I look closer at the holo and then I understand: The bullet goes in, but nothing comes out.
“It isn’t, is it?” I mutter as my pencil flies across the paper. I crack the graphite tip and grunt with frustration at the time to stop and sharpen it.
Instead of hair, I give Wanadi an exit wound. And instead of that mixture of brains and bone and blood I’ll never forget, I give him flowers and vines. The plant life curls around Regina, merges with the stylized ribbons of flame into something that resembles mechanical circuits. A strange, inverted amalgam of life and destruction. Is it technophile or isolationist, this new version I’ve created? Is it both?
I want to show it to Gil, but I know that if I reach out to him, he’ll demand to know what happened outside the exam room. I can’t lie, and I can’t bear to tell him. Not yet.
I cut the image from the holo, leaving only the floating graphic of our pyramid city, shining its light calmly in the bay.
“City,” I say, activating the holo’s com link.
“Yes, June?” says that voice I’ve grown so fond of.
“Could you tell Enki I miss him?”
“I’ll try, June,” she says, and I know I’m not imagining the sadness and confusion in her voice.
“What has he done now?” I whisper. She doesn’t answer.
I wait an hour, alternating my attention between my rain-streaked window and the idealized city floating in the air above my bed. I love Palmares Três, but how I have begun to hate the Aunties who run her.
Finally, I shut off the holo, toss the drawing on a nearby stack, and open the door to my bedroom. Mother is alone, as usual, and watching the rain from the screened-in porch.
“Have you eaten?” I ask.
She shakes her head, but she’s nursing a glass of wine; there’s a bottle nearby. I take a glass and join her.
“Is Auntie Yaha coming back tonight?”
“She said not to wait up.”
Maybe it’s the rain, maybe it’s the wine, but Mother looks as lonely and vulnerable as I’ve ever seen her. I almost touch her fingers but at the last minute pick up the bottle instead. I don’t know if the bridge we’re building is steady enough for that, yet.
“Is something big happening?” I ask.
“Tomorrow, Oreste is going to announce a full-session inquiry into the Pernambuco affair.”
That’s what the news casters have taken to calling the disaster with Ueda-sama and the technophile mob: the Pernambuco affair. As though everything about the mess that killed Wanadi and Regina wasn’t entirely Palmarina, no matter who sold them the weapons. But still, if they’re doing an inquiry …
“She’s finally going to indict Auntie Maria?” I feel relief like a plunge into the bay, cold and shocking and exhilarating.
“Maybe,” Mother says, and drains her glass. “They’re only doing this much because of public pressure. Those stencils are doing more work than a hundred lobbyists.”
Mother turns abruptly, gives me a long look. I blush, though I don’t know why. I imagine Mother learning about my agreement with Oreste, and the blush deepens.
“You know I didn’t do those stencils, right?”
She smiles a little. “I didn’t think so, filha.”
“You didn’t?”
“They didn’t look like you.”
I wonder what she’d make of my latest drawing.
Mother stands, surprisingly steady given the half bottle of wine she just consumed, and walks into the kitchen. “There’s some moqueca left,” she says. “Should I heat it for you?”
The moqueca is Auntie Yaha’s and reliably delicious. I remember that I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
“That would be —”
I get a ping. Anonymous, of course. Open your door, it reads.
“I have to go,” I say as I stand up and race to my room. “I’ll be back later. Something for the Queen’s Award.”
“You sure you don’t want to eat?” she asks.
“Sorry, Mamãe,” I say. “Don’t wait up.”
Enki is across the street, standing in the rain. It pours in a steady shower, punctuated by an occasional flash of lightning. His back is to me; he watches the bay. No one else is near him, which ought to surprise me, but doesn’t. If Enki wants to be alone, he manages. Even in the middle of a public street. I look up, reflexively, for the dozen or so camera bots that usually hover at the edge of the anti-bot zone surrounding the house. But the air is clear, save for the rain, and for the first time in months, I feel unobserved when I walk outside. Enki is soaked. I brought an umbrella, but I don’t unfurl it.
