Edson shifts on his feet, surly, stupid stupid stupid with his disfigured white leather jacket hanging around him.

“She told you not to go but you just had to, didn’t you? Look, there’s nothing special about you. There’s been dozens before you. She likes boys of a certain type, but she is out of your class. It doesn’t mean anything. Did you think it did? This is business and you can’t even begin to imagine what we’re doing here and, frankly, ignorance is bliss. Really. Look, you think they give these away in packets of Ruffles?” He flips back his jacket to reveal the blade. “So you’re going now. And you’re not going to come back. Leave her alone. You are Sorocaba playing against São Paulo. You won’t see her again. Go on. Go; I will cut you.”

Edson’s face is hot with rage, and humiliation sings in his ears. He shrugs off the halves of his jacket. Whatever is in the pockets can stay. He will not bow to pick them up.

“Bicha!” he shouts as he tries to maintain dignity descending the treacherous scree of tech-trash. The knifeman shrugs.

“Give my head peace, favelado.”

On the third day Gerson comes to his kid brother, sixth son of a sixth son, and stands over him, rocking and raging in the hammock beside his office. His calls have fallen into dead air. It’s that puta of a bicha blocking him, he’s sure of that. Three days, stomping round the house; kicking over Dona Horttense’s little piles of farofa and cubes of cake offered to the Lady; getting nothing done; earning no money.

“You’re in my light.”

“You know, if you were half the man you claimed you were, you’d be right over there, Q-blade or no Q-blade.”

And Edson thinks, He’s right. And Fuck it luck it luck it. And It’s a sorry state when Gerson is right. Thirty minutes later, the green-and-yellow scrambler bursts our of the alley behind Dona Hortense’s. But they’re not Edson’s sweet thighs straddling it. They’re Efrim’s; in a short silvery strappy dress like the one Fia wore at the gafieira (not that Efrim would admit playing copycat) soft suede calf boots in pink, and his beautiful big Afro. One final layer of costume: he swapped identities with Petty Cash, his most trusted alibi.

Edson bumps over the debris-strewn approach to the decaying mall where the quantumeiros have parked up the truck. He rounds the collapsed delivery bay. Mothers and kids, escaped debt slaves, a life lower than even the favela, follow him with their eyes. Edson would not leave an empty Coke can there, but the quanrumeiros’ spooky reputation keeps the street kids away. The vast parking lot is empty. Efrim touches one pink suede boot to the blacktop, spins the bike, accelerates across the weed-strewn parking lot to the highway.

The tail is back to three kilometers, says the traffic report on his Chilllibeans, but Efrim slips up the side of the convoy of food trucks up from Santos. He can see the top of the truck over the cars and gridlocked executivo coaches. The roof slants at an odd angle. The police have traffic cones out and are trying to wave vehicles into one lane. There are three cruisers, one ambulance, and a lot of rotating orange lights. Two camera drones circle overhead. Now sick with dread, Efrim duck-waddles the Yam up between the grinding cars. No one will notice another rubber-necker among all the passsengers craning out their windows.

The truck lists as if capsized by a sudden melting of the road. The line of the cut starts just above the fender and slices perfectly through cab, engine, and coupling. The driver’s side front wheel has a neat spiral of glittering swarf sheared off from it. Efrim knows that if you were to touch that bright metal, it would cut you quicker than any razor. Sharp down to the quantum level. The slash runs the length of the trailer, makes the same strange spiral pattern on the rear wheels before exiting at the rear. The sheared-away material lies some hundred meters down the highway. Oils and hydraulic fluids spread from severed lines.

It would have been like this , Efrim thinks as he paddles his scrambler bike past the wreckage of Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. He would have waited on the verge, like a hitcher. Aristide would have given him the horns: You’re too close to the road, fool. But he needed to be close; he needed to be at fingertip reach. All he would have to do was flick out the Q-blade and let the truck drive straight down his cut. The pattern of the wheels would be a turning tire intersecting a moving line of incision. A miracle the driver kept it upright. A clean circle is cut into the side of the trailer.

Analyze, script it, play it. Stops it being real. Stops the dreading. Makes that lingering glance at the figure under the plastic sheet just curiosity. Those are not hydraulic fluids. The roadway is black with flies. There are black vulltures overhead. Sticking out from the sheet, a hand, palm upturned, imploring the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. Shirt cuff, silver links, ten centimeters of good jacket. That would be enough to identify Titifreak, let alone the broken blade, severed almost to a stump. He fought, then. No point looking for the rest of the blade. It’s on its way down to the center of the Earth.

“Hey, what are you staring at?”

Caught. Efrim throws his hands up in dismay. The cop fixes him with her mirrored visor.

“Go on, get out of here before I lift you for obstructing a police investigation.”

“Yes yes yes,” Efrim mumbles, ducking his head. For he was staring.Staring at the paramedics in their green and hi-visibility yellow lifting a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. On that stretcher, a body under plastic, but the sheet is too short and the body’s feet stick out, feet flopping away from each other; feet in shoes. Efrim recognizes the soles of those shoes. The last time he saw them was in a Todos os Santos print-shop, being woven layer upon layer from smart plastic.

Fé em Deus

Rio Amazonas: above Pauxi Fort

My dear Heloise,

Finally, my dear sister, finally, I sail the calm waters of the great Amazon and I find myself in the realm of the mythological. The island of Marajó, which in former times was the habitation of many advanced Indian tribes, is the size of Brittany and Normandy together yet lies easily in the mouth of the river. A flow equal to that of every river in Europe passes out of the river every day. The water, so our Captain Acunha tells us, is sweet up to seventy leagues out to sea. Yet the Amazon drops only fifty toises over its entire length, and its flow is so gentle it may take a leaf a month to drift from the rank, miasmic foothills of the Peruvian Andes to pass beneath the hull of our Fé em Deus.

While I languished in Belém at the governor-general’s pleasure, not a day passed that I did not see La Condamine and his expedition descending upon the coast in a cloud of sail. But now our vessel beats upstream under the command of her master Acunha, a river trader of surly and aloof disposition, yet I was assured at Belém do Pará that there was none more experienced in the ever-treacherous seasonal patterns of shoals and banks that form and shift in this great stream. What with the manioc and beans, powder and shot required to equip an expedition into the high Amazon — I am assured I can find bearers, guides, and crew in plenty at São José Tarumás — let alone the many cases of scientific equipment, Captain Acunha mutters about the loading of his barque. But we make excellent haste: we have already put the narrows at the Fort of the Pauxis behind us; São José Tarumás lies before us. This far inland from coastal influences the winds are too light and variable and the river too excessively braided to allow us to raise sail, so it is by the power of human muscle we ascend the mighty Amazon, bent to oars, a true classical slave-galley.