by Ian McDonald
‘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.