Luna: New Moon

FIVE

Duncan Mackenzie storms through Crucible. Humans make way for him, machines accommodate him. The CEO of Mackenzie Metals is not to be kept waiting for trivial safety regimes. Not in his pale wrath. Duncan Mackenzie’s anger is grey, like his suit, his hair, the surface of the moon. Esperance has hardened to a ball of dull pewter.

Jade Sun-Mackenzie meets him at the lock to Robert Mackenzie’s private car.

‘Your father is undergoing a routine blood-scrub,’ she says. ‘You’ll appreciate the process can’t be disturbed.’

‘I want to see him.’ Duncan Mackenzie’s voice is cold as the metal above his head is hot.

‘My husband is undergoing a delicate and important medical treatment,’ Jade Sun restates. Duncan Mackenzie’s grip is at her throat. He slams her head back against the lock. A fat drip of blood runs slowly down the white lock. You have a scalp contusion and possible impact trauma, her familiar Tong Ren says.

‘Take me to him!’

I have images, Esperance says. The familiar overlays Duncan Mackenzie’s lens with a high-angle view of the old horror in a diagnostic cot. Nurses, human and machine, surround him. Tubes and lines pulse red.

‘That’s not real. You could have fed that to Esperance. You fuckers are clever like that.’

‘You. Fuckers?’ Jade Sun whispers. Duncan Mackenzie releases his grip.

‘My daughter is dead,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. ‘My daughter is dead, do you hear?’

‘Duncan, I’m so sorry. A terrible thing. Terrible. A software error.’

‘The recovery team found precise cuts in her sasuit. That bot hamstrung her.’ Duncan Mackenzie covers his mouth with his hands to hold in the horror. After a moment he says, ‘They found drill marks on her helmet. That’s a very precise software error.’

‘Radiation regularly causes soft fails in chips. As you know, it’s an endemic problem.’

‘Do not fucking insult me!’ Duncan Mackenzie roars. ‘Endemic. Endemic! What kind of word is that? My daughter was killed. Did my father order this?’

‘Robert would never do a thing like that. You cannot possibly suggest that your father – my oko, my husband – would order his own granddaughter assassinated. That is ridiculous. Ridiculous and odious. I’ve seen the report. It was a terrible robotic accident. Be thankful that the boy is unharmed.’

‘And the Cortas are parading him around like a newly signed handball star. When that idiot Rafa Corta isn’t swearing that he’ll cut the throat of every Mackenzie he sees. We’re on the edge of war because of this.’

‘Robert would never court the possibility of harm to the company. Never.’

‘You put a lot of words in my father’s mouth. I’d like to hear them from his lips. Let me through.’

Jade Sun takes a step forward. The only way to the lock is through her.

‘What are you saying?’

‘Like you say, Robert would never harm his own granddaughter.’

‘Is this an accusation?’

‘Why won’t you let me see my father?’

Duncan Mackenzie takes Jade Sun by the shoulders, lifts her, hurls her hard against the lock. She crumples. Hands fall on his shoulders. Strong arms wrestle him away from the gasping, shaken woman. Duncan Mackenzie tears free to confront his assailants. Four males in suits as grey and corporate as his own. Big men, Jo Moonbeams, heavy with Earth-muscle.

‘Leave us,’ he orders. The four men do not budge. Their eyes flicker to Jade Sun.

‘These are my personal blades,’ she says, still pale and shaking on the floor.

‘Since when?’ Duncan Mackenzie bellows. ‘By whose authority?’

‘Your father’s authority. Since I started to feel unsafe in Crucible. Duncan, I think you should go.’

The largest blade, a mountainous Maori with rolls of muscle down the back of his neck, lays a hand on Duncan Mackenzie’s shoulder.

‘Get your fucking paw off me,’ Duncan Mackenzie says and slaps away the hand. But there are four of them and they are big and they are not his. He lifts his hands: no trouble here. Security steps back. Duncan Mackenzie straightens the fall of his jacket, the alignment of his cuffs. Jade Sun’s blades place themselves between Duncan Mackenzie and his stepmother.

‘I will see my father. And I’m ordering my own investigation into what happened out there.’

Duncan Mackenzie turns and stalks away, a walk of shame and humiliation through the shafts of light from the smelting mirrors, but there is time for last thrown-back word, à l’esprit de l’escalier. ‘I am CEO of this company. Not my father. Not you fucking people!’

‘My fucking people stand shoulder to shoulder with your fucking people,’ Jade Sun shouts. ‘Vorontsovs are barbarians, the Asamoahs are peasants and the Cortas are gangsters straight from the favela. Suns and Mackenzies built this world. Suns and Mackenzies own it.’

‘She’s never out of that dress.’ Helen de Braga and Adriana Corta stand by the rail of the eighth-level balcony, between the stone cheekbones of Ogun and Oxossi. The cheeks are dry, the waterfalls have been shut down. Gardeners, robotic and human, dredge leaves from the ponds and stream.

‘Every time it gets dirty, Elis just prints her a new one,’ Adriana Corta says. In her beloved red dress, Luna runs barefoot through the puddles at the bottom of the pools, splashing the garden bots, skipping from stepping stone to stepping stone in a complex game: this one must be landed on left-footed, that right-footed, the other two-footed or skipped over entirely. ‘You must have had a favourite dress when you were that age.’

‘Leggings,’ Helen de Braga says. ‘They had skulls and crossbones on them. I was eleven and a proper little pirate. My mother couldn’t get them off me so she bought me another pair. I refused to wear them because they weren’t the same, but the truth was, I didn’t know which were which.’

‘She has little hiding holes and dens all over Boa Vista,’ Adriana Corta says. Luna disappears into the stand of bamboo. ‘I know most of them – more than Rafa does. Not all of them. I don’t want to know all of them. A girl has to keep some secrets.’

‘When will you tell them?’

‘I thought about my birthday but it seems too morbid. I’ll know the time. I need to finish with Irmã Loa first. Make a full confession.’

Helen de Braga’s lips tighten. She is a good Catholic still. Mass in João de Deus weekly; saints and novenas. Adriana Corta knows that she disapproves of Umbanda, under the eyes of pagan gods every day. What must she think of Adriana making holy confession to a priestess, not a priest?

‘Look out for Rafa,’ Adriana says.

‘Enough with that kind of talk.’

‘I will become less able and competent. I feel it already. And Lucas has his eyes on the throne.’

‘He has always had his eyes on the throne.’

‘He’s having Rafa watched. He’s using the assassination attempt to destabilise Rafa. And after what happened to Rachel …’

Helen de Braga crosses herself.

‘Deus entre nós e do mal.’

‘Rafa wants an independent investigation.’

‘That will never happen.’ Helen de Braga and Adriana Corta are of a generation, the pioneers. Helen was moneyed, an accountant, a Tripeiro from Porto. Adriana was self-made, an engineer, a Carioca of Rio. Adriana reneged on her vow never to trust a non-Brazilian. More than nationality, more than language; they were both women. Helen de Braga has quietly directed Corta Hélio’s finances for over forty years. She is as much family as any of Adriana’s blood.

‘Robson is safe,’ Helen de Braga says. Adriana’s children have always been her second family. Her own children and grandchildren are scattered across the moon in a dozen Corta Hélio facilities.

‘That filthy nikah,’ Adriana says. ‘I’ve already had demands for compensation from Crucible.’

‘Ariel will shred that in court.’

‘She’s a good girl,’ Adriana says. ‘I fear for her. She is so terribly vulnerable. Is it silly to want her here, at home, with us and Heitor and fifty escoltas between her and the world? But you never stop worrying, do you? The Court of Clavius, even the Pavilion of the White Hare, they won’t protect her.’

‘How did we get to be two old women standing on a balcony worrying about vendettas?’ Helen de Braga says. Adriana Corta rests her hand on her friend’s.

At the heart of the bamboo grove is a hidden place, a whispering special place. Natural dieback has exposed the soil and inquisitive hands and feet have picked and trodden it into an enchanted circle. This is Luna’s secret room. The cameras can’t see it, the bots are too big to follow her path through the stems, her father knows nothing and she’s pretty sure that Grandmother Adriana, who knows everything, doesn’t know this one. Luna has staked her claim with scraps of ribbon tied to the the canes, print-ceramic Disney figures, buttons and bows from loved clothes, pieces of bot, cat’s cradles of wiring. She crouches in the magic circle. The bamboo stirs and whispers above her head. Felipe the head gardener once explained to her that Boa Vista is big enough to have its own small winds but Luna doesn’t want there to be a scientific reason.

‘Luna,’ she whispers and her familiar unfolds its wings. The wings open to fill her vision, then close to form her mother.

‘Luna.’

‘Mãe. Hi. When can I see you?’

Lousika Asamoah glances away from her daughter.

‘It’s not so easy, anzinho.’ She speaks Portuguese to her daughter.

‘It’s not fun here any more.’

‘Oh love, I know. But tell me, tell me; what have been doing?’

‘Well,’ says Luna Corta, holding up fingers to count off, ‘Yesterday, Madrinha Elis and I played animal dress-up. We got the printer and the network kept showing us things and we kept printing out animal clothes. I was an anteater. That’s an animal, from the other place. It’s got a big long nose that touches the ground. And a big long tail.’ She folds a finger, one transformation counted. ‘And I was a bird with a big … What’s that thing on their mouths?’

‘Beaks. They are their mouths, coracão.’

‘A beak and it was as long as my arm. And yellow and green.’

‘I think that’s a toucan.’

‘Yes.’ Another counted. ‘And a big cat with spots. Elis was a bird, like Tia Ariel’s familiar.’

‘Beijaflor,’ Lousika says.

‘Yes. She liked that one a lot. She asked me if I wanted to be a butterfly but a moth is really like a butterfly so I said she could be the butterfly, I think she liked that a lot too.’

‘Well, that sounds fun.’

‘Yessss,’ Luna concedes. ‘But … It’s always Madrinha Elis. I used to go to play dates in João, but Papai doesn’t let me do that now. He won’t let me see anyone who isn’t family.’

‘Oh my treasure. It’s only for a while.’

‘Like you said you would only go away for a while.’

‘I did, yes.’

‘You promised.’

‘I will come back, I promise.’

‘Can I come to Twé and see real animals, not dress-up ones?’

‘It’s not so easy, my love.’

‘Do you have ant-eaters? I really want to see ant-eaters.’

‘No, Luna, no ant-eaters.’

‘You could make me one. Real small, like Verity Mackenzie’s pet ferret.’

‘I don’t think so, Luna. Your know how your grandmother feels about having animals around Boa Vista.’

‘Daddy’s been shouting a lot. I hear him. From my special place. Shouting and angry.’

‘It’s not you, Luna. Believe me. It’s not me either, this time.’ Lousika Asamoah smiles but the smile puzzles Luna. Now Lousika’s smile vanishes and in its place she seems to be chewing her words as if they taste bad. ‘Luna; your tai-oko Rachel …’

‘She’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Gone to Heaven. Except there is no Heaven. Just the Zabbaleen who take you away and grind you down to powder and give you to AKA to feed to the plants.’

‘Luna! That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘Helen de Braga believes in Heaven but I think it’s a silly thing. I’ve seen the Zabbaleen.’

‘Luna, Rachel …’

‘Dead dead dead dead dead. I know. That’s why Daddy is upset. That’s why he’s shouting and smashing things.’

‘He’s smashing things?’

‘Everything. Then he prints it out new and smashes it up again. Are you all right, Mamãe?’

‘I’ll talk to Rafa – your daddy.’

‘Does that mean you’re coming back?’

‘Oh Luna, I wish I could.’

‘So when will I see you?’

‘It’s Vo Adriana’s birthday at the end of the lune,’ Lousika says.

Luna’s face brightens like noon. ‘Oh yes!’

‘I’ll be here for that. I promise. I will see you, Luna. Love you.’ Lousika Asamoah blows a kiss. Luna leans forward to place her lips on her virtual mother’s face.

‘Bye Mamãe.’

Lousika Asamoah unfolds Luna into moth form. The familiar returns to its ordained place above Luna Corta’s left shoulder. As she twists and twines back along the twisty path through the bamboo, Luna becomes aware of a change in the the air, a humidity, and a noise. The gardeners have completed their tasks and turned the cascades on again. Water drips, tears, gushes, then torrents from the eyes and lips of the orixas. Boa Vista is filled with the gleeful rush of playing waters.

The ball bends. It’s a beautiful fast arc curving in from right to left, from the height of a throwing hand at the apex of a dive to the bottom left corner of the goal-line. The goalkeeper never moves. It’s in the back of the net before Rafa hits the deck.

The elegance of LHL, what makes handball the beautiful game on the moon and an Olympic oddity on Earth, is its relationship with gravity. With and against. The size of the net, the dimensions of the court and the goal area constrain the advantages of lunar gravity, while gravity makes possible the tricks of spin and slice and ball bending that make spectators gasp at the magic skills of the top players.

‘You’re supposed to stop the ball,’ Rafa Corta laughs. Robson sullenly picks it out of the back of the net. How competitive can a father be against his children? How much can he gloat when he scores against them? ‘Come on.’ He dances back across the court, feet barely brushing the wood. This handball court at Boa Vista is Rafa Corta’s indulgence. The playing surface is perfectly sprung. The sound system was installed by the same engineer who built Lucas’s listening room, though its acoustic is geared for rousing go-faster beats rather than the subtleties of old school bossa. There are concealed bleachers for private invitation matches between Rafa and his LHL rivals. It’s the most perfect court on the moon, and Robson can’t throw, can’t catch, can’t run, can’t score, can’t do anything on it. Rafa intercepts Robson’s dribble, the boy scrambles back and in under a second he is picking the ball out of the back of the net again.

‘What did those Mackenzies teach you, eh?’

Corta security rushed Robson straight from the BALTRAN capsule to the Boa Vista medical centre. His escape from Crucible had left no physical damage but the psych AIs noted a reluctance to speak and a compulsion to show a card-trick to any human who showed an interest in him. Psych recommended a prolonged course of trauma counselling. Rafa Corta’s therapy is more robust.

