In this black pyramid squatting on the Marsh of Decay he was born, fifty-three years ago. Duncan Mackenzie draws his finger through the dust that lies thick on the desk. Here are his skin flakes; with every dust-filled breath he inhales his childhood. Adrian wears a dust mask; Corbyn Vorontsov-Mackenzie sneezes theatrically; but there was no other place Duncan could assemble his board than Hadley. The first forge of the Mackenzies.
Duncan Mackenzie lays his right hand flat on the surface of the desk. Esperance sends the silent order running out through the nervous system of the old city. Duncan smiles at the vibration beneath his feet; systems waking, checking, powering up. Lights switching on, corridor by airless corridor. Pressure seals closing, atmosphere rushing into the vacuum. Buried elements and headlamps raising the temperature from lunar cold. Chamber by chamber, system by system, Duncan Mackenzie builds his capital. When the family is safe, when the company is secure and rooted, then he will let the full weight of Crucible’s fate rest on him. Until then, someone must bear the roof beams on his back. Someone must share air until everyone has escaped from the rover.
‘Bryce is relocating to João de Deus,’ Yuri Mackenzie says. ‘Tranquillity Ops Managers have received orders to surrender the control codes.’
‘That fucker has no right,’ Denny Mackenzie says.
‘My brother is mounting a coup,’ Duncan says. ‘He has to go for helium. We have the only rare earth smelter on Nearside. If we move fast, we can kill this before it breathes. Who have we got on the ground in Tranquillity and East Fecundity?’
Denny Mackenzie lists teams, dusters, resources. Duncan is distracted by his new gold teeth. He lost two in the flight from Crucible. Duncan hopes the poor bastard who lost his place to Denny died on the bend of his blade, quick and clean.
‘How many can we trust?’ Duncan asks.
The list is shorter by half.
‘Take twenty solid jackaroos and get me those extractors. Deny them to Bryce. Whatever means you think appropriate.’
‘Use their weapons against them,’ Denny says. Duncan remembers that maxim. Hadley Mackenzie, his half brother, had been teaching Robson Corta how to fight among the shafts of blazing light in Crucible’s Hall of Knives. In three moves he disarmed the kid, pinned him and brought the tip of Robson’s own knife within a hair of the boy’s throat. An eleven-year-old boy. Lady Luna is fickle. She loved the Cortas; the lucky, flashy Cortas. She has never been kind to the Mackenzies. Hadley Mackenzie died on the edge of Carlinhos Corta’s knife. Carlinhos died on Denny’s blade, when João de Deus fell. Lady Luna tests who she loves.
‘And send teams to Crisium,’ Duncan says. ‘Yuri, take charge of that. I’m not losing Mare Anguis twice.’
Denny is already in the elevator. He will be putting out contracts, assembling squads and materiel to strike hard, strike fast. Bryce’s flaw is that he has never understood the physical. Codes, orders, commands, analyses is his way. Dusters in the field, boots on the regolith win every time. Duncan will plunge his knife into that flaw and twist it until the blood pours free.
‘Adrian.’
‘Dad.’
The Eagle of the Moon has flown back to his eyrie in Meridian but Adrian came to Hadley. Family is what holds when the iron falls.
‘I need you to give us the LDC.’
Adrian Mackenzie hesitates. Duncan reads a dozen emotions in the muscles around his mouth.
‘The Eagle’s influence over the Lunar Development Corporation is not as sure as it used to be. Eagle and LDC differ on certain issues.’
A turn-tongued, diplomat’s-oko answer.
‘What does that mean?’ Duncan says but the voice of Vassos Palaeologos, once steward of Crucible, now steward of Hadley, cuts in.
‘Mr Mackenzie.’
The perfect retainer, Vassos would only interrupt with the most important news.
‘Go ahead.’
Vassos is a small man, balding, sallow skinned. His familiar is the concentric blue rings of the matiasma, the eye that banishes evil.
‘A report from Meridian Station. Wang John-Jian is dead.’
John-Jian was the best production engineer on the moon. Duncan had secured his loyalty at the memorial at Kingscourt. This is a deep wound.
‘How? What happened?’
‘On the platform. A targeted insect.’
Cyborg drone-insects, armed with fast-killing toxins, are the signature weapons of the Asamoahs but no one in Hadley’s small control room believes for an instant that AKA sanctioned this assassination. It was chosen because it was small, silent, precise, cruel and involves no expensive collateral that might demand damages. A very Bryce Mackenzie murder.
Strike hard, strike fast. Strike fast. Bryce has gone in one smooth power curve from rivalry to war. Esperance calls Denny’s familiar. Denny is in motion, accelerating out from under Hadley’s half-kilometre tall black pyramid down the Aitken-Peary polar line.
‘I’ve got five full squads. Staunch jackaroos.’
‘Good work. Denny. I want this over fast. Gut the fucker.’ A rumble of approvals and murmured yeahs from around the control room. Duncan holds out a hand.
‘Does anyone here deny that I am Chief Executive of Mackenzie Metals?’ Duncan Mackenzie asks.
Yuri is the first to take the offered hand. Corbyn, Vassos. Adrian is last.
‘I’m staunch, Dad.’ But he won’t look at his father, won’t hold eye contact when Duncan seeks eye contact. Are you with me, son? You aren’t with Bryce, but who are you with? You shake my hand, but do you pledge allegiance? Bryce may have the company, Duncan has the family.
One last piece of theatre. Duncan Mackenzie likes to search out the theatre of the everyday, turning presentations into productions, finding the melodrama in meetings. His signature head-to-toe grey, the shimmering grey sphere of Esperance, are all calculated effects. A silent command and behind him the long-shuttered windows of Hadley Control slide open. The heavily glassed slots in the thick sloping sinter walls of Hadley yield enormous views over the Marsh of Decay and the thousands of dark objects waiting there.
The mirrors wake.
Hadley rises from an array of five thousand mirrors. At Duncan Mackenzie’s command, long-stilled mechanisms jar and creak, grind dust in their motors and actuators. Juddering, the mirrors turn their faces to catch the sun. The mirror field blazes so bright the men in Control throw their hands up in front of their eyes before the photo-chromic glass reacts and brings the shafts of blazing, dusty light down to bearable levels. The power of the Mackenzies has always been the sun. Hadley’s mirror array had been the envy of two worlds, the summit of solar-smelting technology, but it had not been enough for Robert Mackenzie. For the fourteen days of the lunar night, the mirrors were dark, the smelter cold. He had conceived a smelter that would never go dark, that would always have the high noon sun pouring into its mirrors. He built Crucible. The Suns boast of their spire-palace, the Pavilion of Eternal Light. A cheap boast, a fortune of location and selenography. The Mackenzies engineered their endless noonday. They shaped the moon itself to create it.
The mirrors lock into position; five thousand beams focused on the smelters at the apex of the dark pyramid. Even in the light of a full moon, it will be visible from Earth; a sudden star kindling in the grey of Palus Putridinis.
Duncan Mackenzie closes his eyes but the light still sears his eyelids red. He shuts them the better to feel. Subtle, but unmistakable once he has isolated it from the background hum of the awakening city. An old body-memory; the all-pervading tremor of Hadley under production; the vibration of liquid metals pouring from the smelters down the refractory gullet at the centre of the pyramid.
He turns to his board.
‘Mackenzie Metals is back in business.’
* * *
Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball gets the distress call five hundred kilometres out from Meridian. The glassers have been out for a lune in the highlands east of Tranquillity. The crew has been working the northern edge of the solar array, checking the performance of the sinterers, maintaining and repairing, reporting and analysing. Glass work is well paid and boring boring boring. For the past three days the crew has been repairing damage from a micrometeorite shower over the Dionysus region. A thousand pinholes; ten thousand cracks, a whole sector of the solar belt gone dark. Painstaking, detailed work that can’t be hurried, that can’t be done any faster or more efficiently. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball is impatient to get back to Meridian. None more than Wagner Corta, laoda of Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. The Earth grows round. Changes sweep over him. His crew has no problem working with a wolf – both the boundless energy and ability to think three different thoughts at the same time of his light aspect and the intense focus and concentration of his dark aspect are valuable talents on the surface. The times between, when the Earth waxes and wanes, are the difficult ones, when he becomes restless, moody, unpredictable, irritable and unapproachable.
Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Wagner gives the same speech at the start of each tour of duty. Some veterans have heard it seven times. That’s our name. The new workers look at each other. Lady Luna is a jealous queen. To call a thing lucky, fortunate, favoured, blessed is to invite her wrath. And we are. The old hands stand with arms folded. They know it’s true. Do you know why we’re lucky? Because we are boring. Because we are diligent and attentive. Because we focus and concentrate. Because we are not lucky. We are smart. Because on the surface you have a thousand questions, but only one question matters. Do I die today? And my answer to that is no.
No one has ever died on the Little Wolf’s squad.
Out on the glass, forty kilometres south of Dionysus, a spinning red asterisk flashes up in Wagner Corta’s lens: SUTRA 2, the penultimate of the five levels of surface threat. The ultimate level is white. White is the colour of death on the moon. Something has gone very bad out in the sinterlands. Wagner checks atmosphere, water and battery levels, flicks command of the rover to his junshi Zehra Aslan while he acknowledges the emergency and briefs Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. His light-aspect familiar, Dr Luz, flashes up the rescue contract. Mackenzie Metals. Memories flock to him – huddling afraid and alone at Hypatia Station while his family fell, slipping home to the pack feeling a knife in every shadow, hiding among the bodies of the wolves, hating himself for surviving.
Wagner signs the contract, flashes it to the Palace of Eternal Light for executive authority. There is memory and there is survival. He works for the Suns now. They tried to kill him, when he lifted the corner of their intrigue to set Mackenzies and Cortas at each other. The Magdalena wolves of Queen of the South saved him that time. When the House of Corta fell, the Meridian pack sheltered him, paid his Four Elementals, until he realised that with Corta Hélio destroyed the Suns no longer held any animosity towards him. Wagner applied for a glass crew and got a contract the next day. He has worked Taiyang for over a year. He is the good wolf.
They find the first body twenty kilometres west of Schmidt crater. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball flick up their safety bars and drop to the regolith. The rover’s medical AI searches for vital signs but, to the glassers, it’s clear there is no life inside the suit. The tight weave has been opened throat to balls.
‘Clean edges,’ Zehra Aslan says.
Wagner crouches to study the slash. Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill, none of them clean. A blade did this. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball leaves a tag for a Zabbaleen recycle team: carbon is precious, even abandoned in the boulder fields of West Tranquillity. Emergency beacons lead the rover along a string of corpses. By the tenth the crew no longer leave the rover. Wagner and Zehra photograph, report tag, move on. Stabbed, slashed, amputations. Beheadings. Death by a blade’s edge.
Zehra crouches to closer examine a tangle of four bodies.
‘I don’t recognise this suit design.’
‘Mackenzie Helium,’ Wagner says. He stands up, surveys the close horizon. ‘Tracks.’
‘Three rovers, and something much bigger.’
‘A helium extractor.’
In the shadow of the western wall of Schmidt crater, Wagner finds a rover. Its spine is broken, its axles snapped. Wheels lie at crazy angles, aerials and comms dishes bent and crushed. Every seat bar is up. The crew tried to escape their stricken vehicle. They didn’t make it. Sasuited bodies litter the crater floor. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball investigates the corpses. Wagner plugs Dr Luz into the dead rover’s AI and reads its logs, voice and data records. He needs to patch together the events that ended here, in the cold shadow of Schmidt.
Zehra Aslan stands up and waves.
‘We’ve got a live one here!’
Barely. A sole survivor in a ring of bodies. A golden sasuit. Wagner has heard of this suit. Half of Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball has heard of this suit. Wagner’s medical AI identifies a score of traumas, a dozen violations. Crush and heavy impact injuries, multiple lesions and abrasions, a deep puncture wound between the seventh and eight ribs. The golden suit has healed over the puncture; the tension of the weave will hold the wound shut.
What do you think? Zehra asks on Wagner’s private channel. Call in a moonship?
We’re forty minutes from Hypatia, Wagner says. We’d be there before any moonship. They’ve got full medical facilities.
The survivor’s sasuit is low on power and O2. How long has he been out here, waiting? Hoping? Wagner has often thought, out in the tedium of the pristine black glass, of what he would do if Lady Luna deserted him and left him wounded on the surface, air running down, power too low even to call for help. The long look at death, advancing with every breath one step across the dead regolith. Nothing surer, nothing more true. Open the helmet. Look Lady Luna in the face. Take the dark kiss. Would he have the courage to do that?
Wagner runs a jack into the golden suit.
‘We’re going to move you now.’
The man is unconscious, verging on comatose but Wagner needs to speak.
‘This may hurt.’
Wagner’s crew lift the survivor and strap him to the carry rack. Zehra runs lines from the air and water processors into the suit.
‘His core temperature is way too low,’ she says, scanning readouts on her helmet. She patches a connector to the environment pack. ‘I’m going to cycle his suit with warm water. I’m shit scared I’m going to drown him in his own suit but if I don’t the hypothermia will kill him.’
‘Do it. Willard, get Hypatia. We have a casualty incoming.’
The man stirs. A groan in Wagner’s helmet speakers. Wagner presses hands to his chest.
‘Don’t move.’
Wagner winces at the sudden cry of pain in his earphones.
‘Fuck…’ An Australian accent. ‘Fuck,’ he says again, in deep bliss as the heat bathes him.
‘We’re taking you to Hypatia,’ Wagner says.
‘My crew…’
‘Don’t talk.’
‘They jumped us. They had it all planned. Fucking Bryce knew we were coming. We ran straight on to his blades.’
‘I said don’t talk.’
‘My name’s Denny Mackenzie,’ the survivor says.
‘I know,’ Wagner says. Wagner knows the legend of the man in the golden suit. In the dark time, when the light of the Earth is dim, Wagner has tried to imagine Carlinhos’s final vision: the face of Denny Mackenzie holding his head up by the hair, baring his throat, lifting the knife to show Carlinhos the thing that will kill him. He’s always been as faceless as he is now, behind the reflective faceplate. And I am as faceless to you. ‘You killed my brother.’
Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball’s chat on the common channel is silenced as if with a knife. Wagner feels every faceplate turned to him.
‘Who are you?’ Stabbed and pierced, hypothermia, exhausted and reeling from industrial painkillers, at the mercy of the man with every reason on the moon to kill him. Still defiant. The Mackenzie Way.
‘My name is Wagner Corta.’
‘Let me see you,’ Denny Mackenzie says.
Wagner retracts his sun visor. Denny Mackenzie clears his faceplate.
‘You killed my brother with his own knife. You drove him to his knees and tore his throat open. You watched him bleed out, then you stripped him and ran a cable through his Achilles’ tendons and hung him from the West 7 crosswalk.’
Denny Mackenzie does not flinch, does not look away.
‘So what are you going to do, Wagner Corta?’
‘We’re not like you people, Denny Mackenzie.’ Wagner silently gives the order for Glass Crew Lucky Eight-Ball to strap in and move out. Seat bars fold down, sasuits link to the rover’s life support.
‘My people owe you,’ Denny Mackenzie croaks as the safety bars descend around Wagner Corta.
‘I want nothing from your family,’ Wagner Corta says. He flicks control of the rover to Zehra.
‘Doesn’t matter, Wagner Corta.’ Denny Mackenzie groans as the rover jolts over battle debris. ‘The Mackenzies will repay three times.’
* * *
‘Marina!’
No answer.
‘Marina!’
No answer. Ariel Corta swears under her breath and reaches for the grab-rope. She pulls herself up from the empty cool box.
‘We’re out of gin!’
Ariel grabs the ceiling net and swings from the kitchen alcove past her shameful hammock to the consulting cubby. Three short swings and a much-practised drop at the end into what she calls her Justice Seat. The apartment is too small for two women and a wheelchair. It’s been a lune since she last deprinted the wheelchair and left the occupancy at just two women. She needed the carbon allowance. She’s since drunk ninety per cent of it.
‘Let’s see me, Beijaflor.’
