The Summer Prince (21 page)

Nearly insensible?
It must be close, then. I ache for what I imagine he’s feeling. And I’m furious, because a disaster is about to fall on our city, and they will do nothing about it.

“You have to evacuate,” I say.

They ignore me.

“It’s going to happen soon,” I say, even louder. “If he’s in that much pain, the city knows it’s going to happen soon.”

Auntie Yaha turns to me, red with fury. “June,” she bites out, “will you please shut up?”

The other Aunties shuffle uncomfortably, but none so much as look at me. Not even Queen Oreste.

What will happen to Enki when that spider drops?

What will happen to the city?

I know what I have to do. I want the Queen’s Award so badly I could get on my knees and beg, but I don’t hesitate.

A brush of my fingers, and I see the familiar array of my fono. I jack into the city.

“Yes, June?” she whispers, low in my ear.

“I need you to send a message,” I say.

“To whom, June?”

“Enki.”

“You don’t have clearance for the summer king, June.”

I smile. “That’s okay. I just want you to know, City, I want
you
to know that I need cameras. Lots of cameras in the throne room, in about thirty seconds.”

“I don’t know what to do with this information, June,” she says.

“Could you tell all the parts of yourself? Even the small ones?”

“I can do that,” she says. “I still don’t … I see now. He says,
Does forty work?
”

I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. “Yeah. Forty works.”

They arrive like a plague of locusts, streaming through the open windows and doors and even cracks in the wall. Some of them wobble and die after hitting the anti-camera technology, but the throne room is one of the few areas of Royal Tower open to certain kinds of camera bots. These are plenty enough eyes to see exactly what I’m going to do.

“What is going on?” Queen Oreste says, rising from her seat.

I don’t give them time to wonder. I stride to the front of the room and stop right beside her.

“There’s a malfunctioning spider bot on the second megatruss, west side, Tier Nine,” I say, clearly as I can to the expectant horde. “The summer king has acquired bio-nanomods that allow him to interface with the city in a way no one has ever done before. I think we all know how old and outdated the spider bots are. The city’s systems are malfunctioning, but the bot is going to collapse, and any residents of tiers Seven and Eight on the west side are in severe danger. You should
all get out now, if you can. And if any engineers can do something to stop it from falling, now is the time to try.”

I stop, take a deep breath. There. That should do it.

“June.”

It’s the Queen. I turn to her, slowly. “How do you know?” she says. “Why are you so sure about him?”

“I’ve seen him do it,” I say quietly. “Dozens of times before, I’ve seen him do things that are impossible unless he’s talking to the city.”

“But
why you
?” says the Queen, insistent.

I sigh and face the cameras.

“I’m his collaborator.”

I
won’t call what I did with Ueda a mistake, though I know I should. Remember how Sebastião justified it? He said that summer kings were above morality, and he was right, and he was wrong.

Gods are what people worship. Men are what die.

The trouble, the truth that I realized only after I saw you facing those cameras, was that I love Gil. And now you will say that I love everyone, and I do, but not all in the same way. You’re the other reason he didn’t declare, I don’t know that he told you. Even before we met I owed you his life. Maybe he could have beat me, but then, maybe not. If he were the summer king, if I were the boy dancing on glass, would we have come together? Would he still love me?

Would I still hurt him?

I won’t call it a mistake — though it was a mistake.

The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.

Gil peels the shells from shrimp as if he’s undressing them for the evening. Beside him, shoulders touching, Enki dices cilantro with surprising care. I offered to help, but they both insisted I rest on the hammock Enki has strung across his living room. In a large frying pan, coconut milk stews with palm oil and chiles and a dozen other spices. I’ve been watching them cook for the past half hour. Gil got his mamãe to write down the family recipe for him, which as far as I’m concerned warrants all the time in the world. A vatapá stew is not
something anyone should rush, and from the smells drifting over my lazy, swinging perch, this promises to be delicious.

From behind, Enki and Gil could easily pose for a holo feature on the summer king’s contented domesticity, but I can see the cracks. Enki’s movements are uncharacteristically slow and deliberate to control the jittery aftereffects of some unnamed mod. Gil asks him perfectly pleasantly to check on the stewing chiles, but there’s more pain than warmth behind the words.