‘Didn’t they teach you this?’

Rafa throws the ball hard and flat. It strikes Robson on the shoulder. He cries out.

‘Didn’t they teach you to dodge and weave?’

Robson throws the ball back at his father. There is venom in it but no skill. Rafa neatly picks it out of the air and curves it back at Robson. Robson tries to move but it strikes him on the thigh with a clear slap.

‘Stop doing that!’ Robson says.

‘So what did they teach you?’

Robson turns his back and drops the ball. Rafa scoops it up and throws it at point blank range with all his strength. Handball game-suits are tight and thin and the smack of ball against ass is loud as a bone breaking. Robson turns. His face is tight with fury. Rafa catches the ball on the rebound. Robson lunges to slap the ball from his father’s hand but it’s not there: Rafa has dribbled it, turned and scooped it up again. He slams it hard. The court echoes with the boom of ball on flooring. Robson recoils from the ball bouncing up in his face.

‘Afraid of a ball?’ Rafa says and it’s back in his hand again. Again Robson lunges. Again Rafa skips around him, a circle of bounces around his son. Robson turns, turns but he can’t follow the ball. His head turns this way, that way. Boom! He turns into the bounce and it takes him in the belly.

‘Once afraid of a ball, always afraid of a ball,’ Rafa taunts.

‘Stop it!’ Robson yells. And Rafa stops.

‘Angry. Good.’

And the ball is back, bouncing, hand to hand. Badam badam badam. Shoot. Robson yelps at the slap of weighty handball. He yells and throws himself at his father. Rafa is big but fast and light of movement. He dances effortlessly away from his son. The mocking ease with which Rafa outclasses Robson stokes the boy’s anger higher.

‘Anger is good, Robbo.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not, Robbo?’ Dribble, shoot, sting. Catch and bounce, always a blink ahead of Robson’s fingers.

‘That’s what they called me.’

‘I know. Robbo.’

‘Shut up shut up shut up shut up!’

‘Make me, Robbo. Get the ball and I’ll shut up.’

Robson doubles over at a point-blank impact to the stomach.

‘Your mama is dead Robson. They killed her. What does that make you want to do?’

‘Go away. Leave me alone.’

‘I can’t, Robson. You’re a Corta. Your mamãe. My oko.’

‘You hated her.’

‘She was your mother.’

‘Shut up!’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want you to stop!’

‘I will, Robson. I promise. But you have to tell me what you want to do.’

Robson stands stone still in the centre of the court. His hands are held low, outstretched a few fingers’ breadth from his body.

‘You want me to say I want them dead.’

The ball smashes him in the back. Robson rocks but does not move.

‘You want me to say I will get back at them for Mamãe, however long it takes.’

To the belly. Robson wavers but does not fall.

‘You want me to swear like vengeance and vendetta on them.’

Belly, thigh, shoulder.

‘And I do that and they do it back and I do more and they do more and it never ends.’

Belly. Belly. Face. Face. Face.

‘It never ends, Pai!’ Robson punches out. He hits the small, dense handball a glancing blow, enough to deflect it. In an instant it’s back in Rafa’s hand.

‘What they taught me in Crucible,’ Robson says. ‘What I learned from Hadley.’ Rafa can’t clearly see what Robson does, but in a sly fast heartbeat he steps inside his father’s reach and the ball is in the boy’s hand. ‘They taught me to take a man’s weapon and use it against him.’ He flings the ball the length of court and walks off to the sound of its slow, dying bounces.

Badam. Badam. Badam.

From its claw-hold on the inside of the Oxala’s right eye, the spy-fly observes the board table of Corta Hélio.

The Serpent Sea floats in Lucas Corta’s augmented vision. Socrates and Yemanja display identical maps to Rafa and Adriana Corta.

‘A prospecting site at Mare Anguis.’ Toquinho zooms in, rings the named areas. ‘Twenty thousand square kilometres of mare-regolith.’

Lucas lifts a finger and taps the illusory map. Data from selenological surveys overlay the grey and dust. Rafa flicks over the information but Lucas sees his mother’s eyes narrow with concentration.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of running a cost-benefit analysis. Corta Hélio starts turning a profit in the third quarter after the claim is licensed. We can reposition extraction plant from Condorcet. Condorcet is eighty per cent mined out; we have materiel mothballed. Within two years we will be extracting half a billion dollars of helium-3 annually. We estimate the life of Mare Anguis at ten years.’

‘This is thorough,’ Rafa says. Sourness on his tongue and lips. Through his little fly Lucas knows of the private, furniture-smashing tantrums. The constant bodyguard, even among the waters of Boa Vista. The hesitation in Luna before her father scoops her up and throws her up into the air. Golden, affable Rafa is turning dark, ugly with sudden anger at parties and receptions. Berating his useless handball manager, his useless coaching team, his useless players. Lucas appreciates irony: the man who had no good word for his wife in life rages at her death. The news channels reported Rachel Mackenzie’s death as a catastrophic depressurisation event. A delicate lie. The press won’t press. Journalists who vex the Five Dragons suffer their own catastrophic depressurisation events. Report the smiles and the frocks, the affairs and the beautiful children, the marriages and the adulteries. Don’t tug the Dragon’s tail.

‘How soon?’ Adriana asks.

‘Twelve ZMT on Muku.’

‘Not long,’ Rafa says.

‘Long enough,’ Lucas says.

‘This is sound information?’ Adriana asks. Lucas sees her eyes darting over her own virtual lunar terrain. She has the highest surface hours of any living Corta, even Carlinhos. She may not have locked a helmet for ten years but once a duster, always a duster. She will be analysing the terrain, the dust cover, the logistics, the electrical effect of the moon’s transit of Earth’s magnetotail, the likelihood of a solar storm.

‘It comes from Ariel. A tip-off from someone in the Pavilion of the White Hare.’

‘Hell of a tip-off,’ Rafa says. Lucas hears an energy in his voice, an interest in his eyes. His muscles tighten, he draws himself up from his uncharacteristic stoop. The old gold light glows under his skin. It’s game night. The teams are in the tunnel and the crowd is in full cry. But he is still suspicious. ‘We have to act now.’

‘Delicacy,’ Adriana says. She presses the tips of her fingers together, vaults of a bone cathedral. Lucas knows this gesture well. She is calculating. ‘Too fast, we expose Ariel and I spend the rest of my years fighting my way through the Court of Clavius for alleged claim-jumping. Too slow …’

The law on extraction rights is primitive: the steel law of placer stakes and gold rushes that shaped the North American West. Whoever stakes out the four corners of the newly released territory has forty-eight hours to lodge a legal claim and the licence fee with the LDC. It’s a straight race. Lucas has seen Rafa screaming, incoherent, transcendent at Moço games. This is the same thrill. This is what he loves: movement. Energy. Action.

‘What assets have we?’

Lucas commands Toquinho to highlight extraction units around the target quadrangle. Orange icons lie at varying distance from north-west, north-east and south-east corners. The south-west vertex is dark.

‘I have the north-east Crisium units in motion. It will be hard to disguise it as a routine redeployment or a scheduled maintenance.’

Lucas is jonmu: movement orders are not his to issue. Anger flickers; Rafa contains it. He passed the test.

‘My concern are the vertices.’ Toquinho zooms in the scale.

‘We have nothing we can get there in less than thirty hours,’ Rafa says, reading the deployment tags.

‘Nothing on the surface,’ Lucas hints. Rafa picks the ball up.

‘I’ll go talk to Nik Vorontsov,’ Rafa says. He dips his head to his mother and is in motion: decisions to be made, actions to be taken.

‘A simple call will save hours,’ Lucas says.

‘This is why I’m hwaejang, brother. Business is all about relationships.’

Lucas dips his head. Now is the time for a small acquiescence. Let his mother see that her boys are united.

‘Bring this home, Rafa,’ Adriana says. Her face is bright, her eyes clear. Years have rolled from her. Lucas sees the Adriana Corta of his childhood, the empire builder, the dynasty-maker; the figure in the doorway of the berçário. Madrinha Amalia’s whisper: Say goodnight to your mother, Lucas. The smell of her perfume as she leaned over the bed. She wears it still. People are loyal to perfume in a way they are not to any other personal adornment.

‘I will, mãezinha.’ The most intimate term of endearment.

Unseen, the spying fly disengages from its cranny and floats after Rafa.

The bolt of electric blue hits Lucasinho square on the abs. Blue splat to join the red, the purple, the green, the yellow. Almost none of his bare body is unstained. He is a harlequin of colours, as bright as a reveller on Holi.

‘Whoa,’ Lucasinho says as the hallucinogen kicks in. He spins, gets a shot off from his splatgun and then the world unfolds into millions of butterflies. He turns, grinning like a fool, at the centre of a tornado of illusory wings.

The game is Hunting, played up and down and through the Madina agrarium, with bare skins and guns that fire random bolts of coloured hallucinogens.

The butterflies open their wings and link and lock together. Reality returns. Lucasinho ducks under the fronds of a towering plantain. Rotting fronds mash to slime beneath his bare feet. He advances, gun at the ready, still wide-eyed and trippy after the blue. He has been shattered into diamond tiles, flown up the side of an endless skyscraper, watched the colours drip from the world into purple, been his left big toe for what seemed an eternity, chasing and being chased through towering cylinders of dappled light, sniped at from positions high among yams and dhal bushes.

Fronds rustle: movement. Splatgun muzzle next to his cheek, Lucasinho ducks under foliage into a small, damp clearing, heady with growth and rot, a hidden nest.

Something touches the nape of his neck.

‘Splat,’ says a female voice. Lucasinho awaits the sting of the ink-hit, the trip into somewhere else. He came to the party because it was at Twé and he might meet Abena Asamoah. Guerrilla games were not Abena Asamoah’s fun. But it is exciting to chase and be chased, to be lost and a little bit scared at times, to beat people to the draw and shoot them, to snipe them so that they never knew what had hit them, and be hit in return. The gun against his neck is sexy. He’s at the mercy of this girl. Arousing helplessness.

He hears the trigger click. Nothing.

‘Shit,’ the girl says. ‘Out.’

Lucasinho rolls and comes up, splatgun levelled.

‘No no no no!’ the girl cries, hands held up in surrender. Ya Afuom Asamoah, an abusua-sister of Abena and Kojo. Leopard abusua. AKA kinship makes his head hurt. Her skin bears five colour-blots, right hip, left knee, left breast, left thigh, the right side of her head. Lucasinho pulls the trigger. Nothing.

‘Out,’ he says. The same call rings out across the tubefarm, down from the high terraces and the sniping positions in the solar array. Out. Out. Faintly, down the tunnels that connect the agrarium tubes. Out. Out.

‘You’re lucky,’ Lucasinho says.

‘What do you mean?’ Ya Afuom says. ‘I had you on your knees.’ She looks him up and down. ‘You’re covered, man. You need a bath. Come on. This is the best. You’re not scared of fish, are you?’

‘Why?’

‘You get them in the ponds. Frogs and ducks too. Some people freak at the idea of being touched by a living thing that isn’t human.’

‘I think this game is broken,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The more you get hit, the easier it is to get hit.’

‘It’s only broken if you’re playing to win,’ Ya Afuom says.

The bar is set up on the decking. Drinks and vapers in plenty but Lucasinho has had so many chemicals through his brain that he doesn’t welcome any more. The pools are already full. Voices and water-splash ring up the shaft of the tubefarm. Lucasinho lowers himself carefully into the water. Do fish bite, do they suck, can they swim up your dick-hole? Mildly hallucinogenic skin-paint dissolves into the water; halos of red and yellow and green and blue. What does that do to the fish? What does that do to the people who eat the fish? He can’t imagine eating anything that’s shared water with him. He can’t imagine eating anything with eyes.

‘Hey ha!’ Ya Afuom splashes in beside him. Hips, butts touch. Legs entwine. Bellies rub, fingers walk.

‘Was that a fish?’

Ya Afuom giggles and Lucasinho finds he has a breast in his hand and her fingers cradling his ass. His own hands dive deeper through the blood-warm water, seeking folds and secrets. ‘Oh you!’ She has the best ass since Grigori Vorontsov. Then he’s hard and they’re touching foreheads and looking on each other’s eyes and she’s laughing at him, because naked men are ridiculous.

‘I always heard the Asamoah girls were polite and shy,’ teases Lucasinho.

‘Who told you that?’ Ya Afuom says and pulls him in.

Abena. Glimpsed through tomato leaves. Moving from the bar towards the service tunnel.

‘Hey! Hey! Abena! Wait!’

He surges up out of the pool. Abena turns, frowns.

‘Abena!’ He strides dripping towards her. His semi swings painfully. Abena raises an eyebrow.

‘Hi Luca.’

‘Hey Abena.’

Ya Afuom slips in beside him, puts her arm around him.

‘Since when?’ Abena says and Ya Afuom smiles and presses closer. ‘Have fun, Luca.’ She drifts away.

‘Abena!’ Lucasinho calls but she’s gone and now Ya Afuom is gone too. ‘Abena! Ya! What’s going on?’ Some game of abusua-sisters. Now the air is chill and the semi is gone and the hangover of the multiple hallucinogen hits makes him shivery and paranoid and the party has soured. He finds his clothes, begs a favour to get a ticket back to Meridian and finds the apartment very full of Kojo and his new toe. Lucasinho can stay the night but only the night. Homeless fuckless Abena-less.

Wagner is late into Meridian. Theophilus is a small town, a thousand lives on the northern edge of the great desolation of Sinus Asperitatis where only machines move. The rail link to the mainline went in three years ago, three hundred kilometres of single track; four railcars a day to the interchange at Hypatia. A micrometeorite strike took out the signalling gear at Torricelli, trapping Wagner – pacing, scratching his itchy skin, drinking glass after glass of ice tea, howling in his heart – for six hours until the maintenance bots slotted in a new module. The railcar was crowded, standing room only for the hour-long ride.

Am I changing before your eyes? Wagner thought. Do I smell different, other than human? He has always imagined he does.

