Our Lady of the Ice (14 page)

“You do understand what would happen if you told anyone?”

Eliana nodded. She thought of a scandal that had broken when she was a little girl—no, not a scandal, exactly, but a news story, something her parents had talked about at dinner. A cyborg had made its way into the city. It—and everyone had called it
it
, she remembered, although she couldn’t imagine anyone calling Lady Luna
it
—had been involved in an automobile accident. A fluke. That was how the authorities found it.

The cyborg had been deported, kicked back to Japan where it had come from. But she remembered people saying it should have been dismantled, that it was unnatural. No one ever explained why, but as an adult she understood—because people wanted to know where the robots were. And a cyborg was enough of a human that you couldn’t tell from looking at it.

Lady Luna was staring at her.

“Why did you come here?” Eliana asked.

Lady Luna blinked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t stand the thought of going home.” She pressed her hand to her mouth, her eyes glittering with intensity. “Really, I’m just afraid that Ignacio’s men might still be at the house. I should have fought them when they came. Why I didn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off, and her expression glazed over. “Of course, I didn’t want them to know what I was—but they’ll wonder how I survived out in the desert—”

Lady Luna seemed to recede into herself. She slumped against the chair, her face blank. Eliana jumped up and ran over and shook her shoulder. Lady Luna stirred, blinking.

“Are you okay?”

Lady Luna turned to Eliana. “No. I’m not sure. I feel strange.” She pressed her hand against her forehead. “I think it’s passing.”

“We should go to a hospital.”

“No!” Lady Luna’s shout echoed around the office. “No,” she said softly. “We can’t do that.”

Eliana’s cheeks burned. She felt stupid.
An automobile accident.
“No, of course not. But if you’re hurt—”

“I’m fine.”

Eliana didn’t believe that. “Okay. But you’re probably cold, right?” She could hear the brightness in her voice, trying to pretend like this was normal.

Lady Luna hesitated. “It’s uncomfortable, yes. I’d like some dry clothes, at the very least.” One of those small smiles. “I’m afraid this dress is probably ruined.”

Eliana’s laughter twanged with discomfort. “My apartment’s only a fifteen-minute walk from here. You can borrow some of my clothes and get warm, and we can figure out—something.”

Lady Luna shook her head. “You don’t have to help me. Your silence is all I ask.”

Eliana considered this. Why did she want to help Lady Luna? The woman was just some aristocrat, after all, with her own private dome.

Except she wasn’t.

Lady Luna stared blankly off into space. Eliana wondered if Diego had been there, if he’d seen it happen and hadn’t stopped it.

If he’d pushed her out himself.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eliana said. “You showed up here. You obviously don’t want to be alone.”

Lady Luna blinked and became more present. “I didn’t think about it that way.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for.” Eliana nodded toward the door. “You ready?”

Lady Luna didn’t move.

“You can wear my coat,” Eliana said.

“All right.”

Lady Luna stood up. Her movements were more natural now, not as stiff. Eliana still couldn’t imagine her as part machine.

Eliana gathered up her coat and scarf and gave them both to Lady Luna, who tossed the coat around her shoulders and draped the scarf over her half-frozen hair. She looked almost glamorous.

They left the office, Eliana locking up behind them. The streets were more crowded than Eliana had expected, and Lady Luna tightened the coat around her chest and tilted her head down. Whenever someone passed too close to her, she bumped against Eliana, as if by their touching she somehow gained strength.

It was funny, how people hated cyborgs because they were afraid of them, but here was a cyborg who seemed more afraid of people.

They were about five blocks from Eliana’s apartment when they passed the big neighborhood church. Eliana walked a few paces before she realized that Lady Luna was no longer walking alongside her. When she looked back, she found Lady Luna standing in front of the steps, looking toward the carved wooden doors.

“Lady Luna?” Panic rippled through her. “Is something wrong?” She jogged over to Lady Luna’s side. Lady Luna’s face was pale, her hair dark with water.

“If you don’t mind,” she said in a small voice, “I’d like to stop here for a moment.”

“The church?”

Lady Luna nodded.

“But don’t you need to—” Eliana waved her hands around, not wanting to finish her thought out loud.

