The Summer Prince (35 page)

When evening falls, I’m where I’ve spent the happiest moments of my life: in Gil’s garden, listening to the latest from the King Zumbi bloco and talking. I have my pack with me, but I tell Gil it’s for an art project and he’s the last person to ever think that strange.

“Do you remember,” he says, lifting the bottle of wine from beneath the blanket we’re sharing, “that time we were ten and snuck away to Gria Plaza at night?”

I start to giggle, though I’ve barely tasted the wine. “We were so small we could hardly see anything. I remember thinking we’d get trampled when the music started.”

He takes a swig. “But I felt so proud when we came back, even when Mamãe made me stay home for a month.”

“Papai didn’t speak to me for a week,” I say. “Mamãe had to talk him out of it.”

We fall silent. Gil leans more heavily against me and passes the bottle. I pretend to drink, but then he swigs enough for both of us. It’s unlike Gil to drink so much, but I understand why.

“Have you thought of anything?” he asks, much quieter this time. “Some way to save him?”

My heart races so fast I feel sure he must hear it. “Gil, he’s the summer king. What can I possibly do when the whole city is waiting to watch him die in a few months?”

It’s harsh, but I meant it to be. Gil’s bottom lip quivers. “June, I don’t know if I can stand it. Not just to lose him, but to
watch
him die?”

“You’ve watched other years,” I say, as if I don’t know exactly how he feels.

He sits up straighter. “Enki is different. You know that.”

“Maybe he is,” I say. “But he isn’t different to the Aunties. He’s the summer king, and he dies at the end of winter. I wish I could change that, Gil, I do, but there’s nothing….”

The hypocrisy chokes me before I can quite get out the rest of the argument. Gil hears it anyway.

“Oh, I know,” he says. “I just let myself dream, I guess.”

“Gil,” I say, hugging him, “it’s okay to dream. It’s why I love you. One of the reasons, anyway.”

He takes a long pull of the wine. “Oh, yeah?” he says in a reasonable approximation of cheer. “What others?”

“Well,” I say, “you
can
dance.” I glance at my fono. I’ve stayed too long. I don’t want this to be my last time in Gil’s garden. I have to see Gil again, but not for months at least, and probably years. That’s if I succeed.

If I fail? Well, this always had to be good-bye.

“I’ve got to go,” I say, standing. “See you soon.”

Gil lifts my chin. “Everything okay, June?”

I shrug. “Not really. Take care, Gil. I love you, you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “I —” He breaks off and looks down at his wrist fono.

“Something is happening,” he says. “Breaking news ping. Something on Tier Ten, it looks like. Aunties, maybe?”

Ueda-sama. “Maybe,” I say. “Look, I’ve got to leave.”

He hugs me good-bye, but he’s distracted, already calling to his mamãe to turn on the holo while I leave through the back gate.

There are no tears in my eyes when I race to Harassi Plaza, the transport node for Tier Eight. I’m nothing but forward momentum and a curse. Ueda-sama promised to give us our cover. Have I spent so long with Gil that I wasted the opportunity? I pay no attention to the buzzing of the crowds as I catch the first transport pod out. I use nothing but public lines, but at the end of the workday, they’re efficient and anonymous. I make it to the verde about twenty minutes late, but hopefully it won’t matter. Enki is waiting for me at the center of the spider’s web.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “We have to hurry. I think Ueda-sama —”

Enki’s eyes are bleak. “Kiri,” he says. “He cut his own throat.”

My run slows, then stops. “Oh.”

“We need to leave. Ueda — Toshio killed himself for this. Let’s use his distraction.”

I could choke on the bitterness of the way Enki says
distraction
. But he’s right — no sense in waiting here, shell-shocked. Enki shoulders his pack and takes me to a part of the spiderweb I’ve never been before. There’s a tunnel large enough for a small, self-powered vehicle.

“This leads through the cliff,” he says. “I’d guess this is the fourth way they’ll look for us to have left.”

He starts into the dark. I hurry after him. “Enki, I’m —”

“It’s my fault,” he says. “It was my idea to ask him for help.”

I reach out and find his hand on the third try. “Listen,” I say, hauling him to a stop. “He was more than three hundred years old. Let’s give him this much credit: He must have known what he wanted.”

Maybe the bleakness clears Enki’s face a little. Hard to tell in the dark. “And I know what I want too,” he says.

It takes nearly forty minutes to walk through the steeply sloping tunnel to the cliffside surface. The city seems surprisingly far away, the expanse of untrammeled winter-dead grass surprisingly empty. The fresh air makes me clammy and afraid, but I don’t even think of turning back.

It’s Enki who pauses to look.

“Will you miss it?” I ask.

“I’m its king,” he says simply.

And then, the king and I, we run.

W
e took the road to Salvador like pilgrims and like fugitives; every step I took with the silence of the city heavy inside me felt like a prayer — to the orixás, to Christ, to my mother.

I prayed so hard I heard her voice. She said, “Enki, what have you done to yourself?” and “Enki, you should have worn some better shoes.”

