Chapter 890: Touring Nova Manaus [Bonus - ]

Chapter 890: Touring Nova Manaus [Bonus Chapter]

The gunboats docked at the military harbor on the eastern edge of the city, a huge fortified complex of concrete piers, warehouses and watchtowers, and word had clearly traveled ahead of them, because the dock was already packed.

Hundreds of soldiers lined the piers in formation, and behind them, held back by a wall of military police, stood an enormous crowd of civilians with their phones raised high, craning their necks to see while news drones buzzed overhead and somewhere a band had started playing.

The prisoners were marched off first.

Carver Briggs and his people came down the gangplank in chains under heavy guard with their grey armor stripped away and their heads bowed, and the crowd broke into an angry roar the moment they saw them.

People shouted and jeered and threw things, a woman near the front screamed something about her brother’s patrol, and the military police had to lock arms to hold everyone back.

Da Silva walked down the gangplank behind them with her saber at her hip and her face carved from stone, and the roar changed into something else as they started cheering for her.

“MARSHAL! MARSHAL! MARSHAL!”

Aki came next, stepping down with her hand resting lightly on the railing and her blue hair shining in the sun, and the cheering wavered as thousands of people tried to work out who she was, until someone recognized her face from the news and a fresh wave of murmurs rippled through the crowd.

“Wait, isn’t that the First Princess? The one from the broadcasts?” a man near the barrier asked, squinting over the heads in front of him.

“The one they kept saying was Unawakened?” the woman beside him said, then frowned harder. “Look at her though… She walked off a gunboat full of poachers with the Marshal. She doesn’t look very Unawakened to me…”

Then Kara stepped off the boat behind her, tall and dark and one-armed with her cloak sweeping the gangplank, and the crowd went quiet in a nervous fascinated way, because everyone knew that face too and then Lara stepped off the boat.

She came down the gangplank barefoot with her gold-beaded locs swinging down her back and her staff resting against her shoulder, wearing nothing but a long loose black man’s shirt that came down to the middle of her thighs, and she was taller than every single person on the dock.

The crowd went completely silent.

The civilians stared at her in total confusion, a tall barefoot stranger in an oversized shirt carrying a glowing wooden staff, and nobody had the faintest idea who she was.

The soldiers knew, though.

All along the pier, rows of hardened Amazonian soldiers in perfect formation saw her face, saw the staff and saw the jade eyes, and their discipline broke like a dropped plate.

“Is that… No, no way, that can’t be her, can it?” one of them stammered, gripping the arm of the man beside him.

“My grandmother told me she was real my whole life,” the man whispered back, his face drained of color. “And I kept telling her, Grandma, she’s a story for kids, stop it… Oh God, I owe that woman an apology…”

One young soldier in the front row dropped his rifle, and his sergeant never even noticed, because the sergeant had gone pale as milk and was staring at Lara with his mouth hanging open.

“The Forest Mother…” someone whispered, and the words spread down the dock like wildfire.

Lara walked down the pier through the dead silence, completely unbothered by the hundreds of stares, and gazed around at the soaring towers, the bridges, the river traffic and the buzzing news drones with an expression of deep, profound boredom.

“It’s loud,” she said flatly, squinting up at a news drone hovering ten feet above her head until it nervously backed away. “Everything here is loud. The boats are loud, the people are loud, those little flying things are loud… How does anyone in this place hear themselves think?”

“Most of them don’t,” Kara said, strolling beside her with her hand in her pocket. “That’s what cities are for, Lara. You’ll get used to it eventually, I promise…”

“I won’t,” Lara said. “It smells like engines and far too many people standing too close together.”

She sniffed the air again, then stopped walking so suddenly that the soldier behind her nearly crashed into her back, and her head turned slowly toward a row of food stalls set up along the edge of the dock behind the crowd, her nostrils flaring.

“…What is that?”

Kara followed her gaze and caught the smell drifting over on the river breeze, smoky and sizzling.

