by Ian McDonald
‘Hey!’ Rosario de Tsiolkovski rounds on Dakota. ‘I’m the contracted zashitnik.’
‘You’re a ghazi-school drop-out,’ Dakota says. ‘The university wouldn’t have you.’
‘Don’t wave your doctorate at me,’ Rosario says defiantly. ‘I can take you.’
‘You?’
‘Speed and skill takes size and pomposity every time.’ Rosario swaggers from the kitchen space. The two women face off. The zashitnik is a head shorter than the ghazi, but she radiates punk ferocity.
‘Girls,’ Ariel says. ‘Rosario remains Team Corta’s zashitnik.’
‘You do know Mariano Gabriel Demaria will carve her up on the fighting floor,’ says Dakota Kaur Mackenzie.
‘Mariano Gabriel Demaria will carve both of you up on the fighting floor,’ Ariel says. ‘Unless you fight clever. Now go and get tea someplace. I’ve got my first interview in five minutes and I need to get the smell of testosterone out of the soft furnishings. Everyone except Lucasinho and Abena. You too, Luna.’ The girl scowls. ‘Elis, take Luna.’
Madrinha Elis takes Luna’s hand and coaxes her towards the door.
‘Hey.’ In the corridor Rosario crouches at Luna-height. ‘Is that the knife box? Can I see the knife? I mean, like hold it?’
Ariel hears Luna say, ‘No,’ and the bickering between ghazi and zashitnik moves lobby-wards.
* * *
Dakota has heard of these fantastic creatures but she has never seen one until now. The wolf and his son are two pools of darkness in the hotel lobby. Guests and staff alike avoid them as if they glow with radiation.
Of course Wagner Corta is not a wolf. He is a man with a specialised social structure for a neurological condition. And Robson Corta is not his son, though from what Dakota has heard Wagner has been more a father and mother to him than Rafa Corta and Rachel Mackenzie ever were. But they can be nothing other than the wolf and his son.
The wolf burns with a tightly constrained intensity: Dakota’s trained perceptions show her a sharp insightfulness and honed faculties even she cannot match. He is in his light aspect, then. The boy: she has never seen a child more damaged. Torn in two and whip-stitched together, the sutures barely holding. Her heart goes out to them both, the wolf and his son.
‘I am Dakota Kaur Mackenzie. Ariel is very happy that you’ve come. Please follow me.’
The glances of the other guests are brief, the whispers hushed but not so that Dakota can’t make them out. That’s him … the boy who killed Bryce Mackenzie. Needles in his eyes. His eyes …
They move well, the wolf and his son. Like assassins.
Wagner is taken aback by the intensity of the greeting. Dakota can see that he has not expected everyone to be there. Luna. Lucasinho. His sister.
‘Irmão.’
‘Irmana.’
From the hesitations, the flinchings, the small moments of discomfort and unfamiliarity, Dakota fills in the gaps of the family history. Wagner was made the outcast, Ariel made herself the outcast.
‘The last time we met you were in a bed in the med centre in João de Deus,’ Wagner says to Ariel.
Dakota raises an eyebrow. Weird family. Mackenzies are straightforward, to the face, speak your mind and your heart. Cortas, you never know where you are with them. One moment they love, the next they are radioactive ice. Resentments brood for years, for generations. She watches Robson embrace Lucasinho: these boys are beautiful and damaged and aliens to each other.
Dakota slips close to whisper to Rosario.
‘A word. On the balcony.’
Dakota closes the windows and breathes in Meridian’s unique fragrance. The noise of the prospekt beyond the screen of shrubs is warm and human.
‘Keep an eye on the wolf and the boy.’
‘That’s not my job,’ Rosario starts.
‘You won’t have a job if your employer is assassinated.’
‘Wagner and Robson?’
‘The kid killed Bryce Mackenzie. Smuggled the Five Deaths of Twé right into Bryce’s private slime pit bare-ass naked. When they found him there wasn’t a bone or organ in his body. Just a skin full of liquefying fat.’
‘They’re family…’
‘The people most likely to kill you are your family. Keep an eye open and a hand on the hilt.’
