The bundle of plastic pipes was light but after forty flights of steps it felt cast from pig iron. The pipes were contrary fucks to wrangle around the corners, booming and mooing like desolate musical instruments as they clattered against the steps. Add a tool belt and welding mask, top off with the bag of working lights slung across her back and by the time she kicked open the door and hauled her pipework out on to the top of Ocean Tower her thighs and forearms were burning. A moment in the swift lilac twilight to taste the sea in the gloaming, listen to the crump of waves on Barra beach beyond the rumble of traffic along Avenida Lucio Costa and the chug of air conditioners. A dozen musics and voices from a dozen apartment windows. The twilight heat was tolerable. She rigged her lights. Her sodium glare highlighted and shadowed things unnoticed in the day sun. Needles and patches, cigarette butts. Panties discarded behind the satellite dishes. The rustle of roosting fowl in their hutches. The skunk garden, lusciously night-fragrant.
Later. Repair woman’s perk.
She donned the welding mask, keyed open the hatch of the water steriliser and checked the UV array. Nothing wrong with it. Last forever, these modern UV guns. UVc was harsh. With every installation she would call the community together, explain how ultraviolet made the water safe, tell horror stories of UV-induced conjunctivitis ‘like having sand in your eye, forever’. Then she showed the photographs of eyes burned red and ulcerated by photokeratitis and everyone went whoa. No fingers strayed near her sterilisation plants.
She disconnected the UV array and took off the mask. Full dark now. She inspected the pipe run. Good thing she had turned off the supply; her finger went through the first u-bend, plastic falling into translucent crumbs. Ultra-violet ate polyethylene.
She would have to replace every pipe. She had brought plenty.
The pipes crumbled as she removed them. The steriliser was hours – perhaps minutes – from failure. Loud voices from below, complaining that the water was off. Not everyone had got the message that the Queen of Pipes was working on Ocean Tower’s supply. What do we pay her for?
For running taps into the Barra main and keeping up the payments to the FIAM officers so that they never find them. For laying and running pipe down the hill and up the sides of the towers and connecting them to the defunct plumbing in each and every apartment. For the pumps, and the solar panels that powered them, and the rooftop tanks and filtration units and this sterilisation unit so that the water you give your children is clean and bright and fresh. That’s what you pay me for. And if I spend what you pay me on a trustworthy secondhand Hawtai pick-up or football boots for the boy or a new hub for the apartment or an intensive manicure and nail rebuild for me, would you begrudge me? Because water engineering is hard on the nails.
She flicked up a playlist on her ear bud and set to her work. Night deepened, and on the third set of tubes Norton tried to booty call her.
‘Working.’
‘After you’re working?’
‘You’re working.’
As she tightened the connectors, she played with the idea, as she often did, that maybe she should have a better boyfriend. Norton was toned, honed and carried himself with a ripped nonchalance softened by a self-awareness that she found charming. He was proud to be a boyfriend of the Queen of Pipes, even if he could not understand why she did what she did. It annoyed him that she earned more than him. It annoyed him that she worked at all. She should let him keep her, support her, spoil her; like a man ought. Norton was security; security was the thing, security was important. You met celebs and rich people but security could get your ass killed.
She never said what everyone knew, that the best security, the most expensive security, was robotic. D-listers hired humans. But he had plans, aspirations for them both. A beach side apartment, and a proper car. Not that Hawtai pick-up; it made him look bad, her riding around in that. An Audi; that was a proper car. Can I get my gear in the back of an Audi? she asked and he would answer, When you’re with me you won’t need any gear.
She didn’t want Norton’s future. Time would come when she would have to get rid of him. But he was sweet and the sex, when their diaries connected, was good.
She hooked up the last pipe, turned on the water, checked the joints, drained any air locks. She listened to the gurgle and thrum of the water in the pipes. Then she flipped on her welding mask, reactivated the UV array and closed and locked the hatch.
There’s your clean water, Ocean Tower.
Her ear bud pinged again. Not Norton this time. An alert. She tapped up her lens and the app dropped a reticule over the arrival point. South-south-east, twenty kilometres out. She grabbed a fistful of buds from the skunk farm and sat on the edge of the parapet, legs dangling over the eighty-metre drop, kicking the backs of her heels against the concrete and looking out across the ocean. The power was out again, the streets were dark. Good for drop-watching. Not so good for community safety. Generators chugged from the roofs of the surrounding apartment blocks. The booths and shops glowed with harvested solar. Three hundred kilometres out, her reticule said. One hundred and fifty up. She let the digits guide her and gazed into soft, warm night. And the sky lit. Arcs of fire; three of them, looping down from the thermosphere in golds and crimsons. Her breath caught. Her breath had been catching for twenty years, since the night a seven-year-old went up with Tio German to see the moon.
See the moon? See those lights? Those are your cousins. Family. Cortas. Like you. Your Great-Aunt Adriana went there and became very rich and powerful. She is Queen of the Moon, up there. Then she saw stars fall, streaks of fire across the stars, and nothing else mattered. She knows now that they are freight packages; rare earths, pharma. Helium-3. Corta Hélio lights the lights. Fusion was supposed to end the brown-outs. Fusion was cheap and limitless, the ever-bright and humming saviour. All saviours fail. Fusion was never about the power that could be delivered, it was always about the wealth that could be extracted by buying and selling on the electricity markets. The three packages fall, cloaked with re-entry plasma, in slow, incredible beauty. She preferred the time of innocence and wonder, when her great-aunt threw stars down to her like candies.