The Torricelli strike has thrown out travel plans over much of the western hemisphere. By the time Wagner gets into Hypatia Station – little more than the junction of four branch lines from the southern seas and central Tranquillity with Equatorial One – the platforms are thronged with commuters and shift workers, grandparents on pilgrimage around their extended families. Tribes of children; running, shrieking; sometimes complaining at the long wait. Their voices grate on Wagner’s heightened senses. His familiar has managed to book him on to Regional 37; three hours’ wait. He finds a dark and quiet place away from the families and the discarded noodle cartons and drinks cups, sits down with his back against a pillar, pulls his knees up and puts his head down and redesigns his familiar. Adeus, Sombra: olá Dr Luz. The pillars shake, the long halls ring to the impact of fast-passing trains, up there. Zabbaleen robots sniff around him, seeking recyclables. Calls, messages, pictures from Meridian. Where are you we want you it’s kicking off. Train trouble. Miss you, Little Wolf. None from Analiese. She knows the rules. There is the light half of life, and there is the dark half.

Dr Luz couldn’t book Wagner his usual window seat so he can’t spend the journey gazing up at the Earth. That’s good: there’s work to be done. He has to devise a strategy. He can’t arrange a meeting. One whisper of Corta and Elisa Stracchi will run. He’ll lure her with a commission, but he’ll have to make it convincing and exciting. She will do due diligence. Companies within companies, nested structures, a labyrinth of holding bodies; a typical lunar corporate set-up. Not too complicated; that too will spark suspicion. He will need a new familiar, a counterfeit social media trail, an online history. Corta Hélio AIs can fabricate these but it takes time even for them. It’s hard to be thorough when he can feel the Earth up there, tearing at him, quickening and changing him with every fast kilometre. It’s like the first days of love, like being sick with excitement, like the moment of euphoria at the edge of being drunk, like dance hall drugs, like vertigo, but these are weak analogs; none of the moon’s languages has a word for what it’s like to change when the Earth is round.

He almost runs from the station. It’s small morning hours when he falls into the Packhouse. Amal is waiting.

‘Wagner.’ Amal has embraced the culture of the two selves more fully than Wagner and has taken the Alter pronoun. Why should pronouns only be about gender? né says. Né pulls Wagner to ner, bites his lower lip, tugs with enough force to cause pain and assert ner authority. Né is pack leader. Then the true kiss. ‘You hungry, you want anything?’ Wagner’s demeanour says exhaustion more eloquently than words. Change days burn human resources. ‘Go on, kid. Jose and Eiji have still to arrive.’

In the dressing room Wagner peels off his clothes. Showers. Pads soft-footed to the bedroom. The sleeping pit is already full. He lowers himself in; the soft upholstery, the fake-fur lining caress him. Bodies grunt and turn and mutter in their sleep. Wagner slides in among them, cupping and curling like a child. Skin presses close to him. His breathing falls into rhythm. Familiars stand over the entwined bodies; angels of the innocent. The union of the pack.

The rover is lunar utility at its purest: a roll-frame open to vacuum, two rows of three seats facing each other, air plant, power, suspension and AI, four huge wheels between which the passenger frame hangs. Shit fast. Clamped in with her Surface Activity Squad, Marina jolts against the locking bars as the vehicle bounces up rilles, leaps crater rims. Marina tries to calculate her speed but the close horizon and her unfamiliarity with the scale of lunar landmarks gives her mathematics no anchorhold. Fast. And boring. Degrees of boredom: the high blue eye of Earth, the low grey hills of Luna, the blank faceplate of the sasuit opposite her – Paulo Ribeiro, says the familiar tag. Hetty flicks up in-suit entertainment. Marina plays twelve games of Marble Mayhem, watches Hearts and Skulls (a holding episode, as the writers maneouvre the series arc and characters towards the finale) and a new video from home. Mom waves from her wheelchair on the porch. Her arms are thin and blotched, her hair a grey straggle, but she smiles. Kessie and her nieces, and Canaan the dog. And there, oh there is Skyler her brother, back from Indonesia, and his wife Nisrina and Marina’s other nephews and niece. Against a background of grey rain, grey rain cascading from the overwhelmed porch gutter, a waterfall, rain so loud everyone on the porch shouts to be heard.

Behind the blank mask of her faceplate, Marina cries. The helmet sucks up her tears.

A tap on her shoulder. Marina unblanks her faceplate: Carlinhos leans across the narrow aisle of the rover. He points over Marina’s shoulder. The seat restraints allow just enough freedom to turn and take her first sight of the mining plant. Spidery gantries of the extractors reach up from beneath the close horizon. The squad mission is a scheduled inspection of Corta Hélio’s Tranquillity East extraction facility. Moments later the rover brakes in a spray of dust and the harnesses unclamp.

‘Stay with me,’ Carlinhos says on Marina’s private channel. She drops to the tyre-streaked regolith. She is among the helium harvesters. They are moon-ugly, gaunt and utilitarian. Chaotic, hard to comprehend in a glance. Girders house complex screws and separator grids and transport belts. Mirror arms track the sun, focusing energy on solar stills that fraction out helium-3 from the regolith. Collection spheres, each marked with its harvest. Helium-3 is the export crop but the Corta process also distils hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the fuels of life. High-speed Archimedes screws accelerate waste material into jets that arc a kilometre high before falling in plumes of dust like inverted fountains. Earthlight refracts from the fine dust and glass particles, casting moonbows. Marina walks up to the samba-line. Ten extractors work a five-kilometre front, advancing at a crawl on wheels three times Marina’s height. The near horizon partly hides the extractors at each end of the samba-line. Bucket wheels dig tons of regolith at a scoop, moving in perfect synchronisation: nodding heads. Marina imagines tortoise-kaiju with medieval fortresses on their backs. Godzilla should be fighting these things. Marina feels the vibration of industry through her sasuit boots, but she hears nothing. All is silence. Marina looks up at the mirror arrays and waste jets high above her head, back at the parallel lines of tracks, ahead at the ridge of Roma Messier. This is her workplace. This is her world.

‘Marina.’

Her name. Someone said her name. Carlinhos’s gloved hand grasps her forearm, pushes her hand gently away from her helmet latches. The latches: she had been about to open them. She had been about to remove her sasuit helmet in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity.

‘Oh my God,’ Marina says, awed by the absent-minded ease with which she had almost killed herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just …’

‘Forgot where you were?’ Carlinhos Corta says.

‘I’m okay.’ But she isn’t. She has committed the unforgivable sin. She has forgotten where she is. Her first time out in the field and every word of training has fallen from her. She’s panting, snatching for breath. Don’t panic. Panic will kill you.

‘Do you need to go back to the rover?’ Carlinhos asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’

But the visor is so close to her face she can feel it. She is trapped inside a bell jar. She must be rid of it out of it. Free, breathe free.

‘The only reason I’m not sending you back to the rover is because you said, I’ll,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Take your time.’

He’s reading her biosigns on his hud; pulse rate, blood sugar, gases and respiratory function.

‘I want to work,’ Marina says. ‘Give me something to do, take my mind off it.’

Carlinhos’s blank helmet visor is motionless for a long moment. Then he says. ‘Get to work.’

The moon is almost as violent with robots as it is with human meat. Unfiltered radiation eats AI chips. Light degrades construction plastic. The monthly magnetotail, the event of the moon passing through the streaming coma of Earth’s magnetic field, can short weakened electrical circuits and whip up brief but destructive dust devils. Dust. Chief devil of the Tranquillity East samba-line. Everywhere dust. Always dust. It coats struts and spars and spokes and surfaces like fur. Marina moves a finger gingerly over a structural truss. The fuzz of dust moves like hairs to the dance of the electrostatic charge of her sasuit. Over lunes dust grinds, wears, abrades, destroys. Marina’s job is regaussing. It’s simple enough for a Jo Moonbeam and fun to watch. A timer sets the magnetic and electrical reversal and she runs in great bounding moon-strides to the safe distance. The field reverses and repels the charged dust particles in a sudden cloud of silver powder. It is pretty and dramatic and very more-ish. Marina sees in terrestrial, biological similes: an ocean-wet dog shaking its coats; a forest fungus exploding a puffball of spores. The module team is at work even as the dust settles on their sasuits, swapping chipsets and actuators: work robots find hard. Marina’s fingers trace graffiti hidden like heiroglyphs under the dust: the names of lovers, handball teams, imprecations and curses in all the Moon’s languages and scripts.

Boof. Marina gausses off another soft explosion of dust. It should make a noise. The silence is improper. Boof, she whispers inside her helmet. She hears laughter on a private channel.

‘Everyone does that,’ Carlinhos says.

Under the dust are hieroglyphs. Generations of dusters have left their names, their curses, their gods and their lovers on the bare metal in a dozen colours of vacuum pens. Pyotr H. Fuck this shit. Moços HC.

She boofs with every extractor. There are tricks to moon-work. Maintain concentration. The sameness of the terrain, the closeness of the horizon, the uniformity of the extractors, the mesmerising weave on their scoop-heads; all conspired to sedate, to hypnotise. Marina finds her thoughts drifting to Carlinhos running, tassles and weaves and body oil. She shakes him out of her head. The second trick is also a seduction. Not all pressure suits are equal. A sasuit is not a diving suit. There is no water resistance, no air resistance on the surface. Things move fast. Oleg’s head was crushed in training because he made that very mistake. Mass, speed, momentum. Concentrate. Focus. Check your suit reports. Water temperature air radiation. Pressure, coms, network. Channels, weather reports. The Moon has weather, none of it good. Magnetotail, solar activity. A dozen things to check every minute, and still do her work. Some squadmates are listening to music. How do they do that? By the fifth extractor Marina’s muscles are aching. Focus. Concentrate.

So deep is her concentration, so sharp her focus, that Marina doesn’t notice when alerts go off across the public channel as the name above Paulo Ribeiro’s helmet goes red, and then white.

Rafa runs his hands over the burnished aluminium of the landing strut.

‘She’s beautiful Nik.’

The VTO transporter Orel stands bathed in kilowatt brilliance from twenty floodlights. The lifter’s own search-spots highlight hull, thruster pods, the clustered spheres of the fuel tanks, the manipulator arms, the recessed pilot windows, the VTO eagle on the nose.

‘Fuck off, Rafa Corta,’ Nikolai Vorontsov says. ‘She is not beautiful. Nothing on the moon is beautiful. You are such a shitter.’ He laughs like a landslide.

Nikolai is everyone’s idea of a Vorontsov, a wall of a man, as broad as he is tall. Bearded, long hair braided. Earth-blue eyes and a deep booming voice. He amplifies the accent. No follower of the current taste for retro fashion, Nik Vorontsov. Shorts with many pockets, workboots, T-shirt straining over heavy muscles slumping into slack flab. Like all his family, his familiar is the double-headed eagle, with his own personal heraldic device emblazoned on the shield. He is professionally Vorontsov.

‘It’s not how she looks,’ Rafa says, ‘It’s what she is.’

‘Now really fuck off,’ Nik Vorontsov says.

Orel is a moonship. A point-to-point surface transporter. The most expensive and spendthrift means of travel on the moon. The hydrogen and oxygen in the spherical tanks are precious; the fuel for life, not rocket thrusters. It’s the same insanity as burning oil for electricity, up on old Earth. On the moon, energy is cheap, resources rare. People and goods travel by train, rover, surface bus, decreasingly the BALTRAN, the orbital tethers, their own muscle power on foot and wheel and wing. They don’t fly in the cargo pods of moonships.

VTO maintains a fleet of ten transporters stationed at widely dispersed locations around the moon. They are the emergency service, the ambulance, the rescue team, the lifeboat. Nowhere is more than thirty minutes flying time from a transporter hub. Nik Vorontsov commands the fleet and is occasional pilot, engineer and lover of his ugly moonships. They are dearer to him than any of his children.

‘So, you come all the way from John of God to lick my ugly babies and tell me they are beautiful?’ Nik Vorotnsov asks. He says the name of the city in Globo because he has always made a play about how impossible it is to pronounce Portuguese. He and Rafa are old university friends. They studied together, they gymmed together: weights and body culture. Nik went further up Muscle Road than Rafa, but Rafa has made it business to keep on top of the sport to be able to discuss supplements and training regimes with his former gym buddy when they meet at the Nevsky Bar in Meridian over vodka.

‘I came all the way from João de Deus to hire one of your babies,’ Rafa says.

‘Any baby in particular?’

‘Sokol at Luna 18.’ Knowing the locations of the VTO lifeboats is core surface-work knowledge, as is an up-to-date rescue insurance.

‘So sorry. That baby is rotated out for maintenance,’ Nik Vorontsov says.

‘What about Pustelga at Joliot?’

‘Ah. Pustelga. Still waiting spaceworthiness certification. The LDC is so slow.’

‘That’s the entire Tranquillity-Serenity-Crisium sector without any cover.’

‘I know. It’s deplorable. Civil servants – hah. What can I do about it? Be careful out there.’

Rafa slaps Orel’s landing leg.

‘This one.’

‘When do you need her?’

‘A forty-eight-hour wet lease, from now.’

Nik Vorontsov sucks in the air through his teeth and Rafa knows that Orel will not be available for that time, that no Vorontsov transporter will be available. Rafa’s jaw and belly muscles tighten. Anger blisters hot across his face, his hands. The personal touch, he had assured Lucas. Business is all about relationships. Now he has come all this way in his stylish clothes and groomed hair and manicured hands to be made to look like a fool by this Vorontsov blockhouse.

‘How much do you need?’

‘Rafa, this is undignified.’

‘Who got to you?’

‘Rafa, this is not good talk.’

‘The Mackenzies. Was it Duncan, or did the old man crank himself up to doing it personally? Family to family. Robert, it’ll have been Robert. Tying up the transporter fleet, that’s his sense of style. Duncan never had any style. Did he ask you personally, or did it ping up to old Valery and he told you to jump?’

‘Rafa, I think you should leave now.’

Rage bursts inside Rafa, a surge of boiling blood. He is shouting in Nik Vorontsov’s face, speckling him with spittle.

‘You want to make an enemy of me? You want to make an enemy of my family? This is the Cortas. We can fuck you so many ways you will never get out from it. Who the fuck are you? Bus drivers and cabbies.’

