Our Lady of the Ice (12 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MARIANELLA

Marianella stepped off the train, and cold wind rushed around her. No one stepped off with her because no one else had been on the train. It was a private line, running from a station tucked away at the edge of Hope City, through the snow and wind and ice to the agricultural dome.

This stop, with its simple wooden platform, its bare light fixtures, was the end of the line. The train sat on its tracks, engine sounds dying away. It would wait for her.

Marianella stepped down from the station and followed the path until she came to the robot who guarded the entrance to the fields of crops. It was an older, repurposed model—human-shaped, although taller and wider and cast in dull burnished metal, with a round, old-fashioned speaker instead of a mouth. She had installed atomic lights into his faceplate, the new set into the old. As those bright white lights scanned over her, warmth tickled her skin.

“Hello, Escobar,” she said.

“Hello, Lady Luna.” His voice was scratchy and distorted through the speaker.

“You know you don’t have to call me that.”

Escobar didn’t answer. He wasn’t intelligent enough to understand
the complex system of human names. But Marianella always reminded him anyway. She did not like robots to call her Lady Luna.

The scan finished. Escobar stepped aside and pressed his palm flat against the door. His palm was the key and the doorknob both, a design trademarked by the city’s founders. With a click and a grinding of gears, the door slid open, and Marianella at once smelled the sweet organic scent of dirt and oxygen and growing things.

A little over a week had passed since the party. Marianella had delayed the trip to check on the maintenance robots longer than she’d intended because the party had brought with it a flurry of social engagements—her phone had rung constantly the last few days, old friends and acquaintances asking her to come for a visit. This was the first chance she’d had to get away, and she’d been looking forward to it. It was always a joy to dress in her city clothes and ride the private train to the agricultural dome.

To
her
agricultural dome.

Marianella stopped in the middle of the main path, next to the cornfield. She slipped out of her coat and waited the three seconds for the domestic robot to notice her; it came swooping out of the rows of corn and purred as she draped it with her coat, her gloves, her scarf, her hat. The dome was warm, warmer even than Southstar, and certainly warmer than Hope City. It had to be, for all the plants to grow.

For a moment, Marianella didn’t move, only stood in the center of the path, taking in everything around her. The ag dome was not just a container of seeds but a seed itself, the start of a new nation of Antarctica. A hundred years from now this dome would be immortalized, and Hope City would once again represent the best of humanity.

The wind switched on. Elsewhere in Hope City, wind was a luxury, but here it was used to re-create the natural environment and to help disseminate seeds. The corn rippled and rustled, a hollow empty sound she felt in her chest. Beyond the corn were other crops: wheat, sorghum, and potatoes, plus short test rows of grapes and a cluster of apple trees. All the crops had been chosen based on the mild climate of this dome; other domes, later domes,
would be hotter and more humid, for growing sugarcane and citrus fruit. Marianella had chosen every crop herself, all of them designed to say,
Look, we can grow food, just like the mainland.

Marianella turned and walked down the path.

She stopped at the crossroads, where the path split off into the corn, leading to the sorghum and the wheat. She lifted her head and whistled the first few bars from the “
Ave Maria
.” For a moment nothing happened but the wind. Then robots gathered along the roof of the dome, dark scurrying spots that coalesced above her head. She watched them, squinting against the floodlamps. Twenty-five total. They had helped build the dome in secret, and now they ran it. They adjusted the sunlight, they activated the wind and the rain, they pulled weeds and watched for rot.

She whistled the hymn again, and the robots dropped down on invisible filament, showering around her, landing in the dirt with soft dry puffs. Marianella knelt down, mindful of her stockings, and picked up the closest. It was the size of a cat and shaped like a beetle, with a row of lightbulbs illuminated across its back. Marianella twisted each bulb, and they winked out in turn.

All around her, the robots’ lights went out. The dome seemed suddenly empty.

Marianella walked a few paces away from the empty robots and placed the one she cradled in her arms on the ground. She pressed an indentation on its underside and held it in place for ten seconds, counting under her breath. When she dropped her hand away, the robot split open, revealing a tangle of metal wires that caught the reflection of the floodlights.

