by Ian McDonald
‘There is,’ Marina says. ‘But I had to come here to see it clear.’
‘Expensive moment of clarity,’ Dr Gutierrez says.
‘It’s only money,’ Marina says.
Dr Gutierrez smiles and Marina thinks she may have misjudged him. The door opens and Melinda is in the white room. Marina hasn’t given thought to her rehabilitation liaison since her tail-lights turned the corner of the dirt road and vanished behind the trees.
‘Are you finished, Jaime?’
‘She’s good to fly,’ Dr Gutierrez says.
‘I need a word, Marina.’
Marina follows her up the corridor, the tips of her hiking poles tick-tacking on the wood.
‘Coffee?’ Melinda asks as Marina settles herself carefully in to the sofa in the small, bright room with high views over Lake Union. Low sofas are upholstered fly-traps to moonwomen. You can get in but you can’t get out.
Coffee arrives with a woman in a suit that reads government. She pours two cups of coffee.
‘Thank you, Melinda.’
She slides the cup across the low table to Marina.
‘My name is Stella Oshoala. I work for the Defence Intelligence Agency.’
‘I thought it might be something like that.’
Stella Oshoala stirs two sugars into her coffee and takes a sip.
‘You’ve been experiencing some hostility in the neighbourhood.’
‘Do you keep tabs on all the returnees?’
‘We do. Many returnees find assimilating back into the terrestrial lifestyle challenging. The moon often gives rise to unorthodox political ideas. Extreme libertarianism, a yearning for utopian communities, anarcho-syndicalism. Alternate takes on the legal system.’
‘All I was trying to do was fit in. Make a new life for myself.’
‘But that’s not true, is it, Marina?’ Stella Oshoala sets down her cup. ‘You’re going back. That’s unprecedented.’
Marina’s coffee no longer tastes of wonder and nostalgia.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to pay for your mother’s healthcare.’
‘I pay for her healthcare and you don’t talk about Mom.’
‘You can pay for your Mom’s care or you can go back to the moon. You can’t afford both.’
‘You’ve been into my accounts?’
‘You applied for a Earth-moon transit loan. Of course we’re going to be interested in that.’
The government woman is right. The figures don’t add up. Marina hadn’t calculated on moonflight costs rising, medical care costs spiralling. Now, as when Marina first came to this lakeside office for her pre-flight assessments, VTO was prepared to advance loans to potential moon-workers. Now as then, filled in the application in the dark, private heart of night. She was fearful of exposing her secret: moonworker Marina, long the pillar of the Calzaghes, might not be as rich as she thought.
‘All I want to do is cover all my responsibilities.’
Stella Oshoala looks at her shoes. Her mouth twitches.
‘You need to know that your loan application is unlikely to be approved.’
Marina feels gravity reach out and pull down every strong thing in her. The room swims. The floor looms at her.
‘What?’
‘VTO has not approved your loan.’
‘It’s only a hundred K.’
‘Hundred K or a hundred thousand, the answer would be the same,’ Stella Oshoala says. She takes a sip from her cup but the coffee has turned cold and stale.
‘I don’t understand,’ Marina stammers. Her world has imploded. Her every hope is falling into that hole in her heart.
‘A returnee who wants to go Jo Moonbeam again isn’t VTO’s idea of a safe and stable investment.’
Stella Oshoala makes eye contact.
‘I want you to do some work for us, Marina. For which you will be paid. Enough to cover your shortfall. More.’
And out of that hole comes anger.
‘You told VTO to turn down my loan, didn’t you?’
Stella Oshoala sighs.
‘You are in a unique position that my organisation would be negligent not to exploit.’
‘You want me to spy.’
Stella Oshoala grimaces.
‘That’s not a word we use, Marina. We’re interested in information. Updates. Insights. Our government is not one of the major players in the LMA. What’s happening up there is important but all we’re thrown by the Russians and Chinese is bird feed.’
‘Are you telling me it’s my patriotic duty?’
‘Those aren’t words we use either, Marina.’
Marina feels trapped in the deep, swallowing sofa.
