“Go,” Enki says suddenly. He puts his arms around my shoulders, angles himself so his back is to the bots and I’m shielded from their view.
“But …”
“What can they do to me, June? It’s the fastest way to get their attention. I’ll try to convince them. But if they catch you with me, they’ll know who you are.”
And they’ll know I was involved in an art project that exposed the Queen and one of her trusted advisers to the entire city. He knew what it meant when I didn’t listen to the file. He understood what I was sacrificing.
But if they catch me now, my chance of getting the Queen’s Award goes very close to zero. It seems trivial, in the face of what might happen to the city, and yet Enki still considers it.
I love the whole world, he said. Not me in particular. It’s my stupid lips and skin and pulse that make him seem to reciprocate. What meaning does love have when you’re not capable of anything else?
The crowd shouts. I hear the crash of thrown objects.
“— official security business!”
“It’s on the Sé line,” he says. He closes his eyes, the shivering redoubles. “High up, between eight and nine on the western face. There should be a spider there, it’s … oh, God.”
Enki sinks to his knees so fast I nearly buckle with him. “What —”
He opens his eyes. “It’s going to fall off. Something is wrong with its thorax. It’s too old, the nanotubes aren’t actually regenerating. Can’t support its weight.”
“So tell them, Enki!”
“They won’t believe me.”
I kneel, so my head is level with his. “You’re the summer king,” I say.
“With a dozen mods so illegal they don’t even have names. Who just hijacked the city for an art show.”
“What … what should I do?”
There’s a blast, shrieks. The security bots must be firing air guns into the crowd. I wince — that always looked painful on the holos.
Enki laughs a little and rests his head in the hollow between my neck and shoulder. This close, I can sense his struggle to just keep himself conscious.
“Find Ueda. The ambassador from Tokyo 10. Tell him he has to speak with Auntie Maria immediately. Tell him to confess everything. That’s the only way they’ll believe me.”
Confess everything? If I thought my heart stuttered earlier tonight, when Enki talked about bio-nanobots and loving the whole world, that’s nothing compared to the slow-growing horror that roots itself there now.
“What did you do, Enki?”
“Sometimes I think you’re lucky, June. That you can hate.”
Take a deep breath. Save the city. Think later. “Why will he believe me?”
“Tell him … tell him I said the first night, he asked me to whip him before we —”
I let him go like he’s caught fire. I think I might drown in my horror. Of all the people for him to sleep with, and of all the reasons for him to do it — Enki smiles like it’s the last time he’ll see me.
Everyone knows the summer kings screw like mayflies.
But not all of them screw foreign dignitaries for illegal biomods.
“Summer King, please come with us. We are on official security business.”
Maybe Enki stands. Maybe they drag him away. I don’t know; I’m already elbowing my way through the crowd, blinking back tears, hating Enki with all my heart.
Determined to save him.
I grab a pod by shoving the person who flashed it out the doors as they’re closing. I tell it to go to Tier Eight, and pray these tunnels are still safe. As the pod rockets through the city, I jack into the operator and beg her to let me speak to Ueda-sama.
“I’m sorry, June,” says the city, that same pleasant, reassuring voice I’ve heard all my life. “But Ueda-sama has not given you clearance. Would you like to leave a message with the department of foreign affairs?”
“No, listen, it’s an emergency. Believe me, he’ll want to hear this. It’s about Enki.”
“I’m sorry, June, but the department cannot allow access to any level-ten personnel without clearance. Perhaps I could file your message with the department as urgent?”
“No!”
“There’s no need to be agitated —”
“A spider bot is about to crash on Tier Nine!”
The voice pauses. “I have no information of that kind, June,” she says. “None of our warning systems have triggered. Spider operation is perfectly normal.”
“None?” I say.
“No, June. We are fully operational. Would you like to leave that message?”
“That’s … no, never mind. Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome, June.”
The city jacks out. I’m left staring at the now-blank face of my fono, hurtling through the city in someone else’s pod and wondering the kinds of things that would have been unthinkable even an hour ago.
None of our warning systems have triggered.
Why would Enki be able to feel something in the city that the city’s own warning systems can’t detect? This is Palmares Três, the jewel on the bay, and surely a structural failure of this magnitude would show up on multiple warning sensors.
But I remember Enki’s face as he collapsed on the floor, looking as if he could literally feel the city’s pain. He seemed so sure. He took for granted that I would believe him.
