How to Guard a Castle

2. Career Choices

"I can't believe you did that," Gabi giggled, a few hours later.

Neymar gave a derisive snort. The two of them were running down a secret tunnel that had been built underneath the palace decades ago. Gabi wasn't entirely sure if anyone else knew of their existence or not, and to be honest, she didn't really care. As long as they existed, she and Neymar would continue to use them to exit the palace undetected.

They were both disguised now, Gabi having left her blue dress in her bedroom before changing. Since silver hair was pretty unmistakable, she wore a beanie to hide Benji's immaculate braid, and big glasses with no prescription in the lens. Simple shorts, t-shirt and sandals completed the look, but with a wreath of flowers draped around her neck. It was Carnival, after all.

"Spare a thought for Raheem and Leroy," said Neymar, glancing at his cousin, as the two rounded a corner, and began on the last stretch of the tunnels. Gabi laughed.

"Hey, it's their career choice, not mine. Definitely not mine, because I don't get a choice at all."

Raheem and Leroy were the two guards who always shared the post at the entrance to the palace, and were generally the ones who copped it for letting Gabi get past them without alerting anybody. The truth was a little hard to explain, as far as Gabi was concerned. She could tell her father she hadn't gone past them, and have her father scour the palace for the secret tunnels so he could block them up, or she could keep her mouth shut, and let them get in trouble. It wasn't even a hard decision, really, but the fact that Neymar brought it up made her feel a little bad. He was as unscrupulous as they come, so if he was feeling bad about something, it was probably pretty bad.

"I wish there was a way we could stop it from being a problem," Gabi sighed. "But there's not."

"Hey, don't stress about that now. It's Carnival."

"Damn right it's Carnival," Gabi grinned at him. The two had made it out of the tunnels by now. They exited through a trap door in the ground that was overgrown with grasses and weeds just outside the bounds of the palace. Gabi peeled off her beanie to tuck a few strands of hair behind her ears before pulling it on again, and then the cousins made their way towards the festival.

Gabi had a more genuine appreciation for music and dancing than for anything else on the planet. She had taken ballet classes until she was sixteen, and her tastes had taken a more modern direction and she'd moved into hip-hop which wasn't a genre that could be taught well if you didn't really appreciate the concept of it. After about a year, she'd stopped lessons altogether, unless you counted the occasional ballroom lesson, but she continued to dance. Neymar wasn't a bad dancer either - he could have been better, in Gabi's not very humble opinion, but he was better than anyone else around her.

Neymar and Gabi followed the noise of the crowds until they were finally amongst them. There was a parade going on in the street, and many of the crowd had drums to beat in time with the dancers. The two of them had a specific destination however, and they continued on, following the procession towards the square.

"Dance off," Neymar grinned. "That's what we like to see!"

"Just what the doctor ordered," Gabi agreed.

The crowd in the square were singing without any music, but somehow everyone seemed to know which song to sing. In the middle, a mysterious mixture of every genre of dancing was going on, with a definite Brazilian flair blended throughout.

"Let's go!" Gabi grabbed her cousin's hand, and pulled him in to the centre. Neymar laughed, and grabbed her other hand as well, as they began dancing together. There was no choreography, just both of them feeling the music, and knowing each other well enough to keep in time. Neymar was the biggest show off Gabi knew, and of course he had to throw in a few flips, making the crowd cheer for them. Both of them fed off the energy of the people around them, making everything seem to slow down and speed up at the same time. And Gabi thought, not for the first time, that this was the most beautiful kind of adrenaline rush. When they finished their dance, the section of the crowd cheered loudly for them once again.