Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

She was starting to realize how deeply Cabrera was embedded into the city, if even the robots in the park worried about him. She finally understood what Mr. Vasquez had meant about playing it safe through the end of winter. Cabrera was hard to avoid if you were involving yourself with the underworld.

Eliana came to the top of the stairs. A bit of thin warmth trickled out of the hallway radiator with the fading sunlight.

And Diego was sitting in front of her door, his back pressed against the wall, a bouquet of hothouse flowers balanced across his knees.

“Diego?” Eliana stopped a few paces away. He squinted up at her, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from one lip. That was the hitch in her plan to leave Hope City. Even with all the extra money, she still didn’t want to accept the reality that it would mean leaving Diego.

“Been waiting long enough.” He pushed up to standing and shoved the flowers in her direction. “These are for you.”

Eliana hesitated, but then she reached out and took the flowers from him. They were bright orange-red, the color garish against the muted backdrop of her tenement building.

“How did you afford these?” she asked, turning them over in her hands. He’d never bought her flowers before. Running errands for Cabrera wouldn’t pay enough for such a luxury. But hurting people for him, that might.

Mr. Cabrera had Sala killed.

“I had some cash saved up,” Diego said. “Thought I should get you a present. Can we go inside? It’s fucking freezing out here. The power was out for a few minutes.”

“God, again?” Eliana shivered. She decided to believe him, that he’d been saving his money. It was so much easier that way. Maybe he’d done something terrible. But she wanted to fall back into him anyway, wanted to lay her head on his chest and listen to his heart beating.

Eliana dug the keys out of her purse and pushed open the door to her apartment.

It wasn’t much warmer inside, and she kicked on the space heater as she walked past. The flowers seemed to light up the whole apartment. “How long have you been waiting?”

“Not long. Twenty minutes.” Diego smoked down his cigarette and dropped it into the ashtray. “I should’ve called first, but I didn’t feel like dragging the flowers to my place and then back here. Lady at the store said the cold could freeze ’em out, make ’em die faster.”

She wished he’d stop saying the word “freeze.”

“You’re supposed to put them in water,” he said.

Eliana smiled. “Every girl knows what to do with hothouse flowers, Diego.”

“Yeah? Anybody ever get them for you before?”

She shook her head.

“Good.” Diego started to shrug out of his jacket, and Eliana disappeared into the kitchen. She took the gun out of her coat pocket and slid it into the silverware drawer, far into the back where she wouldn’t have to look at it or think about what she’d done with it.

Maybe she was the one capable of violence after all, and not Diego.

She didn’t have a vase, but she filled up a juice pitcher with water and put the flowers in that. They fanned out when she unwrapped them from the paper, and she thought she could catch their scent, sweet and tropical like the mainland.

“So where were you?” Diego’s voice drifted in from the living room.

“Working.” She walked out of the kitchen, holding the pitcher in both hands so she didn’t accidentally drop it. She didn’t tell him how close she was to having enough money to purchase her visa. She didn’t want to have that conversation. Not today. Not after everything that had happened. “It was just some case with a city man—”

Eliana stopped. Diego looked up at her from the couch. His arm was wrapped in white gauze.

“What happened!”

Diego kept his face blank. “Got shot. Not a big deal. Bullet just grazed me, but it’s still healing up.” He nodded at the flowers. “They look nice. Where are you going to put them?”

“You got shot?”

“Yeah. It happens.” He laughed. “It’s not a big deal, Eliana. It really isn’t. Put the damn flowers down and come over here and I’ll show you.”

The flowers were heavier than Eliana had expected, and she put them down on the table. But she didn’t move to join Diego. He’d never gotten shot before, not in the year that she’d been seeing him. He just ran errands. Errand-runners didn’t get shot.

“Did you go to the hospital?” she said.

“I’m fine! All patched up.” He patted the white gauze. “It’s nothing you have to worry about.”

But of course Eliana was worried. She looked at him stretched out on the sofa, and she knew that she loved him, even as she realized she might not completely know him. She’d only ever seen pieces of him. The good pieces.

“Come on,” he said, playful. He gestured with his good hand.

And Eliana wanted to go to him. Wanted to be as close to him as she could before she left for the mainland. He was involved with Cabrera, but that didn’t mean he had tried to kill Marianella. He probably didn’t even know about it. He was just an errand-runner.

