Enki meets my eyes. I must look wild, because he puts his hand on my shoulder, leans in, and touches my cheek with his own. “Say whatever you want,” he whispers. “It’ll be fine, I promise.”
My summer king loves to make promises he can’t possibly keep.
I love to believe them.
“Palmares Três,” I say, low and fast. Tomas freezes. Zanita whistles.
“Jesus,” she says, because she knows who we are. “Let’s go.”
Tomas stops arguing.
We go up. I might be grateful for that if it didn’t seem we were heading closer to all the noise and the shouting. The streets smell of sulfur and smoke, but we only see our own shadows bobbing with Zanita’s light. We cut through alleys that stink of shit, so narrow I have to turn to the side just to make it through.
I wonder where we’re going, but have no breath to ask. Any precarious sense of the city I might have had is lost on that mad run. All I can see in this run-past darkness are flashes of corrugated tin and concrete rubble. The streets get wider.
There’s a light up ahead. Zanita snaps hers off, and now I can’t tell if her hands are shaking, if she’s as afraid as I am.
“We should turn around,” Tomas whispers.
“And go where?” Zanita says.
My eyes have adjusted to the dark enough to see him turn away, cross his arms over his chest. The new light moves closer; it bobs like a firefly, graceful and hypnotic.
Enki touches my hand. He doesn’t say anything — none of us do — but I imagine there are words beneath his burning fingertips. Words like, You won’t die, I promise.
You can’t promise that, I think.
Enki laughs, very softly. For an irrational moment, I wonder if he heard me.
There’s a skull above the light.
A death’s head with big white lips and frosted kinky hair. One by one, other skulls appear beside it. They each hold what I had thought was a light, but is something stranger: a large white carnation, inexplicably glowing.
Zanita starts to pray, solid Catholic prayers like you rarely hear in Palmares Três. Enki looks at her — with more recognition than I can explain — and gently pulls her back into the doorway of the only building on the street. Tomas and I crouch beside them. I wonder why we don’t go back, find someplace else to hide from the deathless army, but a moment later, the ecclesiastical silence is broken by a sharp trill. The other Death Heads answer it. Their carnation lights get brighter, illuminating the rest of their clothes: skeletons painted over skintight black suits.
And then, back the way we came, an answer: bursting colored lights, wild and raucous laughter. The Burning Hearts, Tomas called them.
“Ready for us, esqueletos?” someone from the newest group calls.
The first of the skeletons stretches his painted lips wide. “Too easy,” he says.
A moment later, one of each gang detaches himself from the others and walks to the middle of the street — almost directly across from us. I stop breathing. If it wasn’t for his comforting, unnatural heat against my thigh and arm, I’d think that Enki was a statue.
But the two wakas don’t see us. One is skeleton white and the other full of wildness and color, but they both have drums strapped around their necks, and the quiet look they share has a strange mixture of camaraderie and wariness.
“Bloom line rules,” the first skeleton man says. “No knives, no guns, we stop at the first soldier down.” He pauses and stretches his phosphorescent lips into a grin that terrifies me. “Or if you run.”
“No one’s running,” the leader of the Hearts says without a smile. “Winner keeps the streets between Matatu and Tororó. Bound?”
“Bound.”
I expect more words and posturing, but instead I get drums, hard and furious and fast. And then laughter in a blur of color and white. For a moment, I think that I must have been mistaken, that this isn’t battle at all but some kind of strange Salvadorense dance.
Then the first flower explodes. A blizzard of white petal shrapnel flies everywhere — one of them slices my cheek before embedding itself into the rotting wood of the door behind me. I reach back to touch it, but it turns to ash as I watch, a slightly sticky black smudge.
“Nanotech,” Zanita says in response to my blank expression. “Probably get it from the ’bucos.”
Like the cloud that killed the wakas back home? But I had no idea that nanotech weapons could be so … beautiful.
