The Summer Prince (38 page)

And what? We’ll be a big, happy family?

I try to imagine it. I close my eyes and force the images to come: Gil and me laughing, Enki learning to live with his mods, decades of music and dance and art and love. But the images seem flat and washed out in the screen of my mind, something I can picture, but not
really believe. When I open my eyes, Zanita has stopped and looks at me with that birdlike curiosity.

“Everything all right? You look like your mother just died,” she says.

“My father,” I say.

Zanita purses her lips and rubs my shoulder before pressing on. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, and I like her better for it.

Enki walks up ahead, his eyes scouring the boarded-up buildings with the avidity of an artist.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m so scared of the future even my imagination is failing me. Every morning I wake up, faintly surprised we’re both still alive. But I can’t tell either of them that, and so I straighten my spine and I walk on.

Enki swears that the soursop tree survived the bombing, but the closer we get to the old neighborhood, the more I wonder. This part of town is deserted compared to the warren of Low City where we first came in. The rotting, crumbling buildings we pass are occasionally inhabited, but most often they’ve been raided for useful supplies and left for the grafiteiros. The street art here can’t compare to even the worst of the offerings in the verde. Mostly I see names in blocky, stylized letters and an occasional white carnation. I ask Zanita about it, and she just snorts.

“These are just practice lanes. The real grafiteiros won’t let these guys near the good spaces down by the old buildings. So they come up here.”

Our destination, it turns out, is nearly an hour’s walk from Zanita’s mother’s place in High City. Maybe there used to be transport pods in Salvador, but now the options are either foot or cruiser. Enki knows when we find the street, because he made sure to download every map of this neighborhood in the Palmares Três library before we left. I’ve glossed over the details with Zanita, though I think she suspects something unnatural about his knowledge of the city.

“There,” he says, pointing to a tiny house a few feet ahead. The roof has caved in and the door is missing. I don’t know how Enki can sound
so sure until I catch up with him. The gap-toothed doorway shows a clear path to the backyard scattered with rotting tin, concrete rubble, and scraggly patches of grass turned brown by the cold winter.

And a tree, taller than I imagined it, right behind where the kitchen would have been.

“Are you sure?” Zanita asks. She sounds too quiet, worried. I wonder if she’s thinking about Tomas.

Enki walks up the crumbling front steps and fingers what remains of the wooden lintel above the doorway.

“She carved her name here when she was small,” he says. “See?”

My breath catches a little. I’ve never heard that kind of grief in Enki’s voice before. It reminds me of my own. On my tiptoes, I can just barely make out the remains of childishly malformed letters:
Sintia
.

“I never knew her name,” I say.

He shrugs. “I never told you.”

We walk over the threshold together. From behind us, Zanita calls out, “Are you sure that’s safe?” We ignore her. Rubble from the caved-in roof blocks a lot of the small house, but there’s just enough clear space for us to get through to the garden. My hands and face are covered in sweat and grit, and I smile. This reminds me of when Enki and I first started working together, the satisfaction of dirty, hard, physically demanding art. Only, we don’t seem to be making art anymore.

In the open space of the garden, I wipe my hands on my pants and look up. I’ve seen soursop trees in the hothouses of Palmares Três, but this doesn’t look much like them. The leaves clump in brown, withered bunches. A few balls of desiccated fruit sway in a passing breeze. At least the tree hasn’t fallen yet. It probably just died — this has been an unusually cold winter, even as far north as Salvador.

“Enki, I …”

I don’t think he’s heard me. He runs his fingers along the thick trunk. Then he just backs away and looks at it.

Behind me, Zanita has overcome her fear of the collapsing house and clambers into the garden.

“That’s what he came for?” she asks. I can’t tell if she sounds incredulous or sad.

“You have the shovel, June?” he calls.

I’m surprised, but it doesn’t seem like a good time to question him. I shrug off my pack and rifle through until I find our tool kit. Two knives, a shovel, a brazier, and tent all folded into a box about as big as my hand. This cost most of what reals I had left over after the thermal clothes, but it’s been invaluable over the last month. I take out the shovel, press the button, and watch it unfold itself on the ground.

