Luna: New Moon

TEN

You pass the first line of security twenty kilometres out from João de Deus. You may be on the train, a bus or rover, perhaps you fall towards the Fecunditatis 27 catcher in a BALTRAN capsule, but your vehicle, your passenger manifest and you will have been interrogated by Corta security AI. The first trip-line is so subtle you won’t even know you’ve crossed it. Unless you trip it.

The second line of security is not a line but a level, a field that covers every prospekt and level, every crosswalk and elevator, every duct and pipe and shaft of João de Deus. Bots, crawling and climbing and flying, from massive tunnel diggers and sinterers to insect-sized inspection drones. Eyes and ears and senses only bots possess turned outward, alert and engaged.

The third circle is the security personnel, women and men in sharp suits with sharper blades and other, longer-range weapons that can take down an assassin, biological or machine, before it closes to killing distance. Poisons, air-drones, tasers, targeted insects. Heitor Pereira has spent freely and widely. His arsenal is the finest on the moon.

At the centre of these rings of security lies Ariel Corta in an induced coma in the intensive care unit of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Medical Facility.

The Cortas have come from the four quarters of the moon. The doctors are firm in their refusal to allow the family access to the ICU. There’s nothing to see. A handsome woman in a life-support cot, tubed and wired, bot sensors and scanners weaving over her body like mudras from a Hindu dance. Beijaflor hovers above her head. Adriana has moved her court to João de Deus. Corta Hélio has requisitioned a suite of rooms on the level above the ICU. Occupants have been well-compensated; where necessary, they have been booked in other medical facilities, transported at Corta expense with the best available care, upgraded. Boa Vista staff print out furniture and fabrics and broadcast catering tenders. Press and gossip sites camp outside the med centre. Heitor Pereira has caught thirty spy drones already.

Their familiars have told them the details of the attack and the damage but the Cortas find comfort and reassurance in repeating, rehearsing, renewing them to each other. An assassin’s litany.

‘A bone knife,’ Adriana Corta says.

‘He carried it straight past the scanners at the party,’ Rafa says. He’s arrived directly from Twé; three jumps by BALTRAN. He’s unruffled; groomed, clothes, shoes, hair immaculate despite the indignities of ballistic transport. ‘They never saw it.’

‘The pattern is widely available on the network,’ Carlinhos says. He’s come twelves hours by rover from the small war on the Sea of Crises, itchy in an unfamiliar shirt and suit. He tries to loosen the confining collar. ‘Half my crew carried them. They were fashionable a couple of years back. You’d use your own DNA as the template.’

‘A litigant with a grudge,’ Adriana says.

‘Not so short a commodity,’ Lucas says.

‘Ridiculous,’ Adriana hisses. ‘If you’re on the sharp end of the bad divorce, you don’t take it out on the lawyer, you take it out on the ex.’

‘The story is credible,’ Lucas says. ‘Barosso vs Rohani. The Court of Clavius has the case file. He backed out of negotiations and went for a court settlement. Ariel took him to pieces.’

‘Yet he was a guest at this party,’ Adriana says. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.’

No one has yet named the obvious, nor will they until Ariel is out of danger. The rest of the moon can work up rumours and frenzies and network indignation. It feeds the Corta well, but not so well as their dignity in distress.

‘And where is Wagner?’ Adriana asks.

‘Queen,’ Carlinhos says. ‘He’s found something.’

‘If he wants to be one of us, he needs to be here.’

‘I’ll try him again, Mamãe.’

But Lucas’s eyebrow is raised and he flicks a look at his brother that says we’ll talk about this.

Dr Macaraeg is here, everyone’s familiar announces.

Ariel’s physician hesitates in the open door, intimidated by the phalanx of Cortas facing her. She sits at one end of the conference table. The family congregate around the other end.

‘It’s not good,’ Dr Macaraeg says. ‘We’ve stabilised her though she’s lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood. There has been nerve damage. The knife has severed part of the spinal cord. There has been a loss of function.’

‘Loss of function?’ Rafa blusters. ‘What’s that? You’re not talking about a bot here. My mother needs to know what’s happened to Ariel.’

Dr Macaraeg rubs her eyes. She’s exhausted and needs nothing less than Rafael Corta’s futile temper.

‘The knife caused a category B lesion in the region of the L5 section of the spinal cord. With a category B lesion motor function is lost. Sensory function remains. The L5 region is associated with motor control in the feet, legs and pelvic region. That’s been lost. There’s also a loss of bowel and bladder control.’

‘What do you mean, bowel and bladder control?’ Rafa says.

‘Incontinence. We’ve fitted a colostomy system.’

‘She can’t walk,’ Carlinhos says.

‘It’s a paraplegia. Your sister is effectively paralysed from the hips down. We’re also concerned about potential brain damage from the heavy blood loss.’

Carlinhos murmurs an umbanda invocation.

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Adriana Corta says.

‘What can you do?’ Rafa asks.

‘We’ll begin stem cell therapy as soon as Ariel is stabilised. It has a good success rate.’

‘I don’t understand: good success rate? Kojo Asamoah had a new toe in two months,’ Lucas says.

‘There’s a big difference between growing a new toe and repairing spinal nerves. It’s a delicate process.’

‘How long?’ Adriana asks.

‘It can take up to a year.’

‘A year!’ Rafa says.

‘Maybe eight months, if the grafts take first time. Then there’s the recuperation process, learning to use the motor systems all over again, imprinting the neural pathways. We cannot rush this. It’s precision work. Any mistakes can’t be rectified.’

‘A year, in total,’ Lucas says.

‘Anything you need, we’ll get it for you,’ Adriana says. ‘Equipment, new techniques from Earth, anything. Ariel will have it.’

‘Thank you, but our medical technology is in advance of anything on Earth. We’ll do everything we can, Senhora Corta. Everything.’

‘Of course. Thank you, Doctor.’ The second thank you is the dismissal. Adriana turns to her sons. ‘Rafa, Carlinhos, if you please? I need a word with Lucas.’

‘I’d be a fool and a liar if I said this didn’t work for me,’ Lucas says when the suite is empty.

‘You expect me to admire that?’

‘No. It’s reprehensible but it is good business. But it’s not the issue uppermost in my mind. The wedding, Mamãe. Without Ariel negotiating the nikah, the MacKenzies will eat Lucasinho alive.’

Lucas sees his mother try to take in this new perspective, like a piece of extraction plant that requires whole landscapes to make a turn, a train that must begin to brake before it’s over the horizon. She would have spun like a dancer once. Quick of wit and apprehension. This dynastic marriage will not be the long trap he shared with Amanda Sun. Ariel will broker a deal. The best marriage contract of her career. Lucas still hasn’t told Lucasinho. He had not intended to until the contract was prepared. Now the boy is on his way up from Meridian and Lucas dreads the coming conversation.

‘What can we do?’ Adriana asks and Lucas hears exhaustion and indecision in his mother’s voice.