Eliana slid onto the couch beside him. It felt right, the way their bodies locked together. It gave her a peace she needed after what had happened at the amusement park.

Diego pressed one hand against the side of her face, then leaned in and kissed her.

“So what were you doing this afternoon?” he asked as he pulled away. “Better not have been anything that would get you shot.”

“Hypocrite,” Eliana said, but her thoughts had turned brittle. She remembered how the metal beneath Luciano’s skin had gleamed. The moment the gun went off, she was certain her own heart had stopped.

Diego kissed her again, and she was grateful he didn’t want a real answer. The kiss melted everything away. Diego lay down on his back, and she straddled him at the waist, never breaking the kiss. It didn’t take long before she started to undress him, moving cautiously around his arm. This normalcy was exactly what she needed right now. It was as deadening as a narcotic, and already she could feel it seeping through her, turning her thoughts away from Cabrera and the amusement park and Marianella. None of that had to touch her life, not if she wouldn’t let it.

She told herself that, and she decided to believe it too.

Despite how cold the apartment was, their bodies warmed each other up. The sex was intense and passionate, and afterward, Eliana drew an afghan over them both. She rested her head on Diego’s bare chest.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Diego asked, toying with her hair.

“Guess not.”

“You really don’t have to worry about me.”

Eliana propped herself up on one elbow. She looked him hard in the eye. “And you don’t have to worry about me.”

Diego laughed, held up his hands. “Fine, we’re even.”

Eliana lay her head back down. She studied the couch’s fabric. The threads were worn down enough that bits of stuffing poked through. She’d never noticed that before.

Diego stroked her hair, humming tunelessly to himself. In that calmness Eliana’s thoughts once again began to wander away from Diego’s warmth and back into the cold of the amusement park. Cabrera (and only Cabrera) trying to kill Marianella. Sofia stopping the city from culling robots. Luciano dragging her across the park like he meant to kill her.

The world was so dangerous. Her man was dangerous, her job was dangerous. But here she was, still alive, with a way to the mainland hanging on the spring light of the horizon. Maybe she could even convince Diego to give up his dangerous life and come with her.

Eliana closed her eyes and fell asleep.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MARIANELLA

The workshop buzzed with electricity. Luciano sat sideways on the conveyor belt, stripped down to the waist. The light was dim from the energy drain of the repair box, but even in the shadows Marianella could make out the thin imprint of the Autômatos Teixeira logo stamped on his chest.

She had no such logo herself, having been a private project of her father’s. Her family’s wealth had come from beef exports during the nineteenth century, but by the time Marianella was born, in the 1930s, it was already becoming clear that that income stream couldn’t last forever. Her father hadn’t been much for cattle anyway; having grown up surrounded by grazing fields, he’d rejected them in his adolescence and gone off to Buenos Aires to study engineering. It had caused a scandal, from what Marianella understood. At the turn of the century, science represented change, and there was nothing the aristocracy hated more than that.

Funny, then, that her father changed her so irrevocably. It hadn’t even been a long process. One morning she woke up not to sunlight falling through her window but to the harsh overhead lights of a laboratory she had never seen before. By the end of the day, she was no longer human. She remembered her mother screaming at him when she found out, crying that he had lost his mind, that he would bring shame upon their family. And her father, in calm, even tones, explained that she, Marianella, would usher in a new age, one in which machine and human were intertwined.

It never happened. The world’s prejudices were too deeply ingrained.

“All right. Everything’s set up.” Araceli breezed back into the workshop, the sleeves of her white coat pushed up around her elbows. She’d been deep in the bowels of the repair box, programming it to Luciano’s specifications.

“Is there enough material?” Luciano asked. His hand went to his metal skull, fingers hovering but not touching. He dropped his hand back into his lap.

“Sure, there’s enough.” Araceli looked tired. She pushed her hair away from her face. Over in the corner, Sofia frowned.

“Will it match?” Luciano asked.

Araceli sighed. “I tried my best, Luciano. Scraped the bottom of the barrels. So to speak.”

Luciano nodded.

“We need to get this started,” Araceli said. “The ink’ll have to do, because these repairs are going to take all afternoon.”

“Of course.” Luciano didn’t move.

