The Summer Prince Page 7

  I almost stayed at home. I have more important things to think about than even Enki, but Gil begged and so of course I agreed. You don’t abandon a friend in love. And if my heart races at the thought of seeing him again, well, I’m a waka with a pulse. That doesn’t mean I want him.

  There are camera bots everywhere and occasionally they buzz near the two of us, but I stare straight ahead and pretend not to notice. Right now, I want to be invisible. I want to come up with an idea that will make Bebel look like she’s leading a sing-along at a birthday party. And when it’s ready, I want the world to know my name.

  “I still think you should do the garden,” Gil says. “Vines growing out of the trains? You’d definitely get attention.”

  “It’s too derivative. Juliana Consecu did that installation with roses five years ago, remember? Everyone will think I’m just imitating her.”

  “And the graffiti? We both know you’re great at that.” He flashes me a smile and I catch myself wondering how much the bots can hear, and if anyone could possibly put together his cryptic statement with the painting that interrupted the royal tour six days ago.

  “Not so great,” I say way too casually, and then Gil finally realizes that maybe we should be more careful.

  The truth is, I am good at graffiti, but I’m not sure I’m better than the big grafiteiros from the verde, and I don’t know how the Queen feels about it as an art form. It’s not technically illegal in public spaces, but the bots sure do get rid of it quickly.

  “Oh, God,” I say, burying my head in my hands, “I have no idea! I swear, I could kill Auntie Yaha.”

  “You’d rather not be a finalist?”

  I glower at him, because he knows I wanted this more than anything. It’s more than a second chance: It’s the only chance.

  Gil rubs my arm. “When they see what you can do, no one will care who your stepmother is.”

  A moment later, the lights dim to a cool twilight. Auntie Isa walks onto the stage, wearing her official red turban.

  “Thank you, all,” she says when she reaches the podium. “Tonight marks the beginning of a very special time for all citizens of our great city. We Aunties and the Queen are incredibly pleased by the election of Enki as our new summer king, and we have full confidence that he will fulfill the duties of the position as befits the royalty of Palmares Três.”

  She waits for dutiful applause, while Gil and I look at each other meaningfully. “Looks like Enki has already pissed off the Aunties,” I say.

  “I bet they’re even sadder they didn’t rig it for Pasqual.”

  “And now, I present to you our summer king!”

  Auntie Isa steps to the side of the podium, clapping her gloved hands politely. Gil and I go crazy, along with about half the audience. Now that I’m here my heart pounds and my lights flash and all I can think is how much I want to see his face again. Gil is so lucky.

  Enki walks out. He wears all black this time, and it reminds me of my hunting outfit. But who would he have to hide from, up on that stage?

  He waits for the noise to subside, though it takes a while. In the meantime, he nods politely at a few familiar faces in the audience: Gil, a few of the Aunties, the ambassador from Tokyo 10. His eyes slide over me like water. I had wondered if he even saw me, suspended in the air above Gil. I suppose I have my answer.

  Eventually we grow quiet and Enki smiles. Gil groans a little.

  “Thank you,” he says, as though he means it. “Here’s something I thought you might like.”

  I have time to catch Auntie Maria glancing at the woman next to her, and then there’s a noise like a rainstorm and the whole world disappears.

  For a moment, I think I’ve gone blind. Then someone two rows away flashes a portable light and I realize what’s happened.

  The lights — the famous lights of Palmares Três — have gone out.

  “June?”

  That’s Gil, groping for my hand. People are shouting. Nearby, someone prays.

  And then, as abruptly as they went out, the lights come back on.

  The room goes eerily silent. We look around. It’s not hard to see what’s changed.

  There are about thirty wakas onstage instead of Enki. They’re dressed in fraying sackcloth and their feet are bare. From the back of the audience, the drums start.