Now there’s only one way for me to get through to Ueda-sama, and using it will mean ruining my plan to win the Queen’s Award.
“Bebel will probably win,” I mutter.
Is it worth it? How will I feel if it turns out that his mods have caused strange side effects, made Enki imagine things that aren’t there? There’s a reason the Aunties have made so many mods illegal, after all. If people in Tokyo 10 feel like destroying their bodies, that doesn’t mean we have to do it here.
“How could he have done this to himself?”
I’ve been pacing as much as the pod will let me, but this thought makes me freeze. I look down at my hands, cut and raw from planting so many lights on hard rocks. I think about how to me, this is nothing, no price at all for the beauty of the art I created tonight.
I remember what I said to him when I convinced him to be my partner.
You chose to use your own body as a canvas that no one could ignore.
I understood that then. When all I’d seen was a laugh, a plunge of lights, music and wakas and dance. It was nothing, the grandes thought. Just a prank. But I heard that note and predicted the symphony. I didn’t take it far enough, though, did I?
Enki will die at the end of winter. Why not do everything to his body that he possibly can? Why not experience every enhancement, every altered state, every different way of being that modern technology has to offer? And if Palmares Três has made itself too backward to have it, why not look elsewhere, to perhaps the most advanced city on the planet?
Enki will never be a grande. He’ll never have children and teach them the lyrics to his mother’s old songs, he’ll never walk the paths of the verde and complain that it looked nicer fifty years ago, he’ll never try to play football in the park and realize he’s not as young as he used to be.
He has always known what that meant; he has always understood what his art demanded. And me?
I was just playing at being radical, trying on transgression like my skin lights, secure that I could cut it out and go right back to graduating and university just as soon as the year was over.
Just as soon as Enki died.
The pod shuffles to a stop at Tier Eight. The doors open. I blink at the jostling crowd on the platform, so unusual for this time of night.
“Destination?” the pod queries when I don’t leave.
I let it read my own flash. “Royal Tower,” I say.
And then I ping Auntie Yaha.
In the throne room, the Aunties yell at one another.
“The city has confirmed that all sectors are fully operational,” says Aunti
e Serena, the municipal director. “For the fifth time.”
“I don’t know why we should believe the boy,” says Auntie Isa. “He’s just causing more trouble.”
Ueda-sama, still disheveled from his rush to Royal Tower, coughs. “I’m afraid,” he begins, then tries louder. “The biomodifications allow him to have a special rapport with AI interface. He has made connections your systems don’t have. And your systems …” He coughs again. “They’re rather out of date.”
Auntie Serena bristles at this. “They’ve served us quite well for the last century, Ambassador Ueda. Palmares Três hasn’t had a municipal disaster even close to the ones brought on by your city’s addiction to biomodification —”
“Serena!” Auntie Yaha says, and Auntie Serena stumbles to a stop. Apparently even disgraced foreign dignitaries can’t have their city’s ethics derided to their faces.
They go on like that, while I stand in the corner, wondering what I should do, wondering how much time we have left before the slow-moving bot loses its grip and crashes. How can they debate like this when there’s even a chance that thousands of people might die? The megatrusses are strong, but a spider bot is big enough to damage them. I don’t know where they’ve taken Enki, but Auntie Maria is conspicuously absent, and I suppose that whatever he told them was unconvincing.
“Has anyone actually checked on the bot?” Queen Oreste says from her chair at the head of the conference table. The room quiets.
“It’s moving slowly,” Auntie Serena says, “but you know those old clankers. There’s no indication anything is abnormal.”
“We should order it back down to the storage pod as a precautionary measure.”
Auntie Serena looks suddenly uncomfortable. “I have, Queen.”
“And?”
“It’s slow.”
“Perhaps,” Auntie Yaha says, and I can feel her discomfort, her fury even from my shadowed space ten meters behind her. “Perhaps we should evacuate the west side of tiers Eight and Seven, just in case.”
“Just because a spider bot is slow?” says Auntie Isa.
“The modifications —” Ueda-sama begins, but Queen Oreste waves her hand in distaste.
“There is a reason we don’t allow such things in our city, Ambassador. Inhuman abilities don’t mesh well with human brains. Auntie Maria tells me that Enki is nearly insensible because of the effects of these modifications. I don’t think it’s wise to trust him on this.”
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 who
le 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.
The Summer Prince Page 14