“Lie down, then,” Araceli said. Luciano did as she asked. “Set your hands along your sides there, like that—good. You need to keep everything clear of your face.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll be monitoring your progress out here, but your system is programmed to recognize any errors on the repair box’s part, so if you get that ping telling you something’s wrong, you need to say ‘Stop the repair box’ very loudly and clearly. Say it for me.”

“Stop the repair box.”

“Good. That’s perfect.”

Something about this exchange left Marianella unsettled. Her repairs, when she had them, were more like human surgery, because her machine parts had been so deeply embedded into her muscle tissue. This process was alien, too dangerous for her human side.

Sofia drifted away from the wall and joined Marianella underneath the dimming lights of the workshop. She stood close enough that the hairs on Marianella’s arm stood on end.

“That’s the same speech the park engineers would give,” she said in a low voice. Marianella looked at her; Sofia looked at Luciano. “Araceli told me it was a script they had to memorize.”

“And she still gives it?”

“It has all the necessary information.”

Marianella didn’t answer. Sofia was still staring at the repair box, her face blank.

“If I have to stop the machine, don’t move,” Araceli went on. “Lie perfectly still and wait for the conveyor belt to carry you out.”

“All right.”

Araceli’s expression shifted then, and her face filled with a gentle, tired warmth. “I’ve done this plenty,” she said. “Not just from my old amusement park days, but with the culled robots who managed to escape. We’ve never had any problems.”

“I’m guessing that wasn’t part of the script,” Marianella said.

Sofia almost smiled. “Of course not.” Her voice was bitter. “Most of the engineers didn’t deem it necessary to console us.”

Marianella almost took her by the hand, as if to console Sofia forty years after the fact. Sofia had told Marianella enough about her work in the park for Marianella to know that Sofia would have gone through these repairs multiple times, whereas someone like Luciano might not have gone through them at all. It was the patrons, Sofia had told her. Sometimes they would get—overenthusiastic.

“Ready?” Araceli asked.

“Yes, I’m ready.”

Araceli pressed the activation button. The conveyor belt rumbled to life, and Luciano slid into the repair box, disappearing behind strips of faded red cloth. Araceli perched on the edge of a chair next to the ticker-tape machine, code tapping out in fits and starts. All that information that made up Luciano.

“She’s much more watchful than the park engineers were,” Sofia said to Marianella. “I would have liked to have her repair me, back then.” She no longer sounded so bitter. Marianella smiled at her, and Sofia caught her gaze, and that was the closest they came to touching.

Araceli leaned back in her chair, still watching the ticker tape. It was the old-fashioned way of doing things, Marianella knew, but the repair box was too cumbersome to be hooked into even a rotary display.

“Did we really have enough materials?” Sofia asked.

“I wouldn’t lie to him.” Araceli glanced up at Marianella and Sofia, the overhead lights turning her skin sickly-looking. “But I was never good working with the inks. Hopefully the machine gets the right tone.”

“I’m sure it’ll be wonderful,” Marianella said.

“Even if it’s not,” Sofia said, “he’ll survive. It’s not like how it was, when some superficial imperfection would get him sent to the scrap heap.”

“The skin’s the important part anyway,” Araceli said. “And we had plenty for him.”

The three of them fell into silence. After a moment’s pause, Sofia dragged two chairs over to beside Araceli and offered one to Marianella, who sat down, tucking her hands into her lap. No one spoke; they only watched the ticker tape run across the table. Marianella watched the code and thought about what her father had done to her, turning her from an innocent little girl into an abomination. All so the family could regain their old fortune. Because that had been his true goal—not ushering in an era of scientific possibility, but selling his new system for melding human bodies with machines. He was delusional, thinking humans would accept his method over all the previous ones, just because he’d found a way to make the machine parts evolve as their host aged.

Abomination. She shouldn’t think of herself that way. Sofia had told her that, all those years ago when they would lie side by side in a hotel bed. “You’re not an abomination,” Sofia would whisper into the side of Marianella’s neck. “You’re beautiful.”

Being with Sofia in that way had been an abomination unto itself. A sin. And yet Marianella had seen the beauty of their relationship, eventually, even if it still left her shaky with guilt sometimes, in a way her tryst with Alejo Ortiz never had. But seeing that beauty in the abomination of herself, the abomination of her machine parts—

That was impossible.

“—really going to take all day?” Sofia was saying.

Marianella blinked out of her reverie. Araceli stretched out a piece of ticker tape, and she and Sofia hunched over it.