Adriana Corta had sent money to the brothers and sisters she left behind on Earth. The Brasil Cortas had lived high and comfortably; then one day, the money stopped. Adriana Corta had closed the sky but her great-niece still watched the lines of fire drop down from the moon and felt her heart crack.
Dark now. The show was over. Out there on the dark ocean retrieval ships were picking up the capsules. Alexia Corta picked up her tool bag and welding mask. Someone else could clean up the old pipework. She had sensimilla in the pocket of her cut-offs. She would savour its giggly blurring of her cheap and tattered world. Every time she saw the packages fall in blazing stars, she suffered a stab of resentment, of opportunity blighted. She was Barra’s Queen of Pipes, but what more might she have been, in that world up there?
At the front door the security kid handed her an envelope of cash.
‘Thank you, Senhora Corta.’
She counted it in the pick-up. Another term of Marisa’s school fees. Pharma for grandma Pia, a night out with Norton. Nail art and money in the savings account. The Queen of Pipes steered out into the flow of tail-lights along Avenida Lucio Costa and the betraying moon was a blade thrown into the sky.
* * *
Like most apps, Alexia used the police siren twice: once when she bought it, once to show off to her friends, then forgot about it. Several times when cleaning out her ware she thought of deleting it but always its little smiling cop-cruiser icon jiggled and said, When you need me, you will need me.
This morning, on Avenida Armando Lombardi, auto-drive off and eleven-year-old Caio and fourteen-year-old Marisa and Sister Maria Aparaceida from Abrigo Cristo Redentor in the back, she needed it.
Her air horns blasted emergency. Her hazard lights flashed blue: another little car-hack, as was the police traffic network tag that made every car in Leblon think she was an emergency vehicle. Whatever got them out of her road. She shot through the intersection of Avenida das Americas and Avenida Ayrton Senna.
Sister Maria Aparaceida in the back banged on the roof and leaned over the cab to bellow through the driver’s window.
‘Where are you going? Holy Mothers is left.’
‘I’m not going to Holy Mothers,’ Alexia yelled over the howl of sirens. ‘I’m taking him to Barra D’or Hospital.’
‘You can’t afford Barra D’or.’
‘I can,’ Alexia shouted. ‘Just not anything else.’ She bounced the heel of her hand off the horn and plunged through the intersection. Automated vehicles fled like gazelles.
She sent him off smart and fed. Every day, clean, clothes ironed, shoes bright. Smart and fed, and a proper lunch, with stuff he would eat and stuff he could trade. Money for the security guys, money for the savings scheme; Alexia on emergency dial, in case. He would never be A-grade, that was not the way his intelligence worked, but he was always presentable and a credit to the House of Corta.
School security called Alexia when Caio was half an hour late. She dropped her tools. The neighbourhood had already found him, in a shallow concrete culvert clogged with corn-starch water bottles and tied plastic bags of human excrement. A community sister from the Holy Mothers was with him. Alexia slid down the concrete slope. His head was a mess. A mess. His lovely head. Everything was wrong. She didn’t know what to do.
‘Get the pick-up down to the steps!’ Sister Maria Aparaceida yelled. Neighbours hauled Alexia up the rough cast culvert. She backed the pick-up to the low curve where street crossed culvert. Hands passed him into the back of Alexia’s truck, where Maria Aparaceida had set down some foam packing. Maria Aparaceida arranged Caio in the recovery position and snatched an offered bottle of water to wash the wound. So much blood.
‘Well, drive!’ Sister Maria Aparaceida shouted.
‘Where’s his backpack?’ Alexia asked. He had pestered and pestered and pestered her for the Capitan Brasil backpack and when she relented and bought it for him he had been so pleased and proud he had almost slept inside the thing. It was gone.
‘Alexia!’ Sister Maria Aparaceida shouted. Alexia swung into the seat. Sirens.
She swung into the ambulance bay at Barra D’or. Armed security surrounded the pick-up.
‘Get a gurney!’ Alexia screamed at the solid, well-fed security faces. Hands stayed other hands reaching for weapons. They knew the Queen of Pipes. Alexia burst into the Emergency Room reception. She leaned over the reception desk.
‘I’ve got an eleven-year-old kid in the pick-up, half his head is in. He needs immediate medical attention.’
‘I’ll need your insurance details,’ the receptionist said. She had flowers on her white desk.
‘I don’t have insurance.’
‘Barra Day Hospital does offer Medicare services,’ the receptionist said. Alexia snatched the pay terminal, held it up to her eye, pressed her thumb to it, swivelled it back to the receptionist.
‘Will that cover it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get him in.’
The nurses called security to prise Alexia away from Caio as the crash nurses wheeled him.
‘Lê, let them do their work,’ the security men said. ‘As soon as it’s safe, the doctor will let you see him.’
She sat. She fretted. She curled up one way on the uncomfortable waiting room seat, then another, then another and none of them was right for her bones. She went back and forth to the vending machines. She glared death at anyone who so much as turned an eye on her. After two and a half hours the doctor came for her.
‘How is he?’
‘We’ve stabilised him. Can I have a word?’
The doctor took her to a private consulting room. She laid a piece of stained paper on the bed.