‘Spy on my friends.’ The anger is red and hot and oh so joyful but she must keep it controlled. She bites back the words spy on my loves.
‘Your mother will receive the best of care,’ Stella Oshoala says.
Now the hot anger gives Marina the strength to push herself out of the suffocating sofa, across the room to her hiking poles.
‘We look after our own,’ Marina says as she slips her wrists through the loops and takes the grips.
‘I’ll leave it with you,’ Stella Oshoala calls, a parting shot as Marina stalks down the corridor. Tick-tack, tick-tack. A spy. A tout, a traitor. How dare she? The hurt and humiliation is doubly hot because the woman was right. She can afford to go to the moon or look after Mom. Or betray the family that took her in, raised her up from the dust, placed their trust and confidence – placed their lives – in her.
‘Good?’ Kessie asks as Marina swings past the lines of hopefuls with eyes full of moon, towards the car pulling in under the porch. ‘You were gone a long time.’
‘Sound in wind and limb,’ Marina says. ‘Give me a hand with this. will you?’ Kessie holds the sticks while Marina struggles into her jacket. It’s too small and too hot for the city but her proud Corta Hélio T-shirt feels like a brand of treachery.
* * *
Cloud has drawn in around Rainier. Fickle goddess. Marina turns her back on the mountain, on the Space Needle, on the thuggish towers of Elliott Bay. Traitor town. She grips the rail and looks across bay and sound to the mountains of her homeland. She zips the jacket up to her throat. Always cold on the sound. A good jacket won’t let you down.
The ferry has rounded the southern point of Bainbridge Island before Kessie says, ‘You are in one hell of a mood, sister of mine. Did something happen back there?’
Jellyfish tumble through indigo water, bouquets of blubber and poison.
‘I need you to lend me one hundred thousand dollars.’
‘That’s what it was about.’
‘What is was about, Kessie,’ Marina says, her knuckles white against the dark wooden rail, ‘what it was actually about, was the Defence Intelligence Agency trying to turn me into a spy.’
Wooden houses line each stony shore, dapper and wealthy. Beyond them rise the trees.
‘They don’t call it spying. I’d be an information feed. Feed them the Cortas and they’ll pay for Mom’s care.’
The engine pitch changes as the ferry lines up on Bremerton pier.
Kessie shifts uncomfortably at the rail.
‘I have to ask—’
‘The Cortas are the most egocentric, narcissist, arrogant – outright weird – pack of fucks I have ever met,’ Marina says. ‘And every second I am away from them, it kills me.’
Docking announcements blare on the speaker system. The ferry shudders as the bow thrusters open up. Dark waves lap high up the concrete piles and rubber buffers of the pier.
‘I don’t know, Marina.’
‘I have to move fast on this, Kess.’
‘Marina, I don’t know.’
The off-ramp scrapes up the concrete of the dock. Marina is the last one at the rail. She can clearly make out Kessie’s car in the lot, that will soon take them back between the mountains and the water to the house under the eaves of the forest.
TWENTY-TWO
Alexia understands that when you are scared, when you are headed into the worst thing in the world with no escape, no adjournment, you find deep engagement in your trivia. Your music, your chat, your beloved shows. But Gods, how many games of Dragon Run can one thirteen-year-old play?
The LMA rail car drives east from Hypatia Junction across the smooth black glasslands of the sun-belt. A landscape to drive the soul inward, to dark reflection and self-examination. Gods. She prefaced the thought: Gods. The lunar way. Gods and saints and orixas, the whole a crazed feijoada melding into something strange, something new, something more. And she is part of this melting, mixing, melding. How long since she thought of home, of the green and blue of Barra, of the people of Ocean Tower who cheered and toasted her up into space, of gorgeous, vain Norton, of Marisa and Caio? Days of forgetting slip into lunes and one day you find years have turned and you cannot go back again.
‘Haider.’
No answer.
‘Haider.’
He looks out, focuses from game to Alexia.
‘Are they safe?’
Haider opens his mouth wide. Alexia sees nibs of colour under his tongue, in his cheeks. Red, green, blue, yellow, white. The black she can’t see, concealed in the darkness within the human body. It’s there, the last death of all.
