Our Lady of the Ice (4 page)

Eliana looked at the andie, unsure of how to act around him. It?

“It would be my pleasure,” the andie said. “Although I don’t think I know anything of value.”

“You’d be surprised,” Eliana said.

Lady Luna and the andie stood side by side, watching her.

“If you give me a minute,” she said, “I’m just gonna poke around here, and then I’ll talk to—to him.”

Lady Luna nodded. She put her hand on the andie’s arm, and they both turned away. It was a small gesture, an intimate one, and it made Eliana uncomfortable.

Lady Luna dropped her hand to her side as if she knew what Eliana was thinking.

Eliana turned back to the safe. She reminded herself of the stack of money she’d locked away in her own safe back at the office; then she knelt down on the carpet, moving slowly, her eyes scanning the room. Everything seemed in its place except for the safe, but Eliana had already learned that sometimes you had to look beyond the surface of things. She didn’t have the equipment to dust for fingerprints, but something told her she wouldn’t find any anyway. She had to look
close
.

She felt around on the carpet in front of the safe. Nothing. The fuzzy artificial light made it difficult to see, so she straightened up and walked over to a nearby lamp. Lady Luna was sitting in a chair, her arm draped over the side. The andie was gone.

“I’m going to borrow this,” Eliana said, and before Lady Luna could answer, she yanked the cord out of the wall and dragged the lamp across the room. She plugged it in closer to the safe and shone the light on the floor, where she uncovered a solar system of dust and flakes of grass. Nothing of interest. She directed the light into the safe. Nothing there, either.

Eliana sat back on her heels. “I’d like to talk to the andie now, if you don’t mind.” She glanced over her shoulder at Lady Luna, who stared at her from across the room.

“Yes, of course.” Lady Luna leaned forward toward the coffee table and rested her fingers on top of a brass paperweight in the shape of a shell. It didn’t fit in with the rest of the library. Too old-fashioned. It made a loud clicking noise when she pressed on it.

A few moments later, the andie appeared in the doorway.

Eliana hesitated. He looked so much like a person. But she still found him unnerving—the placid dark eyes, the inexpressive mouth. He didn’t move the way a person would, didn’t shift his weight, didn’t tap his fingers against his thigh.

She took a deep breath.

“What exactly did you hear last night?”

The andie glanced at Lady Luna, machine-quick.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing unusual.”

“What’s usual?”

The andie took on a blank expression. His eyes went slack. Eliana was aware of Lady Luna standing up, her arms wrapped around her chest like she was cold.

“Wind,” the andie said. “The maintenance drones increase it at night. The grass, of course. A handful of animals.”

“Animals?”

“Yes, field mice. Owls.”

“You have owls out here?” The city dome had rats and spiders. Eliana’d seen pictures of an owl once and hadn’t realized they’d been imported into Antarctica.

“Of course.”

“So are you sure you didn’t hear anything that you mistook to be an animal?”

Lady Luna was at Eliana’s side now, staring at the andie with a peculiar intensity.
Intelligence,
Eliana thought.
Cunning.

Lines appeared in the robot’s brow, distressingly human.

“I did hear a—scratching, I suppose you could call it.”

“Scratching? You didn’t think that was unusual enough to report?”

“It’s not unusual,” the robot said. “You often hear scratching along the walls. I heard it three times last night, several hours apart.”

“He’s right,” Lady Luna said. “I hear it sometimes myself, as I’m trying to fall asleep. The emptiness out here—it amplifies sound. That’s what my husband used to say.” She smiled, her face incandescent.

“Fine. It’s not unusual. But it could still be something.” Eliana stared up at the robot. “Do you remember exactly where you heard it? Each time?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, do you know where it was coming from, not where
you
were—” Eliana’d worked with enough computers in secretary school to know that you had to be specific with them. And this man was a computer, even if he didn’t look like it.

“Yes, that’s what I thought you meant. I can show you.” The andie smiled politely, coldly. “Come.”

Eliana glanced at Lady Luna, but she was still watching the andie, her face intense again. It was unsettling. It made Lady Luna’s beauty frightening.

“The first was in the walls, here.” The andie led Eliana through the hallway and stopped in the parlor. The chandelier threw off dots of light. He pressed his hand against the wall. “It lasted five seconds and stopped.”

“The others?”