“I know you’re fine,” she murmured under her breath. “But I suppose we can never be too careful.”

She reached her hand into the copper wires. Her skin sparked. The robot’s code rode over her—this robot’s code, and the code of all the other robots. One was the same as any other. They shared an intelligence.

The rustle of the plants became a harsh mechanical slur in the buzz of information. She closed her eyes, and the world went dark except for the little robot revealing itself to her. Its programming
flashed across the interior of her machine brain, and her human brain interpreted that information as streaks of light.

This went on for a long time.

When it finished, Marianella’s eyes flew open and she stared out at the corn, waiting for her mind to return to itself. She slid her hand out of the robot’s wires. It was unchanged, her skin pale and unblemished, her nails filed into perfect curves and French-tipped. Not even a mainland style.
European.
She went so overboard in trying to prove she was normal.

Marianella settled back into herself. Her mind was still on fire, though, bright with the memory of the robot.

She closed him up, turned him over, twisted the lights in the opposite direction. The robot came back on, and then so did all the others. They looked at her expectantly.

“Just what I thought,” she said, her voice shimmering on the wind. “Your programming remains unbroken.”

The robots didn’t react, and Marianella left them so she could walk the paths through the dome, slow and meditative, her head bowed in prayer.

She always did this when she came here alone.

*  *  *  *

When Marianella finally arrived back at Southstar, night was falling, winter-early. Hector had installed moonlights in their dome, dots of silvery brightness that leached the color out of everything and cast long, unfamiliar shadows in the wheat. They had come to Hope City together from the mainland, both looking for new lives—Marianella so she could hide her nature and start over with a clean slate of humanity, Hector because he had followed the promise of wealth from the atomic plants—and so both of them had remembered the moon and the stars. But the moonlights were not the moon, and she’d always intended to have them turned off now that Hector was gone. She just hadn’t done it yet.

The wheat rustled its sad soft song, and Marianella unlocked her front door and stepped inside. The door swung shut behind her. She took off her coat. Turned on the lights.

And froze.

Something was wrong. She could sense it, a disruption in the circulation of the house’s air.

The hallway light was white and dazzling, as if it were refracting off a thousand mirrors. But Marianella could sense shadows amid all that brightness. A shadow. A man.

Someone was in the house, waiting for her.

“Who’s here!” she shouted. She took off her scarf. She kept on her gloves. “I know you’re here! Who is it!”

God, why hadn’t her maintenance drones intercepted her? She should have asked Luciano to stay. He’d offered. But she’d said no and told him she could take care of herself.

“Mother of mercy,” she whispered.

The house answered her with silence.

“Who’s
here
!” she shouted, and this time, she caught a scent on the air. Cigar smoke and wool and aftershave and the faint, faint trace of women’s perfume.

He was here.

Not just one of his enforcers but
him
.

“Where are you?” she shouted. “I know you’re in here!”

Silence. Brightness.

Footsteps.

“Brave, brave woman,” said a silken voice. “I gave you time to run.”

Marianella stood ramrod straight. Ignacio Cabrera stepped out of the parlor doorway, looking like a businessman in his gray suit and his black fedora. He cradled one of her maintenance drones in his arms, its wires hanging out in loops and tangles. Her stomach turned over at the sight of it.

“You’re in my house,” she said.

He dropped the drone, and it broke when it hit the floor, parts scattering across the tile.

“So it would appear.” An easy smile. Marianella knew not to look at it. She looked at his eyes instead, cold and empty, to remind herself of what he was.

“It’s been a while.” He ambled toward her. Marianella didn’t move. She caught the scent of others in the house.

“I missed this place,” Ignacio said. “Miss Hector, too.” He stopped a few paces from her and smiled. “I’ve seen your commercials on the television. An agricultural dome, Marianella? You don’t think that’s going to work, do you?”

“What do you want?”

