Our Lady of the Ice (2 page)

“It’s not impossible.” Diego pulled her closer. “It just happened.”

The murmuring from the crowd was louder, more panicked. People were starting to realize what Diego and Eliana just had—a
blackout
had happened. An old fragment of a nightmare from their youths. It was real.

“We have to get away from this crowd,” Eliana said.

That right there, that was why Diego loved Eliana so much. She wasn’t an idiot.

He gripped her hand tight, squeezing her fingers together. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife. He never brought his gun when he came to see Eliana, but the knife was better than nothing. He pulled her toward the edge of the crowd. “Get the fuck out of the way!” he shouted. Someone shouted back. The crowd jostled, surged, and a violent ripple cascaded down from the direction of the smokestack district.

Eliana screamed. Her hand slipped away.

For the span of a heartbeat Diego was paralyzed with fear. But you couldn’t let that happen in his line of work, and so he dove into the crowd in the direction where she’d been pulled. He caught the flash of her dress, orange in the firelight, and grabbed her upper arm.

“Got you,” he said, pressing his mouth against her ear. His heart was pounding. “You’re right, we’ve got to get out of here. Come on.”

They pushed on. The knife was enough to get people to move
out of the way. Most of them were terrified, their panic poisoning the darkness. Another surge of the crowd. Eliana slipped, but she grabbed on to Diego and stopped herself just in time. Smart girl.

And then they were out.

Eliana pressed close to him, and her frantic breath warmed a spot on his neck. They slammed against a wall of cold hard brick. Bodies flowed past them, but they were, for the moment, in an untouchable bubble. Diego let out a long sigh of relief.

In his arms, Eliana shivered. It was a tiny movement, but it reminded him of their precarious position here in the dark.

A blackout meant no electricity.

No electricity meant no heat.

No heat meant the city would ice over in—Diego had no idea how long. This had never happened before, not in his lifetime.

Hours?

Minutes?

No. He forced himself to focus. He glanced at Eliana, and she was staring at the surging crowd, her body almost entirely subsumed by shadows, the only visible part of her the left side of her face. It looked carved out of molten stone in the orange firelight.

“This is bad,” Eliana said.

“No shit.” He pressed his back flat against the wall, squeezed Eliana’s hand. They needed to get inside, away from people. People turned to monsters in situations like this. Diego had seen it.

“Maria!” Eliana shouted suddenly, turning toward him. “We have to find Maria!”

Damn it.
“Sorry, babe. That ain’t happening. We need to get inside.”

He pulled her again, skittering up against the wall. He could feel the start of a riot crackling around him, the air tightening like a wire.

“Something’s going to happen to her!” she shouted.

“Something’s going to happen to
you
,” Diego snarled. “Come the fuck on.”

Eliana seemed to shrink in on herself, and Diego felt a twist of guilt that he pushed aside. Time for that later.

The building’s door was only a few meters away. If it was locked, he could pick it. If it was barricaded—

He’d figure something out.

Somewhere to the left a fire flared.

A woman screamed.

Eliana muttered a string of frightened profanity.

And then the lights came back on.

They were at full power, daytime power, noon power. Diego’s eyes burned at the sudden brightness, little dots of darkness spotting his vision. Eliana threw her arm over her face. Diego stopped dragging her. The crowd had frozen in place, a garish cacophony of color.

A fire licked at one of the tenement buildings. Eliana dropped her arm away, and she stared at the fire like she’d never seen one before.

Diego’s adrenaline was still pumping through his body. He kept anticipating violence, but the tension of the riot was gone, and he shook his head, trying to clear out his brain. Eliana leaned against him and kissed his chest. She was shaking. Not from the cold. It hadn’t been long enough to get cold.

Distantly, an alarm rang out. Water poured down from the dome, falling across the crowd, across the burning tenement building. Diego looked up, squinting past the glare of the floodlights. A dark shape moved across the underside of the dome. A robot, a maintenance drone, tending to the fire.

“Everything’s back to normal,” Eliana said, although she didn’t sound like she believed it.

Diego certainly didn’t.

