Luna: New Moon

TWO

Luna Corta: small spy. Boa Vista is rich in hiding places for a bored girl. Luna discovered the service tunnel following a cleaning bot one long Boa Vista morning. Like all moon kids Luna is drawn to tunnels and crawlspaces. No adult could fit it and that is good because hiding holes and dens must be secret. The shaft has grown tight since Luna first crawled in and realised she could look down into her mother’s private room and, if she held her breath, hear. Tucked up behind the eyes of Oxossi, Luna squirms, a constriction in a sinus in the head of the hunter and protector.

‘They put a knife to my throat.’

Her father says something she can’t make out. Luna twists closer to the ventilation grille. Dusty light-rays strike up around her face.

‘They put a knife to my throat, Rafa!’

Luna sees her mother brush fingers against her neck, touching the remembered edge of the knife.

‘It was just security.’

‘Would they have killed me?’

Luna moves again to fit both of her parents into her narrow slot of sight. Her father sits on the bed. He looks small, diminished, as if the air and light has gone out of him.

‘They were protecting us. Anyone who wasn’t a Corta was suspect.’

‘Amanda Sun isn’t a Corta. I didn’t see a knife at her throat.’

‘The fly. Everyone knows you people use biological weapons.’

‘You people.’

‘The Asamoahs.’

‘There were other Asamoahs at the party. Abena Maanu for one. I didn’t see a knife at her throat. My people, or just some of my people?’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because your people, Rafa, put a knife to my throat. And I don’t hear anything from you that says they wouldn’t have cut me.’

‘I would never let them do that.’

‘If your mother gave the order, would you have stopped them?’

‘I’m bu-hwaejang of Corta Hélio.’

‘Don’t insult me, Rafa.’

‘I’m angry our security put a knife to your throat. I’m angry that you were a suspect. I’m raging, but you know how we live here.’

‘Yes. Well maybe I don’t want to live here.’

Luna sees Rafa look up.

‘I know how we live in Twé. It’s a good place, Twé. It’s a safe place. With my people, Rafa. I want to take Luna there.’

Luna gasps. The shaft is so tight she can’t press hands to mouth, to try and call back the noise. They might have heard. But then she thinks, Boa Vista is full of sighs and whispers.

Rafa is on his feet. When he is angry, he gets close, breath-close. Spit-in-my face close. Lousika doesn’t flinch.

‘You’re not taking Luna.’

‘She’s not safe here.’

‘My children stay with me.’

‘Your children?’

‘Didn’t you read the nikah? Or were you too eager to jump into bed with the heir apparent of Corta Hélio.’

‘Rafa. No. Don’t say this. This is beneath you. This is not you.’

Rafa’s anger is stoked now. Anger is his sin. It is the other side of his affability: easy to laugh, to play, to make love. Easy to rage.

‘You know? Maybe your people planned …’

‘Rafa. Stop.’ Lousika presses her fingers to Rafa lips. She knows his anger is as quick to ebb as to flow. ‘I would never, ever plot against you – not me, not my people – to get hold of Luna.’

‘Luna stays with me.’

‘Yes. But I won’t.’

‘I don’t want you to go. This is your home. With me. With Luna.’

‘I’m not safe here. Luna’s not safe. But the nikah won’t let me take her. If you’d once said you were sorry that your escoltas put a knife to my throat, it might be different. You were angry. You weren’t sorry.’

Now her father speaks but Luna can’t hear his words. She can’t hear anything but a rushing noise inside her head that is the sound of the worst things in the world arriving. Her mamãe is going away. Her chest is tight. Her head rings with the horrible hissing, like air and life leaking away. Luna wriggles free, pushes herself down the shaft away from the hidey-hole where she overheard too much. She has scuffed her shoes and torn her Pierre Cardin dress on the raw stone.

The rain has swept the dead butterflies into floes and flotsam. Their wings form an azure scum around the lips of pools. Luna Corta sits among the corpses.

‘Hey hey hey, what is it?’ Lousika Asamoah crouches beside her daughter.

‘The butterflies died.’

‘They don’t live very long. Just a day.’

‘I liked them. They were pretty. It’s not fair.’

‘That’s how we make them.’

Lousika kicks off her shoes and sits down on the stone beside Luna. She swishes her feet in the water. Blue wings cling to her dark legs.

‘You could make them live longer than a day,’ Luna says.

‘We could, but what would they eat? Where would they go? They’re decorations, like flags for Yam Festival.’

‘But they’re not,’ Luna says. ‘They’re alive.’

‘Luna, what happened to your shoes?’ Lousika says. ‘And your dress.’

Luna looks at the floes of butterflies slowly drifting downstream.

‘You’re going away.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I heard you say it.’

None of the questions Lousika could ask have any meaning here.

‘Yes. I am going back to Twé, back to my family. But only for a while. Not for always.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know, love. No longer than I have to.’

‘But I’m not going with you.’

‘No. I would love to, more than anything – more than myself – but I can’t.’

‘Am I safe, Mama?’

Lousika hugs Luna to her, kisses the top of her head.

‘You’re safe. Papa will keep you safe. He’ll tear the head off anyone who tries to hurt you. But I have to go until things are clear. I don’t want to, and I will miss you so much. Papa will look after you, and Madrinha Elis. Elis will not let anything hurt you.’

The words burn Lousika Asamoah’s throat. Madrinhas, host mothers. Hired wombs, who become nannies, who become unofficial aunts, become family. For small corporations like the Cortas with a business to build and no time for pregnancy, birth, early infancy, Lousika could understand the arrangement. Not for the next generation, not that the coven of demure, ever-present madrinhas should become tradition. She resented tall, Brazilian-cheek-boned Madrinha Elis carrying her child, birthing her baby. She had been shocked when Rafa had presented the surrogacy as a done thing: the Corta way. Put it in me, plant it in me, let me grow it and carry it and press it into the world. I don’t need Madonnas of Conception to mix your sperm with my egg and pronounce, let there be life. I don’t need to watch your gyno-bots slide the embryo up into sleek, smiling Elis and watch her every day grow bigger and fuller. I don’t need to see the reports, the scans of her uterus, the daily posts of how her pregnancy is progressing. And I did not need to lock myself away in my room howling and smashing things as Elis went under the knife. It should have been me, Luna. It should have been me they brought you to. My smiling, exhausted, teary face the first thing you saw. An Asamoah. Life flows and spurts and gushes in all our fluids and juices. I am fit, fertile, everything works naturally, brilliantly, fecundly. But it’s not the Corta way.

I love you Luna, but I cannot love the Corta way.

Lousika wraps Luna up in her arms, rocks as much for her own comfort as for Luna’s. One assassin-fly has cracked her world. This is not a garden of gods, a palace of waters. It’s a tunnel in the rock. Every one of her family’s light-filled agraria, every city and factory and settlement, is a scrape, a fragile bivouac of rocks against the vacuum sky and the killing sun. Everyone is in danger, all the time. Nowhere can you escape, or even hide.

‘Your papa and the contract and everyone may say you’re a Corta, but you are an Asamoah. You’re an Asamoah because I am an Asamoah because my mother is an Asamoah. That’s our way.’

Lucas Corta sweeps his hand across the board table and scatters the virtual documents.

‘I haven’t time for this. Where did it come from? Who made it?’

Heitor Pereira dips his head. He is a head shorter and a decade greyer than everyone at the board table except Adriana Corta and her Finance Director, Helen de Braga, the dark will of Corta Hélio.