Her familiar hooks into the cubby camera. Ariel studies her working face. Cheekbones highlighted with gradated powder. Orange eyeliner, black mascara. Her eyes widen, Beijaflor zooms in. This new crease, where did that come from? She hisses in exasperation. Beijaflor can edit it out for clients. Your familiar is your true face. She pouts her lips. Fuchsia, deep Cupid’s Bow. If Ariel can afford one thing on trend it’s cosmetics. And her top: Norma Kamali, bat wing and funnel-neck, in carmine. Still in the game.
The upper half of Ariel Corta is professional. The bottom, out of camera shot, is slouch. From the waist down Ariel is a disgrace, swinging around the place in whatever pair of basic-print leggings Marina isn’t wearing. She always steals, never asks to borrow. That would be surrender. She could manage her caseload as easily from her hammock as the Justice Seat but that too would be surrender.
‘Beijaflor, get Marina to get some gin.’ There’s a good little printer down on Level 87. She takes folding, material cash.
You have only ten bitsies of data.
Ariel swears. She’ll need every bit of bandwidth for her clients. Now that she can’t have it, breakfast gin is the roof and the ground, the Earth and the sun, the background hum of the universe. She takes a drag on her long titanium vaper. It supplies nothing but hauteur and oral satisfaction. Ariel checks her hair. It’s fashionably big.
‘Let’s have the first one.’
The Fuentes Nikah. Beijaflor calls Aston Fuentes up on Ariel’s lens and she quickly runs down the twenty-seven clauses in the contract with the potential to turn around and rip her client’s heart out of his chest. His mouth opens a little more with every legal point.
‘You’re gaping, Aston.’
Client two. The Wong divorce. The only way he can get custody is by having his daughter file a separate petition effectively divorcing her co-father – failure to thrive or to provide an optimal domestic environment are the obvious paths, though the easiest for Lily to argue would be personal disgust at remaining with Marco in a parental role. Ariel recommends going deep and dirty – there will be something, everyone has something. Even if she succeeded, it would be the girl’s decision to contract parenting to Brett. And it would effectively destroy Marco’s name and reputation – for which he could seek legal redress. So what Brett has to ask himself is: Is the price worth paying?
The Red Lion amory. By now the image of gin is as precious as the rare rains that sweep the dust from the air of Orion Quadra. No no no no no, darling. Ariel will always advise against partnering into an amory with too heavy a contract.
‘Amory’s are light, open, flitting and fleeting things, darling. You don’t crush them beneath heavy nikahs. Send me the contract, I’ll take it apart and put…’
And gone.
We’re out of data, Beijaflor says.
‘Fuck!’ Ariel Corta swears. She smashes a fist edge-on against the white wall. ‘I fucking hate this. How can I get any fucking work done? I can’t even talk to my clients. Marina! Marina! Get me some connectivity. I’ve ascended into the fucking proles.’
She hears movement outside the street door.
‘Marina?’
Marina has warned Ariel time and again not to leave the door open. She’s not safe. Anyone could walk in. That’s the idea, darling. Law is always open. To which Marina answers: Who carried you up here on her shoulders? You may never be safe.
Movement in the lobby space.
‘Marina?
Ariel pushes herself up from the Justice Seat and hooks her fingers into the netting that lines the ceiling of the tiny apartment. She swings herself out into the main room.
A figure turns.
* * *
She first feels a fist, and then a kick.
She’s up in a cross-tube, one of the forgotten access tunnels that run through the bare rock connecting one quadra to another. They’re old, dusty, scary with radiation. Behind her is midnight in Antares Quadra, before her is morning in Orion. She’s got a belt of old dirty printed money from clients, some curry noodle and moon-cakes for the festival and she’s on her way home to Ariel.
The cross-tubes are long and shadow-filled. The moon abandons its obsolete infrastructure. Kids, rebels and up-and-outs all find their own uses for it.
They were waiting. They were practised, they knew her routines and what she was carrying. She never saw them. Of course she never saw them. If she had seen them, they would never have hit her. The first took her in the middle of her back. A fist, from the dark, into a kidney that knocked breath and thought from her and sent her crashing to the mesh.
Then the kick. She sees it through the red pain and scrambles away. The shoulder, not the head.
‘Hetty,’ she gasps. But she is alone. She has shut down her familiar to donate her data to Ariel for her consultations.
The boot again raised over the side of her head. She reaches for it, tries to push it back before it crushes her skull against the titanium mesh. The boot comes down on her hand. Marina screams.
‘Got it got it,’ a voice yells. A knife nicks her money belt.
‘I want to kill her.’
‘Leave her.’
Marina gasps, bleeding. Boot heels on the walkway. She can’t make out if they are women or men. She can’t stop them. She can’t touch them. They take her money, her curry noodle and her moon-cakes.
She couldn’t touch them. That makes her scared beneath the blood, the beating, agonised kidney, the cracked ribs, the black fingers. Once she threw Mackenzie Metal dusters around the lock of Beikou habitat like toys. Two muggers up in a cross-tube at midnight, and she couldn’t touch them.
* * *
‘I’d offer you gin but we’re out of gin. I’d make you tea but I don’t do making and I’m in the only chair,’ Ariel Corta says. ‘Sorry. There are hammocks, or you can perch.’
‘I’ll perch,’ says Vidhya Rao. E positions erself on the edge of Ariel’s desk. E has put on weight since Ariel saw er last, in the faded decor of the Lunarian Society. E is a bulb of a human; waddling and ungainly, swathed in layers of fabric. E has jowls, bags under the eyes.
‘I’m sorry to find you in reduced circumstances,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘I’m happy simply to find myself breathing,’ Ariel says. ‘You still work for Whitacre Goddard?’
‘Consulting,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘I have a portfolio of clients. And I still dip my fingers in the markets, see what I can stir up. I’ve been following your recent cases. I can understand why you practise matrimonial law. There is no end to the entertainment.’
‘That entertainment is people’s hopes and hearts and happinesses,’ Ariel says. Gin. She wants a bloody gin. Where is her gin, where is Marina? Ariel twists a capsule into her vaper and flicks a fingernail against the tip. The element glows, she inhales a cloud of customised tranquillity. Calm floods her lungs. Almost gin.
‘Your reputation still precedes you,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘I have state of the art pattern recognition software but in all honesty, I didn’t need it to find you. For a woman in hiding, you show a distinctive flair. Most theatrical.’
‘I never met a lawyer who wasn’t a frustrated actor,’ Ariel says. ‘Courts and stages: it’s all performance. I remember you saying, when I was a member of your little political glee club, that your software had identified me as a mover and shaker.’ She gestures with her vaper, a curl of smoke taking in the whole three and a half rooms of her empire. ‘The moon remains unshaken. Sorry to disappoint your August Ones.’
‘And yet it shook,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘We live among the aftershocks.’
‘You can hardly connect me with what happened at Crucible.’
‘But there are patterns,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The hardest ones to spot are the ones so large they seem like a landscape.’
‘I can’t say I was overly upset when Bob Mackenzie took the thousand degree shower,’ Ariel says with a flourish of vapour. ‘Living under a million tons of molten metal is tempting, if not Providence, certainly something with a sense of irony. Oh, don’t look at me like that.’
‘Your nephew was there,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘Well he’s obviously all right, otherwise you wouldn’t have said that. Patterns. Which nephew?’
‘Robson.’
‘Robson. Gods.’ She hasn’t thought about her nephew since the word distilled through old legal contacts that the boy had been made a ward of the Mackenzies. Lucasinho, Luna, any of the kids, the survivors. She hasn’t thought about Wagner the wolf, or Lucas, whether he is alive or dead. She hasn’t thought about anything but herself, her life, her survival. Ariel inhales sharply to mask the tic of loss and guilt. ‘Do the Mackenzies still hold the parenting contract?’
‘He is a ward of Bryce Mackenzie.’
‘I should get him out of it.’ Ariel taps her fingers together. You could always tell a Mackenzie contract. Sloppy work.
‘More important, since Ironfall, the terrestrial commodity markets are in turmoil,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Helium-3 and rare-earth prices hit an all-time record yesterday and will set a new one today. The G10 and G27 groups are calling for action to stabilise prices and production.’
‘In vacuum no one can hear you shout,’ Ariel says.
