"Take it." Mr. Peach offers the gun handle first to
Sextinho. It's a handsome, cocky piece he keeps in his bedside
cabinet, for the night when the indentured biofarm workers above and
the housing projects below meet and the world breaks over Fazenda
Alvaranga.
"I wouldn't know what to do with it."
"It's easy, I've shown you; this, this, and you're ready. Just
take the fucking thing."
He never swears. Mr. Peach never swears. ''I'm sorry . . . " He
presses hand to head. "It's just you don't know what you're
doing. So take the fucking gun."
Edson lifts the bone handle in limp fingers. It's much heavier than
he imagined. He understands now what the boys see in these pieces,
the sexy metal, the potency. He stashes it away quickly in his bag.
Dona Hortense must never find it. It would be a nail in her heart to
see her littlest and second-favorite son gone to the gun. Quickly, he
says, "You've seen the video, what do you think that was?"
"A ghost," says Mr. Peach.
"I don't believe in ghosts," Edson says.
"I do," says Mr. Peach. "The most real things there
are, ghosts. Take the gun, Sextinho, and please, please, querida,
look after yourself."
That evening in his hammock Edson takes a fistful of pills and
invents a new self: Bisbilhotinho, Little Snoop the private dick. He
is polite and quite slow spoken. He plans everything carefully and
moves slowly and deliberrately so that people will make no mistake
about his seriousness. He always leaves himself a clear way out. He
deals with killers. Little Snoop is a young personality and has yet
to spread wide his wings and flash the colors hidden there, but Edson
likes him, can see where Little Snoop might surprise him.
"You're going where?" Petty Cash says as Bisbilhotinho
trades identities with him. "Hey, I'm not so sure about this; if
you get killed, I'm dead."
"Then you get to inherit my clients," Little Snoop says.
"What clients?" Petty Cash calls after him.
It's a risk, leaving the bike with all its engine parts in place, but
he may need to get away fast. He's paid two different kids well to
mind it, with more on his return. They'll keep an eye on each other.
Todos os Santos at night is a blazing city. Truck headlights dip and
veer as they plow the rutted road into the heart of Out Lady of
Trash. Garbage fires smolder; kids gather around burning oil drums
stirring the flames with broken planks. Churrassceiros tend their
small braziers, charcoals red under white, flyaway ash. Boys shoot
pool under clip-on neons in tattered lanchonetes. Edson can see the
guns tucked in the backs of their baggies, like his own. But it
doesn't make him feel safe at all. Heads turn as he works his way up
the spiral road. Atom Shop is closed.
The bar is jammed with customers watching soccer on a big screen.
Little Snoop orders a Coke and shows the video grab to the barman.
Edson has watched the clip so many times it has become a visual
prayer: her face turning away from him as the moto-taxi accelerates
into the traffic.
"Her parents are worried," he says to the barman.
"I'd be too, if you're looking here," says the bartender, a
handsome twenty-something. "No, I don't recall her."
"Do you mind if I pass it around?"
The fans pass the I-shades hand to hand, a cursory look, a purse of
the lips, a shake of the head, a small sigh. Some comment that that
is a goodlooking girl. Goooooooooooool! roars the commentator as
Little Snoop steps down onto the road. Half the bar leaps to its
feet.
Patiently, politely, Little Snoop works up the spiral. As the
trasherers and collectors never rest, neither do the workshops and
the disassemblers. The kids running handcarts of parts to the grill
plates and ovens barely glance at the video. Have you seen her, have
you seen her? The chippers and smelters bent over in the hissing
light of bottled gas shake their heads, irriitated at the
distraction.
"Her parents, eh?" The woman is big, easy, rolls of fat
lapping generously as she sits, one leg outstretched, on the step of
the gold refinery. Her wealth is in her teeth, around her neck, on
her fingers, the stubby, sweet-smelling cigar she smokes with simple
relish. "And they hired you? Son, you're no priivate detective.
But you're not anything else either, so I'll answer your guestion.
Yes. I know this face." Edson's heart kicks inside so hard she
must hear it: a meaty knock. "She was selling stuff, tech stuff;
gear, good gear. Gear like I've never seen before, like no one had
ever seen before. And some jewelry."
"In the last month?"
"In the last twenty-four hours, son."
