by Ian McDonald
Max and Arjun are flapping around, scooping their precious collectables into bags.
The apartment shakes again to hammer blows. The door. Not impacters, not the Vorontsov space-gun, not a quake: there is someone outside.
‘Haider! I need to talk to you.’
Max and Arjun turn to the door.
‘I think it’s Wagner Corta,’ Haider says.
‘Haider!’ Fists hammer on the door again. Plastics creak and snap.
‘He’ll have that down,’ Max says.
‘Haider, go back to your room,’ Arjun orders.
‘I know you’re in there,’ Wagner calls from the other side of the door.
‘Go away. Leave us in peace,’ Max shouts.
‘I only want to talk to Haider.’
Haider’s care givers look at each other.
‘He won’t go away,’ Haider says.
‘We’ll contract in security,’ Max says.
‘In Theophilus?’ Arjun answers. The two men place themselves between Haider at the door. Arjun is short, muscular, bald-headed and bearded and works out but he is no match for a wolf when the Earth-light in hot in him.
‘I can wait forever,’ Wagner shouts.
‘I have to talk to him,’ Haider says.
‘He doesn’t come in,’ Max says.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Wagner says. ‘I just want to know.’
‘I’ll open it a crack,’ Max says. ‘Wagner, I’m going to open it a crack.’
‘No, don’t do that …’ Arjun says and the door flies open, sending Max reeling into the conversation-pit. Arjun recovers like a cage-fighter, brow to brow with the wolf.
‘I. Just. Need. To. Talk,’ Wagner says. Haider has never seen him like this. Every muscle is taut as a cable. His face is pale, his eye huge and dark. He blazes with energy. He could have smashed the apartment door down one-handed.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ he says again.
Arjun pushes Haider down on to the sofa and takes up guard on his right side. Max, bruised and shaken from the fall, sits on Haider’s left. Haider loves his sweet, brave dads.
‘You found her,’ Wagner says. His voice is a low growl.
‘I found her.’ The anti-anxiety diffusers have finally halted the flood of nightmares welling up from Theophilus’s deep levels. ‘The door opened for me.’ Blood, seeping under the door into the street. ‘It opened and I went in.’ On her side, limbs folded at crazy angles. Eyes wide. Hair glued into the mass of congealing blood. The knife. God, the knife, the knife through her neck. ‘I called the med centre, then the zabbaleen.’
‘Was there any … any. Sign. Of Robson?’
‘I saw stuff. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Broken furniture, like there’d been a fight. A sheet. The place was a mess.’
‘I need you to think hard, Haider,’ Wagner says. He crouches in front of Haider, presses his hands together. ‘Did you see or hear anyone or anything out of the ordinary?’
Haider shakes his head.
‘I’m sorry. It was the next morning when I went to the apartment. To go to El Gato Encantado. You know.’
‘You’re scaring him, Wagner,’ Max says.
‘I need to know. I need to understand what happened. I need to be able to put it together in my head. I get the call in the pack house. Analiese is dead. I think, what? And Robson is missing. I get the first train back but its still eight hours before I get there. The zabbaleen have cleaned everything. Nothing left. I need to be able to see what you saw, Haider, in my head, to get to understand it.’
‘He’s told you everything he knows,’ Arjun says.
‘I get camera footage from the network. I see the two men arrive with a box. I see the two men leave with the box. What happened in the apartment, I don’t know.’
Max gets up from the lounger and crosses to the cook-space. Water boils; a few moments later he hands Wagner a glass of tea.
‘Sit.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wagner says. ‘I can’t make any sense out of this.’
‘I’ll try to help but I really don’t know much,’ Haider says. ‘You don’t … you don’t think he’s been kidnapped?’
Alexia pulls the quilted coat tighter around her and suppresses a shiver. Both are theatrical, psychological: Boa Vista has been at habitable temperature for ten days now but she feels the deep, endless cold of the rock around her, the memory of the vacuum ice that filled this lava tube. Plants grow, whole trees flower, small AKA-designed birds hop from rock to engineered branch to rock, but Boa Vista will always chill Alexia. It is a haunted place.