‘Moon and Earth are bound by more than gravity,’ Vidhya Rao says. Ariel exhales a long plume of vapour.
‘Why have you come here, Vidhya?’
‘To bring you an invitation.’
‘If it’s the festival, I’d sooner stick needles in my eyes. If it’s politics; Cortas don’t do politics.’
‘It’s an invitation to cocktails. The Crystaline, Mohalu, thirteen hundred Orion Quadra Time.’
‘The Crystaline. I’ll need a dress,’ Ariel says. ‘A proper cocktail dress. And accessories.’
‘Of course.’
Beijaflor whispers, Credit transfer. It’s enough for the dress and the accessories, for a new wheelchair, a moto. Gin. Beautiful beautiful gin. Before any of those: data. Beijaflor reconnects to the network. The sensation of world, the inrush of information, message, chat, gossip, news at the same time as her curiosity rushes out like a child into morning light, is powerfully sensual.
‘Beijaflor, get me Marina,’ Ariel commands. Already Beijaflor is opening catalogues and pattern books. ‘I need her to pick an order up from the printers.’
‘You can afford to get them delivered,’ Vidhya Rao says from the door. ‘Aren’t you curious about whom you’re meeting?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll stroll it.’
‘The Eagle of the Moon.’
* * *
Marina stumbles through a kilometre of cross-tube to Orion Quadra. She hits the call button for the service elevator and cries aloud at the blaze of pain through her bruised, blackened fingers. As she rides the elevator cage down from the top of the city she remembers all the people she saw die on the moon, how sudden and arbitrary their deaths. Head caved in by an aluminium beam in the training bay. The edge of a knife pulled out through a throat. Impaled through the skull by the silver spear of a vaper. She never stops seeing that death. She never stops seeing that man’s eyes change from living to dead. She never stops seeing the moment he realises that this fraction of a second is all he has remaining of life. Edouard Barosso. He crippled Ariel, would have killed her if Marina had not seized the only weapon to hand and stabbed it up through the softness of his jaw, out through the top of his soft, moon-born skull.
How easily she could have joined that roster of the dead, up there in the cross-tunnel. They hurt her. They wanted to kill her. They should not have been able to hurt her. Two third-gen punks should not have been able even to touch her.
She swears as she wrenches open the gate with her black, rigid fingers, slumps against the safety grilles. Every breath is a slow, deep knife. She reels out on to West 17th, staggers across traffic to seize the balustrade. The chasms of Orion Quadra open before her. She hauls herself along the edge of the drop, stanchion by stanchion. The clinic is a kilometre north on the vast cylinder where the five wings of Orion Quadra meet. Stanchion by stanchion she hauls herself to help. It takes her ten minutes to make a hundred metres.
Almost, she whispers the command to reboot Hetty. Call for help. Call Ariel. Ariel can help. That’s what everyone up in the Bairro Alto says. She can’t. She failed. She let them take Ariel’s money. How can she claim to protect Ariel when she can’t even protect her money? Since that day Corta Hélio fell in fire and blood and she climbed up to the roof of the world, hand over hand, rung over rung, Ariel Corta on her shoulders, she has kept her safe against enemies many, harsh and patient.
Hand over hand, Marina hauls herself along the railing.
Call her. Don’t compound idiocy with pride.
Hetty boots up. There are three messages. Two about gin, one to inform that their data credit limit has been exceeded. Marina Calzaghe smashes her wounded fist on the handrail. The pain is intense, justified and purifying.
It isn’t that they beat her that scares her. It’s how they were able to beat her.
The moto swings in and unfolds.
‘You work with Ariel, don’t you?’ The fare is a middle-aged man, hair and skin greyed by years of slow radiation.
Marina manages a nod.
‘Get in. Gods you look like shit.’
He helps her to the clinic door.
‘I used to work for Corta Hélio,’ the man says. ‘I was a duster, then.’ Then he adds in Portuguese, ‘Piss on Bryce Mackenzie’s contracts.’
* * *
‘Of course Ariel’s credit is good.’ Dr Macaraeg’s clinic on Orion Hub 17th is glossy and well-equipped. Gleaming bots, shiny clients. Real flowers on the reception desk, where Marina leaves blood smears on the white plastic. Dr Macaraeg is the former medic of Boa Vista, personal physician of Adriana Corta. She tended Ariel in João de Deus med centre, after Edouard Barosso severed her spinal column with a knife grown from his own bones. She huddled with the family in the over-crowded, fetid refuge when Boa Vista was destroyed; she tended to the survivors, the last thing she could do for the Cortas. She came to Meridian and set up her high-end practice on Orion Hub, close to the centres of society and power. Dr Macaraeg remembers honour and loyalty, family and duty. ‘Just not good enough for a patch up and a scan.’
Dr Macaraeg is not a charity.
‘I’ll take the scan,’ Marina says.
‘I would advise…’ Dr Macaraeg begins but Marina cuts in.
‘The scan.’
The scanner is cheap and perfunctory; two sensors that snap-fit to universal arms, but sufficient for the task. Marina stands on the footprints and the bot moves its arms over her, intimately mapping every centimetre of her body. She doesn’t even need to take her clothes off.
‘How long?’
‘One, maybe one and a half lunes.’
Hand over hand, rung over rung, Marina had borne up Ariel Corta into the roof of the world, to Bairro Alto where the up-and-outs go; the poor, the out-of-contract, the refugees, the sick and the ones whose lungs are turning to stone after thousands of dust-filled breaths. The hunted. Up the ladders and the staircases, to the cubicles and cells and caves pushed into the gaps between the old environment plants and power units, lighting grids and water tanks. Marina knew this world. Six weeks on the moon, scarcely able to walk straight, a cancelled contract had sent her up to Bairro Alto. Selling piss. Breathing short so some air-buyer, down there, could breathe long. She never thought she would return. But she knew it and knew how to survive it. And she knew that Ariel Corta did not know it, and that her ignorance would kill her quicker than any Mackenzie blade. She found the cubby, scavenged hammocks and the ceiling netting, and, as she gathered in the bitsies, the paraphernalia of a life with some comfort. Reliable data. A reliable print shop with an idea of fashion. Cosmetics. A refrigerator and gin to put in it. As Marina wove a life for Ariel, she forgot her own. She forgot her own body. She forgot what the moon was doing to it; leaching the calcium from her bones, the strength from her muscles, sucking away the Jo Moonbeam strength that allowed her to throw those Mackenzie dusters around the lock at Beikou like rags, until a couple of skinny punks could smash her to the ground, rob her, beat her to nothing.
Marina pulls the scanner display panel to her.
‘It’s not going to contradict me,’ Dr Macaraeg says. It doesn’t, but Marina has to see the numbers that tell her Moonday is coming, and soon. The day when she will have to decide whether to go back to Earth, or remain on the moon permanently. One, maybe one and a half lunes. Thirty, forty-five days. Days.
‘Don’t tell Ariel.’
‘I won’t.’
This she must tell Ariel face to face. Tell her that Moonday is rising. Tell her that she hates the moon, has always hated the moon, hates what it makes people, hates the fear and the danger and the smell of dust that gets into everything, every blink and breath, the smell of death. That she aches for open skies, horizons, free air in her lungs, free rain on her cheeks. Tell Ariel that the only reason she stays, serves Ariel, protects Ariel, cares for Ariel, is because Marina can’t abandon her.
Then tell her nothing.
‘Thank you doctor.’
Dr Macaraeg presses fingers into her bruised ribs, forcing her by pain down on to the examination trolley.
‘Sit there and keep still. Let’s get you fixed up.’
* * *
It is the night of Zhongqiu in Meridian. Aquarius Quadra is decked in red and gold; fork-tailed banners, prayer flags and cascades of lamps tumble from levels and galleries and bridges, and every staircase and ramp twinkles with lights. Enormous festival lanterns waddle up toward the darkened sunline. Flocks of helium-filled Jade Rabbits skip through the middle air, dodging flotillas of red balloons that have escaped from children’s hands. There is a flying drone-dragon, undulating between the bridges and cable ways. Here biolights gleam through the trees and glimmer from the cafés and tea booths and Mooncake kiosks that line Tereshkova Prospekt. Look: cocktail stalls! Listen: a dozen musics competing with jugglers and street magicians and bubble blowers! On the moon, bubbles reach titanic dimensions. Parents tell their children that bubbles can trap naughty kids and carry them up to Bairro Alto: a venerable lie. There is face painting. There is always face painting. I’m going to turn you into a tiger, the face painter says lifting her brush. What’s a tiger? the children ask.