‘We’re still analysing—’

‘We have the best R&D unit on the moon and you can’t tell me who made this?’

‘They’ve gone to remarkable lengths to hide anything that might identify the drone. The chips are generic, we’ve nothing on the printer pattern.’

‘So you don’t know.’

‘We don’t know yet.’ Everyone around the table hears the tremble in Heitor Pereira’s voice.

‘You don’t know who made it, you don’t know who sent it, you don’t know how it got through security. You don’t know if, right now, another one of those things is coming for my brother, or me, or, God save us, my mother. You’re head of security, and you don’t know this?’

Lucas holds the stare. Heitor Pereira’s face twitches.

‘We are in a total security situation. We’re monitoring everything over the size of a skin-flake.’

‘What if they’re here already? That drone could have been planted months ago. Have you thought of that? There could be a dozen more waking up right now. A hundred more. They only need to get lucky once. I know what modern poisons do. They make you wait. They make you wait in hours of pain, knowing each breath is shorter than the one before, knowing there’s no antidote, knowing you’re going to die. You spend a long time looking at death. Only then do they let you die. And I know that someone tried to use one of those poisons on my brother. That’s what I know. Now, tell me, what do you know?’

‘Lucas, enough.’ Adriana Corta occupies the head of the board table. For months her seat has been empty, her only presence the large, clumsy portrait of her in a sasuit, Our Lady of Helium, looking down the length of the table. An immediate and lethal threat her children has brought her to the board room in all her authority. Rafa is seated at her right hand, Ariel to her left. Lucas sits to the right of his brother.

‘Mamãe, if your head of security can’t keep us safe, who can?’

‘Heitor has been a faithful agent of our family for longer than you have been alive.’ No one can mistake the sting of authority.

‘Yes, Mãe.’ Lucas dips his head to his mother.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Rafa fills the stinging silence.

‘Is it obvious?’ Ariel says.

‘Who else has it ever been?’ Rafa leans low over the table. His anger smokes. ‘Bob Mackenzie has never forgiven Mamãe. He’s slow poison. Not today, not tomorrow; not this year or even this decade, but some year, some day. The Mackenzies pay back three times. They’re striking at the succession. They want you to see everything you’ve built come apart, Mamãe.’

‘Rafa …’ Ariel begins.

‘Kyra Mackenzie,’ Rafa interrupts. ‘She was at the party. Did anyone search her, or did we just wave her through, because she was one of Lucasinho’s friends?’

‘Rafa, do you think the Mackenzies would risk all-out war?’ Ariel says. She draws long on her vaper. ‘Really?’

‘If they thought they could break our monopoly, they might.’ Lucas says.

‘It’s starting again, can’t you see that?’ Rafa says.

Eight years before, Corta Hélio and Mackenzie Metals fought a brief territory war. Extractors fallen in tangles of metal, trains boarded and shipments hijacked, bots and AIs crashed under bombardments of dark code. Dusters fought hand to hand, knife to knife in the tunnels of Maskelyne and Jansen and out on the stone seas of Tranquillity and Serenity. One hundred and twenty deaths, damage in the millions of bitsies. In the end, Cortas and Mackenzies agreed to arbitration. The Court of Clavius ruled for Corta Hélio. Two months later Adrian Mackenzie married Jonathon Kayode, Eagle of the Moon, CEO of the Lunar Development Corporation, the owners of the moon.

‘Rafa, enough,’ Adriana Corta says. Her voice is thin, her authority is incontestable. ‘We fight the Mackenzies through business, we beat them through business. We make money.’ Adriana rises from the table, stiff and worn in face and limb. Her children and retainers bow and follow her from the board room.

Carlinhos stands, purses the fingers of his right hand and bows to his mother. He has not spoken a word at this board meeting. He never does. His place is out in the field, with the extractors and refiners and the dusters. He’s the duster, the fighter. Rafa can outshine him with his charm, Lucas bludgeon him with his arguments, Ariel tie him up with her eloquence but none of them can walk the dirt the way he does.

Lucas detains Heitor Pereira a moment.

‘You made a mistake,’ Lucas whispers. ‘You’re too old. You’re past it, and you’re gone.’

In the lobby outside the board room Wagner Corta waits. Adriana and her retainers pass without looking at him, then Lucas and Ariel. Ariel nods, a tight smile. Carlinhos claps his brother on the back.

‘Hey brother.’

Wagner is the conspicuous absence at the board table.

‘I want a word with Rafa,’ Wagner says.

‘Sure. You want to bike back to João?’

‘I’ve something else planned.’

‘Catch you later, Lobinho.’

‘A word about what?’ Rafa says. He perches on the inside lip of Oxala’s right eye. Behind him water tumbles slowly.

‘The fly. I want to take a look at it.’

Rafa has made sure that Wagner received Heitor Pereira’s schematics. Rafa makes sure Wagner receives all data from every board meeting.

‘You’ve got everything.’

‘Respect to Heitor and even your R&D, but there’re things I’d see he wouldn’t.’

Rafa knows that Wagner’s life is complicated and lived in the shadows on the edge of the family and that his contribution to Corta Hélio is solid but hard to quantify, but he is an outstanding engineer of the small and intricate. Sometime Rafa envies his two natures; the dark precision, the light creativity.

‘Like what?’

‘I’ll know it when I see it. But I will need to see it.’

‘I’ll let Heitor know.’ Socrates, Rafa’s familiar, has already sent the notification. ‘I’ve told him not to let Adriana know.’

‘Thank you.’

Wagner has been the shadow in the family so long his siblings have evolved an alternative social gravity, informing him, including him while keeping him invisible, like a black hole.

‘When will we see you around, miudo?’ Rafa says. Adriana is looking back, waiting for him.

‘When I have something to say,’ Wagner says. ‘You know me. Keep breathing, Rafa.’

‘Keep breathing, Little Wolf.’

‘Ariel.’ Lucas calls to his sister down the length of the Oxala steps. Ariel turns. ‘Going back already?’

‘I have business in Meridian.’

‘Yes, the reception for the Chinese trade delegation. I couldn’t ask you to miss that.’

‘I told you clearly at the party.’

‘It’s family.’

‘Oh come on, Lucas.’

Lucas frowns in puzzlement and Ariel sees that he cannot understand what she is saying. He believes absolutely that his every act is for the family, only the family.

‘If the positions were reversed, I would do it. Without a thought.’

‘Things are simpler for you, Lucas. People are taking an interest in my career. My skin has to be airtight. I have to be clean.’

‘No one’s clean on the moon. They tried to kill Rafa.’

‘No. Don’t you ever do that.’

‘Maybe not the Mackenzies. But someone did. We’re Corta Hélio: we’re good, but we’re good at only one thing. We extract helium. We keep the lights burning down there. That’s our strength but it’s also our vulnerability. AKA, Taiyang; they’re everywhere, doing everything. They’ve got more than one place to go. Even Mackenzie Metals is diversifying – into our core business. We lose the business, we have nowhere to go. We lose everything. The moon does not suffer losers. And mamãe. She’s not what she was.’

Ariel had been glancing away from Lucas, breaking his powerful eye contact. Even as a child, he won every staring-game. Now he says five words and she can’t look away.

‘Even you must have noticed,’ Lucas says. Ariel takes the barb. It is months since she was at a Corta Hélio board meeting.

‘I know Rafa’s been managing her public engagements.’

‘Rafa Corta. The Golden Boy. He’ll run this business into the dust. Help me, Ariel. Help me, help mamãe.’