Nik Vorontsov wipes the back of his hand across his face.

‘Rafa—’

‘Fuck you, we don’t need you. We will get this claim, and then the Cortas will fucking deal with you.’ Rafa petulantly kicks the transporter’s landing leg. Nik Vorontsov roars in Russian and Corta security has Rafa’s arms pinioned. They came out of nowhere, silent, well-dressed, strong.

‘Senhor, let’s go.’

‘Let me fucking go!’ Rafa shouts to his bodyguards.

‘I’m afraid not, Senhor,’ says the first escolta, wrestling Rafa away from Nik Vorontsov.

‘I’m ordering you,’ Rafa says.

‘We’re not on your orders,’ says First Escolta.

‘Lucas Corta’s apologies for any slight to your family, Senhor Vorontsov,’ says Second Escolta, a tall woman in a well-cut suit.

‘Get your boss the fuck off my base!’ Nikolai Vorontsov roars.

‘At once senhor,’ says Second Security. Rafa spits as he is manhandled towards the door. The gob flies far and elegantly in the lunar gravity. Nik Vorontsov dodges it easily but it isn’t aimed at him. It’s aimed at his ship, his baby, his precious Orel.

The Professional Handball Owners Club is small, comfortable, intensely private. It displays a flagrant discretion: leave your escoltas at the door. The clubs heavily-muscular security tap left forefingers to their pineal glands as you pass: no familiars. The staff will politely remind you until you comply. The club is sporty not luxurious; its ambiance recalls university colloquiums. It has two dozen members, all of them men.

Two dozen men, two dozen friends, and Rafa doesn’t want to speak to any of them. Jaden Wen Sun calls from the depths of a club chair across the salon; Rafa waves an answer and strides for his room. He is charred with anger. He slams the door, lifts a chair and slings it effortlessly across the room. Table, lamps smash and fall. He kicks the shards high and hard. He rips the old-fashioned screen from the wall, how the owners watch their team in the so-discreet PHO Club, smashes it across the edge of the dressing table, smashes and smashes and smashes until it breaks in two. He wedges the broken screen halves into the output hopper of the printer, levers them until he has warped the printer into uselessness.

A tap at the door.

‘Mr Corta.’

‘Nothing.’

The rage has burned to embers. He breaks everything. This room, the deal with Nik Vorontsov – all the same rage. He spat on Nik Vorontsov’s ship. He might have spat on his daughter. When he called João de Deus, Lucas’s pauses and long silences were more eloquent condemnations that any outburst of anger. He has failed the family. He always fails the family. Everything he touches falls to ruin.

Rafa has been careful in his room-smashing red rage. The bar is intact. He sits on the bed, eyes the bottles like lovers across a crowded room. The club keeps Rafa’s room stocked with his personalised gins and rums. It would be a fine night with them, drinking together. Drinking himself to maudlin regret; drunk-calling Lousika in the small hours.

Have some fucking dignity, man.

‘Hey,’ Jaden Sun calls again.

‘I’m going out,’ Rafa says.

The club staff will have the room rebuilt by his return.

Madrinha Flavia is as surprised to see Lucasinho at her door as he was to see her at the foot of his hospital bed.

Lucasinho opens the cardboard box he has carried so carefully from Kojo’s apartment. Green fondant-frosted letters spell the word Pax.

‘They’re Italian,’ he says. ‘I had to look up where Italy is. They’re really light. They’ve got almond in them. Are you okay with almond? It says Pax. It’s kind of like the Catholic word for paz.’ A boy naturally speaks Portuguese to his madrinha.

‘Paz na terra boa vontade a todos os homens,’ Flavia says. ‘Come in, oh come in.’

The apartment is cramped and dim. The only light comes from dozens of small biolights, arranged in every crevice and cranny and along every shelf and ledge. Lucasinho frowns in the green glow.

‘Wow, it’s kind of small in here.’ Lucas ducks under the door lintel and tries to find a place to sit amid the paraphernalia.

‘There’s always space for you,’ Flavia says, taking Lucasinho’s face between her hands. ‘Coração.’

When you need a roof, a bed, hot food, water and clean, your madrinha will always be there.

‘I like your place.’

‘Wagner pays for it. And my per diems.’

‘Wagner?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘Um, my Dad doesn’t …’

‘Talk about me. Your mother neither. I’m used to that.’

‘Thank you for coming to see me. In hospital.’

‘How could I not? I carried you.’

Lucasinho squirms. No seventeen-year-old male can bear being told that he was once inside an older woman. He settles on the indicated spot on the sofa and surveys the apartment while Flavia flicks on the boiler and brings plates and a knife from her kitchen cubby. She shifts icons and biolamps to clear a space on the low table in front of the sofa.

‘You’ve a lot of … Stuff.’

Icons, statues, rosaries and charms, offering bowls, stars and tinsel. Lucasinho’s nose wrinkles at the collision of incense vapers, herbal mixes and stale air.

‘The Sisterhood is big on religious clutter.’

‘The …’ Lucasinho catches himself before the conversation descends into asking parrot-questions to his madrinha’s every statement.

‘The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now.’

‘My vovo has something to do with that.’

‘Your grandmother gives us money to support our work. Irmã Loa has been visiting her as a spiritual adviser.’

‘What does vo Adriana need with a spiritual adviser?’

The boiler sings. Madrinha Flavia crushes mint leaves and infuses.

‘No one’s told you.’ Flavia pushes more statues and votives to the end of the low table and settles on the floor.

‘Hey, I should …’

Flavia waves away Lucasinho’s offer to take her place.

‘Now, this cake you’ve brought me.’ She lifts the knife before her eyes and whispers a prayer. ‘You must always bless the knife.’ She cuts a tiny fingernail of cake and sets it on a dish in front of a statue of Saints Cosmos and Damiano. ‘Unseen guests,’ she murmurs then takes her own slice of Pax cake between fingers as thin and precise as porcelain chopsticks.

‘This really is very good, Luca.’

Lucasinho blushes.

‘It’s good to be good at something, Madrinha.’

Madrinha Flavia brushes crumbs from her fingers.

‘So tell me what brings you to your madrinha’s door?’

Lucasinho lolls back on the patchouli-smelly upholstery and rolls his eyes.

On the train back from Twé he had thought his heart might explode. Heart, lungs, head, mind. Abena had walked away from him. He found his fingers straying to the metal spike in his ear. Abena had licked his blood at his party. At the Asamoah party she looked at him and stalked away. Five times he almost pulled the plug from his ear, to send back it back to Twé the moment the train arrived in Meridian. Five times no. When you have no other hope, Abena had said. When you’re alone and naked and exposed, like my brother; send the pierce. He wasn’t any of those things. To misuse the gift would make her hate him more.

‘I need someplace to stay.’

‘Obviously.’

‘And I have this question I can’t figure.’

‘There’s no guarantee I can figure it either. But go on.’

‘Okay. Madrinha, why do girls do things?’

‘He’s making that wrong.’

The bartender freezes. The bottle of blue Curacao waits over the cocktail glass. The woman turns with granite slowness to stare from the other end of the bar.

‘The lemon twist goes in first.’

Rafa Corta slides to the end of the bar beside the woman. Her clothes are immaculate, her Fendi bag on the stool beside her a classic. Her familiar is a rotating galaxy of golden stars. But she is a tourist. A dozen physical misco-ordinations and stiltednesses, mis-timings and maladaptations declare her terrestrial origins.

‘Excuse me.’

Rafa lifts the glass and sniffs.

‘At least that’s correct. The Vorontsovs insist on vodka, but a true Blue Moon must be made with gin. Seven botanicals minimum.’ He lifts the orb of curled lemon peel with tongs and drops it into the glass. He nods at the Curacao bottle. ‘Give me that.’ A click of the fingers. ‘Teaspoon.’ He inverts the teaspoon and holds it twenty centimetres above the glass. The bottle he holds another twenty centimetres above the spoon. ‘It’s about sculpting with gravity.’ He pours. A thin thread of blue liqueur falls slow as honey from the lip on to the back of the spoon. ‘And two steady hands.’ The Curacao coats the back of the spoon and drips from the rim in chaotic runnels and drops. Azure spirals like smoke into clear gin. The yellow marble of lemon peel is wreathed in ribbons of diffuse blue. ‘Fluid dynamics does the stirring. It’s the application of chaotic systems to cocktail theory.’

He slides the cocktail to the woman. She takes a sip.

‘It’s good.’

‘Only good?’

‘Very good. You make a sweet Blue Moon.’

‘I should. I invented it.’

A group of four middle-aged customers toast some family business success in a corner booth. Corta security haunt a table a discreet distance from the bar. Rafa and the Earth woman are the only other clients. Rafa has stumbled into this bar because it was the closest to the club but he likes it. Old-fashioned up-light turning each drink into a jewel, tightening chins, sharpening cheekbones, shading eyes with mystery. Rare wood and square club couches in tank-leather. Mirrors along the back bar, muttered music, a terrace high on the central hub of Aquarius Quadra. Galaxies of city lights in every direction. He was two caipis down when the tourist woman entered the bar. His mind is made up. No more drinking alone. Blue Moon all the way.

Her name is Sohni Sharma. She is a New York-Mumbai post-graduate researcher finishing a six-month placement with the Farside Planetary Observation Array. Tomorrow the moonloop snatches her up to the cycler and back to Earth. Tonight she drinks the moon out of her mind and blood. She either doesn’t recognise his name or her Mumbai hauteur is supreme. Rafa moves into the vacant social space.

‘Leave these,’ Rafa says, touching the cocktail paraphernalia. ‘A bucket of ice for the gin. I’ll let you know when we need glasses.’

She moves the Fendi. Rafa’s invitation to sit.

‘So did you invent these?’ she asks after the third.

‘Ask them at Sasserides Bar in Queen of the South. Do you know what the expensive part is?’

Sohni shakes her head. Rafa taps the lemon peel.

‘It’s the only bit we can’t print.’

‘Your hands are very steady,’ Sohni says as Rafa performs the spoon and Curacao trick. Then she gasps as Rafa snatches up a glass, slings the gin across the bar floor and slaps it upside down on the bar. Inside, under-lit, buzzing: a fly. Rafa turns to the guards quiet at their tables.

‘Do you know what is in this glass?’

His escoltas are on their feet.

‘Sit down. Sit down!’ Rafa bellows. ‘Tell my brother I know his little spy has been buzzing around since Ku Lua.’

‘Senhor Corta, we don’t—’ the woman starts but Rafa cuts her off.

‘Work for me. Doesn’t matter. You let it get close. You let it get close to me. You’re fired. Both of you.’

‘Senhor Corta—’ the woman guard starts again.

‘You think Lucas wouldn’t fire you for that? You stay with me until I get replacements from Boa Vista. Socrates. Get me Heitor Pereira. And my brother.’ He looks over at the family, sheepish at their table. ‘Where are you going?’

They mumble the name of a restaurant, a song bar.

‘Here’s three thousand bitsies. Have the best night of your lives.’

Socrates transfers the money. They bow themselves out of the bar. The bartender rearranges the bottles while Rafa withdraws to speak with his head of security and then, in less reasoned tones, with his brother. Sohni rests her chin on the bar to stare at the fly.

‘It’s a machine,’ she says.

‘Half machine,’ Rafa says. ‘One of those things almost killed me. I’m sorry I scared you. You shouldn’t have seen that. I’m not sure I can make it up to you.’ He summons a clean glass and pours ice-chilled gin. Splash of lemon. Tendrils of dissolving Curacao. ‘Not a tremor.’ He slides the Blue Moon across the bar to Sohni. ‘One wife has left me, my other wife is dead, my daughter is afraid of me and I hurt my son because I was angry at someone else. My brother spies on me because he thinks I’m a fool and my mother is halfway to believing him. I just lost a deal, my enemies have fucked me over, my security guards couldn’t find their own asses in the dark, someone tried to assassinate me with a fly and my men’s handball team is bottom of the league.’ He raises his own glass. ‘But I still invented the Blue Moon.’

‘I could be an assassin,’ Sohni says. ‘I could pull out a knife and open you from here to here.’ She runs a finger from chin to crotch.

Rafa arrests her hand.

‘No you couldn’t.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

Rafa tilts his head at his former guards.

‘I may have fired them but they still scanned everyone in the place.’

‘You infringed my privacy.’

‘I can compensate you.’

‘Everything really is a contract with you people.’

‘You people?’

‘Moon people.’

Rafa still hasn’t let go of her hand. Sohni still hasn’t slipped it from his grasp.

‘I know I should feel privileged to be working here, but I can’t wait to get back home,’ she says. ‘I don’t like your world, Rafael Corta. I don’t like its meanness and tightness and ugliness and that everything has a price.’ She lifts a finger to her eye. ‘I can’t get used to these. I don’t think I could ever get used to these. You’re rats in a cage, one look, one wrong word away from eating each other.’

‘The moon is all I know,’ Rafa says. ‘I can’t go to Earth. It would kill me. Not quickly, but it would kill me. None of us can go there. This is home. I was born here and I will die here. In between, it’s people, all the way up, all the way down. At their best and at their worst. In the end, all we have is each other. You see contracts for everything; I see agreements. Ways we work out between us to live.’

‘Okay then. Compensate me.’ Sohni frees her hand to tap the gin bottle. Rafa seizes her hand, so firmly her lips part in small shock.

‘Don’t you ever pity me,’ he says and in the same instant releases her. A click of mechanisms releasing: an awning unfolds from above the bar and extends over bar and drinkers.

‘It’s going to rain,’ Rafa says, looking up. ‘Have you seen it rain on the moon?’

‘You haven’t been to Farside Array, have you?’

‘I’m a businessman, not a scientist.’ Slug of gin, plash of peel, the trick with the spoon and the slow Curacao.

‘It’s tunnels and corridors and cubbyholes. I feel like I’ve been stooping for six months. I’m amazed I can straighten my spine.’ She turns on her barstool to look out at the stupendous vistas of Aquarius Quadra. ‘This is the furthest I’ve looked in six lunes.’

