Our Lady of the Ice

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “Of course I can,” Marianella muttered, thinking of the moment when she had first sensed Ignacio lurking in Southstar’s hallways.

  “He told me what had happened with you, that I’d be next if I didn’t back down.” Alejo laughed. “But I could tell they didn’t know what you were. I’d hoped you’d found a way out of that scrape, and it looks like you have.”

  The forced joviality in his voice jarred against Marianella’s bare nerves. Get to the point, she thought.

  “I agree it’s probably good for you to lay low,” he said. “I assume you’re hiding out in the park right now. You sure that’s a good idea? You know I can put you up in a safe house. In fact, I think that’d be the better idea all around.”

  A safe house. Marianella knew he meant an AFF safe house, something shabby and worn down and guarded with heavily ­muscled men in sealskin coats. She didn’t like the idea. Alejo didn’t understand the park, or the extent of Sofia’s protection. Marianella knew she was safer here.

  “But we’re going to need to get this sorted out as soon as possible,” he went on. “The Midwinter Ball is coming up, and I’m not about to back down on that. Ignacio Cabrera isn’t going to push me around. Or you.”

  Marianella shivered and drew her legs in closer.

  “We can’t let him stop progress, Marianella. Which is exactly what he’s trying to do with this little stunt. So I agree with you. Go into protection—and the safe house is open for you—until we figure out a better plan. But we need a better plan, and we need it before the Midwinter Ball.”

  The drone sputtered, a click-pop-hiss coming from its speakers. Marianella straightened up, frowning. But then Alejo’s voice broke through the feedback.

  “I know you’ll come up with something,” he said.

  The drone’s light faded away. Marianella sighed. She pressed the playback button to pop it back into place. The drone spun in two circles before settling, awaiting her next order.

  “The Midwinter Ball,” Marianella said. Her voice echoed oddly around the room. She’d almost died, and Alejo was talking to her about parties. Not that it was any party. It was the key to their fund-raising, and if she didn’t go, it would seem that she had no faith in the domes.

  But Ignacio was standing in the way. Marianella burned with anger at Hector’s memory. How could he have done that, slipping just enough of a hint about her nature to Ignacio to be dangerous? It was enough of a hint that if Marianella revealed that she had survived the freezing desert, Ignacio could make the connection. He could go to the authorities; he could accuse her of being a cyborg. And they would believe him. They would come for her.

  She wanted her documents with her. They would keep her from being killed.

  Marianella drew her knees to her chest, curling in on herself as she had as a child. But she wasn’t thinking like a child. Not now. She refused to abandon her domes, and so that meant she had to deal with Ignacio. She would have to pay him off or agree to work for him. Or she would have to kill him.

  The thought hit her like electricity, and she felt a wave of nausea that she’d even had it. No. She was not going to kill Ignacio Cabrera.

  But she could give him money. If it meant keeping the dome safe, if it meant she could stay in Antarctica as a human being, if it was a choice between murder and funding a criminal—

  She knew what her option was.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DIEGO

  Diego stood on the platform until the train rattled off, speeding through the uncanny night toward the next private dome. The silence that settled around him was thick and unnatural. Diego was used to Hope City proper, which was never silent—there was always music playing on the street and people fighting in the apartment upstairs. Being out here, surrounded by false wind and ­rippling thigh-high grasses, made him nervous.

  The house was called Southstar, Mr. Cabrera had said, and that was how Diego had known to get off at this platform. He walked toward the house, his muscles tense, one hand ready to reach for the gun beneath his coat.

  The front porch light was on, and three of the windows were illuminated, golden squares floating against the darkness. Diego pulled out his gun. The wind blew his hair into his eyes. Mr. Cabrera had promised no one would be home. “You saw it yourself. We pushed the broad out into the snow, and the whole point is to get you out there before the cops show up.” But Diego wasn’t one to take chances.

  He crept forward in the dark.