‘We found this in his pocket. Is this his writing?’
‘He writes better than that.’
‘It’s addressed to you.’
An address, and a signature. Alexia did not recognise the signature but she knew the name. An infant’s hand-writing, an adult implication.
‘Can I take this?’
‘That depends if you want to involve the police.’
‘The police don’t work for people like me and Caio.’
‘Then take it.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be back, but I have a piece of business to conduct first.’
* * *
Only the new boys stared as Alexia walked into the gym. The older men, who knew who she was, paused at their weights and punch-bags and nodded in respect. She strode past the desk and the sign that said Men Only, all the way past the sauna, the whirlpool and the dark maze to the office at the rear. Two escoltas in gym T-shirts stepped in front of her.
‘I would like to see Seu Osvaldo.’
The younger escolta was about to open his stupid mouth and refuse her; the older laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘Of course.’ The guard mumbled into a concealed microphone. A nod. ‘Please go in, Senhora Corta.’
Seu Osvaldo’s office was as cosy and compact as the cabin of a sailing schooner. Brass and polished wood. Framed photographs of MMA fighters covered the walls. A well equipped bar stood beneath the shuttered window. Chinese electro-pop hovered in the air, present but not so emphatic as to break Seu Osvaldo’s concentration. He was a great bear of a man, tall and heavy, spilling out of his chair behind his desk, where he studied MMA matches on an array of old desk monitors. The air was conditioned cool and faintly mentholated but he sweated heavily. Seu Osvaldo could not tolerate heat and daylight. He was dressed in a pair of well-pressed white shorts and the T-shirt of his gym.
He tapped one of his old school screens.
‘This boy, I think I might buy him. He’s a vicious little fuck.’ Seu Osvaldo’s voice was luxuriant and deep, thickened with the rattle of childhood tuberculosis. The legend in Barra was that he once trained to be a Catholic priest. Alexia believed it. ‘What do you think?’ He swivelled the screen to show the fighters in the cage.
‘Which one am I looking at, Seu Osvaldo?’
He laughed and with one graceful gesture folded all his screens flat to his desk.
‘You’d have made a good fighter. You have the discipline and the focus. And the rage. What can I do for you, Queen of Pipes?’
‘I have been wronged, Seu Osvaldo.’
‘I know that you have. How is your brother?’
‘His skull is fractured in three places. There’s been severe concussion and significant blood loss into the brain. The doctors say damage is inevitable. The question is how much.’
Seu Osvaldo crossed himself.
‘How will he be?’
‘He may require care for the rest of life. The doctors said he may never fully recover.’
‘Shit,’ Seu Osvaldo muttered in his deep, rich voice. ‘If it’s money…’
‘I’m not asking for money.’
‘I’m glad. I would not want to charge you interest.’
‘The Gulartes have sent me a message. I would like to send them one back.’
‘It would be an honour, Alexia.’ Seu Osvaldo leaned forward. ‘How emphatically would you like your message delivered?’
‘I want them never to threaten my family or anyone ever again. I want their water empire wiped out.’
Seu Osvaldo sat back again. His chair creaked. Oily sweat beaded on his bald head, though the office was chill to Alexia.
‘You are the Iron Hand.’
‘Pardon?’ Alexia said.
‘You’ve never heard that? It’s a Corta family name. My family and yours are old friends. My grandfather bought Mercedes from your great-grandfather.’
‘I know we had money once.’
‘It’s a Minas Gerais nickname, from the mines. The one with the grip and the will – and the ambition – to take what they want from the world. The Iron Hand. Your great-aunt, the one who went to the Moon, she was a true Miniera. The Mão de Ferro.’
‘Adriana Corta. She cut my family off. All the money in the moon, and she cut us off.’
‘And you forgot you were ever called Iron Hand. Maybe she’s just waiting. I will do this for you, Alexia Corta. I am very upset about Caio. A kid … Rules have been broken. I will make sure the Gularte brothers enjoy real pain before they die.’
‘Thank you, Seu Osvaldo.’
‘I do this for the respect I bear to the Queen of Pipes. We all owe you. But, please understand, I can’t be seen not to require a payment for my services. Even from you.’
‘Of course.’
‘My mother – Jesus and Mary be kind to her – is very comfortable in her old age. She has a nice apartment, she has a sea view, she has electricity almost all the time. She has a veranda and a chauffeur to take her to mass or cocktails or to play bridge with her friends. She wants one thing. I think you can address that want.’
‘Name it, Seu Osvaldo.’
‘She has always wanted a water feature. Fountains and cherubs and those things that blow horns. Shells and baths for birds. The sound of falling water. This would complete her life. Can you arrange that, Rainha de tubos?’
‘It would be an honour to bring a little water into an old lady’s life, Seu Osvaldo. Can I ask one more favour?’
‘If you can start within a week.’
‘I want Caio’s Capitan Brasil backpack.’
* * *
Norton came to the apartment.
‘You don’t come to the apartment,’ Alexia said, the bar on the door and her left eye to the gap. She let the concealed taser slip down behind the door and toed it away. In this time between asking the favour of Seu Osvaldo and his execution of it, uninvited hammering on the door met an armed response. The corridor cams showed only Norton. That meant nothing. The Gulartes could be holding his family hostage. Marisa, pressed close to the wall, scooped up the taser. Always have back-up.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘You don’t come to the apartment.’