“I missed you too,” he says when I’m a few feet away. He still hasn’t turned around.
“Have you been busy?” I ask.
“Oreste is having a big show trial starting tomorrow. She wants me to star.”
The rain runs down my back, so cold my skin tightens like the top of a pandeiro. Enki wears short sleeves with a rip at the collar. If I squint, I can see a faint, hazy layer of steam rising from his exposed skin. I stand beside him and take his hand. He lets me, but he doesn’t move to do anything else. Just touching him makes me feel warm and happy, but I wish I knew how he feels.
“Are you going to?”
He shrugs. “Maybe. I’ll see what she has planned.”
I almost grin at that, imagining the Auntie consternation when Enki yet again confounds their expectations. But then I remember the more pressing worry.
“And Auntie Maria?”
“Oh, June.” His hand tightens around mine. When he turns, his wet dreadlocks splash my face. He doesn’t smile.
“What?”
“You really thought they would do something about that?”
I don’t know. I remember Mother’s story about the wars in her department and the way everyone would manipulate everyone else. “But she killed two people!”
He smiles now, bitter and tender at once. “She’s over a hundred years old, and she’s been an Auntie for at least fifty of them. She has dirt on every official in Royal Tower, and they all know it. June, probably at least a few other Aunties helped her plan the whole thing. They can’t indict her without putting the whole system on trial.”
“So they sent me like a fetching dog to get the name out of Lucia, just so they could play games with her.”
“Play politics.”
I open my mouth — to scream, I think, or maybe just to cry — but he puts a careful finger on my lips. I breathe a little of his steam, and it warms me all the way through.
“It is horrible and wrong,” he says, almost a whisper. “A twisted-up grande thing. But you could always change that.”
“How? Become an Auntie? I never want to be one of them.”
He wags his finger gently before my face. “Of course not. You really haven’t thought of this yet? Who else knows what Lucia confessed?”
A sudden crack of thunder startles me into a yelp. I jump away from Enki and nearly fall on the slick ground. He gives me one of his calm, searching looks; he knows perfectly well I’ve thought of it.
“They’d hang me from Royal Tower,” I say.
He shrugs. “They’d exile you, at worst.”
At worst. The very thought makes my teeth chatter. I huddle against the railing, avoiding his clear look, the bay’s flashing beauty.
“Enki, I have a future to plan for. And you won’t live to see spring.” I regret the words immediately, but then, I don’t take them back. I would blame it on the wind and the icy rain. On the lightning that’s always made me nervous. But I’m a coward; why else would I argue in the first place?
His grin looks like a monkey’s: a feral baring of teeth. “Do you think I really need reminding?”
“Why don’t you tell the casters, if you think it’s so important? You know too.”
“Only because you told me. And the moment I accuse Maria, the Aunties will blame you anyway. So you’ll still lose your precious Queen’s Award and the Aunties will find a way to
claim I’m lying. I wasn’t the one who spoke to Lucia. You were, and everyone knows that.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
He shakes his head. “What did you miss, June? Me? Or your summer project? I’m sure it was exciting to play at being radical, but there’s a time for fun and a time for reality, is that it? It’s strange. I never really believed you would pick the Queen’s Award, when it came down to it. But you have.”
The steam wafting off his body gets thicker, heavier. He smiles again, but it’s a little sad and a lot angry and entirely human. He turns his back to me. He starts to walk away.
“Enki, I didn’t want —”
“Didn’t you?”
I want to make this better. I want to feel good again, like a person I can admire. I don’t want to admit what I’m terrified is true: The Queen’s Award matters more to me than justice for two dead wakas. After all, I let the Queen cheat for me. I’m in too deep, too close to just give it up.
“I meant it,” I say finally. “All of our art.”
“Not enough.” And then, with the faintest hint of a smile in his voice, “There’s a song.”