  It’s a mad rhythm, reminiscent of what Enki did for the Queen, but wilder. The wakas onstage move as if they might die if they sit still. Beside me, Gil is gaping. His hips twitch. A camera bot comes too close and bounces off my forehead. The audience seems torn between laughter and outrage. En masse, the Aunties leave their seats in the first two rows and head deep into Royal Tower for damage control.

  It takes me a moment to recover from my surprise and understand what this means. The wakas are from the verde, the poorest part of our city, and their clothes recall the slavery of our ancestors. Their clothes, their dance, Enki’s presence speak more eloquently than words: What does this distant Queen know of the verde? What has she done for it? The hypocrisy of Palmares Três dances on that stage, and though it shocks me, I can’t help but want to join them.

  Gil and I look at each other. Barefoot wakas are laughing and dancing.

  “Shall we?” Gil says.

  I nod, grip his hand, and we leap over the chairs to reach the aisle. The wakas onstage welcome us inside, and before we know it there are a dozen more, then the entire theater has filled with us dancing and clapping like it’s carnival already, and all the grandes just stare and cluck their tongues.

  And that’s when I realize it.

  From one artist to another, he said.

  Enki is an artist — just like me.

  I wear my hunting outfit, though I suppose regular clothes would do, because it feels like armor and I need every advantage I have to make it through this night.

  I’ve decided on a project for the Queen’s Award.

  It turns out that all I needed was the right partner.

  I go to Tier Ten, where only the Queen and the highest-ranking Aunties have their apartments. More like palaces, really, and so high up in the pyramid that the city regulates the oxygen content in the air. The pod takes me up but balks when I want to open the door.

  A face I recognize, but can’t quite place, hovers on the pod’s tiny holo.

  “Yaha?” she says. “What do you need so late?”

  “Oh,” I say, and it doesn’t take much to induce a blush. “I’m so sorry. It’s just …”

  “Who are you?” says the woman. Her bobbing head gets larger — she’s leaning in to look at me.

  “Ah, I’m so sorry!” I say, sounding like a moron and grateful for it. “It’s just that I’m so desperate to see Enki, so I took my stepmother’s flash….”

  She sighs. “You’re Yaha’s stepdaughter? I’m afraid the summer king isn’t taking visitors, dear.”

  “Oh, but can’t you just ask him! Tell him I’d do anything —”

  “I can pass a message, June, but it’s not my place to interrupt the summer king for this sort of … well.”

  My smile feels as if it lights my face. This will work. “Oh, thank you! Tell him I’d like to see him, like one artist to another. Is that okay?”

  The woman smiles. “It’s lovely, dear. I hope you get what you want. Now, I’m telling your pod to take you back home, all right?”

  I nod and her image flicks out. I’m very still on the ride home.

  All I can do now is wait.

  The ping the next day is anonymous, and has only two words: spiderweb midnight.

  I don’t tell Gil. I’m not sure why, except if Enki refuses me, at least only the two of us will know I failed. And besides, Gil might make the same assumption as the Tier Ten gatekeeper. This isn’t about sex. This isn’t a love story. I’m not doing this so a king can choose me and make me special.

  I’m doing this so two artists can create work together that they could never imagine alone.

  So I’m on my own again, pod
-hopping in my hunting outfit until I make it to the verde. It’s even harder from there. I find one of the horizontal transport tunnels, the kind that delivers goods straight to the industrial heart of the city. There’s no way to hop a pod through these. The only vehicles allowed to go through are used by the engineers, and they shut down except for emergencies at the end of the workday.

  So I have to crawl.

  As I’m creeping along the ceiling (the only place in these old tunnels safe from electrocution), I wonder how Enki will manage to get there. He’s from the verde, so perhaps he knows the ways the gangs use. I’ve heard rumors of easier walking paths, but I don’t know them. If everyone had to use nanohooks in the transport tunnels, trips to the heart would be pretty much limited to spoiled Tier Eight kids with access to technology of questionable legality.