The gangs are so busy fighting each other that they haven’t noticed us. The din created by the drums and the explosions and the shouts is more than enough to cover any sound that we might make. Despite myself, I start to relax a little.
“So what exactly is a bloom line?” I ask.
“Young gang way of dividing territory,” Zanita says. “They fight like this until one person goes down. Sometimes dead, sometimes not. At least they’re not as bad as the ’bucos. If we can just get past the Heads, we’re only a few blocks from High City.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Tomas says, furious. “Ask them politely? In the middle of a goddamn bloom line?”
“I feel like dancing,” Enki says.
We all stare at him. Zanita tilts her head. “You feel like …”
Enki grins at her, taps his foot to that mad, driving rhythm. It’s something like the wilder releases from the blocos back home, but then, nothing like it at all. If I weren’t afraid we were all about to die, I might want to dance too.
“Dancing,” Enki says.
“Are you crazy?” Tomas says.
Enki shrugs. He looks at me and holds out his hand. For some reason, I take it.
“He’s a summer king,” I say.
“How about it, June?” he asks.
Just a few feet away from us, something explodes. The ball of flame lights the ends of a few of Enki’s locks. He doesn’t notice, so I put them out.
I have a sudden flash of the two of us in that bubble over the city, the lights shutting off beneath us. I don’t think that even Gil really trusts Enki, much as he loves him.
But I do.
“Sure,” I say.
Are Zanita and Tomas saying something? Probably a protest. I am in Enki’s eyes, the flash of his teeth; it’s hard to hear them. “You should follow us,” I say. “We’re going to get out.”
I know they don’t believe me.
Enki stands up and walks a few feet into the street. I follow him. Shrapnel petals fly past; a few nick my skin. This is a fight, but it’s acrobatic, showy. This violence takes its time and the drums keep its pulse. I follow Enki’s lead, letting adrenaline make my feet move faster than they ever have before. We dance with death, Enki and I.
I don’t know how the gangs first notice us. Perhaps it’s the way Enki moves so deliberately into the center of their melee. Maybe because the two of us are so provocatively unarmed. But the torches stop blasting, the flowers stop exploding.
The drums keep beating.
One of the Death Heads takes a step forward. He raises his flower, but his eyes are curious behind the glowing white paint. He keeps it in his hand. His feet shuffle lightly, keeping time. On the other side, the Burning Hearts with their bloodred feathers and beads don’t need much encouragement. One of them tosses a ball in the air. It explodes in a shower of fireworks. I put out my hand to catch the ash. Perhaps there was a moment when this could have gone badly, but it’s passed by the time the fireworks fade. Someone trills time on a whistle, someone else starts a chant. Everyone dances. Enki laughs and kisses me. Someone catcalls and I swear I blush to my bones.
Zanita catches up with us. She looks around like the dancing men might shoot her at any moment, and she clasps my hand like she might drown without it, but she dances.
“Where’s Tomas?” I whisper.
She shrugs. “It looks to me like your king made a truce day come early. Tomas doesn’t trust it.”
I want to wave to him to come on, but if I draw any more attention to ou
r hiding place, they’ll know we’ve left one behind. All we can do now is keep going.
The Hearts and Heads have mixed in their dancing, fiercely competitive even without violence. The smell of hard booze mixes with the smoke and the blood. Sweat drips into cuts I didn’t know I had, and I wince at the sting. Enki dances like he cares for nothing else in the world, but we move steadily closer to the far edge of the group. Toward the north side of the street and High City. I surreptitiously look back at the door, but Tomas still hasn’t shown. Zanita just shrugs helplessly.
When we get to the far edge, the skeletons on that side stop dancing and look at us. They carry guns, not flowers. Enki stops and looks back.
“That was brave,” one says, almost diffidently. “We can finish the line after you go.” He lowers his gun. The other stares at Enki, shrugs, and turns back to the crowd. Enki walks through.