‘You’re a bastard, Lucas.’

‘I’m not. I’m the only true son in this entire place. I need something on those Chinese, Ariel. Not much. Just a tiny edge. They’ll have something. A little loose skin I can tear.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Lucas bows. As he turns away from his sister, a smile breaks on to his face.

One light for doors locked, two for undocking. Three for departure. A small tremor in the rock as the induction motors levitate the car. And the tram is gone. It is only five kilometres from Boa Vista to João de Deus station. From Rafa’s hugs, farewells, and, yes tears, it might be worlds.

Lucas observes his brother’s bare emotion with discomfort. The corner of his mouth twitches. Everything is big with Rafa. It always was. The biggest bully, the loudest laugher, the charismatic boy, the golden light; as profligate with his anger as his pleasure. Lucas has grown up as his shadow: restrained and precise; honed and holstered like a taser. Lucas feels as profoundly and intensely as his older brother. Emotion is not emotionalism. One is script, the other performance. Lucas Corta has room for emotion but it is a private room, windowless, white and airy. White rooms, without shadows.

Rafa hugs his brother. This is undignified and embarrassing. Lucas huffs in pain.

‘She’ll come back to you.’ It’s the kind of platitude that is expected in situations like this.

‘She doesn’t trust me.’

Lucas cannot understand his brother’s emotional incontinence. This is what marriage contracts are for. Trust and love are no architecture for a dynasty.

‘While Luna is here, she will come back to you,’ Lucas says. ‘She understands. I’m keeping Lucasinho here until the security situation improves. He’ll hate it. It’ll be good for him. Give him something to work against. He has it all too easy.’ Lucas claps Rafa on the back. Make light of it. Get over it. Let go of me.

‘I’m going to get Robson back.’

Lucas suppresses the sigh of exasperation. This, again. When Rafa is frustrated, in business or sport or society or sex, he falls back on the enduring injustice of his son and first born. It has been three years since Rachel Mackenzie took Robson back to her family. Contracts were broken, flagrantly and deliberately. Lawyers are still arguing what is effectively an act of hostage-taking. Ariel has negotiated a steel-bound access agreement but every time the tram takes Robson back to Queen of the South or Crucible, Rafa’s scabs tear and bleed. In such moods, not even Lucas can talk his brother down.

‘You do what you have to.’ Lucas respects his mother in all things, except in her blind adoration of Rafa. Golden Rafa, the heir apparent. He’s too emotional, too open, too soft to run the company. Hearts can’t decide the fate of dynasties that keep Earth’s lights burning. Lucas hugs Rafa again. His mission is clear. He will have to take control of Corta Hélio.

Two jumps from Queen of the South to João de Deus. Rafa and his escoltas wait in the private arrivals area of the BALTRAN station. Until now Rafa’s guards have been electronic. Today they are close and biological: two men, one woman, armed and alert.

The capsule is in the elevator tube, Socrates informs him.

Green lights. Doors open. A boy charges out; brown-skinned, mane of dreadlocks; all legs and arms. He crashes into Rafa. Rafa scoops him up, swirls the boy around, laughing.

‘Oh you you you you!’

Behind the boy comes the woman: tall, red-haired, white-skinned. Green-eyed like her boy. With infinite poise she stalks up to Rafa and slaps him hard across the face. Bodyguards’ hands flash to the hilts of knives concealed in well-cut suits.

‘We have trains, you know.’

Rafa cracks into great golden laughter.

‘You look stunning,’ Rafa says to his wife. And she does look fantastic, for a woman who has been bucketed across the moon in a converted cargo can like a load of ore. Make-up immaculate; every hair, every pleat and fold: immaculate. And she is right. The BALTRAN is outmoded since the high-speed rail network has been linked up: it’s crude, but it is quick. The BALTRAN is a ballistic transport system. On an airless moon, ballistic trajectories can be calculated with precision. A magnetic mass-driver accelerates a capsule. Throws it up. Gravity brings it down. A receiving end of the target mass-driver catches the capsule and decelerates it to rest. In between, twenty minutes of free fall. Repeat as necessary. The capsules can contain cargo, or people. It’s tough but endurable; fast and only hair-raising if you think about it too much. Rafa used to enjoy it for the freefall sex.

‘I want him to catch the game. He’d miss it if he came by train.’ Then to the boy: ‘You want to see the game? Moços versus Tigers. Jaden Sun thinks he’s got us beat but I say we kick Tiger ass all over the stadium. What do you say?’

Robson Corta is eleven years old and the sight of him, the presence of him, his magnificent hair, his face, his great green eyes, the way his lips part in excitement, fill Rafa’s heart with a joy so great it is pain, and at the same time a loss so deep it is a nausea. He crouches to kid level. ‘Game day. What do you think, eh?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Raf.’ Rachel Mackenzie knows, Rafa knows; their respective sets of bodyguards, even Robson knows that this is not about a handball match. The terms allow Rafa access to his son at any time. Even if that means lobbing him like a handball across the moon. Throw and catch. Throw and catch.

‘We can have this in front of him if you want,’ Rafa says.

‘Robbo, honey, could you go back to the capsule? It’ll only be a couple of minutes.’ A nod from Rachel sends one her blades with the boy. He glances back once at his father. Killing green eyes. He will break hearts. He is breaking one now.

‘Robbo,’ Rafa says with contempt.

‘I had nothing to do with what happened at the party.’

‘“What happened at the party.” What happened at the party was someone tried to stick me with a neurotoxin-armed fly. I’d’ve been spasming and pissing and shitting myself for hours before I suffocated.’

‘Classy, but it’s not our style. Mackenzies like you to see our faces before they kill you. You should look to your friends the Asamoahs. Poisons, assassin bugs; that’s more their game.’

‘I want him back.’

‘The terms of the settlement …’

‘Fuck the settlement.’

‘Leave this to the lawyers, Raf. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘He’s not safe with you. I’m invoking the security clause. Please send Robson to me.’

‘Not safe with me?’ Rachel Mackenzie’s laugh is like mining tools on stone. ‘Are you insane? Raf, I don’t care how they kill you, or even if they kill you but I know the moon and they won’t stop at you. Root and branch, Rafa. Let you take Robson? No fucking way. Rob stays with me. Mackenzies look after their own.’ She turns to her guard. ‘Lay in a new BALTRAN jump. We’re going to Crucible.’

Rafa roars in inarticulate rage. Knives whip out from magnetic sheaths: escoltas and blades.

‘You know, your brother’s right,’ Rachel Mackenzie says. ‘You are shit-stupid. You want to start a war with us? Stand down lads.’ The Mackenzie blades open the capsule. Rachel Mackenzie says as the lock closes, ‘I tell you something; your sister scares me more than you do. And she’s got more balls.’

The capsule is in the elevator, Socrates says. The mass-driver is powering up.

Rafa punches concrete, hard. Blood sprays from his knuckles.

‘I know it was you!’ he bellows. ‘I know it was you! You want to put him in the chair of Corta Hélio!’

