The Summer Prince (30 page)

I don’t normally copy other people’s art, but this seems a worthy exception.

The isolationists have found a way to fight back. There’s a new stencil in the city. It looks familiar to anyone who’s seen the now-ubiquitous silhouette of Enki and me. But the two figures are Wanadi and Regina, upside down in clouds. Wanadi smiles, Regina frowns. Wanadi has a perfect bullet hole through the middle of his forehead. Regina holds a candle behind her back, the stark white of the flames engulfing her hands.

It’s very good. I only wish I had something to do with it. So I do the next closest thing, and study a holo of the new stencil. Messy stacks of paper litter my bedroom floor, a fortune of wood pulp and graphite and ink. As the weeks have gone by, I’ve found my style changing, or at least growing, turning so deeply abstract that sometimes even I hardly know what I’m drawing. Most of these are faces: Enki and Gil. Auntie Yaha and Mother. Even a few of Papai, though his face is so deconstructed I doubt anyone but I would recognize him.

I keep meaning to show the sketches publicly and start building support for my award bid, but every time I start to scan them in I have a vision of Ieyascu’s contemptuous face and I put them down.
Later
, I always think.
When I have more.

Copying the isolationist art relaxes me, as though I’m meditating with the sure strokes of my pencil. In the two weeks since I cheated on that test, I’ve been nervous, jumpy, reclusive. I haven’t been able to confess to Gil. He asks me what’s wrong and I say I’m busy. He knows I’m lying; he knows I know he knows. We haven’t spoken to each other much.

I haven’t seen Enki at all.

These days, I mostly speak to Mother and Auntie Yaha. They both congratulated me sincerely on my test score. Whatever game Oreste is playing with me, it’s not about Auntie Yaha. It’s probably about Enki, but that’s always where my thoughts stick. I don’t know how or why she thinks she can use
me
to get to him. I think Enki has always been untouchable, but these days anyone can see it.

I haven’t been able to look Bebel in the eye. I haven’t been able to sit through a full day at school without feeling sick to my stomach. I shouldn’t have said yes. I am a fool and a coward and I try not to think about it. If I win the Queen’s Award, the self-loathing will bury me, but I don’t know how to climb out of the hole I’ve dug for myself.

I’m barely conscious of my scribbling right hand, though the drawing unfolds steadily beneath it. But when I start to draw that artfully stark bullet hole, I stop.

For some reason, my thoughts have Enki’s voice: “It looks too clean, right? Death isn’t so pretty.”

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.