‘Play for time.’

‘The MacKenzies will never allow that.’

‘I’ll see who I can find. Beijaflor manages Ariel’s contacts.’

‘Yes,’ Adriana says but Lucas can see that her thoughts are turned to the room below. ‘We’ll do our best for Lucasinho.’

‘Mamãe, I feel for Ariel, I truly do, but the company …’

‘Tend to the company, Lucas. I’ll tend to Ariel.’

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

He’s reeling up and down corridors trying to find food, tea, something to pass the waiting time with which medical facilities are so generous. She’s stumbling out of a room where she has been debriefed by Heitor Pereira; question after question, questions, three hours of questions. Details. Memories. Tell me again, again, again. Any glimpse or peripheral detail that might be an insight into the attack. She is tired and sick.

The attacker was dead dead dead by the time the rest of the bodyguards arrived. Someone prised her fists off the vaper. Someone pulled her away from the pooling blood. Bots arrived first; scuttling across the ceiling, floating on fans. They assayed Ariel Corta, already blue from blood loss, ran lines and tubes into her arms, compressed and stapled the gaping flaps of flesh, printed up artificial blood, put her into recovery position and called human medics. A freelance security team, crash-contracted by Beijaflor, cleared the party. Now Corta Hélio brought its resources to bear. A Vorontsov moonship was arriving at Aquarius Quadra’s surface lock. Ariel was to be taken to João de Deus. No questions. The security mercenaries escorted gurney and med team up into the hold of the moonship. Marina drifted in their orbit, a bloodstained satellite. She had never been in a moonship before. It was noisy. Everything shook. She felt much less safe than she ever had on Carlinhos’s dustbikes. She was nauseous the entire twenty-minute flight, then understood as she threw up quietly in the corner of the elevator down into Nossa Senhora da Gloria Hub that it was from the stench of blood from her dress.

Heitor Pereira seized her at the gate and hurried her away from the emergency team. She glimpsed mother and brothers over shoulders, between milling bodies.

Tell me everything.

The cameras were swarming.

We need to know. Everything.

I saved her fucking life.

‘Your, ah, dress.’

Marina’s still wearing the Jacques Fath. It’s rigid with dried blood, reeking of iron and death.

‘They wouldn’t let me …’ Now she has stopped moving and the momentum of events and voices and faces threatens to topple her. Marina is dizzy with fatigue, shocky and vertiginous.

‘Come on, we’ll get you something.’

The big printers are tied up with medical parts or Corta Hélio furnishings but there is a small public unit behind the med centre teahouse. Customers stare, at the blood, at the Corta.

‘Stop staring at me!’ Marina shouts. ‘Stop fucking staring at me!’

The deprinter refuses to accept Marina’s dress. Contaminated material, Hetty informs her. Please recycle by contracting Zabbaleen.

‘Here.’ Carlinhos offers tea as Marina waits for the printer. Casual, classic: hoody and leggings. Pumps.

‘Do you mind?’ Marina peels the straps from her shoulders.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ Carlinhos jokes.

‘Could you just give me a moment?’ There are no possible jokes, no levities here.

The dress has stuck to her skin. Marina dabs the fabric with cooling tea to loosen the scabbed blood. Her underwear is soaked through. She peels it all off, there in the kiosk behind the teahouse; all of it, off her. She can smell herself. Marina gags. If she throws up now she’ll never stop. Print-fresh, the leggings, the hoody feel religiously clean against her skin.

‘Come on.’

Carlinhos takes her arm and she lets him guide up to a quiet room on the ninth floor. Sofas, fake fur throws, space to lounge and curl.

‘Drink?’

Carlinhos holds a Blue Moon in either hand.

‘How can you …’ Marina cries. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

Carlinhos sits down beside her, sprawls. Marina huddles, arms around knees.

‘You did good.’

‘I just did. That’s all. I didn’t think about it. There was nothing to think about. Just do it.’

‘Something takes over. It’s not body, not spirit, something else. Instinct, maybe, but we’re not born with it. I don’t think we have a word for it. Something instant and pure. Pure action.’

‘It’s not pure,’ Marina says. ‘Don’t call it pure. I can see him, Carlinhos. He looked so surprised. Like this was the last thing he expected. Then, annoyed. Frustrated, that he was going to die and wouldn’t see if his plan had worked. I can still see him.’

‘You did what you had to do.’

‘Shut up, Carlinhos.’

‘You do what you have to do. That’s what I mean about it being pure. It’s necessity.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Carlinhos.’

‘You did good.’

‘I killed a man.’

‘You saved Ariel. He would have killed her.’

‘Not now, Carlinhos!’

‘Marina, I know how you feel.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ Marina says and then her breath catches because truth lies in the eyes, the muscles, even the scent of the sweat; unconscious truths we read intimately. ‘You do. Oh God you do. Get away from me, get away. I smell blood on you.’

Marina pushes Carlinhos away. Moonbeam muscles shove him hard into the wall, hard enough to bruise.

‘Marina …’

‘I’m not like you!’ Marina screams. ‘I’m not like you.’ Then she runs.

The wolf is not a lone hunter. Wagner Corta is. He has realised a truth about his two natures that his pack mates haven’t, for all their identities and arguments over pronouns and nés: he doesn’t change from mundane to wolf and back again. There are two Wagner Cortas, light and dark, each a separate and distinct self, with unique personalities and characteristics, skills and talents. Mundane Wagner Corta died twelve years in the sun-dome of Boa Vista. Survived by the wolf and the dark one.

He folds himself into the post-match crowds shouldering along Falcon West 73rd. His familiar is likewise folded deep into the Queen of the South security grid. He worked for hours coding the hack that allows him to follow Jake Sun. He has spent days observing the man, his habits and his rituals, his patterns and his predictabilities. Rafa has called, again and again: Ariel; Ariel has been critically injured in a stabbing. Come to João de Deus. Now. He must push that aside, focus. Concentrate on the hunt.

Jake Sun is one block ahead, a level down, winding back from the game in the Taiyang Arena. Tigers 34, Moços 17. Another kicking. A terrible result for Rafa’s Boys. Rafa has more to think about. The fans are in the best of humours. Jake Sun jokes with his friends; he is happy, relaxed, unsuspecting. Wagner can take him easily. The friends suggest a drink, dinner. Jake will refuse. He has an engagement lined up with Zoe Martinez, his Queen of the South amor. And here is where he will take the elevator down to 33rd. Wagner rides the parallel car down, one level behind. Zoe Martinez’s apartment is down a side street off 33rd, shadowy and discreet. Wagner tightens step and closes on his victim. The prey turns in to the quiet district.

‘Jake Tenglong Sun.’

Jake turns and sees the knife in Wagner Corta’s hand. There is a flash, more pain than Wagner has ever known and he is on the ground, rigid. Hands have reached inside his body to shred every muscle. He rolls on to his back to see a ring of knives pointing down at him. Sun security.