“I don’t remember it taking that long when I had it done,” Sofia said.

“Did you ever have to repair your face?”

“Well, no.”

“That’s why.” Araceli dropped the ticker tape back into the pile. “It’s not just a matter of stretching some false skin over the frame. The gunshot blasted away a lot of the muscle, too—I don’t want any paralysis when we’re done.”

Sofia nodded. She glanced over at Marianella. “You hear that? Your little friend almost caused Luciano’s face to become paralyzed.”

“She didn’t do it on purpose,” Marianella said. “She panicked.”

“Humans always cause destruction when they panic. I suppose it’s a good thing for your friend that Luciano’s not human. He just lost a few hours instead of his whole life.”

Marianella didn’t say anything. Eliana had apologized to Luciano when they’d walked her back to the train station, stuttering and looking at her feet. Luciano had told her he was fine and handed back her gun. And he’d meant it too. But Sofia was right; Eliana was lucky she hadn’t panicked and shot a human man.

They fell into silence after that. The repair box hummed and trembled, and Luciano’s code spilled out on strips of ticker tape. The three of them watched it pool onto the floor. As far as Marianella could tell, nothing was out of the ordinary with Luciano’s system. Nothing was going wrong.

And then one of the park Klaxons began to wail.

At first Marianella thought it was from Luciano’s repairs, that the machine had broken him. Her eyes flew to the ticker-tape machine, but it still tapped out the same unending rhythm.

Sofia and Araceli both leapt to their feet.

“We have to get to operations,” Sofia said. “I told you we should have installed the surveillance computer here as well.”

“That was impossible. We didn’t have the parts.” Araceli jogged over to the repair box speaker. “Luciano! It’s Araceli. We’re not taking you out—it could mess up the re-musculature. But we’ll lock up the workshop and I’ll stay here to watch over you.”

“What’s going on?” Marianella asked, her heart hammering, her computers reining it in, suppressing that very human fear. Her hand went to her necklace. “Lock up the workshop?”

“It’s a culling.” Sofia was standing by the door, putting codes into the locking system. She looked at Marianella from across the room. “You’ve never seen one before.”

“A culling,” Marianella whispered.

“You don’t need to worry. Their scanners will see you as a human.”

“How do you know for sure?” Marianella’s voice was breathy with panic.

Sofia put in the last of the codes, and the doors slid open, a red light blinking overhead. She looked at Marianella. “Because I know the sort of scanners they use. They’re primitive. But you need to come with me. We have to draw the cullers away from the workshop.”

“We?” Marianella looked back at Araceli and the repair box, and then she understood. They’d come here first otherwise, because they’d see the steam belching into the air.

And then they’d take Luciano.

“Yes, we. I told you, they aren’t looking for cyborgs.” Sofia marched across the workshop and grabbed Marianella by the hand. The light above the door was still blinking red, blinking faster now. “The whole workshop’s about to go on lockdown. Come on.”

“They could be looking for me,” Marianella said. “Ignacio could have seen me, he could have figured it out. An anonymous tip, that’s all it would take.”

Sofia took her by the hand. “It’s a culling. I wouldn’t do anything to put you in danger.”

And she yanked Marianella out of the workshop just as the blinking light went solid. The doors slammed closed with a loud reverberating clang, and Marianella and Sofia stood out in the bright floodlights.

The park was silent and still. No Klaxons, no robots, no men from the city.

“You wouldn’t put me in danger,” Marianella whispered, “but you’d put yourself.”

Sofia pulled her forward on the path, heading in the direction of the Ice Palace. “The Klaxons sound anytime someone unauthorized opens the gate.” Sofia walked more quickly, and Marianella stumbled after her, terrified. She was too vulnerable out here in the open. “Every robot here has the alert system worked into their programming. Even the stupid little entertainment robots. So they know to hide.”

They were jogging now, their feet pounding with panicked urgency against the cobblestone paths.

Marianella felt dizzy.

Sofia stopped abruptly. She closed her eyes. For a moment Marianella felt a disturbance on the air, a transmission she couldn’t quite see.

“Inéz will help.” Sofia nodded, and then pulled Marianella along. “We need to get to the operations room so we can see where they are.”

“Inéz?” Marianella’s thoughts spun around and around. She clutched at her cross. “I thought she was out of the park! Why wasn’t she helping Araceli?”

“Because she was tending to the robots in storage.”