Lady Luna smiled. “It won’t take long. And I—I’m fine.” Her voice wobbled. “I’m not cold.” She lurched up the steps. Eliana hadn’t been inside a church in years, not since she’d been a little girl and her mother had taken her to Easter services out of a sense of obligation. All she knew of the church was the sound the bells made when they rang out for mass to begin.

But Lady Luna was already slipping through those heavy wooden doors.

The inside of the church was dim, lit only by thin colored light seeping through the stained glass. It was also empty. Lady Luna blessed herself with holy water and then knelt down in the back pew, her hands folded and her eyes closed. Eliana hung back at the door, unsure if a sinner like herself should go any farther. The altar seemed far away. Rising behind it was a statue of the Virgin Mary, wrapped in white cloth and white furs, lines of silver metal extending in a sun ray halo behind her head. Our Lady of the Ice.

A Madonna for Antarctica, the stories went.

Lady Luna didn’t take long. She crossed herself again, then knelt and crossed herself a second time when she left the pew. She didn’t say anything until they were back out on the street.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Uh, no problem.”

“You must think it’s strange, my nature being what it is.”

Eliana shrugged, not wanting to say yes.

“It’s all right. My husband thought it was strange too. He used to tease me.”

“Oh.” Eliana paused. “Your husband knew? About the—” She wasn’t about to say it on the street.

“Oh yes. I told him. Our marriage was basically arranged, you have to understand—not in any explicit way, but that’s what it amounted to. I hadn’t particularly wanted to marry him. He was much older than me, and my parents only wanted it because they were running out of money.” She gave a hard smile. “My father treated me as—as an experiment. He meant to sell off the results.
But that didn’t happen. You can’t change people’s opinions about some things.”

Eliana was burning alive with questions, but of course she and Lady Luna were still surrounded by people. Her apartment building rose up in the distance, pale gray walls and rows of darkened windows. The air had an acrid scent to it, like something burning. The heaters. All those machines keeping them from freezing to death.

Well, keeping
Eliana
from freezing to death. But then she glanced at Lady Luna out of the corner of her eye, elegant still in her borrowed coat, and felt guilty for her private nastiness.

“I told him,” Lady Luna said, breaking the silence, “because I wanted him to reject me.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Oh, very. I was young, though. Barely eighteen.” She laughed. “When you’re young, you think nothing bad will ever happen to you. Then you grow up and you realize that’s all life is.”

Eliana started. Her mother had said something similar to her once, just before she died.

They arrived at Eliana’s building. She unlocked the front door, and they rode the rickety elevator up to her floor, not speaking. When the elevator opened, Eliana had a moment’s panic that Diego would be lounging by her apartment door, smoking a cigarette, waiting not for her but for Lady Luna. She didn’t want that final proof that he was a murderer and not just an errand-runner. Without it, she could still convince herself he was a good person paying back a debt to the man who’d raised him.

The hallway was empty.

They went into Eliana’s apartment. Lady Luna took off the coat and scarf and laid them across the sofa and then stood with her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes scanning the room. Eliana thought about Lady Luna’s house in its private dome and was suddenly embarrassed by her shabby apartment, the gouges in the linoleum, the crack in the glass door leading out to her balcony, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink of her kitchenette. But Lady Luna’s face gave no hint of disgust or displeasure.

“My bedroom’s this way,” Eliana said. “You can pick out some clothes to wear. I don’t have anything fancy—”

“I don’t need anything fancy.” She smiled, and in that moment she couldn’t have been more different than the hostess at the cocktail party, or the woman who’d come into Eliana’s office two weeks ago.

Eliana’s bedroom was messy, as usual, her bed unmade and her dirty clothes strewn across the floor. She tried not to think about it. She flicked on the lamp and pulled her closet door open.

“Pick out whatever you like. I still have some coffee, but I think there’s some Hope City tea in the cupboard.” Could Lady Luna even drink tea? No, of course she could—she’d been drinking at the party—

“Tea would be lovely. Thank you.” Lady Luna stared into the closet, her face illuminated by golden lamplight. Eliana left her, closing the bedroom door, and went into her kitchenette. She was exhausted, and it was cold in here, since she’d turned the radiator off when she’d left that morning.

She filled the water kettle and set it on the stove.