“One was upstairs, in the attic. Two seconds. I can show you if you insist—”

“The third one?”

“In the downstairs guest room.”

“The walls again?”

“No.” The andie shook his head. “Outside.”

“How long?”

“Seven seconds.”

Eliana frowned. She turned to Lady Luna. “Did you look in the guest bedroom this morning?”

“No. I didn’t think to.”

“Did you?” To the andie.

“No, ma’am.”

“All right, show me.” Eliana flicked her hand down the hall. “Is it close to the library?”

“Yes, it’s one room over.”

The air took on that tingle that meant she was getting close to something. She’d become a secretary because there weren’t many options for a girl like her, and she didn’t want to wind up like her parents. But she’d become an investigator because of that tingle. That joy of solving a puzzle and finding an answer.

The guest room door was closed but not locked. The room was decorated as tastefully as the rest of the house, but there was a coldness about it, an unlived-in quality that reminded Eliana of an exhibit in a museum. As in the library, nothing seemed out of place.

“Where exactly?” Eliana asked.

“By the window.” The andie walked across the room and laid his hand on the wall next to the sill. His movement rippled the diaphanous curtains stretched over the window. Eliana noticed they never fell still but kept moving back and forth like shimmer across the surface of a water puddle.

There was that tingle again.

Eliana slid the curtains aside. Warm air brushed across her knuckles.

“This window isn’t closed all the way,” she said.

“No,” said Lady Luna. “It never has.”

“So it doesn’t lock?”

Lady Luna shook her head.

Eliana grabbed hold of the window and pushed. The window slid open, scraping against the frame. The wind blew into the room, bringing with it the dried-herb scent of the grass.

She turned to the andie. “Was that the scratching you heard? Sounded like seven seconds to me.”

He glanced at Lady Luna, whose expression did not change. “It could have been, yes.”

“It didn’t occur to you that was the sound of a window opening?”

The andie’s expression went slack.

“You opened it from the inside,” Lady Luna said. “It’s almost impossible to do from outside. And besides, he didn’t hear anything else.”

Eliana frowned. “Give me a minute.” Eliana shoved her shoulders through the window and looked down. The grass grew right up to the base of the house, but it was trampled there, the stalks bent and broken. She remembered the path she’d cut through the grass herself, the sound of the grass crunching under her feet, and her heartbeat quickened.

No path led to the window, but someone had certainly stood here.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and then she pushed herself through the window completely, landing in the grass. Lady Luna cried out in surprise. Eliana readjusted her skirt and looked to find the andie standing in the window, watching her. Creepy.

She pushed the feeling aside and felt around in the grass, her heart hammering. Every nerve in her body jangled with anticipation, and she forgot about Lady Luna and the andie. The only thing she cared about was finding the answer.

She crawled parallel to the house, plunging into the grass. It brushed rough and dry against her face and pricked her through her clothes. Whatever had made the impression in the grass had dropped out of the sky, she was certain. Definitely a robot. Not like the andie, but the sort she was used to, the drones they kept up at the top of the dome for repairs. The ones that buzzed around like insects.

It would have dropped out of the sky, pulled open the window, and slid inside. The dome robots were designed to stay silent, because you didn’t want people knowing they existed.

But it wouldn’t have done this on its own. Robots couldn’t steal, not even the more modern ones. Only humans could. Eliana had learned that quickly enough on this job. And if she wanted to find the human who’d programmed the robot before Lady Luna’s documents leaked to all of Hope City, she didn’t have time to ambush every power plant and maintenance center in the domes clustered over the desert. Hell, she didn’t have the ability to do that even if there weren’t a deadline.

“C’mon, c’mon,” she muttered, turning back to the flattened patch of grass by the window. There had to be
something
.

But there wasn’t. Only grass, wind, the andie’s watchful stare.

Eliana stood up, brushing bits of broken grass off her stockings. Lady Luna had joined the andie in the window and was watching her with alarm.

“Have you gone mad?” she asked.

“It was a robot,” Eliana said. “Not like—” She gestured at
her
robot. “One of the newer maintenance ones, most likely. The flying ones. But I don’t have the evidence to track it to its source. It could’ve come from anywhere.”

“No,” the andie said.

“What?” Eliana narrowed her eyes. “How else could someone get in? The grass is flattened. That’s where it landed—”

“Pardon me,” the andie said. “I wasn’t criticizing your theory. I was trying to say that it could not have come from anywhere.”