* * *
What is a Blue Moon? Alexia asks and the bar-keep makes her one. The conical ice-cold glass, the house gin (fifteen botanicals), the slow pour of the blue curacao over the back of the spoon and the tendrils dropping slowly, monstrously into the spirit, twining and dissolving into sky blue; sunline blue; the globe of orange peel.
She sips it, doesn’t like it.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The Cortas are back,’ the bar-keep says.
Alexia still doesn’t get it, but he’s late so she finishes it and he’s still late so she orders another and doesn’t get it any more than the first. She’ll give him until the bottom of this glass and then fold up the courage she flew to ask him for a drink and walk away.
Nelson Medeiros recommended the bar and his taste is sure: low enough for swank, high enough for bairro-alto raw. The music hit her and she smiled: beats, rhythms she could move to. Feet to tap and head to nod. She took a seat at the bar and asked for the signature cocktail.
He arrives with half a centimetre of Blue Moon left. Heads lean together: That’s him. Then who’s she?
He slips on to the seat beside her. He’s different. Changed. She can’t put her finger on details, only generalities. Impressions. Deeper rather than wider. Slower but more profound. Present not restless.
He winces at the music.
‘We can go somewhere else if you don’t like the music.’
‘I don’t like any music right now,’ he says, jerking a thumb roofwards. Beyond the sunline, through two hundred metres of stone, an Earth five days past full stood high over the Sinus Medii. This was the liminal place between the wolf and the shadow. ‘It passes.’
Wagner Corta died that day, he said up in Boa Vista’s dusty observatory. I am not one person, I am two.
‘Sorry,’ he says, getting up from the chair and stepping back. ‘Let’s do this right.’ He kisses Alexia on each cheek, the formal way. He indicates the seat.
‘Please,’ Alexia says and he sits again.
‘I apologise for being late. Robson wanted to stay later with Luna.’
‘Is he…’
‘Back in the hotel.’
‘You’re not with…’
‘The pack? No, that doesn’t work for him.’
‘I was going to say with Lucas.’
‘That doesn’t work for Lucas.’
He smiles differently; guarded, rationing the emotion.
‘Robson wanted to go and meet up with some of his old traceur friends, from when he lived up in Bairro Alto. I told the escoltas not to let him out of the house.’
‘You have escoltas?’
‘The accessory of the moment. I would like a drink, Alexia Corta.’ In the abruptness is an echo of the swift bright wolf.
‘I’ve been drinking Blue Moons,’ Alexia says.
‘I’ve never got on with those,’ Wagner says and orders a caipiroshka. Alexia joins him: glasses clink and the music is a comfortable, pregnant pulse in her stomach. Conversation is lubricated by vodka but there are still long pauses while Wagner considers a question, odd asides and non sequiturs and intense picking apart of casual remarks. In the spaces, Alexia wonders if it is possible to love both the shadow and the wolf. If she had to choose one, which Wagner Corta would it be? Can anyone but a wolf love the wolf? Then she realises that another woman asked that same question and reached an answer. A woman he loved, who betrayed him and paid a hideous price. And now Alexia Corta turns these compromises and accommodations over in her mind.
He’s looking at her. His eyes are wide and uncomfortable.
‘Sorry, mind wandering.’ He won’t let that go. ‘Just thinking about tomorrow.’ Get him talking.
‘You’ve been, haven’t you?’
‘I was in the Court of Clavius when Bryce challenged Lucas.’
‘Do you mind? Can you tell me? What it’s like.’
Wagner goes into himself for dark moments.
‘Fast,’ he says. ‘Faster than you can think. I’m fast – when it’s the other me – but not as fast as knives. Knives are faster than conscious thought. One mistake, one lapse of concentration and you are dead. There is nothing clean or honourable about it.’
‘Did you see … the result?’
‘The death? That’s the result. That’s always the result. Knives are drawn, someone dies. I saw Carlinhos drive a knife through Hadley Mackenzie’s throat and kick his blood up in his mother’s face. I saw him take the knife and become something I didn’t recognise.’
‘How can your law allow a thing like that?’