‘Fuck’s sake, Haider!’
He spits the vials out into his hand.
‘Just trying it out. You never noticed me put them in, did you? I picked up some of Robson’s tricks. I’ve got this thought out. Can’t hide them up my ass because I’d never get them out without everyone seeing. This way, I slip them in when we get there, I slip them out again when I see Robson. All I got to do is keep my mouth shut.’
‘What if you swallow?’
‘They’re coded to Robson’s DNA. Only he can open them. They just go right through me.’
And you trust that?
‘How long to João de Deus?’
‘Ten minutes.’
‘Enough time.’ Haider settles in his seat, refocuses his eyes back into his game. Strange boy. Deliberately awkward, challenging others to come to him. She tried to talk, to engage him, to understand him on the rail ride from Theophilus. He rejected every approach. The quietness, the inwardness repel Alexia. She would never have him as a friend, but she is not thirteen, she is not a boy, she is not Robson Corta and to know a friendship you must see both parts of it. But he is a friend, the greatest and bravest friend Alexia has ever seen.
The railcar slows. The deceleration jogs Haider from his game. The LMA honour guard take up positions, swaying as the railcar takes the points on to the branchline to João de Deus. Four of the best non-Corta mercenaries Nelson Medeiros could recuit. They’ll last forty seconds if it comes to a real fight. They know it. The railcar is in the tunnel now, lights strobing, slowing as it brakes into the station.
‘Okay, Haider.’
No answer.
‘Haider?’
When Alexia looks back Haider’s hand is empty.
* * *
Alexia hates João de Deus. She hates the thick, rebreathed air, she hates the stench of cooking oil rubbed deep into the porous stone, the reek of piss and poorly managed sewage. She hates the taste of dust and the soft scrape of it under the soles of her Bonwit Teller shoes. She hates the meanness of the streets, the judging loom of the overhanging levels, the claustrophobia of the too-close sunline – she can read the individual cells of the false sky. She hates the eyes that glance as they pass, or from the alleys and ladeiras, or look down from crosswalks. The eyes that glance and turn away when she looks back. She knows what they say. Mão de Ferro? There has only ever been one Mão de Ferro: the woman who built this place, who built a helium empire on regolith exhausted of all other value. Adriana Corta.
Her wards and charms are immaculate: she and Haider were greeted at the station by Hossam El Ibrashy, Mackenzie Helium’s new First Blade. Finn Warne, his predecessor, was now First Blade at Hadley.
Fifty Mackenzie blades landed on these two platforms, overwhelmed Corta Hélio defenders and attacked up Kondakova Prospekt, Maninho informed her as the LMA railcar drew into João de Deus Station. On your right, first level, highlighted is Lucas Corta’s erstwhile apartment. His sound-room was the finest in the two worlds. She can’t refuse to look: she sees smoke-stained windows, charred interiors, imagines she still smells burned woods, melted organics. Hossam El Ibrashy makes charming small talk, the two Mackenzie Helium blades are tight and discreet and Maninho whispers the other story. Every centimetre of the city is embossed with a history of Mackenzie perfidies: every door, every alley overlain with the memory of wrongs. Estádio da Luz: home of João de Deus Jaguars, formerly Gatinhas and Mocos.
‘Hold on a minute.’
Maninho highlights the Boa Vista tram stop, shuttered and sealed, but here is something not written in its histories. A semicircle of biolights flickers at the foot of the wall – red, green gold. Among them, cheap printed figurines loll and slump or wobble on unsteady bases.
‘A moment please.’ Alexia breaks away from her escort to crouch before the biolights. Haider joins her. Icons have been hung on the pressure seal: elderly women in white and beads like old Baianas. Mães de Santo, holy women, the Sisters of the Lords of Now, arranged around a broken triangle of portraits. Two men, a woman at the centre; a gap where one has been removed; the adhesive pads still tacky to the touch. That picture lies face down among the votives. Alexia touches each picture in turn. So this is Rafa. Golden son. Smiling, popular, but Alexia reads demons behind his eyes. And this is Carlinhos, the fighter. He is beautiful. Alexia regrets she will never meet him. And this: a strong-featured, dark-skinned woman, dark hair flecked with radiation-grey, looking out with eyes of empire: this can only be Adriana Corta. The Iron Hand that dug a dynasty out of the regolith. The Iron Hand would not hire criminals to bring justice to the men who damaged her beloved brother. The Iron Hand forges and delivers her own justice.