The moon has no ghosts, the saying goes.
The moon is ghosts all the way down.
Nelson Medeiros greets her in Portuguese and escorts her into the Eagle’s new Eyrie. Escolta by escolta, Lucas has been replacing and reinforcing his official bodyguard with ex-Corta Hélio dusters and refugee Santinhos fled from João de Deus. She sheds the coat. Maninho shows her the way up through the machinery-cluttered corridors of Lucas’s new Eyrie.
A face. She is inside the face of an orixa. Lucas’s new office is inside the eyeball of Oxala. Boa Vista creeps her out. She hates the thought of Lucas permanently moving his government here.
Alexia hears a thing here she has never heard before: Lucas Corta laughing. She finds him leaning back in his chair shaking with barely suppressed giggles. He holds his hands to beg her not to speak to him while he shakes with mirth.
Lucas Corta is one of those people, naturally serious in demeanour, who are so utterly transformed by joy that they almost become another person.
‘It’s still the Suns, isn’t it?’
Lucas nods and quivers with laughter again.
‘And it will be for quite some time,’ he says when he breathes.
‘How much did they go for?’
‘Twenty billion.’
Alexia still converts lunar bitsies into Brasilian reais. Her eyes widen.
‘That’s …’
‘A fortune by your standards. Small change for the Suns. And they know it. A final, well-judged insult from Mackenzie Metals. This is all you’re worth.’
Lucas indicates for Alexia to sit. He enjoys another seism of sniggering. His laughter is beginning to irritate Alexia now. It is not clean.
‘So Darius has withdrawn his claim to Mackenzie Metals?’
‘Denny Mackenzie is crowned king and struts around Hadley like some St Olga cage-fighter.’
Alexia goes to the window to look out over the shoots and seedlings of Boa Vista reborn.
‘I don’t understand. The Mackenzies killed Rafa and destroyed this place. Denny Mackenzie killed Carlinhos in cold blood.’
‘My account with the Mackenzies is settled.’
‘Ironfall? That’s not your account, Lucas. That’s my account. My account, and I will never be free from that.’
The laughter dies, the smile vanishes. This is the Lucas Corta Alexia recognises.
‘The Suns are our common enemy. They set us at each other’s throats. Allow me a little schadenfreude. It’s a rare commodity.’
‘Have you ever thought that maybe you’re so scheming, so twisty, you might trip yourself up?’
‘That’s why I employ you, Lê. I trust you to tell me the truth. There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s asked for an audience.’
‘This wasn’t on my agenda.’
‘Toquinho, have Nelson bring my guest up please.’
Three chairs. There are three chairs in Lucas’s mirador. How had she not noticed?
Escoltas in cream linen suits and broad-brimmed straw planter hats guide the supplicant into Oxala’s eye.
Alexia’s breath catches. This short, dark, powerful man: she recognises the haunted eyes, the smoking energy coiled tight in every muscle, the bright, terrible presence in his
walk, his stance, his every move. This is the wolf.
‘Brother.’
‘Wagner.’
The greeting is perfunctory. Lucas can barely tolerate Wagner Corta’s embrace.
‘Sit, sit,’ Lucas says.
‘I prefer to stand.’ He cannot keep still; he fidgets from foot to foot, he cannot rest.
‘Stand then. My Iron Hand, Alexia Corta.’
Wagner purses his fingers, dips his head to Alexia in the Corta manner. Connecting with his eyes is like gazing into the sun-heart of a fusion reactor. Alexia returns the greeting, enchanted by his dark formality. He may be the most attractive man she has ever seen.
‘Senhor Corta.’
‘He is not a Corta,’ Lucas says.
‘Bryce Mackenzie has Robson,’ Wagner Corta says.
The corner of Lucas’s mouth twitches. The barb has driven deep. Alexia observes that Wagner has observed it too. The wolves have strong bruxaria, she has heard. When the Earth is round, they see what others cannot, they sense beyond the human spectrum, they join together into a pack mind greater, faster than their individual intelligences. They have phenomenal sex.
‘Robson was under your protection,’ Lucas says.