On her return to Meridian Marina Calzaghe buys a window seat, top deck. Mountains and craters, great and dusty, short of magnificence, as she thought. She watches a telenovella on the entertainment channel. It makes no sense, it makes all sense. Love, betrayal and rivalry among the elite. This elite are rare-earth miners. It’s stupid and repetitive and badly acted. She watches it because she can. She sends a message home. Mom, Kessie: news news news. I GOT A JOB! A proper job. With Corta Hélio. The fusion people. Five Dragons. I can get that money to you. Hetty out-boxes it, then Marina goes into the train shopping menu to find a new skin for her familiar. Cute robot monkeys are cute but so very obvious. God with swords. Steam witch. Cyborg orca. Yes. She blinks buy and Hetty’s default form reformats into lithe liquid metal and black. Marina lets out a little ecstatic squeak. Money makes you free. She looks out the window again at the soft grey mountains and rilles, patterned with tyre and foot tracks, tries to imagine her feet out there with Carlinhos Corta and his dusters. The Cortas scoop up great buckets of dust, sift, sort it, extract the helium-3 and throw the rest away. Dirt work.

Talk to Carlinhos, Lucas Corta had said. Marina ran. Post-crisis promises are forgotten if not redeemed instantly. Carlinhos brought her tea and sat her down under the dome of one of Boa Vista’s many pavilions to explain herself to him and Wagner.

‘So what’s your business?’

‘My postgrad degree was computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture.’

There was a thing Carlinhos Corta did when he didn’t understand a thing. His lower lip sagged, just a millimetre, and the tiniest vertical line formed between his eyebrows. She thought it was cute. But when Wagner made that same frown, it meant he had dug deep beneath her words.

‘That’s making manufacturing more like biology,’ Wagner said.

‘Put very simply. I was studying how a solar-rich energy environment like the moon is analogous to a terrestrial photosynthetic dry-land ecosystem like a tall-grass prairie, and how that might generate new manufacturing paradigms, and increase efficiency. Technology will always converge with biology.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Wagner said with tilt of his head, as if the weight of ideas had shifted him off balance. That’s your cute thing, Marina thought.

‘So have you any surface experience?’ Carlinhos interrupted.

‘I’ve been here eight weeks. I haven’t seen anything except the inside of Meridian.’

Both Corta brothers still wore their sasuits. The hi-visibility beading followed the lines of their musculature. Marina inhaled their perfume of gunpowder moon dust and recycled body-fluids. Sweat of the moon. The boys were relaxed and easy in their dirty pressure skins. They filled her with hurt and longing in that same way snowboard gear and goggles made her soul tighten. Her friends, they boarded; up at Snoqualmie and Mission Ridge. They were snow kids. They had offered once to take her and teach her but a paper was due. Not an impossible paper, but a troubling one. It needed time. So she stayed in the apartment while they loaded the car and cried with loneliness when it drove away. She completed the paper but she would always be the Girl Who Missed Snowboarding. The offer never came again. Every time she saw goggles and gloves and gear in the stores, when the weather reported first falls up in the ranges; she ached with want and loss. Someone out in a parallel universe, snowboarder Marina existed; fresh and joyful. The decal-plastered sasuits, the helmets; they called her like rumours of snow. The opportunity is back again. Do not be the Woman Who Missed the Moon.

‘I want to work on the surface. I want to be up there. I can learn it.’

‘You need to learn a whole set of physical skills,’ Wagner said.

‘I’ll teach you,’ Carlinhos said. ‘Report to the Corta Hélio Extractions Facility in João de Deus.’

‘I can do that.’ A subvocal whisper set Hetty on the task of finding accommodation.

‘Learn Portuguese,’ Carlinhos called as a farewell. Security was escorting huddles of guests and catering staff to the station. ‘And thank you.’

Marina leans back in her window seat. The job, the apartment, the complete transformation of her life, is reflected in one tiny, imperceptible movement: she flicks up her chib in the bottom right corner of her vision and sees the O2 gauge in gold. She’s breathing on the Corta account. Marina is nearing the bottom of her second mojitka as the train pulls into Meridian and the airlocks seal with the doors. The escalators bring her up into the roaring, chaotic cathedral of Orion Hub. Every tea and water stall, every shop and outlet, every street food stand and service kiosk is brilliant with things she can buy. Then she remembers Blake, up there in the roof of the city, coughing his lungs up gobbet by gobbet. Orca-Hetty puts out bids to farmacias, contracts a price for a course of phage therapy. Multiply-resistant tuberculosis is a recent invader from Earth despite the strict quarantine, and not long finding a lodging, clinging like white mould to the damp, stagnant high ribs of the quadras, up among the poor. The stall prints out twenty white tablets. Little white tablets.

Three bitsies for the express elevator. One bitsie for the escalator; riding up through the flat roofs and staircases and alleys of the West ’80s and ’90s. Beyond 110 nothing mechanical goes. She runs the rest of the way up into Bairro Alto, great tireless earth-leaps; whole stairways at a time. Here is the pissbuyer, here is our Lady of Kazan, still lightless and loveless. Here is the balcony from which she had envied the flying woman.

The room is empty. Everything is gone: mattress; water bottles, Blake’s scraps and orts of things. Plastic spoons and plates. Empty to the last fleck of mucus, the last grain of dust. Skin flakes are precious organics.

Surely she has come to the wrong house.

Surely Blake has moved.

Surely this can’t be.

Marina leans against the door frame. She can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Hetty adjusts her lung function. Breathe. She shouldn’t breathe, oughtn’t breathe. Breathing undeserved air, while Blake is gone.

‘What happened?’ she shouts to the curtained doors and empty windows of the jostling cubicles. On the ladders and corridors, Bairro Alto turns backs to her. ‘Where were you?’

I have footage, Hetty says and Marina’s lens overlays the empty room with bodies. Zabbaleen with their robots. Scavengers. She glimpses a foot, ankle turned out, at the end of a mattress. The Zabbaleen close around it and shut it out from view. The video has been snatched from a street camera so the angle is obtuse and the magnification grainy. The Zabbaleen come out with a hefty metal cannister in each hand.

‘Take it away take it away!’ she screams. Hetty kills the feed just as Marina sees the machines covering the door and window in vacuum plastic. Every last skin flake. Every last drop of blood. And there is nothing to be done. No appeal to be made. Blake is dead but, on the moon, death is no release from debt. The Zabbaleen sill collect on Blake’s chib accounts by viciously recycling every part of his body into useful organics.

Coughing yourself to death, listening for the scritch-scratch of the Zabbaleen bots around your door, waiting for the coughs to fall silent.

‘Why didn’t you do anything?’ Marina shouts at the door and windows. ‘You could have done something. It wouldn’t take much. A couple of decimas from everyone. Would a couple of decimas have killed you? What kind of people are you?’ The empty doors, the turned backs, the shoulders hurrying away from her are her answer. People of the moon.

The tram denies him. Refuses him. Defies him.

Nothing has ever defied Lucasinho Corta before. For a moment the sheer affront paralyses him. He orders Jinji to open the lock again.

Access is denied to you, Jinji said.

‘What do you mean, denied to me?’

Access to the tram has been restricted from the following list of people: Luna Corta, Lucasinho Corta.

He had thought his father was joking when he told Lucasinho that Boa Vista was under lock down. Protect the children.

‘Over-ride it.’

I’m not able to that. I could inform security. Do you wish me to inform security?

‘Leave it.’

Lucasinho had liked the idea of hanging around Boa Vista and João de Deus a while. Live the way you’re meant to live. No hurry about getting back to the university: his colloquium will fill in what he missed. That’s what it’s for. Now his father has locked him down and he has to get out. This is claustrophobia. Boa Vista is a stone intestine. He is locked in the gut of the beast, being slowly digested. He raises a fist to strike the defiant metal of the gate. Stopped. Has a sudden, brilliant, better idea.