Alexia doesn’t need to turn the fallen portrait face up. She knows who it is. Iron Hand, charmer, fighter. Traitor. You’ll see, João de Deus.
‘Senhora Corta, we need to move on.’
‘Of course.’
She squeezes Haider’s hand. He glances at her, startled and she regrets the gesture: too big a startle and he might choke on the deaths hidden in his mouth.
Almost there, she says on their private channel.
Mackenzie Helium has appropriated a half-kilometre of prospekt-front offices. The logo is worked out in neon, three levels high. Heavy security. Alexia can tell the Santinho recruits by their furtive glances of guilt and hope.
‘If you please, Senhora Corta, this is as far as you go.’
She nods to Haider. This was expected but he is afraid now.
‘You go on, Haider. It’ll be all right.’
Seats are provided, tea is brought by bright staff in neat Mackenzie Helium uniforms. Hossam El Ibrashy touches Haider lightly on the arm and escorts him through the sliding doors.
* * *
The room is white, bright, upholstered ivory faux-leather. No windows. Haider blinks against the hard brilliance. Robson is a spirit in white shorts and sleeveless T. His skin and hair stand stark against the white white white.
‘I’ll leave you alone,’ Hossam El Ibrashy says. ‘Five minutes.’
The door closes. Now is the part you cannot practise, that has to be right. Now is where the friendship is tested on the edge of the knife, where Robson has to accept and understand without a whisper or a flinch. Now is the trick.
‘Hey.’
‘Ola.’
Haider hugs Robson to him. He still feels like a sack of bones and cables. Pulls him close.
Now.
Kisses him. On the mouth. Pushes the first death with his tongue against Robson’s lips. Quick quick please be quick. Cameras are watching. AIs are scanning up and down the private freque
ncies. Quantum processors stand by, ready to crack encryptions like an infant’s skull. Robson hesitates, then Haider feels his body relax. Robson opens his mouth. Haider locks his fingers behind Robson, turns his head to make the kiss deeper, longer, more passionate. Death by death, he slides the poisons into Robson’s mouth.
‘You’re okay, you’re okay, I’m so happy,’ Haider babbles, still clinched boy to boy. It’s cover, and it’s pure nervous relief. ‘Are you all right? Are they treating you good? Is the food okay? Do they let you move around? Wagner says to give you his love – they wouldn’t let him come. Do you know about … about, what happened?’
Robson nods solemnly, eyes wide.
‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’
Will an AI hear the change in his voice? Will machines read what lies behind the awkwardness? Are these all imaginings?
‘Do you want some horchata?’ Robson says. ‘I got a kitchen. Sort of.’
It’s hard to talk. Conversation is as heavy as lead. Words are rough and uncomfortable. Haider drinks the horchata. It is how he likes it. His eyes widen as he sees Robson take a sip. Nothing. Cool and controlled as if he were taking a saut de bras off the Level 5 water tank. That’s clever, so clever. He’s drinking horchata so there can’t be anything in his mouth. They forget that Robson knows both the trick and the misdirection.
‘Got a gym, want to see it?’ Robson says. Robson has more rooms in his João de Deus prison than entire sectors in Theophilus. ‘I’m supposed to work out.’ Robson shows Haider the free weights, the running track, the step and swivel trainer. ‘There’s a lot of stuff for working on my ass here.’ He pauses. Frowns. ‘’Scuse me. Bathroom. Be right back.’
And this is where the switch is done. From mouth to another hiding place. Not in the bathroom; they’ll surely search that. The ass, probably. Robson can work it so even if there are cameras in there – and Haider wouldn’t put it past Bryce Mackenzie – they will never see it.
‘Sorry about that. This has been happening. The water here is weird.’
The door opens.
‘Sorry, but it’s time,’ Hossam El Ibrashy says.