Luna: New Moon

‘Pick it up again,’ Carlinhos calls and pulls ahead. Marina kicks and follows him into the heart of the pack. Beats engulf her, their rhythm the rhythm of her heart, her feet. The chanting voices call to her voice. She can’t understand the words but she wants to join them. She is expanded. Her senses, her personal space overlap with the runners close around her, yet at the same time she is radiantly conscious of her body. Lungs, nerves, bones and brain are a unity. She moves effortlessly, perfectly. Every sense is tuned to its highest possible note. She hears the drums in her knees, her heels. She smells the sweat of Carlinhos’s skin. The play of the tassels across her skin is erotic. She can distinguish every hovering dust mote. She recognises a shoulder tattoo at the head of the pack and, as if her look was a touch, Saadia from her squad turns and acknowledges her. A wave of undiluted joy breaks through Marina’s entire body.

The words. She knows them now. They are Portuguese, a language she doesn’t fully understand, in a dialect she can’t comprehend, but their meaning is clear. St George, lord of iron, my husband. Saint strike boldly. St George has water but bathes in blood. St George has two cutlasses. One for cutting grass, one for making marks. He wears robes of fire. He wears a shirt of blood. He has three houses. The house of riches. The house of wealth. The house of war. The words are in her throat, the words are on her lips. Marina has no idea how they got there.

‘Pick it up, Marina,’ Carlinhos says a third time and together they move through the press of bodies and familiars to the head of the pack of runners. There is nothing in front of Marina. The tunnel curves away forever before her. Air eddies cool on her skin. She could run like this forever. Body and mind, soul and senses are one thing, greater and more perceptive than any of its elements.

‘Marina.’ The voice has been calling her name for some time. ‘Drop back.’ They peel from the lead position and drop down the side of the pack. ‘Take this right.’

It’s physical pain to leave the runners for the cross tunnel, but the emotional hurt is crushing. Marina comes to a halt, hands on thighs, head bowed, and howls with loss. She hears the voices and drums and chimes of the runners disappearing into the distance and it is like she has been cast out of elf-land. Beat by beat she remembers who she is. Who he is.

‘I’m sorry. Oh God.’

‘Better to keep moving or you will lock up.’

She coaxes her body into a painful jog. The cross tunnel opens on to Third Santa Barbra Quadra. The skyline is dark, the quadra glows with low pools of street light and ten thousand windows. Marina is cold now.

‘How long was I …’

‘Two complete circuits. Sixteen kilometres.’

‘I didn’t notice …’

‘You don’t. That’s the idea.’

‘How long …’

‘No one really knows, but it’s been going on all my life. The idea is that it never stops. Runners drop in, runners drop out. We cycle through the saints. It’s my church. It’s where I heal, where I disappear for a time. Where I stop being Carlinhos Corta.’

Now the weight of those sixteen kilometres descends on Marina’s thighs and calves. She had only ever been a reluctant runner in pre-launch training. This is different. Part of her will always be out there, running in that ever-circling wheel of praise. She can’t wait to go back.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Anything more would tarnish the moment. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we shower.’

Analiese Mackenzie descends the spiral staircase from the bedroom into the entrails of a fly; exploded, expanded, enhanced and annotated. Wings unfold into vanes, eyes disintegrate into their component lens, legs and pulps and proboscis, nanochips and protein processors whirl around her head. At the centre sits Wagner, back turned, naked as he likes to be when he is concentrating, summoning and dismissing, enlarging and superimposing images in their shared sight. It’s dazzling, it’s dizzying, it’s four thirty in the morning.

‘Ana.’

She made no sound she’s aware of but Wagner has picked her out of the apartment’s background of hisses and hums and creaks. It starts with heightened sensitivities, restlessness, a boundless energy. This insomnia is something new.

‘Wagner, it’s …’

‘Take a look at this.’

Wagner leans back his chair, slips an arm around Analiese’s ass. His other hand spins dismembered fly around the room.

‘What is this?’ Analiese asks.

‘This is the fly that tried to kill my brother.’

‘Before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of us.’