

Lucas accepts the praise, though to him it is bitter, like coffee. His father he has never known. He has only ever wanted to be his mother’s son.

‘Mamãe, can I speak in confidence?’

‘Of course, Lucas.’

‘I’m worried about Rafa.’

‘I wish Rachel hadn’t taken Robson to Crucible. And so soon after the assassination attempt. One could mistake it for conspiracy.’

‘Rafa’s convinced it is.’

Adriana purses her lips, shakes her head in frustration.

‘Oh come now, Lucas.’

‘He sees the Mackenzies’ hand in everything. Rafa’s said this to me. You know Rafa: good old Rafa, fun Rafa, party-boy Rafa. Who else might he say it to in an unguarded moment? Can you see the danger to the company?’

‘Robert Mackenzie will want payback for losing the Chinese deal.’

‘Of course. We’d do exactly the same. But Rafa will see it as another piece of Robert Mackenzie’s personal vendetta.’

‘What are you asking for, Lucas?’

‘Cooler heads, Mamãe. That’s all.’

‘Do you mean, Lucas Corta’s head?’

‘Rafa is bu-hwaejang, I have no disagreement with that. I wouldn’t want any diminution of his prestige. But maybe delegate some responsibilities?’

‘Go on.’

‘He’s the face of Corta Hélio. Let him be the face. Let him be the figurehead. Let him take the meetings and the pitches. Let him continue to sit in that chair at the head of the board table. Just, very subtly, move him out of making the decisions for the company.’

‘What do you want, Lucas?’

‘Only the best for the company, Mamãe. Only the best for the family.’

Lucas Corta kisses his mother goodbye: twice, for family. Once on each cheek.

Twenty kilometres downline from Crucible, Robson Corta-Mackenzie’s familiar wakes him with a song in his ear. The boy runs to the observation blister at the front of the car and presses his hands against the glass. To an eleven-year-old, the first glimpse of the capital of the Mackenzies never ages. The railcar is a Mackenzie Metals private shuttle, running out across the Ocean of Storms on the slow east line of Equatorial One: six sets of three-metre wide track; pure and shining with reflected Earth light, reaching out around the shoulder of the world, all the way around the world. A fast express, inbound from Jinzhong, seemingly leaps out of nowhere and is gone in a blur of light. Rachel finds the view from the front end of the shuttle nerve-wracking. The boy loves it.

‘Look, a Ghan-class hauler,’ Robson says as the rail car skims along the flank of the long, ponderous freight train on the slow up-line. It’s quickly forgotten for, on the eastern horizon, a second sun is rising; a dot of light so brilliant and piercing that the glass darkens to protect human eyes. The dot expands into a ball, hovering like a mirage on the edge of the world, never seeming to grow closer or brighter.

We will be arriving at Crucible in five minutes, the familiars announce.

Rachel Corta shields her eyes. She has seen this trick many times: the dot will dance and dazzle, then at the last instant, resolve into detail. It never fails to awe. The dazzle fills the entire observation bubble, then the rail car moves into the shadow of Crucible.

Crucible straddles the four inner tracks of Equatorial One. The bogies run on two separate outer tracks; old-fashioned steel, not maglev. The living modules hang twenty metres above the line, studded with windows and lights, casting perpetual shadow on the track beneath. Above them are the separators, the graders, the smelters; higher than all of them, parabolic mirrors focus sunlight into the converters. Crucible is a train ten kilometres long, straddling Equatorial One. Passenger expresses, freighters, repair cars run under and through it as if it’s the superstructure of a colossal bridge. Forever moving at an inexorable ten kilometres per hour, it completes one orbit in one lunar day. The sun stands at permanent noon above its mirrors and smelters. The Suns call their glass spire on the top of Malapert Mountain the Tower of Eternal Light. The Mackenzies scorn their affectations. They are the dwellers in endless light. Light bathes them, soaks them, enriches them; leaches and bleaches them. Born without shadows, the Mackenzies have taken darkness inside them.

The rail car passes under the lip of Crucible into shadows and spotlights. Half-seen highlights become a freighter, disgorging regolith through a battery of Archimedes screws. The rail car slows: train and Crucible AIs exchange protocols. This is the bit Robson likes best. Grapples lock on to the railcar and lift it from the line to dock into a slot in the rack of MacKenzie Metals rail shuttles. Hatches meet, pressure equalises.

Welcome home, Robson Mackenzie.

Blades of light stab down through the roof slots, so bright they seem solid. The approach to the heart of the Crucible is guarded by a palisade of light; shards from the mirrors that focus the sun on the smelters. A thousand times Rachel has made the progress down the hall and every time she feels the weight and heat of thousands of tons of molten metal above her head. It is danger, it is wealth, and it is security. The molten metal is Crucible’s only shield from the punishing radiation. It’s a constant awareness for the people of Crucible: the molten metals above their heads, like a steel plate in a fractured skull. Balanced, precarious. One day a system may fail, the metal will fall, but not this day, in her days, in her life.

Robson runs ahead of her. He’s seen Hadley Mackenzie at the lock to the next compartment, his favourite uncle, though only eight years separate them. Hadley is the son of patriarch Robert from his winter marriage to Jade Sun. An uncle then, but more like an older brother. Only sons are born to Robert Mackenzie. It’s the Man in the Moon, the old monster still jokes. Through selective abortion, embryo mapping, chromosome engineering the joke has become a truth. Hadley scoops Robson up into the air. The boy flies high, laughing and Hadley Mackenzie’s strong arms catch him.

‘Result with the Brazilian then,’ Hadley says. He kisses his step-niece on each cheek.

‘I really think he’s the child,’ Rachel Mackenzie says.

‘I hate the thought of Robbo growing up there,’ Hadley says. He’s short, wire and steel, knots of wrought muscle and sinew. Blade of the Mackenzies; deeply freckled from sessions in sun-rooms. Spots upon spots; a leopard of a man. He picks and scratches constantly at his pelt. Too long under the sun-lamps, working on his vitamin D. ‘That’s no place for a kid to learn how to live right.’

Message from Robert Mackenzie, announces Cameny, Rachel’s familiar. Hadley and Robson’s expressions tell Rachel that they are receiving the same communication. ‘Rachel, my love. I’m glad you’ve brought Robson home safe. Delighted. Come and see me.’ The voice is soft, still accented with Western Australian, and unreal. Robert Mackenzie hasn’t sounded like that longer than any of the three people in the lobby have been alive. The image in the lenses isn’t Robert Mackenzie, but his familiar: Red Dog, the symbol of the town that birthed his ambition.

‘I’ll take you up to him,’ Hadley says.

A capsule takes Rachel, Robson and Hadley to the head of Crucible; ten kilometres upline. The maglev drive of the capsule seems to Rachel to amplify the gentle but ever-present tremor of movement. The slow rock of the Crucible on its tracks is the heartbeat of home. Rachel Mackenzie was a reading child, and on those screens, among those worlds built of words, she sailed oceans of water with dire pirates and swashbucklers. In her world of stone seas, this is the closest she can imagine to being on a sailing ship.

The capsule decelerates abruptly and docks. The lock opens. Rachel breathes green and rot, humidity and chlorophyll. This carriage is a great glass conservatory. Under constant sunlight and low lunar gravity, ferns grow to stupendous heights; a green vault of fronds against the curved ribs of the greenhouse. Dappled light, tiger-stripe light: the sun stands unmoving, a hair off the zenith. The ferns all lean towards it. Among the ferns, bird-calls and bright flickers of plumage. Something is whooping somewhere. This is a paradise garden but Robson takes his mother’s hand. Bob Mackenzie dwells here.

A path winds between pools and softly gurgling streams.

‘Rachel. Darling!’

Jade Sun-Mackenzie greets her step-granddaughter with two kisses. The same for Robson. She is tall, long-fingered, elegant and delicate as the fronds around her. She looks not a day older than the one on which she married Robert Mackenzie, nineteen years ago. None of Robert Mackenzie’s offspring are deceived by her appearance. She’s wire and thorn and tight, sinewy will. ‘He can’t wait to see you.’

Robson’s hand tightens on his mother’s.

‘He’s been in a foul mood since the Cortas stole that Chinese output deal,’ Jade throws over her shoulder. She sees Robson glance up at at his mother. ‘But you’ll sweeten it.’

Robert Mackenzie waits in a belvedere shaped from woven ferns. Budgerigars and parakeets keep up an insane gossip of chirps and whistles. Robot butterflies flap lazily on wide iridescent polymer wings.

The legend is that the chair keeps Robert Mackenzie alive but one look tells the truth: it is the will that burns in the back of his eyes. Will to power, will to own, will to hold and let nothing be taken, not even his husk of a life. Robert Mackenzie stares down death. The life-support system towers over his head like a crown, a halo. Tubes pulse, pumps hiss and spin, motors hum. The backs of his hands are blotched with slow-healing haemotomas where needles and cannulas pierce the flesh. No one can bear to look more than an instant at the tube in his throat. The perfume of fern, the smell of fresh water, can’t hide the smell. Rachel Mackenzie’s stomach lifts at the taint of colostomy.

‘My darling.’

Rachel bends to kiss the sunken cheeks. Robert Mackenzie would notice any hesitation or revulsion.

‘Robson.’ He opens his arms to embrace. Robson steps forward and lets the arms enfold him. A kiss from the hideous old mummy, on both cheeks. Robert Mackenzie was forty-eight years old when he chose Mare Insularum over Western Australia and committed family and future to the moon. Too old to go to the moon. He would never survive the lift to orbit, let alone the slow gnaw of low gravity on his bones and blood vessels and lungs, the steady sleet of radiation. Leave it to the kids and the robots. Robert Mackenzie came and sunk the foundations of the moon’s million-strong society. This thing in the life-support chair can rightly claim to be the Man in the Moon. One hundred and three years old, a dozen medical AIs monitor and maintain his body, but its fuel is the same will in his pale blue eyes.