After all, he’d lived in Hope City for twenty-nine years—his entire life.

His entire life, and not once had the power ever gone out.

Not once.

CHAPTER TWO

ELIANA

Eliana woke up to Diego’s arm slung across her chest, their bodies tangled up in the bedsheets. She blinked up at the ceiling. Gray light filtered in through the window.

And then her alarm went off, screeching like a mechanical bird. Diego moaned and pulled the pillow over his head. When she reached over to turn it off, she knocked it to the floor instead. It let out a loud
sprang
and fell silent.

“What the hell, Eliana? Why’d you set the alarm?”

“Gotta go back into the office today.” She didn’t move to get out of bed, though, only snuggled closer to Diego. He was naked, his skin warm to the touch. Three days had passed since Last Night, and he hadn’t disappeared into the city for work once; Eliana thought this might have been the longest he’d gone, not leaving her. She liked it and didn’t like it at the same time. She liked waking up to find him sprawled under her blankets, but she didn’t like the break in her routine.

“Your office?” Diego rolled over onto his back. Eliana lay her head against his chest and listened to his heart beating. “Hell, that big
PI
office gives ’em a whole week after Last Night.”

“Yeah, but if you work for them, you get paid vacation. I don’t.”

“Nobody’s gonna come in today.” He played with her hair, a lazy, distracted gesture. “They’re still sleeping off their hangovers.”

“They’re afraid the power’s gonna go out again,” Eliana said softly, not wanting to think about the almost-riot on Last Night. People were already saying it hadn’t been an accident, that it had been either mainland interference or
AFF
terrorism, depending on whether or not they favored Independence. Eliana wasn’t a big Independence supporter. The atomic power plants here were the first of their kind in the world, and the Independents, whether
AFF
or not, had big ideas about turning this place into some kind of modern marvel. But Eliana knew people had used the word “marvel” when the city had been an amusement park back in the 1890s, and you just had to look outside to see where that had gotten them.

Still, she also didn’t think the Antarctican Freedom Fighters would want to break down the system that let Hope City exist in the first place. They usually took their violence to the mainland, or went after big-time city politicians.

At least Maria’d turned up the next day, hungover but otherwise fine. “And someone might come in. Besides, I have filing to do.”

“Filing? Jesus, you really are a cop.”

“You want to come in with me?”

Diego laughed.

“It’s just me. It’s not like anybody knows who you are.”

“That so?” Diego dropped his head to the side to look at her, black hair falling across his eyes. In the dim early-morning light he looked like some classical statue, too handsome to be real. “The problem isn’t with your clients, Eliana. It’s with Mr. Cabrera.”

Eliana sighed.

“Word gets out I’m hanging around an
investigator’s
office—”

“You didn’t call me a cop. An improvement.”

“Eh, you’re licensed. Just as bad.”

Eliana laughed, tossed her pillow at him. He caught it, threw it aside, grabbed her wrists, and pulled her close. She could smell the soap from his shower the night before, and the scent of sleep. He kissed her, and for a moment she forgot about her office.

“You can go in late,” he mumbled into her neck, and his hands were already tracing over her hips, finding the places he knew too well.

*  *  *  *

Two hours later, Eliana walked the familiar path to her office. Alone. It was cold as hell this morning, especially now that she was away from her radiator and the heat of Diego’s touch. But those weren’t the only reasons—it was always colder in the days following Last Night, the trade-off for turning up the heat during the celebration.

Eliana pulled her coat more tightly around her waist and readjusted the scarf she’d wrapped around her hair. Nobody was out, just like Diego’d said. But there hadn’t been many clients lately, and she didn’t want to run the risk of missing somebody. She had left Diego in her apartment, flipping through the newspaper like he cared. He probably wouldn’t be there when she went home; as she’d walked through the door, he’d called out, “Guess I should see if the old man needs me for anything.”

A private investigator stepping out with a gangster. That was a story. Almost as good a story as there being a lady
PI
in the first place.

