The Summer Prince (34 page)

“You would have,” he says, apropos of nothing. His voice is rough.

“Would have what?”

“Given Auntie Maria’s name. Maybe you aren’t sure, but I am.”

I contemplate this. I can’t say that he’s right, really, but how happy I am that he thinks so. His mention of Auntie Maria reminds me of the scheming and the politics and the frenzy surely brewing in the unnaturally dark city below.

“Shouldn’t you turn those back on?” I kiss him.

He kisses back. “Soon,” he says. “They threatened Gil’s mamãe too.”

“Oh. Oh, Enki …”

He hardly moves when I hug him. I lower my lips to his ear. I mean to kiss it or whisper something kind, but instead I hear: “Run away with me.” Maybe Mother couldn’t save Papai. But I can do that most dangerous thing. I can
try
.

Enki’s only reaction is an uncanny stillness. “Where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Tokyo 10. Accra. Salvador.”

He says, “I’ve never seen Salvador.”

I know that. He’s never seen anywhere but here. Just like me. But somehow it seems important not to say so. His mother is from Salvador, I remember.

“Then Salvador,” I say. “We can walk there, at least. That’s what they say.”

“Okay, June.”

“Okay?”

“I’ll run away with you.”

From somewhere down below, a generator starts to buzz. The lights flicker and then burst back to life. Enki hugs me tight and plants a kiss on the crown of my head.

“We should leave,” he says. “The Aunties are on their way.”

He’s crying, a little. I wipe his eyes before we stand.

Have you ever gone rivet surfing?

I know, you haven’t. I like asking questions when I know the answer already. Have you ever gone rivet surfing? I ask, and then I imagine your voice, saying something like, “I was never dumb enough, Enki.”

And now I wish I could know what you’ll actually say, whether you’ll frown or laugh or —

Here’s how to go rivet surfing. You need a maglev board. Your nanogrip shoes would work great, but most surfers use mag shoes also. You find yourself a nice internal rivet. The kind with giant, gleaming metal that goes on forever. Pipelines are good, which is why you’re almost always surfing into the verde.

Get a good thirty feet above the metal. Make sure you have some space to run. Then step, step, step, shout, and fall, all the while scrambling to get the maglev turned on, the board beneath you, your shoes to grip. You have about five seconds, and if you screw up, well, you’re lucky to live.

But you might catch. You might get your legs beneath you and start to sail faster than a pod down and down that smooth expanse of metal.

You might win and you might lose.

It might be the best experience of your life, and you might never do it again. That’s the trouble with —

Connecting the city’s external weather sensors to her municipal energy production unit, that’s where I put my love for you. It’s probably still there, if you ever want to find it.

I spend the week before my birthday collecting presents, wishing that these could be for a celebration, and not for the most dangerous project I’ve ever attempted.

We might die out there. I’m willing to take that chance, and of course Enki is. When Gil asked me if there was a way to save him, I thought he was asking for a fairy tale.

But this isn’t a fairy tale. With every self-heating blanket and fire starter and water purifier that I carefully stash away, I’m one step closer to abandoning everything I have ever loved in my life.

Everything except one.

Enki spends the time with Gil. I think he wants to say good-bye, since we’ve agreed we can’t tell him of the plan. To protect Gil and his mamãe, we’ve arranged for the city to release sensitive information if anything happens to either of them. But Gil is famous; if something happened to him, the whole city would know. The Aunties might not take our threat seriously enough if his mother remained here, alone.

Two days before my birthday, Enki and I meet Ueda-sama in the ambassador’s apartments. It was Enki’s idea, but Ueda-sama seems relieved to see us, and surprisingly willing when we make our proposal.

“A distraction?” he says. “Of what nature?”

“Something that would make the Aunties pay attention for, oh, at least five hours,” I say. “If you can manage it.”

Ueda-sama nods thoughtfully, as though our request for him to further destabilize his relationship with the government is perfectly reasonable, only a question of logistics.

“Are you planning another art project?” he asks us.

Enki smiles. I shrug uncomfortably. “Something like that.”

Ueda-sama doesn’t press the issue. He just leans back in his chair and looks out the tall window of his apartment, where mist obscures all but the barest hint of the bay. I think again of how tired he looks, how old, despite the formal agelessness of his face. When he was born, there were people alive who had seen New York City and Rio before the blasts. When he was born, men still died of the Y Plague.

I wonder how it feels to bear that much history. I wonder what a man fifteen times our age sees when he looks at us.