‘You’re a good kid, Robson,’ Robert Mackenzie breathes in the boy’s ear. ‘A good kid. It’s good to have you back where you belong, away from those Corta thieves.’ The papery claw hands shake the boy. ‘Welcome home.’ Robson tears himself free from the frail claws. ‘They won’t steal you back.’

‘My husband has been thinking,’ says Jade Sun. She stands behind him, one hand on the old man’s shoulder. The hand is slim, refined, nails lacquered, but Robert Mackenzie seems to sag under its tiny weight. ‘Is there any reason why Robson shouldn’t be married?’

Hi Mom, hi Kessie. Kids, if you see this, hi. I’ve been kind of quiet for a while. I have an excuse. So: as I said in my really rushed mail, I am working for the Dragons. Corta Hélio. The helium-3 miners.

I’m working for Corta Hélio. I just thought I’d say that again so you can appreciate it. What it means right up front is, no more worrying about oxygen or water or carbon or network, which is why I can send you this. I don’t think I can make you understand how it feels not to have to worry about the Four Elementals again. It’s like winning a lotteria, where you get to keep breathing rather than winning ten million dollars.

I can’t tell you too much about how I got the job – it’s a security thing: the Five Dragons are like the Mafia, always at each other’s throats. But I can say that I am under the personal watch of Carlinhos Corta. Kessie, sister. You should emigrate. This rock is full of hot bodies.

I’m in a surface activity induction squad. Moon-walking. There’s a lot to learn. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. That’s rule one and it rules everything. There are ways of moving, reading signs and signals, being in or out of communications, analysing data from your suit and you need to know them or the one tiny thing you’ve overlooked will cook you or freeze you or asphyxiate you or shoot you full of radiation. We spent three whole days on dust. There are fifteen kinds of dust and you need to know the physical properties of each one from abrasion to electrostatic properties to adhesion. Like Sherlock Holmes learning his fifty types of cigar ash? There’s battery recharge times, lunar navigation – Jo Moonbeams misjudge the horizon and think everything is much further away than it is. And they haven’t even taken us up on the surface yet. And the sasuits. I know they’re meant to be tight, but are they sure they’ve got the size right? Took me ten minutes to get into the thing. Wouldn’t want to do that in a depressurisation. Put it on wrong and you get bruising where the seams pinch. Mind, if the environment deepees, bruising is the least of your worries.

I’m probably scaring you to death. But you get used to it. No one could live with that level of constant dread. But if you ever once get sloppy, it will have no mercy. Carlinhos tells me we usually have at least one death each induction squad. I’m being extra careful that it’s not me.

My squad: Oleg, José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience and me. I’m the only Norte. They look at me. They would say things about me but the only common language is Globo and I’m a native anglophone. They don’t like me. Carlinhos works more or less one to one with me and that makes me different. The special one. So the trainers think I’m a Corta spy and class thinks I’m teacher’s pet. The one who dislikes me least is Patience. She’s originally from Botswana but, like the rest of the squad, she’s been in universities and corporations all over the worlds. Jo Moonbeams must be the most educated immigrants in history. Patience will talk to me and share tea. José wants me dead. If he could engineer it without him getting caught I think he might. He interrupts everything I have to say. I can’t work out if it’s because I’m a woman or a North American. Probably both. Asshole. The squad mentality is like a college football team. Everything in your face in your face in your face. Every breath you taste testosterone. It’s not just because it’s extractive industries; everyone is young, smart, ambitious and very very motivated. At the same time, this is the most sexually liberal society that has ever existed. Lunar Globo doesn’t even have words for straight or gay. Everyone is on the spectrum somewhere.

I’ll tell you what’s hard. Learning Portuguese. What kind of language is this? You have to make yourself sound like you have a permanent head-cold. Nothing sounds the way it spells. At least Portuguese reads logically. But the pronunciation … There is Portuguese pronunciation, and then there is Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation. And then there is Rio Brazilian Pronunciation. And last of all there is the Lunar Variant Rio Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation; and that’s what Corta Hélio speaks. I suggested Hetty translates everything: the looks I got. So, it’s time to learn Portuguese. Which means, adeus, eu te amo, e eu vou falar com você de novo em breve!

Lucas Corta spirals down as light and fragile as a dream through pillars of leaves. Water drips and runs, trickles and riffles, through the runnels and pipes that connect the tiers of grow-tanks. He spirals around the central column of mirrors, reflecting sunlight on to the stacks. Glances up: the green goes up forever until it merges with the blinding sun-coin of the farm cylinder cap. The agriculture shaft is a kilometre deep. The Obuasi agrarium contains five such shafts, and Twé lies at the centre of a pentagram of seventy-five such agraria. Lettuces, salad vegetables, packed so tight a beetle could not crawl between them. If there were beetles on the moon but there are none, nor aphids, nor chewing caterpillars: no insect pests. Potato plants the size of trees; climbing beans reach a hundred metres up the support lattices. The fronds of root vegetables; verdant banks of calaloo and aki. Yams and sweet potatoes; gourds and cucurbits: pumpkins the size of Meridian motos. All nurtured by the run and trickle of nutritionally enriched water, crossplanted and symbiotically managed in self-sustaining micro-ecosystems. Obuasi has never lost a harvest, and it crops four times a year. Now Lucas looks down. Far below, on the catwalks over the fish tanks, are two insect-figures. Ducks gabble, frogs belch. One of those tiny figures is him.

‘The audio quality is extraordinary,’ he says, blinking out of the vision on his lens.

‘Thank you,’ says Kobby Asamoah. He is a vast man, tall and broad. Lucas Corta is a pale shadow next to him. He lifts a hand and the fly lands on it.

‘May I?’

A thought sends the fly from Kobby Asamoah’s hand to Lucas’s. He lifts it to eye-level.

‘You could kill us all in our sleep. I like it.’ Lucas Corta throws the fly up into the air and watches it climb up the shaft of light and green and dank chlorophyll until it is lost to vision. ‘I’ll buy it.’

‘Unit life is three days,’ Kobby Asamoah says.

‘I’ll need thirty.’

‘We can deliver ten and print the rest up.’

‘Deal.’

Toquinho takes the price from Kobby Asamoah’s familiar and flashes it up on Lucas’s lens. It is quite obscene.

‘Authorise payment,’ Lucas orders.

‘We’ll have them for you at the station,’ Kobby Asamoah says. His big, wide open face works again. ‘With respect, Mr Corta, isn’t it a rather excessive way to keep an eye on your son?’

Lucas Corta laughs aloud. Lucas Corta’s laugh is deep, resonant, like chiming music. It quite startles Kobby Asamoah. The ducks and frogs of Obuasi agrarium tubefarm five fall silent.

‘Who says it’s for my son?’

Heitor Pereira lets the fly run over his hand, tiny hooked feet tickling his dark, wrinkled skin. Whichever way he turns the hand, the Asamoah fly stays uppermost.

Lucas says, ‘I want twenty-four-hour surveillance.’

‘Of course, Senhor. Who is the target?’

‘My brother.’

‘Carlinhos?’

‘Rafael.’

‘Very good, Senhor.’

‘I want to know when my brother fucks, farts or finances. Everything. My mother is not to know. No one is to know, except you and me.’

‘Very good, Senhor.’

‘Toquinho will send you the protocols. I want you to handle it personally. No one else. I want daily reports, encrypted, to Toquinho.’

Lucas reads the distaste on Heitor Pereira’s face. He is a former Brazilian naval officer, cashiered when Brazil privatised its defence forces. He fell from grace with the sea and left it for the moon where, like so many ex-military, he set up a private security company. Those days when Adriana was tearing Corta Hélio from the ribcage of Mackenzie Metals were bloody days, of claim jumping and duels of honour and faction fights, when legal disputes were more quickly and economically ended with a knife in the dark. Lives pressed up close against each other, breathing each other’s air. Heitor Pereira has stopped many a blade for Adriana Corta. His loyalty, his bravery and honour are beyond question. They are just irrelevant. Corta Hélio has moved around him. But the loathing Lucas sees is not for that, not even the surveillance fly. Heitor hates that his lapse at the moon-run party has led him into a yoke and harness. Lucas can ask anything of him, forever more.

‘And Heitor?’

‘Senhor?’

‘Don’t fail me.’

An archipelago of dried semen lies across the perfect hollow of Lucasinho Corta’s left ass cheek. He gently lifts Grigori Vorontsov’s arm and slides out from the boy’s embrace. He stretches, tightens muscles, cracks joints. The Vorontsov kid is heavy. And demanding. Five times he had been tottering on the edge of sleep when he felt the prickle of beard against his cheek, the whisper in his ear – hey, hey – the throb of hardening penis against his inner thigh.

Lucasinho has always known that Grigori is hot for him – mad hot, Afua in the study group had said, in one of those girls’ games where you are never told the rules but are punished horribly if you break them – but not that he was such a consummate fucker. He could fuck for hours. Steady, deep, hard. A relentless fucker. And generous with the reach-round. He had hardly been able even to moan. Who would have known the passion inside the guy across the table, when they met up at their weekly in-person colloquium seminars? It was great, tremendous, the best sex he has ever had with a boy, but no more now, right? No more.