Zanita and I follow behind, looking for all the world like the king’s stately retinue. My shoulders tense, expecting a bullet at any moment, but Enki only moves even more gracefully than normal. It’s the only way I can tell that he’s aware of the danger.
We’re nearly to the bend in the road when we hear his voice behind us.
Funny that I notice the shout, given the roars from the gangs, evidence the dance is edging back to something deadly.
“Wait!” Tomas calls.
“Oh, God,” says Zanita, both a prayer and an expletive. I don’t know why he didn’t just stay hidden.
Maybe I never will.
Enki starts running for him, but it’s too late. Tomas breaks through the far edge of the crowd, elbowing aside one of the gunners who let us pass. The man steadies himself, frowns and raises his weapon.
I hear the blast like a drumbeat; Tomas falls to the ground.
Zanita takes us herself to the old neighborhood, though she doesn’t say much. She told us that morning that she needed to get out of the house, and I couldn’t blame her.
You’d have thought Tomas was already dead, from the prayers and the candles and the muffled tears.
Then again, he’s not far from it, and I don’t know how he’ll recover without access to the one good hospital near São Roque. The prohibitively expensive good hospital near São Roque.
Zanita asked us if perhaps, since Enki is, well, royalty, did we perhaps have enough money …
I couldn’t even speak. I had to shake my head. Enki looked her straight in the eye and apologized, and that was the last we’ve heard of it.
We’re both glad to be outside, I think, and finally so close to finding his mamãe’s old house. She lived in High City, but far to the west, near the university. It had been one of the safer neighborhoods, Zanita says, eighteen or so years ago. Until the Pernambucos bombed it in some protracted turf war with a militia so thoroughly decimated it no longer exists.
“A lot of those places are rotting now,” Zanita says as we walk. “No one really moved back in. Happens like that sometimes. I don’t know how much you’re going to find.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Enki says. I can’t tell if he means it.
Enki doesn’t have an address, he has a tree. An ancient soursop tree — one of the few that survived the encroaching cold — grew in her garden. They aren’t very common, but it still seems like too little to go on.
So close to our goal, I allow myself to fantasize about the future. I’ve decided that we can’t stay in South America if we want to have any peace from the Aunties. We’ll find a merchant liner leaving from the docks here and take it to its next port of call, no matter where. We can do that for months if necessary, throwing off the scent. Eventually, we’ll make it across the Atlantic, to Port Harcourt or Lisbon. We’ll find another city, a place just as beautiful and strange as Palmares Três, and we’ll make a home there. And eventually, when it’s safe, we’ll call Gil and tell him to find us and …
And what? We’ll be a big, happy family?
I try to imagine it. I close my eyes and force the images to come: Gil and me laughing, Enki learning to live with his mods, decades of music and dance and art and love. But the images seem flat and washed out in the screen of my mind, something I can picture, but not really believe. When I open my eyes, Zanita has stopped and looks at me with that birdlike curiosity.
“Everything all right? You look like your mother just died,” she says.
“My father,” I say.
Zanita purses her lips and rubs my shoulder before pressing on. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, and I like her better for it.
Enki walks up ahead, his eyes scouring the boarded-up buildings with the avidity of an artist.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m so scared of the future even my imagination is failing me. Every morning I wake up, faintly surprised we’re both still alive. But I can’t tell either of them that, and so I straighten my spine and I walk on.
Enki swears that the soursop tree survived the bombing, but the closer we get to the old neighborhood, the more I wonder. This part of town is deserted compared to the warren of Low City where we first came in. The rotting, crumbling buildings we pass are occasionally inhabited, but most often they’ve been raided for useful supplies and left for the grafiteiros. The street art here can’t compare to even the worst of the offerings in the verde. Mostly I see names in blocky, stylized letters and an occasional white carnation. I ask Zanita about it, and she just snorts.
“These are just practice lanes. The real grafiteiros won’t let these guys near the good spaces down by the old buildings. So they come up here.”