Sudden drumbeat on the canopy. Beyond its shelter, rain drops like glass ornaments, detonating softly on the terrace.

‘Oh!’ Sohni raises hands to face in delight.

‘Come on.’ Rafa extends a hand. Sohni takes it. He leads her out into the rain. Fat drops splash Blue Moon from their glasses, detonate around their feet. Sohni turns her face up to the rain. Within seconds they are soaked through, expensive clothes clinging, wringing. Rafa brings Sohni to the rail.

‘Watch,’ he orders. The vault of Aquarius hub is a mosaic of slow-falling, quivering drops, each a twinkling jewel in the night lights of Aquarius. ‘See.’ The skyline comes on, momentarily blinding. Sohni shields her eyes. When she can see again a rainbow spans the vast space of the quadra’s hub. ‘Look!’ Down on Tereshkova Prospekt traffic has come to a standstill. Passengers, pedestrians stand motionless, arms outspread. From stores and clubs, bars and restaurants, others stream to join them. On the terraces and balconies children run out to cavort and yell in the rain. The rain hammers Aquarius Quadra, drumming, booming from every roof and awning, gantry and walkway.

‘I can’t hear myself think!’ Sohni shouts and then the skyline fades to dark. The rain ends. The last drops fall and burst on her skin. The world drips and glistens. Sohni looks around her, dazed with wonder.

‘It smells different,’ she says.

‘It smells clean,’ Rafa says. ‘This is the first time you’ve breathed air without dust in it. The rain scrubs out the dust. That’s why we do it.’

‘How can you afford to waste the water?’

‘It’s not wasted. Every drop is collected.’

‘But the expense. Who pays for this?’

Now Rafa touches a finger under his eye.

‘You do.’

Sohni’s eyes widen as she reads the charge to her water account on her chib.

‘But that’s …’

‘Nothing. Do you begrudge it?’

‘No. Never.’ She shivers.

‘You’re wet through,’ Rafa says. ‘I can print you something fresh at my club.’

Sohni smiles through the shivers.

‘That’s a pick-up line.’

‘Yes it is.’

‘Come on then.’

Socrates throws a big tip to the bartender and Sohni and Rafa dash back through the dripping city to the PHO Club. The spying fly remains, buzzing in its glass bell-jar.

Lucas returns to the listening room and sits on the acoustic centre of the sofa.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything is in order. Please start Expresso again.’

‘It’s just that you don’t take interruptions.’ This is Jorge’s third listening room session but the pattern is established. He plays for an hour unbroken, Lucas listens for an hour undivided. But in the third bar of Expresso, Lucas had risen abruptly from the sofa and hurried from the room. Jorge could not hear Lucas’s business but he was gone several minutes.

‘Expresso, please.’

But the disturbance has thrown Jorge and it takes him a few moments to work out the tension in his fingers and body and throat. Fingers find the chords, voice the syncopation. There are no further interruptions but the flow of energy from performer to audience and back to performer is disturbed. Jorge finishes Izaura with a muted cadence and packs away the guitar.

‘Same time next week, Senhor Corta?’

‘Yes.’ A hand on Jorge’s shoulder as he turns to go. ‘Stay for a drink.’

‘Thank you, Senhor Corta.’

Lucas guides Jorge, guitar in hand, to the lounge and brings him a mojito.

‘I have got the proportions right?’

‘It’s perfect, Senhor Corta.’

‘Taste it first.’

He does. It is.

Lucas takes his own drink to the window. João de Deus whirls past, movement and light, level upon level. Blue neon, green biolights, gold street lamps.

‘I apologise for taking that call. I could see it threw you.’

‘Being professional is not letting it throw you.’

‘It threw me. I must still be an amateur audience. Do you have brothers, Jorge?’

‘Two sisters, Senhor Corta.’

‘I would say you’re lucky, but in my experience, sisters can be as difficult as brothers. Differently difficult. The thing about brothers is, the rules are set in place at birth. Firstborn is always firstborn. Always golden. Are you firstborn, Jorge?’

‘I’m in the middle.’

‘That would be me and Ariel. Carlinhos is the darling. The youngest always is.’

‘I thought there were five Cortas.’

‘Four Cortas and a pretender,’ Lucas says. ‘I see you’ve finished.’ Jorge gulped his mojito. Nervy drinking. ‘Have another one. Try to enjoy it this time. The rum really is good.’ He brings the second drink and with it lures Jorge to the window. ‘My mother was a pioneer, an entrepreneur, a dynasty builder but in many ways quite traditional. Those things are not incompatible. The firstborn will run the company. The rest serve as their talents allow. I do. Carlinhos does. Even Wagner serves. Ariel. I envy Ariel. She chose her own career outside the company. Counsel Ariel Corta. Queen of the nikahs. The toast of Meridian.’ Lucas raises his glass to the teeming, dusty street. ‘She is a White Hare.’

‘Anyone who says they’re a White Hare—’

‘Almost certainly isn’t. I know. If Ariel says she is a White Hare, she is. What do you think of my rum, Jorge?’

‘It is good.’

‘My own personal brand. When you were a boy, did you have pets?’

‘Only machine ones.’

‘Us too. My mother wouldn’t have anything organic about the place. All that shitting and dying. The Asamoahs gave us a flock of decorative butterflies for Lucasinho’s moon-run. My mother complained about the mess for days. Wings everywhere. Machines are cleaner. But they still terminate. They die. They make them die, you know? To teach kids a lesson. And then someone has to put them into the deprinter. That was my job, Jorge.’ Lucas takes a sip. Jorge is nearing the bottom of his second mojito. Lucas has barely tasted his first. ‘The Golden Boy has made a dreadful mistake. He has managed to alienate the Vorontsovs. He let his feelings get the better out of him and has jeopardised not just our expansion plan but our shipping deal with VTO. We rely on VTO to ship helium containers to Earth. And it’s up to me to repair the damage. Think of a solution. Upcycle the dead. Clean up the mess.’

‘Should I be hearing this, Senhor Corta?’

‘You’re hearing what I want you to hear. Jorge, I fear for my family. My brother is an idiot. My mother … She’s not what she was. She’s keeping something from me. Helen de Braga and that fool Heitor Pereira will never tell me, no matter what levers I apply. The company will fall unless someone deals with the shit and the death. Do you have any children, Jorge?’

‘I’m not on that spectrum.’

‘I know.’ Lucas takes Jorge’s empty glass and sets a fresh one in his hand. ‘I have a son. I find myself unexpectedly proud of him. He ran away from home. We live in the most enclosed, surveilled society in human history and young people still try to do that. I cut him off, naturally. Nothing fatal, nothing health-limiting. He lives by his wits. It seems he has some. And charm. He doesn’t take after me in that. He’s making some success of it. He’s become a minor celebrity. Five days of fame and then everyone will forget him. I can pull him in any time I want but I don’t want to. Not yet. I want to see what else he finds inside himself. He has qualities I don’t. He’s kind, it seems, and quite honourable. Too kind and honourable for the company, I fear. I fear a lot for the future. What do you think of this one?’ Lucas tilts his glass towards Jorge’s.

‘It’s different. Smokier. Tougher.’

‘Tougher. Yes. That’s my own cachaca. It’s what we should be drinking when we make bossa. I find it a little uncouth. So, I must stage a board-room coup. I must fight my family to save my family. And I’m telling all this to a bossa nova singer. And you’re thinking, am I his therapist, his confessor? His minstrel, his fool?’

‘I’m not a fool.’ Jorge snatches up his guitar. Lucas stops him three paces from the door.

‘In old Europe the king’s fool was the only one the king could trust with the truth, and the only one who could tell the truth to the king.’

‘Is that an apology?’

‘Yes.’

‘I should still go.’ Jorge looks ruefully at the glass in his other hand.

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Same time next week, Senhor Corta?’

‘Lucas.’

‘Lucas.’

‘Could we make it a little earlier?’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Mamãe?’

Adriana wakes with a small cry. She is in a bed in a room but she doesn’t know where and her body will not answer her though it feels light as a dream, insubstantial as fate. A presence over her, close as breath, breathing in as she breathes out.

‘Carlos?’

‘Mama, it’s all right.’

The voice is inside her head.

‘Who?’

‘Mama, it’s me. Lucas.’

That name, that voice.

‘Oh. Lucas. What time is it?’

‘Late, Mamãe. Sorry to disturb you. Are you all right?’

‘I slept badly.’

The light swells. She is in her bed, in her room, in her palace. The looming, breath-eating ghost is Lucas, rendered on her lens.

‘I’ve told you to see Dr Macaraeg about that. She can give you something.’

‘Can she give me thirty years?’

Lucas smiles. Adriana wishes she could touch him.

‘I’ll not disturb you then. Get some sleep. I just want you to know that we haven’t lost Mare Anguis. I have a plan.’

‘I’d hate to lose that, Lucas. I’d hate that more than anything.’

‘You won’t, Mama, if Carlinhos and those damn fool dustbikes of his are up to it.’

‘You’re a good boy, Lucas. Let me know.’

‘I will. Sleep well, Mama.’

Marina rides back with the corpse strapped beside her. It’s close enough to rub thighs and shoulders but that is better than it facing her in the opposite seat. The suit, the featureless helmet, the seat harness restricting movement; there is little to distinguish the meat from the dead. Knowledge, that’s the horror. Behind that blank face is a blank face: dead.

Cause of death was a swift and catastrophic rise in body temperature that cooked Paulo Ribiero to death in his suit. Carlinhos sifts data, trying to discern what went wrong. If a duster with a thousand surface hours on his log can die inside three minutes, anyone can. So can she, Marina Calzaghe, strapped into an open, unpressurised roll frame; hurtling at one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour through hard, irradiated vacuum. Nothing between her and it but this flim-flam suit, this bubble of helmet visor. Even now, a thousand tiny failures could be conspiring, multiplying, allying. Marina Calzaghe bolts back panic like yellow bile. In the Sea of Tranquillity she had almost taken her helmet off.

‘You all right?’ Carlinhos on her private channel.

‘Yes.’ Liar. ‘It’s a shock. That’s all.’

‘You’re fit to continue?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘We’ve been redeployed.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m going to turn you into a drinking game,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Every time you ask a question, I take a drink. We’re catching a train.’

Marina can’t discern any change in the rover’s course but an hour later it skids to a halt at the side of Equatorial One. Seat harnesses lift, the squad disembarks shaking stiffness out of their limbs. Marina gingerly rests a foot on the track, feeling for the vibration of an approaching express. Nothing of course. And the outer rails are reserved for the Mackenzie mobile foundry – Crucible, Marina remembers from her briefings. The expresses runs on the inner four maglev tracks. She can see the adjacent power tracks. Touch a foot to those and your death would be clean and instantaneous and light up Carlinhos’s hud like Diwali.

‘It’s coming,’ Carlinhos says. An atom of light appears on the western horizon, becoming three blinding headlights. The ground is shaking. At maglev speed, with so tight a horizon, the train is on them before Marina can make sense of her impressions: size, speed, blinding light; oppressive mass and utter silence. Windows blur past, then slow. The train is stopping. Marina sees a child’s face, hands cupped against the glass, peering out. The train comes to a halt. Two thirds of its kilometre-length are passenger carriages; freight and pallet cars take up the rear third. Carlinhos waves his crew across the tracks to the very last flatbed. Marina easily vaults up the sintered track-bed and hand-over-hands up the side of the open car. Motorbikes. Big, fat-tyred, studded with sensors and coms equipment, ugly and unaerodynamic, but unmistakably motorbikes.

Wha— she starts to ask but that would only gift Carlinhos another win in his drinking game.

‘We’re claim-staking,’ Carlinhos announces on the common channel. Rumbles of approval from the old dusters, squad and those who have come with the bikes. ‘Lucas tells us we’re heading to Mare Anguis. There’s a claim that Mackenzie Metals thinks only they know about. But we do, and we can steal it out from under them. They’ve got VTO’s surface fleet in their pockets but we’ve got these.’ He pats the handlebars of one of the motorbikes. ‘Corta Dustbike Team will win it. First, we ride train.’ A roar of approval. Marina finds her voice among them. Without lurch or jolt the train moves off. Marina watches the rover power up and swing away from Equatorial One, carrying its sole, dead passenger back to João de Deus.

Flavia makes food. It’s substantial, entirely vegetable like most lunar cuisine but it tastes thin to Lucasinho, like music from a guitar missing bass strings.

‘Is there something wrong with onions and garlic?’ he asks. ‘And chili?’

‘They are theologically improper vegetables,’ Flavia says. ‘They raise passions and stimulate base instincts.’

Lucasinho picks at his food.

‘Madrinha, why did you leave?’

Lucasinho was five when Flavia left Boa Vista. He remembers confusion more than hurt; an absence that filled quickly with grains of new normality. Amanda, his genetic mother, had quickly passed him to Elis, pregnant with Robson.

‘Has your father never told you?’

‘No.’

‘Your father and grandmother dismissed me and forced me to leave you and Boa Vista. I carried Carlinhos and I carried Wagner and last of all I carried you, Luca. Do you know what we madrinhas do?’

‘You are surrogate mothers.’

‘We sell our bodies, that’s what we do. We sell the very heart of our womanhood to someone else. It’s prostitution. We spread our legs and take someone else’s embryo into our wombs. You were conceived in a tube, Luca, and you were carried in a stranger’s uterus, for money. A lot of money. But you weren’t mine. You were Lucas Corta and Amanda Sun’s baby. Carlinhos was Carlos and Adriana Corta’s.’

‘You were Wagner’s madrinha too,’ Lucasinho says.

‘It’s the cruellest profession. If you had been taken away from me after birth, maybe that would have been easier. But the contract is that we don’t just gestate and birth you, we raise you. My life was dedicated to you, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I was in every way a mother, except one.’

‘You didn’t have a baby of your own. I mean, one you made.’

‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to spend every hour with children that you carried, that are yours in everything but genetics, but aren’t yours, and never will be yours.’

‘But you could …’

‘You can’t understand, Luca. You can’t even begin. The contracts are exclusive. The only children I was allowed to have were Corta sons and daughters. I love you, Luca, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I love you like you’re my own.’