‘Well, where can I talk to you?’
The gazebo. Marisa put a message out on the tower network and the rooftop nest was empty by the time Alexia and Norton made it to the stop of the stairs. A whisper of wind down from the hills made the evening air tolerable. Alexia curled up on the divan. She had thrown six Antarcticas into a cool sack and casually opened one on a wooden rail. She offered it to Norton. He looked away. The tendons of his neck, his throat, the veins in his forehead were tight with anger. Alexia took a swig from the bottle. Dear cold sacramental beer.
‘Why did you come to the apartment?’
‘Why did you go to Seu Osvaldo?’
‘It’s business. You don’t ask me about business.’
Norton paced. He was a pacer. Do you know how restless your hands are when you’re angry? Alexia thought.
‘And I don’t come to the apartment,’ Norton said. ‘Was there a contract I should have signed?’
‘That’s glib, Norton.’ Alexia had never been able to bear others’ laughter. Norton understood this: never make a joke out of Alexia Corta.
‘I know why people go to Seu Osvaldo. Why didn’t you come to me?’
A true, spontaneous laugh burst from Alexia.
‘You?’
‘I’m in security.’
‘Norton, you’re not in Seu Osvaldo’s league.’
‘Seu Osvaldo has a price. I don’t want you owing Seu Osvaldo.’
‘Seu Osvaldo’s eighty-year-old mamãe is going to have the best water feature in Barra on her balcony. Cherubs and everything.’
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ Norton snapped and the dark flash of his anger, the knife-quick turn of his passion stole Alexia’s breath. He was beautiful-angry. ‘How do you think it makes me look if every time you need help, you go running to Seu Osvaldo? Who’s going to hire a man who can’t look after his woman?’
‘Norton, be very careful here.’ Alexia set the beer bottle down half drunk. ‘You don’t look after me. I am not your woman. If your security-jock friends disrespect you for that, either you get new friends or a new me.’
As the words were spoken, Alexia wished them unspoken.
‘If that’s what you want,’ Norton said.
‘If that’s what you want,’ Alexia mimicked, knowing what she was saying was the worst of all possible words, unable to stop saying them. Junior, when he was alive, used to say she would fight with her own shadow. ‘Why don’t you just make your own decision for once?’
‘Well what I want is to go someplace else,’ Norton yelled. He stormed off.
‘Fine!’ Alexia shouted at his back. The roof door slammed. She would not follow him down. She would not even indulge in a killing riposte down the stairwell. Let him come to her. ‘Fine.’
She waited three minutes, four. Five. Then she heard the sound of a scrambler bike engine in the parking lot below. She didn’t need to look over the parapet to know it was Norton’s. The infantile engine-rev sound he had patched over the electric motor was unmistakable.
‘Fucker,’ she said and slung the half-drunk bottle of beer the length of the roof top. It smashed against the concrete coaming. ‘Fucker.’
The roof door creaked open.
‘Lê?’
Marisa joined Alexia in the gazebo. They watched the half-moon rise out of the Atlantic. On the avenida the street lights flickered and went out.
‘Hope he crashes,’ Alexia said.
‘No you don’t.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘You won’t let anyone laugh at you but you laugh at him.’
‘Shut the fuck up, irmazinha.’
Marisa swung her legs. Alexia reached up a dewed beer from the cooler.
‘Open it for me.’ Marisa had been drinking beer since she was ten.
The bottle cap spun in the moonlight.
* * *
She loved the feel of Norton’s fresh shaved balls. She loved the smooth suppleness of the skin, the softness of the oil; how they felt like something independent from his body, like a small, nuzzling animal. How they lay heavy in her palm, the way she could circle the scrotum with her thumb and forefinger, the yield and tightening of his body in surprise when she gently stretched them. She loved their fullness and vulnerability; how with a shoelace or some rubber bands or hair ties she could turn them into two glorious swollen apples of lust. She liked to flick her fingernail against his tight tied balls. The first time she did it he almost concussed himself on the headboard.
Alexia folded her hand around the shaved shaft of his cock. Norton was big; smooth and oiled, his cock was a vain monster, a rain forest giant standing proud from cleared undergrowth. Big and elegantly curved. She had worked out long ago how to keep him on edge, bringing him to the brink of orgasm only to pull him back, by the manipulation of her closed hand over his glorious cock. She folded his head into the palm of her hand, ran her thumb along the thick line of his corona. He moaned and lolled back on to the pillows.
This was how she knew it wasn’t goodbye sex. He had shaved for her.
She pressed the ball of her thumb to the little triangle where the two curves of the cock head – like a heart, she thought – met the pee slit. Coraçãozinho was her name for it. She didn’t know if it had a scientific name but she did know that when she touched him there, rubbed him there, flicked him there, vibrated him there, this square centimetre of nerve endings gave her absolute power over him.
The rest of the guys in his security team must have seen that he shaved for her.
They could pick up an idea or two.
She had a fantasy that one day she would lather him and shave him, then oil and work him closely over with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor until he was so smooth she could take each ball into her mouth like a doce. She imagined the fear and trust and delight on his face.
She bent low and touched the tip of her tongue to coraçãozinho.
Norton jerked as if mains voltage had run through his urethra. His abs tightened, his ass cheeks clenched. Now she had his attention. Alexia guided him to where she really wanted his Little Heart to go.