‘You’re far too predictable, Little Wolf.’ The taser sparks in Jake Sun’s hands. ‘The August Ones saw you coming a week back. And you’re getting far too close. Sorry about this.’

The narrow street explodes with howls. For an instant the Sun killers are distracted. The instant is enough. Figures drop from balconies, whirl out of doors, vault up over the rail from the level below. Bodies fall, a boot comes down on the side of a head. Wagner rolls clear as a knife stabs for his eye. The tip jams in the soft surface of the street. In the split second it takes the security guard to wrench it free a woman in sports gear has run a blade through his neck. Hands grab Wagner’s wrist, pull him clear, drag him upright. Two Sun assassins are down, the rest, outnumbered, cover Jake Sun’s retreat.

‘You okay?’

Wagner is gripped in an agony of pins and needles, but his eyes can focus and he can speak. Irina, who likes to bite. Sasha Ermin. The Magdalena pack.

‘Come on go go,’ Sasha Ermin. Er pack rushes Wagner down the street. He’s numb, itchy, he’s pissed himself.

‘You cubs have a lot of learn about being a pack,’ Irina says. ‘You’re way too used to having the Earth over your heads all the time. You don’t stop being a wolf when the Earth goes dark.’ But she looks different, smells different, wears her hair differently, dresses in standard sports gear; a thousand differences that say she isn’t a wolf.

‘We’d heard tenders were out for a hit on you,’ says a tall, muscled man in sports tights and running shoes. Wagner saw him swing over the rail one-handed and take a hit-woman straight down with a kick to the kidneys.

‘Thanks,’ says Wagner. Lame but no word more true.

‘There’s got to be some better way than everyone for themselves, all the time,’ Sasha says. ‘We’ll get you fixed back at the Packhouse.’

‘I need to get to João de Deus,’ Wagner protests. ‘I need to see my family.’

‘We’re your family now,’ Irina says. She hands him his lost knife.

Marina brings the tea from her living room to sit and sip and watch the man sleep. Sex has always rewarded her with insomnia. The men have snored or grunted or mumbled their way into the night while she pulls an arm from under a belly, repositions a leg, slips out from under a shoulder and there is no sleep until sun-up.

Marina drinks her tea. The darkened room, lit only by accidental light from the bathroom, the street, turns Carlinhos’s skin to velvet. He has the most beautiful skin. Like all dusters he has shaved his body hair. It’s a particular agony, peeling a sasuit off over back hair. She touches his skin gingerly, afraid to arouse him; enough to catch the nap, feel the living electricity. The light casts fine shadows across the landscape of his back, like low sun exposing the memories of old craters and rilles. His side, his hip and the sculptural curve of his ass are covered in a faint network of lines. Scars.

The charmer, the schemer, the talker, the fighter.

He breathes like a baby.

How good it is to have a muscled man. A tall, muscled man; moon-tall, big enough to scoop her up and enfold her and overpower her, which she likes. A big man to roll over on to his back and ride. The other men had been collegiate: geeks and engineers, dice-rollers and occasional runners; snowboarders and skateboarders. Board boys. One jock once; a swimmer. He had been a good shape. Earthmen. This is a moonman. Marina has seen Carlinhos naked, freshening up after the Long Run, suiting up, suiting down, in that precious pool at Beikou under the eyes and claws of Ao Jung, but she has never seen him as a man of the moon until now; on his belly, head turned to one side, in her bed. And he is so different, this moonman. A head and some taller than her, though he’s reckoned not tall among the second generation, and below average by the slender trees of the third gen. His skin lies close over a different musculature, a landscape, like all landscapes, governed by gravity. His toes are long and flexible. You grip with your toes. His calves are round and tight: Marina’s calves ached for a whole lune while she learned how to walk like a moon girl. Carlinhos’s thigh muscles are defined and long from running, but underdeveloped by terrestrial standards. Thigh muscles are too powerful for the moon: they can send you slamming into walls and people, or soaring up to crack open your skull on the roof. His ass is magnificent. Marina wants to bite it. Calves and ass get you around, give you that Gagarin Prospekt swing. That’s why 1950s retro is so hot this season; those skirts and petticoats, these box jackets move like seduction on the streets.

His belly is turned from her but she knows it’s tight and packed. His spine runs in a deep valley of muscle. The upper body by contrast is overdeveloped. Heavy shoulders, massive pecs, biceps and triceps bulging. He’s top heavy. On the moon you need upper body strength more than lower. He lies sprawled on her bed like a defeated cartoon superhero. Mouth-breathing.

Strange man, beautiful man. You’re fit for this world and fitness is beauty. But I’m as strong as you, I pushed you into a wall at the hospital, when you scared me. I grabbed you when you came down on me and turned you over and you laughed because no amor has ever done a thing like that with you and then I came down on you.

Marina’s tea has grown tepid.

She had run, corridor to corridor, unable to escape the hospital, the city, the moon, until she found a tiny corner. There she curled up, arms around knees, and felt the stone sky press down on her; billions of tons of sky. He found her there. He sat across the corridor from her, not speaking, not touching, not doing anything except being there. Up in Bairro Alto, in the desperate sky, a man with a knife had taken her fog-catcher and drunk her water before her eyes. The knife had won, the knife would always win. The knife was a reproach to her until fear and fury and adrenaline sent her to face the knife, and drive a titanium spike through a man’s brain and through the top of his skull.

‘Carlinhos,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

Scared?

‘I am like you.’

In her room under the same stone sky she lays her cheek against the hollow of Carlinhos’s spine. She feels the movement of his breath, the rhythm of his heart and blood. The impossible texture of his skin. She can’t feel the scars at all.

‘Oh man, what do we do now?’

‘How old is he?’ Lucasinho asks.

‘Twenty-eight,’ Lucas says.

‘Twenty-eight!’

At Lucasinho’s age, that’s death. Lucas remembers seventeen. He hated it. Rafa’s shadow fell long on him; his few friends had all moved away, he had slipped off contact with them and felt too gauche and uncertain to make new ones. Nothing felt right around him; friends, lovers, clothes, laughter and what seventeen understands as love. It came to Rafa like rain, soaked him through with charm, cleansed him. Alone then, alone now.

He’s jealous of his son; Lucasinho’s easy sexuality, his charm, his comfort in his own body. The Dona Luna pin on his lapel.

Lucas met his son at the station. The kid wore all his piercings – a formal occasion – and clutched a cardboard cake box. Lucas almost smiled at the cake box. Where had he learned this kindness? Escoltas cleared a way through the press of celebrity spotters. On the moon, nothing was as gossip-worthy as an assassination attempt. Lucasinho held the cake box like a baby while drones swooped overhead.