Lady Luna emerged from the bedroom five minutes later, wearing one of Eliana’s simpler sweaters and a pair of black cigarette pants. “Is this all right?”

“Sure, you can borrow whatever you like.”

“I promise to return to it.”

“I know.” Eliana smiled. The kettle steamed, and she poured a cup for Lady Luna, dropping in the tea strainer. No milk, of course, but she brought the last of her sugar into the living room along with the teacup.

“Sugar,” Lady Luna said. “That’s hard to come by.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been careful with it.”

“I prefer my tea unsweetened anyway.” Lady Luna sipped at her cup, and Eliana wondered if she really took her tea unsweetened or if she was being polite or if she just felt sorry for Eliana.

She wondered if Lady Luna was afraid Eliana would turn her in to the authorities.

“So what do you want to do about your house?” Eliana said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said you weren’t sure if Cabrera would be staking it out or not. I’m guessing you don’t want to go to the police—”

“I avoid the police whenever possible, yes.” Lady Luna set her teacup down on the table. “I’ll speak with my maintenance drones. I’m sure he didn’t destroy all of them.”

“Your maintenance . . .” Eliana’s voice trailed away. “You can talk to them.”

Lady Luna wouldn’t meet her eye. “One of the perks of being what I am, I suppose. I’ll have to find one of the contact stations. You needn’t worry about it.”

“A contact station? You have access to those?”

Lady Luna looked up, and her eyes glittered in a way that struck Eliana as nonhuman. Not inhuman, though. Not exactly.

“Technically,” Lady Luna said, “I do not.”

“Oh.”

“I suppose I’m not giving you much reason to trust me.”

Eliana thought about Diego.

“It’s fine,” Lady Luna continued. “That’s why human beings are so terrified of cyborgs, isn’t it? Because we bridge the gaps? But I’m just as human as you are. I survived the cold longer, but I couldn’t survive it forever. I can starve, I can die of dehydration, I can bleed to death. I can do any number of things you can do, all equally unpleasant.”

Eliana’s cheeks flushed. “I’m s-sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to imply— I just— I’ve never known a—someone like you.”

Lady Luna picked up her cup again and stared down at it. “I suppose you haven’t.”

“I don’t mind.”

Lady Luna smiled, still looking down at her teacup. “That makes you a rarity. Even those who have tolerated me still
minded
.”

Eliana forced out a laugh. “I live in the smokestack district. You learn tolerance pretty fast out here.”

Lady Luna looked up at her. Studied her. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

Eliana grinned. “You call that snapping at me? You hang around
here a few days longer, you’ll really see what happens if someone snaps at you.”

Lady Luna didn’t say anything, but Eliana thought she seemed calmer, less on edge, less falling apart into pieces. And she was glad for that. She was glad Lady Luna didn’t feel uncomfortable around her.

“Look,” Eliana said. “When you go talk to the maintenance drones, if you find out Cabrera’s still around, you can come back here, okay? You can stay here as long as you want.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

Eliana shrugged. “Hey, you said you’d pay me for my discretion. You’ve paid me twice what I usually make anyway, and you introduced me to all those people at your party. I already solved one case for Mrs. Quiroga, and I’m working a second for someone else.” Eliana didn’t mention Mr. Gonzalez.

Lady Luna blinked. She almost looked confused. “Of course.”

“Besides,” Eliana said. “How often do you get to help somebody famous?”

“Famous?”

“Sure. You’re in all those advertisements. The lovely Lady Luna and her agricultural domes.” Eliana stopped. Funny that a cyborg would care about agricultural domes and Independence.

Lady Luna laughed. “I hate those things. The advertisements, I mean.”

“So does everybody else.”

Lady Luna finished her tea and set it aside. Then she stood up. “You really do have my utmost gratitude, Miss Gomez.”

“Eliana. Nobody calls me ‘Miss Gomez.’ ”

Lady Luna smiled, and it was that sad smile from earlier. “Plenty of people call me Lady Luna,” she said, “but you don’t have to.”

Eliana blinked. She felt oddly touched.

“ ‘Marianella’ will be fine.” Lady Luna gave a short nod. “I really should be going. I have some matters to attend to before I check on my house.”