Afterwards she rolled out of his bed and padded to the bathroom, then to the fridge.
‘Any guarana?’
‘Behind the Bohemia.’
The fridge light flickered as she squatted in the blue glow, shuffling beer cans. A man’s fridge. Beer, coffee, soft drinks. Sex always affected her fluid balance. Liquid out, liquid in. She popped the can and slid back under the black sheet.
Black bed linen. New, for her. Clean bedsheets for back-together-again sex. Jesus and Mary. Little silver archipelagos.
He lay on his side, one leg folded, the other stretched straight, hugging the sheet to him. He knew it made him look cute. His skin was three shades darker than hers – castana-escura to her canela. She liked to look at him.
The lights went out.
‘Shit. Give me a minute.’ Crouching naked, Norton scuttled around the room lighting the aromatic candles Alexia brought him. They kept the stale male smell down. Alexia preferred Norton’s apartment by candlelight. She did not like to see it in too high a resolution.
She really needed to get herself a better boyfriend.
‘Caio’s back home,’ she said. The guarana was working now. Sugar and caffeine.
‘How is he?’
‘He’ll be two months out of school. I’m arranging tutors. His right side is affected. He’ll have to learn to become left handed.’
‘Shit. I’d like to see him.’
A thing she liked about Norton: how he treated Caio like a kid brother. A thing she did not like about Norton: that he tried to teach Caio to be like him. A malandro.
‘You can call at the apartment to do that.’
‘Thank you. I appreciate that, Lê.’
He made her melt when he dropped the man-theatre and spoke what he felt.
‘What happened to the Gulartes?’
‘You don’t want to know.’ Bodies in the concrete footings of the new commuter rail viaduct. ‘No one will be threatening Caio again.’
‘Lê…’
Alexia rolled on to her side. Norton was shy of her eye contact. It was another tool by which she could control him.
‘We used to have another family name. Did you know that? Mão de Ferro. It’s an old Minas Gerais name for the big one, the serious one. The one who does what needs to be done. I was the Iron Hand. So shut up and never ask me again.’
Norton sat up abruptly, jostling Alexia’s arm and slopping sticky guarana over her breasts.
‘Fuck, Norton…’
‘No, listen listen listen. I’m working for a Corta. New contract, started yesterday. Thanks for asking. You always said there weren’t many of you, no one knows where the name comes from, no one really knows where you came from. Well, this is a Corta and he comes from the moon.’
‘No one comes from the moon.’ Alexia felt around for a tissue that wasn’t creamy with cum. This man needs to learn the necessity of wet wipes.
‘That’s not quite right, Lê. Milton came from the moon.’
‘Okay, workers come back from the moon.’ Barra had cheered when one of their own made it to the moon to mine helium-3. He came back to Earth before gravity withered his bones with enough of a fortune to buy his way out of Barra, settled in Zona Sul and was murdered a year later. All his wealth was electronic. The killers didn’t get a centavo.
‘He’s not a worker. He was born there.’
Alexia jerked upright. The can of guarana spilt over Norton’s black sheets. She rolled over Norton to straddle him, pushed her vaj hard against his cock.
‘Who is he? Tell me.’
‘Something Corta. Lucas Corta.’
‘Lucas Corta’s dead. He was killed when the Mackenzies took out Corta Hélio.’
‘Maybe that was a different—’
‘There is only one Lucas Corta. Do you know anything about the moon?’
‘I know they play handball and you can fight people to the death but other than that I don’t really care what goes on up there.’
Alexia ground again. Norton groaned.
‘Up there is my family. You’re sure he’s Lucas Corta?’
‘Lucas Corta from the moon.’
‘How is he … never mind.’
‘He’s pretty sick. A wreck. Doctors all over him.’
‘Lucas Corta on Earth.’ Alexia lifted herself off Norton’s cock and showed him her full magnificence. ‘Norton Adilio Daronch de Barra de Freitas, if you ever want in here again, you will get me in to talk to Lucas Corta.’
* * *
The maids’ uniform was a size too small. Buttons gaped on the shirt. The skirt was too tight, too short. She constantly pulled it down. The gusset on her panty hose rode low. She constantly pulled it up. Ridiculous that staff were expected to work in such stupid shoes. She had bribed the hotel manager heavily: at least she could have supplied a uniform that fitted.
Half of Barra worked in service but Alexia had never seen the interior of a five-star hotel. The paying parts were marble and chrome, over-polished and tired of standing to attention. The kitchen and service were concrete and stainless steel. She suspected this was universal. The corridors smelled of much-breathed air and tired carpets.
The Jobim suite.
The fear hit her at the doorbell.
What if there was security beyond the security Norton had fixed?
She would think of something. She rang the bell. The door buzzed open.
‘Turn-down service.’
‘Come in.’
His voice surprised her. When he spoke, Alexia realised she had no idea how a man from the moon should sound, but it was not this. Lucas Corta spoke with the voice of a sick, sick man. Tired, weighed down, struggling for breath. His Portuguese was strangely accented. He sat in a wheelchair by the panoramic window. Against the brightness of beach, ocean and sky he was a silhouette: Alexia could not tell if he was facing her or turned away.
She went to the bed. She had never seen one so wide, smelled one so fresh. Five different medical bots attended it, a dozen medications stood on the bedside table. She touched the sheets: the bed undulated. A water bed. Of course.