  But I know his choice of location is a test. If I can’t get there on my own, then there’s no way I could be the one who did that graffiti; then I really am the ditzy waka I seemed.

  By the time I reach the internal node that marks the end of the first transport tunnel, my back is soaked with sweat. From here, the way is easier. The spider warehouse is down a short tunnel from the main node.

  I don’t have to worry about security bots or even a door blocking the way to the sleeping mechanical giants. Spider bots are so massive and old there’s not much worth stealing. I climb down the ladder as silently as possible, but even my breath seems to echo off their giant silver bellies.

  “Hello?” I whisper.

  Nothing.

  I check my fono for the time, which is a few minutes after midnight. Is he late? Did he leave when I didn’t show up exactly on time? I shake my head and walk farther into the maze. No, not after going through all this trouble. He’d want to see who I am.

  “Gil is my friend,” I whisper, a little louder this time. “But the casters love him, and I don’t want them to know about this.”

  I look around and see nothing but my face, reflected and distorted in a dozen giant silver thoraxes.

  And then, something darker.

  “You’re the one from that first night, aren’t you? The girl with the lights.”

  He leans against a spider to my right. His white shirt is unmistakable; I don’t know how I missed him.

  “I didn’t think you saw me,” I say, after a thick swallow. The force of his physical presence is stronger than I remembered. My eyes trace the lean muscles in his arms before I realize what I’m doing and focus firmly on his eyes.

  “Did I?” he says nonsensically. “I must have. Gil was … memorable.”

  “He has that effect on people.”

  Enki smiles and steps closer to me. “So that explains the mural? I thought it was one of the grafiteiros from the verde, but of course not, it had to be someone who knew him.”

  Enki stops talking and walks around me, a man looking over an expensive bot he might just buy. I make myself still, though inside I am trembling and hot. I swore this wouldn’t be a fairy tale, and now it isn’t. But I’m afraid of what that makes it.

  “What do you propose, June Costa?”

  I move in front of him, deliberately cutting his circuit short. Before I can think, I reach out, touch his shoulder with my gloved hand, and feel the suck of the activating nanohooks. His eyes widen. I have bound us, and he knows it.

  He is so beautiful, so warm and cruel and distant that I think, without the connection, I might just run away.

  “You’re an artist,” I say. “And I don’t think anyone but me truly understands what you mean by that. Not that you paint or you sculpt or you see the world in colors. You mean that you manipulate, that you express yourself on objects and use them to express you. You mean that when you chose to be the summer king, you chose to use your own body as a canvas that no one could ignore.” I have to stop for a moment, catch my breath. If this works, not even Bebel can beat me for the Queen’s Award.

  “That’s very interesting.” But his pupils have dilated, turning his light eyes black. He is precisely my height, and our eyes are locked as firmly as my hand on his shoulder.

  “And in exchange,” I say, barely a whisper, “you die.”

  “It seemed a fair trade.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “Why should I?”

  “My name is June,” I say, “and I’m the best artist in Palmares Três.”

  It hurts, and I wondered for a while if the Aunties made it like that so we go quietly to the slaughter. But now I see that it has to be this way, that you cannot force the human body, the human mind in such unnatural directions without a payment. In the Tokyos, they have subverted this rule, continued their self-augmentation until the body itself became uninhabitable. They haven’t transcended the body as they say. Of course they haven’t. Who wouldn’t rather be neurons and synapses and electrochemicals and sweet, sticky orgasms? They live in their data streams because their bodies won’t have them.

  My body won’t have me.

  Did you realize this, when we first made our pact in that mausoleum to ancient technology? You said my body was a canvas.

  But a human canvas can’t live. It can only flare and make a record of its dying.

  This is a record of my dying.

  On the twenty-fifth of December, Enki and I look over the bare cliff edge of O Quilombola, the easternmost island in the bay. We are arguing, because we always argue, and I’m thinking that I’m in no danger of falling in love with him, since right now I feel in hate with him, though that isn’t really true either.

