The Summer Prince (17 page)

I decide to walk home instead of flashing a pod, because sometimes it’s good to think, and nothing is prettier than Palmares Três in the summer. It used to be summer all the time in this part of old-Brazil, of course. I like to imagine that world, where the marmelo never died in the frost. Where liana flourished in the wild, and not just in the hothouses of Tier Six. Still, we do our best in the summer. The walking paths of Tier Eight are lined with flowering fruit trees. The smell is heavenly, and I can’t help but think of the verde and the catinga that Enki and I so briefly delivered to the upper tiers. There are no banana trees in the verde. Nothing but concrete and algae. Here on Tier Eight, the walkways are either wood or mulch. They twine through the summer growth like paths in a forest. A strange kind of forest, a thousand feet above the water. The glass of the megatruss has been raised, letting in the warm breeze from the bay.

I go into one of my favorite places, a tiny grotto tucked at the end of a forgotten turn from the main path, hidden by the ferns and magnolia. It has a perfect view of the four siblings. I used to come here with Papai. After he died, I would return sometimes to think and sketch. Today, I turn to face the descending sun, its heat full on my face, my arms, my naked shoulders. I’m alone, and after a moment I untie the top of my halter-neck dress. I lean back in the grass, let the sun stream over my breasts. My nipples ease out in the lazy warmth. The red-gold light of the sun glints on the fine hair of my stomach, a shading of peach fuzz. The trunk of my tree still stops just below my heart, but the lights I have are muted in the presence of the sun. I can feel them pulse, but I can hardly see them. My ears fill with the basso drone of evening cicadas, the chirruping of plovers, and the soft mechanic whir of the pods rushing through the tunnels beneath me.
For once, even my thoughts fall silent. I watch. I breathe. My hand drifts to my stomach, then lower, beneath my folded-over dress and my underwear. I bite my lip, but there’s no one here but me and the seabirds.

The sun makes me savor it. I’m slow and deliberate and not thinking of anyone much at all, which is strange of me. I think about art. I look out on the bay and imagine the four siblings gauded in their luminous finery. I imagine how it will seem from up here on Tier Eight, because I know I’ll never get to see it. The shimmering array growing more and more frantic as the voices compound and coalesce. In the dark, it will look as though the four islands are dancing.

Like Gil and Enki, that night it all began.

At that bare thought of him, I gasp and shudder and fall back against the grass and packed dirt. A worm slides past my ear while I pant.

“Should I come back?”

I sit up so fast I feel dizzy. It’s Enki, leaning against the guardrail. I can hardly see his face, the sun is so bright behind him.

“I didn’t hear you,” I say stupidly.

I think he smiles; at least, I can hear it in his voice. “You wouldn’t have.”

I’m embarrassed, not because of what he saw me do, but because of what I was thinking when I did it.

“How did you get away?” I ask. I yank up my dress.

“From the Aunties?” He steps away from the balcony, shattering my illusion of anonymity. He’s my beautiful boy, reborn and so much more immediate than I remember. My breath comes short for a moment, as though my body anticipates a different sort of pleasure.

Which you are never going to get, June.

My fingers slip; the ties of the dress fall back over my shoulders. I try again.

“Gil said you had spies and minders.”

Enki kneels in front of me. Gently, he takes the ends of the dress from my clumsy fingers and ties them together in a simple bow.

He smiles. “I could have gotten away from the Aunties anytime. But sometimes it’s useful to make them think they can hold me, you know? And it’s never any trouble with Gil.”

No, it wouldn’t be, would it? These days, if Enki’s troublemaking began and ended with his less-than-diplomatic selection of Gil as his primary partner, the Aunties would probably dance in Royal Park.

“You want to go out to the islands?” I ask. “I haven’t been able to get more lights yet.”

He shakes his head, a strange smile playing on his lips. He looks like a mischievous god. Even when Enki is completely honest, I never know what he’s thinking.

“Am I only art to you, June?”

No
, I think. “Of course,” I say.

He stands and offers me his hand. After a moment, I take it. “I thought I could show you something,” he says. “Nothing to do with art.”

“But everything has to do with art.”

Now Enki stares at me. His light brown eyes look like pieces of colored glass in the red light of sunset. He leans forward. I feel smooth and still, a fly drowning in amber. We stay like that for an endless moment, hung in time like the sun from the sky, waiting and watching each other. What will Gil think?

And then something loud and mechanical buzzes behind me.

I turn around, but Enki’s already let go of my hand. He frowns. It’s a camera bot, and I can’t tell from this distance if it’s a caster’s or one of Auntie Maria’s.

“I told them not to follow,” he mutters. He draws his eyebrows even further together and his eyes
flash
somehow, though I can hardly believe it even as I watch. They turn yellow or green and then back again, and suddenly the camera bot is wobbling in the air like it’s drunk. Enki snatches it and hurls it over the side of the balcony.

“I think we should hurry,” he says.

“Was that …”

A mod? But I trail off. His gaze is steady. He has that look, like he might tell me if I ask.

Do you really want to know?
I can hear him say.

I don’t. Not now. Not when I felt … not when we almost …

Just this once, I want to forget that Enki is the summer king. Today I don’t want to remember what that means.

