Luna: New Moon

Wagner picks up the knives, instinctively finds the balance. He looks at the things in his hands. He’s just past full dark and his focus and concentration are at their most intense. He could spend hours obsessing of the line of the edge, the metallurgy.

‘You do that too comfortably,’ Carlinhos says.

‘Scary things.’ Wagner sets them back in the case. ‘I’ll be there. I don’t want to be, but I will.’

‘I don’t want to be either.’

Brothers hug. Carlinhos had offered a room in the apartment but Wagner has called on the pack. The Packhouse is a cold and dim place when the Earth is dark. He came up from Theophilus the night before and slept fitfully in the pack bed, tiny and spread across as much space as he could, but still one man; troubled by recurring dreams of standing naked in the middle of the Ocean of Storms. Analiese doesn’t believe his story about going up to Meridian on family business but she can find no obvious lie to get purchase on.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Wagner asks. Carlinhos’s laugh startles him.

‘All the others, they all say how sorry they are, how guilty they feel. Not one has asked if they can do anything for me.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I should like very much to eat some meat,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

‘Meat.’

‘You can eat that?’

‘Not usually in this aspect, but for you, irmão …’

Sombra locates a churrasceria, vainly expensive. It boasts rare-breed pork and gin-massaged, music-soothed beef from dwarf Kuroge Washu cattle. Glass-fronted meat safes display the hanging carcases, small as pets. The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything.

Run with me, he said.

Marina and Carlinhos drop on to the back of the Long Run. In five breaths they have matched the rhythm of the ritual. Marina is not afraid to sing this time. There is only one Long Run. It hasn’t stopped, day or night, since she last dropped out of it. Then her heart, her blood, her muscles tune to the unity.

Yes, I will, yes, she said. Marina had come to Carlinhos’s call expecting sex, hoping for something else. Something to take them out of this apartment that stank of the close presence of death. Carlinhos wanted to go home and run. João de Deus was only an hour away on the fast train. She and Carlinhos travelled in their Long Run kit. They drew admiring smiles and glances. They are handsome together. You know who they are? Oh, really? Marina’s kit was smaller and tighter than she had ever dared before; her body paint more aggressive. I’m tighter and more aggressive, she thought. She had retrieved the green tassels of Ogun from vacuum storage and wore them with pride.

Marina kicks forward to the head of the run. Carlinhos laughs and comes up on her shoulder. Restless blade, Ogun’s knife cuts out-of-doors. Restless blade. Ogun’s knife goes for the kill. Then time, self, consciousness vanish.

They fall on to the train home, sweet and sweaty, fall into the seats as the train accelerates on to Equatorial One, fall together. Marina curls up against Carlinhos. He is so good, he brings out her inner cat. She loves the otherness of men; they are as unknowable as animals. She loves them as things different from and marvellous to her self.

‘Will you come?’ Carlinhos mumbles.

She has been expecting and dreading this question so her answered is prepared.

‘I will, yes. But …’

‘You won’t look.’

‘Carlinhos, I’m sorry. I can’t see you get hurt.’

‘I won’t die.’

Ten minutes to Meridian.

‘Carlo.’ This is the first time Marina has ever called Carlinhos by his most intimate name; his family-and-amors name. ‘I’m going to leave the moon.’

He says, ‘I understand,’ but Marina feels Carlinhos’s body tighten against hers.

‘I’ve got the money and my mum will be all right and your family has been wonderful to me, but I can’t stay. I’m scared every day. Every single day, all the time. I’m afraid all the time. That’s not a way to live. I have to leave, Carlinhos.’

Passengers are already rising and collecting their children, luggage, friends in anticipation of arrival. On the pressurised side of the platform Marina and Carlinhos kiss. She stands on tiptoe. Train travellers smile.

‘I’ll be there,’ Marina says. They go to their separate apartments and in the morning Carlinhos walks out to fight.