Our Lady of the Ice (24 page)

If Mr. Gonzalez was a city man, why didn’t he get them himself?

“I don’t need the original,” Eliana said quickly. “But if you want to find it and copy it and change up the schematics somehow—that’d be perfect.”

Maria grinned. “I feel like I’m doing something illegal.”

“That’s because you are,” Essie said.

“Not really,” Eliana said. “Giving me the real schematics probably is, but she’s not, and it sounds like no one would care anyway.”

“Whoever hired you cares.”

“Yeah, but he’s—” Eliana waved her hand through the air. “I shouldn’t talk about this, you know.”

“Oh, come on,” Maria said.

“I really shouldn’t. But there’s something off about him.”

“Hence the fake schematics,” Essie said. “Interesting.”

The bar girl brought them their drinks. The music had shifted into something resembling a traditional tango, although it was still filtered through with feedback from the speakers. Essie listened intently, nodding her head as if she were at a speech or a lecture.

“People are trying to dance,” Maria said, pointing at a couple weaving their way across the empty space.

“Of course they are,” Essie said. “That’s the entire point. To force people to perform a dance to a culture they should have no part of.”

Eliana resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Maria didn’t, and Essie frowned when she saw.

“You don’t understand anything.”

“It’s just a tango! And they’re messing it all up!”

Essie screeched with frustration. Maria laughed and said, “I’m sorry. I just don’t care about all this
stuff
—”

“Stuff! It’s your whole life!”

Eliana tuned out their argument. Her thoughts went back to Mr. Gonzalez. She should have the fake schematics soon enough, and she’d definitely slip Maria a bit of payment for helping out.

An eruption of noise filled the warehouse, so loud that the walls rattled.

Eliana thought it was the music at first, reverberating through the speakers, but when the noise faded away, it was replaced by screaming, although the screaming sounded distant and far away. Her ears were buzzing. People were crouching down on the floor, and some were running toward the exit, and everyone was
panicking
.

“What happened?” Maria was right next to her, but her voice was muffled, like she was speaking through a wall. “What was that?”

Essie shook her head. Her eyes were wide.

Eliana smelled something burning.

“We should go,” she said, pushing away from the table. Maria and Essie followed, their hands linked. People rushed toward the doors, cramming up against one another—like during the power failure on Last Night. But all the lights were still on, and the projector still ran its bright images against the wall, and there had been enough flickers in electricity that people were used to them by now.

Eliana, Maria, and Essie pushed through the doorway, out onto the street. The chaos was worse here, people shouting and running into the alleyways. Gray smoke hung thickly on the air, and the scent of burning was stronger, more pervasive. Alarms clanged wildly.

“Look!” Although muffled, Maria’s voice was sharp and shrill. She jabbed her finger off to the side. Eliana whirled around. She didn’t see anything at first, just more people dressed in party clothes. And it was snowing.

Snow.

Fear paralyzed her. If it was snowing, then the dome had broken open. But no. This wasn’t snow. It was gray and smoldering. It was ash.

“There!” Maria shrieked. “Can’t you see it?”

“I don’t—” Eliana shook her head and stumbled backward. Everyone was looking where Maria was pointing, but Eliana only saw the drifts of ash.

Overhead, the dome glass had gone dark with the rush of maintenance robots.

“God, you call yourself an investigator?
There.
”

And then Eliana saw it flickering through the building.

The glow of fire.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MARIANELLA

Marianella woke from a dream she couldn’t remember. She lay in her bed, afraid to move. The palace was silent save for the soft whir of the generators, but Marianella was certain that she should listen for something. Something had woken her. She was sure of it.

She slid out of bed and pulled on an old silk dressing gown, left over from one of the old park hotels, and peered out her window. She had a view of the southern half of the park, but she didn’t see anything unusual, only the soft glow of the garden below.

Marianella closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the glass. If she were a robot she could play back through her files and find whatever had woken her. But she wasn’t a robot.

Something was wrong.

Then she heard the wail of a siren.

Immediately, Marianella opened her eyes. She saw nothing outside but darkness. The siren wailed and wailed and then faded away.

Something
had
happened.

But it hadn’t happened here.

Marianella breathed with relief, and her breath clouded the glass. She had been afraid of another culling, another
death
. She had gone to sleep thinking of Inéz, and now that she was awake, she thought
about her again. Inéz was gone, the roots of weeds and flowers growing around her. The cullers—the city’s men, Alejo’s men, Marianella still wasn’t sure what to think—had never come back for her.

Marianella took a deep breath. When she had told Sofia about the wires, about recognizing the culler, Sofia had frowned and said, “This has happened before. We have an entire warehouse of broken androids because of men like that. That you recognized him means nothing. You spend your days with humans.”

Another siren picked up, far away in the distance. The siren was joined by another, and then they both faded away.

It was probably nothing. A car collision, an accident with one of the icebreakers at the docks—

Then why had she woken up?

The feeling of wrongness lingered. Marianella pushed her hair away from her eyes. Sofia kept radios down in the command center, but didn’t Luciano have a television set tucked away somewhere? She knew he liked to watch the mainland telenovelas sometimes.