Something twitched on the side of her neck. Alexia raised her hand.
‘Touch that insect, you die,’ Lucas Corta said in his old sick man voice. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody, I’m…’
‘Unpersuasive.’
Alexia flinched to the touch of insect feet, tip-tapping as they crawled around to the soft spot behind her left ear. The urge to flick it away was overpowering. She did not doubt Lucas Corta. She had read about cyborg insect toxin delivery systems. On the moon they were the preferred weapon of the Asamoahs. And she was thinking this, appreciating this, with neurotoxic death in a pool of her own piss and vomit a millimetre from her skin.
‘I’ll try that again. Who sent you?’
‘Nobody…’
She whimpered as she felt the tiniest prick of needle snag skin.
‘I am the Iron Hand!’ she shouted.
And the insect was gone.
‘That’s a name to live up to,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘What’s the rest of it?’
Alexia dry retched, hands trying to find support and certainty in the seascape of the waterbed, shivering with frayed fear.
‘Alexia Maria do Céu Arena de Corta,’ she gasped. ‘Mão de Ferro.’
‘The last Mão de Ferro was my mother.’
‘Adriana. Luis Corta was my grandfather. He was named after his grandfather Luis. Adriana was named after her great-aunt. She had an electric organ in her apartment.’
A hand lifted against the searing blues of ocean and sky.
‘Come into the light, Iron Hand.’
She saw now that he had not once looked at her. He had sat throughout with his back to her. The light collapsed his shadowy bulk, withered him, made him translucent and sick, a spider caught in the light. His hands were gnarls of sinew and swollen joints. The skin of his throat, his cheeks, under his eyes, his lips, sagged. He looked something crueller than old, more terrible than death.
Lucas Corta looked up into the sun, his eyes black with polarising lenses.
‘How do you live with this?’ he asked. ‘How does it not continually dazzle and distract? You can see it move. You actually believe it moves … and that’s the trap, isn’t it? It blinds you to reality. You can only understand if you look away.’
He glanced at Alexia and she felt the black lenses peel the skin from her face, the flesh from her cheekbones, flense every nerve to the fibre. She did not flinch. The heat radiating from the triple-layered glass was palpable.
‘You have the look.’
Lucas Corta spun away and wheeled away from the window to the dim cool of the interior.
‘What is it you want, Senhora Corta? Is it money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why should I give you my money, Senhora Corta?’
‘My brother…’ Alexia began but Lucas Corta cut her off.
‘I’m not a charity, Senhora Corta. But I reward merit. See me tomorrow. Same time. Find a new way in. This way is closed to you. Show me you’re the Iron Hand.’
Alexia picked up her hotel bag of turn-down goodies. Her mind still reeled, vertiginous. She could have died on that bed. She had come within a needle’s-point, a fractional instant of everything ending.
He hadn’t said yes, he hadn’t said no. He said, Show me.
‘Senhor Corta, how did you know?’
‘The uniform is two sizes too small. And you smell wrong. Room service has a particular aroma. Chemicals get into the skin. It seems we on the moon are more olfactorily sensitive than terrestrials. On your way out, please send up the real turn-down service. I am sleeping stupid hours.’
* * *
Alexia stripped off the maid’s uniform the moment the service door swung behind her: too tight blouse, too short skirt. Stupid stupid shoes. In underwear and sag-crotch hose, Alexia Corta pushed past Norton and into his car in the Copa Palace’s underground garage.
‘It’s on my skin, my fucking skin,’ she shrieked at Norton as he drove her back to his apartment. ‘I can feel it.’
She plunged straight into his shower.
‘I should kill him,’ Norton said, watching the silhouette behind the water-beaded fabric.
‘Don’t touch him.’
‘He tried to kill you.’
‘He didn’t try. He defended himself. But I feel dirty. It was on me. An insect, Nortinho. I’m never going to feel clean again.’
‘I can help with that,’ Norton said and slipped through the curtain. Clothes dropped to wet tiles. He stepped out of pants, shook off shorts. ‘So what was he like? You were so freaked by that insect bot you never told me.’
‘He creeped the fuck out of me, Norton,’ Alexia said. Her back was turned to him; water ran down her skin, down the glass. ‘It was like something pretending to be a person. It looks okay from a distance but when you get up close everything is just that little bit off. Uncanny valley. Nothing was the right shape. Everything was too long or too big or top heavy. An alien. I heard people born there grow up different; I never thought…’
‘You don’t get to pick your family,’ Norton said and stepped into the shower. He pressed against Alexia’s warm, wet flank and she gasped. ‘So where is this dirty bit?’
She scooped her hair away and tilted her head to show him the soft places on her neck and beneath her ear where the assassin insect had nuzzled. He kissed them.
‘Cleaner now?’
‘No.’
‘Now?’
‘A little.’
He moved his hands to cradle the perfection of her ass. She pressed muscle-close, curled a leg around his thighs, hooked him in to her soft dark skin.
‘So are you going to see him tomorrow?’
‘Of course.’
* * *
‘Handsome boy.’
‘Here he is on the futsal team.’ Alexia flicks him the picture of Caio grinning in singlet and shorts and long socks into Lucas Corta’s eyes. He lolls in the pool, cool water roiling gently. He has invited Alexia several times to join in. The idea repels her. She sits on a pool chair in the shade of the canopy. The sun is brutal today. The sea looks like it is dying.