They stood together ten minutes by the window to the ICU. Familiars could have shown Ariel in every detail, overlain with schematics and medical notes, but that would just have been image. The glass made it physical. Ariel lay in her coma; Beijaflor performed slow topological involutions. Then Lucas took Lucasinho up to his room. Jinji had transfered schematics to the hospital printers: the Boa Vista staff had built a comforting replica of Lucasinho’s colloquium room in Meridian. There Lucas told him about the wedding. He had planned it carefully. Lucas’s own room would have been indecent, his office too formal, too overbearing.

‘Your mother was twenty-nine when I married her. I was twenty.’

‘Look how that worked out.’

‘It worked out with you.’

‘Don’t make me do it.’

‘We’re not free in these things, Luca.’ The intimacy, the nick-of-a-nickname: he had rehearsed it on the way down to the station, trying to get used to its discomfort in his throat. He had feared he would stumble over it but when he had to say it, the word slipped free. ‘The Eagle of the Moon has ordered it.’

‘The Eagle of the Moon, the rat of the moon – that’s what you say.’

‘He has us, Luca. He can wreck the company.’

‘The company.’

‘The family. I didn’t want to marry Amanda Sun. I never loved her. Love wasn’t in the contract.’

‘But you bought you way out. Buy me out of this.’

‘I can’t. I wish I could, Luca. I would do anything to be able to do that. It’s political.’

In the box are macaroons, glossy and perfect, arranged in a spectrum of colours. Those are the things that make Lucas feel the greatest traitor. They are innocent and kind and gentle and betrayed.

‘I have a first-draft nikah,’ Lucas says.

‘Ariel is on life-support.’

‘It’s not one of Ariel’s,’ Lucas says. Lucasinho’s cheek twitches.

‘What?’

‘It’s a first draft. Luca, I could order you. For the family, all that. I’m asking you; will you marry Denny Mackenzie?’

‘Paizinho …’

Now Lucas is rocked, a small quake: he can’t remember the last time Lucasinho used the familiar, the contraction. Daddy.

‘For the family?’

‘What else is there?’

‘How long have you been there?’

The voice wakes Marina from her warm, antiseptic doze. Intensive Care Units are hugely conducive to sleep. Their warmth, the hum and mesmerising dance of the machines, the perfume of gentle botanicals that reminds her of forests, of mountains and home.

‘How long have you been awake?’

‘Too long,’ Ariel Corta says. Beijaflor brings up the head of the ICU bed. Her hair hangs loose, limp, unclean around her face. Her skin is dull and waxen, grey; her eyes sunken. Tubes and cannulae run from her wrists to the smooth white arms of the medical machines.

‘I don’t think you’re supposed to—’

‘Fuck supposed sideways,’ Ariel says. She turns the bed to face Marina. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I watch over you, remember?’ After Ariel was brought out of her artificial coma her family had buzzed around her. There hadn’t been an hour when one or more hadn’t been at the bedside, holding hands, smiling, there even when she slipped back into the long healing sleeps the medical team had programmed for her. Over the hours, the days, the demands of the company drew them away. The vigils became visits. The media mob at the door flew away, the entourage dissolved. In the end, Marina sat the hours in the ICU. She feared the solitude, that would not be able to escape from the face of the man impaled on the spike but she found the watch peaceful, healing. Time away from people and their wants. She could accommodate what she had done to the man who tried to kill Ariel. In time she might justify it.

‘Well you look like shit,’ Ariel says. ‘And what are you wearing?’

‘Clean stuff. I like it. It’s comfortable. And you can talk.’

Ariel’s laugh is a dry, bitter bark.

‘God yes; be a dear and get me some make-up? I’m not facing the moon like this.’

‘Already ahead of you.’ Marina hooks the zip-case out from under her chair and sets it on the bed. It’s only a Rimmel Luna travel-pack, one upgrade from budget, but Ariel opens it with the impatience and excitement of a New Year present.

‘You are a treasure.’ Ariel’s eyes soften as she regards her face through Beijaflor and surveys the restoration work. Abundant thanks for the cosmetics, not a word for saving your life, Marina thinks. ‘And where is my ever-loving family?’

‘Planning a wedding,’ Marina says. Ariel jerks upright, then collapses back in pain. ‘Are you all right?’ Lipstick rolls from Ariel’s fingers.

‘No I’m not fucking all right. I think I tore something. Where’s the doctor? I want a human. Get me some pain relief.’

‘Easy.’

A nurse arrives at speed and bustles Marina away from the bed. Marina catches glimpses of Ariel’s exasperated face as the bed is reset, the monitors checked, the dosage administered. The cosmetics are repacked and parked on a table out of reach.

‘Give me those,’ Ariel commands when the nurse is gone. She applies foundation, eye shadow and liner; mascara in careful, precise strokes. Ariel’s ritual transformation of her face is a reclaiming of her body, a degree of control in an environment, a body outside her command. Finally, the lips. Ariel turns her head from side to side to catch every angle of her restored face.

‘So: my nephew. Who’s looking after the nikah?’

‘Lucas.’

‘Lucas! The kid’s fucked. Get him over here. Now. Has he signed anything? Gods save us from amateur matchmakers.’

‘The doctors say you’re still very frail.’

‘Then I’ll fire those doctors and hire ones who have a bit of respect. What am I supposed to do, lie here and gaze up at the ceiling and have Beijaflor play me womb-music? It’s my legs don’t work, not my brain. This is therapy. Beijaflor, get Lucas over here.’

External communications have been restricted on medical grounds, Beijaflor says on the common channel. Ariel shrieks in exasperation. The nurse returns and is driven from the room in a fluster by Ariel’s bellow. Marina turns away to hide her delight.

‘Marina, coração, can you get Lucas for me?’

‘Already done, Senhora Corta.’

‘I keep telling you: Ariel.’

The cry wakes Marina. She’s in the corridor, running while Hetty is still informing her of the alarm in Ariel Corta’s room. Ariel has been moved from the ICU to a private room up on the former Corta floor. The level is airy and quiet and secure. Machines walk or flit by, sniff Ariel’s vital signs, drift on. Marina’s momentum carries her into the room and hard into the wall beside the bed. Medical bots reach out from their hatches in the walls to examine her. Superficial bruising, no lasting trauma.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I heard – Hetty alerted me.’

‘Nothing!’

The bed again brings Ariel Corta into a sitting position. Hetty displays diagnostics but Marina can see the fear in Ariel’s wide eyes, the tightness of her breathing, the resentment in the set of her mouth that she should be found like this: unseemly.

‘I’m not going.’

‘Nothing. No. I saw him.’

‘Barosso …’ Marina begins. Ariel holds up a hand.

‘Don’t say it.’ She gives an exasperated sigh, fists clenched. ‘I see him all the time. Every time anything moves; the bots, someone in the corridor, you; it’s him.’

‘It takes time. You’ve had a trauma – a serious trauma, you need to heal the memories …’

‘Do not give me that therapy-speak, healing shit.’