It took Eliana the usual fifteen minutes to make it to her office, which was on the second floor of a brick building right at the edge of the smokestack district. Last year it had belonged to an old
PI
named Marco Vasquez. Eliana’d been his secretary. When he’d retired, he’d given her the building and his gun and told her to get her firearm license.

“They aren’t gonna give me one of those,” she’d said.

“They will once you get your
PI
license,” he’d said, and for two straight days she’d thought he’d lost his mind. But it was true she’d been just as much assistant as secretary, and although the proctors laughed when she went down to take the test, she passed, and they didn’t have much choice but to make everything official. It was sad, though, that her mother had died before Eliana had started working for Mr. Vasquez. She would have been proud. It was a big deal, for the daughter of an old amusement park dancer to get a
job like this one. It was the sort of thing Eliana’s parents had immigrated to Hope City for in the first place, back when it had still been an amusement park. The park had promised endless opportunities, before wars and revolutions and poverty on the mainland had left people unable to believe in its magic anymore. It had shut down back in the 1940s, leaving Eliana’s parents, along with half the city, unemployed. Things got better with the atomic power plants—more jobs, more people moving back in. But her parents had been long gone by then. Eliana had stood in the city’s freezing mausoleum on two separate occasions and watched her parents’ ashes fly out of the dome.

Work had been steady over the last eight months. At first people had been looking for Marco, and Eliana’d gotten used to the disappointment in their voices as they’d said, “It’s just you?” Gotten used to their excuses, to the way they fumbled out of the office without giving her a case whenever she explained, patiently and calmly, that Marco Vasquez had left Hope City for the mainland. But enough time had gone by that now people showed up looking for her specifically, and that was a good feeling.

The mainland. Mr. Vasquez was lucky. Not many people got out of Hope City. Eliana’s parents certainly never did—they’d lived and died here. She didn’t want to do the same, and she hoped this job would generate enough money for her to purchase a visa out of Antarctica. Someday.

Eliana’s footsteps echoed in the stairwell as she clomped up to the office. The name on the door still read
VASQUEZ
because she didn’t want to waste money getting the glass replaced.

She pulled out her key, let herself in. The bell clanged against the doorframe.

The office was freezing, the air cold enough that she could see her breath. Eliana switched on the radiator and set a pot of coffee to percolate on the hotplate. The air had that still, untouched quality it got when you leave a place alone for too long. Too long—just three days. Still, Eliana had missed the office, with its cracked floorboards and its thick, wavy windows and its worn-out schoolteacher’s desk from which she conducted her business.

Eliana switched on the radio to break up the stillness. Usually she kept it on the mainland station, but this morning she spun through the dial until she came to a news program. The newsman was talking about the blackout in his lisping mainland accent, claiming that there was no evidence of the
AFF
’s involvement, that it had been the fault of a defective robot from the power plant. The city commissioner planned on publicly dismantling the robot tonight.

Diego hadn’t wanted to hear about it, these last three days. Kept shutting off the radio anytime she tried to listen.

The coffee finished up, letting off clouds of steam. Eliana poured herself a cup and sprinkled in the last of the sugar. She still had some at home, but once it was gone, she wouldn’t see any more sugar until winter was over.

The radio played on quietly in the background, a dull murmur, and the radiator was rattling. Good. It’d be warm enough soon for her to take off her coat.

Eliana turned to the stack of files sitting at the corner of her desk. Left over from the last case she’d worked, one of those adultery jobs where she’d had to tail a housewife all over the city, looking to see if the woman was faithful or not. As it had turned out, this particular housewife had just gotten a job.

The bell clattered against the door.

Eliana immediately sat up, shoving the files into the desk drawer where she kept her pens. She felt a momentary surge of smugness—looked like coming in so soon was about to pay off.

The door swung open, and a woman stepped inside.

Eliana had seen her before. She was certain of it, although she couldn’t place her. The woman looked like a film star, tall and shapely, her hair that peculiar European blond. She glided into the room like she was made of light.

“Eliana Gomez?” the woman said.

“That’s me.” Eliana stood up and walked around to the front of her desk. The woman stood by the door, staring at her.

The radio hummed in the background. The radiator clanged against the wall.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Eliana said.