“Jesus,” Zanita says. “Is that nanotech?”

“Nah. The Aunties aren’t such big fans.”

She laughs a little. “Yeah, I’d heard that.”

I take the assembled shovel and offer it to Enki. He kneels in front of the tree.

“I’m sorry,” I manage.

He looks up at me, takes the shovel. “What for?” he says. “It’s just a tree.”

He frowns at the ground, and then makes a slow circuit around the tree trunk. He stops at the point closest to what must have once been a kitchen window.

Then he starts digging.

Zanita and I look at each other, but there’s not much else we can do, so we sit on the ground and watch. Enki digs maybe a foot or so deep then stops. As far as I can tell, he’s hit nothing but dirt and stones.

“Find any treasure?” I ask.

“Not yet,” he says, and starts another hole a bit to the right.

He finds something on his third try. He digs a little deeper before he stops and tosses the shovel aside. He kneels beside the hole and scrabbles with his hands until he pulls a piece of dirty, rotting fabric out of the ground. He holds it up to the sun with a smile that makes me want to hug him.

“What the hell is that?” Zanita asks.

I shrug and walk over. It’s a rag doll. Or it used to be. It has a simple hand-stitched face and a thick body wearing the tattered remains of a formal white dress.

“She looks like an Auntie,” I say.

“Doesn’t she?”

He stares at the doll with a bemused half smile. I sit down beside him so my back is against the dead tree trunk and my sleeve brushes against his.

“Just once, Mamãe told me she buried this here. I think she thought I was too young to remember.”

“What is it?”

When he looks at me now I’m struck by how gentle he seems, how restful, even at peace. I have never seen Enki so relaxed.

“Oh, bem-querer,” he says, whispering for no reason I can tell. “Sometimes you don’t know me at all, sometimes you read me so clearly.”

“Which is it today, Enki?”

He hands me the doll. “You should take this.”

The once-white cloth of her dress stains my hands with red soil. She smells a bit like the catinga and suddenly, I’m so homesick I could throw up.

“But it’s your mamãe’s,” I say. A little girl named Sintia had loved this. A young woman named Sintia, pregnant with the future summer king, had buried this in her garden. But why?

“Do you remember what I told you about her? About how she convinced the Aunties to let her into the city?”

“The library?” I say, and then I remember: She made two copies of the classified information before the university had been bombed to rubble. One, she brought with her to Palmares Três. The other …

I look down at the doll.

“Oh,” I say, and remember Zanita.

She’s studiously ignoring us, leaning against the crumbling wall and whittling a fallen branch with a penknife. I mostly trust her, but
if I’m really holding the one remaining copy of Salvador’s university library, it seems prudent to keep that to myself.

“Hey,” I say. She looks up.

“You guys done? Mind if we wait a bit? This wood is really good to work with.”

I lean over so I can get a better view. She’s working on the tail of what looks like some four-legged animal — a cow, maybe, or a horse. She’s taking her time with it, putting in detail that I can’t help but admire.

“That’s pretty good,” I say.

She shrugs. “Just something I tinker with. Tomas says it’s a waste of time.”

“Art is never a waste of time.”

Zanita flashes me the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her all day, but it’s soon drowned by something else. I shift uncomfortably, remembering Tomas’s shallow breathing in the second-floor bed, the hushed whispers as his family discussed their options.

Her cousin might die today, but Zanita is sitting here with us. People handle grief differently. I ought to know that.

Enki stands, breaks a wrist-thick branch from the dead tree and ambles over to her.

“Can you show me how?” he asks with surprising diffidence.

Zanita stares at him blankly for a moment, then shrugs and tosses the half-finished figurine to the grass. “Sure, why not?” she says. “We still have time.”

I haven’t done much sculpture before, let alone wood carving (it’s a crime to cut trees in Palmares Três). I can no more resist a new kind of art than Enki can. I hover nearby, riveted when she hefts her small knife and demonstrates how to strip the bark.

“Always remember to go with the natural grain of the wood. Work with it, not against it, eh?”