For such as Lucasinho Corta has received, what shall he give? Cake. Since his father cut him off he has little else to give. While Grigori snores Lucasinho searches the cooler. Almost as bare as Ariel’s, but there’s enough to bake up a batch of flourless brownies. Two batches. Lucasinho is thinking of his next bed. He can’t stay another night in this one. He can’t take it. Lucasinho drips a little of Grigori’s stash of THC juice into the mix. They had vaped it last night, sprawled across each other on the couch, sharing smokes and kisses. He glances back at Grigori spread like a star across the bed. So hairy. They say that about the Vorontsovs. Hairy and weird. Touched by space. Lucasinho knows the legends. House Vorontsov descends from Valery, the original patriarch, an oligarch who invested in a private launch facility in Central Asia. Wherever that is. They built the orbital tethers, the two cyclers that loop constantly in a figure of eight between moon and Earth; the BALTRAN, the rail network. Space has changed them. They have bred strange: weird, elongated things born to freefall. No one has seen a cycler crewperson for years. They can never come down. Gravity would crush them like decorative butterflies. But none so strange as Valery himself – still alive, a monster grown so huge, so bloated that he fills all the core of a cycler. The legends can never agree whether it’s Sts Peter and Paul or Alexander Nevsky. That’s how you know it’s true. Stories are always too neat.

Lucasinho waves his hand over the cooker panel to clear the glass, peers in at his batches. He glances anxiously at Grigori. This is not the time for the beast to wake. A few minutes more. And out and cooling. Lucasinho feels the shadow on his skin before the press of Grigori’s hair and muscles.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Baking.’

‘What, like?’

‘Brownies. They’re good. They’ve got hash in them.’

‘Do you always bake like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like no clothes.’

‘It connects me.’

‘I think it’s hot.’

Lucasinho’s heart sinks. Grigori is close and tight against him, getting hard. Is this boy made of cum? Lucasinho picks of a crumb of cooling brownie and turns to slip it between Grigori’s lips.

‘Sweet.’

Then they go back to it again.

Marina has a balcony. It’s small but quite addictive. At the end of each day she returns from her training group bone-weary and aching from the new things her body must learn for Corta Hélio and goes to her balcony.

The apartment Corta Hélio has assigned her is on the West 23rd of Santa Barbra Quadra so the drop from the balcony to the street, while not as high as the one from Bairro Alto to Gagarin Prospekt, is an overhang. The vertigo attracts her. And the sounds. João de Deus’s Portuguese-speaking streets have a different timbre from Meridian. Shouts and greetings; the look-at-me cries of teenagers, the voices of children buzzing up and down Kondakova Prospekt on big-tyred tricycles. Different voices. The hum of the moto engines, the elevators, the escalators and moving walkways, the airplant; different noises. The light of the skyline is brighter, the spectrum more yellow than Meridian. The colours of the neons cluster around blue green and gold, the colours of Old Brasil. The names, the words are exclusively Portuguese. Different, exciting. João de Deus is a compact city; eighty thousand people in three quadras, each eight hours out of phase with its neighbours: mañana, tarde, noche. In many ways João de Deus is an old-fashioned place, sculpted from the lava tubes that thread the skin of Mare Fecunditatis. Santa Barbra Quadra is three hundred metres in diameter and feels cramped to Marina. The roof feels close and heavy. She is a little claustrophobic. But there is not enough airspace for fliers and for that Marina is thankful. She hates those fit, arrogant aeronauts.

‘O bloqueio de ar não é completamente despressurizado,’ she says. She tries to speak Portuguese around the apartment. Hetty has been programmed not to respond to Globo.

Daqui a pouco sair para a superfície da lua, Hetty responds. Seu sotaque é péssimo. Her familiar not only speaks better Portuguese than her, she does so in a perfect Corta Hélio accent.

Hetty breaks off her lesson.

Carlinhos Corta está na porta, she says.

Hair good, face good, straighten clothing, check teeth, fold unmade bed back into wall. Within twenty seconds Marina is ready to receive her boss.

‘Oh.’

Carlinhos Corta is dressed in a pair of shorts, footgloves and coloured braids around his elbows, wrists, knees and ankles. That’s all. He greets her in Portuguese. Marina barely hears him. He is a beautiful sight. He smells of honey and coconut oil. Beautiful, intimidating.

‘Get dressed,’ he says in Globo. ‘You’re coming out with me.’

‘I am dressed.’

‘No you’re not.’

Senhor Corta está acessando a sua impressora, Hetty says. The printer dispenses shorts (short) a bra top (skimpy) and footgloves. The instruction is clear. Marina slips them on in her washroom. She tries to pull the top down, the shorts up. She feels nakeder than naked. In her room is her boss and she doesn’t know what he is doing, why he has come, who or what he is really.

‘For you.’ Carlinhos scoops handful of green braids from the printer. ‘I’m giving you the colour of my orixa, Ogun.’ He shows her how to tie them around her joints, how much of a tail to leave hanging. The footgloves feel as if they are sucking her toes. ‘You can run, can’t you?’

Marina follows him down ladeiros. The staircases are narrow and shallow, difficult to jog. Passersby press in to the walls and nod greetings. She runs at Carlinhos’s shoulder along Third, parallel to the central Prospekt but three levels higher. Bicycles and motos whirl past. Marina smells grilling corn, hot oil, frying falafel. Music beats from tiny five-seater bars carved into naked rock. The skyline dims towards purples and reds. Carlinhos takes a left on to a cross-passage. Marina is now under artificial lights. From a T-junction main tunnel ahead she thinks she hears chanting voices. Then she sees a body of runners sweep past along the tunnel, their familiars a hovering choir. Bare skin glistens with oil, sweat, body-paint. Tassels and braids stream from elbows and knees, wrists and throats and foreheads. Singing. They are singing. Marina almost stops dead in surprise.

‘Come on pick it up,’ Carlinhos says and adds half a metre to his stride. Marina lunges after him. She is not a runner but she still has Earth muscle and she catches him easily. Carlinhos turns into the intersecting tunnel, a wide service way curving gently to the right. Marina is unfamiliar with this part of João de Deus. Ahead is the pack of runners, tightly bunched, a peloton. Under lunar gravity they surge and lunge like running gazelles. A rolling sea of movement. Marina hears drums, whistles, the chime of finger cymbals over the chanting. Carlinhos catches up with the back markers. Marina is two steps behind him. The runners part to admit them and Marina falls in easily with the pace.

‘Pick it up again,’ Carlinhos calls and pulls ahead. Marina kicks and follows him into the heart of the pack. Beats engulf her, their rhythm the rhythm of her heart, her feet. The chanting voices call to her voice. She can’t understand the words but she wants to join them. She is expanded. Her senses, her personal space overlap with the runners close around her, yet at the same time she is radiantly conscious of her body. Lungs, nerves, bones and brain are a unity. She moves effortlessly, perfectly. Every sense is tuned to its highest possible note. She hears the drums in her knees, her heels. She smells the sweat of Carlinhos’s skin. The play of the tassels across her skin is erotic. She can distinguish every hovering dust mote. She recognises a shoulder tattoo at the head of the pack and, as if her look was a touch, Saadia from her squad turns and acknowledges her. A wave of undiluted joy breaks through Marina’s entire body.

The words. She knows them now. They are Portuguese, a language she doesn’t fully understand, in a dialect she can’t comprehend, but their meaning is clear. St George, lord of iron, my husband. Saint strike boldly. St George has water but bathes in blood. St George has two cutlasses. One for cutting grass, one for making marks. He wears robes of fire. He wears a shirt of blood. He has three houses. The house of riches. The house of wealth. The house of war. The words are in her throat, the words are on her lips. Marina has no idea how they got there.

‘Pick it up, Marina,’ Carlinhos says a third time and together they move through the press of bodies and familiars to the head of the pack of runners. There is nothing in front of Marina. The tunnel curves away forever before her. Air eddies cool on her skin. She could run like this forever. Body and mind, soul and senses are one thing, greater and more perceptive than any of its elements.

‘Marina.’ The voice has been calling her name for some time. ‘Drop back.’ They peel from the lead position and drop down the side of the pack. ‘Take this right.’

It’s physical pain to leave the runners for the cross tunnel, but the emotional hurt is crushing. Marina comes to a halt, hands on thighs, head bowed, and howls with loss. She hears the voices and drums and chimes of the runners disappearing into the distance and it is like she has been cast out of elf-land. Beat by beat she remembers who she is. Who he is.

‘I’m sorry. Oh God.’

‘Better to keep moving or you will lock up.’

She coaxes her body into a painful jog. The cross tunnel opens on to Third Santa Barbra Quadra. The skyline is dark, the quadra glows with low pools of street light and ten thousand windows. Marina is cold now.

‘How long was I …’

‘Two complete circuits. Sixteen kilometres.’

‘I didn’t notice …’

‘You don’t. That’s the idea.’

‘How long …’

‘No one really knows, but it’s been going on all my life. The idea is that it never stops. Runners drop in, runners drop out. We cycle through the saints. It’s my church. It’s where I heal, where I disappear for a time. Where I stop being Carlinhos Corta.’

Now the weight of those sixteen kilometres descends on Marina’s thighs and calves. She had only ever been a reluctant runner in pre-launch training. This is different. Part of her will always be out there, running in that ever-circling wheel of praise. She can’t wait to go back.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Anything more would tarnish the moment. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we shower.’

Analiese Mackenzie descends the spiral staircase from the bedroom into the entrails of a fly; exploded, expanded, enhanced and annotated. Wings unfold into vanes, eyes disintegrate into their component lens, legs and pulps and proboscis, nanochips and protein processors whirl around her head. At the centre sits Wagner, back turned, naked as he likes to be when he is concentrating, summoning and dismissing, enlarging and superimposing images in their shared sight. It’s dazzling, it’s dizzying, it’s four thirty in the morning.

‘Ana.’

She made no sound she’s aware of but Wagner has picked her out of the apartment’s background of hisses and hums and creaks. It starts with heightened sensitivities, restlessness, a boundless energy. This insomnia is something new.

‘Wagner, it’s …’

‘Take a look at this.’

Wagner leans back his chair, slips an arm around Analiese’s ass. His other hand spins dismembered fly around the room.

‘What is this?’ Analiese asks.

‘This is the fly that tried to kill my brother.’

‘Before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of us.’

