The Summer Prince

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  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.

  Even now, he looks straight ahead.

  “There’s something in the grass,” the man says softly. “Some … animal, maybe.”

  I don’t think Enki even blinks. Just watches with those modded eyes, reflecting light in the way no human’s should. Glowing in the dark.

  “Victor, let’s go back. There’s always a few rats around —”

  “Not a rat.” His voice is slow, distracted. He walks forward until he’s not even three meters away from us. My eyes have adjusted enough to see the caked mud on his boots. They smell like clay and shit and just a faint undertone of something antiseptic.

  My hand vibrates with every thudding heartbeat. I will vomit all over those quaint workman’s boots. I will vomit over both of us.

  And then Enki, calmly as a king, lifts his head just slightly above the grass line.

  Victor had been looking to our left. Now, his head snaps around. He doesn’t make a noise — not even a grunt of surprise — though his hands tighten around some sort of stick in his arms.

  He’s younger than I’d have thought from his voice. Not anyone I could call a waka, though I wonder if he’s even ten years older than me. Maybe the landscape ages you out here; maybe life does. All I know is that this Victor, this farmer with shit on his boots and a stick in his hands, will determine the course of the rest of my life.

  One million reals.

  He knows who we are. Even if he’d never seen a holo, how could anyone mistake the what of Enki, the way he’s not quite anything and too much of everything?

  And then Enki inclines his head.

  The man smiles — not happily, but with some irony. He nods, brief and sharp.

  “A rat,” he says, taking long strides back to the cruiser. “Right, of course, querida. Let’s see what bribe those women left us to find their sacrificial chicken.”

  I stay in the grass for long minutes after they drive away. I shouldn’t. I should make us leave, make us walk through the night just to get far away from this place. Instead, there’s ice in my ears and earth in my nose and stars in my eyes. There’s a band of white across the sky. When I was eight or nine, Ieyascu told me that was an arm of our whole galaxy.

  “One million reals,” I say.

  Enki lays his head on my chest. I know he does it to comfort me.

  “He won’t tell.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I can’t.”

  I choke. Just make it to spring, I say to myself, my same mantra for the past two months, but now it has no power to comfort me.

  “Enki, what —”

  “We’ll get to Salvador, June,” he says. “I promise.”

  And I know he can’t promise that either, and I believe him anyway.

  Palmares Três has always loved its royalty. In the rest of old-Brazil, my mamãe told me, people think we’re delusional — a city so sure of our own superiority that we actually crown our rulers. They think we’re greedy and vain and utterly unaware of how we appear to others.

  And we are, of course. Who would know that better than you?

  (If you say that I would, you shouldn’t. I’m dead, June, you can’t forget that.)

  But we still know something they don’t. Have you ever heard of the divine right of kings? Royalty is an act of God, give thanks to our orixás.

  That’s why the Queen can’t be elected.

  That’s why the king must be.

  The king is legitimized by the people and sanctified by the gods. His choice is ultimate, and unquestioned, because he embodies a whole people. On the sacred altar, beneath the sacred blade, his blood has the power to turn a woman into a Queen.

  This might seem unfair to you. Perhaps it is.

  But I think our Founding Mothers meant it differently. No system of checks and balances has ever been stronger than the summer kings and their Queens.

  Because we kings have power, and we must always give it up.

  When we arrive, Salvador greets us at sunset with a body.

  It’s a man — a grande, but not by much �
� wearing just a pair of ragged jeans. I think someone has stolen his shirt and shoes. He has a bullet hole, neat as a painting, through the middle of his forehead.

  It’s messier in the back. Just like Wanadi. Enki turns him over with his foot, grimaces, and lets the body flop back onto the sand.

  He looks at me, and then up at the city.

  We can barely make out the buildings of High City from here — crumbling stone edifices nearly a thousand years old, and perhaps the only thing Salvadorenses have made a point of preserving. The whitewash of an old Portuguese colonial bell tower seems to glow orange in the sinking sunlight.

  Closer by, in Low City where we’ve entered, rolling hills of piled rubble give way to hints of closely stacked shanties and market stalls.

