Read The Summer Prince for Free Online Page B

her.
    It’s hard to take the public lines this late, and if I used my flash, Auntie Yaha would know where I’ve gone. Gil and I learned this early: Cover your tracks and use the city. Pods will take you anywhere you want to go, but the city knows who calls them. For a moment, I feel as if Gil is beside me, but then I turn and realize his space is empty. Will it always be like that now?
    “Up early for a student,” the woman says. Her skin is light, like mine. Usually that means you’re poor, but sometimes it just means you have a strange papai.
    “I work some nights,” I say.
    “Doing what?”
    “Spiders,” I say. “Basic maintenance, you know.”
    “You’re an engineer,” she says, and I smile because I know she doesn’t believe it.
    “Good with my hands,” I say. She clicks her tongue and shakes her head. I look out the window, through the maze of trusses that extends as far as I can see this deep in the pyramid. Our pod shakes when it passes close to one of the giant spider bots as it ejects nanotubes from its thorax to repair one of the transport megatrusses. Our little pod is barely larger than one of its knee joints. The bots are at least two hundred years old by now, but the city keeps them running because they do their job and I suppose the Aunties don’t want to invite any newtech into the city. Spider bots live in a concrete warehouse at the center of the base, a place so damp and dangerous only the gangs from the verde venture inside, and they never stay for long.
    This one has dents like butterfly wings on its left side, and one of its legs is made of a darker metal than the others. A lot of the spider bots have gone into retirement these days, and only the engineers know for sure which ones still work.
    “Did you catch the feeds tonight?” the woman asks. I turn around, forcing my expression into something neutral and curious.
    “Did something happen?” I say, and my voice cracks on the last syllable. I cough.
    She chuckles a little, and I wonder if that’s a blush I see creeping up her cheeks. “That Enki, crazy boy. He’s already lighting a fire under the Aunties.”
    Gil, kneeling before our beautiful boy. Gil, his seat empty beside me.
    “What … what did he do?”
    “You really didn’t hear? Picked his first consort already, right under Oreste’s nose. Ay, you should have seen that samba, I thought my tabletop would catch fire.” She giggles. To my surprise, I join her, and if my laughter is a little hysterical, at least it’s genuine.
    Oh, if Gil were going to abandon me, he could hardly have done it better.
    “What did Oreste say?” I ask.
    The woman leans back in her seat, relaxing into the gossip in that intimate way I remember from my papai when he was alive. “Oh, the Queen didn’t say anything. She just looked . I tell you, I don’t envy our boy this morning.”
    I like that our boy . It means that she believes I belong in the verde. And maybe in some ways I do.
    “But he’s the summer king now,” I say, watching the glow of the dawn sun behind purple-black thunderclouds. This will be a big one, and I’m heading into the verde. I bite my lip in anticipation.
    “You’re young. I’ve seen, oh, four moon years in my time. Enki is wilder than any of them, and he’s just begun. The Aunties, they like you wakas to have an outlet. Someone they’re not afraid of for you to obsess over. But if he has too much of his own mind?”
    “You can’t think they’ll do anything. Everyone would see.”
    The woman shrugs. “The Aunties have their ways. We could watch the whole time and not see anything at all.”
    I smell the verde before I see it. The pod jerks as it aligns with a different tube and then we’re hurtling toward the green. The waves break higher and higher even as I watch.
    The woman sees it too, and her eyebrows pull together. “Get home quick, filha,” she says. “This will be a bad one.”
    “Sure,” I say. I can feel my lights hot against my