Eliana’s cheeks burned, but she stood up straight. “What do you mean?”

“The sort you’re talking about—the flying sort. There aren’t many in the city. Most crawl.” The andie made a spidery motion with his fingers. “The flying ones all operate out of the city offices. As you mentioned, they’re quite a new model. They’ve only been around the last few months.”

“Yeah,” Eliana said.

“Forgive me if I seemed brusque. I only wished to rectify your mistake. You said we should not let any information go unmentioned.”

Eliana nodded, although she still felt sore about him correcting her. Lady Luna smiled up at the andie, moved her lips with something Eliana couldn’t hear. Maybe “Thank you.” The andie was right, though. Eliana wouldn’t have to beat down every power plant in Hope City. She wouldn’t have to beat down anything. Maria worked for the city, as a secretary in the budget office. She’d gotten information for Eliana before.

Warm wind blew through the grass, tossing Eliana’s hair into her face. She was giddy again, the andie be damned.

“Lady Luna,” Eliana said. “I’m going to get those documents back for you. Tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll have them in hand. I swear it.”

And Lady Luna gave her a look that might have been doubt, might have been desperation, might have been anything.

CHAPTER THREE

SOFIA

Sofia had not been to this part of the city in a long time. She doubted she had ever been to this particular building, with its imported brown brick, its wide glass windows. It was the tallest building for several blocks. Height was always a mark of wealth in Hope City.

The walkway leading to the building’s glass door was lined with lavender. Imported from Europe. Expensive. Sofia trailed her fingers across the top of the plants to release the scent.

The door was locked. Sofia read each label on the buzzer until she came to
LUIS VILLANUEVA
. She pressed the button and waited.

“Yeah?”

“It’s your four o’clock appointment, Mr. Villanueva.”

He didn’t question her further, just as Cabrera had promised. The buzzer chimed and the glass door slid open. Sofia slipped inside. The lobby was decorated in the earth tones no lifelong citizen of Hope City had ever seen in nature, browns and blues and greens. A woman sat alone on a tasteful brocaded sofa, reading. She glanced up at the sound of Sofia’s heels on the tile. The woman didn’t speak, didn’t smile, but she watched as Sofia clicked her way toward the elevators. Sofia pressed the button for the twenty-eighth floor and
glanced over her shoulder. The woman looked away, back down to the glossy magazine spread open on her lap.

Sofia memorized her face. It was necessary to account for certain contingencies.

She rode all the way to the twenty-eighth floor alone. It took longer than she’d expected, and as she waited to arrive, she pulled a compact out of her handbag and checked her reflection. She didn’t wear any face powder because she didn’t need it, but she had applied liner and lashes and lipstick for the first time in years. She had styled her hair in the manner that had become fashionable recently, teasing it up high from the roots. She wore a dress Cabrera had purchased for her from a department store downtown. A down payment, he’d called it. “If you fuck this up,” he said, “you owe me thirty dollars.”

She wasn’t going to fuck this up. Everything hinged on this one moment, on convincing Cabrera that he could trust her completely.

The elevator chimed and the doors opened. Sofia stepped into the hallway. One of the light fixtures flickered, casting staccato shadows across the carpet. She walked to room 2848 and knocked three times, as Cabrera had instructed. She had just pulled her hand away after the third knock when Luis Villanueva answered, music spilling out around him.

Music.

For a moment Sofia froze—but it wasn’t a melody she recognized. Something new, something modern. Rock and roll, she thought it was called. Those songs were never dangerous.

“You’re not Alissa,” he said, face twisting into concern. His eyes darted out into the hallway.

“Alissa couldn’t come today,” Sofia said. “They sent me instead.”

Luis looked doubtfully at her. Sofia held her chin high, pushed out her chest, drew in her waist. She was aware of time passing.

“Alissa told me what you liked,” Sofia said. “And she sent me over with a gift.”

Luis’s expression softened. “A gift.” He smiled nervously. “She told you about that?”

“Of course. And I can keep it a secret too.” Sofia pushed inside
without waiting for an invitation, drawing her hand across his chest as she moved past him. He didn’t protest. The apartment was clean and sparse and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. Sofia draped herself on his sofa. Over the thumping whine of the music, she could hear the computer in the next room, whirring behind the closed door.