Carlinhos and Wagner came in through the surface lock. He can go out through it. And when he is through that lock, he can go anywhere. Everywhere. Away. Fuck lock-downs, fuck family security. Fuck family. Maybe not fuck his vo. She is old and not what she was, but she can still burn fierce and Lucasinho admires how she commands respect as naturally as breathing. And maybe not Carlinhos, though Lucasinho never quite knows what to say to his uncle, how to tell him that he thinks he’s all right. Lucasinho has feared for years that Carlinhos thinks him a dick. The kids aren’t even worth considering. The rest, fuck them.

Especially fuck his father.

The emergency suit-liners were not designed for third gens and it takes Lucasinho five minutes wrestling to pull it on. There is no room in the suit shell’s pressure pouch for his clothes. No loss. He can print new gear in João de Deus. He unpins his Lady Luna and packs her in the pouch. The emergency suit is a bulbous sci-fi robbie-robot, hi-viz orange, with flashers. Roomy enough inside for Lucasinho to move around. Jinji copies into the suit system and powers it up. On the surface he will be out of range of the network. Clamps clunk. Seals lock. Pressurisation hisses and fades.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Lucasinho breathes. Jinji marches Lucasinho into the outlock. Lucasinho remembers his last outlock. Naked bodies. Knee to knee. Naked Abena Asamoah opposite him. The sweat evaporating on her perfectly curved breasts as the pressure reduces. He will have those breasts. Out there in the world. He will find them. He’s owed them. She has drawn his blood.

He does not think about the inlock. The tangle of bodies, pulsing in and out of consciousness. The pain the red the black the pain. The scream of emergency repressurisation.

The outer door slams open.

Jinji controls the hard-shell’s servos and pushes the suit into a fast, loping run. Security will know a lock has been opened, a suit taken. They won’t know who had taken the suit, where it was going, how fast. They will work that out, but by then Lucasinho will be in, repressurised, out of the shell suit and lost among João de Deus’s crowds.

You’re not so smart, Pai.

Lucasinho steps out of the João de Deus lock and rides the elevator downtown. The suit will cycle out and jog back to Boa Vista under its own power. Emergency suits are too valuable to leave scattered around the Sea of Fecundity. A life might depend on it one day. It is almost as tough to pin the moon-run token through the pressure weave as it was to pull the skin-tight suit-liner on. He’s ruined its integrity. He hopes a life won’t depend on it one day. Hopes his life won’t depend on it. No: that was the last time Lucasinho Corta intends be on the surface.

João de Deus is a half-made town; raw rock and low lintels, its prospekts and quadras tight and lean. Safety doors spasm and jerk, the sunline flickers. It smells of shit and body odour and environmental systems straining at their performance limits. The water tastes of batteries. Too many people, scurrying people. Always someone in front of you, in your way. Elbows and breath, ghosting through floating hosts of familiars. The signs and names, the handbills and graffiti are all Portuguese. João de Deus is Helium-ville, a frontier town. A company town and that is why Lucasinho is not staying here.

‘If you were my father, what would you do?’ Lucasinho asks Jinji.

I would freeze your cash accounts.

So Lucasinho heads to the station, not the fashion printshop.

Suit-liners are commonplace in João de Deus, even acceptable. In Meridian Main Station, twenty heads have turned by the time he gets to the main escalator and up on to Gagarin Prospekt. Got to get out is this suit, even if he does wear it well? Could he persuade everyone it’s a new micro-trend? 1950s is so last lune. Surface-worker chic. Blue collar is the thing: so honest and now. He starts to walk a little big. Lead from the package, the lower belly. Swagger. He feels good. He’s done a thing. Because Boa Vista couldn’t hold him and family couldn’t keep him. Because he ran away, by his own cleverness and cool. Because he’s free. Because he is back. That’s not just a thing. That’s things. Lucasinho Corta feels more than good; he feels great.

The waiter can’t hide the stare as Lucasinho orders a vaper and mint tea and stretches out in the café chair. Is it the suit or the muscles inside it? Lucasinho arches his back to tighten his stomach muscles opens his legs to show off the thighs. He likes to be looked at. I’m a rich kid in a suit-liner. I make this thing look good, but you can’t afford me.

Lucasinho flicks the end of the vaper and inhales. THC coils cool in his throat. He feels the unwinding inside, the inner smile. He sips a glass of tea and has Jinji flash up the Boy de la Boy catalogue on his lens. By the time he has put a wardrobe together he is nicely high. Jinji flicks the order to a printshop. The order bounces back.

Payment declined.

Lucasinho falls off his high. It’s a long fall, and the hit at the bottom is hard.

Your account has been frozen, Jinji says. A sick pit opens in Lucasinho’s stomach, full of wheels of rotating teeth. He looks around to see if anyone has noticed him jolt, gasp. The motos whir by, the crowds push along Gagarin Prospekt beneath the trees. No one one knows that in an instant he has gone from Dragon to beggar. No money, he has no money. He has never had no money. He doesn’t know what to do with no money.

Lucasinho’s fingers find the plug Abena Asamoah put through his ear. When you need the help of House Asamoah; when you have no other hope, when you’re alone and naked and exposed, like Kojo … He turns it, enjoying the small pain of its tug on the scab. No. He is not that desperate yet. He’s Lucasinho Corta; he has charm, looks and hotness. These he can parlay.

The four digits in his chib are huge and brilliant. They are the whole world: air, water, carbon, data. They can’t cut off the Four Elementals. Paying for air and data is a thing people who have to work do. Cortas have these things arranged. He can breathe, he can drink, he is connected, he has his carbon allowance. From that plan your next move. He can’t go to the apartment. His father’s escoltas are probably there already. He has friends, he has amors, he has places he can go. He needs clothes, somewhere to stay.

He needs to go dark. Yes. This. His father can trace him through the network. So Jinji must go. That does make Lucasinho’s belly and balls tighten with fear. Off-network, disconnected. He hesitates to whisper the words that will shut Jinji down. This is social death. No, it’s survival. His father may already have identified his location from the failed payment. Contract security may already be on their way.

He needs to pay for a vape and a tea.

No he doesn’t need to pay for them. Like he did at Boa Vista and João de Deus, he can just walk away. What is the waiter going to do? Stab him? Raise a mob? He’s still a Corta. Lay skin on one Corta and all Cortas will cut you. There are no crimes on the moon, no theft, no murder. There are only contracts and negotiations.

Lucasinho eases out of the chair and strolls across Gagarin Prospekt. Even in his fluorescent pink suit-liner, he disappears into the push of people and vehicles and bots. A few steps more and he is under trees. Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. As he walks he strips out commands and routines from Jinji, severs connections and clicks off utilities until he is left with an empty skin hovering over his left shoulder. People get suspicious if they can’t see a familiar in their augmented vision.

The walls of Orion Quadra rise on either side of him; tier upon tier, level upon level, lights and neons; Roman and Cyrillic and Chinese neons. Disconnecting Jinji has removed a layer of augmented advertising from the world but there are still physical screens and cute kawaii animations, looking down on him. Alone in Meridian without a bitsie to his thumbprint. Like poor people. Except he has friends up there, among the lights in the walls of the world. So, not like the poor people really. Fuck poor. He needs to get moving.

All the moon is in love with Ariel by the time she arrives at the reception for the Chinese trade delegation. The LDC has hired an open belvedere on the eightieth level of the rotunda, the central axis where the five Prospekts of Aquarius Quadra meet. Vistas stretch for kilometres. Vertical gardens drop curtains of climbing plants over the open arches. Beyond them, lights drift across the voids.