Because there’s always a song.
I would ask him what, but he’s gone too far away. I could watch him forever, and he vanishes before I can blink.
The second day of the hearings, I get a curious message.
Would you like to accompany me to this afternoon’s session? — Toshio
It’s from Ueda-sama. I haven’t heard a word from him since our dinner more than a month ago, and I gasp from my seat in the back of the classroom. The teacher doesn’t pause, but Gil turns his head and cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Ueda,” I mouth, and he frowns. Maybe he harbors some lingering resentment over Enki’s involvement with the ambassador, but I think it more likely that he worries what I’m up to. I glance back at my fono: one hour until the afternoon session starts. Should I run back home and change, maybe into something that shows off my light-tree? But no, too revealing if something happens at the trial that upsets me. Enki says he can see half my thoughts in those lights.
At least, he would if he were still talking to me.
The school’s fields don’t allow for much fono communication, but I figure if Ueda was able to get a message to me, then I should be able to respond. I tell him yes and he says to wait in the public entrance to the parliamentary hall. I wonder what Enki will think if he sees me there. That I’ve changed my mind about Auntie Maria? Will he stop hating me?
I grit my teeth. Forget him. He’s too far down the path of his own death to see what it’s like for a waka with centuries ahead of her. He thinks I can just sacrifice everything I might have in the world for the sake of some abstract justice, but it isn’t that simple, as Auntie Yaha would say. As Mother would say.
What is right, Valencia? my papai says in my mamãe’s voice.
Shut up, João, I think, because I could never have said it if he were still alive. I’ll win the Queen’s Award, I’ll become a famous artist, and then I’ll do good — when I have a position and influence and a life to do it with. If I make this one futile gesture, then what? I never get to see my home again? I get to stay, but I never have any professional success because I’ve been blacklisted?
“No.”
I didn’t mean to say this out loud. The teacher looks up from the English text he was reading to the class.
“You have such a strong objection to Atwood, June?”
Bebel, a few rows ahead, turns to look at me. “You okay?” she whispers.
My stomach lurches. God, I wish I could still hate Bebel. It was so much simpler.
“I need to leave,” I say, and now the whole class stares at me.
He sighs. “Another unexplained absence? Do what you will, June.”
He returns to the text. I pick up my things and head for the door. I have to watch this hearing. I have to prove to Enki that I’m fine with my decision. And maybe prove it to myself.
“He’s the one who’s being judgmental,” I mutter as I stalk through the deserted hallway. “The one who doesn’t have any empathy.”
But the words feel absurd as soon as I speak them. For all our summer king’s faults, he certainly doesn’t lack empathy. I’m nearly at the outside doors when I hear the echo of canvas shoes running through the hallway.
“June,” Gil says, “wait!”
I wait for him with resignation and relief. I’ve missed him so much. And soon he will hate me as much as Enki does.
“You’re doing something with Ueda-sama?” he says when he’s caught up with me. He almost touches my elbow but then pulls his hand back, stuffs it inside his pocket.
“He invited me to the hearings.”
“Oh.”
We stare at each other. Gil shuffles his feet, an awkward samba, but somehow still achingly graceful. My lights strobe hot and cold. Gil is my brother, my best friend. Why are we acting like strangers to each other?
“Gil —”
“June, I’m sorry —”
“I did something … I shouldn’t have, when Ieyascu pulled me out of the exam. I was too ashamed to tell you.”
He smiles suddenly. “I’ve been so wrapped up lately, I just didn’t know what to say to you. It seems so silly …”
“Wrapped up?”
The smile fades a little, and I see that face, the one I’d mistaken for derision. It’s that deep sadness that I glimpsed weeks ago in the park.
“I can’t stop hoping,” he whispers.
“About … saving Enki?” The phrase sounds nonsensical. You can’t save a summer king any more than you can save a mayfly.
Maybe he sees my disbelief, because he sighs and changes the subject. “What happened to you?”