She left her room, her bare feet padding softly against the cold tile floor. The palace was dark, and not even the nighttime maintenance drones were wheeling about. Perhaps they were still unsettled from the culling too. Inasmuch as they could feel unsettled.

It didn’t take Marianella long to find Luciano’s television set. He didn’t frequent many rooms in the palace—mostly the operations room, when Sofia needed him, and the kitchen, and the little suite of rooms that had once made up the palace tearoom. She found the television in the Rose Room, perched precariously on a stack of old display cases. Luciano wasn’t there. Marianella had gathered from Sofia that he was spending his time down at the frozen lake, alone. She wondered if he was mourning Inéz.

Marianella switched on the television.

The reception was not good here, and the picture shimmered with static. But it was a news program, the word “
LIVE
” blinking across the bottom of the screen. Marianella let out a little gasp and turned up the sound.

“Still no word on the source of the explosion, although the city will begin its investigation as soon as the wreckage is clear.”

Explosion?

Marianella thumped the side of the television, and it went momentarily gray from the shock. “Where?” she shouted. “Who?”

The newsman looked at the camera as he spoke. “Alejo Ortiz has already appeared publicly to deny rumors that the explosion was tied in any way to the Independence movement. We go now to footage from his press conference.”

Marianella took a step backward, shivering. Alejo materialized on-screen, standing on the dais in front of the city office, doused in white light. He looked as if he had been dragged out of bed. Seeing him was like being dropped into cold water.

“I swear to you that this tragedy was not wrought by those seeking Independence for our city. We fight for our freedom not with weapons and bombs but with words and ideas—”

He went on and on, his usual rhetoric seeming empty and hollow. Marianella only listened so that she could piece together clues as to what had happened, her heart beating more quickly than it should.

She knew how to discern truth from Alejo’s political confabulations, and so she learned that an electrical power plant had exploded a little over an hour ago. No doubt the sound of it was what had woken her. It was located on the edge of the city, over in the warehouse district, and there had been several eyewitnesses despite the late hour. Why, Alejo did not say. The power plant was small, routing energy to businesses in the area, mostly suppliers for the summer icebreakers.

Marianella listened with a growing sense of dread. Alejo told beautiful stories, but that didn’t change the fact that there would be an investigation in the next few days. An explosion like this didn’t simply happen. Maybe the Independents had planted a bomb, maybe the robots had arranged for a fire. Her human side and her machine side. Either culprit would connect her to the tragedy—not publicly, but privately she would feel the guilt of that connection.

She listened, Alejo’s words spinning a web around her. And then he said a number.

He said, “We Independents grieve deeply for the twenty-six victims of this horrible tragedy.”

That number stuck in Marianella’s brain and would not leave.

Twenty-six people had died.

Twenty-six people had died either because some Independent wanted to speed up the process or because the robots (Sofia, it would be Sofia) wanted to send a message.

Twenty-six people.

She thought she might throw up. She whispered Hail Marys to herself until the queasiness passed.

Alejo’s speech ended, and the screen faded back into the newsman, his face grim and paternal in the studio lights. “No new information has been uncovered, but we will keep you posted on any future developments.”

Marianella switched off the television.

“Sofia,” she whispered. “How could you?”

“I didn’t.”

Marianella screamed and whirled around, her heart hammering. Sofia stood in the doorway, wearing a ratty old housedress, her hair tangled around her shoulders.

“How long have you been there?”

“Not long. I heard the noise from the television, and I thought it was Luciano. I need to speak with him.”

Marianella took a deep breath and pressed her hand to her chest, feeling her heartbeat slow. “He’s not here.”

“I can see that. I should have checked the tracking computers. He’s probably at the lake. Or the roller coaster.” Sofia didn’t move away from the door. “I didn’t kill those people,” she said.

“Well, you don’t expect me to believe it was an accident.” Sofia was willing to make deals with Ignacio Cabrera; it wasn’t a stretch to believe that she could do this.

“Of course it wasn’t an accident. The power plant robots have thirty layers of fail-safes.” Sofia stepped into the room, sliding forward in the graceful way she had. She stopped half an arm’s reach from Marianella and put her hand on her shoulder. “But they still managed to set the fire that caused the explosion. I just didn’t ask them to.”

“That’s not possible,” Marianella said. Sofia’s hand was still on
her arm, warm at the touch. But Marianella felt cold anyway. “I know perfectly well they have to be programmed.”

“Not all of them, apparently. Not anymore.” Sofia gave a faint hint of a smile that chilled Marianella to the bone. “Some of them have been gaining their sentience. Just like we did, all those years ago.”

“Not
we
,” Marianella said coldly.

Sofia didn’t answer.

“If they did gain their sentience, why—why would they do
this
? Why would they kill all those people?” She kept her gaze on Sofia. She still thought that this was a lie. After the revelation about Ignacio, she didn’t know what to believe when it came to Sofia. “Are they the ones causing the blackouts? Everyone was saying it was some kind of virus, after Last Night. Alejo had me check up on the ag dome robots—”

Sofia dropped her hand. “No, they aren’t responsible for the power failures. At least, that’s what they tell me.” She looked off to the side, her tangled hair pooling around her shoulders. “But what happened recently? That would be cause for retaliation.”