Ariel wears a Ceil Chapman cocktail dress. Every eye turns to her. Every human wants to orbit her. She can hear the whispers, see the heads nodding together. Attention is oxygen. She takes a draw on her long titanium vaper and advances into the party.

The guests from the Five Dragons: Yao Asamoah from the Golden Stool; a reluctant, shy Alexei Vorontsov; Verity Mackenzie cradling a beautiful pet angora ferret, a biological one. It draws admiring attention. Wei-Lun Sun, orbiting at aphelion from the Chinese.

The Chinese mission, all men, still ungainly and exaggerated in their movements. They make no effort to tune their bodies to the demands of lunar gravity. They don’t intend to be here that long. They bow and smile and shake Ariel’s hand and have no idea who she is except that she seems to be greatly celebrated. Ariel enjoys a small, sexual lower-belly prickle of excitement. She is the spy in the Ceil Chapman dress.

The LDC grandees. Company managers and finance directors. Lawyers and judges.

Judge Nagai Rieko nods over from across the room. Nods to the Eagle of the Moon. I’ve mentioned you to the Eagle, she says through her familiar. He approves. Ariel lifts a cocktail glass in answer. Welcome to the Pavilion of the White Hare.

And there is the Eagle of the Moon. Jonathon Kayode, Chief Executive of the Lunar Development Corporation; King, Pope and Emperor, in reality a figurehead, a brightly-plumaged cage-bird. His familiar is the lunar eagle itself. Only he is allowed to bear this skin. At his shoulder, his oko Adrian Mackenzie, careful to be always one shade drabber than the resplendent Eagle. His familiar takes the shape of a raven.

‘The famous Ariel Corta,’ the Eagle of the Moon says. He is big for an Earth-born; a giant Igbo from Lagos. He stands shoulder to shoulder with even the second generation moon-children. ‘I can trust you not to start a fight here?’

‘In this frock?’ Ariel says flirtatiously, but still turns her empty cocktail glass upside down; the sign that she will fight the entire party. The Eagle of the Moon does not know the sign but his husband, an Australian, understands the joke. His smile is thin.

‘I made on you in the Celebdaq,’ the Eagle whispers. He flashes his eyes at his oko. ‘We have these little competitions. They keep us sane. He is a terribly bad loser.’

‘Even on the moon the only way a girl can get noticed is by taking her clothes off.’

The Eagle of the Moon guffaws. His laugh is huge. The room freezes, then little aftershocks of humour ripple across the party; people laughing because more important people are laughing.

‘Too true. Alas, too true, what?’ He playfully slaps Adrian Mackenzie in the ribs. Adrian winces, chews resentment. The rumour is that Adrian Mackenzie has been manoeuvring the Eagle of the Moon into making his office more political, more powerful, more presidential, while settling it deeper into the pockets of Mackenzie Metals. ‘Your family has quite a facility for the public eye. You pull off a spectacular coup du tribunal in your underwear. Your nephew saves that Asamoah boy on the moon-run. And then your brother, well; shocking. Quite shocking.’

‘It seems we have compounded one security breach with another.’ Ariel sends a spiral of vapour up to the lights.

Jonathon Kayode pulls down one eyelid.

‘The eye of the Eagle,’ he quips. He guides Ariel out through hibiscus curtains to an outside balcony. A glance tells Adrian Mackenzie to remain inside. The balcony is high, stirred by air currents spiralling up from the lower levels. The light moves into sundown. Long golden light, mauve shadows, indigo rising from the floor far below; whole districts coming alive with lights, twinkling in the dust. Jonathon Kayode says in a deep, intimate whisper, ‘I am delighted to have you on my advisory panel.’

‘It’s an honour.’

‘Speaking personally, I think it’s high time the Cortas kicked the dust off their boots and took their proper place in political society. It’s not a dirty word, politics. However, we are disturbed by the assassination attempt. It is like some ghastly throwback to the sixties. Duels and vendettas and assassinations – we’ve moved on from that. Of course, the Eagle has no authority to intervene, but we can advise and warn. It would be a shame if an opportunity for the Cortas were stymied by the behaviour of the few bellicose brothers.’

The Eagle of the Moon dips his head. Ariel Corta purses her fingers. The audience is over. Jonathon Kayode brushes through the hibiscus curtain. Loose petals powder the shoulders of his agbada. Adrian Mackenzie links his arm.

Ariel lingers, leans on the stone balustrade. The riding lights of drones and pedicopters, the sparkle of fliers, the jewelled abacus of the elevator cars and cable gondolas: she is immersed in light, breathing it as a fish breathes water. Bubbles of exhaled light.

She draws on her long vaper and reviews the brief conversation. Two things. The LDC knew about the assassination attempt, and also Rafa’s certainty that it was a flare-up of the old Mackenzie-Corta feud. And the Eagle of the Moon had left the conversation on-record; overheard by familiars. She was meant to relay it to Boa Vista, with all its promises and threats. We can be kings of the moon like we are kings of helium but we must act like kings, not wild bandeirantes. The Eagle of the Moon had tasked her with restraining her impetuous brother.

The party beckons and she will flirt outrageously tonight, but there is one last piece of work; Corta work. Bandeirante work. She tilts her head to the man who has been hovering at the edge of her vision all evening. The man comes out on to the balcony and stands a moment beside her, looking out at the constant movement.

‘An Xiuying,’ he says without a look or an acknowledgement.

And he’s gone. He’s a middle-ranking Lunar Development Corporation civil servant in a suit better than his salary, who hired a nikah advocate better than his salary, to allow him to marry the Sun boy he loves with all his generous, weak heart.

‘Lucas,’ Ariel murmurs to Beijaflor. Her brother is on instantly. He’s been waiting for this call all night.

‘An Xiuying,’ Ariel says.

‘Thank you.’

‘And don’t ask me for any more favours Lucas,’ Ariel says and breaks the connection. She straightens her back, uncoils the day’s tensions and tightness. Confidence is the most alluring necklace. She suits the sexy jewels of power. She suits them so well.

Movement, noise at the door. A figure in pink beyond the bots and the obdurate human security. Some want, some grudge, some hope. Some petition. The Chinese are looking now.

‘Senhora Corta?’ Ariel did not see the aide approach. All of a sudden a voice is at her ear. That is what aides are supposed to do, approach inconspicuously. An eagle pin on the upper breast of her Suzy Perette dress identifies the aide’s allegiance. ‘Do you know a Lucas Corta Junior?’

‘My nephew.’

‘He would like to see you. Outside, if you would be so kind. His dress is not appropriate.’

The figure in pink recognises her. What is that, a suit-liner? But there is no mistaking the handsome big lunk. No mistaking those love-god cheekbones, that big heart-melting grin.

‘Tia, he says in Portuguese. ‘I’ve run away from Boa Vista. Can I stay at yours?’

Cake and mint tea wait for Ariel in her tiny, unused kitchen space.

‘I made you cake,’ Lucasinho says. ‘To say thank you. For the hammock.’ Ariel’s apartment is very small. Living for one. She sent Lucasinho there from the door of the Chinese reception. A hammock was waiting for him in the printer hopper. By the time she returned he was lolling in it, deeply unconscious, mouth open, limbs loose and sprawling in deep sleep beneath the wall-sized print of Richard Avedon’s full-face photograph of Dovima. It’s her only decoration: bleached-out face, soft dark eyes and mouth, holes for nostrils.