In the end, it’s a relief to tell him. “I let the Aunties help me cheat on my exams to stay in the running with Bebel.”
He freezes and stares. “Oh, June.”
“I’m sorry.” My eyes are hot, but I can’t cry here.
“Will you tell Bebel?”
“But if I do —” I cut myself off, ashamed to even finish the sentence.
“You won’t win,” Gil finishes, and he touches my elbow. His disappointment is like a flashing sign above his head, but he doesn’t let go. That’s enough for now.
We look at each other for another moment, then he pulls me forward, very gently, and kisses me on the forehead.
“If you think of a way to save him, June, do you promise to tell me? Do you promise to let me help?”
I don’t understand how someone as smart as Gil can’t see this is a fantasy. “Enki made his choice. There’s nothing we can do now.”
He turns away and I’m overwhelmed with an echo, with the sense that the words in my mouth aren’t my own. But of course they are. Gil is being foolish, and someone had to tell him so.
Just like your mamãe told you, when Papai died?
I gasp. “I’ll try,” I hear myself saying, before he can walk away.
It’s all the reward in the world when he turns around and smiles.
Ueda-sama has a secretary meet me at the public entrance and escort me to our seats at the front of the giant parliamentary hall. No one important enough to be at these hearings would ever conspicuously snub him, and yet he stands as though alone in the sea of Auntie turbans and colorful dresses. He wears simple trousers and a shirt — perhaps the bird design around the collar subtly evokes his home, but perhaps not. He looks older than the last time we met. Exhausted in a way that goes beyond the dark rings under his eyes.
He smiles at me after I push my way through the milling crowd to find my seat next to him.
“I’m so glad you could come, June,” he says. I’m here just in time — a second later, Auntie Isa calls the meeting to order.
Enki doesn’t invoke the proceedings with a prayer this afternoon. He just sits quietly with the head Aunties and Oreste. He acts as he has for the last two days: like a model summer king f
rom a moon year, beautiful and obedient. I try to catch his eye, but he looks straight ahead. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m here, or maybe he’s just ignoring me. Just looking at him makes me short of breath, makes me want to cry, makes me want to rage and scream. How dare he hold me in such contempt for having the temerity to control my own life?
There’s some hubbub on the floor as the remaining two Aunties and one Uncle take their seats on the committee. In the audience, murmurs swell into a chorus, cloth rustles. Ueda-sama bends his head toward me and whispers, “Are you all right, my dear?”
I nod and take a deep breath. “Yes, of course,” I say. “Thank you again for inviting me.”
He shrugs. “I just had a sudden thought that you would like to see this. Perhaps almost as much as I do.”
I wonder how much Ueda saw from his cage that day. I wonder if, amid the teeming confusion of the protesters and the nanocloud and the security bots, he saw those bullets tear through Wanadi and Regina. What would that look like to someone from Tokyo 10, whose citizens have forsaken death altogether?
“Do you think this will …” But I realize that he doesn’t know about Auntie Maria, and I don’t dare tell him in this space.
But still, he seems to understand. “We’ll see, June,” he says.
“The special investigative body is now in session,” says Auntie Isa. The sudden silence is like an intake of breath. I look at Enki again. His smile would look smug if I didn’t notice the sadness at the corners. In his stillness, he nonetheless conveys volatility, as though he must either sit still or explode.
“The goal of today’s inquiry,” says Auntie Isa, “is to continue investigation into ethical breaches that may have allowed the infiltration of war tech into our city.”
And killed two people, I think, but of course the Aunties want nothing so grisly as fact to intrude on their sanitized hearings.
But, “Also,” says Enki, leaning forward a few gentle centimeters, “resulting in the deaths of Wanadi Dias and Regina Silva.”
For a second, Auntie Isa breaks her infamous calm — she glances at Enki, startled, before serenity returns to her ageless face and she nods once in solemn acknowledgment.
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