“No, thank you.” The woman glanced around the office. Her face was as flawless and as expressionless as a mask, and she wore a gray fur draped around her shoulders. Only the wealthy wore fur in Hope City.

“I received your name from a former client of yours,” the woman said. “Annetta Marchel. I hope this isn’t too—forward.”

Annetta Marchel. One of the first who’d asked for Eliana by name. She had specifically wanted a lady detective, someone she could trust with information about a sensitive medical procedure.

“Forward?” Eliana smiled. “Not if you’ve got a job for me.”

“I do.” The woman slipped her fur off her shoulders, revealing a pale silk blouse, a glittering necklace. “I’m afraid it requires a certain amount of discretion.”

“Then it’s a good thing you came to me and not those
PI
firms downtown. I specialize in discretion.” Eliana gestured at the chairs set up in front of her desk. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me about it?”

The woman gave a thin, elegant smile, frustratingly familiar. She floated across the room and draped herself in one of the chairs. Eliana felt clumsy and graceless by comparison as she took her own seat.

“My name’s Marianella Luna,” the woman said, “and some important documents of mine have gone missing.”

Marianella Luna.
Immediately Eliana remembered where she’d seen the woman before—on television. She was that Argentinian aristocrat, the one all the Independents loved, the one in those advertisements with the city councilman Alejo Ortiz, raising money for his Hope City agricultural domes.
We have the strength to run our own city. Atomic power should be ours! End Antarctican dependence on Argentina!
As if that was ever going to happen.

Marianella Luna stared at Eliana, her pale eyes framed in thick dark lashes.

Eliana found her voice. “Well, that’s certainly a shame, Lady Luna.”

Lady Luna sat with perfect posture, her hands folded in her lap. “More than you could know, I’m afraid. Will you be able to help me?”

“I’ll certainly try.” Eliana pulled a notepad and a pen out of her desk. “So. These documents. When did you notice they’d disappeared?”

“This morning. I woke up and found someone had broken into the safe in my library. It was—distressing.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

Eliana kept her voice neutral, but she watched Lady Luna closely, looking for clues. Always start an investigation with the client—one of the few pieces of advice Mr. Vasquez had given her.

Lady Luna took a deep breath and toyed with her necklace.

“The contents of these documents,” she said, “are sensitive.”

“Sensitive.”

“Yes, Miss Gomez. I don’t wish to give the impression that I don’t have faith in the city’s police department, and I’m sure they would never betray me intentionally, but if some newly minted detective were to glance at these documents, it would be—” She dropped her necklace. “Disastrous. If I hired you, it would be as much for your discretion as for your investigative skills. I do hope you understand, Miss Gomez.”

When she said Eliana’s name, her voice softened, her eyes took on a soft aristocratic glow.

“That’s why people come to me,” Eliana said, floundering a little. “Discretion and investigation.” She felt stupid saying this, but she didn’t want to risk Lady Luna taking her business downtown. And people did come to Eliana for discretion. It wasn’t a lie.

Eliana leaned back in her chair, trying to smooth out her awkwardness, and sipped at her coffee. “I won’t even charge you extra. Ten bucks a day, just like all my clients.”

Another light smile. “I’ve every intention of paying you handsomely for your work. Speed is another issue we’ll need to discuss, of course, and another reason I didn’t contact the police. They can be dreadfully slow with these things, as I learned when my late husband’s office was robbed.” She sighed. Eliana tried to remember who her husband was, but she’d never followed gossip about the aristocracy. She’d have to ask Maria later.

“I’ll get them back as fast as I can,” Eliana said.

“It’s important that you do so, yes. As I said, I can’t have the contents of these documents released to the public.”

“Of course not.” Eliana wondered what the documents were for. Immigration? Something tying Lady Luna to the mainland? She was palling around with Alejo Ortiz, after all, with his hypocritical mainland suits and his speeches about Hope City growing her own food. If Lady Luna wanted to hold on to the Independents’ good graces, it wouldn’t serve her well for word to get out that she still owned property back in Argentina proper.