  Nothing stirred. When he stepped up onto the porch, he saw that the front door hung open by a few centimeters. He nudged it open with his toe. Dust and flakes of golden grass scattered across the entrance. He pushed in, gun lifted and ready, listening.

  Silence.

  This was a clean-out job. Supposed to be easy. Get in, clean out anything that might tie her disappearance back to Mr. Cabrera. They’d already done one pass last night, but Mr. Cabrera was antsy about it since she’d been Hector Luna’s wife, and good ol’ Hector might have tucked away some damning evidence that they didn’t initially catch. He’d been a slippery one.

  There was also the matter of the documents that Pablo Sala had tried to show Mr. Cabrera. Even though Mr. Cabrera had decided to kill the woman, he was still curious what those documents might be, and whether or not they might be back in the house. And he was still kind of pissed about Diego killing Sala the way he had, though at least he had bought the story that Sala had tried to fight back and Diego had had no choice. So Mr. Cabrera had sent in Diego to make up for killing Sala but also because Mr. Cabrera trusted him. “Like a son,” Mr. Cabrera had said, and those were always the magic words.

  Diego slid forward down the hallway, uncomfortable in the bright, glaring lights. The wind whistled around the open door, low and mournful. Diego checked each room as he passed, but they were all dark and empty. At the base of the stairway, he stopped and listened again.

  Wind.

  Silence.

  No one was here.

  He repeated that line like a refrain in his head, trying to calm himself. This was supposed to be an easy job. In, and out with anything that could hold up in a mainland court.

  But he’d been here last night; he’d thrown the bag over the ­woman’s head and shoved her into Mr. Cabrera’s car. And those kinds of jobs were never easy.

  This one was even worse. The woman just had to go to Eliana about the break-in, didn’t she? Just had to get her involved. It was the damn mainland. Eliana would take any dangerous job if it paid well enough, all so she could get away from the poor assholes stuck in Hope City. Assholes like him.

  Her fucking visa. She hadn’t said much about it lately, but he knew she hadn’t given up. If anything, she was coming close to her goal, probably trying to spare his feelings, make him forget that she was just going to ditch him here in Hope City. It wasn’t like he could ask Mr. Cabrera for a visa of his own, though Mr. Cabrera could have provided one, and probably would have too. But Mr. Cabrera had raised him, given him a life, and Diego couldn’t just leave all that behind for a girl.

  He crept up the stairs, his gun still out. He checked each of the doors until he came to the master bedroom. Big king-size bed with a mirrored headboard. Door leading into a bathroom, another leading into the closet. A vanity. A bureau.

  He checked the vanity first, yanking open the drawers and running his fingers along their seams, looking for latches. Nothing. He dug through makeup brushes and jars of powder until he found a slim wooden box. When he opened it, the inside glittered, throwing the overhead light into his eyes. A necklace. Diego stared at it for a moment, thinking about how the woman had stared at Mr. Cabrera through the thin yellow of the car lights. She hadn’t even seemed afraid.

  Diego snapped the box shut and dropped it back into the vanity. It wasn’t evidence, it was hers. And he wasn’t going to take it.

  He checked the bureau next. The
woman’s clothes, scented like lavender. No secret latches there either, no documents with Mr. Cabrera’s signature tucked away for safekeeping. If there was any evidence in this house, it wasn’t in the master bedroom. Fine by him. Diego felt like if he spent another second in this bedroom, the woman’s ghost was going to appear, wreathed in white light and pissed the hell off.

  Still, he had a job to do.

  So Diego made a quick pass through the rest of the upstairs rooms, looking for a library or a study or an office, thinking they might contain a safe. But they were nothing but bedrooms, all looking like no one’d ever slept in them. Back downstairs. A house this size, there had to be a study somewhere—

  Footsteps.

  Diego froze. He was in the hallway, a few paces from the staircase. The footsteps came from the back of the house, in the direction of the kitchen. Tap, tap, tap. Pause.