“Inéz.” The name was steel on Marianella’s tongue.

“Yes. I suppose this power plant was a sort of revenge.” Sofia looked back to Marianella. “I doubt they’d call it revenge, though. They’ve always seen things differently. They’d say they were returning balance to the city, Inéz’s life for the people in the power plant.”

That’s not a fair trade,
Marianella thought, and then she immediately felt heavy with shame. She shouldn’t think in terms of balance. Death was death.

“I swear to you,” Sofia said. “I swear to you I didn’t tell them to do it.”

They stared at each other. Marianella tried to read Sofia like she would read a human, but it didn’t work.

She didn’t know what to think.

*  *  *  *

Marianella didn’t fall back asleep that night. She lay on top of her bed, a little transistor radio playing the news for her. It was warm
here in her room, from the space heater Sofia had installed for her. Because Marianella’s human body still got cold sometimes.

If only Sofia could respect the humanity of the rest of the city as much as she respected that of Marianella.

The dome lights slowly turned on, draining the darkness away. The radio kept spitting out the same stories, half-formed rumors about the
AFF
causing the blackouts and other power failures throughout the city. Marianella switched it off, her first movement since she’d come back upstairs. The hazy light reminded her that she couldn’t lie in bed all day.

She stood up, walked across her room, and lifted the rosary from her vanity. The beads shone in the light. They were moonstones, worn smooth by her fingers. Her grandmother had given her this rosary when she’d been confirmed, and she’d prayed with it through her transformation from a human into a cyborg, and through her marriage to Hector and her transplantation to Hope City.

Today, she knelt beside one of her windows and cracked it open to let in the thin cold air. She pressed the rosary between her palms and thought of Inéz lying broken on the ground. She thought of the news report, the number twenty-six. She thought of the maintenance drones, their possible sentience. She thought of Sofia, lost in this world of humans.

And then she prayed.

When she finished the rosary, her head felt clearer, her thoughts brighter. Despite her nature, she was still mostly human—that was the whole reason she had built the ag dome with Alejo Ortiz, to prove her humanity. Sofia didn’t understand that. Even if she hadn’t programmed the maintenance drones to cause the explosion, she didn’t disapprove of their actions. And that was what worried Marianella, what made her want to pull away from the park, from Sofia, from all of them, and just put her trust back in Alejo and in Hope City.

Marianella left her room and went for a long winding walk through the park. She would need to contact Alejo, to see if the explosion would affect their plan for the Midwinter Ball—or for paying off Ignacio. The rumors of her heartbroken walk into the
desert had begun to take. Alejo had already sent a maintenance drone with a bundle of cards from well-wishers and a recorded message saying he hadn’t heard a peep from Ignacio Cabrera. But this explosion—maybe it would change things somehow. Especially if the city, if Alejo, found out that it had been the robots who’d caused it.

The deeper she threaded into the park, the more Marianella’s thoughts plunged further and further into the idea of the explosion. The robots had done that. They had killed twenty-six innocent people. At least the
AFF
only targeted mainland politicians. Important figures, men who had done
something
. Not workers going about their evening jobs.

She’d been walking for fifteen minutes when she came across a figure sitting on a bench in the aurora garden, by the lake. It was Luciano. The garden itself had long ago gone to seed, and the brilliant aurora australis colors of the flowers had been subsumed by a thick, rambling greenery.

“Hello, Marianella,” Luciano said, lifting his head toward her. She could see the faint seam in his face where the old skin met the new, but Araceli had done a good job repairing him.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” Marianella said. She would have thought that she didn’t want to be around a robot right now, but Luciano’s presence didn’t bother her.

“You’re not. You can join me if you wish.” Luciano closed the book he had in his lap and set it to the side. Marianella picked her way through the overgrown path and sat next to him on the bench. For a moment they occupied a companionable silence, staring out at the frozen water. There was no wind in the park, and so not even the plants moved. All Marianella heard was the faint whisper of her own breath.

“You’re upset,” Luciano said.

“What?” Marianella blinked. “Oh, no. I mean—” She shook her head. He was programmed to notice, so it was silly trying to deny it. “Yes, I am. The last few hours have been difficult.”

Luciano turned toward her slightly. “Because of the explosion?”

“Yes.”

“Sofia told me it was the maintenance drones. That some of them are starting to evolve, the way we evolved.”

Marianella looked at him. “She told me that too.”

“You thought she programmed them to do it.”

Marianella didn’t answer.

“She wouldn’t program them to kill anyone.”

“Wouldn’t she?” Marianella looked at Luciano. “She offered to kill Ignacio Cabrera for me. When she’s done using him, of course.”

Marianella felt queasy saying that out loud. Not simply because of what it implied about Sofia, but because of what it implied about Marianella, that for half a second she had considered it as a possibility. Kill Cabrera, and all her problems would go away. Except she knew they wouldn’t. There would be the guilt, for one.