Marina bites back her words. She grew up in the vocabulary of well-being, of balancing and aligning and rebirth. Crystals turned, chakras glowed. Hurts crippled, traumas wounded, offences maimed. She realises she has never examined its principles and beliefs. It is all analogies. But healing, practical healing, might be a thing of the body only, not the emotions. A different process might apply to the emotions – if what is wounded are emotions at all, if wound isn’t just another analogy for a realm that has no names or words beyond the experience of the emotion itself. Or perhaps no process at all, except time and the decay of memory.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Self-help shit,’ Ariel growls. ‘What I need: I need to be able to walk, I need to be able to take a piss or a dump without feeling something warm in a bag next to my hip. I need out of this bed. I need a bloody martini.’

You’re angry, Marina makes to say. No. ‘My brother-in-law, Skyler, was in the military.’

‘Really?’ Ariel props herself up on her elbows. The bed catches up with her. A human story. People doing things; those interest her.

‘He was working down in the Sahel. That was when they brought the army in on any kind of emergency; some multiple-resistance outbreak or refugees or famine or drought.’

‘What you people get up to down there, I don’t understand any of it.’

A spike of fury stabs through Marina. Who is this lofty rich bitch lawyer? A rich bitch lawyer on the moon. Stabbed and paralysed. Let the emotion go. Calm. Heal.

‘He was in information support. Every crisis needs information support. But he still saw things. Kids. They were the worst. That was all he’d say. He wouldn’t talk about it. They never do talk about it. He was diagnosed as a PTSD victim. No, he said. I’m not a victim. Don’t make me a victim. That’s all people will see. That will become everything about me.’

‘I am not a victim,’ Ariel says. ‘But I want to stop seeing him.’

‘So do I,’ Marina says.

‘What do you mean, you don’t do other people?’

Two o’clock and Marina and Ariel are insomniac again in a med centre room. They’ve talked people and politics, law and ambition; unspooled their stories and histories and they’ve come round to sex.

‘I’m not sexually attracted to other people,’ Ariel says. She lies propped up in bed vaping. Dr Macaraeg has given up her admonitions and warnings. Who pays for your breathing, darling? The vaper is new, longer and more deadly than the one with which Marina stabbed Edouard Barosso. Its flowing tip mesmerises Marina. ‘I can’t be bothered with them. All that neediness and attention seeking and having to think about them when they’re not thinking about you. All that having to negotiate sex, and the falling in and out of sex, and then there’s love. Spare us that. It’s so much better to have sex with someone who’s always available, knows what you want and who loves you more deeply than anyone else ever can. Yourself.’

‘That’s, um, wow,’ Marina says. When she arrived as a print-fresh Jo Moonbeam, Marina explored the moon’s sexual diversity but there are niches in the ecosystem – a sexual rainforest – she has never imagined.

‘You’re so terrestrial,’ Ariel says with a flick of the vaper. ‘Sex with other people is always compromise. Always barging and shoving and trying to get it all to fit and who comes first and who likes what and you don’t like what they like and they don’t like what you like. Always something held back; that secret thing you love or want to try or that makes you lose everything and scream yourself sick that you can’t say because you’re scared they’ll look at you and say, you want to do what? and see not their lover but a monster. Nowhere is as dirty as the inside of your head. When you’re with yourself, when you’re jilling off, flicking the bean, fishing for pearls, playing women’s handball, cutting a siririca; there’s no one else to worry about, nothing to hold back from. No one’s judging you, no one’s comparing you, no one’s got someone else in their head they’re not telling you about. Me-sex is the only honest sex.’

‘Me-sex?’ Marina says.

‘Self-sex sounds grubby, auto-sex is bots fucking and anything with the word “erotica” in it is by definition un-erotic.’

‘But what do you—’

‘Do? Everything darling.’

‘That room you wouldn’t let me into, in your apartment …’

‘That’s where I go fuck myself. The things I have in there. The fun I’ve had.’

‘Is this an appropriate employer/employee conversation?’

‘As you keep reminding me, I’m not your employer.’

‘Goodness,’ Marina says; an old grandma expression, but the only one she can think of that adequately expresses her sense of wonder and shock. It is as if she opened that locked door in the small, bare apartment and found an endless wonderland of meadows and rainbows, oiled skin and soft flesh and orgasmic choirs.

‘Who are you thinking about?’ Ariel asks.

‘I’m not—’

Ariel cuts her short.

‘Yes you are. When you tell anyone you’re A, they immediately start comparing the best they’ve done solo with the best they’re doing with their current other. Every time. Who is it?’

It’s the dark, it’s the smallness of the hour, it’s the click and whirr of lunar machinery, always present but in this room on this level loud and present; it’s the feeling that there is only her and Ariel in this whole world that gives Marina the courage to say, ‘Your brother.’

A grin of delight spreads across Ariel’s face.

‘Oh you ambitious girl. One of the family. That’s why I do like you so very much. Carlinhos? Of course it’s Carlinhos. He’s gorgeous. Really looks after himself. Doesn’t talk too much either. If I were the kind of girl who fucked other people, I’d want to fuck him.’ Ariel’s vaper freezes on its way to her lips. Her eyes widen. She sits forward and grasps Marina’s hands in her own. The gesture is startling, the skin still hot and dry from medications.

‘Oh mi coração,’ Ariel says. ‘You have, haven’t you? Please don’t tell me you love him. Oh you silly woman. Did my mother not tell you this about my family? Don’t get close to us, don’t care for us; above all, don’t love us.’

With a huff of effort, a bite of the lower lip in pain, Ariel Corta swings herself on to the edge of the bed. Marina watches in agony.

‘Can I?’

‘No you fucking cannot,’ Ariel says. She pushes herself to the very edge of the bed, legs dangling, pulls the petticoats and skirts of the full-length dress up around her thighs. ‘Come legs.’

In the corner of the room legs whirr and stir. Corta Hélio roboticists designed and built them in under a day: all other projects suspended to the imperative of making Ariel Corta walk. The legs stride across the floor to the bed. Their gait is natural, easy, human and quite quite horrifying to Marina. They’re like bones a body has stepped out of. They’ll be stalking through her nightmares for lunes. They nuzzle against Ariel’s hanging legs, open like traps and lock from foot to thigh. ‘I need your help now,’ Ariel says. Marina gets an arm around Ariel’s waist, a shoulder under her arm and holds Ariel up as the neural links spider up her spine seeking the socket the surgeons have set into her back. The woman is as light as thought; bone and air, but Marina feels her tight-wired strength. The spiders scuttle over skin beneath bunched fabric and sink connectors into the socket. Ariel hisses in discomfort. Two drips of blood.

‘Let’s try this.’

Marina steps away. Ariel drops down to the floor. The machine legs buckle, for an instant she might topple, then the gyros and servos mesh with her intentions and she stands firm.

‘Hold the dress up.’

Ariel takes a step forward. There is no hesitation or faltering in it. She takes a tour of the room, Ariel holding up the train of her dress like a courtier.

