The Summer Prince (20 page)

When we reach the terraces, my shirt sticks to my skin and each gasping breath sears a little. Enki bends over with something more than just exhaustion. Even here, there’s a crowd, though almost no one lives on the bottom terrace. At first, people only glance at us as we push them aside, racing for the one pod station on this level. But then someone points, and someone else laughs, and then the crowd turns into a swarm with us at the center.

“Enki! That was some trick —”

“Oreste will think twice next time —”

“Something to tell my grandkids —”

Enki stops running when the people get too close, hemming us in. His muscles tense, he looks around with sharp, darting motions, like a panicked bird. He’s still shaking, and I know why.

Because he can feel the city. Because he can hear her.

Because he has infected himself with bio-nanobots that let him do that.

And I can see, clear as if I read the instruction manual that came with his mods, that if we don’t hurry, if we don’t get to where this collapse is going to happen and stop it, the pain of the city will be his own pain.

But Enki isn’t a city, he’s a human, and he might not survive that.

“Let us through!” I shout. “We have to find the Aunties.”

The voices mingle, but not like the roda viva of the song. Like a faceless, screaming monster, demanding our attention and our love and our time when we have none to spare.

“Please clear the way for official security business.”

The pleasantly officious female voice is so incongruous in this setting that Enki and I stare at each other.

“Security bots,” he says after a second.

“Crap. Auntie Maria.”

No, Auntie Maria wouldn’t be very happy about what the city heard her say.

The leviathan crowd quiets. They hesitate — should they protect their boy hero, their summer prince? Or should they run, before one of them gets caught in Auntie Maria’s notoriously sticky grip?

“Please clear the way for official security business.”

The voice is closer now, but we still can’t see the bots through the crowd.

“Go,” Enki says suddenly. He puts his arms around my shoulders, angles himself so his back is to the bots and I’m shielded from their view.

“But …”

“What can they do to me, June? It’s the fastest way to get their attention. I’ll try to convince them. But if they catch you with me, they’ll know who you are.”

And they’ll know I was involved in an art project that exposed the Queen and one of her trusted advisers to the entire city. He knew what it meant when I didn’t listen to the file. He understood what I was sacrificing.

But if they catch me now, my chance of getting the Queen’s Award goes very close to zero. It seems trivial, in the face of what might happen to the city, and yet Enki still considers it.

I love the whole world
, he said. Not me in particular. It’s my stupid lips and skin and pulse that make him seem to reciprocate. What meaning does love have when you’re not capable of anything else?

The crowd shouts. I hear the crash of thrown objects.

“— official security business!”

“It’s on the Sé line,” he says. He closes his eyes, the shivering redoubles. “High up, between eight and nine on the western face. There should be a spider there, it’s … oh, God.”

Enki sinks to his knees so fast I nearly buckle with him. “What —”

He opens his eyes. “It’s going to fall off. Something is wrong with its thorax. It’s too old, the nanotubes aren’t actually regenerating. Can’t support its weight.”

“So tell them, Enki!”

“They won’t believe me.”

I kneel, so my head is level with his. “You’re the summer king,” I say.

“With a dozen mods so illegal they don’t even have names. Who just hijacked the city for an art show.”

“What … what should I do?”

There’s a blast, shrieks. The security bots must be firing air guns into the crowd. I wince — that always looked painful on the holos.

Enki laughs a little and rests his head in the hollow between my neck and shoulder. This close, I can sense his struggle to just keep himself conscious.

“Find Ueda. The ambassador from Tokyo 10. Tell him he has to speak with Auntie Maria immediately. Tell him to confess everything. That’s the only way they’ll believe me.”

Confess everything? If I thought my heart stuttered earlier tonight, when Enki talked about bio-nanobots and loving the whole world, that’s nothing compared to the slow-growing horror that roots itself there now.

“What did you do, Enki?”

“Sometimes I think you’re lucky, June. That you can hate.”

Take a deep breath. Save the city. Think later. “Why will he believe me?”

“Tell him … tell him I said the first night, he asked me to whip him before we —”

I let him go like he’s caught fire. I think I might drown in my horror. Of all the people for him to sleep with, and of all the reasons for him to do it — Enki smiles like it’s the last time he’ll see me.

Everyone knows the summer kings screw like mayflies.

But not all of them screw foreign dignitaries for illegal biomods.

“Summer King, please come with us. We are on official security business.”

Maybe Enki stands. Maybe they drag him away. I don’t know; I’m already elbowing my way through the crowd, blinking back tears, hating Enki with all my heart.

Determined to save him.

I grab a pod by shoving the person who flashed it out the doors as they’re closing. I tell it to go to Tier Eight, and pray these tunnels are still safe. As the pod rockets through the city, I jack into the operator and beg her to let me speak to Ueda-sama.

“I’m sorry, June,” says the city, that same pleasant, reassuring voice I’ve heard all my life. “But Ueda-sama has not given you clearance.
Would you like to leave a message with the department of foreign affairs?”

“No, listen, it’s an emergency. Believe me, he’ll want to hear this. It’s about Enki.”

“I’m sorry, June, but the department cannot allow access to any level-ten personnel without clearance. Perhaps I could file your message with the department as urgent?”