‘Oh I’m sure of that.’ Wagner reaches out, pulls a knot of protein circuit out of the exploded fly and dismisses everything else. ‘See?’ He twists his hand, enlarges it until it fills the small room; a brain of folded proteins.

‘You know I’ve got no eye for this kind of thing.’ Analiese works in custom meta logics and plays sitar in a classical Persian ensemble.

‘Heitor Pereira wouldn’t have known what to look for. Not even the R&D guys. It took me a while to find it but the moment I saw it, I thought, that has to be it, and I blew it up and it was, I mean, it’s written all over the molecules, it’s like she scrawled her tag all over it but you have to know what you’re looking for, you have to know how to see.’

‘Wagner.’

‘Am I talking really fast?’

‘Yes you are. I think it’s starting.’

‘It can’t. It’s too early.’

‘It’s been getting earlier and earlier.’

‘It can’t!’ Wagner snaps. ‘It’s a clock. Sun rises, sun sets. You can’t change that. That’s astronomy.’

‘Wagner …’

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He kisses the hollow of her belly and he feels the muscles tighten beneath the honey skin, a thing he loves so hard, because it’s not tech or code or math; it’s physical and chemical. But he can feel the change, like the sun beneath the horizon. He had thought it was the fascination, the dedication that drove his mood, but he realises it’s the change driving his fascination. When the Earth is full, he can work for days on end, burning. ‘I have to go to Meridian.’

He feels Analiese pull away from him.

‘You know I hate it when you go there.’

‘It’s where the woman who made this processor is.’

‘You never had to make excuses before.’

He kisses her strong belly again and she slips a hand behind his head, lacing her fingers through his hair. Analiese smells of vanilla and fabric-conditioned sheets. Wagner breathes deep and pulls away.

‘I got some more work to do.’

‘Go to bed, Analiese,’ Analiese says.

‘I’ll be up later.’

‘You won’t. Promise me, you will be here in the morning.’

‘I will.’

‘You didn’t promise.’

When Analiese has gone Wagner opens his arms and pulls his hands together in a slow clap, summoning the exploded elements of assassin-fly. He set them in slow orbit around him, looking for other clues to its builders but his concentration is broken. On the edge of his hearing, on the edge of every sense, he can hear his pack calling across the Sea of Tranquillity.

For the Pavilion of the White Hare, Ariel Corta wears a reprint 1955 Dior in chocolate with a Chantilly cap-sleeve blouse, deep plunging, ruched. A pillbox hat with a brown silk rose, gloves to mid forearm, complementing bag and shoes. Co-ordinating, not odiously matchy-matchy. Professional but not starchy.

A receptionist takes Ariel up to the conference suite. The hotel is tasteful, the service discreet, but it is far from the most expensive or opulent Meridian offers. In the elevator Ariel switches off Beijaflor as instructed. There is a level of political and social life where constant connectivity is a liability. Nagai Rieko greets Ariel in the lobby where the counsellors socialise in the lobby drinking tea, taking sweet-bean baozi from trays. Fourteen, including the outgoing members. So many exquisite dresses, so many bare shoulders. Ariel feels as if she has been admitted to a secret louche sex party: improper, a little scandalous.

Rieko makes the introductions. Jaiyue Sun, head of development at Taiyang; Stephany Mayor Robles the educationalist from Queen of the South. Professor Monique Dujardin from the Faculty of Astrophysics at the University of Farside. Daw Suu Hla, her family allies of the Asamoahs by blood and business, Ataa Afua Asamoah of the Kotoko trying to keep an over-lively pet meerkat under control. Fashionable chef Marin Olmstead: Ariel blinks at his presence: Everyone does that, he says. He’s been in the White Hare for four years. Pyotr Vorontsov from VTO. Marlena Lesnik from Sanafil Health, the major medical insurers. Sheikh Mohammed el-Tayyeb, Grand Mufti of the Queen of the South Central Mosque, scholar and legalist, famous for his fatwa excusing the necessity of the Haj on the lunar acclimated. Outgoing Niles Hanrahan, and V. P. Singh the poet, his replacement. Six women, five men, one neutro: all successful, professional, moneyed.

‘Vidhya Rao.’ A small, elderly neutro shakes Ariel’s hand vigorously. ‘A pleasure, Senhora Corta. Your family’s presence in the White Hare is long overdue.’

‘Pleasure is mine,’ Ariel says but she is already scanning the room, smart as the meerkat, seeking social advantage.

‘Long overdue,’ Vidhya Rao says again. ‘I was a doctor of mathematics at Farside but for the past ten years I’ve been on the board at Whitacre Goddard.’

Ariel’s attention snaps back to the neutro.

‘The Rao forward.’

Vidhya Rao claps er hands in pleasure.

‘Thank you. I’m honoured.’

‘I’m aware of the Rao forward, but I don’t really understand it. My brother speculates regularly in them.’

‘I would have thought Lucas Corta was far too canny to gamble on the forwards market.’

‘He is. It’s Rafa. Lucas insists he only use his own money.’ Rafa has explained Rao forwards several times – too many times. They are financial instruments, a variant of a futures contract that exploits the 1.26 second communications gap between Earth and moon: the time it takes any signal, travelling at the speed of light, to cross 384,000 kilometres. Time enough for price differentials to open between terrestrial and lunar markets: differentials traders can exploit. The Rao forward is a short-term contract to buy or sell on the LMX exchange at a set price. If the lunar price drops, you are in the money. If it rises, you are out. Like all futures trading, it is a guessing game; a good one, adjudicated by the iron law of the speed of light. That is where Ariel Corta’s understanding ends. The rest is voodoo. To the AIs that trade in milliseconds on the electronic markets, 1.26 seconds is an aeon. Billions of forwards, trillions of dollars, are traded back and forth between Earth and moon. Ariel has heard that the Vorontsovs are considering building an automated trading platform at the L1 point between moon and Earth, setting up a secondary forwards market; time delay .75 of a second. ‘Lucas believes that you should never invest in something you don’t understand.’

‘Lucas Corta is a wise man,’ says Vidhya Rao with a smile. The doors to the suite open. Inside are low tables, deep sofas upholstered in vat-grown leather, tasteful art works.

‘Shall we?’

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the Eagle?’ Ariel asks.

‘Oh, he’s not invited,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Marin is our liaison.’ E nods at the celebrity chef.

‘It’s all very informal,’ Judge Rieko says at the door. With Niles Hanrahan she remains outside as Ariel follows Vidhya Rao into the room. Then the hotel staff close the doors and the Pavilion of the White Hare is in session.

‘Hey.’

Kojo Asamoah lies facing the wall. Medical bots flit and dart around him. At the sound of Lucasinho’s voice he rolls over, sits up in surprise.

‘Hey!’ A wave of the hand banishes the medical machines. They flock in the corners of the room; digitally concerned. Access to the medical centre had not been so easy now that Lucasinho was Kid Off-grid. Grigori Vorontsov had swung it. He had always been the best coder in the colloquium.

‘What are you wearing?’

Lucasinho shows off in the suit-liner. The clothes Ariel printed are top-marque, of the mode, but he tried them on once and then consigned them to the backpack. He likes the look of the suit-liner now. It turns him into a lean rebel. People notice. Eyes catch him as he swings past. That’s good. He might even become a fashion.

He kisses Kojo on the mouth, like a boy.

‘How are you?’

‘Bored bored bored bored bored.’

‘But you are all right?’

Kojo leans back, arms behind head.

‘Still coughing up bits of lung but at least I can lie on my ass now.’ He lifts his left foot. It’s enclosed in what looks like a sasuit boot, with tubes running from it into the base of the bed. ‘They’re growing me a new toe. They printed a bone out, and the stem cells. It’ll be back in about a month.’

‘Brought you something.’

Lucasinho takes the seal-pack from his bag and opens it. The medical bots flutter in distress as their sensors register chocolate, sugar, THC. Kojo props himself up on his elbow and takes an offered brownie, sniffs at it.

‘What have you got in this?’

‘Fun.’

‘That’s what I heard you were having with Grigori Vorontsov.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Afua.’

‘This time she’s right.’

Kojo sits up in the bed. His face is puzzled.

‘What happened to Jinji?’

‘I’m not wearing him.’

Not wearing a familiar is like not wearing clothes. Or skin.

‘Afua said you’d run out on the family. Your father cut you off.’

‘She’s right about that too.’

‘Wow.’ Kojo studies Lucasinho closely, as if looking for sins, or parasites. ‘I mean, you can breathe all right?’

‘He’d never do that. Grandmother would never forgive him. She loves me. Water is okay too, but he has frozen my carbon and data accounts.’

‘What do you do for money?’

Lucasinho spreads a fan of cash.

‘I have a useful aunt.’

‘I’ve never seen this before. Can I smell it?’ Kojo riffles notes under his nose. He shudders. ‘Just think of all those hands that have touched it.’

Lucasinho sits on the bed. ‘Kojo, how long are you going to be in here?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Just, if you’re not using your place …’

‘You want my place?’

‘I saved your life.’ At once Lucasinho regrets playing his ace. It’s unbeatable, it’s low.

‘Is that the reason you came here? Just to hide out at my place?’

‘No, not at all …’ Lucasinho backtracks. No words will convince. He offers a brownie. ‘I made these for you. Really.’

‘I’m not supposed to have anything recreational until the toe grows back,’ Kojo says and takes a brownie. He bites. He melts. ‘Oh man these are great.’ He finishes the brownie. ‘You’re really good at this.’ Halfway down the second, Kojo Asamoah says, ‘You have the apartment for five days. I’ve reset the lock to your iris already.’

Lucasinho pulls himself up on to the bed and curls up like a pet ferret at Kojo’s feet. Now he takes a brownie. The medical bots hum and swarm and register their patient’s increasing level of stonedness. The two teenagers munch and giggle the sweet hours down.

