“Here, you’re freezing.” She peels off her ripped hoodie. Beneath she wears a tight sleeveless T, dragged up to her breasts by the cling of the hoodie. Edson stares. Beneath the crop top is a tattoo like none he has ever seen before. Wheels, cogs, meshing; arcs, spirals, paisleys, fractal sprays, and mathematical blossoms. A silvery machine of slate-gray ink covers her torso from breastbone to the waistband of her leggings. Edson’s hand stays Fia’s as she moves to pull her top down.

“Oh my God, what is that?”

Fia stands up, pulls up her top again, and coyly wiggles her leggings down to the sweet tiny pink bow on the hip-band of her panties where the tattoo coils in to nestle like a snake against her pubis. Not taking her eyes off Edson, she hooks her red hair back behind her left ear. There is a cursive of gray ink over the top of ear and along her hairline, like one of Zezão’s sinuous abstract pichaçãos that now have preservation orders smacked all over them.

“You wear your computers,” Fia says as she restores her clothing. “We’re more… intimate… with ours.”

Edson lifts a finger, whirls into a crouch.

“I hear something.” He slides Mr. Peach’s gun out of the waistband of his Jams and pushes it across the foot-polished wooden floor of the camarinha to Fia. She knows what to do with it. Edson moves cat-careful between the shrouded saints. The layout of the terreiro is as inviolable as its obrigacões. Beyond the sacred camarinha is the great public room of the barracão, then the hall with the ilê where the saints stand when they are awake. He checks the front door. The manioc-paste seals are intact, the coffins of the Good Dead laid out on the floor, dusted with white farofa. Nothing to be scared of there. Probably one of the abiás getting up for a piss. The quarters run around the back of the terreiro and open onto the barracão and the backyard where the chickens and Vietnamese pot-belly pigs are kept and the holy herbs are grown in fake-terracotta planters. The Sisters maintain private room upstairs. Edson opens the door from the corridor to the big kitchen, where the food for the gods, hungry as babies, is prepared.

A foot smashes into his breastbone, sends him sprawling, windless, across the barracão, scattering offerings. He sees a figure wheel out of the darkness in a capoeira meia lua de compasso into a poised ginga. A white woman, in sports top, Adidas baggies, and bare feet. She wears odd metal bracers on her forearms. Edson fights for words breath sanity power.

A shot. From the holy camarinha.

“Shit. He’s already here,” the woman hisses and flicks her right hand into a fist. A blade flashes from the bracer over her balled knuckles. Blue light flickers around its Planck-keen edges. She whirls through the door to the barracão in a one-handed dobrado cartwheel. Gasping for breath, Edson limps after her.

The camarinha is a martyrdom of slashed saints. Fia holds off a man armed with a Q-blade using a statue of Senhor de Bonfim on his pole, golddtassled shroud flapping. Faint hope in the saint: the Q-blade cuts through it like smoke. Mr. Peach’s beautiful silver gun is already in two pieces, cut through the firing chamber. The assassin’s blur of blue light drives Fia back to the wall. By tradition this sacred room has only one door. The killer knows this tradition. The woman wheels into the camarinha and drops into the neggativa fighting crouch. The assassin spins to face her. He is a young man, pale skinned, with floppy hair and a goatee. Blades blur past each other; the capoeira woman’s foot wheels up to deliver a stun-blow to the side of the Q-blade man’s head. But the killer ducks under it and rolls across the camarinha to put space between him and the woman. Fia hunts for a gap, feinting with her mutilated orixá, but the assassin is between her and the door. Frantic with fear, Edson looks for an opportunity. Voices, behind him. The terreiro is awake. Abiás in their underwear, shorts, jog pants, Sisters in their nighttgowns. Their hands are raised in horror at the violation of the sanctuary.

“Get everyone out of here!” Edson shouts. The boys understand and herd the Sisters back to the kitchen and the safety of the garden, but Tia Marizete is paralyzed at the vision of her saints, her murdered saints, their desecration. Arms out, she rushes to comfort them. Edson grabs her by the waist, drags her away. The assassin’s attention flickers to him. The capoeirista uses the moment to spin up into a great flying leap, blade-arm drawn back. With a roar, the assassin leaps to meet her. They clash, they pass in a flash of ionizaation in the middle of the air above the heart of the camarinha. Then they are both crouched like cats, glaring, panting. Their shattered blades spin on the wooden floor, flat sides, safe sides down.

“Yeah,” says the woman. “But I’ve got another one. Have you?” She snaps her left hand into a fist, and a fresh Q-blade flicks our from the magnetic sheathing on her wrist-guard. The killer scores the possibilities in an eyeflash. He dives flat, arm ourstretched, and with the tips of his fingers catches the flat side of the Q-blade and flicks it at the capoeirista. At any speed the quantum-sharp cutting edge is a sure kill. Then Edson’s vision goes into marrtial arts-movie slow motion. The woman bends back from the hips, trying to roll away from the blade cutting toward her throat through a wake of burned blue air. Fia brings the Senhor do Bonfim sweeping up under the flying blade. An orixá-blessed hit. She catches the harmless flat of the shard. The fragment spins up into the air, but the flick is too feeble to carry it to safety. The Q-blade shard loops down and cuts sweetly, cleanly through the man’s shoulder and upper right thigh before vanishing into the floor of the camarinha. He stares a moment at his arm, his severed leg, and then explodes in blood.

The capoeirista seizes Fia while she is still frozen and drags her our into the barracão.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” the woman swears. “That went wrong. I needed to know if he was Sesmaria or Order.” She’s in one place long enough now for Edson to see her properly. She’s short, thin as a cat, loira skin and bubbleblonde hair. “They know where you are. Get out of here.” The little Asian pigs are spooked, turning in their tiny pens, snorting in alarm. Sirens, Sisters, frantic initiates, and in a moment Fia is going to lose it. The entire bairro is awake. Alarm fireworks explode all across the sky. Police and drug lords alike have been blessed by the hands of the Sisters of the Good Death and will come to their aid.

Edson turns to call to the woman to help him with Fia, but she is gone.

Vanished as she appeared. Tia Marizete is there, her arm now around Fia’s shoulder. She stares at Fia’s torso tattoo.

“I’m sorry,” Edson whispers to his aunt. The gay boys are inconsolable, some weeping, most looking petty, vengeful. He cannot begin to imagine the desecration he has worked on the camarinha.

“Edson, what have gotten yourself into? These Take Out the Trash people, we have no argument with them, they have no argument with us. Why have they come here, why have they come for you?”

“It’s not Take Out the Trash ,” Edson says. “It’s…” What indeed, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas? Quantum blades and quantum computers. Priests and orders. A gazillion universes next to each other. Capoeiristas and killers. And this Fia, this refugee with bad clothes and a computer tattooed on her belly. “I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.”

But it won’t be the Yam that takes him to safety. It lies bisected headdlight to exhaust in a pool of aka and engine fluids. The insane energy, the stubborn refusal to believe what is happening to him that has kept Edson running for what feels like lifetimes gushes out of him. He feels old and scared and more tired than any human can be and there is still farther to run. He stares dumbly at the two fillets of his lovely, lovely motorbike.