Tina found a three-gallon plastic bucket and filled it with water. She then sat on the back steps of the club, raised it to her lips, and drank deeply. She drained and refilled the bucket twice more while she waited for the kid to return. The water felt like heaven in her stomach, and her body seemed to swell and cool as it absorbed and replenished all it had lost.

Sounds of the city echoed down the alleyway: traffic and sirens, people shopping or headed for home. A police aerodyne roared overhead, and Tina ducked back instinctively as it flew by. It looked like a flying box mounted on cylindrical repeller-coil booms. A gunner with a machinegun hung off the side, scanning the streets for signs of trouble below—which would likely include her. Funny how the government had money to spend on paramilitary shit like that, while half the population was stuck slumming it in the favelas without proper electricity or running water.

A few more minutes passed and the kid finally returned, the rickshaw loaded with a basket of empanadas, a cauldron of steaming rice and beans, and a foil pan full of barbequed chorizo sausage.

“Hey, they call you Size Queen, right?” The kid gestured to the chorizo with a silly grin on his face. “I heard it means you like big sausages.”

“Don’t be a pervert . . .” Size Queen. She’d always hated the double entendre of that stupid name. “But you did good, kid. Obrigado.”

Tina placed the pot of rice between her legs, the pan of chorizo to her side, and the basket of empanadas next to it. She offered the kid some, but he admitted that he’d already eaten his fill on the trip back. She grabbed a large serving spoon and began chowing through the rice and beans. It had been four days since she’d been able to eat last, and the food hitting her stomach felt orgasmic. She kept shoveling down the rice, alternating the chorizo and empanadas between spoonfuls, wolfing them down in two or three quick bites.

“Puta merda . . .” the kid swore. “I should be recording this.”

Tina ignored him. It took her a good thirty minutes of solid eating to work through it all. By the time she finished, her jaw ached from chewing almost as much as her stomach did from being stuffed. She belched loudly and leaned back, already feeling her muscles strengthening and filling out as the nanites did their work.  

She released a deep sigh. “I needed that.”

“No shit,” the kid said in English.

“You swear too much. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Paulo,” he said.

“I’d take off now if I were you, Paulo. Some bad things happened last night, and you don’t need to be mixed up in it.”

“Hey, are you from outer space?” He cocked his head. “Like one of them moon people or something?”

“No,” she said, since it sounded like a genuine question. Guess he was too young to know about the League. “It’s likely to get worse around here, understand? Go on, get on out of here.”

Tina stood and stretched, her muscles growing with each flex. Yesterday, her figure had been slender and bony, like an emaciated dancer. Now, she bulked with the heft of a bodybuilder.

“How come you always wear that same blue suit? I ain’t never seen you in nothing else.”

“Because it fits me,” she said. “You ever try shopping for a size sixty bra?”

“What?”

Tina chuckled at his response. She descended the steps and headed down the alley. “I’m getting out of here. I suggest you do the same.”

“Where you going? You not gonna wait for Marcos to come back?”

“Marcos isn’t coming back.” The cachorro. She wouldn’t even be in this situation if not for him. If her body hadn’t been so low on reserves, she wouldn’t have frenzied and killed those two dreadheads last night. And who’s to say Marcos himself hadn’t set it all up for exactly that outcome? The idea chilled her. She needed to find her own answers to all this. 

“Hey, one more question,” Paulo called out behind her and Tina paused at the end of the alley. “How tall are you, anyway?”

She laughed. “It depends.”

“On what?”

Tina looked back at him over her shoulder and grinned.

“On how mad I get.”