Luis didn’t live here. No one did. The city had purchased an apartment in this expensive uptown building just to house a mainframe. To hide it, actually, from people like Sofia and Ignacio Cabrera. Keeping it in the city offices would be too obvious. These new sorts of computers, that ran on electricity instead of steam, always made the city nervous.

Luis sat beside her. She smelled his expensive European cologne, his cigarettes, the residual electric scent of the computer. But beneath all that was the strange feral fragrance she associated with humanity, pheromones and salt water and iron.

She reached into her handbag and pulled out the little glass apothecary jar Cabrera had given her and set it on the coffee table.

“Your gift,” she said sweetly. “From Alissa.”

Luis stared at it. Already desire was coalescing inside him, manifesting in the form of droplets of sweat on his forehead. Not desire for her. Or for Alissa, that sad girl with haunted eyes Sofia had seen sitting in Cabrera’s office as he’d explained what Sofia was to do.

“Here, let me.” She picked up the apothecary bottle, unscrewed the lid, drew the thin golden liquid up into the dropper. Luis watched her with something like longing. She let two drops fall onto her tongue. It tasted dull and bitter. Then she did the same to Luis. He closed his mouth and his eyes at the same time and fell backward onto the couch like his bones were melting away.

She did the same.

She lay there for five minutes, listening to him breathe beneath the music. She stared at the filigree in the ceiling, a pattern like snowflakes. An old pattern in a new building. Those two golden drops were working their way into Luis’s bloodstream, seeping like lead into his cells. Like lead, it was poison. She wondered how it was, for them, to languish so close to death. She wondered why they enjoyed it.

His breath slowed but did not stop.

She stood up, swinging her legs over him in one liquid movement. He lay, unmoving, on the sofa, his eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling, dark with pupil. She slipped off her shoes and walked over to the record player lurking in the corner and knocked the needle off the turntable. The record scratched and fell silent, and Sofia was free from the sharp panic associated with music. She could hear the computer better now—
whump
,
whump
,
whump
, as slow as Luis’s poisoned heartbeat.

The door leading to the computer was locked. Sofia pulled a pin out of her hair and picked the lock easily, then slipped inside, leaving the door open. The computer took up the entire room, lights dazzling in the dim apartment, magnetic tapes rolling out their long streams of information. It was a database, brand-new, that contained information about every power plant, every dome, every utility, every icebreaker, every entrance and exit, every seaport in Antarctica. Everything you would need to know to run a domed city on the bottom of the world, collected into one place.

It was beautiful. A modern marvel.

And they left it alone with a man like Luis Villanueva.

She dragged a chair across the room and sat in front of the computer. It was much more advanced than she was, and designed for different things, but Araceli had assured her she would be able to connect with it easily enough.

She pulled a narrow cable out of her handbag, coiling it around her wrist like a bracelet. She knelt on the floor and ran her fingers across the back of the computer until she found the connection port. It was exactly where Araceli had promised it would be. Then she wrapped the cable over her shoulder and pushed her hair away from her left ear. Her own connection port was where it had been the last time she’d been hooked to a mainframe. She slid the skin aside to reveal it.

She plugged in the cable and stood up.

As she’d expected, she hit up against the mainframe’s security systems, but it was easy for her to thread her way around them; she was an old computer, and this new computer didn’t quite know
what to make of her, so it only took a bit of trickery inside her head to convince it to let her pass.

The moment she was in, the computer’s information poured into her. She had never experienced so much at once before, and it left her dizzy and disoriented. She slumped down in the chair. For a few terrifying seconds, she was afraid she wouldn’t acclimate to the information rush, that it would overcome her and she’d have to disconnect. If that happened, her entire plan would fall apart. All her actions to this point would have been a waste. This trip into the city, the meeting with Ignacio Cabrera. The murder of the man who used to reprogram all of Cabrera’s icebreakers.

But then she began to make sense of things.

Cabrera had asked her to locate a specific piece of information. When she brought it back to him, he’d consider her an employee. He’d explained that he was looking to expand the fleet of mechanized icebreaker ships he employed during the winter months to bring in food and supplies and luxury goods (his phrase, of course—Sofia knew he meant narcotics) into the city, in competition with the city’s own efforts. He’d heard from a source that the city engineers were hard at work developing a new model of robot for the icebreakers, and he hated when the city got the jump on him. If there was any chance of his network of reprogrammers taking control of these new icebreakers in a timely manner, he needed the plans. The code.