Lucasinho’s head pounds. Pressure in the skull. Pressure behind the eyes. This is heavy stuff. Stuff he can’t factor, stuff that doesn’t play on any of the emotional processes he’s learned. Flavia is right. He can’t understand it. This is what adults feel.

‘And Wagner,’ Lucasinho says. ‘You keep saying “and Wagner”.’

‘You always were smarter than your father gives you credit for, Luca.’

‘Pai’s always said he’s not a Corta. Vovo can’t talk to him. As soon as he was eighteen he left Boa Vista.’

‘Leave, or was made to leave?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Wagner is half Corta. Half Corta, half Vila Nova.’

‘That’s you.’

‘Flavia Passos Vila Nova. Madrinhas are very well paid. Enough to hire an obstetric gynaecologist to fertilise and implant a different set of embryos.’

‘Vovo, Carlos’s …’ Lucasinho can’t say the words. Eggs, sperm, embarrassing. Moreso when they make you.

‘Carlos had been dead twenty years. There were still hundreds of sperm samples frozen. Carlinhos came from one. Then the gracious Adriana decided she wanted another child. A baby-toy, a last reminder of her dead husband. At the age of fifty-six she wanted another baby. And there was me, with nothing of my own! She didn’t deserve another child, a little late-life boy-toy. And it was so very simple.’

The saints, the orixas, the exus and guias fix Lucasinho Corta with plastic eyes. He feels itchy and self-conscious. The green biolight makes him nauseous. He’s sure it’s the green biolight. Not the immediate, terrible question he has to ask.

‘Flavia. What about me?’

‘Those are Sun cheekbones and Corta eyes, Luca. No mistaking.’ Flavia reads his confusion. ‘I said you couldn’t understand it.’

‘So you had Wagner …’

‘A boy of my own. That was all I needed. You Cortas, your pride makes you blind. It’s the first and greatest sin, pride. You would never have considered that Wagner might be the son of Carlos and Flavia and not Carlos and Adriana. Never. Arrogance and pride!’ Flavia lifts her hands, as if in praise, or denunciation. ‘And you would never have known except for Wagner going to hospital for that lung treatment. He developed a bronchial condition. Adriana was worried that it might be congenital, that Carlos’s sperm and her eggs had curdled and gone sour over the years. The hospital ran genetic tests. My deception was revealed in an instant. I had broken my contract, but it would have been the scandal of the century if the news networks had found out that Adriana Corta’s last child wasn’t hers. I took Corta money to be quiet, and a threat.’

‘Vo threatened you?’

‘Not Adriana. Her agents came bearing gifts. Helen de Braga showed me the money, Heitor Pereira showed me the knife. Wagner stayed at Boa Vista to be brought up a Corta in every way. But Adriana couldn’t love him. She looked at him and she saw something that was Carlos’s, but not hers.’

‘She’s always been distant around him. Cold. But my father really hates him.’

‘He’s wise, your father. Wagner is a threat to the family, I am a threat to the family, me telling you this is a threat to the family.’

Lucasinho’s heart leaps with panic.

‘Would he, if he knew you’d – Hurt you?’

‘He wouldn’t run the risk of losing you forever.’

‘Like that would bother him. I didn’t see him sending security to find me when I ran out of Boa Vista.’

‘Your father knows exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. He knows where you are right now.’

‘I fucking hate being a Corta.’ A sudden sweep of the arm clears the table of saints and votives. Flavia painstakingly replaces them.

‘Listen to rich boy. You run away and your friends throw you parties, your aunt throws you cash and your lovers throw a sheet over your ass and a roof over your head. You hate being a Corta? You hate never having to sell the breath in your lungs and the piss in your bladder? You hate never having to steal from recycle bots, knifing someone for a bag of manioc fries? Close your mouth. Your brains might fall out. That cake you brought? I would have cut you open for it, boy. Your family always hired Jo Moonbeams for madrinhas because we’ve got Earth bones and muscles. I was six months off the cycler, working in robotics development for Taiyang in Queen of the South when a micro-recession threw me out on to the street. I slept up in the roof, I could feel the radiation hammering through my body like sleet. I stole and I maimed and I sold everything I had and then I said never again. Never again. So I went to the Sisters because I knew what they were doing with genelines and the Mãe-do-santo looked me up and down and checked my medical records five, ten, fifty times. Then sent me to Adriana Corta and she put Carlinhos in me and I was never hungry or thirsty or breathless again. You hate having all those things? Mother and saints, you fucking ingrate.’ Flavia crosses herself and kisses her knuckles.

Lucasinho’s face burns with anger and shame. He’s tired of being told what he needs to do with himself. Wear this dress. Put on that make-up. Don’t be with that girl. Be a thankful son. Madrinha Flavia gets up from the floor and boils water in her kitchen cubby. Pestle in mortar, then a thick green smell fills the small room.

Lucasinho’s hand is on the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No. But you won’t go. You wouldn’t be here if you had anywhere else to go. And I don’t want you to go. Here.’ Flavia hands him a glass of herbal maté. ‘Sit.’

‘Orders. Everyone gives me orders. Everyone is so clever about me and who I am and what I want.’

‘Please.’

Lucasinho sniffs the brew.

‘What is this?’

‘Helps sleep,’ Flavia says. ‘It’s late.’

‘How do you know?’ The apartment has no clocks. The Sisterhood does not countenance them: clocks are the knives of time, slicing the Great Now into finer and finer divisions: hours, minutes, seconds. Continuity is the philosophy of the Sisters: time whole and undivided, existing all at once in a fourth dimension, in the mind of Olorum the One.

‘It feels late.’

‘Don’t like this,’ Lucasinho says, sniffing the glass with a scowl of distaste.

‘Who says it’s for you?’

Lucasinho drinks. By the time Flavia comes back from washing the glasses in the kitchen, he is curled up asleep on the sofa.

Twelve lines of moon dust. Twelve riders in V formation, cutting across the Eimmart K crater. Marina Calzaghe is three hours into the ride. Her ass has long since turned to rock. Her neck aches, her fingers are numb with vibration, she can feel the cold gnawing her sasuit and she cannot tear her gaze away from the O2 figure in the bottom right of her hud. It’s all been calculated: air enough to reach the location plus an hour. That’s time enough for the rovers from Mare Marginis to reach them and resupply. Three hours in, one hour to go, one hundred and eighty kilometres an hour – two hundred and twenty flat out but it chews battery life – and somewhere, up there, around the shoulder of the world, the Vorontsov fleet is barrelling towards Mare Anguis. The calculations say Team Corta will arrive at the furthest vertex five minutes before the Mackenzie/VTO transporters. Plus or minus three minutes. All worked out. Lucas Corta is precise in his calculations.

The first hour of the ride north from the rail stop is over jolting, jarring highland terrain; craters and ejecta and treacherous slopes that demand the focus of every sense, natural and cybernetic. The dustbikes’ massive drive wheels take the smaller debris with ease but every rock is a judgement call; run it, steer it. Call it wrong, wreck the wheels and the transmission and you are alone among the craters watching your comrades draw long lines of dust away from you. The lifeboats won’t come. They’ve been bought up by the Mackenzies. Marina grits her teeth at every rock and rille. Every rim sends a jolt of pain up her spine. Her back is a rod of molten pain. Her arms throb from holding the handlebars steady, steady as the bike bounds and bucks over the fearsome terrain. Her jaw is set rigid and she can’t remember when she last blinked. Marina Calzaghe is deliriously alive.

‘Motorbikes,’ she’d said.

‘Dustbikes,’ Carlinhos had corrected.

Eleven bikes, corralled on the flatbed car. Magnificent, potent things that showed their veins and wires and bones and gears; brutally functional and beautiful for that. Each was different, handcrafted and bespoke, metal surfaces engraved with death’s-heads, dragons, orixas, big-cocked men and mega-breasted women, flames and starbursts and swords and flowers. Biker aesthetic is changeless and eternal. Marina ran a gloved hand over a chromed flank.

‘Have you ridden one of these before?’ Carlinhos asked.

‘Where would I …’ Marina began and then remembered the game.

‘Do you think you could?’

‘How hard can it be?’

‘Hard. If something goes wrong, you will be left behind.’

There was no bike for her. The Jo Moonbeam would ride to Meridian in pressurised warmth and comfort. But with Paulo Ribeiro heading back to autopsy at João de Deus Team Corta was down a rider and the plan required every bike. The Mackenzies might pull something out of their asses yet. The more riders, the more flexibility.

‘Will you come?’

In Portuguese, it was an invitation, not a question. Already the train was slowing. Lucas’s plan was simple. Marina remembered him as the dark, serious man who had spoken the words that had saved her life: You work for Corta Hélio now. He had remembered a detail that even Carlinhos had forgotten: they were dustbikers. Lucas’s plan: rail all available dustbikes to the closest point to the claim, open the throttles and strike north for the Mare Anguis. Fire up a GPS transponder from each of the four corners of the territory. Four corners, eleven bikes.

‘I will,’ said Marina Calzaghe.

‘Here’s the contract.’ Hetty flashed it up on Marina’s lens. A cursory scan – so many clauses referencing accidental death – a yin and back to Carlinhos.

‘Keep with me,’ Carlinhos said on Marina’s private channel. Eleven bikes, four corners. So it would be her and Carlinhos racing Mackenzie Metals and all their spaceships for the furthest, final point of the territory.

Riders mounted up. Marina’s machine was a beast of twisted aluminium and crackling power cells. A chrome-etched Lady Luna regarded her from between the handlebars, her skull hemi-face grinning. The AI meshed with Hetty as Marina settled on to the saddle. The bike came to life. The controls were easy. Forward, back. Twist for speed.

Before the train had even come to a halt Carlinhos gunned his engine and leaped off the flatbed, soaring high and beautiful, glinting in the earthlight, to land beyond the furthest rail track. By the time Marina craned her bike down to the surface and learned how to keep the machine from performing terrifying, deadly wheelies, Carlinhos was over the horizon.

She locked in the bearing, twisted the throttle and steered up the dust-trails. A burst of speed took her into the formation and there, to Carlinhos’s left, was a gap in the arrowhead. Marina kicked into it. Carlinhos turned his blank face and nodded to her.

The bikers plunge down the long shallow crater rim of Eimmart K. Marina veers to avoid a corpse-sized chunk of ejecta. It’s sat there for longer than life has existed on Earth, she thinks. Dumb grey in-the-way rock. Out on to the dead sea-floor.

Carlinhos raises a hand but familiars have already cued the riders. Three bikes peel off from the left trailing edge of the arrows and steer east-south-east. Marina watches their slow-settling dust plumes. They will strike the south-eastern vertex of the quadrangle. Nine bikes now, racing across the dark flatland; a lop-sided wing. The riding is easy and fast and monotonous and full of traps; the worst kind, the kind that come out of yourself, out of boredom and familiarity and monotony. Flat flat flat. Monotony monotony monotony. This can’t be the fun of it. Flat flat flat fast fast fast. Why invent a sport just about going fast in a straight line? Maybe that is it. Men and their sports. Everything can be turned into a pointless competition, even going fast across a lunar sea-bottom. There must be more to it. Stunts, skills. What Marina understands of sports is they are all stunts, scores or speed.

At the designated way point Carlinhos again raises his hand and the trailing right wingtip peels off and cuts a westerly arc across the Mare. The south-east corner of the claim is fifty kilometres distant. The five remaining bikes race on.

‘Do you like Brazilian music?’ Carlinho’s voice startles Marina. She wobbles, recovers.

‘Not really. It all sounds kind of elevator-y. Maybe there’s something I’m just too norte to get.’

‘I don’t get it either. Mamãe adores it. She grew up with it. It’s her link with home.’

‘Home,’ Marina says but it’s not a question.

‘Lucas is a big fan. He tried to explain to me once how it worked – saudade, bitter-sweet, all that, but I didn’t have the ear for it. I’m very simple. I like dance music. Beats. Something physical, with weight.’

‘I like to dance but I’m not a dancer,’ Marina says.

‘When we get back, when we’ve got this, we’ll go dancing.’

At one hundred and ninety-five kilometres per hour across the Mare Anguis, Marina’s heart leaps. ‘Is that a date?’

‘I’m taking everyone else in the squad as well,’ Carlinhos says. ‘You haven’t seen a Corta party.’

‘I was at the one in Boa Vista, remember?’ Marina says, backing away, crestfallen. Flushing hot inside her sasuit.

‘That wasn’t a Corta party,’ Carlinhos says. ‘So, what music do you like, Marina Calzaghe?’

‘I grew up in the Pacific Northwest so it’s guitars all the way down. I’m a rock girl.’

‘Ah. Metal. My squad, it’s all they listen to: metal.’

‘No. Rock.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Big difference. Like your brother says, you have to have the ear for it.’

Forward radar paints an obstruction over the horizon. A detour would cost precious minutes.

‘You know a lot about me Marina Calzaghe – I like dance music, I follow the Long Run, I love my mother but I don’t like my big brothers. I love my kid brother and my sister I don’t understand at all. I hate business suits and having rocks over my head. But I still don’t know anything about you. You rock, you’re from the norte, you saved my brother: that’s it.’

The obstruction is an outcrop of rough highland terrain marooned when ancient basalts flooded the Mare Anguis basin. The transition is abrupt for the gentle, eroded moon, but Carlinhos shows no hesitation and steers straight for the rocks.

‘I kind of drifted here,’ Marina says.

‘No one drifts to the moon,’ Carlinhos says and his bike hits a ridge and goes flying, ten, twenty metres before splashing down in an explosion of dust. Marina follows him. She is powerless, abandoned; her heart chokes in panic. Hold it steady. Steady. Then the rear wheel touches down, she fights to hold the bike upright, then both wheels. Steer true. Steer true. She gasps with exhilaration.

‘So?’ Carlinhos’s voice on the private channel.

‘My mom got sick. Tubercular meningitis.’

Carlinhos whispers a Portuguese invocation to São Jorge.

