Mr. Peach quickly wipes any tears gone before they gather gravity. Edson says gently, “I remember you told me once that it was all fixed, from beginning to end; like the universe is one thing made out of space and time and we only dream we have free will.”

“You’re not reassuring me.”

’Tm just trying to say, there was nothing you could have done.”

The spliff has burned down to a sour roach. Edson grinds it flat under the sale of his Havaiana.

“Sextinho… Edson. I think I really need to be with you tonight.”

“I thought we’d agreed.”

“I know but, well, why should it matter if it’s not her?”

Edson loves the old bastard, and he could come for him, without games, without boots and costumes, without masks, pretend to be that nasty Cuban malandro, pretend to be whatever he needs to send him to Miami in his mind. But still, it does matter. And Mr. Peach can read that in Edson’s body, and he says, “Well, looks like it’s not fated in this universe either.”

In retro Hello Kitty panties, Fia backstrokes laps of the pool. From verandah shadow Edson watches sunlit water dapple her flat boy-breasts. He checks for stirrings, urgings, dick-swellings. Curiosity, getting a look, like any male. Nothing more.

“Hey.” She treads water, face shatter-lit by reflected sun-chop. “Give me a towel.”

Fia hauls herself out, drapes the towel over the mahogany sun lounger and herself on the towel. Nipples and little pink panty-bow.

“This is the first time I’ve felt clean in weeks,” Fia declares. “He’s not your uncle, is he? I found your stuff. I couldn’t sleep so I went poking around. I do that, poke around. I found these costumes and things. They’re very… sleek.”

“I told him to make sure they were locked up.”

“Why? If you guys have something going on, I’m cool with it. You don’t have to hide stuff from me. Did you think I would be bothered? Did she know? That’s it, isn’t it? She didn’t know.”

“You’re not her, I know. But are you bothered?”

“Me. No. Maybe. I don’t know. It bothers me you didn’t tell her.”

“But you said — ”

“I know, I know. Don’t expect me to be consistent about this. What did you do, anyway, with the gear and all that?”

“Superhero sex.”

Her eyes open wide at that.

“Like, Batman and Robin slashy stuff? Cool. I mean, what do you actually do?”

“What’s it to you?”

’’I’m a nosy cow. It’s got me into trouble already.”

“We dress up. We play. Sometimes we pretend to fight, you know, have battles.” Hearing it spoken, the secret spilled, Edson feels burningly embarrassed. “But a lot of the time we just talk.”

“I’m trying to picture Carlinhos in one of those full suits.…”

“Don’t laugh at him,” Edson says. “And I call him Mr. Peach. The first time we met, he gave me peaches for minding his car because he didn’t have any change. He watched me eat them. The juice ran down my chin. I was thirteen. You probably think that’s a terrible thing; you probably have some clever educated middle-class judgment abour that. Well, he was very shy and very good to me. He calls me Sextinho.” There is an edge in his voice that makes Fia feel self-conscious, tit-naked in an alien universe. It’s their first row. A motorbike passes the gate. Edson notes it, remembers fondly his murdered Yamaha scrambler. A few seconds later it passes the gate again in the opposite direction. Slow, very slow. Edson feels his eyes widen. He looks up. A surveillance drone completes it buzz over the shiny new gated estate, but does it linger that moment too long on the outward turn? He had been so careful in Mr. Peach’s car, but there were always cameras he could have missed, a new one put up, an eye on a truck or a bus or in a T-shirt or even a pair of passing I-shades that later got into a robbery or an I-mugging or something that would have had the police running through the memory. Paranoia within paranoia. But everyone is paranoid in great São Paulo.

He says, “How long have you been here now?”

“Three days,” Fia says. “Why are you asking?”

“You’ve been talking all that physics — ”

“Information theory … ”

“Whatever shit, but I want to ask, have you found a way back yet?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said it was a one-way trip, there was no going back.”

“Well, a quantum mainframe the size of São Paulo U’s would do. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I think they’re looking for us.” That gets her sitting upright. Hello Kitty. “In fact, I think they know where we are. We’re not safe here. I can get you safe, but there’s one problem. It’s going to take a lot of money.”

Bare-ass naked on the pseudo-Niemeyer wave mosaic by the green green pool Edson holds the towel in one hand and asks the soldados, “Where do I go?”

They grunt him to the landscaped sauna at the back of the spa. Both High and Low Cidades know The Man has a morbid fear of age and wreck and spends profanely on defeating it. No one in the two cities expects him to live so long, but he has resident Chinese medics and Zen hot springs for his hilltop pousada. Some sonic-electric field tech thing holds in the heat. The Man beckons Edson join him on the hardwood bench. Around him sit his soldados, as naked as he; stripped-down guns at easy reach on the hot wood: the Luz SurfTeam, they call themselves. They have surfers’ muscles and scrolls of proud dotted weals across their chests and bellies where they pierce themselves and carefully rub in the ashes of scarification ritual. Edson sits carefully, conscious of his shaved genitals, unsure of the etiquette of being caught staring at your drug lord’s dick.

“Son, do we find you well?” The Man is nested in as many names as his corporate structure. The lower city, where his writ runs partial, knows him as Senhor Amaral; in the upper city he is Euclides. Only the priest who baptized him knows his full name. Layers, pyramids: he is fleshy, rolls of fat tapering toward his hairless head, shaved as close as Edson’s balls. “And the dona, how is she this weather?” When Anderson died, Euclides the Man sent flowers and condolences with a picture of Our Lady of Consolation. He claims to be as omniscient as the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, but he does not know that Dona Hortense shredded the card and, by dark of moon, threw the flowers into the fetid, Gurana-bottle-and-dead-piglet-choked sewer that is Cidade de Luz’s storm drain. “I hear you’ve been causing that good lady grief, Edson.”

“Senhor, I would not pur my own mother in any kind of danger, believe that.” Edson hears the shake in his voice. “Could I show you something? I think you’ll be impressed.” Edson lifts his hand. The SurfTeam stirred toward their guns. The Man nods. Edson completes the gesture and out of the changing room bounds Milena in her monogrammed top and patriotic thong and socks, soccer ball skittering like a puppy before her, blithely chewing her gum before her audience of naked male meat. Remember what I taught you , Edson wills at her as she keeps the ball up up up. Smiling smiling always smiling.

“So, senhor, what do you think?” After this , Edson thinks, one hundred thousand fans at Morumbi are easy.

“I am impressed; the girl has a talent. Now, she will need some surgery up top, and I am sure you have that already planned, but her ass is good. She has a Brasilian ass. How long can she keep it up for?” The Man slaps the soldado beside him hard on the thigh. “Hey, you like that white ass? That getting you stiff, eh?” Slap slap. I would remember that, ifl were him, Edson thinks. “Jigga jigga eh?” Slap slap slap. “Who’s got boners, eh? Come on, show me, who’s hard?” Everyone but The Man, Edson notices. And Edson. “So, son, I am rightly entertained, but you didn’t come up here just to show me your Keepie-Uppie Queen.”

“That’s correct,” Edson says. “I’m here because I’m planning an operaation, and I need your permission.”