He didn’t answer right away. Every muscle in Marianella’s body was taut. Her heart raced and raced. He’d come to collect her documents himself this time. She still didn’t understand why Hector would have betrayed her like that, why he would have alerted Ignacio to the possibility of a weakness. She should never have told Hector her secret, all those years ago. But she had been young and stupid.

“That’s no way to treat a guest,” he said.

“You aren’t a guest.”

He gave her a long, inscrutable look. “No,” he said. “I suppose I’m not. But I had a message I wanted to deliver myself. I figured I owe that much to Hector.”

She knew the men were coming. She heard the distant fall of their footsteps against the carpet. She felt their heat closing in on her. But she panicked, and she didn’t know what to do.

One of them grabbed both of her arms and jerked her back; the other shoved the barrel of a gun into her side. Cold metal locked around her wrists. She didn’t try to fight back. Her heart was beating too fast, as fast as a hummingbird’s. The machine parts of her body reinforced the rest of her for what was to come.

Ignacio leaned in close, and Marianella remembered the first time she’d seen him. They’d just moved to Hope City, and her husband had thrown a summer solstice party and Ignacio had been there. She’d taken one look at him and known he was a murderer.

“Time to go,” Ignacio said, and then one of the men threw a bag over her head. The material was thick enough that the world blinked out. She was jerked backward, stumbling, not out the front door as she’d expected but through the familiar pattern of her house’s rooms. Her hip banged against a table. Glass rattled. The mechanical parts of her brain tracked their progress—down the hallway, through the living room, the dining room. Toward the patio door.

She knew she should fight back, but she didn’t want to, because
she wouldn’t be able to muffle her strength. She didn’t want to risk revealing her secret to Ignacio if he didn’t already know—and she suspected, with the way his men had come in here unarmed save for their guns, the way they’d tossed a bag over her head, that he didn’t.

She only prayed that he or his men wouldn’t find the secret lockbox hidden behind the refrigerator, where she’d tucked the documents away after the first break-in. If he learned what she was, she would have to kill him herself.

And she didn’t think she could do that.

A sudden rush of wheat-scented wind told her they were outside. She smelled car exhaust.

“What?” she said, breaking her silence out of surprise. Her lips rubbed against the rough fabric of the bag. “A car. How did you get a car out of the main dome?”

“You know I have my ways, Lady Luna.”

They dragged her through the wheat. Not far. A car door opened. She was shoved inside, pushed onto the seat. The gun was still in her side. The door closed. Another opened. She tracked these sounds and she tracked the scent of the men, and in her head she saw a picture of herself, still dressed for travel in the city, her arms lashed behind her, flanked by two men with guns.

“You have a lovely home,” Ignacio said. His voice was close by, coming from in front of her, like he was facing her. “But it’s always much better to do business on my own turf. Don’t you think?”

“You don’t do business.”

Ignacio laughed. The car’s engine started, a rumbling beneath her seat. They were moving. She could hear the wheat scraping against the windows.

“Of course I do business,” he said. “That’s all I do. Your husband understood that.”

“Hector is dead.”

“So he is. And with him went my monthly checks from the Luna family.”

Marianella’s heart lurched. Was it possible that could be the only reason he was here?

“It’s only been six months.” Every time Marianella opened her
mouth, the bag stuck to her lips. “Surely you haven’t fallen on hard times already?”

“Cut the bullshit, Lady Luna. That was a minor irritation, to be certain, but the new manager at the plant has taken up Hector’s donation habits. He appreciates the protection I give them. Paying me is cheaper than paying all those taxes to the city.” The wind whistled through the windows. Cold. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for the last two years. I was willing to look away from your work with Alejo Ortiz when Hector was alive, but if you can’t even see fit to send a few donations my way to make up for stirring up the Independents, well, I guess my relationship with the Luna family is, sadly, over.”

Marianella didn’t respond. The air inside the bag was thick and humid from her breath. Her heart raced.

“The city government isn’t the only group who distributes food in the winter. I get food to the people of Hope City too,” he said. “Delicacies like they couldn’t imagine. And you want to take all that away from me.”