“Who are you?” Marcelina shouted. “Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?”

She fled into the bedroom, emptied her bag onto the bed. There, there, the translucent plastic clamshell. She slid the DVD into the side of Heitor’s plasma screen.

Her finger hesitated over the play button.

She had to know. She had to see.

Marcelina wound through Canal Quatro staff slipping out home, a nod and a silent word to Lampião. There went Leandro. Several fast-scans minutes of Lampião dully gaping at a flickering television. How little he moved. Then Marcelina saw the edge of the door revolve across the shot. A figure in a dark suit entered. Marcelina’s fingers stumbled over the buttons as she tried to find slo-mo. Back. Back. The drive whined. Again the figure entered. A woman. A woman jogging forward frame by frame in a good suit — dark gray. A woman, short, with a lot of naturally curled bouncing blonde hair. A loira woman. Lampião looked up from his TV and smiled.

Frame by frame, the woman turned to check the location of the camera. Marcelina hit pause. The only snow that Rio knew blew across the top of the screen.

Her face. She was looking into her own face.

After midnight the axé flows strongest through the Igreja of the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte. Taxis and minibuses bring supplicants from all across the northern suburbs: when the saints are tired the walls between the worlds are weak, and the most powerful workings may be dared. Edson tosses a coin to St. Martin, the Christian aspect of Exu, Lord of the Crossroads, Trickster and Rent-boy of the orixás, patron of all malandros.

The Sisters of the Good Death have orbited Edson’s life like fairy godmothers. His grandmother from the northeast had given the Sisterhood her two daughters, Hortense and Marizete, in exchange for the success of her sons in hard, clutching Sampa. But Dona Hortense had loved pirate radio and dancing and boys with fast cars and the madre had released her from her vows (truly, no God regards the vow of a fourteen-year-old as binding). Tia Marizete found peace and purpose in the discipline of a post-Catholic nun and remained and for twenty-five years had brought the Dignified Burial and unofficial social services to the bairros and favelas of north São Paulo. Unlike their mother church in Bahia, the Paulistana daughters did not practice seclusion: their Baiana crinolines and turbans were familiar and welcome sights on the streets as they gave healings, told fortunes, and collected reis in their baskets. Twice a year, at the Lady Days, Tia Marizete would call on her sister and nephews and the entire bairro would land on Dona Hortense’s verandah with a variety of small but niggling maladies.

“Does your mother know where you are?” Tia Marizete asks, clearing the guest room of gay abiás (“we’ve become icons again, Mother help us”). She sets wards of palm and holy cake on the windowsills and door lintels.

“She knows. She’s not to come looking for me. Don’t let her. I need money. And I may have to stay a while.”

“You are welcome as long as you need. But I have a service to conduct. And Edson, remember, this is God’s house.” Then the drums start so loud he can feel them in his bowels, but they are a comfort; he feels himself slipping down into their rhythm. By the time the tetchy initiate slips a tray of beans and rice and two Cokes through the door he’s nodding, exhausted.

The Sisters have always saved him. When he was twelve he had been given a fluky antibiotic that kicked off a massive allergic reaction that left mouth, tongue, lips covered in white-lipped ulcers and drove him fever-mad, hallucinating that a ball at once chokingly small and jaw-wrenchingly huge was being forced endlessly into his mouth. The doctor had rolled his eyes and shaken his head. Biology would take its course. His brothers had carried him on the back of a HiLux to the Sisters, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets. Tia Marizete had laid him in one of the acolytes’ rooms, bathed him with scented and herbal waters, anointed him with sweet oils, scattered prayers and consecrated farofa over him. Three days he had raged along the borderlands between life and death. The ulcers advanced down his throat. If they reached his tonsils, he would die. They halted at the base of his uvula. Axé. Through it all, the memory the drums and the clapping hands, the stamp and belljingle of the Sisters as they whirled in their ecstasy dances; the cheers and tears and praises to Our Lady, Our Wonderful Lady. Down, into the drums.

Crying. Soft and faltering, at the very end of tears, more gasp than sob. Edson slips from the thin foam mattress. The sound comes from the camarinha, the innermost, holiest sanctuary, the heart of axé. Fia sits in the middle of the floor, legs curled, fingers twined. Around her the statues of the saints on their poles lean against the walls, each draped in his or her sacramental color.

“Hey. It’s only me. You know, we shouldn’t really be in here. It’s for the Sisters and the high initiates only.”

It takes a long time for Fia’s gasps to form words. Edson’s cold and shivering after his sleep; the energy of the night has left him. He could hold Fia; his comfort, her warmth. But it’s not her.

“Did you ever have a dream where you’re at home and you know everyone and everything, but they don’t know you, they’ve never known you, and no matter how much you try and tell them, they never will know you?”

“Everyone has that dream.”

“But you know me, and I’ve never seen you before in my life. You say you are Edson Jesus…”

“Oliveira de Freitas.”

“I think I need to know this now. Who was I?”

So among the shrouded saints Edson tells her about her father with his New Age columns and stable of accountancy bots and her mother with her urban farm and her brother away across the big planet on his gap-year chasing surf and surf-bunnies …

“Sorry, what?”

“Yoshi, your brother. You have a brother, where you come from?”

“Of course I do, but he’s in his first year at the São Paulo Seminary.”

Edson blinks in astonishment.

Fia asks, “Edson, what was I like?”

“You. Not you. She liked bags, clothes, girlie things. Shoes. The last day I saw her, she went to a shop to get these shoes printed.”

He sees the soles, the logos bobbing before him as the crash team slides the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

“Shoes, printed?”

Edson explains the technology as he understands it. When Fia concentrates, she tilts her head to one side. Edson never saw the real Fia do that. It makes this Fia look even less true, like a dead doll.

“She never got on the back of my bike. She always took taxis. She hated getting dirty, even when we were up in Todos os Santos she was immaculate, always immaculate. She had quite a lot of girlfriends.” How little I know , Edson realizes. A few details, a scoop of observations. “She was very direct. I don’t think she was comfortable being too near to things. All those friends, but she was never really close to them. She liked being an outsider. She liked being the rebel, the quantumeira.”

’’I’m nowhere near as wild and romantic as that,” Fia says. “Just a plain quantum-computing postgrad specializing in multiversal economic moddeling. My world; it’s less paranoid. We don’t watch each other all the time. But it’s more… broken. I’m broken, everyone’s broken. We leave bits of ourselves all over the place: memories, diaries, names, experiences, knowledge, friends, personalities even, I suppose. I loaded everything I could, but there are still important parts of me back there: pictures, childhood memories, school friends. And the world is broken. It’s not like this. This is… like heaven.”

Edson tries to imagine the point at which Fia’s world branched off from his. But that is a trap, Mr. Peach had taught. There is no heart reality from which everything else diverges. Every part of the multiverse exists, has existed, will exist, independently of every other. Edson shivers. How can you live with that sort of knowledge? But Fia notices him shiver.