‘How does it feel?’

‘Like I’m seven years old and wearing Mamãe’s shoes,’ Ariel says. ‘All right. Make me presentable.’

Marina lets fall the dress and straightens out the folds and layers. It gives no flash of the prosthetics beneath. Ariel examines herself through Beijaflor.

‘It’ll do for now.’ The grafts have already restored some control to bladder and bowel but the voluminous dress conceals discreet colostomy equipment. ‘I’m not wearing floor-length frocks for the rest of my life. Unless I set a new trend. Please keep behind me. I want to make an entrance.’

Lucas is first to applaud as Ariel waltzes through the door into the reception room but Marina marks the momentary flicker of sour across his face. Kisses. Then Adriana embraces her daughter, stands back to admire what Corta engineers have wrought.

‘Oh my love.’

‘It’s temporary,’ Ariel chides. ‘Purely cosmetic.’

The third member of the family to have come to the med centre is Wagner. He is the most intriguing Corta to Marina. Since the party in Boa Vista, Marina has seen him only once, at the birthday celebration. Like Carlinhos he serves the family outside the board room but Marina senses this is through politics not temperament. He is dark-eyed and -skinned, long-lashed and high cheekboned, his familiar is a sphere of oily black rubber spikes and he is here when Rafa and Carlinhos are not.

Ariel sits, crosses her legs, flicks out her vaper. Marina stands behind her, enjoying the show.

‘Lucas. A proper nikah.’ Familiars flicker with data transfer. ‘That’ll keep the boy safe and happy. Don’t read it, just sign it and don’t mess around with things you don’t understand again.’

‘Have the Mackenzies agreed?’

‘They will or they’ll be years renegotiating every clause and Jonathon Kayode is very impatient for a glam wedding.’

Lucas dips his head but again Marina reads resentment.

‘Wagner has something to report to us,’ Adriana says.

‘Ariel, your bodyguard,’ Lucas says.

‘Marina stays,’ Ariel says. ‘I trust her with my life.’

Lucas looks to his mother.

‘She has saved the lives of two of my children,’ Adriana says.

‘I know I don’t have a position at the centre of this family,’ Wagner says. ‘I made an arrangement with Rafa, after the attack at the moon-run party. I’d make some investigations. My special … situation … means I can see things the rest of you can’t.’

Ariel catches Marina’s puzzled frown.

He’s a wolf, Beijaflor whispers on Marina’s private channel.

What? Hetty whispers back. Marina remembers when he had quizzed her at Boa Vista. Carlinhos had asked her whether she had any surface experience. Wagner had asked her about her engineering specialism. She sees the dark intelligence here, and the sense of something lonely, feral, vulnerable. Wolf.

‘I caught a scent of something I recognised in one of the protein processors and tracked down the designer. She led me to the people who commissioned her. It was a one-shot disposable shell company but one of the owners was Jake Tenglong Sun. I went to talk to Jake Sun in Queen of the South. He knew I was coming. He tried to kill me. The Magdalena pack saved me.’

Magdalena pack? Hetty whispers to Beijaflor but Ariel has a question.

‘He knew you were coming?’

‘His words were “You’re far too predictable, Little Wolf. The August Ones saw you coming a week back.”’

‘Gods,’ Ariel says.

‘Ariel,’ Adriana says.

‘I’m a member of the Pavilion of the White Hare. I’m also a member of the Lunarian Society.’

‘Why was I not informed of this?’ Lucas says.

‘Because you’re not my keeper, Lucas,’ Ariel snaps. She vapes deep and long. ‘Vidhya Rao is also a member.’

‘From Whitacre Goddard,’ Lucas says.

‘E told me about an AI analytics system Taiyang designed for Whitacre Goddard. Three quantum mainframes, designed to make highly accurate predictions from detailed real-world modelling. E called it prophecy. Fu Xi, Shennong and the Yellow Emperor: the Three August Ones.’

‘The Suns are our allies,’ Adriana says.

‘With respect Mamãe,’ Lucas says, ‘the Suns are their own allies.’

‘Why would the Suns commission a device to try to kill my son?’ Adriana says.

‘To bring us to exactly where we are, Mamãe,’ Lucas says. ‘The edge of war with the Mackenzies.’

Lucas is awake the instant before Toquinho calls him. The present is an illusion. He had read that as a child. Human consciousness lags half a second behind every decision and experience. The finger moves unconsciously, the mind approves the action and imagines it initiates.

Helen de Braga, Toquinho says. Esperança Maria, her familiar, appears in the dark before him.

‘Lucas, your mother asked me to call you.’

It’s time then. Lucas feels no fear, no dread, no anxiety. He has prepared for this moment, rehearsed his emotions again and again.

‘Can you come to Boa Vista?’

‘I’m on my way.’

Helen De Braga meets Lucas on the tram platform. They kiss formally.

‘When did you find out?’

‘I called you as soon as Dr Macaraeg told me.’

Lucas has never had much regard for Dr Macaraeg. Hers is an unnecessary profession. Machines do medicine so much better; cleanly, impersonally.

‘Your mother’s condition has deteriorated.’ Dr Macaraeg says. Lucas turns the full chill of his stare on her and she flinches. Another thing the machines do better: truth.

‘Since when?’

‘Since before her birthday. Senhora Corta instructed us …’

‘Do you have ambitions, Dr Macaraeg?’

The doctor is taken aback. She flusters.

‘I’m not ashamed to say it, but yes, I have ambitions to further private consultancy.’

‘Good. Modesty is a vastly overrated attribute. I hope you’re able to achieve them. My mother must have told you about her condition. Yet you kept the full degree of it secret from me. How do you think I should respond to that?’

‘I am Senhora Corta’s private physician.’

‘Of course you are, yes. Is there any medical reason why I can’t see my mother?’

‘She is very weak. Her condition is—’

‘Very good then. Where is she?’

‘She’s in the surface observatory,’ Dr Macaraeg says and slips away from Lucas’s attention. Boa Vista’s staff have turned out under Nilson Nunes on the tailored lawns. Their questions Lucas Corta can’t answer, but he is a Corta, he is authority. He nods acknowledgement to each of them. Good faithful people. Next the madrinhas, a word for each.

‘How long does she really have?’ Lucas asks Helen de Braga.

‘Days at the most. Maybe only hours.’

Lucas leans a moment against the polished rock lintel of the elevator lobby.

‘I can’t blame her doctor for obeying her.’

‘She asked for you and you alone, Lucas,’ Helen de Braga says.

‘You!’ Lucas shouts. His eye has been caught by a movement of white: Irmã Loa blowing like paper between the pillars of the lobby. ‘Out of my house!’

‘I’m your mother’s spiritual adviser.’ Irmã Loa faces Lucas Corta.

‘You are a liar and a parasite.’

Helen de Braga touches Lucas’s arm.