  “Fuck.” The curse came out as a breath. He slid up against the wall and pulled out his gun. The footsteps had stopped. His imagin­ation? No, Diego didn’t allow himself imagination in situations like this. That was why he wasn’t dead.

  He moved down the hallway. A light was on around the corner. Diego’s whole body iced over. His thoughts washed out.

  A shadow moved across the light, short, stunted. Not big enough to be a person.

  He sighed. A maintenance drone. That was all this was, a fucking robot.

  But then the first was joined by a second shadow, and this one was tall enough to be a man.

  “What is it?” A man’s voice, calm, undisturbed. “There shouldn’t be anyone here.”

  Diego’s mind split in two, and he saw both of his possible futures. He could try to get out undetected. Or he could go around the corner and find out who was here. And kill him, most likely.

  He knew which option Mr. Cabrera would prefer. Which option Mr. Cabrera had trained him for, all those cold days down at the docks as a kid.

  Diego stepped forward.

  The shadows drowned out the light.

  He took a deep breath.

  The maintenance drone came around the corner first, squat and rolling. Diego kicked it, hard enough that it flipped onto its back. The man let out a shout, rounded the corner.

  “You,” Diego said, and then, without thinking, fired.

  It was the robot, the andie who’d showed up with Sofia when she’d reprogrammed the icebreakers. The one who looked like a man.

  Diego’s bullet exploded the plaster in the wall, and the andie ducked, disappeared around the corner.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Diego shouted, chasing after him. He jerked around the corner and fired again. Missed. The andie looked at him over his shoulder. Something metal caught in the light, even though this andie wasn’t metallic at all.

  The motherfucker was armed.

  “What the hell?” Diego fired again. The andie jerked away, but fired off his own shot before he dove into the cavern of the kitchen. Pain blossomed along Diego’s forearm. It melted into sticky warmth.

  He was bleeding.

  He was shot.

  “Shit!” Diego slapped his free hand on his wound and slammed up against the wall, breathing hard. The robot didn’t reappear. Diego knew that if the andie saw him again, the andie wouldn’t miss. It was a fucking computer. Luck was the only reason his first shot hadn’t landed in Diego’s heart.

  Diego took a deep breath. Pain surged; blood seeped through his fingers. He peeled himself off the wall and ran, leaving the maintenance drone trilling on the floor. No time to think.

  He tore out of the house, raced through the golden grass. The only sound was his heartbeat and his own breath. He ran parallel to the train tracks, headed toward the dome’s edge. The very place he’d killed a woman last night. It’d make sense, him dying out here on the edge. But he didn’t want to. He had to find a contact station. Get one of Mr. Cabrera’s robots to send one of those reinforced ice automobiles to fetch him.

  Two kilometers between this dome and Hope City proper. Might as well be the whole fucking world.

  Diego stopped and sucked in deep gasping breaths. His arm was numb, tingling and weak. He glanced back. No one had followed. Southstar was a blaze of light in the darkness. Blood had soaked into his side and dripped down onto his legs. He crouched in the grass, knowing that if the andie wanted to find him, the grass wouldn’t hide him. He checked his wound. Not as bad as it seemed—the bullet had only grazed him. He straightened up and stumbled forward. His thoughts were clouded and thick, but above all else he wondered why the fucking andie had been in the ­woman’s house, carrying a gun like some avenging angel.

  Mr. Cabrera would be interested in hearing about this.

  Diego didn’t know how long he walked. Ten minutes, fifteen. He knew, intellectually, that he wouldn’t walk for long—the dome wasn’t that big. But time stretched out. He walked, his arm ached, he thought about the andie firing off a shot.

  And then the grass gave way to dirt and then the dirt gave way to concrete and then the dome wall loomed out of the darkness, coated in ice and snow. The air was colder too, but not as cold as the air down at the docks, or even in the smokestack district. Diego stopped and craned his neck. The wall disappeared into the darkness overhead. He wondered about maintenance drones. They’d all be the woman’s, no doubt, watching him, reporting.