Our destination, it turns out, is nearly an hour’s walk from Zanita’s mother’s place in High City. Maybe there used to be transport pods in Salvador, but now the options are either foot or cruiser. Enki knows when we find the street, because he made sure to download every map of this neighborhood in the Palmares Três library before we left. I’ve glossed over the details with Zanita, though I think she suspects something unnatural about his knowledge of the city.
“There,” he says, pointing to a tiny house a few feet ahead. The roof has caved in and the door is missing. I don’t know how Enki can sound so sure until I catch up with him. The gap-toothed doorway shows a clear path to the backyard scattered with rotting tin, concrete rubble, and scraggly patches of grass turned brown by the cold winter.
And a tree, taller than I imagined it, right behind where the kitchen would have been.
“Are you sure?” Zanita asks. She sounds too quiet, worried. I wonder if she’s thinking about Tomas.
Enki walks up the crumbling front steps and fingers what remains of the wooden lintel above the doorway.
“She carved her name here when she was small,” he says. “See?”
My breath catches a little. I’ve never heard that kind of grief in Enki’s voice before. It reminds me of my own. On my tiptoes, I can just barely make out the remains of childishly malformed letters: Sintia.
“I never knew her name,” I say.
He shrugs. “I never told you.”
We walk over the threshold together. From behind us, Zanita calls out, “Are you sure that’s safe?” We ignore her. Rubble from the caved-in roof blocks a lot of the small house, but there’s just enough clear space for us to get through to the garden. My hands and face are covered in sweat and grit, and I smile. This reminds me of when Enki and I first started working together, the satisfaction of dirty, hard, physically demanding art. Only, we don’t seem to be making art anymore.
In the open space of the garden, I wipe my hands on my pants and look up. I’ve seen soursop trees in the hothouses of Palmares Três, but this doesn’t look much like them. The leaves clump in brown, withered bunches. A few balls of desiccated fruit sway in a passing breeze. At least the tree hasn’t fallen yet. It probably just died — this has been an unusually cold winter, even as far north as Salvador.
“Enki, I …”
I don’t think he’s heard me. He runs his fingers along the thick trunk. Then he just backs awa
y and looks at it.
Behind me, Zanita has overcome her fear of the collapsing house and clambers into the garden.
“That’s what he came for?” she asks. I can’t tell if she sounds incredulous or sad.
“You have the shovel, June?” he calls.
I’m surprised, but it doesn’t seem like a good time to question him. I shrug off my pack and rifle through until I find our tool kit. Two knives, a shovel, a brazier, and tent all folded into a box about as big as my hand. This cost most of what reals I had left over after the thermal clothes, but it’s been invaluable over the last month. I take out the shovel, press the button, and watch it unfold itself on the ground.
“Jesus,” Zanita says. “Is that nanotech?”
“Nah. The Aunties aren’t such big fans.”
She laughs a little. “Yeah, I’d heard that.”
I take the assembled shovel and offer it to Enki. He kneels in front of the tree.
“I’m sorry,” I manage.
He looks up at me, takes the shovel. “What for?” he says. “It’s just a tree.”
He frowns at the ground, and then makes a slow circuit around the tree trunk. He stops at the point closest to what must have once been a kitchen window.
Then he starts digging.
Zanita and I look at each other, but there’s not much else we can do, so we sit on the ground and watch. Enki digs maybe a foot or so deep then stops. As far as I can tell, he’s hit nothing but dirt and stones.
“Find any treasure?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says, and starts another hole a bit to the right.
He finds something on his third try. He digs a little deeper before he stops and tosses the shovel aside. He kneels beside the hole and scrabbles with his hands until he pulls a piece of dirty, rotting fabric out of the ground. He holds it up to the sun with a smile that makes me want to hug him.
“What the hell is that?” Zanita asks.
I shrug and walk over. It’s a rag doll. Or it used to be. It has a simple hand-stitched face and a thick body wearing the tattered remains of a formal white dress.
The Summer Prince Page 26