Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

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.

“Very well, Mr. Amitrano,” the robot said, and the automobile lurched backward, tires rumbling.

Diego settled back. He kept his gun in his lap, but once they were out in the desert, it would be worthless. If this robot decided he should die, then Diego would be dead.

They drove through the ice and snow.

*  *  *  *

Diego slouched in one of the leather chairs in Mr. Cabrera’s office, staring, bleary-eyed, up at the ceiling. The girl had given him something, drops that made the pain in his arm go away.

“Don’t move,” she told him, squeezing water from her rag into a metal bowl from the Florencia’s kitchen. “I’m about to start sewing.”

“Great.” Diego dropped his head to the side. The girl wore all black, her hair rolled up in a knot at the base of her head. Her hands were bare. At the hospital they wore gloves. But Diego couldn’t go to the hospital.

She had a medical emergency kit open in front of her, bottles with rubber stoppers and rolls of white gauze. She’d cleaned all the blood off his arm, and the water in the bowl was stained red.

“Shouldn’t feel anything, with the drops I gave you.” She peered up at him. Lines cracked around her eyes. “But I’ll put a topical on too. You’re lucky it just nicked you.”

“Tell me about it.” Diego turned away, focusing his gaze on Mr. Cabrera’s desk. It was empty; Mr. Cabrera was out on the floor of the Florencia, meeting with a group of city men on his payroll. Diego’d come stumbling in through the back door, waving his gun in the face of the skinny guy who was supposed to be watching the docks. He’d been mad with fear, his thoughts wild, his skin burning from the cold. All that anxiety had slipped away now, thanks to the drops from the emergency box. He still remembered the andie, though. Its blank, empty expression. The blast of its gun.

Diego was aware of the girl moving beside him; when he glanced at her, she clutched a needle strung with black thread, and the black thread was sliding through his skin. She was right, he couldn’t feel it, but his stomach clenched up and he looked away, down at the dusty floor.

The door creaked open.

“Everything all right in here?” Mr. Cabrera. Diego grunted in acknowledgment.

“He’s going to be fine.” The girl’s hands moved as if she were playing the violin, back and forth, back and forth. “I gave him something to calm him. Thanks for not slamming in here, by the way.”

“I never slam, my dear.” The door clicked shut, and Mr. Cabrera walked into Diego’s line of sight. “You’ve certainly been having a lot of excitement lately, haven’t you, Diego?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Diego’s words slurred. Mr. Cabrera arched an eyebrow and sat down behind his desk. He watched the girl work, his eyes following the movement of her hands.

“All done?” he asked after a time, and Diego turned to the girl, who was cutting out a length of gauze.

“Almost.” She wrapped the gauze around Diego’s forearm and secured it with tape. He felt this, but barely. Layers of cloth lay between his arm and her touch.

“Wonderful work as always, Laura,” said Mr. Cabrera with a grin. The girl didn’t return it, only packed up her things. She looked at Diego.

“If that gets infected,” she said, “tell Mr. Cabrera.”

Then she left the office, leaving the scent of hydrogen peroxide in her wake.

Mr. Cabrera laughed. “Laura. I picked her up on the mainland, you know that? I was in Buenos Aires, visiting a contact of mine. There was a spot of violence. It happens. She fixed me up in the hospital, and I offered her a job.”

“Oh yeah?” Diego studied the wrappings on his arm, then pulled his shirt back on, buttoning it up to his throat.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you personally, Diego.”

Diego nodded. “It’s okay.”

“Mr. Martinez had some concerns about all the recent troubles with the electricity. Thought I might have something to help, like I’m some city engineer. I told him the problem’s just that the domes are too old.” He waved one hand. “What happened, Diego? Who shot you?”

Diego turned back to Mr. Cabrera. The dim green lamplight distorted everything and turned the office nightmarish. Or maybe that was the drops.

“That’s why I asked for you,” Diego said. “It’s that andie you hired.”

“Sofia?” Mr. Cabrera gave away nothing, only tilted his head as if her name came as a surprise. Maybe it did. “Sofia shot you?”

“No.” Diego rubbed his forehead. “Her—friend, or assistant or whatever. The one that looks like a man, not the other one.”

“Luciano.”

“Yeah, I guess. He shot me.”

Wrinkles formed across Mr. Cabrera’s brow. Disappeared. “Was Sofia with him?”

Diego shook his head. “Not that I saw. One of the dome’s maintenance drones was, though.”

“Did he see you? Know who you were?”

This hadn’t actually occurred to Diego, that perhaps the andie hadn’t recognized him. But no, he was a robot. Of course he’d recognized Diego.

“I would assume so,” he said. “I didn’t talk to him.” He laid out the sequence of events as best he could; it was difficult with the fuzz from Laura’s drops.

When Diego finished, Mr. Cabrera didn’t react. His face gave away nothing. He might as well have been a robot himself.

“I see.” He stared at Diego for a moment longer, then pulled out a ring of keys from inside his coat pocket. They caught the light, gleaming. “You know you’re like a son to me, Diego.”

Even through the wall of drugs, Diego’s heart swelled. Mr. Cabrera opened one of the locked drawers in his desk and pulled it open.

“Sofia and her—friend—have not earned my trust the way you have. I’m glad you brought this to me.”

He dropped a stack of money onto the desk.

“I’m sorry you’re going to have to send someone else out there,” Diego said. “I probably missed something.”

“Not something you need to worry about. It wasn’t your fault.” Mr. Cabrera peeled away a section of bills, nearly a third of the stack, and slid it toward Diego. “Here. The least I could do.”

“Thank you, sir.” Diego never called anyone sir but Ignacio Cabrera.

Mr. Cabrera smiled and tucked the rest of the money back into his desk. “You got a girl, Diego?”

Diego thought of Eliana stretched out sleeping beside him on the bed, and drinking beer in the blue light of Julio’s, and walking up her stairwell dressed in her professional-looking outfits for work. He thought about her brushing her hair before bed and cooking dinner for him in the narrow space of her apartment.

He thought about the first time he’d seen her, at a friend’s party. She’d been dressed all in black, her hair loose around her shoulders. It made her look intelligent, he thought, all that black. He hadn’t known he wanted a girl until he saw her, standing alone next to a lamp, swaying in time to the music. Thought he was too busy being Mr. Cabrera’s right-hand man, too busy being Mr. Cabrera’s son. But he’d gone up to her and asked her to dance, and she’d said yes, and the lights from the party had wrapped them in a warm golden glow. And it had been fucking perfect.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got a girl.”

This admission seemed to please Mr. Cabrera, like he’d been worried about Diego’s happiness. “Good,” he said. “You go see her. Take that money and buy her dinner. Be grateful you’re alive.”

Diego looked at the money on the table. After a pause, he reached over and took it.