“You should see them at Interlagos,” says Treats, gun trained on his close knot of hostages.
“Fuck up,” says Turkey-Feet.
The first wheel is on. The second. Edson glances at the timer: the truck should be arriving now. And there it is, rounding the intersection with two fragrant biodiesel belches from its chromed exhausts. Waguinho swings it through the gap in the fence, wheels round and backs up close as a kiss to the trailer. Last wheel is on; the Interlagos brothers throw their gear in the back of the van; Emerson and Big Steak jump in behind it. Edson hauls himself up into the truck cab beside Waguinho and Furação. The trailer locks, Waguinho engages, and Cook/Chill Meal Solutions rolls. As they sweep out through the gate Edson sees Treats and Turkey-Feet back toward the open rear of the van. At the last minute Emerson and Big Steak scramble them in. The militars at once go for their guns, but Edimilson spins the wheels and roars out of the pound onto the street. In the wing-mirror Edson watches the van turn in the opposite direction. They’ll burn it and scatter on foot from the drop-point. Edson sees the DNA-drone skip over the cab roof, climb vertically, and vanish among the rooftop water tanks. He pulls off his bandana, leans back into the seat. The butt of the gun is hard and unexpected against his belly muscles as an erection. He never drew it. He kept that honor; he never showed the gun. Edson pushes his head back into the seat-rest, stares at the rosary and the icon of St. Martin dangling from the interior light fitting. Joy beyond utterance cracks through him; he can barely hold himself still from the huge, shaking energy. He did it. He did it. He stole four quantum computers from the São Paulo Zona Norte Military Police car pound. He wants Fia. He wants her waiting for him at the pickup point with nothing but him in her manga eyes; he wants her spread and begging on the hood of Waguinho and Furação’s truck saying, You’re The Man, Edson, malandro of malandros, you are Lord of the Crossings. What you did will be talked up and down the ladeiras for years; that Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, that was wit, that was malicia.
That Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, Dona Hortense’s crazy son; whattever happened to him? That is what they will say. Where did he go?
Edson pulls one knee up onto the seat, hugs his knee to him. The in-cab display shows police cars converging on the car pound. They may not have an arfid lock, but they have a description of the trailer and an idea where it might be headed. Can he hear sirens? Woo woo all you like, militars. In a moment I will pull my last, best trick. On the far side of the city, parked up behind a bakery that does good pão de queijo, Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles glance at an icon on their I-shades and scatter Cook/Chill Meal Solutions’s cloned arfid ID around fifty vehicles in the truck’s immediate vicinity. A smart trick and an expensive one, but there had been enough change from Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles to convert into six cut Amazonian emeralds: They nestle in lubricated, folded latex in Edson’s colon. When he gets to the other side, he’s going to require some convertibility.
And there she is, sitting on the wall where the light from the soccer ground next door falls brightest. She registers the truck swinging in across the stream of taillights; she jumps up and down in un-self-conscious joy. Her little pack bounces on her back. Edson cannot rid himself of the image of her Hello Kitty panties. The truck bowls across the parking lot past the decaying glass and steel hulk of the food court, draws up under the lights and stops in a gasm of airbrakes.
“Great choice of location, Edson,” Fia says. “Between soccer jocks over there whistling at me and alcos and junkies.” Then she runs and kisses him hard full right then right there where he’s dropped to the hardtop, standing on her tiptoes. Maybe it’s relief, maybe it’s the blaze of success, maybe it’s his corajoso leaving him, but Edson feels as if the soccer ground floods have broken into a shower of light raining down on him; photons, actual and ghost, pounding him cleaning him, bouncing softly from the stained concrete, entangled as kitten-wool with other lives, other histories. The city and its ten thousand towers spin around him: he is the axis of Sampa, of all Brasil, of the whole wide planet and all its manifestations across the multiverse in this instant in the parking lot of a dead mall.
Fia runs her finger along the flank of the trailer, stops at the great cirrcular hole cut out of the side. She leans carefully in to stare up into the trailer interior. Edson knows she is thinking, I died in there.
“The back’s open,” he says.
Memory is such a little Judas. So many times Edson has recalled the inteerior of Cook/Chill Meal Solutions, and now, as Fia finds the light switches and illuminates the décor, the sofa isn’t where he remembered and it’s bigger and a different color, and the coffee machine is on the other side of the counter, and the footstools are zebra skin not jaguar, and the spiral staircase is more Kung-fu Kitsch than Guangzhou-Cybercool. Yet Edson feels as if he’s on a first date: this is his place and he’s invited her back. She walks around the furnishings, touching, stroking, deeply fascinated by the trails her fingers leave in the dust that has accumulated on the plastic surfaces.
“This is weird, weird. I feel her here much much more.” She glances up at the plastic cube over her head, gives a small gasp of wonder and climbs the spiral staircase. Edson watches her move around the studio, awakening the quantum cores one by one. The blue glow of quantum dots skeined across universes underlights her cheekbones in sharp relief, Japans her. He had seen a ghost then, a presence in the empty studio: a quantum echo.
Edson joins Fia in the glowing blue cube.
“The guys want to move the trailer inside. It’s not secure out here.”
Fia waves her hand: Whatever. Her tongue protrudes slightly between her teeth, caught in concentration. Edson steadies himself on a stanchion as Cook/Chill Meal Solutions lurches into motion; Fia moves unconsciously with the flow.
“This should be in an art gallery.” She sounds love-dazed, incoherent with ecstasy. “Four quantum-dot Q-cores. And she built them from… junk? Where I come from, the São Paulo U Q-frame… this is decades ahead of anything we have. It’s like it’s come from the future. Every part of this is beautiful.”
“Can you get it to work?”
“Your language and protocols are different, but I can recode.”
“But can you make it work?”
“Let’s see.”
She slips off her long coat. The tattoo on her exposed belly glows with reflected quantum-light. The wheels within wheels on her stomach start to turn. Fia feels Edson’s stare.
“It’s just an effect thing, really.” She taps keys, leans forward into the blue light. She frowns; her lips move as she reads from the screens. Edson has never seen her so beautiful. “It’s finding a common communication channel. Ooh!” Fia starts, smiles as if to some intimate delight. “We’re in.” She rattles keys; her skin crawls with gears in motion. “Yah! Yah! Come on, you puta!” She slaps the desk. As if it has heard and obeyed, the truck lurches to a stop. Fia throws her hands up. “What did I do?”
Voices, echoing from the naked rolled steel girders of the rotting mall.
Voices Edson doesn’t recognize. He rattles down the spiral stair, cautiously pokes his head out the Q-blade-cut hole. The glinting sin-black visor of a HUD visor looks up into his face. Beneath it, a grin. Beneath the grin, the muzzle of an assault gun. Visor, visors. The truck is ringed by armed and armored seguranças. The rear doors of the trailer slam open: twenty more seguranças with assault weaponry. The grinning face waves its gun toward the rear of the truck.