‘Is he good?’
‘Not really. Not at all. They only pick him because of me.’
‘My brother had a handball team. They weren’t as good as he thought they were.’
Alexia flicks him another picture of Caio, trying to look big on the beach; stripes of blue sun block on his nose, cheekbones, nipples.
‘How is … Caio?’
‘He’s walking. He knocks things over a lot and he needs a stick. Futsal is over for him.’
‘If he wasn’t very good, maybe it’s a blessing. I was terrible at any kind of sport. I couldn’t see the point. One of my uncles was called Caio.’
‘Caio is named after him.’
‘He died of tuberculosis shortly before my mother left Earth. My mother taught me the names of all my aunts and uncles, the ones who never came. Byron, Emerson, Elis, Luis, Eden, Caio. Luis was your grandfather.’
‘Luis was my grandfather, Luis Junior was my father.’
‘Was.’
‘He walked out when I was twelve. He left three of us. My mother just threw her hands up.’
‘On the moon we have contracts for that sort of thing.’
Now. Ask him for the money. Claim kinship. He let you get in to the hotel. She had tracked down Dr Volikova, asked her to pass Alexia off as Lucas’s locum masseuse. Alexia had dressed the part. She sat by his pool in sports leggings and a crop top. Ask him. An image appeared on Alexia’s lens. The moment was lost.
‘This is Lucasinho, my son.’
He was a very pretty boy. Tall in that weird moon way but well proportioned. Thick glossy hair that she knew would smell clean and fresh. An Asian turn to the eyes that made him look withdrawn and beautifully vulnerable, cheekbones to fall in love with, lips you could kiss forever. Not her type – she preferred her men muscled and with no overt signs of intelligence – but so so cute. He was instant heartbreak.
‘How old is he?’
‘Nineteen now.’
‘And how is … Lucasinho?’
‘Safe. As far as I know. The Asamoahs are protecting him.’
‘They’re at Twé.’ As Lucas researched Alexia, she researched him and his world. ‘They run agriculture and environment.’
‘They have traditionally been our allies. The legend is that every Dragon has two allies…’
‘And two enemies. The Asamoahs’ enemies are the Vorontsovs and the Mackenzies, the Suns’ enemies are the Cortas and the Vorontsovs, the Mackenzies’ are the Cortas and the Asamoahs, the Vorontsovs’ are the Asamoahs and the Sun, the Cortas’ are…’
‘The Mackenzies and the Suns. Simplistic, but like all clichés, with an element of truth,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘I fear for him all the time. It’s an elegant fear, of many parts. The fear that I haven’t done enough. The fear of not knowing what is happening. The fear that there’s nothing I can do. The fear that, even if I could, whatever I did would be wrong. I heard what you did to the men who hurt your brother.’
‘I had to make sure they would never go near Caio, or any of us, ever again.’
‘My mother would have done that.’ Lucas took a sip of tea from the glass balanced on the edge of the pool. ‘She always wondered why none of you ever came. I think it was the great disappointment of her life. She built a world for her family and no one wanted it.’
‘I grew up believing that she turned her back on us. Took back her wealth and power and left us to fall.’
‘You still live in the same apartment, I believe.’
‘It’s falling apart, the elevators haven’t worked since before I was born and the electricity is more off than on. The plumbing is good.’
‘When we were twelve years old my mother took each of us up on to the surface at Earth-dark. She showed us continents all lined in lights and the webs of lights across them, and the knots of lights that were the great cities and she told us, We light those lights.’
‘They make more money trading that power than using it,’ Alexia said. ‘But Corta Agua does supply reliable and clean water to twenty thousand people in the Barra da Tijuca area.’
Lucas Corta smiled. It was a heavy thing, costly for his body and the more valuable for that.
‘I would like to see that. I would like to see the place my mother grew up. I don’t want to meet your family … that wouldn’t be safe. But I wish to see Barra, and the beach where the moon fell across the sea like a road. Arrange that for me.’
* * *
The hire MPV was a glassy bubble, all doors and windows, and made Alexia instinctively uncomfortable. Like something the Pope rode, waving and blessing. Nowhere to duck and hide, only faith and toughened glass to save you. She itched on the seat facing Lucas Corta as the car cruised down Avenida Lucio Costa.
Dr Volikova had been adamant in her refusal to allow Lucas Corta out of the hotel until a short, sharply worded argument that startled Alexia with its passion and ferocity. Patient and doctor argued like lovers. Dr Volikova followed in a pick-up stacked with emergency treatment bots.
‘This is my home,’ Alexia said. In the lilac cool, with the eastern ocean indigo and the lights coming on street by street, level by level, Barra could strut its old glamour. If you overlooked the potholes, the sidewalk tiles missing like broken teeth and the trash in the gutter, the parasitic power cables and the cell masts, the white plastic water pipes scrambling up every vertical like strangling fig.
‘Show me,’ Lucas said. Norton ordered the MPV to pull in to the crumbling curb. Alexia had no intention of letting him drive, but relaying commands to the auto-drive gave him sufficient purpose and agency.
‘I’d like to get out,’ Lucas Corta said. Norton scanned the street theatrically. He could be so adorably bad ass. Alexia opened the door and unfolded the elevator. Lucas Corta travelled the few centimetres to touch down on planet Barra. ‘I’d like to walk.’
