The Summer Prince (41 page)

“
Manhã tão bonita manhã
,” sings a voice like a knife-edge.

I thought I would cry. I thought I would break down and give up, but instead that strength bunches inside me. It vibrates. My bare feet slap the metal stairs as Bebel’s voice gets louder. I have never been more alone in my life, and I have never been less afraid. The stairs go up and up until I reach another open door, and a rooftop. The building overlooks a smaller plaza on Tier Two that I’ve seen maybe a handful of times in my life. It’s filled with thousands of people, all so unnaturally quiet that I can hear my feet crunching on bird droppings.
He is dead
, say my feet.
Your lover is dead
, says the strength inside me. I look down. The people stare at me.

No, they stare at a holo on the roof. I have walked inside it like a ghost. The wood of the altar steps goes through my feet. Flies buzz in my ears — but no, those are camera bots.

Oreste stands beside the altar. She is glowing with sweat; her face is savage and confused. There is blood on her dress and a knife on the
floor and Enki, so close I could touch his insubstantial projection — Enki is dead.

He is twisting away from her, as far as the ropes will allow. He has died with his outstretched hand covered in his own blood. He reaches toward me. Toward where the path to the roof has led.

From where I stand, it looks as though he is touching me.

Something vibrates on my stomach. The strange cloth heats and hums with its own energy. I look down. For a second, for a flash, I think I see words there, upside down so I can read them.
I love you.
But they disappear before I can focus and I look up, half blinded by words half seen.

Oreste stares at me. At
me
, though I’m on a prison roof on Tier Two and she’s in the sacred shrine on Tier Ten. I recall the buzzing of camera bots above: My image must be projecting into the shrine.

“You!” she says.

A whisper has started in the crowd below. I don’t understand it at first, but then I do: “In blood.” An echo of the words from the sacrificial ceremony:
You will mark your choice of the woman to be Queen, in gesture or blood.

“You’re not a legitimate choice,” Oreste says.

It occurs to me to look down. If the words were there, they have vanished forever. In their place, a mark more indelible — a bloody handprint across my belly. In a decade, no one has forgotten how Fidel marked Serafina. No one can mistake this for anything else.

I finally recognize the cloth. It’s old tech, more than a century, nothing the Aunties would have worried about. But Gil’s mamãe sometimes uses it in her designs because of its uniquely changeable surface. It’s not really cloth, but a kind of array. A flexible, programmable screen.

It shows the red bright enough, fresh enough that I feel as if he has punched me. I imagine I can smell his blood.

Like Oreste can.

How did it feel to cut his throat?
I want to ask.
To watch him die on the altar once he’d made you Queen?

But did he?

“In blood!” the whisper grows bolder now.

“He picked me,” I say.

“This violates a dozen rules. The courts won’t support it. You should give up while you can.”

“He picked me.”

My voice is pure, flat, and uninflected. But perhaps people other than Oreste can hear me, because the crowd below has gotten boisterous.

“Our summer king picked June,” they shout.

I stand there, barefoot and alone above a sea of people. Oreste glares at me. I turn from her and the body of my beloved. I walk away.

“I’ll fight this, June!” Oreste shouts behind me.

“You’ve already lost,” I say, not turning around. “Don’t you know it?”

“I will —”

“No,” I say, sharp enough to cut her off. “His blood sanctifies his choice, Oreste.”

The crowd roars.

I don’t want to be Queen any more than she wants me to, but Enki is dead, and Enki has chosen.

You know this doesn’t end, right? You’ll die one day — kiri like your father, or claw your way into your third century by the skin of your reconstructed teeth, your story won’t last forever. But for now, it’s yours, a lot longer than mine, and if you think I could use my life as a canvas?

The summer king has nothing on the Queen.

Don’t ever forget the art.

Take care of Gil. He won’t believe I’m dead, but I know you will.

They’ve given me an apartment reserved for special dignitaries on Tier Ten. Oreste has reluctantly agreed to abdicate her throne based on Enki’s surprise selection. She didn’t have much choice, in the end.

It turns out the city takes the institution of its divine summer king far more seriously than its own Queen does. It might be the first time in a century that a Queen has lost her position in a moon year, but the king’s word is his death, and both are final.

I haven’t managed to watch the footage of Enki’s final ceremony. I think about other things: the light show and our plunge from the rock, the wild parties and the way he would dance with Gil. I remember his happiness to finally find his mother’s house in Salvador.

The doll I never thought I’d see again arrived yesterday in an anonymous package. The letter said: “Tomas comes back home tomorrow. I think you left this behind. I’m not sorry.”

No
, I thought,
I never imagined you would be
. I got Lucia to dig out the memory chip. The files haven’t degraded — miraculously, given their long burial. Sintia had flagged an audio file of first Queen Odete on her deathbed. When I heard it, I understood why.