Beyond the shotgun shacks, the dark trash mountains crawl with stars;
LED head-torches and candle lanterns flickering like fireflies. The
miasma the dump constantly exudes blue and yellow. It is radiantly
beautiful. Weird stuff here by superstition, street legend. Whispers
of night visions; strange juxtapositions of this city with other,
illusory landscapes; angels, visitations, UFOs, orixás.
Ghosts.
"Do you know who bought them?"
"Son, there's always someone buying something around here. Some
of the usual dealers—you won't catch them here this time of
night. They've more sense."
"Do you know if she's staying around here?"
"She'd be a bigger fool than you if she were. I got one set of
eyes, son, and a failing memory. Count your blessings."
Descending the spiral Little Snoop calls in at the futebol bar and
has a bottle of good import whiskey sent up to bling woman. It's
expensive, but that's the way his city works. A favor given, a favor
returned. And his Yamaha is intact, untouched, absolutely flawless.
Eleven thirty-eight and Edson's ass feels like a spill of hardened
concrete. There's one safe little niche on the hotel roof, but it's
small, uncomfortable, and ball-freezingly cold. This is an unglossy
neighborhood, forgotten like discarded underwear behind the kanji
frontages and Harajuku pinks of the sushi bars and theatrical
teppanyaki eateries. Hardpoint sensors and an aerial drone on a
three-minute orbit supplement the bored teen with the stupid
near-moustache crewing the security barrier. Edson watches the HiLux
pickup laden with vegetables drive through the gates into the
cul-de-sac. Close behind the scooped red-tile roof the pencil-thin
apartment towers rise, crowned in moving ads for beer and
telenovelas. He's never been so close to the mythical heart of the
city. Praça de Sé is ten blocks away.
She grew up here
, Edson thinks. Her life was shaped in this
long, bulb-ended street like a vagina. She pedalled that pink
kiddie-bike with the streamers from the handlebars around this
turning circle. She put up a stall made from garden tools and sheets
to sell doces and iced tea to the neighbors. She tongue-kissed her
first boyfriend just around that step in the build-line where the
segurança couldn't watch her. Her parents are unloading the
truck now, boxes bursting with green and dark red so soft you could
imagine rolling over in them to sleep.
"Ghosts. Like, the way you mean ghost?" he had said to Mr.
Peach, the gun hard against the crack of his ass.
"Go on." There was a way Mr. Peach carried himself—eager,
leaning, hands tense—when he expected more than affection and
sex from Sextinho.
"There are millions of other Fias out there in other universes,
other parts of the multiverse."
"Yes."
"And one of them . . . "
"Go on."
"Has come through."
"That's a nice expression. Come through."
"That's impossible."
"What you think is impossible and what quantum theory says is
imposssible are very different things. What's impossible is covered
by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Pauli exclusion
principle. The rest is just shades of probable. Quantum computing
relies on what we call a 'superposiition': a linkage between the same
atom in different states in different uniiverses. An answer comes
through from somewhere out in those universes. And sometimes
something more than an answer."
To the right. On the roof of the garage. Movement, a figure. Edson's
heart thumps so hard it hurts. He needs to hurl. He moves to the low
parapet, leans over. He can't make out any detail in this damn yellow
light. His hand goes to click up the zoom on his Chilli beans; then
the figute sets a can of paint on the parapet. Some kid, a
pichaçeiro, leaning over the edge to roller his tag. The heart
eases, but the nausea peaks.
On the left. Walking slowly down the street, hood up, hands folded in
the front pocket of a weird knitted short hoodie thing, like a
street-nun. Skinny gray leggings tucked into fuck-me boots. Boots.
Good boots, but who wears boots with leggings? He knows that
too-tight walk, those too-short steps. Her face is shadowed by the
hood, but the highlights, the glances are identification enough for
Edson. Fia/Not Fia. Her hair is longer. But this is Fia. A Fia.
Another Fia. She stops to glance down the guarded street.
You were
born there too, in that other Liberdade, weren't you? The city, the
streets, the houses are the same. What brought you? Curiosity? Proof?
What are you feeling? Why are you in this world at all?