I learned to fight like every kid in the verde, with fists and feet and an eye to avoiding them. I learned to jump higher than most, kick harder, to feel the rhythm of the roda so deep beneath my eyeballs that even when it was my blood on the concrete floors, the pain felt like just another beat. You love my skin (you will ask how I know that when you’ve never said it, but you might as well ask how I know that the wakas love me or the grandes envy me or that our city is the most beautiful in the world). On Tier Eight, a negro like me has the beauty of the exotic, the forbidden. You forget that the slaves were black too, and the morenas like you couldn’t wait to become as white as our masters.

In the verde, they remember. In the verde, no one wants a negro baby — we’re too close to what that used to represent.

There aren’t any slaves in the verde, but in the roda, we still fight like master might catch us.

And they made me fight hardest of all.

We go to the spiderweb. I say I’ve already done this with him and he grins and says not like this you haven’t. I laugh though I don’t know what he’s planning. But he’s Enki, and that’s enough.

The noise hits us before we even drop down through the garbage vent Enki uses to take us there.
Much
easier than crab-walking upside down through the transport tunnel. Good thing too, because I’m still wearing my dress and neither of us has our nanohooks.

The voices that reverberate through the cavernous room are raucous and wild. I recognize the sound of wakas before I see them. When I do, I’m surprised to find a few grandes here and there. They’re probably not too old, but after thirty-five pretty much all grandes look the same. Boys and girls, most of them in the wide pants and colored shirts that proclaim their membership in one or another of the verde’s gangs. These are all amarelo or vermelho, colors well known for their blocos and the occasional fight, though those aren’t usually fatal.

Tonight everyone seems friendly enough. Near one fat-bellied spider so old its skin is rusting, two blocos prepare to make music. The verde blocos are the vanguard of the naturalist music trend. They make their own instruments or use broken-down antiques that they’ll patch up in interesting ways. Most of them won’t even use amps, performing instead in spaces with natural acoustics. The tech-heavy electronica of my mother’s generation might as well be a declaration of war in the verde. And I’m not inclined to make it — I was raised with my father’s classical music, but I grew up with the modern blocos. I’d heard of these impromptu music sessions in the verde, but I’d never thought I would be lucky enough to see one. The musicians for the amarelo and vermelho blocos shout good-natured insults at one another as they wet the skin of their cuíca drums, test the tension of their pandeiros, run practiced fingers over the single string of hand-made berimbaus.

“Oy, Felix!” a girl in a yellow shirt calls out. “Your cuíca sounds like a rusted spider!”

A boy in red gives his drum a squeeze and fills the room with its booming laughter. “You mean your papai? Or is that just how he sounds when your mamãe leaves the bed?”

There’s laughter, a few groans. The amarela girl bites her tongue and starts a hard, challenging samba on her pandeiro. Someone nearby shouts and gives a running tumble, springing on his hands high into the air before landing upright. Everyone claps. I turn to Enki.

“Gil can’t even do that.”

“Then someone should teach him.”

The rest of the bloco amarelo fall in with her lead. A whistle blows, shrill and high, and I feel something rising in my throat, like a shout and a laugh and a song all at once.

“Enki, what is this?”

We’re still on the edge of the crowd, not quite hidden, but unnoticed in the shadows of the great machines. “It’s a still night,” he says.

“What?”

“When the winds don’t blow, and the catinga gets worse, the blocos will come here sometimes.”

“To dance?”

His eyes are still on the crowd, but I think his smile is meant for me. “And fight.”

He walks into the crowd; I’m right behind him. The knowledge of his presence runs through like wind riffling the bay. They part for us, but they don’t stop dancing. When we reach the blocos, the girl on pandeiro raises her arms and releases her rhythm in a shiver of tiny shaking cymbals. The rest of the bloco stops playing.

“The summer king!”

“Pia,” Enki says, and they hug.

“Didn’t think we’d see you again.”

“How could I stay away on a still night?”

She looks thoughtful. “I wondered, you know. It’s our first of the summer.”

“Oy,” Felix, the vermelho boy with the cuíca, calls. “Is this a contest or a reunion?”

“Don’t you see we’re in the presence of royalty?” someone calls from the crowd.

Felix spits. “Like I’ll bow to some trumped-up verde negro. He’s no better than any of us.”

The nervous laughter covers an oppressive silence.

Enki sketches a mocking bow. “Don’t worry,” he says. “These things don’t last.”

“Isn’t that right,” Felix says. His smirk is too hard — he’s uncomfortable, unsure of Enki’s popularity here in his home.

“So prove it, vermelho,” Enki says. His voice is very soft and low in a way I haven’t heard before. I know it means something, but nothing in my life has prepared me for this scene. There are wakas in the crowd singing to the air, holding on to one another and rocking. I know they’re tripping, and not on something as safe and familiar as wine or Auntie Yaha’s weekend blues either. Others are tuning in to what look like foreign feeds on an ancient, bulky holo modded with wires and tape.

“Give us a dance,” Enki says.

Felix’s lips pull back in a snarl and he actually starts his band with the cuíca, which rarely happens. It’s so insistent that it works, somehow. The vermelhos are mad, pounding and plucking and scraping so fast I’m sure they must be hopped on something illegal.

And the wakas dance. Some just sway, but others move so fast I’m sure their feet will be all blisters by morning. I expect Enki to dance with the rest of them — even I’m trying — but he just stands there and smiles.

Like he knows something else is coming.

Suddenly, in the middle of the beat, Felix curses and throws down his drum. The musicians take a few more bars to realize he’s stopped.