Everyone in Aquarius Quadra has turned out in fresh printed party clothes. Streets, levels, walkways are thronged. Kids run from stall to stall, unable to choose between the wonders on offer. Teenagers and young adults move in groups, disdainful of the populism of it all. They all secretly love Mooncake festival. Some have worked it in each of Meridian’s three quadras. Zhongqiu is the festival to hook up with the someone you’ve been lusting for all year but never had the nerve to approach. There! Did you see that? Those girls, those guys – Were they guys? Were they girls? – running and laughing through the crowds in nothing but body paint. Ten Lady Lunas, one half alive and black, the other bone and white. Zhongqiu is a time for skin and sass.
Zhongqiu rightly belongs to Chang’e, Goddess of the Moon but Lady Luna – usurper, pretender, thief – stole it. On this night Our Lady of Love and Death permits other, lesser saints and orixas, gods and heroes, to share her honours. A hundred perfumes and incenses spiral up to her. Yemanja and Ogun accept flowers cakes and gin. Street shrines to Our Lady of Kazan glow with a hundred luminescent votives. A trillion in paper money will go into the shredders tonight.
And Mooncake! Mooncake. Round and fluted, stamped with mottoes or adinkra, shaped like rabbits and hares and unicorns and little ponies, cows and rockets. Everybody buys it. No one eats it. It’s so rich. Too dense. Too sweet. I just look at it and my teeth ache.
The helmet bears a crest on its brow, just above the plate: a face half-living, half-bone. Not a woman’s face, not the face of Lady Luna; an animal face; the mask of a wolf. Half wolf. Half wolf skull. The helmet is strapped to the back of a suitpack, the suitpack is slung over the shoulder of Wagner Corta. Through Mooncakes and music, saints and sex, he’s coming home. Bone tired but elated, pulled in every direction by the sights, the sounds, the smells, the spirits, as if by fine hooks in his skin.
He moves through the festival like the wolf in his heart, working his way upward by ramp and staircase and escalator. He feels light, lighted, enlightened. His heightened senses pick up a dozen conversations, touch a hundred moments. I love this tune. Try this, go on just a bite. A startled kiss. A bulge-eyed sudden vomit: too much Mooncake. Touch me while I’m dancing. Can I have a balloon? Where are you? His peripheral vision catches on a familiar, one familiar among the host of digital assistants, then five, ten, a dozen others moving through the crowd toward him. Wagner breaks into a run. His pack has come to meet him.
Amal, leader of the Meridian pack, launches nerself into Wagner, wrestles him, tousles his hair, bites his lower lip in the ritual assertion of pack authority.
‘You you you.’
Né lifts him, sasuit and helmet and all and swings him round and by then the rest of the pack has gathered in kisses and embraces and small, affectionate bites. Hands ruffle his hair, play-punch his belly.
The cold death of West Tranquillity, the plain strewn with sasuits, the horror that left him numb; all are burned away in the intensity of the pack kiss.
Amal looks Wagner up and down.
‘You look like death, Lobinho.’
‘Buy me a drink for gods’ sake,’ Wagner says.
‘Not yet. You’re needed at Sömmering.’
‘What’s at Sömmering?’
‘A special delivery for you, Little Wolf, from Hoang Lam Hung-Mackenzie. And because it’s the Mackenzies, we’re going with you.’
* * *
Early, before the other wolves wake, Wagner disentangles himself from the sleeping pack. He shakes the dream out of his head. Shared dreams are heavy, adhesive, haunting. It was an effort to unplug himself from pack sleep. Clothes. Remember clothes.
The pile of blankets on the lounger where he put the boy to sleep is empty. The space where Robson slept has a distinct, alien smell. Honey and ozone; sweat and sleep-drool. Greasy hair and skin spots. Over-worn clothes, under-washed skin. Foot fungus and arm-pit. Back-of-ear bacteria. Teenage boys are rank.
‘Robson?’
You all sleep together? Zhongqiu was ebbing in crushed lanterns and spilt vodka and trampled Mooncake when the pack returned to Meridian. Wolves, people whispered, moving out of the path of the tight, purposeful guard of dark-faced people, a boy in a pale suit, sleeves rolled up, at the centre. Robson was dead on his feet but he doggedly, thoroughly, explored the packhouse. Wagner understood what the boy was doing: embodying the territory. Learning the wolf-world.
I’ll make you something up, Wagner had said. On the lounger. We don’t really have separate beds.
What’s it like, all sleeping together?
We share dreams, Wagner said.
He finds Robson in the food area, hunched on a high stool at a serving bar, sheets draped around him. He cuts a deck of cards – a half deck, Wagner notes, sharp-eyed – one handed, dexterously, lifting the top of the pack, swivelling out the lower cards, swapping them over, closing the pack; again and again.
‘Robson, you okay?’
‘I didn’t sleep that good.’ He doesn’t look up from his compulsive card-cutting.
‘I’m sorry, we’ll try and print you up a bed.’ Wagner speaks Portuguese. He hopes the old tongue will be sweet and comforting to Robson.
‘The lounger was fine.’ Robson answers in Globo.
‘Can I get you something? Juice?’
Robson taps a glass of tea on his small table.
‘Let me know if you need anything.’
‘I will, sure.’ Still Globo.
‘There’ll be people moving around here soon.’
‘I won’t get in their way.’
‘You might want to think about putting something on.’
‘Will they?’ The cards divide and flip.
‘Well, if you do need anything…’
Robson looks up as Wagner turns away. Peripheral vision catches the flicker of eyes.
‘Can I print some clothes out?’
‘Sure.’
‘Wagner.’
‘What is it?’
‘Do you guys do everything together?’
‘We like to be with each other. Why?’
‘Could you take me out for breakfast? Just us?’
* * *
Twenty days on the glass never left Wagner Corta as exhausted as three days of Robson Mackenzie. How can thirteen-year-old boys demand so much time and energy? Nutrition: the kid never stops eating. He is a perfect mass-energy conversion machine. The things he will and won’t eat; and where he will or will not eat them. Wagner hasn’t been to the same hot-shop twice.
Respiration. The adoption contract with the Mackenzies guarantees the boy’s Four Elementals. Bryce Mackenzie is not beyond spiteful breach of contract. It’s an hour’s work for the pack, in full gestalt mode, to discreetly link Robson’s chib to a secondary account through a network of nested false companies. Breathe easy, Robson.
Education: the contracts are far from simple. Is it to be individual tuition or a colloquium group? Specialism or generalism?
Masturbation: finding a private place in the house of wolves to do it. That’s if he’s doing it at all. Wagner’s sure he wasn’t doing it at that age. Then there’s the whole question of where the kid stands on the spectrum: what he likes, who he likes, who he likes more than others he likes, if he likes anyone at all.
Financialisation: gods but the boy is expensive. Everything about thirteen-year-olds costs.
Isolation: the boy is sweet and serious and funny and cracks Wagner’s heart a dozen times a day but every moment spent with him is one spent away from the pack. It’s different for wolves; the need to be together is physical, burned into the bones by blue Earthlight. Wagner feels the ache of separation every moment he’s with Robson and he knows his pack mates feel the disruption. He’s seen the looks, felt the shift in the emotional climate. Robson’s sensed it too.
‘I don’t think Amal likes me.’
They’re lunching at Eleventh Gate. Robson wears short white shorts, neat creases; a sleeveless cropped white T-shirt with the word WHAM! printed large. White-framed Wayfarers. Wagner is in double denim. Some packs only wear their own style; invariably Gothic. Meridian is always on-trend.
Eleventh Gate is a noisy wun sen noodle bar. It’s quiet in the lull after Zhongqiu but Wagner is wary. Wolf-senses on the diners and tea-drinkers. Of all the issues Robson brought with him from Sömmering, security is the greatest.
‘You make ner feel uncomfortable.’ You make a lot of us feel uncomfortable.