‘I’ve thought much about this. I’m not a lawyer, but our law prohibits nothing and permits anything, as long as it is agreed. If the law says you can’t fight to the blood to settle a case, then there is a thing that can’t be agreed and the law is nothing. But I think there is a deeper lesson, which is that the law allows violence to settle disputes to show that violence never settles anything. Violence comes back again and again, down years and decades and centuries and so many lives.’
Four caipis down and Alexia no longer has any taste for a fifth. The bar is crowded with shadows.
‘We’ve a day of it tomorrow,’ Alexia says. Wagner reads her true.
‘We do.’
‘One question: where will you sit?’
‘Robson will be with Haider. I will be with you and Lucas.’
‘Lucas asked me to be second. I don’t know what that means.’
‘Hold the knives, check your zashitnik complies with the judges’ rules. Arrange for the zabbaleen to take the body away, if necessary.’
‘Shit.’
‘The judges will guide you.’
Alexia hesitates.
‘Wagner. When this is done – whatever happens, can we, you know?’
‘Meet again?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘I’d like that too.’
* * *
Ariel intercepts Abena at the bar. Touches two fingers lightly to the back of her wrist.
‘Before you go to Lucasinho, I need a word.’
Between Team Corta and ghazis the suite is low on private places but Ariel takes Abena to the spa room. They perch on the edge of the pool. Blue light, swirl-shadows and the prickle of ozone.
‘This humidity is wrecking my hair,’ Abena starts and then sees a look on Ariel’s face that she has never witnessed before. Gone is the arch knowingness, the swagger and the artifice, the affected cynicism. Abena sees caution, even fear.
‘Tomorrow, in the court: whatever happens, don’t stop me.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Now Abena is alarmed. This is not Ariel’s voice, these are not Ariel’s words.
‘The greatest malandragem is that you play on yourself,’ Ariel says. ‘You asked me once, back in Coriolis, if I was having maternal feelings, Lucasinho and Luna tucked away under my wings. You asked that of the wrong person, I think.
‘You see, Abena Maanu Asamoah, I have been a self-centred, arrogant monster all my life. I knew it. I always knew it. I pretended I loved the monster. I convinced enough people I did. But it took me to drive away the one person who stood with me, who supported me when we were broken, who loved me, to start to convince myself.’
‘Marina,’ Abena says. ‘I was there when you tried to stop her going to Earth.’
‘She went to Earth because I drove her away. And I would do anything for her not to have gone. But no one comes back from Earth.’
‘Lucas did.’
Ariel smiles.
‘That he did. Just to repeat; tomorrow, whatever happens…’
‘Don’t try and stop you.’
‘And if you try and give me any of that redemptive shit, I will have Dakota gut you. Cortas don’t do redemption.’
‘I thought Cortas didn’t do politics.’
‘History, I think, will show that we do. Now go to pretty boy and cover him with kisses and tell him you love him.’
Ariel opens the spa room door.
‘And your hair does look like a train wreck.’
* * *
He doesn’t taste the same.
Lucasinho was always sweet to the lips. When Abena licked the sweat from his biceps, the small of his back, it tasted of honey. His skin was soft and scented of herbs and sugar.
He doesn’t taste the same, he doesn’t smell the same, he doesn’t feel the same. Abena holds him tight and she feels a stiffening, a pulling in and away, as if this is their first embrace. As if he has never embraced before. Abena knows how the university rebuilt his personality: she is the Abena Asamoah of snapshots, network comments, sharings and postings. Does he remember when he was the lost boy in Twé, bored and frustrated under the Asamoah’s protection, does he remember when he cheated on her with Adelaja Oladele and made up to her with cake and sex? Does he remember anointing her chakras with cream and them laughing and laughing as he licked it off, Anahita to Muladhara? Does he remember when they were apart and she skinned his avatar as a fabulous futanari, and he found it thrilling? How can he trust anything he thinks he remembers?
He doesn’t look the same. Those ripe lips, those haughty cheekbones, those long eyelashes will always break boys’ and girls’ hearts but his deep beauty was his eyes and it is there that the changes lie deepest. Those eyes have been dead. They’ve seen the nothing.