They came to the garden at the edge of the Ice Palace. Marianella’s machine parts were doing all the breathing for her, her lungs expanding and contracting so that she wouldn’t be out of breath. She didn’t believe these city men would see her as human. She wasn’t human.

Inéz stepped out from behind the trees and smiled at Marianella like she wanted to ask if Marianella needed anything.

“Stay here,” Sofia commanded. “Inéz, I’ll transmit to you where to find the cullers. They should be headed for the workshop, but it’ll be another fifteen minutes before they make it.”

Inéz nodded. Sofia didn’t explain anything further to her; she must have done it through the transmission while they’d been running to the Ice Palace. Sofia turned and jogged down the path to the palace’s doors, and Marianella wanted to call out for her not to leave. Marianella had already almost died. It was too soon to go through all this again.

But Luciano. She wouldn’t let them take Luciano.

Sofia disappeared around the bend.

“Don’t let them see your face,” Inéz said.

“What?” Marianella’s chest rose and fell. She stared at the place where Sofia had been. “My face?”

“You’re famous,” Inéz said calmly.

Marianella looked at her.

“They’ll recognize you as Lady Luna. That would be unfortunate, yes?”

Marianella nodded. Her whole body was shaking. She’d faced down Ignacio Cabrera and yet she couldn’t stop shaking.

Because this was different. Ignacio only wished to kill her. These men—they could learn her secret. They could destroy her.

“The roller coaster,” Inéz said, voice sharp. “Come.”

She took off down the path.

Marianella hesitated. It happened too fast, the transmission from Sofia. She stared at the path, hoping Sofia would reappear. But there was only stillness.

“Marianella!” Inéz called out. “Come! Please! There are three paths away from the workshop. We need one for each path.”

Of course. One for each path. Marianella choked back her fear and joined Inéz on the path toward the roller coaster. She could already see it, twisting up over the park, dark wood against the white sky.

“Where’s Sofia?” Marianella asked. “Do you know?”

“Intercepting them at the penguin pond,” Inéz said. She stared straight ahead, focused. “She’s going to bring them to the roller coaster, and then we’ll fan out, drawing them away from the workshop.”

The plan didn’t make any sense to Marianella. It wouldn’t coalesce inside her head. She only saw fragments of it—vulnerable Luciano, Sofia racing through the open park, a man in a gray suit cutting Marianella open and finding the machinery that took away her humanity.

Marianella whispered a Hail Mary, the prayer that always brought her the most comfort. The Virgin had once appeared to a pair of Antarctic explorers trapped on the ice, in the years before the city was built. She came to them covered in ice and wrapped in furs, a mother of Antarctica. Marianella wondered if the Virgin ever came to cyborgs, her holiness shot through with machinery. Robots didn’t need her. But a cyborg was not a robot.

Maybe she would come to Marianella today.

Marianella whispered the prayer over and over. Inéz said nothing about it, out of deference, most likely, because, like Luciano, she would see Marianella as mostly human. The prayer calmed Marianella’s nerves, enough that she became aware of her surroundings again. Aware that they were at the base of the roller coaster.

“Quiet, Marianella,” Inéz said politely, laying one hand on Marianella’s wrist.

Marianella tensed. Her body shuddered as it drew her defense mechanisms to the fore. She took a deep breath. The white paint covering the asphalt glittered beneath the dome lights. The roller coaster lurked like a sleeping dragon.

“They’re approaching soon,” Inéz whispered. “Sofia is bringing them straight to us. Be prepared to run.”

Marianella nodded. Her muscles were imbued with a sudden energy from her computer parts.

Silence.

Stillness.

And then, Marianella’s ears perked—footsteps. She heard footsteps.

Sofia burst out of the path, her dark hair streaming out behind her like a comet.

Two men followed.

For a moment Sofia was there in the light, a blazing streak of power, and then she disappeared into the overgrown path leading to the gardens.

“Now!” Inéz broke away from Marianella and leapt across the roller coaster platform. She hit the asphalt and ran, faster than a human could. The men shouted.

“Split up!” the taller said. “Follow the other one.”

The shorter nodded and veered off into the tangle of vines, after Sofia. Inéz looped around the base of the roller coaster, the taller man following her.

Sofia.

Sofia was in danger.

This was enough to spur Marianella into action, and she leapt out of the path and raced across the platform, not thinking about anything but Sofia, and saving Sofia, and keeping the shorter man from hurting her—

A woman screamed.