The tall double doors open and the delegates rise from their sofas and drift away, conversation looping into conversation. The Pavilion of the White Hare is ended.

‘So, Senhora Corta, what did you make of your first taste of lunar politics?’ The banker Vidhya Rao slips in to Ariel’s side.

‘Surprisingly banal.’

‘Attention to the banal keeps us alive,’ Vidhya Rao says. The chef Marin Olmstead hurries to the elevator lobby, impatient to rez up his familiar and arrange his report to Jonathon Kayode. ‘Of course politics doesn’t have to be this banal.’ E touches Ariel’s arm, an invitation to linger, to conspire. ‘There are councils within councils.’

‘I’ve only just got my feet under the table at this one,’ Ariel says.

‘Your nomination was not universally welcomed,’ the banker says. E beckons Ariel to sit with er. The touch of vat-grown leather has always made Ariel’s flesh crawl. She can’t forget its provenance: human skin.

‘It would be impolitic to name names,’ Ariel suggests.

‘Of course. Some of us argued strenuously for your admission. I was one of them. I’ve followed your career with interest. You are an exceptional young woman, with a stellar career before you.’

‘I’m far too vain to blush,’ Ariel says. ‘I hope so too.’

‘Oh my dear, this is not wishful thinking,’ Vidhya Rao says. Er eyes are bright. ‘This has been modelled with a high degree of precision. The Rao forward is the least of my achievements. What every investment bank desires is the ability to see the future. To predict which prices will go long and which will short, that would give us a powerful advantage.’

‘You said “us”,’ Ariel says.

‘I did, didn’t I? For the past seven years I have been developing algorithms to model the markets. In effect, I have created shadow markets running on quantum computers, from which it is possible to make educated guesses as to the movements of the real markets. The accuracy is surprising, though we find it’s a less useful tool than we had imagined – acting on that information shows our hand, so to speak, and the market moves against us, abolishing any advantage Whitacre Goddard might enjoy.’

‘Voodoo economics,’ Ariel says. ‘Black magic.’ She snaps her vaper to full length and locks it rigid. She ignites, inhales, lets out a curl of vapour.

‘We found a more useful application for the technique,’ Vidhya Rao says. E leans forwards, demands Ariel meet er eyes. ‘Prophecy. That’s religious gobbledegook of course. I mean useful predictions based on highly-educated guesses derived from fine-scale computer modelling. Modelling the lunar economy and society. We have three independent systems, each running the model. Taiyang constructed three quantum mainframes, I developed the algorithms. We call them the Three August Ones: Fu Xi, Shennong and the Yellow Emperor. They seldom agree – one has to find patterns in their output, but they agree with a high degree of confidence on one person. You.’

Ariel’s outward demeanour is calm and elegant – her court face – but she feels a shock of cold electricity run from her heart to the root of her brain.

‘I’m not sure I like being the Chosen One to a cabal of quantum computers.’

‘It’s nothing so tendentious. We naturally modelled the Five Dragons. You are the major shapers of the economic and political society. You emerge as a significant figure in the Corta family. The significant figure.’

‘Rafa is bu-hwaejang.’

‘And Lucas is the power behind the throne. You do know he is planning to take over the company. Talented boys, but they are predictable.’

‘And you’ve predicted my unpredictability.’ Ariel looses another stream of vapour into the air. Effortless cool. Inside, she is electrically alert.

‘The Three August Ones were unanimous. The Three August Ones are never unanimous. I shall be frank, Ariel. We want to make a bid for your potential.’

‘You’re not talking about Whitacre Goddard.’

‘I’m talking about a movement, a ghost, a philosophy, a diversity.’

‘If you give me good versus evil, this conversation is over.’ But the small neutro has her attention. Curiosity conspires with vanity.

‘Your mother built the moon.’ Judge Reiko’s voice. Ariel had not seen her reenter the lobby. ‘But the political legacy of the LDC and the Five Dragons is essentially feudalism. Great Houses and the Monarchy, dispensing territories and favours, monopolising water, oxygen, carbon allowance. Vassals and serfs indentured to their sponsoring corporations. It’s like Shogun Japan or medieval France.’

Reiko sits beside Vidhya Rao. Ariel begins to feel targeted.

‘The Three August Ones agree that this model is unsustainable,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The Five Dragons have reached the pinnacle of their power – last quarter profits from derivatives trading exceeded those of the Five Dragons for the third quarter in a row. Financial entities like Whitacre Goddard are in the ascendant.’

Ariel holds Vidhya Rao’s eyes until the banker looks away. Corta disdain.

‘The woman in Hamburg plugging her car into the charge point on the street, the girl in Accra who recharges her familiar chip from the school touch-pad, the boy in Ho Chi Minh City playing his DJ set, the man in Los Angeles boarding the HST to San Francisco; what they plug into is Corta helium.’

‘Eloquently put Senhora Corta.’

‘It’s more eloquent in Portuguese.’

‘I’m sure. The fact remains, the future is financial. We are a resource-poor, energy-rich economy. It’s obvious that our economic future lies with weightless, digital goods.’

‘Weightless goods turn strangely heavy when they fall on you. Or have you learned nothing from the Five Crashes?’

‘The Three August Ones …’

‘We are an independence movement,’ Nagai Reiko cuts in.

‘Of course you are,’ says Ariel Corta with a feline smile and a slow draw on her gleaming vaper.

‘We have our own pavilion. The Lunarian Society.’

‘More talking.’

‘Words are better than blades.’

‘And you want me.’

‘The Lunarian Society draws from all Five Dragons and levels of society.’

‘It is much more democratic than the White Hare,’ Vidhya Rao interjects.

‘I’m a Corta. We don’t do democracy.’

Vidhya Rao can’t disguise er scowl of distaste. Nagai Reiko smiles.

‘You want to invite me to join your society,’ Ariel says.

Vidhya Rao sits back, honest surprise on er face.

‘My dear Senhora Corta, we don’t propose to invite you. We want to buy you.’

With a bed under his back and money in his pouch, Lucasinho hits the party circuit. It’s never hard for a Corta boy to find a party. He follows a chain of acquaintances of acquaintances to Xiaoting Sun’s apartment up on Thirty Aquarius Hub. His reputation has preceded him. You skipped out on your father? I mean, no network, no carbon, no bitsies? Where are you sleeping?

Kojo Asamoah’s. While he’s growing a new toe. I saved him. But they roll straight with the next question: Whatever are you’re wearing?

Xiaoting Sun has hired Banyana Ramilepe, the new narco-DJ. She mixes and prints custom highs and moods and loves into juice for a battery of vapers. Lucasinho drifts through the party, gorgeous in tight pink, inhaling empathy, religious awe, pleasure that’s better than any sex, euphoria, golden melancholy. For twenty minutes he is in deep deep love with a short, wide-hipped serious Budiño girl. She is an angel, a goddess, love divine, every day he’ll just sit and stare at her, sit and stare. Then the chemicals break up into nothing and they are sitting and staring at each other and he drops new juice into his vaper. By the end of the night a boy and a girl are drawing hallucination-creatures on his suit-liner with marker pens.

No one comes back with him to Kojo’s.

At the party the next night in Orion Quadra there are two girls in suit-liners, fluorescent green and hi-visibility orange. He’s still trying to work out if one of them was at the Sun party when a bubble-blonde white girl appears in front of him and asks, Can I see the money?

He flicks out the notes and fans them like a street magician.

And this is bitsies?

Five ten twenty fifty one hundred.

A crowd has gathered, the notes pass from fingers to fingers, feeling the textures, the crumple.

And if I just took it?

And if I tore it in half?

And if I set fire to it?

It would be dead money, Lucasinho says. This stuff doesn’t have insurance.

A boy takes a five bitsie note and scribbles on it with a pencil. He’s one of those moços whose tongue sticks out a little when they concentrate. He’s not used to writing.

What about this?

He’s changed the Five to Five Million.

Doesn’t make any difference, Lucasinho says. The boy has left another message, written along the edge in a hand so bad Lucasinho can barely read it. A location in Antares Quadra, and a time.

Antares Quadra is eight hours behind Orion so Lucasinho has only enough time to stuff the suit-liner in the laundry, get his head down, shower and order in some carbs-for-cash before he finds himself at the top of West 97th, in sun-down dark, with riders on luminous bicycles blazing past him. It’s a long climb when elevators and escalators don’t take folding money. He’s at a downhill; an urban bike race down five kilometres of precipitous city architecture. Zigzagging down ramps and stairways. Stupendous leaps, soaring high over roof tops to land in narrow alleys, and on and on, swerving around hairpin corners, accelerating up ramps to leap and fly again. On and on, hurtling down the dark, steering by night-vision lenses and luminous arrows sprayed on walls and the lamps of Antares West, blowing whistles to warn pedestrians and night-strollers. A girl’s hand snatches Lucasinho into a doorway as whistles blare out of nowhere and two bikes streak past, leaving luminous after-imagines on his retinas.

Oh my God, is it you?

It’s me, Lucasinho says. He’s become a celebrity. He buys her mejadra from one of the stands at the top of the run not because she is hungry but because she wants to see cash at work.

You have to do all those sums in your head?

It’s not so hard.

Together they watch the streaks of light race through the alleys and over the roofs and down the walkways, dipping in and out of sight as they duck under build-overs or round corners. Far below, on Budarin Prospekt, tiny luminous spirals wind around each other: bikes at the finish line. The times don’t matter. The winner doesn’t matter. The race doesn’t even matter. What matters is the spectacle, the daring, the sense of transgression, that something wonderful has fallen out of the sky into safe, conventional lunar life.

