‘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.’
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.
The bots finish dusting the courtroom moments before the combatants arrive. It hasn’t been used in a decade. The air has been scrubbed; no taint, real or imagined, of old blood. The courtroom feels cold though it has been brought up to skin-temperature. It is small and very beautiful, panelled and floored in wood. Its heart is the fighting ring, a five-metre sprung floor, good for dancing or fighting. Witness docks and judges’ benches are narrow galleries around the ring. Adversaries and judges sit close enough to be hit by arterial spray. This is the morality of the combat court: violence touches everyone.
In the Mackenzie dock; Duncan Mackenzie, Bryce Mackenzie. He can barely fit in the narrow gallery. Again in lieu of Robert Mackenzie, Jade Sun-Mackenzie, mother of the zashitnik. In the Corta dock, Rafa, Lucas, Wagner and Ariel Mackenzie. With Ariel, her escolta, Marina Calzaghe. Ariel defeated a last-minute subpoena attempt by the Mackenzies’ legal team to compel Lucasinho, Robson and Luna to attend. Judges Remy, El-Ashmawi and Mishra preside, none of whom have ever worked with Ariel Corta.
Judge Remy calls the court to order. Judge El-Ashmawi reads the offence. Judge Mishra asks if any reconciliation or apology will be made. None, says Lucas Corta.
The formalities calm, the formalities order, the formalities distance you from what will happen in this wooden ring.
Seconds in. For the Mackenzies, Denny Mackenzie and Constant Duffus, deputy head of security. For the Cortas, Heitor Pereira and Mariano Gabriel Demaria. Each side presents the fighting knives to the judges. They inspect them minutely, though none knows about blades, and approve one from each case. Mariano Gabriel Demaria kisses the hilt as he lays the lunar steel knife in its cradle.