‘She’s taken great comfort from the Sisterhood,’ Irmã Loa says.

‘I’ve called security. They’re not under any orders to be gentle.’

‘Mãe Odunlade warned me about your manners.’

Heitor Pereira and a smart security suit arrive. She flicks away the arresting hands.

‘I’m leaving.’

‘This woman is banned from Boa Vista,’ Lucas says.

‘We’re not your enemies, Lucas!’ Irmã Loa calls.

‘We’re not your project,’ Lucas calls back and, before Helen de Braga can ask what he means, steps into the elevator.

The Earth’s last quarter stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Adriana has arranged her seat to look full on it. Wheel tracks in the dust hint at discreet medical bots concealed in the walls. The only thing attending Adriana is a side table with a cup of coffee.

‘Lucas.’

‘Mamãe.’

‘Someone’s been up here recently,’ Adriana says. Her voice is light and weak, a husk of will and Lucas hears in it the truth that her disease is very much more advanced than he or even Dr Macaraeg suspects.

‘Wagner,’ Lucas says. ‘Security saw him.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘The same as you. Looking at the Earth.’

The lightest of smiles crosses Adriana’s profile.

‘I was too hard on that boy. I don’t understand a thing about him but I never tried. It’s just that he made me so angry. Not anything he did; just that he was. Just him being constantly said, You’re a fool, Adriana Corta. That was wrong. Try and bring him in to the family.’

‘Mamãe, he’s not—’

‘He is.’

‘Mamãe, the doctor told me—’

‘Yes, I’ve been keeping secrets again. And what would you have done? Rallied the family? Pulled in every Corta from every quarter? The last thing I see is all of you standing looking at me all big eyed and solemn? Hideous. Hideous.’

‘At least Rafa—’

‘No, Lucas.’ Adriana’s voice can still find the snap of command. ‘Hold my hand, for gods’ sakes.’

Lucas cups the thin kite of skin between his two hands and is shocked at its dry heat. This is a dying woman. Adriana closes her eyes.

‘Some final things. Helen de Braga will retire. She’s done enough for this family. And I want her away from us; safe. She’s not a player. I’m afraid for us, Lucas. This is a terrible time to be dying. I don’t know what will happen.’

‘I’ll take care of the company, Mamãe.’

‘You all will. That’s the way I’ve arranged it. Don’t break it, Lucas. I chose this, I chose this.’

Adriana clenches her fist inside Lucas’s hands and he releases it.

‘I’m afraid for you,’ Adriana says. ‘Here. A secret just for you. Only you, Lucas. You’ll know when you need it. In the early days, when it looked like the Mackenzies would wipe us out, Carlos commissioned a revenge weapon. He planted a trojan inside Crucible’s smelter control systems. It’s still there. It’s a clever piece of code; it hides, it adapts, it self-updates. It’s very simple and elegant. It will redirect Crucible’s smelter mirrors, turn them on to Crucible itself.’

‘Dear gods.’

‘Yes. Here, Lucas.’

The briefest flicker of data between Yemanja and Toquinho.

‘Thank you, Mamãe.’

‘Don’t thank me. You’ll only use it when everything is lost and the family is destroyed.’

‘Then I’ll never use it.’

Adriana grasps Lucas’s hand with startling strength.

‘Oh, would you like some coffee? Esmeralda Geisha Special from Panama. That’s a country in Central America. I had it flown up. What else am I going it spend my money on?’

‘I never got the taste for it, Mamãe.’

‘That’s a pity. I’m not sure you could learn it now. Oh, can’t you see what I’m doing? Sit with me Lucas. Play me some music. You have such good taste. That boy you wanted to marry; it would have been good to have a musician in the family.’

‘The family was too much family for him.’

Adriana strokes the back of Lucas’s hand. ‘Still, you were right to divorce Amanda Sun. I never liked her sneaking around Boa Vista. I never liked her at all.’

‘You agreed to the nikah.’

Lucas feels Adriana’s hand start.

‘I did, didn’t I? I thought it was necessary for the family. The only thing that’s necessary for the family is the family.’

Lucas has no right words so he orders Toquinho to play.

‘Is that?’

‘Jorge. Yes.’

Tears soften Adriana’s eyes.

‘It’s all the little things, Lucas. Coffee and music. Luna’s favourite dress. Rafa telling me the results from his handball teams, whether they were good or bad. The sound of water outside my bedroom. The full Earth. Wagner’s right; you could lose yourself looking at it. It’s so dangerous: you daren’t look because it will snatch your eye and remind you of everything you’ve given up. This is an awful place, Lucas.’

Lucas hides the flinch of hurt from his mother. He grasps her hand again.

‘I’m afraid, Lucas. I’m afraid of death. It looks like an animal, like a dirty, sneaking animal that’s been hunting me all my life. That’s lovely music, Lucas.’

‘I’ll play his Aguas de Marco.’

‘Let it run, Lucas.’

Adriana opens her eyes. She had drifted off. That fills her with cold vertigo. It could have been the last sleep, with things unsaid. The cold shaking her heart is relentless now. Lucas sits with her. From his face Adriana guesses he is working; Toquinho a vortex of files and contacts and messages. The music has ended. It was very good. That boy can sing. She would ask Lucas to play it again but she doesn’t want to break this moment; aware without being noticed.

She turns her eyes to the Earth. Traitor. Yemanja showed her the shining path, drawn across the sea, out from that world to the moon. She followed it. It was a trap. There is no path back. No line of light across this dry sea.

‘Lucas.’

He looks up from his work. His smile is a delight. Small things.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’ Lucas says.

‘For bringing you here.’

‘You didn’t bring me here.’

‘Don’t be so literal. Why must you always take against things?’

‘That’s not my world up there. This is my world.’

‘World. Not home.’

‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Mamãe.’

Adriana reaches for the coffee on the table but the cup is cold.

‘I’ll have fresh made up,’ Lucas says.

‘Please.’

The terminator of the crescent Earth sweeps down across the Atlantic; the whorl of a tropical cyclone spinning north by north-west, the paisley-pattern cloud-avenues of the inter-tropical convergence zone disappearing silently into night. An edge of green, the tip of north-eastern Brazil, draws over the horizon. The night-side of the planet is edged in a lace-work of lights. Clusters and whorls; they mirror the patterns of meteorology. Those lives down there.

‘Do you know what happened to them?’

‘Who, Lucas?’

‘I know when you look at Earth like that, you’re thinking about them.’

‘They failed like everyone fails down there. What else could they do?’

‘It’s no easy world, this,’ Lucas says.

‘Neither is theirs. I’ve been thinking about my mãe, Lucas. In the apartment, singing; and Pai in the dealership, polishing his cars. They were so brilliant in the sun. I can see Caio. None of the others. Not even Achi clearly any more.’

‘You had courage,’ Lucas says. ‘There is only one Iron Hand.’