“I promised Alonso we would only use the sacrifice for the next two cycles,” she says, her voice brittle with age though she was only a hundred years old. “It was his idea because they all hated him for those leaks about his work with the CIA. He was dying anyway, he said, use the sacrifice to build their confidence. But I promised him it wouldn’t be for long, and now it’s been, oh, fifty years? I backed down, Sara …”

First Queen Odete didn’t mean for the summer king ritual to be permanent, and the mother of our last summer king kept this information buried in a doll in her garden. No wonder they let her inside. I wonder if Enki had some idea of what was in those files — perhaps he wanted me to have them as much as he wanted to see his mother’s garden.

I’ve released public copies of all the files into the main library. We’ll see how people react.

Some people are calling me the waka Queen, but it seems like a contradiction in terms. I might only be eighteen, but I feel like a grande. When I stand in front of my window and look out at the bay, my responsibility for this city sits like a weight on my chest. I remember telling Enki that I would never want to be Queen.

Knowing Enki, that’s probably where he got the idea.

Gil hasn’t left his garden since the ceremony. I’ve visited a few times, but he can hardly bear to speak. I just sit and try to be there for him the same way he’s always been there for me. Even if he can’t speak, I can still listen.

I think of Enki as an earthquake who left us with his wreckage. But then, who’s foolish enough to fall in love with an earthquake?

I walk back to my window and press my face against the glass. The bay at night never fails to calm me. It makes me remember love, and that’s not something I can bring myself to regret.

“June,” says the city, over my emergency speakers. I jump and then close my eyes. Not another crisis, not so soon.

“Yes?”

“I’m supposed to deliver a message.”

I stare at my reflection in the glass: tattered pants, a bloco shirt Gil and I scored from the verde almost six years ago, bare feet. Waka clothes, but grande eyes.

“What is it, City?”

“He says,
Sorry about the Queen business. I hope you’ll get used to it
.”

It’s his voice. “What —”

“
I’m dead, June
,” says his voice.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“But the city kept pieces of me.”

My head snaps up. I look around, half convinced he’s going to step out of the shadows of my room, crawl over the balcony in his hunting outfit, and laugh at me.

But I’m alone.

“I’ll be dead, but wait for me,” I whisper. Finally, I’m beginning to understand.

“
Bem-querer
,” says the ghost of my beloved, “
I’ll tell you a story
.”

And that’s the third time the lights go out in Palmares Três.

Palmares Três is a dream city, a future vision rooted in the Brazil of today, but fermented in my imagination. The bay of Palmares Três does not (currently) exist on the coast of south Bahia. Its particular Afro-Brazilian culture with hints of Japan, North America, and West Africa reflects the multicultural mix of modern Brazil through an authorial looking glass. The syncretism of Catholicism and Candomblé is very much alive today, but these traditions have changed in unexpected and unlikely ways in my imagined future.

Any errors of interpretation or extrapolation are my own.

This book owes a debt to the coffee shops of Vancouver, where I completed the first chunk, and to a certain magical apartment on Second Avenue, loaned to me during a difficult time, where I finished the rest. For the good knives and the state-of-the-art stove, you know who you are, and you are awesome.

The work of turning my undigested hunk of prose into a readable novel is based on the advice of a number of generous, talented, and wise people. I would like to thank the attendees of Sycamore Hill 2010 for taking on this novel as a partial. My fellow members of Altered Fluid (in particular David Rivera, Kristine Dikeman, Eugene Myers, Tom Crosshill, Paul Berger, and Devin Poore) took this book apart in the best way possible; you guys are some of my favorite people in the world.

Justine Larbalestier and Tamar Bihari deserve huge thanks for reading a draft so rough I could hardly get through it and seeing the value of this project. I could never have gotten here without your advice and support.

Jill Grinberg understood and believed in this book from the moment she read it; I couldn’t have dreamed of a better advocate, or a better team than everyone at Grinberg Literary. Arthur Levine and Emily Clement devoted incredible time and energy and insight to June’s story, teasing out facets even I didn’t see. You guys make me look smarter than I am.

My family, as always, is a huge source of influence and support. My sister Lauren inspired me with tales of her travels in Brazil, my cousin Alexis encouraged me to develop the first kernel of the idea that became
The Summer Prince
, and my father’s love of bossa nova sparked my own passion for the music of Brazil.

Cristina Lasaitis, Fábio Fernandes, and Christopher Kastensmidt went above and beyond to help me with my Portuguese and to answer cultural questions. The generosity of my fellow writers never ceases to amaze me.

Finally, Eddie Schneider has talked me down from so many ledges he might as well have a helicopter. Thanks for listening, for keeping me sane, and for being such a marvelous human being. You make me happy every day.

Muito obrigada, my friends. You’re all invited to the party.