“No!”

“There’s no need to be agitated —”

“A spider bot is about to crash on Tier Nine!”

The voice pauses. “I have no information of that kind, June,” she says. “None of our warning systems have triggered. Spider operation is perfectly normal.”

“None?” I say.

“No, June. We are fully operational. Would you like to leave that message?”

“That’s … no, never mind. Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome, June.”

The city jacks out. I’m left staring at the now-blank face of my fono, hurtling through the city in someone else’s pod and wondering the kinds of things that would have been unthinkable even an hour ago.

None of our warning systems have triggered.

Why would Enki be able to feel something in the city that the city’s own warning systems can’t detect? This is Palmares Três, the jewel on the bay, and surely a structural failure of this magnitude would show up on multiple warning sensors.

But I remember Enki’s face as he collapsed on the floor, looking as if he could literally feel the city’s pain. He seemed so sure. He took for granted that I would believe him.

Now there’s only one way for me to get through to Ueda-sama, and using it will mean ruining my plan to win the Queen’s Award.

“Bebel will probably win,” I mutter.

Is it worth it? How will I feel if it turns out that his mods have caused strange side effects, made Enki imagine things that aren’t there? There’s a reason the Aunties have made so many mods illegal, after all. If people in Tokyo 10 feel like destroying their bodies, that doesn’t mean we have to do it here.

“How could he have done this to himself?”

I’ve been pacing as much as the pod will let me, but this thought makes me freeze. I look down at my hands, cut and raw from planting so many lights on hard rocks. I think about how to me, this is nothing, no price at all for the beauty of the art I created tonight.

I remember what I said to him when I convinced him to be my partner.

You chose to use your own body as a canvas that no one could ignore.

I understood that then. When all I’d seen was a laugh, a plunge of lights, music and wakas and dance. It was nothing, the grandes thought. Just a prank. But I heard that note and predicted the symphony. I didn’t take it far enough, though, did I?

Enki will die at the end of winter. Why not do everything to his body that he possibly can? Why not experience every enhancement, every altered state, every different way of being that modern technology has to offer? And if Palmares Três has made itself too backward to have it, why not look elsewhere, to perhaps the most advanced city on the planet?

Enki will never be a grande. He’ll never have children and teach them the lyrics to his mother’s old songs, he’ll never walk the paths of the verde and complain that it looked nicer fifty years ago, he’ll never try to play football in the park and realize he’s not as young as he used to be.

He has always known what that meant; he has always understood what his art demanded. And me?

I was just playing at being radical, trying on transgression like my skin lights, secure that I could cut it out and go right back to graduating and university just as soon as the year was over.

Just as soon as Enki
died
.

The pod shuffles to a stop at Tier Eight. The doors open. I blink at the jostling crowd on the platform, so unusual for this time of night.

“Destination?” the pod queries when I don’t leave.

I let it read my own flash. “Royal Tower,” I say.

And then I ping Auntie Yaha.

In the throne room, the Aunties yell at one another.

“The city has confirmed that all sectors are fully operational,” says Auntie Serena, the municipal director. “For the fifth time.”

“I don’t know why we should believe the boy,” says Auntie Isa. “He’s just causing more trouble.”

Ueda-sama, still disheveled from his rush to Royal Tower, coughs. “I’m afraid,” he begins, then tries louder. “The biomodifications allow him to have a special rapport with AI interface. He has made connections your systems don’t have. And your systems …” He coughs again. “They’re rather out of date.”

Auntie Serena bristles at this. “They’ve served us quite well for the last century, Ambassador Ueda. Palmares Três hasn’t had a municipal disaster even close to the ones brought on by your city’s addiction to biomodification —”

“Serena!” Auntie Yaha says, and Auntie Serena stumbles to a stop. Apparently even disgraced foreign dignitaries can’t have their city’s ethics derided to their faces.

They go on like that, while I stand in the corner, wondering what I should do, wondering how much time we have left before the slow-moving bot loses its grip and crashes. How can they debate like this when there’s even a chance that thousands of people might die? The megatrusses are strong, but a spider bot is big enough to damage them. I don’t know where they’ve taken Enki, but Auntie Maria is conspicuously absent, and I suppose that whatever he told them was unconvincing.

“Has anyone actually checked on the bot?” Queen Oreste says from her chair at the head of the conference table. The room quiets.

“It’s moving slowly,” Auntie Serena says, “but you know those old clankers. There’s no indication anything is abnormal.”

“We should order it back down to the storage pod as a precautionary measure.”

Auntie Serena looks suddenly uncomfortable. “I have, Queen.”

“And?”

“It’s slow.”

“Perhaps,” Auntie Yaha says, and I can feel her discomfort, her fury even from my shadowed space ten meters behind her. “Perhaps we should evacuate the west side of tiers Eight and Seven, just in case.”

“Just because a spider bot is
slow
?” says Auntie Isa.

“The modifications —” Ueda-sama begins, but Queen Oreste waves her hand in distaste.

“There is a reason we don’t allow such things in our city, Ambassador. Inhuman abilities don’t mesh well with human brains. Auntie Maria tells me that Enki is nearly insensible because of the effects of these modifications. I don’t think it’s wise to trust him on this.”