There are a lot more suit-liners tonight. Two of the guys are decorating each other with the luminous paint the downhillers use on their bikes. Lucasinho’s presence has somehow graced the downhill. Two girls come to Lucasinho through the crowd. They are dressed as nineteenth-century European males: tail coats, wing-collars, top hats and monocles. Kiss-curls and kill-you-deadly make-up. They carry canes in their gloved hands. Their familiars are little dragons, one green, one red. One of them whispers a time and a place in Lucasinho’s ear. He feels her teeth tug on the metal spike in his ear-lobe. Pleasurable little pain. Abena Asamoah licked his blood at his moon-run party.

The girl who rescued him and shared his mejadra is Pilar. She is of no family but she goes back to Kojo’s apartment with Lucas and falls straight asleep in the guest hammock. It’s still light. Lucasinho sleeps to local morning and makes her fresh-baked muffins as a parting gift.

The rest of the batch he brings to this new party. It’s in Antares Quadra, the morning side of the city, across seven rooms in a colloquium block. The two girls from the previous night receive him. They are still dressed as nineteenth-century aristo boys.

Oh baked goods, says one.

But this is old already, says the other, running a finger up Lucasinho’s suit-liner and holding it a moment under his chin. Her lips are very full and red. We will have to do something about you.

The rest of the night is spent making Lucasinho Corta over. Lucasinho giggles as the girls strip him but he’s vain enough to enjoy the exposure.

You see, it’s not about who you do.

You’re so bi, so spectrum, so normal.

It’s about who you are.

What you are.

They paint him, cosmetic him, change his hair, spray him with temporary tattoos, play with his piercings, dress him up and down. Clothes from all retros and none; inventions by fashion students; of all genders and none.

This is you.

A 1980s gold lamé dress, cinched waist, leg-of-mutton sleeves, power shoulders. Panty hose and red heels.

Absolutely you.

The crowd nod and yes and coo. At first Lucasinho thought he had come to a fancy-dress party: mini-bustles and tutus, hair woven with mirrors and bird-cages; hats and heels; ripped hosiery and leather; hi-cut leotards and kneepads. Everyone made-up in a hundred different regimes, all immaculate. Then he realised that this was a subculture where everyone was a subculture.

One of the boys has a mirror in his bag as a period accessory and Lucasinho studies himself in the glass. He looks stunning. He is not a girl, he is not trans-dressing. He is a moço in a dress. His quiff has been backcombed and gelled into a reef. The lightest touch of make-up turns his cheekbones into edged weapons and his eyes into dark murderers. He moves like a ninja in heels. Not a girl, not entirely a boy.

I think he likes it, says Top-Hat and Monocle.

I think he knows who he is, says Wing-Collar and Cane.

One of the girls catches him: Hey, you’re Lucasinho Corta, great dress, show me the cash. Says, Do you want to come to a party?

Where?

She gives him a location and it’s only when he’s back in Kojo’s on his own that Lucasinho realises that it’s in Twé, the capital of the Asamoahs and that Abena Asamoah might be there. And that what he wants, what he really really wants, has only ever been the girl who put the spike through his ear.

‘This is a strange room,’ the musician says.

Lucas sits on a sofa. The room’s only other piece of furniture is a chair, directly facing the sofa.

‘It is acoustically perfect. It’s designed for me but it will still be the best acoustic you have ever heard.’

‘Where should I …’

Lucas indicates the chair in the centre of the room.

‘Your voice,’ the musician says.

‘Yes,’ Lucas says, quietly and without emphasis and his words fill the room. He doubts there is a sound room in the two worlds to match his. He had acoustic engineers flown up from Sweden to supervise its construction. Lucas loves its discretion. There are sonic marvels hidden in its micro-grooved walls, beneath its absorbent black floor and re-shapable ceiling. The sound-room is his only vice, Lucas believes. He controls his excitement as the musician opens his guitar case. This is an experiment. He has never tried the room with live music before.

‘If you don’t mind.’ Lucas nods at the open case on the floor. ‘It will interfere with the wave forms.’

The case removed, the musician bends over his guitar and picks a soft harmonic. The notes come as soft and clear to Lucas as if they were breathing.

‘It is very good.’

‘You should come over here and try it,’ Lucas says. ‘Except then who would play the guitar?’

Tuning, then the musician rests his hands on the wooden body of his instrument.

‘What would you like to hear?’

‘I asked you play a song at the party. My mama’s favourite.’

‘Aguas de Marco.’

‘Play that for me.’

Fingers float across the board, a chord for every word. The boy’s voice is not the strongest or the most refined Lucas has ever heard – an intimate whisper, as if singing only for himself. But it caresses the song, turns its dialogue into pillow-talk between singer and guitar. Voice and strings syncopate around the beat; between them it vanishes, leaving only the conversation: chords and lyrics. Lucas’s breathing is shallow. Every sense is tuned as precisely as the strings of the guitar, harmonically alive and resonating, focused on the player and the song. Here is the soul of saudade. Here are holy mysteries. This room is his church, his tereiro. It is everything Lucas hoped.

Jorge the musician ends the song. Lucas composes himself.

‘Eu Vim da Bahia?’ he asks. An old João Gilberto song with difficult descending chord progressions and a heartbreaking turn. Jorge nods. Lua de São Jorge. Nada Sera Como Antes. Cravo e Canela. All the old songs his mother brought from green Brazil to the moon. The songs of his childhood, the songs of bays and hills and sunsets he has never seen and can never see. They were seeds of beauty, strong and sad, in the grey hell of the moon. Lucas Corta realised young that he lives in hell. The only way to transform hell, to even survive it, is to rule it.

Lucas feels a tear run down his face.

Por Toda a Minha Vida ends. Lucas sits silent and unmoving, letting his emotions settle.

‘Thank you,’ Lucas says. ‘You play beautifully.’ A thought sends the fee to Jorge’s familiar.

‘This is more than we agreed.’

‘A musician argues about being overpaid?’

Jorge fetches the case and stores his guitar. Lucas watches the care and love with which he handles the instrument, wiping sweat from the strings, blowing dust from under the end of the fingerboard. Like laying a child in a cradle.

‘This room is too good for me,’ Jorge says.

‘This room was made for you,’ Lucas says. ‘Come again. Next week. Please.’

‘For that money, I’ll come when you whistle.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

And there it is, in the flicker of smile, the flash of exchanged looks.

‘It’s good to find someone who appreciates the classics,’ Jorge says.

‘It’s good to find someone who understands them,’ Lucas says. Jorge hefts the guitar case. Toquinho opens the door of the sound room. Even the muffled footfalls, the creak of the guitar case, sound perfect.

Shafts of light fall around the fighting figures. The Hall of Knives is a tunnel of bright, dusty pillars of sunlight. The two males, one tall, one short, lunge and dance, feint and follow, barefoot across the absorbent floor, now lit, now shaded. It is as beautiful as ballet. Rachel Mackenzie watches from a small spectators’ gallery by the door. Robson is quick and brave but he is eleven years old and Hadley Mackenzie is a man.

There is no law on the moon, only consensus, and the consensus outlaws projectile weapons. Bullets are incompatible with pressurised environments and complex machinery. Knives, bludgeons, garrottes, subtle machines and slow poisons, the Asamoah’s fancy of small, biological assassins: these are the tools of violence. Wars are small and eyeball close. Rachel hates to see Robson in the Hall of Knives. She hates more his love for and skill in the techniques Hadley teaches him. She hates most that it’s necessary. The Five Dragons rest uneasy on their treasures. Hadley is the family’s duellist. Rumours pass up and down Crucible that Robert Mackenzie has ordained it to keep Jade Sun’s ambitions in check, and to preserve the inheritance line with pure Mackenzies. There is no one better to teach Robson the way of the knife, but Rachel wishes there were another, better bond between him and Hadley. Sport – like his father’s handball obsession – would be healthy and wholesome and command Robson’s energies.

Look at him, slight but sharp as the blade in his right hand. The fighting pants hang off his slender hips. His shallow chest heaves but his eyes take in everything in the long room. A cry. Robson kicks forward to break a kneecap, follows with a slashing cut, high left to low right. Aiming at the eyes, the throat. Hadley dodges the kick, steps inside the blade and twists the arm. Robson cries out. The knife falls. Hadley catches it before it reaches the floor. Another twist and a trip land Robson flat on his back. A knife in each hand, Hadley brings the blades hammering down towards Robson’s throat.

‘No!’

The blades stop a millimetre from Robson’s brown skin. A drop of sweat falls from Hadley’s brow into Robson’s eyes. Hadley is grinning. He hadn’t even heard Rachel’s cry. She didn’t stay his hand. It’s just the two of them. Nothing else exists. The intimacy of violence.

‘What’s the rule, Robbo? If you take a knife …’

‘You must kill with it.’

‘This time – this time only – I’m letting you live. So what’s the lesson?’

‘Never lose the knife.’

‘Never let go. Use their weapons against them,’ says a voice from the door.

Rachel hadn’t heard Duncan enter. Her father is in his early sixties but has the energy and bearing of a man twenty years younger. His suit is simple grey, conservative, single-breasted, immaculately cut but unflashy. His familiar Esperance is a plain silver sphere, its only ornament, liquid ripples that flow across its surface. Nothing in Duncan Mackenzie’s practised minimalism and modesty advertises that he is CEO of Mackenzie Metals. Everything about Duncan Mackenzie declares it.

‘Is he good?’ Duncan Mackenzie asks.

‘He could cut you up,’ Hadley says.

Duncan Mackenzie gives a sour, twisted smile.

‘Bring him along, Rachel,’ he says. ‘There’s someone I want him to meet.’

‘He’ll be five minutes in the shower,’ Rachel says.

‘Bring him along, Rachel,’ Duncan Mackenzie repeats. Robson looks to his mother. She nods. Hadley raises his knife: a fighter’s salute.

Rachel Mackenzie has always been repelled by her Uncle Bryce. Robert is a horror, but Bryce Mackenzie, Director of Finance, is a monster. He is huge. Tall even for a second-gen, lunar gravity has allowed him to pile weight upon weight. He is a gross man-mountain balanced on strangely tiny feet. Not fat, vast. He moves with the lightness and delicacy that big men often possess.