  The world has gone still around us, or maybe we entered a different dimension at some point during our long walk up the beach. We are in one of the biggest cities of old-Brazil, and the only people I see are Enki and a dead man. Waves crash, seagulls cry out overhead.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  Enki acknowledges my question with a frown. His fingers twitch, trying to access the city, except Salvador doesn’t have anything like a unified AI.

  “A curfew, I think,” he says finally.

  “Did your mamãe tell you?”

  He smiles a little and takes my hand. “Mamãe left here too long ago. It’s gotten worse since then. I loaded my memory with everything Palmares Três knew about Salvador before we left.”

  I swallow. “I hope you were careful.” If someone noticed his information grab, they could use it to track us.

  “We should leave,” he says. “Whoever killed him might come back.”

  He starts to climb the nearest rubble pile. I follow him, though I don’t know where we’re going, or if it’s safe. Enki knows a hundred times more about Salvador than I do. And not, apparently, because of his mamãe.

  Because he loaded the information into his brain.

  Even here, I can’t escape the implications of his mods. I guess I’d hoped I might. That he might turn miraculously human again, away from the influence of the city and its tech.

  Over the second pile of barrier rubble, we find the first streets. Bright signs painted on tin shacks, advertising food and cloth and herbs and contraband tech. Doors are shut, curtains pulled closed, lights dimmed. If I listen, low-voiced whispers combine with shuffling feet and quiet humming into its own noise: the music of a sleeping city. Salvador doesn’t sound much like Palmares Três, but I recognize something in it all the same. The streets have been carved into a warren of rubble. Remains of cobblestones line roads too narrow for anything but a bicycle. The streets twist and wind with no direction I can find, and even Enki seems confused. We pass by tiny, dirt-paved alleyways that must be shortcuts to other parts of the warren, but we don’t go in them. Not enough room to fight, Enki says, and we still wouldn’t know where we are.

  He moves very fast. I stumble to keep up, making enough noise that I occasionally see faces peering through windows and cracked doors — wondering, probably, who would walk these streets after curfew.

  “We need to get to High City,” Enki says, pausing at an intersection. “It’s safer there. Gangs control this part of town. People caught after curfew tend to end up dead.”

  “The man on the beach?”

  Enki rubs his thumb along my knuckles. “Probably.”

  I start to shiver, make myself stop. Why did we come here? I wanted to save Enki’s life, not kill us both.

  But I know why. Because more than anything, he wanted to see his mamãe’s Salvador. Even now, racing through the cracked shanty-town streets of a city more dangerous than anything I’ve ever seen on a holo, he looks around with endless fascination. Not happiness — something more.

  The sun has vanished by now, and the shacks on either side of the narrow street cast inky shadows. Somewhere to our left, though how far away I can’t tell, a sharp crack cuts through the eerie quiet of the nighttime city. A second later, colored fire arcs through the sky. Purples and greens and iridescent white shoot up and float down like strange, dying fireflies.

  “What —”

  “Fireworks,” Enki says very softly. “I think it’s a signal —”

  Footsteps and gunshots and sudden giddy male hollers cut the night more sharply than the lights. It sounds like they’re all around us, like they’ll find us and shoot us like the poor man on the beach.

  “This way,” Enki whispers, and we take off down the right-hand path. Enki doesn’t know where he’s going — even the best map of Salvador couldn’t possibly have these half streets and alleyways — but I trust him anyway. Get to High City, he said. Those beautiful, well-kept ruins on the ridge above the shanties.

  Go up.

  I think we must be, because my thighs burn and I keep tripping on the cracked cobblestones. But perhaps we’re just running too fast and I am so tired from walking more than two months across barren fields and lonely beaches, tired of walking and hiding and walking. All to get to Salvador, a city that wants to kill us.

  Enki stops. I run into him. I would speak, but he reaches back and puts his fingers on my lips. My breath stops in my chest. But I have gotten very good, these last months, at holding my fear.

  A few feet ahead of us, two wakas argue in low voices. The girl holds a light that fades a few centimeters past Enki’s thermal shoes, but she’s too busy whispering something fast and furious to notice.

  The boy does, though.