“Grilled fish, by the smell of it,” she said. “River fish over charcoal with some kind of lime sauce, if I had to guess…”

Lara’s jade eyes narrowed with the sudden unblinking focus of a jaguar spotting a wounded deer.

“I want it,” she said. “All of it, handsome…”

…

Da Silva had to go.

The prisoners had to be processed and the tribunal had to be convened, and on top of that, there was a mountain of paperwork, a furious diplomatic call to make to Columbia and a parliament demanding an emergency briefing.

She stood on the dock with her phone buzzing nonstop in her pocket and her aides hovering anxiously behind her, and she looked at Aki with an apologetic tightness around her eyes.

“I’m sorry, little bird, I’ll be tied up until tonight at least…” She jerked her chin toward the two officers standing at attention behind her. “Maya and Leona will escort you, and anywhere you want to go in the city, they’ll take you… Tonight, you’re all staying at the Rio Negro Garrison, where the convoy’s being assembled, and I’ll meet you there once I’ve dealt with this mess.”

Aki threw her arms around her neck in a quick hug.

“Go, Valeria, we’ll be fine, I promise. Go and yell at Columbia for me…”

Da Silva hugged her back with one arm, and over Aki’s shoulder, her eyes found Kara’s.

“And you, try not to destroy anything while I’m gone,” she said. “This city took a very long time to build…”

“I’ll do my very best,” Kara said, with a smile that promised absolutely nothing.

Da Silva held her gaze for a second longer than she needed to, then turned and strode off toward the waiting military car with her aides scrambling after her.

Soon… It turned out that the First Princess of the World, given a whole day and a whole city, wanted to see bugs.

“The Grand Insectarium,” Aki said, holding up her phone with the map glowing on it and her eyes shining. “It’s the biggest one in the world, and they have a hall just for beetles. A whole hall, Kara… and a butterfly dome that’s three hundred feet high, and glowing moths from the deep basin that nobody’s ever managed to breed anywhere else…”

Maya looked at Leona, and Leona looked back at Maya.

“…Bugs,” Maya said slowly, as if she were hoping she’d heard wrong. “We’re taking the First Princess of the World to go and look at bugs…”

“Bugs, Lieutenant,” Leona confirmed, in the tone of a woman who’d fought rift monsters, river leviathans and Columbian poachers, and had never once imagined that her official escort duty would end in a museum full of beetles.

Kara put her hand on top of Aki’s head and ruffled her hair.

“Lead the way, princess. Show me every single bug in this city, and don’t skip any of the ugly ones…”

The Grand Insectarium sat on the river in the middle of the city, a huge glittering dome of glass and white steel shaped like a giant beetle’s shell, and it was every bit as big as Aki had promised.

She went through it like a child let loose in a candy store, pressing her nose against every glass case in the Hall of Beetles and gasping at stag beetles the size of cats with mandibles like swords and jewel beetles that glittered like scattered emeralds.

In the middle of the butterfly dome, she stood with her arms held out and her face turned up while hundreds of brilliant blue butterflies settled on her shoulders and in her hair.

Kara leaned against a railing and watched her with an expression she didn’t bother to hide.

’She’s so happy,’ she thought. ’She’s been locked up her whole life, and one of the first things she does with her freedom is go look at beetles… Honestly, that’s adorable.’

A big blue butterfly landed on the tip of Aki’s nose, and she went cross-eyed trying to look at it and burst out giggling, and Kara felt her chest go warm.

’I’m going to take her everywhere,’ she decided. ’Every museum, every forest and every stupid tourist trap in the world, if that’s what she wants…’

“You’re staring at her, you know,” a low voice murmured beside her.

Lara had appeared at her elbow and was leaning on the railing with her chin in her hand, watching Kara instead of the butterflies.

“I’m allowed to stare at her,” Kara said mildly. “She’s my princess, after all…”

“You look at her like she hung the moon,” Lara said, her voice thoughtful and almost fond, with none of the jealousy Kara had braced for.