Bryce Mackenzie looks Robson up and down, like a sculpture, like an account. ‘Such a pretty boy.’

A young adoptee brings mint tea. The formality is that Bryce Mackenzie finds his boys at puberty and adopts them, afterwards finding them employment in the company. Many have married in or out, some have become fathers. Bryce is close to his former lovers, and supports them generously. There is never any scandal. Bryce is too dutiful for that. The teaboy is one of three amors currently serving Bryce. Fingers meet over the tea-glass. A look, a smile. Rachel imagines him on top of Bryce, man-mountain Bryce. Riding, riding. Ass pounding.

‘Robson, meet your new husband,’ Duncan says. Rachel’s eyes open. ‘This is Hoang Lam Hung.’ A grown man, well built: twenty-nine, thirty years old.

‘One of your boys,’ Rachel says. Bryce’s soft, full lips purse in offence.

‘Rachel,’ Duncan says. Hung shrugs away the insult, but there is a crack of hurt in the crease of his mouth.

‘This is the nikah.’ Bryce slides the print contract across the desk at the same instant it arrives on Cameny. A legal sub-AI kicks in and summarises the contract to bullet points.

‘You’re joking,’ Rachel Mackenzie says.

‘It’s standard form. No alarms, no surprises,’ Bryce says.

‘Have you asked Robson about his preferences?’ Rachel professes.

‘Dad wants this,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.

‘What do you say?’ Rachel asks her father. She wishes she hadn’t formed that image of the teaboy riding Bryce’s naked bulk. It leads her to imaginings so hideous she covers her mouth with her hands.

‘Like Bryce says, it’s standard.’

‘I need a day or two.’

‘What can there possibly be to think about?’ Bryce says. Rachel is powerless. The will of Robert Mackenzie rules Crucible and she is at the heart of his power. There is no one to whom she can appeal. Jade Sun will always stand with her husband. Whether Hung is kind or cruel, the marriage makes Robson a hostage of the Mackenzies.

Duncan uncaps the pen. Cameny presents the digital signature panel on the virtual contract.

‘I will never forgive you, Bryce.’

‘So noted, Rachel.’

Two quick, decisive stabs of the pen and she would put Bryce’s eyes out. But she signs, and Cameny imprints her digital yin. And it is done.

‘Robson, son: go to your new husband,’ Duncan says.

Hung stands with his arms welcoming. Rachel kneels and hugs Robson to her.

‘I love you, Robbo. I will always love you, and I will never ever let you be hurt. Believe me.’

She leads the boy by the hand across the room. Three steps and the world changes: son to husband. Rachel stands close to Hung and whispers loud for all to hear.

‘If you hurt him, if you even touch him; I will kill you and everyone you have ever loved in your life. Understand.’ Rachel says it to Hung, but her eyes are on Bryce. Again, Bryce’s wet, full mouth works with displeasure.

‘I’ll take care of him, Ms Mackenzie.’

‘I’ll make sure you do.’

Hung rests a hand on Robson’s shoulder. Rachel wants to break every finger, one at a time. She slaps it away from her son.

‘I warned you.’

A touch on her arm: her father.

‘Come along, Rachel.’

The office door opens and two of Duncan’s security enter.

‘What do you think I’m going to do, Father?’

‘Come along, Rachel.’

Rachel Mackenzie kisses her son, then turns away from him, fast so no one will see the look on her face. Never, ever again will she let her uncle, her father, her grandfather, see the marks of the nails they have driven through her heart.

‘Mum, what’s happening?’ The door seals behind her but she can still hear the cries of her son. ‘What’s happening? I’m scared! I’m scared!’

Never let go, her father had said. Use their weapons against them.

The lock is vast, built for rovers and buses, but Marina feels a heart-clench of claustrophobia as the inlock closes behind her. While the lock chamber depressurises, Marina observes. Minute observation is her way of dealing with her fear of confining spaces. Lose herself in the sensory. The crunch of dust under her boots. The dwindling hiss as air is abstracted. The tightening of the sasuit’s grip on her body as the smart weave adjusts to vacuum. Weird, the familiars hovering over the shoulders of her squad. They should be wearing virtual sasuits.

José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience. Oleg is dead. Physics killed him. He mistook weight for mass, speed for momentum. A Joe Moonbeam error. He thought he could stop the moving freight pallet with one hand. Momentum had driven the bones of his outstretched arm through his chest and burst his heart.

Oleg, Blake up in Bairro Alto. As many people have died in Marina’s short life on the moon as in all her years on Earth. Oleg’s death has widened the rift between her and her squad-mates. José no longer speaks to her. Marina knows the squad blames her. She is a jinx, a storm-crow, a karma magnet. She’s started to hear a new lunar word; apatoo: spirit of dissension. The moon is the mother of magics and superstitions.

Marina can’t get the Long Run out of her head. She can’t understand how hours and kilometres disappeared. She can’t understand how she could lose herself in something so irrational. It was nothing more than endorphins and adrenaline, but in her bed she feels the rhythm of the feet, hears the heartbeat of drums. She can’t wait to go back. Body paint next time.

Rotating red lights. The lock is depressurised, Hetty says. She and every familiar wink out and re-visualise as the name of the squaddies, hovering green over each head. Green for all systems normal. Yellow for alert: air supply, water, batteries, environmental warning. Red for danger. Flashing red: extreme danger, immediate risk of death. White for death.

‘Coms check,’ Carlinhos says. Marina says her name and the little tongue-twister of the day to check that she is not touched with oxygen narcosis. ‘Copy,’ she adds hastily. So much to remember. ‘Outlock is opening,’ Carlinhos says. His sasuit is a patchwork of stickers and logos and icons but in the middle of his back is Ogun, São Jorge, his personal orixa. On the wall beside the outlock is an icon of Lady Luna. The skull side of her face has been worn away by thousands of gloved fingers. Touch for luck. Touch to foil death. ‘This is Lady Moon. She is drier than the driest desert, hotter than the hottest jungle, colder than a thousand kilometres of Antarctic ice. She is every hell world anyone ever dreamed. She knows a thousand ways to kill you. Disrespect her and she will. Without thought. Without mercy.’

One by one the Jo Moonbeams line up to touch Lady Luna. Deserts, jungles, Antarctica: those aren’t words Carlinhos has ever experienced, Marina thinks. They sound like a old mantra. The duster’s prayer. Marina brushes fingers across the icon of Lady Moon.

Through the soles of her boots Marina feels the outlock door grind up. A slot of grey between grey door and grey floor opens on to ugly machinery: laagers of surface rovers, service robots, coms towers, the upcurved horns of the BALTRAN. Dumped machinery, wrecked machinery, machinery under maintenance. An extractor, too tall for even this huge lock, roped off with chains of yellow service flashers: a Christmas tree of lights and beacons. Ranges of solar panels, slowly tracking the sun. Far distant hills. The surface of the moon is a scrapheap.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Carlinhos Corta says and leads his squad up the ramp. Marina steps out on to the surface. There is no transition, no crossing from indoor to great outdoors, not even a particular sense of bare surface and naked sky. The close horizon is visibly curved. Carlinhos leads the squad around a kilometre loop marked out by rope-lights. Hundreds of Jo Moonbeams have walked this way, bootprints overlay bootprints overlay bootprints. Bootprints everywhere, wheel tracks, the delicate toe-tips of stalking and climbing robots. The regolith is a palimpsest of every journey made across it. It is very ugly. Like every kid with access to binoculars, Marina had turned the magnification on King Dong; a giant spunking cock a hundred kilometres tall, boot-printed and tyre-tracked into the Mare Imbrium by infrastructure workers with too much time on their hands. Fifteen years back it was already blurred and scarred by criss-crossing tracks of subsequent missions. She doubts anything now remains of its gleeful frat-boy esprit.

Marina looks up. And stops leaving footprints.

A half Earth stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Marina has never see a thing bluer, truer. The Atlantic dominates the hemisphere. She makes out the western limb of Africa, the horn of Brazil. She can track the swirl of ocean storms, drawn in to the bowl of the Caribbean where they are stirred into beasts and monsters, sent spiralling out along the curve of the Gulf Stream towards unseen Europe. A hurricane blankets the eastern terminator. Marina can easily read its spiral structure, the dot of its eye. Blue and white. No trace of green but Marina has never seen anything look more alive. On the VTO cycler she had looked down at the Earth from the observation blister and wondered at the splendour unreeling before her. The streaming clouds, the turning planet, the line of sunrise along the edge of the world. For the first half of the orbit out she had watched Earth dwindle, for the second half she had watched the moon wax. Marina has never seen the Earth from the moon. It squats in the sky, Planet Earth; so much bigger than Marina had imagined, so terribly far away. Bright and brooding and forbidding, beyond reach and touch. Marina’s messages take one and a quarter seconds to fly down to her family. This is home and you are a long way from it, is the message of the full Earth.

‘You staying out here all day?’ Carlinhos’s voice crackles on Marina’s private channel and she realises, startled and embarrassed, that everyone is back at the outlock and she is standing like a fool, gazing up at the Earth.

That is another difference. From the cycler she had looked down on the Earth. On the moon, the Earth is always up.

‘How long was I standing there?’ she asks Carlinhos as the lock repressurises.

‘Ten minutes,’ Carlinhos says. Airblades blast dust from the sasuits. ‘When I first went up I did exactly the same thing. Stood staring until São Jorge gave me a low oxygen warning. I’d never seen anything like it. Heitor Pereira was with me: the first words I said were, “Who put that there?”’

Carlinhos unlocks his helmet. In the few seconds when conversations can still be private, Marina asks,

‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we have a drink.’

‘Did he touch you?’