‘I was misled,’ Wagner says. ‘Betrayed.’
‘Betrayed?’
‘Analiese …’
‘The Mackenzie woman.’
‘They killed her, Lucas. Knife through the neck.’
Lucas does not flinch. Alexia can see the wolf within Wagner Corta thrash and claw. If it breaks free, all the escoltas in Lucas’s bodyguard will not keep it from tearing Boa Vista apart.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Lucas asks.
‘I need him back. I need him safe.’
‘Those are two different things.’ Alexia has been Mão de Ferro long enough to distinguish between Lucas indifferent and Lucas calculating. This is Lucas adding up, subtracting.
‘Safe. Keep him safe.’
‘You realise that my capacity to act is limited. Bryce Mackenzie’s purpose in taking Robson is to have a hostage. If I move, if I show my hand, Robson dies.’
‘I’ll go to Queen myself. I’ll make a hostage swap.’
‘Wagner, you are of no value to Bryce Mackenzie.’
The true legends are the broken ones: fragments of histories, tellings, embellishments, edits and re-edits. Truth abhors a narrative. Some families have a black sheep: the Cortas have a dark wolf. Lucas has never spoken of Wagner but Alexia has picked up scraps of family mythology from staff and security: the strange child who howled at the Earth, the madrinha who wanted more than to be just a rental womb for the Cortas, the life-long hatred of Lucas Corta for a man who was an affront to his mother, to everything his family stood for. He’s not a Corta.
But he is.
‘Alexia.’ Her name, not the apelido. ‘I shall be moving my official residence to Boa Vista. I intend to taunt Bryce. He is easily provoked. He will want to move to João de Deus to show that he is in control,’ Lucas says. ‘Wolf: you will live here. I cannot have you running amok every time the Earth is round. Toquinho has arranged accommodation. It’s in one of the construction barracks, it won’t be the most comfortable. It’s a laborious process, bringing Boa Vista back to its former glory. Then again, you never lived here, did you?’
‘Cut, Lucas. Always the cut.’
‘Thanks would be appropriate here.’
‘You’re not doing it for me. You’re doing it for family. For Rafa. For your mother.’
‘My mother.’
Alexia sees what Lucas is doing. In barbing his brother, cutting him, drawing painful blood, he is channelling the raging Earth-light inside his brother, like a rod calling lightning. Bleeding power and emotion that might lash out unchecked, that could threaten Lucas’s plans.
Your child taken by a monster. Your oko, your partner, your love knifed down, alone and defenceless. These Alexia cannot imagine.
‘Keep him safe, Lucas,’ Wagner says.
‘None of us are safe.’
Nelson Medeiros returns and Wagner understands that the meeting is concluded. When they are out of earshot, Alexia says, ‘So that was the wolf.’
‘Yes. Do you know why I despise him? Because he is free and has never given a second of thought to it. His condition absolves him of all responsibilities. Wolf, man; wolf, man; back and forth back and forth as the Earth grows round, and there is nothing he can do about it. It’s neurobiology, see? Wonderful. He is the victim of his condition. It will always be the sole force acting on his life.’
‘It’s not a condition, it’s an identity,’ Alexia says. Lucas hisses in derision.
‘That puts it beyond criticism? He’s given responsibility – keep my sobrinho safe – and no sooner does the Earth shine blue than he runs off to the pack and Bryce Mackenzie takes Robson.’
‘That’s not fair, Lucas …’
Lucas waves a dismissing hand.
‘I need you to go Twé. I need you to bring a consignment back to Boa Vista.’
‘What is it?’
‘Justice.’
Akosi the Poisoner’s rings catch Alexia hard on the back of the hand.
‘That hurt!’
‘Do you want to die bleeding from your eyes, your ears, your shit-hole?’
‘I was only looking,’ Alexia says, taken by surprise, shame-faced and angry that this old woman, more wrinkle than flesh, eyes like currants folded into bags of skin, caught her out.
‘Looking is not touching. Don’t touch!’
She removes the set of plastic needles from the printer.
‘You touched,’ Alexia says.
The old woman waves her hand dismissively.