“It’s sweet.” Her jade eyes slid sideways. “Do you ever look at anyone else like that, handsome?”

Kara kept her eyes on Aki and let the question hang, and Lara smiled slowly, as if the silence were answer enough.

’I do look at a lot of people like that… women especially.’ Silas thought, how could he not…?

They were his world after all.

On the other side of the dome, Maya and Leona stood stiffly at the entrance like bodyguards with their arms crossed, both of them visibly trying not to be impressed until a butterfly the size of a dinner plate drifted down and landed on Maya’s shoulder, and she went rigid.

“Don’t move, Lieutenant,” Leona murmured, completely deadpan, leaning in to inspect it. “Some of the deep-basin species are venomous… One wrong twitch and you’ll be paralyzed for a week.”

“Is it venomous?” Maya hissed through her teeth, every muscle locked, her eyes rolling sideways to stare at the enormous wings resting on her shoulder. “Leona, I swear, if you’re not sure, then get it off me right now…”

“No,” Leona said, straightening up with the faintest smile. “Not even slightly… But your face was worth it.”

On the way out of the Insectarium, Aki stopped at the little gift stall by the exit and stood there for a long time, staring at a tray of tiny enamel pins shaped like beetles.

Her fingers hovered over one, a jewel beetle glittering green and gold and then she pulled her hand back and kept walking.

Kara bought it while she wasn’t looking, and when Aki turned around at the doors, Kara was standing right behind her, holding the little pin out on her open palm.

Aki stared at it, then up at Kara, her eyes going wide and soft as her face turned a slow deep pink.

“You saw me looking…? What a stalker?” she whispered.

“I always see you looking,” Kara said, and pinned it to the collar of Aki’s blue dress herself with her fingers lingering against Aki’s throat.

Aki touched the little beetle with her fingertips, and her smile said everything she couldn’t get out.

…

After the Insectarium came the floating market, which stretched for a mile along a wide calm stretch of river, hundreds of boats and barges lashed together into a sprawling bobbing maze of stalls, awnings and lanterns, and it smelled like heaven.

There was grilled river fish wrapped in banana leaves, skewers of spiced meat sizzling over charcoal, bowls of hot yellow tacacá soup that made Aki’s lips tingle and towering cups of thick purple a?aí piled with sliced fruit and crunchy granola.

Lara ate everything.

She went from stall to stall in her oversized black shirt, barefoot on the swaying decks, pointing at whatever smelled good, and Kara paid for it while Lara ate it.

She ate three whole grilled fish in a row, bones and all, finished a skewer of spiced meat in two bites and drank an entire bowl of tacacá without stopping, then set it down, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and pointed at the next stall while the vendors stared at her in awe.

“I thought you said the city was too loud…” Kara said, watching her inhale a fourth fish.

“It is too loud,” Lara said around a mouthful. “And it smells like engines, and there are too many people, and they all stare at me.”

She swallowed and licked her fingers clean one by one.

“But the food’s good, handsome. The food’s very, very good… I might have to come back just for the food.”

Aki sat on an overturned crate beside them, cradling a huge cup of a?aí in both hands with purple smeared at the corners of her mouth, and looked up at Kara with a radiant, sticky smile.

“This is the best day ever,” she announced. “Ever, Kara. I’m not even exaggerating…”

Kara reached over and wiped a smudge of purple off her chin with her thumb, and Aki went pink all the way to her ears, while Lara watched them, chewing slowly, and smiled to herself.

A few paces away, Maya stood with her back to a lantern pole and her arms folded, watching the First Princess laugh with purple on her chin, and she kept hearing it in her head, the sweet cheerful voice from the night before, sitting on top of a broken combat frame.

’You were too slow, Lieutenant…’

Her fingers tightened on her own arms.

’Too slow, huh?’ she thought, and her jaw set hard. ’We’ll see about that, princess.’