Our Lady of the Ice (15 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.” Another smile. “Thank you for everything.”

Then she turned and walked out of the apartment. When the door clicked shut, Eliana took a deep, shuddery breath and collapsed on the sofa. Marianella Luna was a cyborg. And Diego—

Eliana had always known that Ignacio Cabrera murdered people. Diego had even warned her about it, like with Sala. But that was the difference. He’d
told
her about it. But she’d actually seen Lady Luna covered in ice. It was the first time Eliana had come close to Cabrera’s violence. The first time she had actually seen the effect of that violence.

And it was the first time she’d truly considered the possibility that Diego may have been involved.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MARIANELLA

Marianella rode the train into the amusement park. The overhead lights flickered as the train roared through the city. Marianella wanted to fall asleep, and that concerned her, especially given how her thoughts had guttered on the edges of her consciousness when she’d been with Miss Gomez—no, Eliana. She’d asked to be called Eliana.

Marianella may have survived the night outside the dome, but she doubted she’d escaped without internal damage.

She still couldn’t believe she’d gone to Eliana’s office instead of Araceli’s place in the park. Stupid. Araceli could repair any damage the ice might have inflicted. But Marianella had been in a haze when the maintenance drone had finally opened the door for her, and she’d been stunned by the sudden wash of floodlights. All she’d known was that she couldn’t go home. And so she had walked away from the dome exit on the basis of some strange muscle memory. She needed help. Eliana was the last one who had helped her. In an electronic daze, that was where Marianella had gone.

Eliana had been kind, at least. Not disgusted or terrified or likely to turn her into the authorities, although Marianella remained on edge. Because Eliana knew her secret, and because Ignacio had finally tried to kill her.

If it had been summer, she would have fled to the mainland. But it wasn’t summer, and no city ship would allow her to board, much less ride north. Because according to the city, she was 100 percent human.

“Approaching park entrance,” the train said in a soft automated voice with a slushy European accent, like half-melted snow. The lights dimmed. At least the train was empty. It was a relic of the amusement park, its walls covered in storybook paintings of penguins and narwhals and orcas and sea lions. Most people didn’t even know it still ran. However, all city trains were automatic, and shutting them down completely, including the one into the park, would be an inconvenience to the city, as they still went mining for robots in the amusement park. Luciano and Sofia called those mining raids the cullings.

She shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. The train passed into the tunnel and dropped underground. The lights grew dimmer and dimmer and then suddenly flared with brightness, spilling yellow light over all the tattered, threadbare seats. A short in the circuit. Marianella’s head felt the same way.

The train pulled up to its one stop, the only station in the park. Marianella stepped onto the platform. It hadn’t changed since the last time she’d been here, almost three years ago. The paint was still faded, the lights were still broken, the air still smelled of mildew.

The train puffed steam into the station. Marianella’s hair curled from the humidity. Frozen and thawed and curled. She’d be lucky if she didn’t have to shave it all off and start over.

She climbed the broken escalator to the surface.

The station was located on the edge of the park, near the towering wooden roller coaster that had, forty years ago, been the most innovative of its kind. It loomed overhead, casting gray shadows across the dirty off-white cobblestone. Marianella turned west, toward Araceli’s cottage. For a moment she thought she had forgotten the way, but neither parts of her brain, computer or human, would ever let that happen.

She walked.

Marianella had never visited Antarctica when the amusement
park was open. It had closed in 1943, when she was ten, and her parents had considered it vulgar. She was a daughter of the aristocracy and as such was expected to spend her time horseback riding and practicing her social graces. At ten her father hadn’t yet taken her humanity away from her—that was still two years off, a transformation that occurred simultaneously with puberty—and never seeing the park before it closed had been her childhood’s greatest tragedy.

Because Marianella, like all former little girls, was familiar with the amusement park’s magic. It had been called Hope City too, just like the surrounding settlement where its employees had lived, but unlike the current Hope City, it had been designed to appear cut from the ice and snow of the Antarctic desert. Marianella vaguely recalled that was its entire gimmick: a true Antarctic civilization, tamed and temperature-controlled for your delight and appreciation.