“Yours is a strange city, Enki,” he says, still staring at the mist.

Has he forgotten our request? I glance at Enki, but he doesn’t seem concerned. “She’s the most beautiful in the world.”

“My Tokyo was beautiful once,” Ueda-sama says quietly. “She lost it long ago, but oh, some mornings, to wake to the sight of our mountain skirted in mist and snow, the smell of my wife’s jasmine incense for the
butsudan
, the call of a crane from the garden … they tell me there are ancient worlds in the data cloud, full re-creations of past Japan.”

But Ueda-sama can’t upload himself. “Do you wish you could go there?” I ask.

“They think they’ve gone to heaven,” he says. “They don’t realize that means they’re dead.”

Enki leans across the table and rests his hand on Ueda-sama’s shoulder. “Will you help us, Toshio?”

The ambassador sighs, rubs his temples. “It would be an honor, Summer King,” he says.

The day before my birthday, I find the last item on my list: a detector for the land mines I’ve heard are still scattered beneath the earth in the fields surrounding Salvador. This sort of tech is highly monitored and hard to come by, but I impersonated Auntie Yaha and strongly implied its necessity for some secret political mission. It worked, astonishingly. Hopefully she won’t be in too much trouble when we leave.

I really like Auntie Yaha, as it turns out. I think of that angry, grieving fifteen-year-old she met when she first married Mother, and I can only shake my head. I’m lucky, I suppose, that she’s treated me with kindness all these years. Yemanjá knows I haven’t deserved it. I try to put all of that into the hug I give her when she leaves for work that morning.

“What’s this, June?” she says, laughing. I’m not usually up early enough for her these days — Royal Tower has been busier than ever since my disastrous turn at testifying.

I hand her a piece of paper. I recopied the drawing I made of her at the wedding, adding a few details and a light color wash. She takes it, but she doesn’t smile.

“It’s a present,” I say.

She hugs me, very tight. “For your own birthday? I’ll see you tonight,” she says. “I’ll come home early.”

“Mother would like that.”

“I know,” she says, and gives my drawing a look I never would have understood a year ago. She leaves. I spend the next few hours readying other things. A purchase of berth aboard a trading vessel bound for Paris, leaving tomorrow night. I use decoy names — enough, hopefully, to convince them that I don’t mean to be discovered. I have maps of Paris beneath my mattress and some discarded plans for the Iberian countryside. With any luck, they’ll assume we’re on our way to Europe. I don’t have any illusions that this will fool Auntie Maria forever, but hopefully for long enough.

That takes a while. Or maybe I’m just delaying going outside, talking to Mother, pretending that everything is normal — or, at least, as normal as anything has ever been for the two of us these past two years.

God, I miss her so much. Is that strange? To miss the woman sitting in the parlor a few meters away? I tie my shoes and heft my pack. A little much, sure, but I’m known enough for my art in the city that no one will remark on it.

Mother looks out at the water from her rocking chair.

We sprinkled Papai’s ashes on the bay, didn’t we? I wonder why I never think of that.

“There’s eggs,” she says without turning around. “And papaya, if you want some. The first crop from the hothouses this year.”

I think I’ll vomit if I eat anything. “I have something for you,” I say, kneeling beside her chair.

I hand her a stack of paper, thick as my hand. “I don’t know what to do with them,” I say. “But I thought you might.”

“June,” she says, flipping through the first few papers. “I had no idea … I thought you stopped drawing when João died.”

“But you still bought me the paper.”

She shrugs and smiles a little. “I hoped, maybe.” She always believed in my art, more than Papai ever did, though it stabs me to admit it.

I sit beside her and watch the water while she looks through the drawings. I remember how nervous I used to be when I would show Papai my art. But Mamãe gave all the approval he withheld, and I never bothered to believe her.

Eventually she stacks the sheets neatly together and puts them down on the table.

“They’re wonderful. Are you sure you want to give them to me? It’s enough that I got to see them. They’d work well for the Queen’s Award. If you’re still interested in it.”

“I made them for you,” I say. “Don’t worry about the Queen’s Award.”

And, for a wonder, she doesn’t. “I’m so proud of you, June.”

“I’m proud of you too, Mamãe.” I stand. “I’ll … be back late, tonight. Don’t wait up.”

She looks up at me, like she’s hoping for something, but then she shakes her head and subsides back into her chair. She misses him. I wonder how I never saw that before. I wish she’d tried harder to save him, but I understand her in a way I never could before. Too late.

Now, we only have time for good-byes.