‘Ach! I’ve been working with them so long I’m immune.’
Akosi the Poisoner lives behind a door in a tangled root mass of a strangler vine that ran away and rooted, thrived and occupied Silo 2 of Kojo Laing Agrarium after its ecosystem collapsed in the Third Great Purging and it was left to grow wild. Alexia climbed twining staircases up through the massive roots; back and forth, around and under, crossing and recrossing the light-pools of the central mirror arrays bouncing light down from the transparent cap. She was a devotee approaching a deep forest umbanda initiation. The Great Tree of Twé impressed on her the power and skill of the Asamoahs, but this two-hundred-metre cylinder of woven roots and trunks and branches was even more awe-inspiring, for magic dwelt here. Alexia imagined orixas muttering among the leaves.
And there was a door, opposite a sheer drop of eighty metres to the pool in which the Poisoner’s Tree bathed its roots. She knocked.
‘Who’s there?’ A scratch of a voice. The old woman knew well who was there. Everything had been arranged through their familiars.
‘Alexia Maria de Céu Arena de Corta.’ Names and titles, honorifics and qualifications played well in Twé. ‘Mão de Ferro of the Eagle of the Moon.’
‘Come in come in, Iron Hand.’
The door creaked wide, opened by no hand. Of course. Alexia ventured through a chain of domed rooms, bubbles blown from the pith of the great fig. In the final room she found the Poisoner.
‘Part of the mystique, baa,’ Akosi the Poisoner said. She was an aged woman, long and thin as famine, draped in white like a Mãe de Santo. Necklaced, bangled and be-ringed. Her dark skin, mottled, was heavily wrinkled and creased, as if she had shrunk inside her own body, ‘I’m heavily branded. So, what business does the Iron Hand of the Eagle of the Moon have with the Mother of Poisons?’
Alexia told her and Akosi the Poisoner’s face creased into the configuration of a grin and with a wave of her stick opened up the rooms beyond the final room; the clean and pristine and white and sterile rooms with printers and chemical synthesisers and staff – staff! – where the work was done.
‘The tree isn’t
just scenery, baa,’ Akosi the Poisoner said as the team made Alexia comfortable and served her tea which she could not bring herself to drink. ‘I’ve engineered it to grow the feedstock for over fifty different toxins. Try not to touch your eyes or your mouth or any holes at all. And wash your hands.’
It was a process involving much tea and boredom, brewing bespoke poisons.
Akosi the Poisoner sets the needles into a second printer and coats them with plastic.
‘Tagged to Robson Corta’s DNA. Only he can open them.’ She holds up the five plastic slivers in her fist. ‘The Five Deaths, Mão de Ferro. Who are they for?’
‘Just one person.’
Akosi the Poisoner hisses.
‘Who does Lucas Corta hate so much he must kill them five times over?’
‘I can’t tell you, Mãe de Santo.’
Akosi snaps her hand shut with a small cry.
‘Manners, baa, manners. The poisons must hear the name.’
Alexia takes a deep breath.
‘Bryce Mackenzie.’
Akosi the Poisoner gives a high, keening cry. She pushes the container into Alexia’s hands.
‘Have them, baa, have them with my blessing. No charge. For the Sisters of the Lords of Now. Take them and tell me when the Brute of Boa Vista is dead. One doubt, baa.’
‘What is it, Mãe?’
‘Have I made enough?’
The dark is soft and dense, broken by dozens of tiny, dim lights that shed enough illumination for Alexia to understand that she is inside a dome, a small one; four, five paces across. The air is old, stale and carries high notes of ozone and a spicy, smoky tang at once exotic and familiar to Alexia.
‘Reveillon!’ Alexia says. ‘It smells of New Year.’
‘Moondust,’ Wagner Corta says. ‘Most people say it smells like gunpowder. I don’t know what that is, but we say it.’
‘Fireworks,’ Alexia says. ‘Like the morning after the party, when everyone is creeping back home hung-over and you smell all the burned-out rockets.’
The barracks where Lucas had billeted Wagner was easily found, even as the heavy contractors were moving out and the landscapers and ecological engineers moving in.