  “Just blast it open, June,” he says, and kicks a cascade of volcanic scree into the rippling waters a hundred meters below.

  I gulp and remind myself that I’m wearing my nanohook boots. In the city, a monument to the comforts of technology, this is reassuring. Out here, in the raw embrace of nature, I’ve never felt more exposed.

  “We’ll destroy the cliff face. There’ll be nothing left to plant the lights on. Plus, you know, the Aunties will kill you.”

  Enki turns to me, dreadlocks swinging, and smiles that slow, mad smile.

  “I don’t know if you heard this,” he says, leaning out at a dangerous angle over the water, “but they’re already planning to.”

  I grimace. “You know what I mean.”

  “Of course I do, bem-querer. You’re saying that we shouldn’t deface public property for art.”

  I open my mouth. Close it again. “That is not —”

  “Exactly what you mean?”

  “It’s an island, Enki. It’s been sitting in this bay, minding its business for the last ten thousand years. Can’t we just … work with it?”

  He leans out all the way. The nanohooks in his shoes catch him, of course, but I still shriek. Enki giggles and hangs, an upside-down crucifixion, Prometheus laughing on the rock. The sun brings out the blues in his skin and the fleeting glitter of some of the mods he won’t explain.

  “Work with it?” he repeats. But I don’t say anything, because by now I recognize his considering voice. He detaches one foot and settles himself into an upside-down crouch.

  “O Quilombola,” he says, caressing the rock, “will you help us make you beautiful?”

  I purse my lips, but they still turn up in a smile. “What does he say?”

  “He says … he says there are crab holes.”

  This is strange, even for Enki. I kneel on the cliff edge, pray to Yemanjá, and lean as far out as I can, my nanohooks firmly planted on the rock.

  “You okay down there?”

  Enki clucks his tongue, but I can’t see his face. He’s looking at something beneath him. “Always worrying, always worrying.”

  “Someone has to be down here on the ground.”

  “And me in midair?”

  My breath stutters in my chest. My blood rushes to my head. I should get up — Enki isn’t going anywhere — but I can’t. The song he’s referencing is old-classical and rare, not even South American. “How do you know all this music, E
nki?”

  He’s still looking at something in the rock. I don’t know how he hasn’t passed out yet, hanging upside down. He must have found some sort of crevice, because his right arm has disappeared to the elbow.

  “How do you, June?”

  “My papai,” I say. “I asked first.”

  “My mamãe.”

  This renders me silent again. Suddenly, Enki laughs, and pulls out his arm. He holds a bright green crab still dripping with water.

  “O Quilombola has an answer,” he says. “Here,” and without any further warning, hands me the crab. I grip it by its head, trying very hard not to shudder. I like crabs plenty when they’re cooked, but right now its helplessly flailing legs remind me of a mushi bot.

  “You want to make art with crabs?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.” He turns back around and sticks his hand in a different hole, a meter below the first.

  “Why am I holding this?”

  “Because it’s wet.”

  “Genius, Enki.”

  “Oh, you can’t figure it out, June?”

  Against my better judgment, I carefully disengage my right boot, twist for a vertigo-inducing moment, and take a step farther down the rock. I do it one more time, so my head is finally level with Enki’s.

  “It’s a crab,” I say. “Why wouldn’t it be wet?”

  Enki pulls his hand out of the rock. He’s holding another crab, smaller, but the same species.

  “Also wet,” he says. He lets the crab skitter up his arm before it hops onto the rock and disappears down another hole.

  “You think the crabs are climbing from the ocean through the rock holes?”

  “How else would they get up here?”

  “Crawling?”

  Enki detaches his left boot, so he’s swinging wildly on the sheer cliff face. I watch him with what feels like a crab in my throat, knowing that at just the slightest wrong angle the nanohooks could give way. He’s laughing, of course he is, swaying like a pendulum right by my face. Our noses brush and my breath comes out in a fierce exhale.