I agreed with her about the shoes. You spent every real you owned on this fancy thermal pair and all I wanted was my sandals. When I tried to take them off, you said, “But it’s winter, Enki,” and I put them back on.

I realized this, on the road to Salvador: Mods don’t go quiet just because they can’t connect to a city.

And the things they speak to? The things they speak of?

You thought I talked in my sleep, and you never mentioned it. You thought I still held the city in my head, until you saw the hole she left inside me. Some mornings I thought I saw your worry frost our blankets, hang in the air with your cloudy breath.

But all the time we walked, you never looked back.

The first time I see the ocean, I stop breathing for a few seconds. I’ve spent my life near water, but I’ve never seen anything so raw, huge, and frightening. I didn’t know water could do that. Eventually, my brain finds a place for that monstrous, beautiful, roaring seascape. I turn back to the map and follow the path.

We’ve been walking for a month, and over that time, the weather has only gotten colder and the landscape more desolate. I decided to follow the coastline even though I suspect that will make it easier for the Aunties to find us. The roads are all farther inland, gray arteries cutting through the endless red irradiated dust. Four hundred years after the dislocation, and almost none of this land is fit to live on. Near the ocean, the air breathes a bit clearer and we’re less likely to need the warning buzz of our land-mine detector.

I’ve wrapped a headscarf over my face, both as a last-ditch effort to protect us from discovery and to guard against the dust. Every few miles, I have to stop and spit. Enki doesn’t seem very bothered by any of it, though I made him wrap a scarf around his face anyway. It’s funny that I can recognize Enki’s eyes though cloth covers his nose and mouth. Even while walking through this contaminated husk of land there’s a lightness to them, an awareness and a joy.

I’m glad we ran away. I’m glad, no matter what happens, because those eyes don’t deserve to die the way the Aunties would have it. I’ve never met anyone more alive than Enki, and it would kill something inside me to watch them spill his blood on that sacrificial altar.

I start to shiver and Enki reaches for my hand. His warmth eases me, though I no longer find it reassuring. I don’t know enough about the mods, I never will, but it can’t be good for him to run such a high temperature for so long.

He hardly sleeps at night. Some mornings, I find him prone and wide-eyed, frozen in some state where he can hardly speak or move. We have to wait, for hours sometimes, until it passes. He doesn’t tell me why.

He doesn’t tell me anything, really, though we’ve talked more in the past four weeks than in the whole almost-year I’ve known him.

He doesn’t tell me anything, but then, have I asked?

Enki straightens his shoulders against the driving wind. He says, mischievous, “Auntie you’d most like to see cleaning the algae vats with a toothbrush.”

I consider. “All of them?”

“Against the rules. You only get one shot, so who deserves it the most? — Isa? Maria?” He pauses and gives me a sidelong glance. “Yaha, even?”

I shake my head — an abrupt, almost involuntary gesture. “Not Yaha.”

“Ah. You should tell Gil when … someday. He always wished you would stop hating your family.”

As always, the thought of Gil is an ache somewhere deep in my chest, the back of my throat. I don’t regret leaving him behind, and sometimes that makes it worse.

“I know,” I say.

“So, who? Your ideal toothbrush wielder.”

“Oreste.”

He purses his lips. “She’s not quite an Auntie —”

“She’s a super-Auntie. An Auntie’s Auntie. We’ll give her a toothbrush of ivory and gold, befitting her station.”

Enki giggles, as I hoped he might. “She would curse your bones, June.”

“So long as she scrubs —”

“And smiles for the camera bots.”

We turn to each other in mutual, transient glee. Opaque cloth covers our faces, and still I feel his grin as my own.

“What would you do if you were Queen?” he says. Waves crash behind me. His eyes go wide, pupils dilated.

“I’d never be Queen,” I say, shivering.

“But if you were?”

I try to laugh, to dispel the strange intensity that hazes the air. “I’d move all of Royal Tower to the verde. I’d make the Aunties learn to draw and get the best grafiteiros to paint the ceiling of parliament. I’d have a summer king all five years and I wouldn’t kill him at the end.”

Enki doesn’t move at all, except to say, “Then he wouldn’t be a summer king, June. Just a king.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You’d let men rule in your city of women?”

“But,” I say, “you already rule. You’re already king. And men can be Uncles. It’s not as if anyone is stopping them from holding power.”

He releases my hands. “Isn’t it?”

I don’t know what to say. He doesn’t seem resentful, exactly, or even accusatory, and yet I feel myself on the defensive. I want to say,
We’re walking through the mess men made of the world
. I want to say that the summer kings have real power — though only one year out of ten, and only then, mostly, to pick the next Queen. I want to say that maybe boys don’t have as much representation, but they have plenty of freedom.

And everything I want to say makes me sound more and more like an Auntie. Like the Queen I could never be.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though I know this means almost nothing.

He takes a few long strides toward the white sand beach. I follow him. “I love our city, June.”

This should be in the past tense. It’s not ours to love anymore. We’ve left it.

But Enki is always the one who looks back.

