The Summer Prince

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  He lets his free hand tangle in my bombril hair. “Which one? All of them? None?”

  “Enki, do you always have to be so —”

  “It’s a side effect,” he says, and there’s not much laughter anymore. “Like the trips. Or the pain. Just something the mods do because they have to work in my brain, and they haven’t had a hundred million years of evolution to balance things out.”

  “Oh.”

  “June.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know how sick I am of talking about these goddamned mods?”

  When I break, I feel it like a physical snap, a sharp flare of pain running between my chest and my groin as I kiss him.

  My tongue slides along his teeth, the inside of his lips. His hand tightens around mine until it ought to hurt, but all I can feel is the pressure and the heat and the wet/rough of our tongues hitting, searching, finding each other again. He tastes like a summer rain on packed earth, like the wind that clears the verde for those few precious hours before the catinga comes home.

  It ends, because he ends it. I don’t know how long after.

  “Is it Gil?” I whisper when I can. I take my hand from his.

  I can’t read him, but then I never could. His eyes are black like he’s high, but I know he isn’t. Enki never takes anything.

  “No,” he says. He sits up, looks around the garden as if he’s never seen it before. My lips don’t tingle, they vibrate like a plucked string. My heart beats faster than a pandeiro.

  Enki isn’t even breathing hard.

  It was different, the first time. Gentle and a little confused, like he hadn’t realized he meant to kiss me until he did. A sweet press of lips on lips that demanded nothing but the acknowledgment of shared joy.

  Now I am nothing but demands and frustrations and denial. I am that kiss, and I am unfulfilled. I watch him; what else can I do?

  He stands and walks over to my discarded papers. For a long time, he studies them, detached and frighteningly remote. I can’t even remember what I was drawing. I’m consumed with simple, stupid things: the line of his corded bicep, the white of his teeth, the skin taut over his collarbone, the light brown tips of the dreadlocks that fall onto his forehead.

  “I look like that to you?” he says.

  For a moment, I think his mods have reached into my brain, seen through my fevered eyes. “Like what?”

  “Like I’m dead already.”

  He shows me the drawing. Gil and Enki looking at each other, only Gil’s legs are twisting like a banyan trunk, and Enki’s fingers have turned into feathers.

  “You’re not dead,” I say.

  “Flying away. That’s the same thing, to you.”

  “It isn’t.” It is.

  He smiles, sinks back to the ground, and I wonder if maybe his body does tremble, just a little. Has he finally felt the cold?

  “You’ll still have Gil,” he says.

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “You love him.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Gil’s easy to love, isn’t he?”

  I relax suddenly. The tension that I had thought would crack me in two turns to something softer in the warmth of Enki’s rueful smile.

  “Unlike the two of us,” I say.

  “I love you, June.”

  I dismiss this, because his mods make him love everyone. “So why won’t you …”

  He pushes the drawing toward me, far enough back that there’s no chance we can touch.

  “Because of this,” he says, and it means nothing, and it means everything.

  You’re probably wondering why this is for you and not Gil.

  So I’ll tell you a story.

  Once upon a time, there lived a young spirit of a lagoon so deep in the rain forest that even now only monkeys live there. He called himself Ikne, and all the world loved him. The nearby trees grew their greenest leaves, flowers unfurled their brightest petals and exhaled their sharpest scents. If a fish was lucky enough to live in the lagoon, it grew sleek and fat and happy, and spent every day singing of Ikne to his less fortunate fishy friends. If Ikne wasn’t always happy, he was more often than most. His life was good. Bright. He could live a long time like this, become an ancient spirit like the ones of caves and mountains, live to complain about kids these days and play arthritic peteca on the municipal courts.

  And so Ikne walked away from his idyll and got a job sharpshooting for the Pernambuco guerrillas in Salvador. It wasn’t an easy life, and one day he got shot in the stomach by a lead bullet. The bullet fell in love with him, of course, but she couldn’t stop the slow bleed of his gastric cavity into his pancreas, and she felt terrible, which was too bad, since he’d known all along what would happen.