Enki holds the knife with a sure, steady grip, as if he’s been using one all his life. But then, growing up in the verde, maybe he did. His
cuts are crude and unsteady at first, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Zanita gives him tips, occasionally demonstrating with her own figurine. Enki watches with eyes that could swallow her, and then he tries again.

She touches his hand and then flinches away. “Are you … do you feel okay?”

Enki looks at me.
Well, should we tell her?
his eyes seem to say.

Saliva pools in my mouth; I have to remember to swallow. “The heat’s just a thing the Aunties did,” I say, though that’s such a twisting of the truth it’s almost a lie.

Zanita scowls. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s the price for living in paradise.”

Paradise? I love my city, but I would never call it that. Zanita looks angry and closed off. Enki shuts his eyes and rolls onto his back. The sunlight hits his face through the dead branches of the tree so that he hardly looks human. His breathing has turned shallow and irregular, but he’s done that enough lately that I don’t think much of it. Everything will be better when we get to Lisbon or Paris or wherever.

But for now, I find myself pulling out the two knives from my pack and unfolding them.

“I have an idea,” I say.

“What, Princess?” Her voice holds more bitterness than her expression. I know she partly blames us for what happened to Tomas, and maybe she isn’t wrong.

Enki opens his eyes. His pupils are dilated near-black; his mouth moves almost imperceptibly. Whoever he’s listening to, it isn’t me.

“Why don’t we carve the tree? We can each take a third.”

“That’s … strange,” Zanita says.

“It’s art,” I say.

She picks up her knife and flips it in the air. “You’re kind of hung up on that, aren’t you?”

I laugh. “My name is June,” I say.

“And she’s the best artist in Palmares Três.”

I didn’t think he could hear us; I didn’t know he remembered that. He levers himself into a sitting position. Zanita shakes her head as though she can’t believe she’s listening to us, but she follows me when I walk over to the tree.

“What should I make?” she asks.

“Anything you like.”

She frowns, but it’s more from concentration than disapproval. A moment later, she starts in on the wood. Enki works on my other side. I take my knife. The trunk is firm but not too dense — perfect for carving, just as Zanita said. I’m not sure what to make, and I have no skill at this anyway, but that familiar stillness, that intense and sharp focus bears upon me like a tide. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to simply create, to feel the joy of art in the absence of its politics or its consequences.

The afternoon sun sinks, warm on my back. In the street, kids shriek and scuffle. I imagine a game of football, like what Gil and I used to do on boring summer evenings before everything changed. I kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the sun-warmed dirt. I breathe earthworms and rust and fresh-cut wood. I don’t look at Enki but I can feel him carving his mother’s tree, as clearly as if he were an extension of myself. The dark of the backs of his hands, the light of his palms, the almost religious fervor with which he cuts, they are mine because they are his.

I think,
You are my heart
, and I know he hears because his hand reaches for mine. For once, I am sure inside Enki’s love. The mods don’t matter anymore. He can love the world, and I won’t begrudge it.

I lose track of time. I didn’t really know what I would carve until I started, but now I focus on it with all my intensity and limited skill. Maybe an hour passes — at least, the sun has burned down to an ember and I find myself squinting to see the detail in my work.

There’s a noise in the street outside. More kids playing ball, I think, and keep carving. Zanita steps away from the tree.

“I had to,” she says.

I ignore her. Just a few more minutes, and I should be finished. It’s been so
long
and I don’t know when I’ll have another chance once Enki and I continue our journey.

Powerful lights illuminate the house, glancing off the tree enough to help me work. I don’t bother to turn around; I’ve spent all my life in a city of lights, after all.

But this is Salvador, and its militias and gangs have never gone in for much illumination.

Enki puts his hands around my waist, rests his head in the hollow of my neck.

“June,” he says. “Bem-querer.”

“June Costa.” I’d recognize Auntie Maria’s voice anywhere. “Put down your weapon and step away from the king.”

“Tomas will die otherwise,” Zanita says, and I want to tell her to
shut up
and crawl back through the house with her million reals and save Tomas’s life because she’s just ruined mine.