‘What do I do?’
‘It’s not what you do, it’s what you can’t do. Ekata.’
‘I’ve heard that word.’ They speak in Portuguese now. Ekata is a wolf word, taken from Punjabi and made their own.
‘I can’t really translate it. It means the togetherness. Christians would say the fellowship, Muslims the ummah I think, but it’s much more intense than that. Oneness, unity. More than that. You open your eyes and I see through them. We understand without understanding … I’m a wolf; I’m not sure I can explain it to anyone who isn’t.’
‘I love the way you say that. “I’m a wolf”’.
‘I am. It took me a long time to own it. I was your age when I realised what all those mood swings and personality shifts and the rages meant. I couldn’t sleep, I was violent, I was hyperactive and then at other times – the dark times – I wouldn’t speak to anyone for days. I thought I was sick. I thought I was dying. The doctor gave me meds. My madrinha knew what it was.’
‘Bipolar disorder.’
‘It’s not a disorder,’ Wagner says, then realises he has spoken too quickly, too sharply. ‘It doesn’t have to be a disorder. You can push it down with meds or you can push it in another direction altogether. You can make it into something more. What the wolves have done is given a social frame to it, a culture that accepts and supports it. Nourishes it.’
‘Wolves.’
‘We’re not really wolves. We don’t physically change at the turn of the Earth. Well, the brain chemistry does. We take meds that change our brain chemistry. Werewolves is a rich and emotionally fulfilling framing narrative for the fact that we cycle from one psychological state to another. Reverse werewolves. Werewolves inverted. Howling by the light of the Earth. Though photosensitivity isn’t unknown in bipolar people. So the light might have something to do with it. Listen to me, I’m probably talking really fast and staccato?’
‘You are.’
‘That’s the light aspect. I take a lot of meds, Robson. We all do. Madrinha Flavia knew what I was and she put me in touch with the packs, back when she was still at Boa Vista. They helped me, they showed me what I could do. They never put any pressure on me. It had to be my decision. It is a rich life. It’s a tough life, becoming someone else every fifteen days.’
Robson sits upright, startled. Noodles and prawns fall from his chopsticks. ‘Every fifteen days. I never knew…’
‘It takes a toll. At Boa Vista, you only ever saw one me; dark-me, and you all thought that was Wagner Corta. There is no Wagner Corta; there’s the wolf and his shadow.’
‘I never saw you much at Boa Vista,’ Robson says.
‘There were other reasons,’ Wagner says and Robson understands that those questions are for another time.
The boy asks, ‘Wagner, when you stop being the wolf. When you turn in to the shadow. What happens to me?’
‘The pack breaks up. We go to our shadow lives and shadow loves. But the pack never ends. We look out for each other. I’m a wolf, but I’m still a Corta. You’re a Corta. I’ll be there.’
Robson pokes with his chopsticks in his bowl.
‘Wagner, do you think I could see my friends from Queen?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Okay.’ Another Wayfarer glance. ‘Wagner, I should tell you, I tried to find my traceur équipe.’
‘I know. Robson…’
‘Be careful on the network. I couldn’t find them. I’m scared for them. Bob Mackenzie said he wouldn’t hurt them…’
‘But Bob Mackenzie’s dead.’
‘Yes. Bob Mackenzie’s dead.’ Robson looks around him. ‘I like this place. I’d like to come here regularly.’ It’s a rite of adulthood, finding a customary hot-shop. ‘Would that be okay?’
‘It would.’
‘Wagner, I take up a lot of your time. I take you away from them. Is that a problem?’
‘It’s a tension.’
‘Wagner, do you think I can learn Ekata?’
* * *
The moto leaves the two women in the door of the Crystaline. Marina slaps a button and the wheelchair unfolds. Ariel swings herself into it. Staff turn and stare, unsure what to do, how they should serve. They are young, they have never seen a wheelchair.
‘I can push you,’ Marina says.
‘I push myself,’ Ariel says.
Ariel rolls across the polished sinter floor of the bar and in booths and at tables heads turn. She’s back; look at her, I thought she was dead. Marina maintains a steady, dignified pace two steps ahead, clearing people from her path but Ariel sees the limps and winces of concealed hurt. Dr Macaraeg had strapped, patched, bound, anaesthetised the grosser wounds; Ariel covered the rest with fabric and make-up.
‘Thank gods they left your face,’ Ariel said. Marina grimaced as Ariel pulled the lace glove over the swollen fingers. ‘You’re going to lose a couple of nails. I’ll print you some new ones.’
‘I’ll grow some new ones.’
‘How long have we been together and you’re still so terrestrial?’ Ariel had felt a reaction in the hand she held, one not caused by any physical damage. ‘There.’ Now a final blend of the eye-liners, a last back-comb to big up the hair. Cocktail ready.
The Eagle of the Moon waits in the private room beyond the private room. The table is set among dripping stalagmites and stalactites, the whole a trickling, gurgling water park. Ariel finds it rather crass. The water smells fresh and pure. She inhales deep.
‘Darling, if discretion is paramount, don’t parade me the whole length of the Crystaline.’
The Eagle of the Moon booms with laughter. Drinks await: water for him, a dewed Martini for her.
‘Ariel.’ He stoops and takes both her hands in his. ‘You look wonderful.’
‘I look like shit, Jonathon. But my upper body strength is truly formidable.’ Ariel places her elbow on the table, forearm upright, the classic arm-wrestler’s challenge. ‘I could take you, and probably everyone else in this bar except her.’ She nods her big hair to Marina. ‘Adrian not with you today?’
‘I didn’t tell him where I was going.’
‘Conspiracies, Jonathon? How delicious. It won’t do any good. Word will have made it round to Farside by now. And Adrian always was such a diligent Mackenzie.’
‘He has more pressing concerns right now,’ the Eagle says.
‘And whose side is he on, his father’s or his uncle’s?’
‘His own. As ever.’
‘Eminently reasonable. And where does the Eagle of the Moon stand on the Mackenzie civil war?’
‘The Eagle of the Moon stands for free contracts, economic growth, responsible citizenship and uninterrupted rental revenue flows,’ Jonathon Kayode says, at the same time touching a finger to his right eye; the signal that this conversation will now be conducted without familiars. Pixels swirl and fizz in lenses. Bare. The Eagle of the Moon inclines his head the barest nod to Marina.
When Marina has closed the door to the softly lit, trickling stalactite room Ariel says, ‘Do you know what I enjoy most about my work? The gossip. I hear the board of the LDC isn’t happy with you, Jonathon.’
‘The Board of the LDC want me gone,’ the Eagle of the Moon says. ‘I’ve been lucky that they’re too mistrustful of each other’s candidates to table a no-confidence motion. Earth is flexing its muscles. It has been since the collapse of Corta Hélio.’
‘Collapse,’ Ariel says. ‘That’s my family, Jonathon.’
‘You once told me the Cortas kept the lights burning up there. Earth fears power shortages, dark cities. The price of domestic electricity has trebled. I was at Crucible, Ariel. I watched it burn. Duncan and Bryce are at each other’s throats. They are hiring mercenaries from as far away as Earth. Blades battle on the Prospekts of Meridian. Commodity prices are soaring. Industries are closing. The old Earth looks up at the moon and it sees a world falling apart. It sees an Eagle who cannot fulfil his contract.’
Ariel takes a sip from her Martini. The Eagle knows her too well. It is perfect: cold, astringent, fabulous.
‘Jonathon, if the LDC really wanted rid of you, they’d have bought up your bodyguards and gutted you in your sleep.’
‘As you enjoy my protection, so I enjoy the protection of the Dragons. None of them wants to see an LDC stooge take over from me. The Suns fear another attempt by the People’s Republic to seize control. Moscow will never admit anything, but the Vorontsovs have been regularly uncovering its agents and sending them out of the lock. The Asamoahs have no love for me but less much less love for Moscow and Beijing. The Mackenzies are wrapped up in their little war but the winner will side with whoever offers Mackenzie Metals the most freedom to wheel and deal.’
‘And the Cortas?’
‘Have no power, no wealth. No status to defend, no family to protect. Nothing to hold, nothing to fear. Which is why I want to hire you as my legal counsel.’