  “Oh, shit,” he says. His voice is so loud I wince.

  The girl stops midsentence — something about her mother’s house — and follows the boy’s gaze.

  “Heads or Hearts?” she asks, as if she’s reading funeral rites.

  “We’re armed,” the boy says. He gestures toward his pocket but doesn’t reach inside.

  Enki holds up his hands. I can’t figure out why until I recall a pre-dislocation movie we watched in class once. A bunch of men ran around with guns in a desert and shot at one another for two hours. Raising your hands meant that you didn’t want to kill someone. That no one had to get hurt.

  “That’s an orange,” Enki says, his voice quiet.

  “What?” the girl says. Her hand with the light trembles. She’s still afraid of whoever she thinks we are.

  “In his pocket.” Enki keeps his hands raised, but his tone is conversational, with a touch of humor perhaps only I can hear. “Unless you Pernambucos have weaponized fruit?”

  The girl shoots a glare at the boy, which tells me Enki is right. I almost laugh.

  She squints at us. “We’re not —”

  The boy elbows her. “Zanita, shut up! Listen, whoever you are, you can’t be sure what I’m packing. Is it worth your lives, eh? Let’s just take a step back and go our separate ways. Before the Death Heads find us.”

  “And we’re not Pernambucos,” she adds. “I mean, you’re not dead yet, right?”

  “That’s what it’s really like?” I say before I can stop myself. “Nothing but gangs and killing?” No wonder Enki’s mamãe wanted to leave.

  Enki puts down his hands. The girl takes a step closer. Her hand has stopped shaking. She’s dark, like Auntie Yaha said the flatlanders could be, though not as dark as Enki. She has bombril hair that reminds me of my own, plaited close to her head and fastened with colorful barrettes.

  “You’re … who are you guys, anyway?”

  The boy gives up the pretense of hovering near his weapon. He grabs the girl’s elbow. “Who cares, eh? You want the Death Heads to dump your body on the beach? We’ll go to your mother’s house, fine, let’s just get out of here.”

  “Would you take us with you?”

  We all stare at Enki. I know he’s completely serious. He has that smile — lidded eyes, all lips, no teeth — that would mean he was talking to the city if we were back home.

  The boy shakes his head. “What the hell? I was just about to blow your head off and now you want to tag
along to my aunt’s house? Are you crazy?”

  “Yes,” Enki says, “but it was an orange.”

  The girl — Zanita — starts to giggle. I think that maybe our summer king has done it again, even in this place where Palmarina traditions have almost no meaning.

  “I like you,” she says.

  “Zanita —”

  “Oh, shut up, Tomas. Look at them — they’re just like us. Probably from someplace country.”

  “Those look like country clothes? His shoes? That’s high tech. Maybe they thought we were ’bucos because they’ve been spending a bit too much time with them?”

  Zanita was ready to take us with her, but she hesitates at Tomas’s words. She raises the light and gives Enki a long look, head to toe. I know what she sees. A beautiful boy in clothes far too fine for anyone in this city without gang connections.

  “Crap,” she says.

  In the distance, another series of cracks and pops cuts the stillness. The four of us look up in time to see the splash of colored fire against the dark winter sky. More fireworks? I’d enjoy them if it weren’t for the sudden hollers — closer, now — and a rattle that sounds like a pandeiro but might be a weapon. I look around for a nanotech cloud, but at least the sky is clear.

  “Burning Hearts,” Tomas says, deep fear in his voice.

  “It must be a bloom line,” Zanita says. “They don’t bring drums if they mean to kill.”

  “Drums?” I say, feeling relieved. “So it’s safe —”

  “Nothing with the Heads or Hearts is safe,” Zanita says. “Bloom lines are still fights, people still die. Especially people who get in the way.”

  More colored fire, not far enough distant. Piercing shouts.

  “We can’t leave them here —”

  “Christ, Zanita!”

  “What if they die?”

  “What if they bring the ’bucos down on us?”

  Her head swings to Enki, but then back to me. “Where are you from? What are you doing here? And don’t lie. God, Jesus, don’t lie, because I don’t want you to die. Okay?”