Enki could have banged half of Tier Eight without hurting Gil as much as a few sessions with Ueda-sama. A broken spider bot rusts in the bay, a fallen mechanical giant, a monument to the consequences of our city’s enforced technological backwardness. Not even the Aunties can ignore it — not when the only thing that saved Tier Seven was the quick work of several technicians who made an impromptu chute of mushi bots and another nearby spider bot. If not for my desperate message — which the whole city knows the Aunties tried to prevent me from sending — a few thousand people would probably be dead right now. Which made Enki’s indiscretions with the ambassador from Tokyo 10 barely rate a few hours of shocked consternation. They care about the exotic, illegal biomods that Ueda-sama gave Enki, not what he got in exchange. There are more important struggles: Fault lines between technophiles and tech isolationists have erupted into an ideological war, its battleground the streets and transport hubs and parliamentary hearings.

But in this room, the real conflict threads through our spoken words, in the way Gil stiffens when Enki touches his ear, in the way Enki glances at me as if he wishes I could do something to help.

I was angry with Enki at first, but mostly because I wanted his kiss on the water to mean something. Gil hates what Enki’s done because he doesn’t believe Enki could ever love someone like Ueda. He thinks Enki is losing his soul, sleeping with people for nothing but material goods. But he doesn’t understand that Enki loves the whole world. Why
shouldn’t
he love Ueda-sama? Why
shouldn’t
he love me? I want to
talk to him about it, but he avoids any conversation about Enki’s mods, and I’ve been too afraid to tell him about our kiss. Too afraid that he’ll hate me for it.

So instead I watch holos, seeing how the casters react to my sudden, dramatic involvement in the life of their summer king. Most assume we’re romantically as well as artistically involved, though I’ve denied it in my few interviews. A kiss is nothing, and it’s none of their business besides. Some are even sympathetic about my probation for the Queen’s Award. Auntie Isa says none of my collaborations with Enki will be eligible for consideration, and that if we do it again, I’ll be disqualified entirely. I’ve decided that this means I still have a slight chance. If I didn’t, why bother with probation? Enki looks baffled and a little pitying when I mention it, but I don’t care. I still want the Queen’s Award, and I’ll do as much as I can with any chance they give me.

“That finalist from the verde has been on all the news feeds,” I say when the silence stretches too thin.

Gil’s shoulders sag in relief. “You’re right, I saw her on Ricarda yesterday. What’s her name?”

“Lucia,” Enki says. He’s perfectly still; even his mouth barely moves. Some sort of mod effect, I’ve learned, and when it starts, he often loses touch with reality for hours at a time.

“Do you know her?” I ask. Now that technology is suddenly the most important issue in the city, Lucia’s projects have reached municipal prominence overnight.

He moves his head very slowly toward me, like he’s pulling it away from a wall coated in sticky glue. Sweat beads on his forehead. Gil frowns and takes his hand.

“Heard of her,” Enki says. “She was getting to be the biggest tech-head in the verde. She could jack all sorts of things to do what they weren’t supposed to. Fonos that could pick up banned feeds from Salvador, Lisbon, even a few of the Tokyos.” His shoulders jerk and his movements regain their normal grace, the spell over with an abruptness
I’ve grown used to. Gil moves away from him to turn down the heat on the stove. I start to get up, but the hammock seems to encase my limbs; it’s too awkward to move, and I give up too easily.

“Tech-head?” Gil says.

Enki laughs and plants a kiss at the base of Gil’s neck. “How many times have you been to the verde, menino? You never saw the bootleggers in Carioca Plaza?”

Gil freezes, then relaxes into Enki’s arms. He’s taller than Enki, and more obviously muscular, and yet Enki dominates him so carelessly. Enki is trying to apologize in his own emotionally blunt way; he’s trying to say that it doesn’t matter what he does with other people, as long as he and Gil are together.

Maybe that will persuade Gil eventually. Now, Gil just closes his eyes. “The ones selling those cobbled-together fonos?”

“The best in the city,” Enki says. “Tech-heads rewire the basic models.”

Now this makes me sit up in my hammock, nearly tumble to Enki’s bamboo floor. “I thought they did that because they couldn’t afford real ones.”

Enki snorts and looks at me over his shoulder. “What we can’t afford, June, is to accept the little they give us. Standard-issue fonos? We have just as much of a right to speak to the city as any Tier Eight brat.”

This stings, though I wonder if Enki meant it to. I walk over. Enki watches me carefully. “So what do the jacked fonos do?” I ask him.

“Show nearby security bots so the grafiteiros can avoid them. Access the up-tier city voice.”

“The city’s voice is different in the verde?” This shocks me. I’ve heard her all my life, answering simple questions and directing me when I’m lost.

Enki shrugs; he can’t even bother to respond to such privileged ignorance.

I try again. These days, I feel as if I’m nothing but one prolonged attempt. “They jack the fonos to speak to the city?”