“You might be an andie,” he’d told her that afternoon in his office, the lights low and amber-colored, “but you’re also just a dancing girl. I looked into it.”

Sofia had burned at the slight, but outwardly she hadn’t reacted except to smile sweetly.

“Any human reprogrammer I take on, they have to prove their mettle. I expect no less from a robot. No matter how much they might look like a woman.”

“I understand,” Sofia had said, and she had. She’d expected to be tested.

All part of her plan.

City information was still flashing through Sofia’s thoughts,
boring her. The initial rush had faded, and her own treacherous programming was listless at the thought that she should care about any of this. It was
dull
, her programming insisted. Concerned with
politics
. Oh, let’s not talk about politics tonight, boys.
Anything
but that.

Sofia forced herself to concentrate.

She did not know how long it took. She couldn’t track the passage of time when she had to also track the passage of information. But eventually a word flashed in her thoughts: “icebreakers.” She immediately diverted the information flow into a special place in her brain, where it would wait to be downloaded by Araceli into a format Cabrera could access on his own mainframe down at the Florencia. She scanned the information as it flashed past. Most of it was old, schematics for the current generation of icebreaker ship and its attendant robots. She’d filter it out later, back at the amusement park.

But then the information took on a heavier quality that Sofia knew meant it was protected more strongly—a new password, a clearance level. Not that it mattered, as the computer let her through. But she could taste the protection in the back of her throat, like ashy metal.

The city was developing new icebreaker robots—indeed, the engineers had already developed them. Already, it seemed, put the prototypes into use. Still working with the old cruise ships, but the robots themselves were quite different, their intelligences extensions of the ship rather than separate entities.

Fascinating. But sickening at the same time. Sofia let the information wash over her, and that heaviness weighed her down. So did other things.

And then the flow of information shifted, back to financial reports for the mainland. Sofia yanked the cord out of her head, and the world was suddenly full of silence. She sat for a moment, readjusting to being alone. She checked to make sure the information about the icebreakers was still secure in its secret place; then she wound up the cord and slipped it into her handbag. She left the computer room, closing the door behind her. Luis Villanueva was still stretched out
on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, his irises moving back and forth, back and forth. He didn’t notice her.

Sofia stepped into her shoes and left his apartment.

More time had passed than she had realized—almost two hours. People were coming home from their offices, filling up the lobby with human warmth and beating hearts, with strained laughter, with the scent of alcohol and stale perfume. No one noticed her, but she memorized faces anyway. Just in case.

A television was turned on in the lobby’s center. Humans clustered around it, watching with bored disinterest. Sofia wouldn’t have cared, except she caught a glimpse of one of the maintenance drones from the power plants on the screen. She stopped. Studio lights bounced off the robot’s shell, sending little white flares across the camera. A table was set up with electronics equipment nearby.

It was the dismantling, she realized with a jolt. Punishment for the blackout on Last Night.

An engineer in a white lab coat appeared on-screen. He said something. The sound was turned down, but Sofia could read his lips:
Again, this was an isolated malfunction, not the work of pro-
Independence terrorists. No evidence has come to light supporting rumors about an
AFF
-manufactured computer virus. There is nothing to be concerned about.

Sofia turned away so she wouldn’t see, although she knew when it occurred, because there was a momentary pause in the chatter of conversation. A sudden vacuum of sound. Something twisted inside her.

She had known nothing about the blackout until it had happened. It was true that some of the maintenance drones were in the process of attaining their own peculiar sentience, but even those drones had denied their involvement, in their weird, nearly incomprehensible way. Sofia was inclined to believe the drones; she suspected this was the humans’ fault, all their old steam technology falling apart around them while they generated atomic power for the mainland—power they couldn’t touch. Stupid, stupid. If she weren’t so impatient, she’d just let them destroy themselves.

That robot that had just been publicly dismantled, its insides
ripped apart and shown to everyone in the city, was an innocent victim. Not that humans cared. A robot was a robot. In all likelihood, they’d grabbed the first one that hadn’t scattered when they’d come chasing after it.

The thing that had twisted inside her tightened now, knotted. She left the lobby of the apartment building, not wanting to be surrounded by humans any longer.