‘You won’t tell Papai?’ Lucasinho says.

‘Lucas will find out,’ Ariel says. She takes a slice of the cake. Lemon, light as a breath. ‘If he hasn’t already. He will ask me.’

‘What will you say?’

‘My brother owes me.’ Lucas would have been awake all night, calling in debts, tapping up allies, marshalling his agents biological and informational down on Earth. All his resources he would bring to bear on An Xiuying, but most of all his deliberate, relentless intelligence, that would never rest or relinquish until Lucas Corta had what he wanted. Ariel is almost sorry for the poor man. Lucas will play the coercion sudden, sharp and impossible to escape. ‘So I can say what I like.’ This time. But she isn’t clean. A seat in the Pavilion of the White Hare and she has already betrayed privileged information; under the eyes of the Eagle of the Moon himself. Lucas has never approved of her seeking a life and career outside the family. Now, making this one, tiny betrayal for family, she has given her brother an edge. Not now. Not soon. But some day, when he needs it most. For the family. Always for the family. ‘This cake,’ Ariel takes another bite. ‘Where did you learn this?’

‘Where does anyone learn anything? The network.’ Lucasinho slides the cake towards Ariel for her inspection. ‘I’m good at cake.’

‘You are.’

‘It was kind of tricky. You don’t have much stuff in your kitchen. Actually, just water and gin.’

‘Did you order it in?’

‘Ingredients, yeah. Stuff I couldn’t print. Like eggs.’

‘Then you’re very tidy too.’

He grins and his pleasure is plain and guileless.

‘Ariel; can I stay?’

Ariel imagines him a fixture in her apartment. Something bright and funny and unpredictable amid the severe whites and pure surfaces, the bespoke gin and the pure water in her cooler, the vast face of a long-dead 1950s model, eyes closed, teeth catching lower lip. Something cute and kind.

‘He doesn’t owe me that much.’

He shrugs.

‘Okay. I understand that.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Friends. Girls. Boys. My colloquium.’

‘Wait.’ Ariel slips into her room and takes paper from her bag. ‘You’ll need this.’

Lucasinho frowns at the bouquet of grey slips in his hands.

‘Is this?’

‘Money.’

‘Wow.’

‘Cash. Your father’s frozen your checking account.’

‘I’ve never … Wow. It smells funny. Kind of hot. And like pepper. What’s it made from?’

‘Paper.’

‘That’s …’

‘Rag fibre, if that means anything. And yes, it’s not LDC sanctioned, but it’ll get you where you need, and beyond there, where you want.’

‘How did you get it?’

‘Clients are often imaginative in settling accounts. Try not to blow it all at once.’

‘How do I use it?’

‘You can count can’t you?’

‘I made you a cake. I can count. And add. And take away.’

‘Of course you can. Hundreds, fifties, tens and fives. That’s how you use it.’

‘Thanks Ariel.’

That great heart-melting smile. Ariel is seventeen again; out from under her mother’s wing, blinking in the light of a big world. The University of Farside had just opened its first colloquium in Meridian and Ariel Corta was first name in the study group. Farside was a geeky warren, João de Deus a dirty mining outpost, Boa Vista little more than a cave. Meridian was colour, glamour, ardour and the best legal minds on the moon. She took the BALTRAN. Nothing could take her away from Corta Hélio fast enough. She ran away, she stayed away. Lucas won’t let that happen to his son. Lucasinho’s future is laid out like a boardgame: a chair at the table in Boa Vista, a family job tailored to his talents and limitations. Where is there a place for cakes made with love? The same place as his father’s love for music. Suborned to the needs of Corta Hélio.

Love this small escape, kid.

‘One note: I spent a lot of carbon on printing those clothes. The least you can do is wear them.’

Lucasinho grins. He is magnificent, Ariel thinks. Muscles and metal and dancer’s poise. And the cake is so very good.

Handball! Game night! Handball! João de Deus Moços versus the Tigers of the Sun Men’s.

Estádio da Luz is a colosseum; steeply banked seats and boxes carved from raw rock, tier upon tier so that the uppermost levels look almost vertically down on the court. The only things higher than the cheap seats are the lights and the robot blimps in the shapes of cute manhua icons, carrying advertising on their bellies. The fans sit close; a player on the court, if he could spare the moment of attention, would see a wall of faces, tier upon tier. He would feel like a gladiator in a pit. The players have yet to make their entrance. Cameras flit across the banks of fans, beaming their faces into everyone’s lens. Down in the court jugglers perform tremendous stunts of skill, cheerleaders strut and thrust, beautiful boys and girls of startling gymnasticism. The fans see it every game but it is part of the rubric. Music and lights. The blimps, fat as gods, manoeuvre into new formations. Jeers and whistles: the LDC has of course increased the O2 price for the game. But the betting is still ferocious.

The people of João de Deus live in tunnels and warrens, but they have the best handball stadium on the moon.

Rafa Corta opens the glass wall of the director’s box and escorts An Xiuying on to the balcony. His right hand is enclosed in a healing glove. He was stupid. Stupid and hasty. Stupid and hot-tempered and emotional. Robson should be here with him, in the box, high above the rows of fans: your team, son. Your players. He played it wrong. Wrong from the moment he saw Rachel Mackenzie step flawless and magnificent out of the BALTRAN pod. He remembered everything he adored about her. The poise, the pride, the intelligence and fire. A dynastic marriage. A truce between Cortas and Mackenzies, sealed with a son. Robson was the central term of the marriage contract, and the thing that had split them apart, like ice cracking rock. At the baptism – one for the Church, once for the orixas – he had seen the Mackenzies cooing around the baby like a flock of scavenging pigeons. Vampires. Parasites. Each time Rachel took him to visit her family – each visit longer than the one before – the mistrust and dread would hollow out his bones. Inside the glove his wounded hand throbs.

But it’s game night. Game night! And he has a guest from Earth. There is the game, and then there is the other game. The one that really matters in this arena tonight.

Turn off your heart, Rafa.

The sounds, the sights, the sensations momentarily stagger An Xiuying as he steps out on to the balcony. Rafa raises a hand to the galleries. The fans respond with a roar. The Patrão is here. Rafa sees Jaden Wen Sun in the next box and bounds over to greet and rib his friend and rival, leaving his guest to soak in the game-night atmosphere. The Earth man grips the rail with both hands, vertiginous with noise and gravity.

Now the stadium announcer is reading out the team list. The fans can get this information instantly on their familiars but it doesn’t have the commonality, the moment, the emotion. Each name is greeted with a wall of noise. The loudest roar greets Muhammad Basra, the left ringcourt recently signed from CSK St Ekaterina.

‘This is very exciting, Senhor Corta,’ An Xiuying says.

‘Wait until the teams run out.’

Fanfare! The visitors run on to the court. The away supporters go crazy down at their end of the court, waving banners and blowing airhorns. In the adjacent box Jaden Sun punches the air and yells himself hoarse. His Tigers of the Sun snap a few balls between each other, practise their leaps and drives and shoulder charges. The goalkeeper hangs a tiny icon in the back of the tiny net. This is what makes handball the moon’s great team sport: gravity may be free but the net is tight.

Music! The Kids are Back. The Moços theme. Here come the boys, the boys, the boys! The fans rise. Their voices become something more than noise. The closed colosseum of Estádio da Luz throbs with it. Rafa Corta bathes in it. It washes him clean of anger and hurt. This moment he loves even more than winning; the moment where he opens his hands and the magic bursts out. See what I give you? But I’m selfish; I give it to myself as well. I’m a fan, just like you.

