Brasyl

’’I’ve seen one of these before.”

“It’s the standard-issue ritual weapon of the Order,” Fisico said. “It looks like a knife, but we think it’s an information weapon. It cuts down to the quantum level. It undoes the braids of quantum loop gravity. This is technology beyond us, beyond any of the worlds of the multiverse. I think it may always be beyond us; it’s part of the fabric of the universal quantum computer itself.”

Marcelina spun with the knife in a wheeling capoeira armada. Did she hear the shriek of fundamental computations coming apart?

“Where did you get this?”

“It came with the book. The a

Again the multiverse pulsed around Marcelina. Cut. Edit. You are not unarmed now. You are not a victim. She held the knife high over head. The egbé roared. The iâos whirled, petticoats held out. The bateria took up the argument of the agogô as Marcelina strutted around the altar, blade held high.

“Zemba!” Mestre Ginga roared, and the terreiro rook it up.

“Zemba! Zemba! Zemba!”

The weather closed in as the Rocinha Taxi Company cab took Marcelina up over the top of the town and down toward the floodlit oval of the Jockey Club. Fingers of low cloud that joined together into a great palm of stratus blew in from the west and pressed down on the morros. By the time the taxi reached the lagoon it was raining steadily. Marcelina itched and fidgeted in the middle of the backseat, burning still with the brief vision of the curupairá. Every flash of passing headlights, every flicker of pink and yellow street neon cast shadows of other universes. With the quantum blade tucked into the top of her white Capri pants and her clingy top, Marcelina could have co

“I don’t know. I mean the mestre said — ”

“I just want to drop something in; it’ll not take five minutes. It’s just down on Rua Tabatinguera; it’s not even really out of your way.”

“I suppose I could, then.”

Marcelina took the steep concrete steps that rose almost sheer up the face of the morro a reckless two at a time. Love does that. Rain punished her. Good rain. Sweet rain. She pressed the PDA close to her chest, protecting it from water. Pools were already forming on Heitor’s gloomy garden patio, a lightless concrete rectangle between the rear of the apartment tower and the dripping raw rock. His light — and love — starved climbing plants shed rain like sweat. Marcelina knew the key code by heart. Her finger stopped a millimeter above the chrome button.

The door was open a crack.

Marcelina slipped back from the door and pressed herself against the wall. She called up the live Canal Quatro newsfeed on her cellular.

“ … and the police report that Mare and Parada de Lucas are quiet tonight, with armed incidents returning to normal levels,” Fagner “Deathand-Destruction” Meirelles reported Live! from a militar cordon. Hissing through her teeth, Marcelina thumbed the volume down. “And back to the studio.” And there was Heitor standing in front of the giant green-screen map of Brazil. The only newsreader who has to worry about the color of his socks, he always said.

Marcelina sent him into darkness. In one G3 call elation turned to dread, to more fear than she imagined anyone could know and live. Every part of her ached. It would be very very good to be sick, even if it was only hot bile, cold coffee, and terreiro drugs. She could feel the multiverse flickering around her, a cloud of orixás and angels. Now. This was the time. She drew the blade, crouched into a fighting ginga stance. Slowly slowly she pushed the door open. Cat-careful, Marcelina advanced through the lobby of books. Stiff, so stiff, and no time to warm up. She would have to go from cold into explosive action. This was no jogo, no game.

No lights, but squatting in cocorinha by the side of the living-room door Marcelina saw a silhouette cross the glittering panorama of the lagoa. The destruction was to be total: her career, her family, her friends, her lover. Then, one by one, Fisico, Mestre Ginga, Barbosa the goalkeeper: the entire terreiro, any and all who knew the secret shape of the multiverse, and about the Order that protected it. And at some point, Marcelina Hoffman. That point was now. Malandros mestres corda vermelhas all you great fighters and dancers, give me malicia. She stood up, flicked on the main light, and cartwheeled into the room in a one-handed aú. Marcelina came up into ginga, blade ready.

She stood momentarily dazed in the light by the kitchen a

The anti-Marcelina advanced on her in a blinding weave of cuts that struck small lightnings from the air in the apartment. Marcelina ducked, rolled, dived, flipped away from the burning blade. One thing, one edge in malicia. Her enemy did not play capoeira. She did not know jeito.

A scything blow left the glass coffee table in two capsized halves. Marcelina backflipped over one of the leather sofas into ginga.

“Say something, will you! Say my fucking name.”

Her enemy smiled and in three strokes reduced the sofa to hide and spring and stuffing. Now Marcelina realized that she had underestimated the power of her enemy’s weapon. She could run, she could dance, but the anti-Marcelina would cut, cut, keep cutting through anything and everything, keep cutting, keep coming until she was too exhausted to play capoeira anymore. You have lost the initiative. Time to stop playing defensive. But I’m not a killer. Yes you are. Look.

Marcelina aimed an asfixiante punch at her enemy’s nose, then brought the blade in a scything sweep. The anti-Marcelina dodged the punch and brought her own blade cutting down onto the flat of Marcelina’s. There was a flash of light, a cry of reality maimed. Marcelina saw the severed blade of her knife flash up into the air, fall point first into the floor and vanish. She imagined it dropping through the apartments below, level by level. Even solid concrete and rock could not resist it. She hoped there was no one directly beneath.

The anti-Marcelina smiled sweetly, held up her own intact blade. Then she beckoned. Finish it.

Marcelina Hoffman ran. Jeito. Street smart. The true malandro knows when and where to fight. A gashed sofa, a bisected coffee table — these Heitor could explain on an insurance claim. A corpse that looked like your lover and disgraced TV producer: that was a career killer.

Marcelina knocked off the lights (these silly tricks worked, but that was the essence of malandragem, the pant-pull boca de calça that had felled arrogant Jair — the stupid and obvious was the last-seen) and ducked out the elevator lobby door. The slam would betray her, but the few seconds it took for the anti-Marcelina to cut through the lock would give her time and space. Marcelina pelted up the emergency stairs. Two flights up she heard the door crash onto concrete. I’m a dancer not a ru