The guard
stirs in his booth. The Fia turns away, walks on. Edson drops from
his surveillance, sits back to the coaming, panting, knees drawn up
to thin chest. He has never been so scared, not even when he went up
the hill to The Man to get his blessing to open De Freitas Global
Talent, not even the night when Cidade Alta exploded around Emerson
and Anderson.
You've identified her. Now get off this roost, get down there
. Edson falls in thirty meters behind the Fia. The security kid
checks him. Edson closes with the Fia. She glances over her shoulder.
Twenty paces now. He knows how to do it. It's all there in his head.
Then the car stops across the end of the road.
"Fia!"
The car door opens; men step out. Fia turns at the sound of the name
no one should speak. Edson pulls the big chrome gun out of the back
of his pants. The security guard leaps to his feet. All in a bubble
of space-time, beautiful, motionless.
"Fia! To me! Run to me. Fia, I knew you, do you understand? I
knew you."
She makes the decision in the instant it takes Edson to bring the gun
up two-handed. She flees toward him, a tight-elbowed, flapping
girl-run. The two men pelt after her. They are big; they know how to
run; their jacket tails flap. Edson snatches Fia's hand, drags her in
his wake. He stops dead. Fia slams into him. From the other end of
the street comes a third running man, a little flicker of blue light
dancing around his right hand where the naked tip of his Q-blade
wounds space-time. And the stupid stupid security kid has his gun
gripped in both hands like something he's seen in a game and he's
shouting, "Don't move! Don't fucking move! Put the gun down! Put
the gun down!"
"Don't be stupid, they'll kill us all," Edson shouts. "Run
now!" The kid panics, throws away the piece, and flees up the
street into the palm-creaking dekasegui gardens. Lights come on
behind bamboo blinds as Edson snatches Fia down the side alley where
he has parked the Yam. Jesus and all the Saints this is going to be
tight. ... Her arms close around his waist. Start. Start.
Start.
The engine yells into life. Edson steers one-handed down the
alleyway, dodging trash cans and junk.
"Take the gun take the gun. Anything you see in front of you,
shoot it."
"But . . . "
But he's already flying. The gun crash/flashes twice by the side of
his head; he hears shells scream off walls and girderwork. He sees
two dark shapes whirl away from him. Gone. But the third man, the man
with the knife, blocks the exit from the alley. An arc of blue. He
holds the Q-blade level; the bisecting stroke. This is how it was;
let them come to you; let their own velocity cut them in half.
Bang
bang
. The knifeman anticipates, dives, comes up with the blade
ready. Crying with fear, Edson kicks out. The backhand slash shaves
rubber swarf from the heel of his Nikes, but the man goes down. Edson
guns the throttle and wheelies out into the street. Behind him, the
two other killers are up. A whisper of jets: security drones are
arriving onscene and deploying antipersonnel arrays. Sirens close
from all sides, but Edson is through them, out into the light and the
endless traffic of his Sampa.
The muzzle creeps cold into the hollow behind his ear on Rua Luis
Gama.
"There's no bullets in that thing."
He feels Fia's breath warm against the side of his head.
"Are you sure? Did you count them?"
"You're going to shoot me in this traffic?"
She reaches round and locks one hand on the throttle, beside his.
"I'll take that risk."
Tetchy. So her. So Fia.
"So who the hell are you."
"Pur that thing away and I'll tell. God alone knows how many
cameras have seen it."
"Cameras?"
"You really aren't from round here, are you?"
Cold muzzle is replaced by hot whisper: "Yes I am."
''I'm Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas."
"That doesn't mean anything. That's just a name. Who are you
with? The Order?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Did she know' you? My ... alter'"
"We were, she was my girlfriend."
She says quickly, harshly, "I'm not her. You must know that."
"But you are Fia Kishida."
"Yes. No. I am Fia Kishida. It was you on the rodovia, wasn't
it? Where are we going?"
"Somewhere. Safe." Not home. Some things, even more than
guns, cannot be explained to Dona Hortense. Emerson can put a couple
of mattresses down in the office; that will do until Edson thinks of
what to do with a murdered girlfriend's double come through from a
parallel São Paulo and being hunted by pistoleiros and
Q-blades. He feels Fia's arms tight around his waist as he blurs
through the wash of taillights. Behind him in the slipstream she says
nothing. She knows where she is. It's always São Paulo.