Can the Eagle detect the minute tremor of shock that runs across the meniscus of her thirteen-botanical gin?
‘I do marriage contracts. I take human passion and human lust and human stupidity and give them as many escape routes as possible.’
‘You can have it all back, Ariel. Everything you lost, everything you had taken from you.’ He inclines his head to the wheelchair.
‘Not everything, Jonathon. Some things are not in your gift.’ But Ariel sets the glass down before the shivering gin betrays her. She never believed in her mother’s personal style of umbanda – never believed in belief. She was thirteen when Adriana brought her to the new palace at Boa Vista. She had stepped from the tram station and been almost overwhelmed by the size, the light, the perspectives. She smelled rock, new humus, green growth, fresh water. She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the sky-glare, squinted, tried to focus on objects more than a few dozen metres distant. João de Deus had been close and cramped. This was endless. Then the faces of the orixas came into view, each a hundred metres tall, shaped from the stuff of Boa Vista and she knew she could never believe. One should never meet gods eye to eye. They looked stupid and stony. Dead and unworthy of faith. Embarrassments: these things wanted her trust?
But Madrinha Amalia had always told her the saints are subtle and Ariel has taken truths from the orixas that have kept her all her life. No heaven, no hell; no sin, no guilt; no judgement or punishment. One opportunity, once given, is all they offer. This is the grace of the saints. She deserves the Marc Jacobs dresses and the Maud Frizon shoes, the low-level Aquarius hub apartment, the place on the party circuit, the entourage of the adoring. She deserves to be famous, she deserves to be feted. She deserves to walk again. ‘What do you want me to do, Jonathon?’
‘I want you to be my lawyer of last resort. I want you to be my counsel when everyone else has abandoned me. For that I need someone with no vested interests, no family loyalties, no political ambition.’
She can feel the orixas around her like a cape; insubstantial yet crowding, eager to see if she takes the gift they offer. Not yet, you saints. The seal of a good lawyer – of this lawyer – is to put everything on trial. Even the saints. The fly move, the cheap trick, is a pillar of lunar law. Malandragem.
‘A counsel of despair,’ Ariel says.
‘I have other counsellors. My enemies expect no less. I don’t trust them.’
‘They are your contracted counsels.’
‘Lady Luna never made a contract she didn’t break.’
‘I won’t be hidden away, Jonathon. I won’t whisper in small rooms. The whole moon has to know that Ariel Corta is advising you.’
‘Done.’
Ariel takes the last of her cocktail. Love me, says the spiral of lemon peel in the empty glass. Love me again. Have me. Her fingers touch the stem, ready to twist the glass a quarter-turn, the acknowledged sign for another. The table would sense it, a server would bring it to her, pure and dewed and cleansing. Almost. And release.
‘What is Vidhya Rao’s role?’
‘With someone who claims to be able to predict the future, it’s better to have er with you than against you.’
‘With someone who can predict the future surely it doesn’t matter which side e’s on.’
‘Our relationship has shifted. We were adviser and advised. Now we find ourselves allies.’
‘Vidhya once told me er machines pegged me as a great mover and shaker in the affairs of the moon. What did they say about you, Jonathon?’
‘The Eagle will fly.’
‘Don’t you just love prophecy? I’ll do it. One condition. I go to every meeting. Beijaflor gets every report. I need to see their faces.’
‘Thank you, Ariel.’
‘That was my condition. These are my riders. Marina is my security. I want a clothing budget. I want a lovely apartment, one hundred square metres minimum, on a hub. No higher than 15th street. I want my legs back. Soon. But first…’
She flicks out her vaper to its full length and locks it. Then twists the stem of her Martini glass.
* * *
The wolves are dancing but Robson Corta doesn’t dance. The moves are simple for him – most of the wolves are bad movers and poor dancers, he could out-funk any of them, and the music – musics; they can follow two different beats at the same time – not too painful, but Robson won’t join the boogie. Wagner nods to him; Amal holds ner hands out in invitation, Robson shakes his head and drifts away from the beats and the bodies out on to the balcony. Amal the top wolf tried to bite Robson that morning. He shied away and avoided ner for the rest of the day but now he thinks it might have been a compliment. Wolves: there is so much to work out.
The club is on the 87th level on east Krikalev, the end of the prospekt; unfashionably far from the hub, disreputably high up. Robson hadn’t wanted to go but a pack is hard to refuse. The wolves like to congregate at full-Earth. The Meridian pack is congregating with the Twé pack: pack members swap in, swap out. There will be a lot of sex.
Robson leans over the rail. Krikalev Prospekt is a canyon of lights, Antares Hub a distant glowing galaxy. Cable cars form chains of swaying lanterns; bikers down-hilling on 75th are streaks of light hurtling down the levels and staircases so fast so thrilling. Robson holds his breath. He did things like that once, when he was the boy who fell to Earth.
Robson holds his cocktail over the drop. There’s more in it than alcohol. Hoang had been strict about psychotropics. Wagner doesn’t have a clue about what’s appropriate for kids. Hoang was strong on boundaries; always enforced but always negotiated. Wagner has no boundaries. Not in Wolf form. Robson misses Hoang. Robson thinks often about Hoang’s last lie, outside at the lock at Lansberg Station. Wagner still won’t let him contact Hoang, or Darius, or the traceurs.
Robson sets down his cocktail glass untouched. Another night, another party he might have wolfed it down and loved the buzz but for what he needs to do now he must be bright in head and bones. He reaches into a leg-warmer for the paint-stick. Robson suspects his 1980s workout gear was not originally designed for guys. Guys would have put in more pockets and pouches. But it looks good on him and feels better. He draws a thick band of white down his lips. Slash left slash right and there is a line of white along each cheekbone.
No one sees Robson Corta leap on to the railing, two kilometres of glowing space on his left, and run light and sure to the end of the balcony. The company of wolves wheels on. The two beats drift in and out of phase.
This place is easy. This place is like a climbing frame. It’s a simple tic-tac to the balcony above. Robson takes a short stride, plants a foot on the wall, pushes himself up and back. Soars. Turns. Seizes the rail of the higher balcony and uses his momentum to clear the rail in a saut-de-bras, legs between arms. Run, bounce, a somersault that no one but him can see – that no one but Robson needs to see – and he is among the trusses that support the level above; running from girder to girder until he finds a place, a crotch where beam and strut meet, from which he can survey the whole club. Robson crouches, wraps his arms around his knees.
He had a pack once. Baptiste, teaching him the shapes and names of the moves. Netsanet who drilled him, again and again and again, until those moves became as close to him as breath and heartbeat. Rashmi who showed him the possibilities within his body. Lifen who opened his senses to see with more than eyes, feel with more than skin. Zaky who made him a traceur. His pack. His Ekata.
Amal comes out on to the balcony below. Né goes to the rail and the vista beyond. As if né can scent him – and Robson knows he has only seen the least part of what the wolves can do when they enter the group consciousness – Amal looks up. Eyes lock. Né nods to Robson, clinging to the ribs of the world. He returns the slightest acknowledgement.
Now Wagner joins Amal on the balcony. Robson watches unseen from his high perch. Cocktails fall in slow blue arcs from their hands, their fingers tear at each other’s clothing. Amal has ripped Wagner’s Guarabera shirt open to the navel. Né tugs at a nipple with ner teeth. Robson sees blood. Robson sees the alien joy on Wagner’s face. Né leaves bloody bite marks all the way down his tight belly. Wagner’s teeth are hard on ner ear lobe and né murmurs with hurt and pleasure.
Robson watches. The blood, the passion, the secrecy of his hidden perch, all excite him but Robson watches to understand. Blood runs from a dozen bites, flows down Wagner’s dark skin, and Robson understands that being a wolf is not an understood thing. You can’t learn to be a wolf. You are born a wolf. Robson can be in the pack, sheltered, protected, loved, but he can never be of the pack. He can never be a wolf. He is, he always will be, utterly alone.
* * *
Robson’s table is at the back of the Eleventh Gate, hard against the glassy wall of the gas-seal. He twists an untouched glass of mint tea, a quarter-turn right, back, a quarter-turn left, back.
