Luna: New Moon

He lies on his belly on a table in the Nossa Senhora da Rocha Pavilion. Spray from the Oxum waterfall gathers and drips from the lip of the dome. A masseur works his body, fingers deep in the muscle fibres. Carlinhos moans, little cries that sound like sex. It repulses Ariel: another touching your body so intimately. Another has touched her body, more intimately than massage, or sex.

Carlinhos turns his head to one side, grins at his sister.

‘Ola.’

‘My silver tongue let me down this time, Carlo.’

Carlinhos’s face twitches sad. He grimaces to another deep working by the masseur. You are magnificent, Ariel thinks, and I think of knives slicing that perfect skin and I am filled with cold horror.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ Carlinhos says.

‘I can try … No I can’t do anything. I’ve reached the end of words. They will have their duel.’

‘I know.’

Ariel kisses the back of her brother’s neck.

‘Kill him, Carlo. Kill him slowly and painfully. Kill him in front of their eyes so they can see every last thing they hoped to do to our family bleed out in front of them. Kill him for me.’

‘Can I come? Can I?’

‘No!’ Rafa thunders. Robson trots at his father’s heel.

‘I want to support Carlinhos.’

‘No,’ Rafa says again.

‘Why not? You’re going. Everyone is going.’

Rafa turns to Robson.

‘It’s not handball. It’s not a game. It’s not a thing you support. We’re going because Carlinhos does not fight alone. I don’t want to go. I don’t want him to go. But I will go. And you will not.’

Robson shuffles, frowns.

‘Then I want to see him now.’

Rafa sighs in exasperation.

‘Okay.’

The gym is the least used of Boa Vista’s chambers. Bots have cleared years of dust, slowly warmed it from the chill of the eternal deep rock. Carlinhos has hung ceramic bells on ribbons from the ceiling. Seven bells. In a pair of fighting trunks he feints and dodges, cuts and pivots across the floor.

‘Irmão.’

Carlinhos comes panting to the rail. He sets the knife on the ledge, rests his chin on his folded arms.

‘Hey, Robson.’

‘Tio.’

‘Did you ring any?’ Rafa nods at the hanging bells.

‘I never ring any bells,’ Carlinhos says. A movement, so fast and unexpected Carlinhos has no answer to it. Robson presses the tip of the knife to the soft skin under Carlinhos’s right ear.

‘Robson …’

‘Hadley Mackenzie taught me, if you take a man’s knife, you must use it against him. Never let go of the knife.’

Carlinhos is liquid action; he ducks away from the knife point and in the same flow of movement twists Robson’s wrist firmly enough to teach pain. Carlinhos scoops up the dropped knife.

‘Thank you, Robson. I’ll watch for that.’

All the bells chime, a gentle tintinnabulation. Another small quake.

Carlinhos comes out of the bathroom, eyes wide.

‘There’s a whirlpool in there. I didn’t even have a whirlpool in Boa Vista.’

‘It’s the least I can do, Carlo.’

Lucas’s preparation of Camp Carlinhos has been unusually difficult. The wedding fiasco still taints the social atmosphere. Should news of a duel between enemy Dragons leak, even the threat of litigation from Cortas and Mackenzies would not stay the gossip networks. Handsome boys fighting in not many clothes. Even better than handsome boys marrying. The exclusive apartment on Orion hub was hired through shell companies; the printer designs commissioned through another and the masseurs, physiotherapists, psychologists, cooks, dietitians, knife-smiths, discreet security hired anonymously through agency AIs. A training room has been built and Mariano Gabriel Demaria brought secretly from Queen of the South and set up in the adjoining apartment. Last of all, Carlinhos’s fighting knives, of lunar steel, have been carried from João de Deus and installed in the dojo.

‘This is the bedroom.’

‘I can walk right round this bed.’

Carlinhos collapses back on to the bed and folds his arms behind his head. His glee is bright. Lucas’s mouth tightens.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry. This. I should never have asked …’

‘You didn’t ask. I offered.’

‘But, if I hadn’t held out on Lucasinho …’

‘Ariel came to see me in Boa Vista. Do you know what she said? That she was sorry she couldn’t stop it. And you’re sorry because you think you’re the cause of it. Luca, I always knew this would come. I printed out my first knife, and I looked at it and I saw this. Not Hadley MacKenzie, but a fight where the family would depend on me.’

It’s a forgiving.

‘Hadley Mackenzie is fit and very fast.’

‘I’m fitter.’

‘Carlinhos …’

Lucas looks at his brother, sprawled on the bed, happy on real cotton. In twenty-four hours you could be dead. How can you bear that? How can you bear to waste an instant to anything that is trivial? Perhaps that’s the fighter’s wisdom; the trivia, the immediate physicality of high thread-count imported cotton, the felt things are the vital ones.

‘What?’

‘You’re faster.’