The closer we get to Salvador, the more life we see. The dead zone we passed through just north of Palmares Três finally gives way to flats of switchgrass, cracked and brown with winter’s frost. Green bamboo grows in stands at irregular intervals — I make sure we sleep near them each night for cover. Aside from the occasional whir of what might be helicopters at night, we’ve had no indication of the Aunties’ pursuit. I try not to let myself relax, but sometimes all my thoughts drift between Enki and the shore — our sex is a little death each time he touches me, much longed-for.

A few homesteads dot the landscape, but we give them a wide berth. No way to know who here has contacts with the Aunties.
Anyone could turn us in. I know that most of our trade comes from closer to Salvador, but the Aunties I’ve come to know in the past year wouldn’t leave any place so close to their city free of a few tendrils of influence.

Some nights we sleep close enough to these lone outposts to smell their actual gas fires and the food they cook on them. I’m sick of the nutrient-rich reconstituted gruel that’s all we’ve eaten for more than a month. Enki doesn’t complain, but he turns his head to the unmistakable smells of real food as unerringly as I do.

And then one night the lights ahead of us are too bright for one house. From more than a kilometer away, we can see our first town as a torch on the barren plain.

We approach the lights slowly, but we approach. We should find a place to sleep for the night, but I think neither of us can resist the thought of a real town, a group of people, after so long with only each other’s company.

“Fences,” Enki says, his first word after hours of silence.

“What?”

We kneel in the tall grass and he points. I see, to the east of the lights, a bare smudge. “What are they for?”

“Cattle, probably,” he says. “Some kind of farming.”

The breeze picks up, bringing both the stench of the cows and the delicious aroma of cooking food. For a mad moment, I wonder if we could sneak in and eat.

But, no. This is the first town we’ve seen since leaving Palmares Três, and the Aunties will certainly look for us here.

I tug on Enki’s sleeve. “We should leave.”

He doesn’t move. I’m not even sure he heard me. He’s looking at the sky, though there’s nothing in it but night and enough stars to hurt my eyes. Not far from us, a cruiser engine rumbles. The growling sound gets louder as we listen.

“Enki,” I say, loud as I dare. “Get
up
. We have to go.”

Is he having another one of those fits? How long will it take him to move this time? But those have only ever happened in the morning. Is he getting worse?

But then he pats my hand — absently, as if I’m an anxious dog. “Shh,” he says.

I almost yell at him, but the cruiser is getting closer. The grass around us grows high enough to conceal us from casual observation, but that won’t mean anything if they run us over.

I grip his arm and pull, but I might as well try moving a boulder. Just a few meters away, jouncing beams of light illuminate the swaying grass. The sound of the motor gets quieter, the beams steady. Have they seen us? Why aren’t they going back to town?

I stop trying to move Enki. Either we’ll be lucky enough to escape notice, or we won’t. Nothing I can do about it now. I mentally curse him, but there’s not much venom to it: My summer king will always be himself.

The engine coughs a little as it shuts down no more than ten meters away. A man gets out, his hands on his hips as if he’s forgotten something.

“What is it, querido?” a woman calls from inside the cruiser. “The engine again?”

He shakes his head. “I just thought I …”

“Heard something,” whispers Enki, very softly. I glare at him. He ignores me. The man freezes, takes a few nerve-jarring steps in our direction. I pray that he won’t find us. That we’ll stay safe.

And then Enki takes my chin and tilts it up.

A flier hovers over the town — only in this absolute stillness can I hear the whirring propellers and engines that keep it aloft.

On its black belly, I can just make out a stark illustration in glowing white paint: a pyramid.

The woman gets out of the cruiser. “Oh, crap. What’s that? I thought we paid off the ’bucos already.”

“Palmares,” the man says very shortly. “At least they won’t want a bribe.”

“Who do those women think —”

“Torqada Township,” booms the voice of our city. I want to cover my ears, and not just because of the volume. “As you have undoubtedly heard, our fair city has lost its king. We have reason to believe he and his kidnapper might be hiding somewhere in these pastoral lands. If you give us any information that leads to their capture, we offer a reward of one million reals, payable immediately. Please take this as evidence of our sincerity.”

Against the lights of the town, I can just barely see a black silhouette, quickly streaking to earth. The thud it makes when it lands is audible from even this distance. I don’t close my eyes; I don’t breathe.

“Victor,” says the woman, “is that …”

She sounds scared. I don’t understand until the man puts his arm over her shoulders. “Not a mine,” he says. “They wouldn’t do that when they want something from us. It’s probably money.”

She relaxes a little and turns back to the cruiser. “Then let’s see what it is.”

Victor shrugs and walks back to the driver’s side. And thank all the orixás, I think we might actually make it out of this alive.

He stops. His shoulders shake, just a little, like an animal tossing a flea. “Emil,” he says, gesturing sharply at the cruiser. “Shut the lights.”

“What? Vic —”

But he waves again and she turns off the lights.

In the dark, I am blind. I reach for Enki and grip his arm, so warm against this cold that mists my breath. I want to leap up and run or just curse everything that has brought us to this place, but I wait. Enki rests his fingers lightly on my thigh — even now, he isn’t worried or scared.