For a moment, Enki’s eyes turn as reflective as a cat’s. “They try,” he says.

On the night of his eighteenth birthday, Enki sits on a throne of shells and shale and fallen blooms; Gil and I sprawl at his feet. The rock of A Quarentena pulses like a beast beneath us — the insistent boom of bloco amarelo blasting up through the island itself — and dancing on it are the hundred luckiest wakas in the city. Enki is on a trip, riding some wave of his mods. Occasionally, he reaches down to touch Gil, who is too still beneath him. City lights bathe us. Near the pylons, a muddy rainbow shoots from the colored array grafiteiros have hacked onto the fallen body of the spider that nearly hit the city.

Camera bots flit everywhere, but none get too close to us. We invited Sebastião and a few other casters to the birthday party, since these days there’s no avoiding them, and there’s something flash about letting them bask in the glow of our fame.

I finished my tree last night, and I take a hollow delight in the knowledge of what Mother will think when she sees the dress I’m wearing to show it off. Gil’s mamãe helped me make it, though she made me swear not to tell. She worries about Gil, his mamãe, and she’s not the only one. His introspective, quiet listlessness hasn’t improved in the week since our dinner at Enki’s house. In the two weeks since I outed myself in the throne room, I don’t think I’ve seen him dance once. I want to hate Enki for him, but I think Enki might have infected me with his biomods, because these days I find it harder and harder to hate anyone.

Especially the ones I love.

“Gil,” I say, rolling closer to him on our pile of beautiful detritus (because Enki and I haven’t given up on art, how could we, though I
hope the Aunties won’t have enough imagination to notice). “Could I wear your coat?”

Gil opens his eyes. He seems confused for a moment; his pupils are dilated a near-black that perhaps the low light could excuse, but I suspect shouldn’t.

“Your tree,” he says, so softly I know his words by the shape of his lips.

“It’s cold,” I say, though it isn’t, not really.

He puts it around my shoulders; I’m glad, because it means that whatever he took, it wasn’t enough for a trip.

“Dance with me?” I say.

Gil closes his eyes as if he wants to say no, but he nods.

For the first time all night, I feel something like happiness. It’s been a hard few weeks for all of us — even Enki, though the way mods grip him sometimes, it can be hard to credit him with any human emotion.

I slide off the throne, Gil’s long spangled coat flapping behind me. Gil even smiles when he helps me up. As soon as we step outside the invisible bubble surrounding Enki’s makeshift throne, the cameras swarm close. I swat a few away and they back off. The same can’t be said of the wakas, unfortunately.

Two weeks ago, no one had heard of June Costa, but now I’m as regular an item on caster feeds as Gil. Plenty of wakas hate me, but the ones we invited to this party don’t — or at least they’d never admit it.

“June!” a girl calls, so young I wonder how she snagged an invite. She points to her arms, where she’s implanted a crude version of my skin lights. The design is pretty, though, and I smile at her.

It isn’t as grand as shutting down the city with a light and sound installation, but there are worse things than being admired and influential. I wonder if the Aunties are watching me; I wonder if Mother is. What would she think of my light-tree if Papai were still alive? I imagine her commenting on the richness of the colors, or the intricacy of
the leaves. If I had the Queen’s Award, could she finally see me again? Could she forgive every poisoned thing between us?

Gil just stands in the gyrating crowd as though he’s heard of dancing but can’t quite remember what it is. I take his hand and hold it over my heart.

“You’re warm,” he says.

I shake my hips in answer and tip back my head, so Palmares Três hangs upside down from a purple sky. A moment later, Gil pulls me closer. He laughs. It’s harsh and sharp, but it’s laughter and it’s dancing, and I hope that maybe Gil has gotten over the worst of his sadness.

The moon sets, and we’re still dancing, wet with sweat and drunk on movement. A few cameras still hover nearby, but not so many as before. Even the gossip casters get tired eventually, and it’s Enki they’re really after, not Gil or me.

I wrap my arms around Gil’s slick neck and rest my head against his collarbone. “He’s sorry, you know.”

“I know. But he’d do it again.”

“That’s Enki, isn’t it? The other side of what we love.”

“That he doesn’t care how he hurts other people?”

“No, no,” I say, aching and wondering how Gil can’t see what’s so clear to me. “That he knows exactly how he hurts people, and he cares, and he does it anyway.”

Gil stops dancing with the abruptness of a slap. He starts to walk — away from Enki, away from the dancers and the cameras, though a few try to follow us. I glance at Enki and they drop, lifeless, to the rock. My sandals slip as I chase after him. I balance myself with out-flung arms and keep running.