  Reporting to who?

  He moved on. Contact stations were usually located next to exits, since the exits were intended for robots, mostly maintenance drones that ran among the inhabited domes and the power plants. Diego wasn’t certain where he was. When he’d fled the house, he’d run in the direction he remembered driving last night. There should be an exit nearby, unless he’d overshot wildly, in which case—he didn’t know. He didn’t think he’d bleed to death, but he wasn’t sure. Even if it did make a fucked-up sort of cosmic sense.

  Diego walked. The wind whistled over the dome, loud and piercing. It reminded him of last night, and the way the woman had stared so defiantly at Mr. Cabrera, like she wasn’t scared of him. And that had been her problem, Diego thought. She hadn’t been scared of him. She hadn’t taken him seriously, because he wasn’t like her, and she’d barely registered his existence.

  They’d learn, the aristocrats. So would everyone else, for that matter. Mr. Cabrera owned half the city, and he would make them all part of his world eventually, the same way he’d made Diego part of his world all those years ago, when Diego had been orphaned and full of an angry energy that Mr. Cabrera knew how to funnel into something more productive.

  Up ahead, an imperfection appeared on the unblemished glass of the dome. “Thank Christ!” Diego shouted, and he lurched forward in a half stumble, half run. The exit was the outline of a square set into the glass, but Diego ignored it in favor of the little gray call box next to it. He flipped it open, his hands shaking. A keypad gleamed back at him.

  He punched in a string of numbers he’d memorized a long time ago. Diego held his breath, hoping the code would work here, in a private dome.

  A long, trembling moment.

  And then the call box switched on, a red light appearing next to the speaker. Diego blew out a rush of relieved air. He punched in the code for Mr. Cabrera’s robots.

  The light switched to green.

  “This is Diego Amitrano!” He pressed the hand of his uninjured arm against the glass, steadying himself, but then jerked it away at the cold, so sharp it was like heat. “I’m in the private dome housing Southstar. I’m in need of outside evacuation.” His words were sharp and ragged. The light glowed green. He pressed the 0 key. The light blinked to red.

  He waited.

  The light blinked once. Diego closed his eyes and let out another sigh of relief.

  “On our way, Mr. Amitrano.” The voice was mechanized. Robotic. But a robot Mr. Cabrera’d had programmed long before that fucking Sofia
had showed up.

  “Thank you,” Diego said, out of habit, because the light was red and the robot on the end couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t care, either.

  He stepped backward and took a deep breath. The darkness hemmed him in. Sofia’s assistant had shot him. What did that say about Sofia?

  And what did it say about the woman, that the robot was in her house in the first place?

  Diego shivered. He wrapped his good arm around his chest and squatted down, trying to draw in all his warmth. The andie hadn’t followed him. But activating the call box would alert the dome’s maintenance drones to his location.

  Jesus. Diego pulled out his gun again, his arm trembling.

  But he was alone.

  The wait seemed to stretch on for hours. When the exit door shuddered and slid open, Diego shouted in triumph and tipped over backward, landing on his ass in the dirt.

  Cold air blasted over him, bringing in a flurry of dry, powdery snow that clung to his face and hair and clothes. When he breathed the snow in, it burned his lungs. He couldn’t feel his arm anymore. That wasn’t good.

  The ice automobile’s door slid open. It was all automated. All robots. But Sofia hadn’t programmed them.

  He didn’t think.

  Diego moved forward. He didn’t have much choice. The only other way out of the dome was on the train, and that meant going back to the house, running into the andie again.

  He climbed into the automobile.

  The door slid shut. It felt like a prison cell. Diego leaned back in his chair. Checked his injury again.

  The robot at the front of the vehicle said, “Are you feeling well, Mr. Amitrano?” in a dull mechanical voice.

  “No,” Diego snapped. “Take me back to Hope City. Entrance 59B.” The closest land entrance to the docks, the closest land entrance to Mr. Cabrera’s office.