  He died; he always said he would.

  Someone had to take out the bullet.

  Demonstrators catch Ueda-sama on his way to a private meeting with Queen Oreste. I don’t see right when it happens. I’m busy with another one of my drawings, at least the tenth this week. I’ve been wondering if they’re too simple for the Queen’s Award, but after the spectacle of this summer, maybe simplicity is my best chance.

  When Mother calls me to the veranda, for once in my life I don’t argue.

  “What is that?” Mother asks, pointing at something on the edge of the holo. All I can see is the crowd, thousands and thousands of tiny people milling around our floor like toy soldiers. After a moment, I recognize the location from my own exploits: the transport platform in Royal Plaza. The crowd surges toward something, but I can’t see what. They just chant and sing and stomp the ground as if they can shake the earth.

  “Find some more angles,” I say.

  Mother flips and flips, but all the cameras must be hovering in the same small area. Parts of the holo start to flicker, which means the feeds can’t get enough data for a full three-dimensional projection.

  “Why don’t the cameras move?” she mutters.

  I sit down next to her and hold her hand.

  Even without the text overlay, I would know these protesters are technophiles. Plenty of Palmarinas have been trying to break us open to technology for a very long time. With more popular support than they’ve had in decades, the technophiles have been staging bigger and bigger protests for the last few weeks. Most have been in the verde, until now.

  “Is that Ueda-sama?” Mother asks.

  One man seems to float on top of the crowd, like a piece of seaweed atop a wave. When Mother zooms, I can see the individuals in the crowd lifting him above their heads and passing him around. Ueda-sama yells for help, but at least he doesn’t seem hurt. The air above him shimmers and darts, as if it’s filled with a thousand camera bots. Only, with the feed shorting out, there can’t possibly be so many cameras.

  “What kind of bots are those?” I ask. Mother’s breath hitches. She puts her hand to her mouth.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “You’ve seen them before?”

  She turns to me, something in her face that makes my breath stick in my throat, my heart pound.

  “Find the boy,” she says, so softly her voice is barely audible over the chants of the holo-crowd.

  “The boy?”

  “Those bots are guarding the protesters. They might not let the ambassador go.”

  “Guarding?” I ask, and then I understand what she means. That glinting swarm of metal is some kind of illegal-tech weapon, and it’s keeping away most of the cameras as well as any security bots.

  “They wouldn’t hurt him!”

  “I don’t know, June. Maybe they only want to talk to him. But maybe they don’t.”

  With a ferocity that surprises me, Mother waves her hand and the miniature crowd vanishes. The absence of their noise doesn’t sound so much like silence as pressure, a held breath.

  She takes my hands. Hers are cold, as they always are, and I remember a time when I would complain about it, when I was little and she would pull my hair into tight braids, and I
would feel her long, cool fingers trace the parts along my scalp.

  “Mamãe?”

  “Get him,” she says. “Go find your summer prince and stop this.” The Aunties have taken to calling Enki that — as though to call him prince instead of king takes away some of his power. But in Mother’s voice, that prince carries all the power in the world. It carries hope.

  I nod, kiss her forehead, and run for the door.

  A swarm of disaffected camera bots awaits me alongside a few human casters.

  I start to push my way past them, then pause. Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way. I persist in thinking of my newfound notoriety as a problem, but perhaps if I’m clever, I can turn it to my advantage.

  I give a little smile my mother might see if she watches the feeds. I hope that she trusts me.

  “Enki and Gil and I are going to speak to the protesters in Royal Plaza,” I say.

  “Do you think you can stop them?” It’s one of the casters, someone I don’t recognize, probably third or fourth tier.

  “From doing what?” I ask. “Hurting Ueda-sama? I hope they weren’t going to do that, anyway. From wanting access to the world’s tech? I don’t think anyone can stop that, do you?”

