“Ah,” Marcelina said. “Oh.”

She heard the blade before she saw it, a shriek of energy, an arc of blue.

And the malicia kicked: before sense, long before conscious thought, Marcelina dropped back to the ground in a negativa angola. The blade whistled over her face. Screams, shouts. People fled. Cars stopped, horns blared. Marcelina rolled out of the defensive drop with a kick. The blade cut down again. Marcelina flipped into a dobrado, then wheeled for a crippling kick. Two hands seized her pants and ankles and pulled her away. The knife slashed again, seeming to cut the air itself; the A-frame sign for the Teresina payweight restaurant fell into two ringing halves. The woman turned and ran. Marcelina struggled, but the hands held her.

“Leave it,” a man’s voice ordered. “This is beyond you. Leave it.”

Now she was quite quite mad, for the voice, the hands, the face belonged to Mestre Ginga.

Mr. Peach adores her.

“First halfway-stimulating conversation I’ve had in months,” he says to Edson in the privacy of breakfast moments while Fia is in the shower. She is a bathroom girl; the sound of her happy splashing carries far up and down the fazenda’s cool tiled corridors.

“Never mind that,” says Edson. “Is all the gear stowed away?”

Mr. Peach holds up a big old iron key. Fia comes in patting the ends of her hair dry with a towel. She knows Mr. Peach as Carlinhos; a kind of uncle in Edson’s far-flung family, scattered like stars linked in a constellation. They’re going to talk science again.

Edson hates it when they do that. He bangs aluminum things in the kitchen while they argue quantum information theory.

The best Edson understands it is this: Fia had been part of a research team using her University of São Paulo quantum mainframe to explore multiversal economic modeling, entangling so many qubits — that, Edson underrstands, is the word — across so many universes that it has the same number of pieces as a real economy. And, Mr. Peach says, if the model is as complex as the things it models, is there any meaningful difference? In Fia’s São Paulo — in Fia’s world — it seems to Edson that tech-stuff took a different turn sometime in the late teens, early twenties. Where Edson’s world solved the problem of processors and circuit boards so small that quantum effects became key elements, Fia’s world learned to use proteins and viruses as processors. Semi living computers you can tattoo on your ass as opposed to cool I-shades and the need to reel out ever-more-complex security codes to satisfy a paranoid, omniscient city. But Fia’s people killed their world. They couldn’t break the oil addiction, and it burned their forests and turned their sky hot sunless gray.

They were on about superpositions again. That’s where a single atom is in two contradictory states at the same time. But a physical object cannot be two things at once. What you measure is that atom and its exact corresponding atom in another universe. And the most likely way for both to be in a state of superposition is for them each to be in quantum computers in their own universes. So in a sense (big brain itch here, right at the back of Edson’s head where he can’t reach it) there are not many many quantum computers across millions of universes. There is just one, spread across all of them. That’s what Fia’s economic model proved; what they’re calling the multiversal quantum computer. Then she created a quantum model of herself and found that it was more than a dumb image. It was Mr. Peach’s storm blowing between worlds. It was a window to all those other Fia Kishidas with whom it was entangled. The ghost Fias Edson had glimpsed in the workshop in Cook/Chill Meal Solutions were counterparts in other worlds spellbound by entanglement.

Edson bangs down the pot and cups.

“Carlinhos. I need to borrow your car.” Edson’s going shopping. Out on the streets of his big dirty city with his hands on the wheel and one of the many backup identities he’s stashed all across northwest Sampa, I-shades feeding him police maps, Edson feels his mojo returning. Careful. Overconfidence would be easy and dangerous. For this kind of operation he would normally have picked up an alibi, but that’s not safe after that poor bastard Petty Cash. The Sesmarias may be out of the game, but there are those other bastards: the Order, who ever they are; and then the cops, always the cops. No, a malandro can’t be too careful. He takes camera-free local roads and backstreets to the mall. Among the racks and hangers is bliss. It is good to buy, but he dare not use his debit account. If the stores don’t give him a disscount for cash — and many will not even accept notes — he moves on to another one.

“Hey, got you something to make you look less like a freak.” From the glee with which she throws herself on the bright bags, Edson concludes there are other things than physics that light up Fia Kishida.

“Did you choose for me or for you?” she asks, holding up little scraps of stretchy sequined fabric.

“You want to look Paulistana?” Edson says.

“I want not to look like a hooker,” Fia says, hooking down at the bottom of her cheek-clinging shorts. “But I love these boots.” They are mock-jacaré, elasticated with good heels, and Edson knew she would coo and purr at first try-on. The crop top shows off the minute detail of her tattoo-computer; in the low light slanting across the fields of oil-soy it burns like gold. Edson imagines the wheels and spirals turning, a number mill.

“Where I come from, it’s rude to stare.”

“Where I come from, people don’t have things like that tattooed on them.”

“Do you ever actually apologize for anything?”

“Why should I do that? Come and eat. Carlinhos is making his moqueça. You need to eat more.”

In the cool of the evening, Edson finds Mr. Peach leaning against his balcony rail with a big spliff in his hand. The burbs glow like sand beneath him; the stars cannot match them. Even the light-dance of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, like attenuated bioluminous Amazon insects, up on the edge of space, is muted and astrological. The night air brings with it the slur of wind turbines up on the old coffee plantations, a sound Edson has always found comforting and stimulating. Endless energy.

“Hey, Sextinho.” Mr. Peach offers Edson the big sweet spliff.

“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Edson says, but takes a good toke anyway and lets it swirl up into the dome of his skull. Mr. Peach leans toward him. He takes another toke from Edson, slips an arm comfortably around his back. He holds the spliff up, contemplates it like holy sinsemilla.

“This the only thing keeping me from running right out that gate and getting on the first plane to Miami,” Mr. Peach says, looking at the coil of maconha smoke.

“Miami?”

“We’ve all got our boltholes. Our Shangri-las. When it’s abstract, when it’s more universes than there are stars in the sky, than there are atoms in the universe, I can handle it. Numbers, theories; comfortable intellecrual games. Like arithmetic with infinities: terrifying concepts, but ultimately abstract. Head games. She didn’t know me, Sextinho.”

Edson lets the name pass.

“She didn’t recognize me. She would have known me, same as … the other one. Jesus and Mary, the word games this makes us play. Quantum theory, quantum computing, quantum schmauntum; at that postgrad level you work across disciplines. But she didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t there. Maybe I was dead, maybe I was in jail, maybe I never was a physicist, maybe there never was a Carlinhos Farah Baroso de Alvaranga. But I know: I’m in Miami. I could have gone. Twenty years ago I could have gone. Open arms, they’d have had me. Lovely doe-eyed Cuban boys with nasty Mafia connecctions. But Dad would have had to go into a home, and I couldn’t do that. Leave him. Leave him with strangers. So I turned the offer down, and he lived three years and I think he was happy right up to the end. By then I was too old, too entangled. Too scared. But he went. He’s leading the life I could have led. I should have led.”