‘Are you sure?’ Alexia said. Dr Volikova was at hand even before the car had opened.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Lucas said. ‘But I want to.’
The two women helped him from his wheelchair and passed him his cane. Lucas Corta clicked along the sidewalk. At every moment Alexia was in fear of a loose tile, a stray can, a kid on a bike, blown treacherous sand, anything that might trip him and send him crashing to earth.
‘Which apartment?’
‘The one with the Auriverde windsock.’
Lucas Corta stood a long time on his cane, looking up at the lights of the apartment.
‘We’ve remodelled it since your mother’s time,’ Alexia said. ‘It used to be a rich neighbourhood, so I was told. That’s why we’re near the top. The richer you are, the higher you lived. Now it just means the more steps you have to climb. If you have any choice, you live as low as you can afford. I read the moon’s like that.’
‘Radiation,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘You want to be as far from the surface as you can afford. I was born in João de Deus and lived there until my mother built Boa Vista. It was a lava tube; two kilometres long. She sealed it and sculpted it and filled it with water and growing things. We lived in apartments carved out of the giant faces of the orixas. It was one of the wonders of the moon, Boa Vista. Our cities are great canyons filled with light and air and movement. And when it rains … It’s beautiful beyond your imagining. You say Rio is beautiful, the Marvellous City. It’s a favela compared to the great cities of the moon.’ He turned away from the tower. ‘I’d like to go to the beach.’
The light was gone now and the beach was the preserve of guy-gangs and teenagers making out or vaping drugs. Norton’s jaw twitched in displeasure but he helped Lucas down the steps on to the beach. Lucas’s cane sank into the sand. He recoiled in horror, tried to tug it free.
‘Careful, careful,’ Dr Volikova admonished.
‘It’s in my shoes,’ Lucas said. ‘I can feel it filling up my shoes. This is horrible. Get me out of this.’
Alexia and Norton carried Lucas to the sidewalk.
‘Get it out of my shoes.’
Alexia and Norton steadied Lucas while Dr Volikova removed Lucas’s shoes and poured out streams of fine sand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lucas said. ‘I hadn’t thought I would react that way. I felt it and thought dust. Dust is our enemy. I have no control over these things. It’s the first thing we learn.’
‘The moon is up,’ Norton whispered. A waning crescent stood over the eastern horizon. The lights of the cities of the moon twinkled like diamond dust. Oceans of dust, Alexia thought and it thrilled and horrified her at the same time. This man, this frail man, dying of gravity in every step and movement, came from there. A Corta: her blood, and utterly, implacably alien. Alexia shivered, tiny and mute under the far moon.
‘My mother told me that the whole family used to come down at New Year and set paper lanterns into the sea,’ Lucas said. ‘The ocean would somehow draw them out until no one could see them any more.’
‘We still do that,’ Alexia said. ‘The Reveillon. Everybody dresses in white and blue, Yemanja’s favourite colours.’
‘Yemanja was my mother’s orixa. She didn’t believe it, but she liked the idea of orixas.’
‘I find the idea of religions on the moon strange,’ Alexia said.
‘Why? We are an irrational species, and profligate at exporting our irrationality. My mother was a benefactor of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now. They believe that the moon is a laboratory for social experiments. New political systems, new social systems, new family and kinship systems. Their ultimate goal is a human social system that will endure for ten thousand years – which they consider the time it will take us to become an interstellar species. I could believe in the orixas more easily.’
‘I think it’s optimistic,’ Alexia said. ‘It says, we won’t blow ourselves up or die in climate collapse. We will get to the stars.’
‘We may. The Sisterhood says nothing about you here on Earth.’ Lucas Corta looked out again at the now-dark ocean. The moon drew a shiver of light across the black waters. ‘We fight and we die up there; we build and we destroy, we love and we hate and live lives of passion beyond your comprehension and not one of you down here cares. I’d like to go now. The sea is making me anxious. I can bear it in the light, but in the dark it has no end. I don’t like it at all.’
Norton and Alexia manoeuvred Lucas into the MPV. The car closed and Alexia saw relief on Lucas’s face. Norton ordered the car into the traffic. A couple of motorbikes had passed twice and made him nervous. Alexia glanced over her shoulder to make sure they hadn’t woven in between the MPV and Dr Volikova in her medical pick-up.
‘Senhora Corta,’ Lucas said. ‘I’d like to make you an offer.’ Lucas touched the glass partition and muted the car microphones. Norton was deaf in the front. ‘You are a talented, ambitious, ruthless young woman with the intelligence to see an opportunity and take it. You’ve built an empire but you can do so much more. This world has nothing for you. The offer my mother made to your predecessors, I make to you. Come to the moon with me. Help me take back what the Mackenzies and Suns stole from me and I will reward you so that your family will never be poor again.’
This was the moment. For this she had bribed, blackmailed, lied her way into Lucas Corta’s bedroom. She had prised open the door to the wealth and power of Corta Hélio. Beyond it was the moon.
‘I will need time to think about it.’
‘Of course. Only a fool would heedlessly step off for the moon. You have your water empire; that’s why I didn’t ask you to work for me. I asked you to come to the moon with me. I want it to cost you. You have two days to decide. My time on Earth is short, I have maybe three, four weeks left before surface-to-orbit will kill me. As it is, the odds are that I will suffer permanent damage to my health. Come to the hotel when you are certain. No more lies and disguises.’