  “So it’s true you side with the technophiles?”

  “Did you design the graffiti?”

  “Are you sleeping with Enki?”

  I can’t answer these questions; I wouldn’t even if I had the time. So I just shake my head and run the rest of the way through them, laughing a little like I’m chasing a football in the park after school. If they follow me, I don’t really mind. Gil and Enki will find me at Royal Plaza and we’ll save Ueda-sama from those strange bots that worried my mamãe so much. I haven’t felt this in control — this sure — in months, at least since Enki and I made our roda viva for the city. For once, the sensation of a million eyes judging my every breath and thought and gesture is a pleasure, not a burden. I want to jump and flip and cartwheel from the exhilaration of it, from the power and the privilege.

  And I realize that I now understand Enki a little better than I did before.

  Someone offers me her pod on the local platform, so I don’t have to wait to call one. I hardly see her, though I hope I remember to say thank you. A few of the casters try to ride with me, but I only allow the woman who asked me the first question.

  “Did you recognize those bots swarming above the crowd?” I ask her. “They didn’t look like cameras.”

  The caster’s back goes rigid and she glances at the half-dozen bots that flew in with us. Maybe a few are hers, but who knows. I start to doubt she’ll answer me, but then she shrugs and leans back against the curved chrome wall of the pod.

  “Weapons,” she says. “A defensive nanotech cloud developed by the Pernambuco militia in Salvador. At least that’s everyone’s best guess. Your side is in some deep trouble, June.”

  “They’re not my side,” I say reflexively. “And Salvador? How could they ever get through our security?”

  I remember Enki’s story of how his mamãe had to bribe the Aunties to live here. If a pregnant, destitute refugee could hardly make it, how could lethal weapons?

  “They could if someone let them in,” the caster says. “Probably someone high in Royal Tower, with ties to Salvador.”

  She leans in as she says this, as if she’s expecting some sort of reaction. It’s that, more than her actual words, that makes me understand her implication.

  But it’s so absurd that all I can do is laugh. “Enki?” I say. “Enki is the most nonviolent person in this city. He loves Palmares Três.”

  “His mother —”

  “Loved it too.”

  The pod glides to a stop. The doors open on to a press of people so dense I wonder how I’ll find Enki and Gil, let alone get through to Ueda-sama. The caster and I share a worried look, but the crowd doesn’t seem particularly violent. In fact, aside from the people closest to the pod, they aren’t paying any attention to us at all. I start to push my way through them. I look back for the caster, but she’s pressed against the back wall of the pod, crossing her arms over her chest. Her chin juts out with a mixture of stubbornness and fear.

  “Not coming?” I say.

  She shrugs in a fair approximation of nonchalance. “Looks dangerous.”

  “Could make your career,” I say.

  “Not everyone has to be famous, June.”

  I wince. “Of course not.” My rush of delight in my newfound power fades, leaving behind a more familiar weariness.

  Just beyond the pod doors, people start yelling for the summer king. “Is that him?” someone says. “And his lover?”

  I look over my shoulder. “Last chance.” But I know what her answer will be.

  She just smiles. “I think their pod must be on the other side of the platform. Be careful.”

  I nod and elbow my way through the crowd. I don’t attempt to cover my face but no one pays me much attention. They’re all too busy surging to the far end of the platform. The private pod bay isn’t very large in Royal Plaza, so I don’t have to go far to see what has so captured everyone’s attention.

  Enki and Gil stand on top of a pod. Enki holds Gil tight around the waist and whispers something in his ear. Gil looks scared and Enki looks like even he might be getting close. I struggle through the crowd, but the nearer I get to Enki’s makeshift podium, the more people push back. Everyone wants to see.

  Enki straightens and faces the people shouting his name. He raises his hand. The roar of voices quiets to a river of whispers. I lean forward and wait with the rest.

  And then something curious happens: He opens his mouth, but his voice comes out of the city’s emergency speakers.

