Luna: New Moon

She had run, corridor to corridor, unable to escape the hospital, the city, the moon, until she found a tiny corner. There she curled up, arms around knees, and felt the stone sky press down on her; billions of tons of sky. He found her there. He sat across the corridor from her, not speaking, not touching, not doing anything except being there. Up in Bairro Alto, in the desperate sky, a man with a knife had taken her fog-catcher and drunk her water before her eyes. The knife had won, the knife would always win. The knife was a reproach to her until fear and fury and adrenaline sent her to face the knife, and drive a titanium spike through a man’s brain and through the top of his skull.

‘Carlinhos,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

Scared?

‘I am like you.’

In her room under the same stone sky she lays her cheek against the hollow of Carlinhos’s spine. She feels the movement of his breath, the rhythm of his heart and blood. The impossible texture of his skin. She can’t feel the scars at all.

‘Oh man, what do we do now?’

‘How old is he?’ Lucasinho asks.

‘Twenty-eight,’ Lucas says.

‘Twenty-eight!’

At Lucasinho’s age, that’s death. Lucas remembers seventeen. He hated it. Rafa’s shadow fell long on him; his few friends had all moved away, he had slipped off contact with them and felt too gauche and uncertain to make new ones. Nothing felt right around him; friends, lovers, clothes, laughter and what seventeen understands as love. It came to Rafa like rain, soaked him through with charm, cleansed him. Alone then, alone now.

He’s jealous of his son; Lucasinho’s easy sexuality, his charm, his comfort in his own body. The Dona Luna pin on his lapel.

Lucas met his son at the station. The kid wore all his piercings – a formal occasion – and clutched a cardboard cake box. Lucas almost smiled at the cake box. Where had he learned this kindness? Escoltas cleared a way through the press of celebrity spotters. On the moon, nothing was as gossip-worthy as an assassination attempt. Lucasinho held the cake box like a baby while drones swooped overhead.

They stood together ten minutes by the window to the ICU. Familiars could have shown Ariel in every detail, overlain with schematics and medical notes, but that would just have been image. The glass made it physical. Ariel lay in her coma; Beijaflor performed slow topological involutions. Then Lucas took Lucasinho up to his room. Jinji had transfered schematics to the hospital printers: the Boa Vista staff had built a comforting replica of Lucasinho’s colloquium room in Meridian. There Lucas told him about the wedding. He had planned it carefully. Lucas’s own room would have been indecent, his office too formal, too overbearing.

‘Your mother was twenty-nine when I married her. I was twenty.’

‘Look how that worked out.’

‘It worked out with you.’

‘Don’t make me do it.’

‘We’re not free in these things, Luca.’ The intimacy, the nick-of-a-nickname: he had rehearsed it on the way down to the station, trying to get used to its discomfort in his throat. He had feared he would stumble over it but when he had to say it, the word slipped free. ‘The Eagle of the Moon has ordered it.’

‘The Eagle of the Moon, the rat of the moon – that’s what you say.’

‘He has us, Luca. He can wreck the company.’

‘The company.’

‘The family. I didn’t want to marry Amanda Sun. I never loved her. Love wasn’t in the contract.’

‘But you bought you way out. Buy me out of this.’

‘I can’t. I wish I could, Luca. I would do anything to be able to do that. It’s political.’

In the box are macaroons, glossy and perfect, arranged in a spectrum of colours. Those are the things that make Lucas feel the greatest traitor. They are innocent and kind and gentle and betrayed.

‘I have a first-draft nikah,’ Lucas says.

‘Ariel is on life-support.’

‘It’s not one of Ariel’s,’ Lucas says. Lucasinho’s cheek twitches.

‘What?’

‘It’s a first draft. Luca, I could order you. For the family, all that. I’m asking you; will you marry Denny Mackenzie?’

‘Paizinho …’

Now Lucas is rocked, a small quake: he can’t remember the last time Lucasinho used the familiar, the contraction. Daddy.

‘For the family?’

‘What else is there?’

‘How long have you been there?’

The voice wakes Marina from her warm, antiseptic doze. Intensive Care Units are hugely conducive to sleep. Their warmth, the hum and mesmerising dance of the machines, the perfume of gentle botanicals that reminds her of forests, of mountains and home.

‘How long have you been awake?’

‘Too long,’ Ariel Corta says. Beijaflor brings up the head of the ICU bed. Her hair hangs loose, limp, unclean around her face. Her skin is dull and waxen, grey; her eyes sunken. Tubes and cannulae run from her wrists to the smooth white arms of the medical machines.

‘I don’t think you’re supposed to—’

‘Fuck supposed sideways,’ Ariel says. She turns the bed to face Marina. ‘What are you doing here?’