‘She lost her right leg from the knee down and the use of both of them. She’s alive, she talks and gets around but it’s not her. Not the mom that I knew. Bits the hospital salvaged.’

‘So you work for the hospital.’

‘I work for Corta Hélio. And my mom.’

There are only two of them now. Carlinhos leads her down off the rocks and the Sea of Serpents is wide and open before them.

‘I was born and grew up in Port Angeles, Washington State,’ Marina says, because there are only two of them, alone on the plain that curves away from them in every direction, she talks about growing up in the house up by the edge of the forest that was full of bird calls and windchimes and the fluttering of flying banners and windsocks. Mother: reiki practitioner and angelic healer and reader of the cards and feng shui arranger, cat sitter and dog walker and horse trainer: all the many jobs of late twenty-first service employment. Father: faithful in gifts at birthdays and holidays and graduations. Sister Kessie, brother Skyler. The dogs, the fogs, the log trucks; the engine-throb of the big ships out in the channel, the parade of RV and motorbikes and trailers passing through to mountains and water; the money that always appeared just as desperation turned its wheels into the front yard. The knowledge that the whole dance was one pay-cheque away from collapse.

‘I had this thing about the ships,’ Marina says, realising as she does that Carlinhos may have no referent for the gigantic carriers that sailed the strait of San Juan de Fuca. ‘When I was real small I imagined that they had giant legs, like spiders, dozens of legs and that they were really walking across the bottom of the sea.’

Thus engineers are built: from walking ships and a loved toy, an improving game for girls where the mission was to rescue imperiled animals using ribbons and pulleys and elevators and gears.

‘I liked to make them really complicated and spectacular,’ Marina says. ‘I videoed them and stuck them up online.’

Her mother was nonplussed and delighted that her eldest daughter showed a flair for problem-solving and engineering. It was an alien philosophy in the ramshackle, last-minute lives of family and friends and associated animals but Ellen-May Calzaghe was fierce in her support even if she did not completely understand what Marina was studying at university. Computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture was a jabber of tech-talk that sounded most like regular pay-cheques.

Then the tuberculosis came. It blew in from the east, from the sick city. People had been moving out from the city for years now, but the house had thought itself immune, protected. The disease blew past charms and chimes and astral warders and into Ellen-May’s lung and from there into the lining of her brain. One by one the antibiotics failed. Phages saved her, but the infection took her legs and twenty per cent of her mind. It left a bill for insane money. More money than any lifetime could earn. More money than any career; except black finance. Or one on the moon.

Marina never intended to go to the moon. She grew up knowing there were people up there, and that they kept the lights burning on the world below. Like every child of her generation she had borrowed a telescope to giggle at King Dong of Imbrium but the moon was as distant as a parallel universe. Not a place you could get to. Not from Port Angeles. Until Marina found that she not only could, but she must, that that world was crying out for her skills and discipline, that it would welcome her and pay her lunatic money.

‘And that skill is serving Blue Moons at Lucasinho’s moon-run party?’ Carlinhos says.

‘They found someone cheaper.’

‘You should have read the contract closer.’

‘It was the only contract on offer.’

‘This is the moon …’

‘Everything is negotiable. I know that. Now.’ Then she had known nothing, only the surge of impressions and experiences, that every sense was yelling strange, new, frightening. Her training failed. Nothing could prepare her for the reality of walking out of the tether port into the crush and colour and noise and reek of Meridian. Sensibility rebelled. Put this lens in your right eye quick. Move like this, walk this way, don’t trip folk up. Set up this account, and this and this and this. This is your familiar: have you got a name, a skin for it? Read that? So: sign here here and here. Is that woman flying?

‘Word from the south-east squad,’ Carlinhos interrupts. ‘The Mackenzies have arrived.’

‘How far are we?’

‘Open her up.’

Marina has been hoping he would say that. She feels the engine leap between her thighs. The dustbike answers with a surge of speed. Marina bends low. She doesn’t need to; there is no wind resistance to cut on the moon. It’s what you do on a fast bike. She and Carlinhos race side by side across the Mare Anguis.

‘And what about you?’ Marina asks.

‘Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter.’

‘What about Wagner?’

‘The wolf.’

‘I mean, Lucas can’t tolerate him. What’s that about?’

‘Our lives aren’t simple. We do things differently here.’ In those few words, Carlinhos says, we are still contractor and contractee.

‘I’m at about twelve per cent O2,’ Marina announces.

‘We’re here,’ Carlinhos says, brakes and swings the tail of the bike round in a doughnut of flying dust. Marina loops wide and slows to park up beside him. The dust settles gently around her.

‘Here.’ Dark, flat sea-bottom, as featureless as a wok.

‘North-east vertex of the Mare Anguis quadrangle,’ Carlinhos says. He unstraps the beacon from the back of the dustbike.

‘Carlinhos,’ Marina says. ‘Boss …’

The horizon is so close, the Vorontsov ship so fast it is as if it has materialised in the sky above her, like an angel. It’s big, it’s half the sky; it’s low and descending on flickers of rocket thrust from its engine pods.

Carlinhos swears in Portuguese. He is still snapping out the legs of the Corta beacon.

‘Those things have built-in positioning. If it touches the ground …’

‘I’ve an idea.’ A bad mad idea, a clause not even a lunar contract would cover. Marina guns the dustbike. The Vorontsov ship pivots on its central axis. Its thrusters throw up pillars of dust. Marina accelerates through the dust and brakes directly under the belly of the ship. She looks up. Warning lights splash across her helmet visor. They wouldn’t land on an employee of Corta Hélio. They wouldn’t mash her and burn her, not in front of a Corta. They wouldn’t. The ship hovers, then the thrusters glow and the transporter veers away from its landing zone.

‘No you fucking don’t!’ Marina kicks the dustbike again and dashes in underneath the descending ship. Rocket thrust buffets her, threatens to tumble her. Lower this time. Belly cameras swivel to lock on to her. What arguments are going on in the cockpit of that ship? This is the moon. They do things differently here. Everything is negotiable. Everything has a price: dust, lives. Corporate war with the Cortas. The transporter hangs in the air.

‘Carlinhos …’

The transporter darts sideways. It can’t drift too far from the co-ordinates of the vertex which neutralises its advantage in speed. Marina can always catch up. But it’s low; dear gods it’s low. Too low. With a cry Marina throws the bike into a skid. The rear wheel goes out, bike and rider hit the dust and slide slide slide. Marina grabs dust to try and brake her speed. Winded, she comes to a halt under the landing pad. Engine-blast wraps her in blinding dust. The landing pad is crushing death bearing down inexorably on her. They’ve made the calculation.

‘Marina! Out of there!’

With the last of her strength Marina rolls out from under the landing gear. The Vorontsov ship touches down. Pad and strut and shock absorbers are two metees from her face.

‘I’ve got it, Marina.’

She rolls on to her other side and there is Carlinhos crouched, hand extended to help her up. Behind him the transponder beacon blinks. Those blinks are life. Those blinks are victory.

‘We’ve got it.’

Marina struggles to her feet. Her ribs ache, her heart flutters, every muscle groans with exertion, she might throw up in her helmet, a dozen hud alerts are flashing from yellow to red and she can’t feel her fingers or toes from the cold. But those lights, those little blinking lights. She puts an arm around Carlinhos and lets him help her hobble away from the ship. The transporter is beautiful and alien, a thing out of place, a child’s toy, abandoned in the Sea of Serpents. Figures in the brightly lit cockpit; one of them raises a hand in salute. Carlinhos returns the gesture. Then the thrusters fire, blinding Marina and Carlinhos in dust and the transporter is gone. They are alone. Marina sags against Carlinhos.

‘How long until that rover gets here?’

Jorge settles the guitar into its customary, comfortable position against his body. Left foot a step forward, weight balanced.

‘What would you like me to play, Senhor Corta?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing. I’ve brought you here falsely, Jorge.’

Sleep had come hard after practice with the band, sequences and chord progressions running silver through his musical imagination; ways of working a difficult syncopation with the drummer. Gilberto his familiar whispered in his ear: Lucas Corta. Three thirty-four. Jesus and his Mother. I need you.

‘I don’t want you to sing.’

Jorge’s breath catches.

‘I want you to have a drink with me.’

‘I’m very tired, Senhor Corta.’

‘There’s isn’t anyone else, Jorge.’

‘Your oko; Lucasinho …’

‘There isn’t anyone else.’

On the balcony, a mojito mixed to Jorge’s taste. Lucas’s personal rum. Heading four o’clock now but São Sebastião Quadra bustles, robots and shift workers, maintenance and materiel technicians. The air is still, electric with suspended dust. Jorge tastes it on his tongue, in his throat. He would slip on his kuozhao to protect his singing voice but the dust-mask might affront Lucas.

‘I’m going to divorce my wife,’ Lucas says.

Jorge struggles for an appropriate reponse.

‘I don’t know much about nikahs in the Five Dragons but I imagine it would be expensive to buy out of the contract.’

‘Very expensive,’ Lucas says. ‘Ridiculously expensive. The Suns are used to fighting in court. They’ve been fighting the CPC for fifty years. But I am ridiculously rich. And I have my sister Ariel.’ Lucas leans on the rail.

‘If you don’t love her …’

‘If you think love ever had anything to do with it, you really know nothing about the way we marry among the Dragons. No, it was pragmatic, political, dynastic. They all are. First the marriage, then the love. If you’re lucky. Rafa was and it’s killing him. This is a celebration, Jorge.’

‘I don’t understand, Senhor – Lucas.’

‘I have pulled off a singular victory. I had a brilliant idea, executed brilliantly. I have defeated my enemies and I have brought power and wealth to my family. I am the toast of Four Dragons. Tonight this is my city. And all I see is a man huddling in a cave in an empire of dust. I was born in this cave and I’ll die in this cave and all my borrowed water and air and carbon will be taken back and paid out. I’ll become part of a million lives. It’s a mean sort of resurrection. And we never had a choice. My mother did. She traded the Earth for wealth. I didn’t have that choice. None of us do. We can’t go back – there is no back for us. This is all we have: dust, sunlight; people. The moon is people. That’s what they say. Your worst enemy and your best hope. Rafa likes people. Rafa hopes for heaven. I know we live in hell. Rats in a tunnel, banished from beauty.’

‘Should I sing for you, Lucas?’

‘Maybe you should. Everything is clear, Jorge. I know exactly what I have to do. That’s why I will be rid of Amanda. That’s why I can’t rejoice. That’s why I can’t hear you tonight. Jorge.’ Lucas brushes a finger along the back of Jorge’s hand. ‘Stay.’

‘Wake up.’

Hands grasp her under the shoulders and lift her. She was within a nod of sliding asleep into the water. Carlinhos crouches by the side of the water tank. He taps Marina’s cocktail glass, sticky with the sapphire residue of a Blue Moon. ‘Not a good mix. Drowning on the moon: it’s not good on the autopsy report.’

‘I felt owed a celebration.’

Marina had been on her last sips of oxygen when the relief rover dashed up over the horizon; shuddering with cold; anoxia blue as Carlinhos hooked her into the life support. The rover spun its wheel-housings and laid in a course at full speed for Beikou, a Taiyang server-farm on the rim of Macrobius. By the time Carlinhos bundled Marina through the outlock and the airblade had blasted her clean of dust she was slipping in and out of hypothermic unconsciousness. Fingers unsealing her sasuit. Hands peeling it from her. Intimate fingers unhooking her function tubes, the tug of caked lubricant and crusted body fluids. Hands lowering her into water, warm warm water what? Water surrounding penetrating caressing her. Water calling her back to life.

What is this?

‘Just a tank.’ Carlinhos’s voice. Those hands: his hands? ‘You nearly died out there.’

‘They wouldn’t have landed a ship on me.’ She could barely force the words through chattering teeth. She was coming back to life and it was agony.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Needed doing.’

‘I love the way you say that.’ Carlinhos said. ‘So norte. So righteous. Needs doing.’ He trailed a finger across the surface of the pool. ‘We’ll cover the water charge.’

Beikou is as close and introverted as a convent: Suns, Asamoahs and minor clans twine together in chains of linked polyamorys. The narrow, stooping tunnels ring with the voices of children in five languages; the triple-breathed air smells of bodies and sweat, the peculiar dust of computer systems, sour urine. For Marina to inhale it, to wallow in this egg of water, clenched inside the moon, Corta Hélio struck contracts with Taiyang and AKA. Marina leans back, lets her hair swirl out in the warm water. She can reach up and touch the sintered glass roof. Ao Kuang, Dragon-king of the East Sea, painted manhua-style, glares down from the close ceiling. Water laps against her breasts. Something has disturbed the pool.

‘What are you doing?’

She had blinked out again, blinks open to see Carlinhos shrug out of his sasuit.

‘I’m coming in.’

He lowers himself into the water. You look tired, she thinks. You’re magnificent but bone tired. You move like an old crab. Hetty’s activity log reported twenty-eight hours on the surface. The sasuits were rated for twenty-four. We should all be dead. She flicks water in Carlinhos’s face. He’s so tired he hardly flinches.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘Did we get it?’

‘The Court of Clavius recognised our claim and issued a licence. We’ve already put out construction tenders.’

She lifts a little, painful fist; gives a little painful yay.

‘You know, maybe we are owed a celebration,’ Carlinhos says. ‘They make a really good potato vodka here.’

‘What was that about drowning looking shit on your death cert?’

‘Worse than a VTO moonship landing on you?’

‘You.’ She flicks water at him again. He can’t or won’t dodge. Oh you man, you are so cute when you’re tired and stinky and stubbly and hurting and I could so do you now and you’re right in front of me, touching my knees, my shins, my feet and if I moved my hand just a few centimetres there and you moved your hand a few centimetres here we would, but I won’t because I’m a wreck and you’re a wreck and you’re still my boss and a Dragon and Dragons have always scared me, but most of all because we are like twins in a womb, curled up next to each other in this warm water and that would be prenatal incest.