  “Palmarinas,” his voice says, though his lips hardly move. “I can’t know what you think of me. I can’t know if you’re technophile or isolationist. At the moment, I think it doesn’t matter. The ambassador from Tokyo 10 has nothing to do with this. I’d like to save him, but I can only do that if you let me through.”

  The speakers cough out an abrupt burst of sound and Enki wobbles, just slightly. I shout his name and try to shove my way closer. They’ll never see me.

  “Please let the summer king through,” says the city’s more familiar voice, over her emergency speakers. She has somehow matched his inflections, conveyed the warmth and the abstraction and the imperiousness. How have I never noticed the way the city and Enki resemble each other? Or perhaps they’ve grown together over the months, like a young vine curling up the trunk of an ancient tree. Enki climbs down from the pod, agile as ever, but maybe only I see the careful way Gil watches him, makes sure he doesn’t fall.

  As one, the oddly silent crowd surges back far enough to clear a path for Enki and Gil. The crowd’s momentum nearly crushes me as I try to push against them. When I’m almost at the front, someone blocks my way. He turns to yell at me, pauses, and then smiles.

  “Hello, June,” says this complete stranger, this grande in engineer’s clothes.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Summer King,” he hollers when Enki passes close by. They both turn — Enki with relaxed curiosity, Gil like he’s ready to hit someone.

  “Found something for you,” the man says. He lets me through.

  “We thought you got stuck somewhere,” Gil says, hugging me.

  “I nearly did.” I turn to Enki. He’s walking fast; I have to jog to keep up. Ahead of us the crowd parts like the old biblical sea. The gap points us to Ueda-sama like an arrow.

  I’m so happy to see them both I could dance. Everything that felt overwhelming and frightening on the pod feels manageable, maybe even exciting. Together, the three of us are invincible, maybe the strongest weapon this city has ever had.

  “What are we going to do?” I say.

  “I thought we’d try to talk,” Enki says. “Whoever wants to speak for them, can.”

  “And what should we say?” I ask. “Please be nice and give Ueda back, he can’t do
anything? He can do everything, and they know it.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to die,” says Gil.

  “They’re not going to kill him!” I say, shocked. “They wouldn’t. He’s too valuable as a hostage.”

  Enki shrugs. “For the leaders. But the mob might hurt him anyway.”

  I want to argue with him. Instead, I say, “Have you talked with Oreste?”

  He shakes his head. “There’s some sort of dampening field over most of Royal Tower. The city feels it like a cold spot. It’s new defensive tech.”

  “Like the cloud?”

  He just nods. Gil takes a few steps away from me and curses. “Who would do that, Enki? Who could have smuggled this tech into the city?”

  Enki raises an eyebrow. “Someone who stands to benefit? An Auntie, or someone close enough to negotiate a deal.”

  This surprises even Gil. “An Auntie?”

  Enki laughs and caresses the edge of his lover’s ear. “We’ll know soon enough, meu bombril,” he says, softly enough that it feels wrong I can hear him. “I know how much she means to you.”

  He means the city, threatened by a mob and weaponized nanotech. No mention of poor Ueda-sama, caught in the middle of this conflict so far away from anyone he loves. Even Enki, with all his mods, probably feels less for Ueda than he does the plants in my mother’s garden.

  The crowd thins as we move away from the transportation hub and toward the main square of Royal Plaza. A combination of security bots and human officers have cleared away most of the people not actively protesting. This makes it easy for us to see what has changed since the last chance I had to look at a holo feed: a cage, suspended above the crowd, topped by something giant, metallic, and spiky. It looks the way I imagined stars when I was a child, but more dangerous.

  “Is that the cloud?” I whisper.

  “Where did they get a cage?” Gil asks. “Is Ueda-sama inside it?”

  Enki rests his hand briefly on the back of my neck. “They’re both the cloud,” he says. “They’ve told it to reshape itself.”