The team starts its on-court warm-up. An Xiuying leans forward on the rail. Rafa can see in the movements of his contact lens: his familiar is zooming in. Muhammad Basra’s back. His name, his number, the sponsor’s logo.

‘It’s the first run out in those game-suits,’ Rafa says. ‘New deal. Golden Phoenix Holdings.’ The same name is on the back of every João de Dios Moço.

An Xiuying steps back from the rail. His hands are shaking. His face is pale and sheened with sweat.

‘I don’t feel very well, Senhor Corta. I’m not sure I can finish the game.’

And Lucas is behind him. His shirt so crisp, his creases so sharp, his pocket-square so precise.

‘I’m sorry to hear that Mr An. It’s quite a sight. Has our choice of shirt logo upset you? An interesting company, Golden Phoenix. I found it surprisingly hard to pin down what they actually did. From my research, it seems to exist solely to redirect infrastructure development funding through a series of shell companies registered in tax havens – many of them here on the moon – in a pattern even I found difficult to unravel. If you don’t want to watch the game – the Tigers will win, Rafa’s boys have been on terrible form all season – maybe we could have a talk about your connection with Golden Phoenix. You see, I can disclose it. Your government seems to be going through one of its periodic clamp-downs on corruption. The penalties are quite harsh. Or I can conceal it. Rafa can retire those shirts. Your decision. We could also talk about the China Power Investment Corporation’s future helium-3 requirements. Corta Hélio is eminently capable of meeting those. The game lasts an hour. I’m sure that’s enough time to make a deal.’

A hand on the shoulder guides An Xiuying back into the director’s box. Before he closes the door, Lucas nods to his older brother.

Rachel was right, Rafa thinks. You are smarter than me. Then the whistle blows and the ball goes up. Game on!

One hour, plus time-outs. The Tigers win; 31-15. A trouncing. Jaden Sun is jubilant, Rafa Corta despondent. Lucas is never wrong about the outcome of games.

The tram will carry one passenger. Boa Vista security has been notified. Surveillance will be discreet. Under no circumstances may the passenger be searched. She comes at the personal invitation of Adriana Corta.

The car pulls into Boa Vista Station. The woman who steps on to the polished stone is tall even by lunar standards; dark of face and eye and blade-thin. She wears voluminous white: a many-skirted dress, a loose turban. Colours: a woven stole in green gold and blue; string upon string of heavy beads around her neck, gold hoops at each ear and around each finger. Her loose clothing accentuates her height and thinness. The woman wears no familiar; an absence like a lost limb. The guards straighten their backs. Charisma crackles from her. They would not dream of searching her.

‘Irmã,’ says Nilson Nunes, steward of Boa Vista. She acknowledges him with the least inclination of the head. In the garden of the Cortas the woman stops. She looks up at the sky panels and blinks in the false sunlight. She takes in the great stone faces of the orixas, mouths the name of each one.

‘Irmã?’

A nod. Onward.

Adriana Corta waits in the São Sebastião Pavilion, a confection of pillars and domes at the highest point of the sloping lava-tube. Waters rush from between its columns. Two chairs, a table. A samovar of mint tea. Adriana Corta, dressed in lounging pants and a soft silk blouse, rises.

‘Irmã Loa.’

‘Senhora Corta. I bring you the fondest greetings of the sisterhood and the blessings of the saints and orixas.’

‘Thank you, sister. Tea?’ Adriana Corta pours a glass of mint tea. ‘I do so wish we could grow coffee on this world. It’s almost fifty years since my last arabica.’

The woman sits but she does not touch the glass.

‘I’m sorry for your family’s recent trouble,’ she says.

‘We survived.’ Adriana says. She sips her mint tea and grimaces. ‘Vile. You never stop worrying for them. Rafa will not give up on Robson. Carlinhos is fretting to get back in the field. Ariel has gone back to Meridian. Lucasinho has run off. Lucas has frozen his account but that won’t stop the boy. He is more like his father than Lucas realises.’

Irmã Loa lifts a cross from amongst her cascades of beads to her lips and kisses the crucified man.

‘Saints and orixas protect you. And Wagner?’

Adriana Corta brushes over the question with another.

‘But you; your work is secure now?’

‘Saint and sinner both pay breath tax,’ Irmã Loa says. ‘And Catholicism still objects to us. On the other hand we had our most successful Assumption Day festival. Your patronage is a constant blessing to us. It is so rare to find someone who thinks as we do, in centuries.’

‘You invest in people. I invest in technology. Our long-term goals will inevitably meet. Best if they meet now, so they will recognise each other when they meet up again, hundreds – thousands of years from now. So few people think in the long term. The truly long term. We’re both dynasty.’

Splashing up through the rivulets, drawn by voices; Luna: barefoot in a red play-dress.

‘Who are you?’ she says to the woman in white.

‘This is Irmã Loa of the Sisters of the Lords of Now,’ Adriana says. ‘She is taking tea with me.’

‘She’s not drinking her tea,’ Luna declares.

‘What’s that over your shoulder, a moth?’ Irmã Loa says. Luna nods, still a little afraid of the thin woman in white, despite her smile. ‘She is drawn to the light. But because she is so single-minded, that makes her easy to distract. The moth is so fragile, but she is the daughter is Yemanja. She is filled with intuition, the moth. She is drawn to love, and others love her.’

‘You don’t have a familiar,’ Luna says.

‘We don’t use them. They clutter us up. They get in the way of our communications.’

‘But you can see mine.’

‘We all wear the lenses, anzinho.’ Irmã Loa reaches into the folds of her turban to press a small object into Luna’s hand: a tiny print-plastic votive of a mermaid with a star on her brow. ‘Our Lady of the Waters. She will be your friend and guide you to the light.’

Luna presses the deity in her fist and skips off down through the tumbling waters.

‘That was kind of you,’ Adriana says. ‘I think of all my grandchildren, I love Luna the most. I fear for them. Havaianas to Havaianas in three generations. Do you know that saying, Sister? The first generation rises from poor people’s shoes. The second generation builds the riches. The third generation squanders the riches. Back to poor people’s shoes again. Long term projects, Sister.’

‘Why have you asked me here, Senhora Corta?’

‘I want to make a confession.’

Surprise on Irmã Loa’s still face.

‘With respect, you don’t strike me as a woman with much of a sense of sin, Senhora.’

‘And the Sisters are not a religion with much of a sense of sin either. I am an old woman, Sister. I am seventy-nine years old. No great age biologically, but I’m older than most things in this world. I wasn’t the first, but I was among the few. I came from nothing – a girl from nowhere – and I built all this, up in the sky. I want to tell that story. All of it. The good and the bad. Did you really think that funding was a donation?’

‘Senhora Corta, simplicity of spirit is not naivety.’

‘You will come here once a week, and I will make my confession to you. My family will enquire – Lucas needs to protect me – but they are not to know. Not until …’ Adriana Corta breaks off.

‘You’re dying, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I’ve kept it secret of course. Only Helen de Braga knows. She has been with me through everything.’

‘Is it far advanced?’

‘It is. The pain is under control. I know I am laying a burden on you. What you tell Rafa, or Ariel, but most of all Lucas, is up to you. But Lucas especially will pick and pick and pick away. Your lies must be airtight. If my children learn that I am dying, they will tear each other apart. Corta Hélio will fall.’

‘I should like to pray for you, Senhora Corta.’

‘Do as you wish. Then I will begin.’