It didn’t appear cut out of ice anymore. The buildings still sparkled a little in the floodlights, but they were no longer white, only the same grimy yellowed-bone color as the cobblestone. Most of the buildings were falling apart. No humans lived here. Well, except Araceli, but she had disavowed all loyalties to humans a long time ago. The city had fired and then blacklisted her because she’d refused to utilize parts pulled from the old amusement park robots—robots she had once tended to, before the park had closed. She couldn’t find any engineering work in Hope City, and she didn’t have the money to go to the mainland. Eventually, it was Sofia who offered Araceli a place to stay. The maintenance drones told Sofia about how Araceli had stood up to the city and their culling practices. Sofia actually invited Araceli to stay in the park, the one human she was willing to trust.

Finding Araceli had been a miracle when Marianella had first come to Hope City. Hector had learned about her somehow. He told Marianella over dinner one night that there was a strange woman living in the park who could tend to any of her
issues
, which had always been his preferred euphemism for Marianella’s nature. Her
issues
. It seemed he hadn’t kept them as well a secret as he’d always claimed.

Still, Marianella had gone to the park after a fall, and Araceli had treated her. That was also the day that Marianella first encountered Sofia. She had seen her watching from one of the gardens, dressed in a tattered old dress, plants growing wild around her. Marianella had registered her as an android immediately, but there had been a sentience, a spark, burning in Sofia’s eyes that haunted her even after she arrived back at Southstar. She had not been able to fall asleep that night, staring up in the dark with Hector snoring beside her.

Marianella went back to the park three days later. To see Sofia, not Araceli. That had been the start of things.

Now Marianella walked for another twenty minutes. Her thoughts kept drifting in and out: Eliana and her cramped, homey apartment; Ignacio looming in the headlights of his car; the maintenance drone who had found her shivering beside the dome, its eyes scanning over her, bright in the darkness, turning white when it found her machine parts. The wind knifing her skin. The maintenance drone leading her through the snow to the main dome, the only part of the building it had access to operate.

That moment of disorientation as she stepped back into the heat, at the edge of a park built into one of the middle-class neighborhoods. Everything green. That blinding, bleeding, terrible green.

Her thoughts were as diaphanous as spun sugar.

She was deep into the amusement park now, away from the rides and the shops, into the section once devoted to guest cottages and restaurants. Araceli lived in the nicest of the cottages.
SUGAR SNOW COTTAGE
announced a sign stuck into the sculpted stucco lawn. The cottage was made to look like a gingerbread house. The windows glinted like candies.

Marianella knocked on the front door. No one answered. She pressed her thumb against the doorbell. A melodic chiming echoed deep inside the house, and then a miniature door sprang open next to the true door, and a tiny mechanical ballerina wobbled out and spun around once.

“She’s at the workshop,” the ballerina said in a singsong voice. “The workshop, the workshop, the worksh—”

“I understand.” Marianella had never liked Araceli’s little toys. More amusement park relics.

The ballerina curtsied and wobbled back inside.

The workshop. Marianella should have known.

The workshop was part of the amusement park’s operations center, which was located in the basement of the Ice Palace, at the center of the park. Another twenty-minute walk. Marianella followed the cobblestone path to the main road. The wooden gate of the cottage banged shut behind her. She was dizzy and light-headed. The cold. No, not the cold—the thaw. The machinery embedded in her brain was wearing down.

She found a bench nearby, wrought iron and once painted silver, and collapsed onto it. The cottages glittered dully around her. She wondered how many robots were lurking inside them, watching her through the windows, trying to make sense of this stranger in their cast-off kingdom. Most were like the ballerina, mechanical performers from the amusement park’s heyday. They didn’t have the intelligence that Sofia and Luciano and Inéz did, but they were slowly developing it, the way all the robots had in the park, day by day, moment by moment. And unlike the maintenance drone, they couldn’t see through skin to learn that Marianella was part of them.

They looked at her, and only saw a human.

Marianella slumped back on the bench and looked up at the top of the dome. A maintenance drone slipped past, a dark pinpoint against the white background. She closed her eyes. She knew she shouldn’t—some voice was whispering to her that it was dangerous. Not just some voice. Her voice, her computer voice. The mechanical part of her brain that controlled the human part.
Don’t fall asleep,
it said in an indolent whine.
If you fall asleep, they’ll never be able
to repair you.

