Luna: New Moon

‘Luna, what happened to your shoes?’ Lousika says. ‘And your dress.’

Luna looks at the floes of butterflies slowly drifting downstream.

‘You’re going away.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I heard you say it.’

None of the questions Lousika could ask have any meaning here.

‘Yes. I am going back to Twé, back to my family. But only for a while. Not for always.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know, love. No longer than I have to.’

‘But I’m not going with you.’

‘No. I would love to, more than anything – more than myself – but I can’t.’

‘Am I safe, Mama?’

Lousika hugs Luna to her, kisses the top of her head.

‘You’re safe. Papa will keep you safe. He’ll tear the head off anyone who tries to hurt you. But I have to go until things are clear. I don’t want to, and I will miss you so much. Papa will look after you, and Madrinha Elis. Elis will not let anything hurt you.’

The words burn Lousika Asamoah’s throat. Madrinhas, host mothers. Hired wombs, who become nannies, who become unofficial aunts, become family. For small corporations like the Cortas with a business to build and no time for pregnancy, birth, early infancy, Lousika could understand the arrangement. Not for the next generation, not that the coven of demure, ever-present madrinhas should become tradition. She resented tall, Brazilian-cheek-boned Madrinha Elis carrying her child, birthing her baby. She had been shocked when Rafa had presented the surrogacy as a done thing: the Corta way. Put it in me, plant it in me, let me grow it and carry it and press it into the world. I don’t need Madonnas of Conception to mix your sperm with my egg and pronounce, let there be life. I don’t need to watch your gyno-bots slide the embryo up into sleek, smiling Elis and watch her every day grow bigger and fuller. I don’t need to see the reports, the scans of her uterus, the daily posts of how her pregnancy is progressing. And I did not need to lock myself away in my room howling and smashing things as Elis went under the knife. It should have been me, Luna. It should have been me they brought you to. My smiling, exhausted, teary face the first thing you saw. An Asamoah. Life flows and spurts and gushes in all our fluids and juices. I am fit, fertile, everything works naturally, brilliantly, fecundly. But it’s not the Corta way.

I love you Luna, but I cannot love the Corta way.

Lousika wraps Luna up in her arms, rocks as much for her own comfort as for Luna’s. One assassin-fly has cracked her world. This is not a garden of gods, a palace of waters. It’s a tunnel in the rock. Every one of her family’s light-filled agraria, every city and factory and settlement, is a scrape, a fragile bivouac of rocks against the vacuum sky and the killing sun. Everyone is in danger, all the time. Nowhere can you escape, or even hide.

‘Your papa and the contract and everyone may say you’re a Corta, but you are an Asamoah. You’re an Asamoah because I am an Asamoah because my mother is an Asamoah. That’s our way.’

Lucas Corta sweeps his hand across the board table and scatters the virtual documents.

‘I haven’t time for this. Where did it come from? Who made it?’

Heitor Pereira dips his head. He is a head shorter and a decade greyer than everyone at the board table except Adriana Corta and her Finance Director, Helen de Braga, the dark will of Corta Hélio.

‘We’re still analysing—’

‘We have the best R&D unit on the moon and you can’t tell me who made this?’

‘They’ve gone to remarkable lengths to hide anything that might identify the drone. The chips are generic, we’ve nothing on the printer pattern.’

‘So you don’t know.’

‘We don’t know yet.’ Everyone around the table hears the tremble in Heitor Pereira’s voice.

‘You don’t know who made it, you don’t know who sent it, you don’t know how it got through security. You don’t know if, right now, another one of those things is coming for my brother, or me, or, God save us, my mother. You’re head of security, and you don’t know this?’

Lucas holds the stare. Heitor Pereira’s face twitches.

‘We are in a total security situation. We’re monitoring everything over the size of a skin-flake.’

‘What if they’re here already? That drone could have been planted months ago. Have you thought of that? There could be a dozen more waking up right now. A hundred more. They only need to get lucky once. I know what modern poisons do. They make you wait. They make you wait in hours of pain, knowing each breath is shorter than the one before, knowing there’s no antidote, knowing you’re going to die. You spend a long time looking at death. Only then do they let you die. And I know that someone tried to use one of those poisons on my brother. That’s what I know. Now, tell me, what do you know?’