She shuffles next to him and they lean comfortably, painfully against each other, like old people, skin to skin, enjoying each other’s weight and presence. A long-limbed teen Sun – Marina can’t make out their gender beyond skinny-gangly – ducks through the low door to serve Blue Moons. Laughter, pop music, children yelling, the burr of machinery, resound through the tunnels as it they were the pipes of a great musical instrument.

‘Corta Hélio.’ A toast.

‘Sea of Snakes. If I do nod off …’

‘I’ll watch out for you,’ Carlinhos says.

‘And I’ll watch out for you.’

The sex always begins the same way. One glass, cold-dewed. One measure chilled gin. Three drops of blue Curacao from a glass pipette. No music. Music distracts Ariel Corta from sex. Tonight she wears an exquisite Rappi ballerina-length dress with petticoats, a New Look Dior straw platter hat and gloves. Her lips are Revlon Fire and Ice red, and pursed in small concentration as she releases the drops of Curacao one at a time from the pipe. Tonight she uses the ten-botanical Dilma Filmus gave her. When the last drop has sent its ripples across the surface of the martini glass Ariel Corta steps out of her dress. Brassieres are unknown in lunar gravity and she eschews other underwear. Gloves, hat, lace-top hold-up stockings, Roger Vivier five-inch heels. Ariel Corta lifts the martini in her gloved hand and takes a sip.

The boys brought it home. Vidhya Rao’s tip was sound. Ariel’s short, secure conversation through private encryption with Lucas has proved three things. To Rafa, that she too has power. To her mother, that the Cortas truly are the Fifth Dragon. To Lucas, that she is always a Corta. We want to buy you, Vidhya Rao had said. Not bought; fee-ed. Hired, not owned. That is the difference between the trader and the consultant. You’ve triumphed. Ariel Corta raises a toast to herself and to all her clients and contractees and coterie. She takes another sip from her Blue Moon. Beijaflor shows Ariel herself through discreet cameras. Ariel poses to better admire her body. She is magnificent. Magnificent.

Before undressing she vapes a capsule of Solo. The Chemical Sisters, narco-designers to society, print it for bespoke, for these sessions. Hat on padded stand, gloves and stockings patiently and carefully rolled off. Ariel enters the sex room. Her skin, her nipples, her lips and vulva and anus crackle with sexual desire. Walls and floor are softly padded white faux-leather. The apparel awaits her, laid out in careful order, made to measure in white faux-leather. The boots first; high and tight and laced tighter still; tightest yet as she tugs in the lacing. She paces around the small room letting her thighs brush against each other, the tickle of the laces against her ass and vulva. She kneels, thrilling in the dig of the eyes and heels against her buttocks. Then the gloves, shoulder length and laced; pulled tight. She spreads her fingers, encased in tight white leather. The stiff, high collar. Ariel gasps as the laces tighten and she surrenders mobility and freedom. Last of all, the corset. A ritual, this; the exhalations, the carefully timed drawings-in of the laces until she can barely breathe. Her small breasts are proud and pert.

At age thirteen Ariel Corta orgasmed after pulling on a sasuit. She hasn’t worn one since but its tightness, its unforgiving constriction and control of the body has permanently shaped her sex play. Ariel Corta has never told a soul about the sasuit come.

The gag. A classic red-ball gag, matching her lip-gloss. She buckles it tight, tighter. This is for those times when she wedged half a bedsheet into her mouth to stifle the noises of her fabulous masturbation. It keeps the bubbles in the champagne. Ariel Corta squeals and begs into her gag. Beijaflor is outside verbal command but the familiar has played this game many many times. The dressing is complete.

Ariel softly claps her gloves together. Haptics engage; she strokes each breast, hissing into her gag at the touch of thick soft fur. She circles each nipple, delirious with pleasure. The haptics realign and she squeaks at the touch of bristles. The gloves follow a random sequence: Ariel is down on her knees, drooling ecstatically as she introduces the soft sensitive folds of her vulva to bristles that become vinyl nubs, then gritty abrasives. Long slow strokes with her right hand; her left explores the terrain of bare skin between the tight-laced leatherwear. She is bursting; blood and bone and flesh and fluid held in check by taut leather. Now the haptics run different sensations on each hand. Ariel in on her knees, leaning back to allow her fingers access to her fierce little vulva. Sharp heels dig into her ass, she can feel her cheeks spreading on the padded floor. She is blaspheming piously into her gag. Beijaflor shows her herself, thighs spread, fingers working, face upturned and eyes wide. Her cheeks are streaked with saliva leaking from either side of the gag. Haptics switch to prickles: now Ariel’s fingers move for her clitoris for the first time. She shrieks freely and joyfully into her gag. The Solo has hypersensitized her clitoris, her nipples, her vulva and the rosebud of her anus. Each touch is an agony and daring delight. Ariel Corta is bellowing mutely now. Beijaflor swoops the camera around her: close-up on her fingers, her eyes, the pillow of thigh-flesh over spilling her tight boots.

The foreplay lasts an hour. Ariel Corta brings herself to the edge of orgasm half a dozen times. But this is the foreplay. Sex is as ritualised as mass. A printer chimes, the haptics deactivate. Shaking, sleek with sweat and saliva flicked from her gag, Ariel crawls to the printer. Coco de Lune is the moon’s greatest sex toy designer. Ariel never knows what she will get until the printer chimes. All that is certain is that it will be customised to her body and tastes and that it will take many hours to explore its subtleties fully.

Ariel opens the printer. A dildo, a set of polished anal balls. The dildo is long and elegant, a classic old school moon-rocket, complete with four stabilising fins at the bottom. Each fin control a different haptic field. A silver pussy-rocket printed to the dimensions of her vagina and vulva. Not a penis. Never a penis. Ariel Corta has never allowed a penis inside her.

You’re beautiful, Beijaflor whispers to Ariel in Ariel’s voice. Love you love you love you.

Ariel moans into her gag, lies back on the padded leather, opens her legs.

Put it up you, in you, kilometres in you, Beijaflor says. Fuck yourself to death.

Ariel works the self-lubing pleasure balls into her anus. Corset and collar hold her rigid, unable to see what she is doing to her orifices. Beijaflor shows her close-ups and whispers filth and insults in her own Portuguese. Ariel works the balls in, pushes them deep, hooks a finger through the handle. She tugs gently, feels the drag and grate inside her. At orgasm she will pull them out, perhaps slowly, perhaps all at once. Then one by one she will push them in again.

She holds the dildo up before her eyes, panting in dread and expectation as her own voice tells her exactly what she is going to do with it, how deep and how fast and how long, every position and stroke. It will take hours. Hours. At the end, Ariel Corta will crawl from a sex room soaking with sweat and saliva and body fluids and creamy lubrication and slowly release herself from her binding leather. No lover, no body, no flesh can compare with the perfect sex she has with herself.

Since the age of thirteen Ariel Corta has been joyously, enthusiastically, monogamously autosexual.

The man goes low, swinging for her knees with the wrench. Marina dives away. Her strength and momentum carry her high, far. High and far are vulnerable. Momentum kills. Marina comes down hard enough to knock the wind out of her, slides, slams into a girder. The Mackenzie man knows how to fight. He’s on his feet, wrench raised to bring it down on her chest. Marina kicks out. Her boot connects with kneecap. The crunch of bone, the scream silences the dock for a moment. The man goes down, felled. Marina picks up the wrench.

‘Marina!’ Carlinhos’s voice. ‘Don’t.’

The Mackenzie is tall, fit, male. She is short, female, but she is a Jo Moonbeam. She has the strength of three moon-men. She could crush this man’s ribcage with a single blow of her fist.

How did the fight start? Like any fight starts: like a fire: combustible tempers, proximity, a spark, something to feed the ignition. Beikou Lock Control kept Team Corta in the holding bay while a Mackenzie Metals rover squadron docked and locked. The squad fretted: enough confining tunnels, foul air, old water. They wanted home. Patience frayed. The Mackenzie squad – all men, Marina observed – filed in from the outlock carrying the spicy smell of moon dust. As the squad leader passed Carlinhos: two words: Corta thieves. Patience snapped. Carlinhos roared and felled him with a head-butt and the holding bay exploded.

Marina has never been in a fight. She has seen them in bars, in student houses, at parties but she was never part of them. Here she is a target. These men want to hurt her. These men don’t care if she dies. The Mackenzie man is down and out of the fighting, burbling faintly in shock. Marina crouches – low is strong – scanning the room. Real fights are not movie fights. Fighters go to ground, tug and claw and try to smash each other’s heads in. Carlinhos is down, on his back. Marina grabs his attacker by the arm. The man screams. She has dislocated his shoulder. She picks him up by suit collar and belt and slings him across the dock as easily as if he were a piece of clothing. Marina spins, charges at the first Mackenzie she sees. She mashes the Mackenzie man against a stanchion. She stands, panting. She has superpowers. She is She-Hulk.

‘Where are the cops?’ she yells to Carlinhos.

‘Earth,’ he yells back, sweeps an attacker’s legs from under him. Carlinhos drives fist into face. Blood sprays from the crushed nose; slow falling red.

‘Fuck!’ Marina cries. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck.’ She throws herself into the fight. The seduction of power is horrible and juicy. This is what it’s like to be a man on Earth, to know that you will always have strength. She kicks, she grabs, she seizes and snaps, she smashes. And it’s over. Blood on the sinter. Burbling sobbing. Dock control has arrived and are holding the parties apart with tasers and knives but fights have half-lives and this one has decayed into pointing and lunging and shouting. The argument now is over who pays, who compensates. The legal AIs fight now.

‘You all right?’ Carlinhos asks. Marina smells violence from him. Her gooseflesh rises: he fought without restraint or passion, as if violence were another tool of his business. Out on the dustbikes, he had said, Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas is the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter. Marina thought he was speaking metaphorically. No. He is a fighter and a strong one. She is a little afraid.

Marina nods. Now the shaking comes, the physical and chemical release. She hurt people. She broke bodies, smashed faces and she feels as pure and euphoric and alive as she did after Carlinhos took her on the Long Run. Elated and intense; dirty, itchy, degraded: a blood-slut. She doesn’t recognise herself.

‘The bus is here. Let’s go home.’

The cold perhaps, or the subtle realignment of weight, or the tiny, careful noises that night amplifies, but when Sohni Sharma wakes she knows Rafa isn’t there. The sex had been almost an afterthought; cursory, due diligence. Come back to my club, he had said and perhaps she should have read the warning in those words. Loud men, some drunk, in their own place and space, looking her up and down, weighing and assaying and slipping sly looks and eyebrow-raises and smiles to Rafa. Men who own things. Then the news came through about the deal – some new extraction rights, territory claimed – that not only annihilated Rafa’s bar-room darkness, but reversed it; turned it into golden light. The club was his. Drinks for everyone; all my friends, drink drink. Raucous and laddish and backslapping; crude and congratulatory: she was trophy and promise. To the victor the prize. Rafa’s arm around her all night, into the vanishing hours. The Professional Handball Owners Club was not a safe space but she stayed.

Her eyes ache, her joints throb, she is as dehydrated as the surface of the moon. How bad is it to ride the moonloop hung over?

Time. Oh five twelve. The sunline is a strip of indigo along the top of the world. She should move, get her stuff, get things together. Where is Rafa? Not in the bedroom, nor the ensuite, the office or the generous living space she tiptoes through, bare-skinned. The air still smells clean, washed. He’s on a chair on a shallow balcony, perched on the edge. The only thing he wears, against all club etiquette, is his familiar. He’s talking, voice low, back turned, a conversation not meant to be overheard. Overhear it she must.

But Robson is perfectly safe. I swear to you. God and his mother. Robson’s safe, Luna’s safe; Boa Vista is safe. I don’t want to have to fight you. I don’t want to fight you. Think about Luna. She’ll be in the middle. Come back. Back to Boa Vista, coracão. You promised me it would only be for a little time. Come back. It’s not about the kids. It’s about me …

Bare-skinned, barefoot, shivering with alcohol and a betrayal she expected but which still wounds, Sohni turns, walks away, dresses, picks up her few things, leaves the moon forever.

In the end, Adriana orders Paulo out of his own kitchen. He is her cook, he has studied the technique, and printers have already produced the flask, the mesh, the lid and plunger. But he has never prepared it, tested it, even smelled it. Adriana has. He leaves with poor grace. The aroma passes through Boa Vista’s aircon. What is that thing?

I think it’s coffee.

Staff are lined up outside Paulo’s kitchen: what’s Senhora Corta doing? She’s measuring it. She’s boiling water. She’s taking the water off the boil. She’s counting. She’s pouring the water on to the stuff, from a height. What’s that about? Oxygenation, says Paulo. She’ll stir it too: the flavour develops fully through an oxidation reaction. Now she’s waiting. How does it smell? Not like anything I’d want past my lips. What’s she doing now? Still waiting. It’s a bit of a ritual, this coffee.

Adriana Corta depresses the plunger. A bronze crema floats on the top of the French press. One cup.

Adriana sips her last cup of coffee. She pushes down the thought. This is a celebration, a small one, a private one, the true one before the gaudy carnival Lucas insists on for her birthday. Not this time, she whispers, to the Mackenzies and to death. But her life is filling with last things, like flooding water filling a tunnel. A rising level: or perhaps it is that her life is descending towards it.

The coffee doesn’t taste the way it smells. For that Adriana is thankful. If it did, humans would never do anything other than drink it. Smell is the sense of memory. Each coffee would recall countless memories, boundless memories. Coffee as the drug of remembering.

‘Thank you, Lucas,’ Adriana Corta says and pours a second cup. The press is empty, only moist grounds. Coffee is precious stuff. Rarer than gold, Adriana whispers, a memory from her duster days. The gold we throw away.

Adriana takes the two cups out to the São Sebastião pavilion. Two cups, two chairs. One for her, one for Irmã Loa. Adriana takes another sip of coffee. How did she ever love this earthy, musky, bitter brew: how did anyone? Another sip. It is the cup of memories. As she sips this coffee, she sips again her previous cup: forty-eight years ago. That coffee too had been a memorial. Her boys have been magnificent; their achievement in stealing Mare Anguis from between the Mackenzies’ grasping fingers will be moon legend for generations, but coffee will always bring her back to Achi.