‘That stupid name!’ Adriana says. ‘It’s a curse, not a name. Play me that music again, Lucas.’

Adriana settles into the chair. Jorge’s whispering voice and agile guitar surround her. Lucas watches his mother drift down through the words and chords into shallow sleep. Still breathing. The coffee is here, Toquinho says. Lucas takes it from the maid and as he sets it on the table he sees that his mother is not breathing.

He takes her hand.

Toquinho shows him vital signs.

Gone.

Lucas feels his breath tremble in his chest, but it is not as terrible as he imagined; not so terrible at all. Yemanja slowly fades to white and folds in on itself. The crescent Earth stands eternally on the eastern horizon.

Luna, in a red dress, picking barefoot over the boulders and through the empty pools of Boa Vista. The streams have run dry, the water no longer falls from the eyes and lips of the ten orixas. Rafa can’t express why he shut down Boa Vista’s waters but no one except Luna objected. The only way he could articulate it was that Boa Vista needed to say something.

The memorial was ramshackle and disappointing. The guests could not outshine the Cortas in their eulogies, the Cortas had no valedictory tradition so their tributes were sincere but stumbling and poorly stage-managed and the Sisterhood, who understood religious theatre, had been barred from attending. The words were said, the handful of compost that was all the LDC would permit of Adriana Corta’s carbon for private ceremonials was scattered, the representatives of the great families made their way to the tram. Throughout the short ceremony, Luna wandered blithe as water, exploring her strange dry world.

‘Papai!’

‘Leave him, oheneba,’ Lousika Asamoah says. Like her daughter she wears a red dress; a funeral colour among the Asamoahs. ‘He has to get used to things.’

Rafa takes the stepping stones over the dry river, enters the bamboo. He looks up at the open-lipped, wide-eyed faces of the orixas. Small feet have drawn a path between the canes: Luna’s feet. She knows this place and all its secrets better than he. But it is his now, he is Senhor of Boa Vista. There is a universe of difference between living somewhere and owning it. Rafa runs the long, rough-edged bamboo leaves through his fingers. He had thought he would cry. He had thought he would be disconsolate, sobbing like a child. Rafa knows how easily his emotions are stirred, to anger or joy or exultation. Your mother has died. What he felt: shock, yes; the futile paralysis of needing to do something, a hundred things, knowing that none of them can change the truth of death. Anger – some; at the suddenness, at the revelation that Adriana had been sick for a long time, terminal since the moon-run party. Guilty that the whirlpool of events after the assassination attempt had drowned any signals Adriana might have given about her condition. Resentment that it was Lucas who had spent the final hours with her. Not disconsolate; not overwhelmed: no tears.

He stands a moment in São Sebastião Pavilion, its streams now dry; their sediments caking and cracking into hexagons. This had been her favourite of Boa Vista’s pavilions. There was a pavilion for drinking tea, a pavilion for meeting social guests and one for business guests, a pavilion for receiving relatives and one for reading, the morning pavilion and the evening pavilion but this one, at the eastern end of Boa Vista’s main chamber, was her working pavilion. Rafa has never liked the pavilions. He thinks them affected and silly. Adriana built Boa Vista selfishly; the palace of her particular dreams. It’s Rafa’s now but it will never be his. Adriana is in the dry ponds and watercourses, the bamboo, the domes of the pavilions, the faces of the orixas. He can’t change a leaf or a pebble of it.

‘Water,’ Rafa whispers and feels Boa Vista tremble as waters stir in pipes and pumps; a gurgle here, a trickle there; pouring from freshets and faucets; runnels merging into streams, channels filling, water chuckling around rocks, drawing eddies and foam and dead leaves; water gathering in the eyes and mouths of the orixas; a slow swell into great teardrops quivering with surface tension then burst into slow waterfalls; showers and trickles first, then bounding cascades. Until he silenced them, Rafa had never realised how the splash and trickle of moving waters filled Boa Vista.

‘Papai!’ Luna exclaims, dress hitched up and calf-deep in running water. ‘It’s cold!’

Boa Vista is Rafa’s now but still Lousika won’t share it with him.

‘Do you think you’ll move back?’ Rafa asks.

Lucas shakes his head.

‘Too close. I like my distance. And the acoustics are terrible.’ A touch on the sleeve of Rafa’s Brioni jacket. ‘A word.’

Rafa wondered why Lucas had sought him out at the far end of the garden, risking wet trouser cuffs and stained shoes among the stepping stones and pools.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Mamãe and I talked a lot in the last hours.’

Rafa’s throat and jaw tighten with resentment. He is eldest, hwaejang, golden. He should have had these last words.

‘She had a plan for the company,’ Lucas says. The play of falling water masks his words. ‘Her will. She’s created a new position: Choego. She wanted Ariel to fill it.’

‘Ariel.’

‘I’ve been through this but she was quite obdurate. Ariel will be Choego. Foremost. Head of Corta Hélio. Above me and you, irmão. Don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. I have this already planned. There’s nothing we can do about the will. That’s set, locked in.’

‘We could fight …’

‘I said don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. It would be a waste of our time and money fighting through the courts. Ariel knows the courts, she would tie us up forever. No, we do this constitutionally. Our sister was badly wounded in a knife attack. She is effectively paraplegic. Her recovery will be slow, and by no means certain. The constitution of Corta Hélio contains a medical competency clause. The clause allows for a board member to be retired from office in the case of sickness or injury that would prevent them from fully discharging their duties.’

‘You’re suggesting—’

‘Yes I am. For the company, Rafa. Ariel is a supremely competent lawyer, but she knows nothing about helium mining. It wouldn’t be a board-room coup. Just placing her powers and responsibilities in temporary abeyance.’

‘Temporary until what?’

‘Until such time as we can restructure the company more in line with what it needs, rather than our mother’s whims. She was a very sick woman, Rafa.’

‘Shut the fuck up, Lucas.’

Lucas steps back, hands help up in appeal.

‘Of course. I apologise. But I tell you this; our mother would never have survived her own medical competency clause.’

‘No, fuck off, Lucas.’

Lucas backs off another step.

‘All we need are two medical reports, and I have those. One from the João de Deus medical centre, the other from our very own Dr Macaraeg, who is very pleased to have been retained as our family physician. Two reports, and a majority.’ Lucas calls back through the spray. ‘Let me know!’

Luna goes splashing down the stream, kicking slow-settling sprays of silver water into the air. They catch the light of the sunline and diffract it: a child crowned with rainbows.

The door of the tram closes, the door opens. Ariel looks out.

‘Well, are you coming?’

There is no one other than Marina on the platform that Ariel could intend, but she still frowns, mouths, Me?

‘Yes you, who else?’

‘I’m technically out of contract …’

‘Yes yes, you didn’t work for me, you worked for my mother. Well, you work for me now.’

Hetty chimes: incoming mail. A contract.

‘Come on. Let’s get out of the fucking mausoleum. We’ve got a wedding to arrange.’