Marianella forced her eyes open. The air was so still here. No trees, no plants, no wind. Hardly any heat. What did robots need with any of those things?

She missed the agricultural dome. She missed the soft rustling wheat surrounding her house.

“Marianella?”

The voice jarred her. She jerked up, her head spinning, and it took a moment for her senses to slow down and her brain to catch up. A man was staring at her. Tall and lanky and handsome.

No, not a man. Luciano.

“What are you doing here? Do you need assistance?” He sat down beside her, his movements as assured and graceful as always. “Have you incurred some sort of damage?”

“Maybe.” Marianella rubbed her head. The computer voice had died away, replaced by a faint buzzing in the back of her brain. Electronic feedback. She didn’t think that was a good sign. “I had—oh, Luciano, I had something terrible happen to me, and I did something so, so stupid—”

The world uprooted itself, and Marianella was lying back, Luciano’s arms around her shoulders. She looked up at him.

“You need to see Araceli,” he said. “I’m concerned about you.”

The buzzing was so loud, she couldn’t hear him, but she saw his lips move, and that was how she knew what he was saying.

“Can you walk?”

“I don’t think so.”

Had she answered? She wasn’t certain. No, no, it appeared she had—Luciano had slipped his arms under her knees and was lifting her up. She felt weightless. Like snow.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Luciano said. “I’m very concerned.”

He was always concerned. They had programmed him that way, sixty years ago.

The world went white.

*  *  *  *

“She’s coming back.”

“The system restart just blinked on.”

“Good, good. That was close. It was good you found her.”

“Yes, I agree.”

Marianella saw only light, as if she were staring into the snow or the floodlamps. At least the buzzing was gone.

“Araceli?” Her voice ricocheted around her head, thrumming with feedback. “Inéz? Luciano?”

“We’re here, love.” Araceli’s voice was smooth, comforting. “Try not to think about anything.”

Marianella’s head filled with images: Hector and Ignacio and the agricultural domes and Our Lady of the Ice and Eliana and the estate where she grew up. Such a human response. She tried to force the thoughts down, but the minute one disappeared, another replaced it.

“We’re almost done repairing your hardwiring, and then I’ll reconnect your optics—your eyesight. How does that sound?”

“Good.” Her voice didn’t thrum as much this time. Marianella’s system was a complicated one, more complicated than most cyborgs. Every part of her human body was reinforced by a complex system of tiny machines, powered by the clean-burning atomic energy her father had developed. It was all designed to make her
more
, to bring the human body itself into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, into the unimaginable new millennium. The reality was that now her human body couldn’t survive without those machines.

She was aware of Araceli leaning over her even though she still couldn’t see her; it was the human warmth of her blood and skin. Marianella wanted to reach up and touch her, but she couldn’t move her hand. She couldn’t move anything.

“Just a few seconds more—
there
.”

The world flooded back into focus. Overhead was a high vaulted metal ceiling and rows of bright lights and bits of glittering golden dust. Araceli would hate knowing there was dust anywhere in her workshop, so Marianella didn’t say anything.

“Is everything working all right?” Inéz asked. She stood next to Araceli, her hand stretched out in Marianella’s direction. Monitoring her progress. “Can you see?”

“I can see fine.” Marianella sat up. Her muscles ached and she was in her underwear—Araceli must have stripped her down to get to her wiring. “You didn’t cut my clothes away, did you?”

“Of course not.” Araceli stepped up to the table, holding Eliana’s sweater and trousers. Like the amusement park, she hadn’t changed much in those three years. Still tall and broadly built. The last few
dark streaks in her hair had been subsumed by silver. “What the hell happened to you? What have you been
doing
out in the city?”

“She wasn’t in the city. She was outside the dome. Weren’t you?”

Luciano. He was tucked away discreetly to the side, half-shrouded in shadow. He didn’t like being the center of attention.

“What were you doing outside?” Araceli asked. “Was this an ag dome thing?”

Marianella nodded without thinking.

Araceli bustled away from the table, over to Inéz, who dropped her hand. Araceli chattered over her shoulder. “You’re going to need to stay here for at least a few hours,” she said. “I’ll get you some food.”