The little rover bowls flat out across Oceanus Procellarum. It hits every bump and rock at full speed, bounds into the air, lands in soft detonations of dust. Speeds on, throwing great plumes of dust behind its wheels. Its two passengers are banged and bruised, jolted hard, snapped back and forth, to and fro in their safety harnesses. Rachel Mackenzie pushes the rover to the very limits of its operational envelope.

Mackenzie Metals is hunting her.

‘Did he do anything to you?’ Rachel Mackenzie asks again over the whine of the engines and the creak and thump of suspension. Robson shakes his head.

‘No. He was real nice. He made me dinner and we talked about his family. Then he taught me card tricks. I can show you. They’re real good.’ Robson reaches into a patch pocket of his sasuit.

‘When we get there,’ Rachel says.

She thought she would have longer. She had been so careful with her decoys and deceptions. It was a skill of Mackenzie women. Cameny had booked a railcar to Meridian. Rachel had even hacked the lock to create the illusion of two people exiting. Robert Mackenzie had stopped the railcar on remote within twenty kilometres. At the same time, two rovers had set out from Crucible in opposite directions. The first rover took the obvious route, north-east to the Taiyang server-farm at Rimae Maestlin. A logical road to escape; the Suns were doggedly non-aligned in lunar family politics. The wrath of Robert Mackenzie held no fear for House Sun.

Rachel has taken the illogical road. Her course seems headed south-east to the old polar freight line. Power stations and supply caches are strung all along the track. By ancient tradition – ancient by lunar standards – the Vorontsovs must stop a train for anyone who flashes it down from the trackside. Everything after that is negotiable, but the tradition of support and rescue endures. Duncan Mackenzie will have contracted private security to meet trains at all the main stations – Meridian, Queen, Hadley. But those aren’t Rachel Mackenzie’s destination. Not even the rail line.

The rover is windowless, airless, unpressurised, little more than a transmission and power system. Automatic return and overrides have been disabled on this and the decoy, sent in the opposite direction. Rachel has always been a good coder. The family has never valued the talent; any of her talents. Her true destination is the isolated BALTRAN relay at Flamsteed. She has a series of jumps laid in. But Mackenzie Metals rovers are closing in from the extraction plants to the south and east. Cameny is shut down to a whisper: Rachel doesn’t want to advertise her location through the network. She hopes the hunters will be trying to cut her off at the rail line. Journey times can be calculated with high precision. The equations are sharp and cold. If they guess the relay, they will catch her. If they guess the mainline, she will escape. But she has to go on to the network, which will advertise her position to the whole moon.

‘We’ll be there soon,’ Rachel Mackenzie says to her son. Look at him, strapped in in his sasuit across the narrow belly of the rover, his knees touching hers: look at him. The helmet visor masks his hair, the shape of his face and draws all attention to the eyes, his eyes, his great green eyes. There is no world finer – not this grey world, not the big blue world up there – than those eyes. ‘I have to talk to someone. I’m making Cameny active but don’t switch on Joker. Not yet.’

The sense of opening as Cameny connects to the network is physical; like breathing from the bottom of the lungs.

Ariel Corta’s familiar curates the call. Hold please. Then Ariel Corta herself appears in Rachel’s lens.

‘Rachel. What is happening?’

Ariel’s dress, hair, skin, make-up are immaculate. Rachel has thought her sister-in-law snobbish, aloof, careerist. She possesses enough honesty to recognise envy – those Brazilians have all the gifts and graces. Ariel has defeated her family many times in court, but she needs her now.

Rachel summarises the escape. Cameny flicks over the nikah.

‘One moment please.’ Ariel is briefly replaced by Beijaflor, then back. ‘It’s a standard-form marriage contract committing my nephew to a ten-year marriage to Hoang Lam Hung. It’s tight.’

‘Get him out of it.’

‘The contract is legal and binding. The obligations are clear. I can’t release Robson from it under any of the clauses. I can get the contract voided.’

‘Do it. He’s eleven years old. They made me sign it.’

‘Legally, there is no minimum age of wedlock or consent. Duress is not necessarily a defence in our law. I would have to demonstrate that by failing to consult Robson regarding his preferences before signing the sexual activity clause, you violated your parenting contract with him. That would nullify the nikah. I wouldn’t be acting for you, I would be acting for Robson against you. I would be trying to prove that you are a bad mother. Lucretia Borgia degrees of bad mother. However, in taking out this action, by escaping with Robson, you are acting like a good mother. It’s a Catch-22. There are ways around it.’

‘I don’t care how bad you make me look.’

Does she see Ariel Corta, perfect Ariel Corta, loose the smallest smile?

‘There would be a lot of dirt.’

‘Mackenzies built their fortune from dirt.’

‘So did I. Robson would need to retain me and agree a contract. Yet again, only a good parent would advise him to hire me. I must advise you off the record that taking this to court means clear and open conflict between our families. It’s a declaration of war.’

‘It’s a declaration of war if Rafa finds out that I let Robson go without a fight. He would tear Crucible apart with his bare hands to get him back.’

Ariel Corta nods.

‘I can’t think of a more intractable situation. It’s almost as if your grandfather deliberately chose the most provocative act possible.’

The rover lurches. Rachel’s safety harness snaps against the sudden acceleration. And again. Something is crashing against the rover, again and again. She feels not hears the vibrations of cutters, drills. A sudden deceleration: the rover is slowing.

‘What’s happening?’ Ariel Corta asks. Concern on her perfect mask.

‘Cameny, show me!’ Rachel shouts.

‘I’m alerting Rafa,’ Ariel says, then Cameny flashes the exterior cameras up on Rachel’s lens. The maintenance drone clings to the rover like a little toothed nightmare. Manipulators and cutters hack at cabling and power conduits. Again the rover slows as the drone severs another battery. How can this machine be here? Where did it come from? Cameny pans the cameras: there are the upraised horns of the BALTRAN relay among the thicket of solar panels, not two hundred metres away. That’s the answer: her family has retasked the relay’s maintenance drone.

But they’ve forgotten the rover is a depressurised model. Two hundred metres of vacuum is a stroll in sasuits.

Rachel touches Robson on the knee. He starts; his eyes are wide with fear.

‘When I say go, follow me. We’re going to have to finish this on foot.’

The rover drops with a jarring crash to one side. Rachel is thrown hard against her restraints. The rover is immobile, capsized at a crazy angle. The drone has cut away a wheel. Then it takes out the final camera.

‘Robson, my love: go.’

The hatch blows. Dust and hills and the flat black heaven. Rachel grabs the side of the hatch and propels herself out. She hits the regolith, runs. Glances over her shoulder to see Robson land light as a hummingbird and run. The drone is crouched over the wreckage of the rover. Rachel thinks of Bryce Mackenzie, of cancer, if cancer could walk and hunt.

Now the bot raises itself on its manipulators from the wreckage of the rover. Unfolds cutters and long sharp plastic fingers. Climbs down on to the surface, picks its way towards her. It’s not fast, but it is inexorable. And there are operations Rachel needs to perform before she and Robson can catapult to safety.

‘Robson!’

Step by step, the bot gains on the boy. He is slew-footed on the regolith. He doesn’t know how to move in vacuum, how to avoid kicking up blinding sheets of dust. His father kept him too long in the coddled womb of Boa Vista. Should have taken him up to see the Earth at age five, the Mackenzie way. Should have could have would have.

The hatch is ready, Cameny says. The personnel lock will only take one person at a time. Out on the Mares, the BALTRAN system is rough and ready, prioritised for bulk transport.

‘Get in!’ Rachel shouts. Robson scrabbles at the lock. He is so clumsy.

‘I’m in!’

Cameny closes the hatch. Now Rachel must rotate in the capsule. Slow. Why is it so slow? Where is the bot? She doesn’t have time for even a glance behind. Breath hisses through teeth in supreme concentration as Cameny powers up the launch sequence.

The pain in her right calf is so sharp and clean Rachel cannot even cry out. Her leg won’t hold her. Something has been severed. Helmet displays flash red; she gasps as the sasuit fabric tightens above the breach, sealing the suit, compressing the wound.

Your right hamstring tendon has been severed behind the knee, Cameny announces. Suit integrity is compromised. You are bleeding. The bot is here.

‘Get me in,’ Rachel hisses and then the pain comes, more pain than she imagined could exist in the universe and she screams; terrible, bellowing agonised screams. Screams that sound impossible from a human throat. A movement, a dart, a second clean slash, and she’s down. The bot is over her, a shadow against the black sky. Her suit lights glint from three drills, descending on her helmet visor.

‘Launch it, Cameny! Get him out of here!’

Launch sequence initiated, Cameny says. The probability of your survival is zero. Goodbye Rachel Mackenzie.

Drill bits shriek on toughened visor. And at the end Rachel Mackenzie finds only rage: rage that she must die, that it must be here in the cold and dirt of lonely Flamsteed, rage that it is always family fucks you. Her visor shatters. As the air explodes from her helmet she feels the ground shake, sees the flicker of the BALTRAN capsule from the mouth of the launch tube.

Gone.

Rafa Corta is ire and thunder, striding at the head of his security detail. João de Deus is his town; his face is familiar among the Corta Hélio workers and ancillary staff, but not like this: an icon of rage and joy. He is Xango the Just, São Jeronimo, judge and defender. His people glance away from his eyes and make way for him.

The boy has already exited the lock. He stands alone in the arrivals, still in sasuit and helmet, smeared with dust, his familar hovering over his left shoulder.

‘He taught me a trick,’ Robson says. Joker relays his words to the world beyond the helmet. ‘It’s a real good trick.’ Gloved hands take a deck of playing cards from a thigh pocket. Robson fans them out. His voice is dead, flat, alien. Joker catches every tone. ‘Pick one.’

The cards fall from his fingers. His knees collapse, he pitches forwards. Rafa is there to take him.

‘Your mother.’ Rafa shakes the trembling boy. ‘Where is your mother?’