He doesn’t act the same.
‘There’s a few of us from my colloquium up in a bar on Twenty-Two,’ she says. ‘Sneak away from this?’ He looks uncertain. She runs a finger down his nose, over his lips, his chin to his throat. ‘Just a few. Not too many.’ No, not uncertain. Scared.
‘Would it be okay…’
‘Whatever you want.’ He would have stormed that party, crashed that party if he wasn’t on the list, climbed twenty-two levels of Meridian straight up to get to that party. Before. Abena’s Tumi calls her friends, waiting with banners and streamers and narco-poppers. He doesn’t want to come. ‘So, what about I just take you out to a hotshop for a quiet glass of tea?’ She sees him shudder. ‘Or even just a walk? I’m sure you want to get out of this place. It would be good to get some fresher air.’ He glances over his shoulder to the balcony of his state room and the city beyond. The voices and sounds of the prospket tempt him. He shakes his head.
‘Dakota says it’s not safe.’
‘We’ll take Rosario. She’s as good as Dakota. You won’t even know she’s there. And my aunt has given me some extra protection. Asamoah-style.’ She taps a large-jewelled bracelet on her wrist. Lucasinho’s resolve wavers, then Abena sees the fear refreeze in his eyes.
‘Maybe some other time. I’m really tired. I think I should sleep.’ He hesitates. Abena knows that pause. Her breath catches. It’s sweet. ‘I’m a bit … scared.’ He bites his lower lip. It’s adorable. ‘I know we were, you know. Back in Twé.’ He looks up through those long lashes. ‘I don’t want to be alone. I’ve been alone too much. Would it be okay for you to sleep with me?’ Abena’s breath catches. Her heart is a thing of light and movement, fleet as a festival flier. In this moment she is not the brightest star of her political science generation; Ariel Corta’s legal agent, the advocate who took down Amanda Sun and the Eagle of the Moon, the shining scion of the Golden Stool; she is a young woman with a boy she adores, whom she has adored since she pushed the vouch-safe of the Asamoahs through his earlobe on the evening of his Moonrun party. Moondust to moondust, vacuum to vacuum.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes I will.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Marina wakes with a cry from a dream of crushing: roof-fall, avalanche, the ceiling of Meridian bearing down on her like a kill-box in an action movie. Light. She blinks scintillas o
ut of her vision. Her optic nerves ache. She clamps her eyes shut. The light is so bright, so sudden she can see the veins in her eyelids.
‘Mai?’
‘Kess?’
Marina squints through barely open eyes. The door is a dark rectangle, the shadow beside it is her sister.
‘I’ve been calling for five minutes.’
‘What’s wrong?’
The shadow moves. Marina can risk opening one eye fully.
‘Come and have a cup of tea.’
Marina opens the other eye.
‘It’s—’ Once her familiar would have told her the time even as she framed the question, would have woken her with a whispered warning that her sister wanted to take tea at three twenty-seven in the morning. ‘Let me throw something on.’
The kettle is boiling by the time Marina pads barefoot into the kitchen. Illumination is from the status lights of network-connected kitchen devices. The room smells of herbal teas, flowers and small fruit. Kessie sets down two mugs. Marina dunks her tea-bag: a hot baptism.
‘I’ve done something I hope I don’t regret,’ Kessie says. She slides a print-out across the table to Marina. Marina squints in the blue gloaming. It’s a notification of the transfer of one hundred thousand dollars to her Whitacre Goddard bank account in Meridian.
‘I raided a few old accounts,’ Kessie says.
‘You’ll get it back, as soon as I start earning,’ Marina says. ‘Every cent.’
‘As long as it’s before Ocean starts college.’ The two mugs of herbal brew steam, untouched. ‘I put it in your lunar account because you said the DIA was watching your US bank. I think you do need to move fast on this.’
‘I can transfer it to VTO right away. Thank you, Kess, thank you.’
Kessie holds up a hand.
‘I think you also need to leave pretty soon too. As soon as they see the payment go through to VTO, they’ll guess what’s happened.’