‘You shouldn’t be here alone,’ Wagner says, dropping on to the chair.
‘You said it was an important stage in socialisation, choosing your hot-shop,’ Robson says. ‘I like it here. And I’m not alone; now.’
‘You have to think about security.’
‘I know where the exits are. I’m facing out. You’re the one with your back to the street.’
‘I’m not happy you being away from the pack.’
‘It’s not my pack.’ The boy reaches across the small table to jab the edge of a thumb nail into a bite mark on the side of Wagner’s neck. ‘Does that hurt?’
‘Yes, a little.’ Wagner does not flinch, does not move Robson’s hand away.
‘Does it hurt when né bites you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you let ner do that?’
‘Because I like it.’ Wagner reads a dozen minute distastes flicker on Robson’s face that would be invisible to any non-wolf. The boy conceals his emotions well. Growing up on Crucible, living in Queen of the South fearful of the call home, control would be a necessary skill.
‘Do you love ner?’
‘No.’
Again, the tightening of the jaw line, the tension of the corner of the mouth, the flick of the eyes away.
‘Robson, I have to go away.’
‘I know. It’s the time of the lune. You’re going dark.’
‘Yes, but that’s not why I’m going. I have work. I would love to stay more than anything, but I need to work. I’m taking a crew out on to the glass. I’ll be gone seven, maybe ten days.’
Robson leans back against the cool glass wall. Wagner can’t look at him.
‘Amal will look after you,’ Wagner says. ‘Someone has to stay to mind the packhouse. But né’ll change. Like I’m changing.’ Wagner reads distrust, apprehension, fear in the tiny play of muscles beneath Robson’s brown skin. ‘I know you don’t like Amal, but you can trust ner.’
‘But it won’t be the same Amal. Né will go away. You all go away. You all become someone else. Everyone goes away.’
‘It’s only seven days, Robson. Maybe ten. I will come back. I’ll always come back. I promise.’
* * *
The delegation will arrive by train, the word went. 14:25 at João de Deus station, direct from Queen of the South. Private railcar.
The notice was short, the expectations high. None other than Bryce Mackenzie is to inspect the new headquarters of Mackenzie Helium so João de Deus must honour him. Squadrons of bots clean the streets and prospekts and scrub anti-Mackenzie graffiti from the walls and apartment-fronts. Crews print banners and pennants and hang them from roof trusses and crosswalks. The conjoined letters of Mackenzie Helium’s sigil stir in the constant light breezes of the air plants. Hoardings and posters cover up those scars and empty, smoke-stained shells that still stand derelict eighteen months after the battle of João de Deus. Squads of blades and cheap enforcers patrol the prospekts; immaculately dressed, more immaculately armed.
The train is prompt to the second. Bryce Mackenzie, his entourage and bodyguard, step from the emptied station on to Kondakova Prospekt. Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie and his blades meet the honoured CEO. Bryce dismisses the fleet of motos that are to convey him to his João de Deus headquarters.
‘I’ll walk.’
‘Of course, Mr Mackenzie.’ Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie dips his head, orders his private guard to fall in with Bryce’s escort.
‘Figures, Jaime. Reassure me that you have this place running smart and Mackenzie-style.’
Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie reels off extractor deployments, estimated reserves, processing and output figures, reserves and delivery schedules, shipments to orbit and de-orbits to Earth. Information that could be faster and better transmitted familiar to familiar. Information Bryce could read in his office high on Kingscourt without coming within a thousand kilometres of João de Deus. This is the conqueror showing the vanquished his right and power. I walk among you and you cannot touch me.
‘Your initial personnel problems have been resolved?’ Bryce asks. His narrow, fat-girdled eyes flash left, right. No detail is lost to Bryce Mackenzie.
‘They have, Mr Mackenzie,’ Jaime says. ‘And without blood.’
‘Glad to hear it. Waste of good human resources. You’ve got the place looking smart. Cleaner than it ever was under those Cortas.’
Jaime knows that Bryce has never before been to João de Deus.
‘On the surface, Mr Mackenzie. A lot of the infrastructure needs replacing to bring this place up to modern standards.’ He ventures: ‘As Head of Production, I would be reassured to know that it’s safe to move extractors back into Mare Crisium. Without threat to my jackaroos.’
‘Your jackaroos can work safely,’ Dembo Amaechi, Head of Corporate security, says. ‘I’ve cleared out Anguis, Crisium and East Tranquilitatis. And without blood too.’ He smiles. ‘Much blood.’
‘And the head of Denny Mackenzie,’ Alfonso Pereztrejo says. ‘That’s a coup.’
‘Not quite,’ Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie says, with evident pleasure. ‘Some Taiyang glass-crew hauled him out of Schmidt Crater with ten minutes of O2 in his pack.’
‘He always was a tough little dunny rat, my nephew,’ Bryce says. ‘But, as long as my brother is back pouring hot metal, I’m content. For now.’
Bryce stops dead, his entourage a heartbeat behind him.
‘Jaime, this city is under your control?’
A rope hangs from the centre of West 7 crosswalk. The loose end is dyed red.
‘I’ll have it removed.’ Blades are already in motion.
‘Do that.’
Bryce Mackenzie sweeps on. His guard check the arcades and side alleys. The small, bloody reminder of what the Mackenzies did to João de Deus was a quick, furtive act. The culprit cannot have got far. Someone’s familiar will have captured the deed. Bryce may even want to interrogate the culprit personally.
Mackenzie Helium’s João de Deus office smells of new-printed furniture and flooring. The small human staff has the look of people who need to seem competent but don’t yet fully know the terrain. There are fresh flowers, a touch Bryce admires with a sniff. No perfume. The Asamoahs breed for visual beauty, not olfactory.
Bryce settles his vast bulk behind the desk. It’s been built to his body shape. He does not doubt that it will be deprinted the moment his railcar pulls out of João de Deus station. He studies the desk, the walls, the comfortable and stylish chairs arranged in front of his desk. It takes a moment for his staff to realise their error. A junior junior scurries to the kitchen area. A printer whines, water thunders to a boil for mandatory tea.
‘I’m irked,’ Bryce Mackenzie declares, pouting in displeasure. His chair creaks under his shifting weight. His feet kick in unconscious irritation. Everyone notices his small feet. A Mackenzie legend, Bryce Mackenzie’s dainty feet. ‘The boy. It is an affront to me, that I can’t keep my own safe and secure.’
‘He’s under the protection of the Meridian pack,’ Dembo Amaechi says.
‘The Meridian pack!’ Bryce roars. Backs stiffen, from the kitchen comes the sound of dropped glass. ‘Fucking kids playing fucking games. You bring me my property, Dembo.’
‘I’ll arrange that, Mr Mackenzie,’ Dembo Amaechi says.
‘Be quick about it. Ariel Corta is back. Give her enough time and she’ll drive a helium extractor clean through my adoption contract.’
Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie and Alfonso Pereztrejo exchange glances. This is news – unwelcome news – to them. This is a failure in corporate intelligence.
‘Mr Mackenzie, I could hire assassins…’ Dembo Amaechi ventures.
‘You will not touch a hair on her cunt. Half of Meridian saw her doing cocktails with the Eagle of the Moon. He’s contracted her.’
‘The Eagle needs a D-list marriage lawyer?’ Rowan says.
‘Big men are not necessarily fools,’ Bryce says and everyone in the room hears the steel in his voice.
‘Mr Mackenzie?’ The intern stands in the door, tray of tea-glasses in hand, plotting a course of grace and caution between the men packing the room. Bryce waves him in.
‘Bring me Robson Mackenzie,’ Bryce commands. ‘If you’re afraid of the big bad moon-wolf, wait until the pack dissolves.’
Dembo Amaechi conceals the flare of anger in his eyes inside a short, obedient bow.
‘I’ll make it my personal responsibility.’
‘Good. No need for any particular gentleness.’ Bryce lifts the freshly-printed tea-glass to his full, pursed lips. He sips, grimaces. ‘Tasteless. Bloody tasteless. And far too hot.’ He sets the glass on the white desk. The rest of his entourage set their untasted glasses on the tray. The intern is grey with fear. ‘I think everyone in this shit hole who needs to see me has seen me? Then take me back to Queen.’