The sound jarred Marianella out of her trance. Sofia didn’t need her help; Sofia had survived the cullings for years. But Marianella could not let either of these men see her face.

Another scream. It was close, and Marianella knew it belonged to Inéz. She dove into the vines, hiding in the shadows.

More screaming.

She peered through the vines, her breath coming short and fast. The taller man stood directly in her line of sight, his back to her. He was hunched over the fallen figure of Inéz. He wore a businessman’s gray suit. The fabric shone a little in the sun, and that meant the suit was expensive.

Marianella didn’t dare move, afraid of making noise. She didn’t understand why a man with an expensive suit would be culling robots in the park—hadn’t Sofia said they came from the city? No one running errands for the city wore a suit like that.

The man pulled a radio out of his pocket. “Echo to Swan. You got the other one?”

Marianella’s entire body turned to ice, but the radio crackled and the voice on the end said, “Negative. Lost her. Not sure where I am—the old hotels, maybe. Don’t see anything else, though. They’re smarter than we expected.”

The other end of the park from the workshop. Marianella closed her eyes. Luciano was safe. Sofia too. But Inéz—

The man shifted his weight. “Too bad. I got one andie. Not sure how much use it’ll be. Spotted the third one, but I can’t see where it went.”

He kicked at Inéz’s body.

Horror spread through Marianella’s system. She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. The man stepped away and tilted his head up at the sky. She still couldn’t see his face.

“Not seeing much of anything here. Where’d you say you are again, the hotels?”

Crackle. “Looks like it.”

The man didn’t say anything else. He slipped the radio back into his pocket and looked down at Inéz’s body. Walked around it in a circle, like he was appraising her for slaughter.

And, like that, Marianella recognized him.

She had seen him at parties before, galas she and Alejo Ortiz threw for their fund-raisers, for the agricultural domes. His name was Andres Costa. He was one of Alejo’s many political aides, young men in suits who petitioned the city and helped plan Alejo’s reelection campaigns.

He did not work for the city.

He should not be here, culling robots. That was not part of Alejo’s work.

Marianella felt like she was sinking into the soil. Andres walked around Inéz’s body; then he pulled out the radio and said “Halo Codex Marrow” and dropped it back into his pocket. Inéz didn’t move.

Inéz was dead.

Andres scanned over the roller coaster platform, his hands tucked into his pockets. Then he kicked at Inéz’s body again—Marianella stiffened with disgust—and walked away. He strolled past the vines where Marianella was hiding, but he didn’t look at them. He didn’t look at her.

She listened to his footsteps falling away. Tears streaked over her face and dropped onto her blouse. She folded her hands and whispered a death prayer: “Saints of God, come to her aid. Come to meet her, angels of the Lord.” It was probably heresy. She didn’t care. The Church was changing anyway, pulling itself into the modern world. Spanish masses and Protestant hymns. If God could accept that, then certainly He would accept a prayer for an android.

She finished the prayer and listened again for the sound of humans. But there was only silence.

Marianella crawled out of the vines, leaves sticking to her hair and dirt staining the hem of her skirt. Inéz lay in a crumpled heap on the asphalt. Her stomach had been split open, and wires spilled out, illuminated golden-white by the dome light. Marianella had seen the inside of a robot before—she had seen the inside of an android before, in fact. But this left her cold and afraid.

She knelt down beside Inéz. The wires were sliced in half. Severed. There was no way of repairing her.

Marianella leaned back on her heels. She was still crying, slowly and silently. She said the Memorare and an Our Father. Then she stood up, shaking. Andres might have ordered maintenance drones to come here, to collect Inéz in some way. Marianella wasn’t sure if the park drones could stop them. She shouldn’t be here if they arrived.

She stumbled away, sticking close to the vines in case she needed to dive into the shadows again. She could not escape the feeling, subtle and insidious, that Inéz was dead because she, Marianella, was a coward. Because she did not want to be discovered.

And yet it was one of Alejo’s men—

She was too terrified to sort out mysteries right now. But the mysteries came to her anyway, questions made to look like pieces of information. And there was one piece of information that kept coming to her, over and over.

The wires that had been severed in Inéz’s stomach were some of the most expensive and sophisticated technology in the world, despite their age. In fact, it was because of that age that they were irreplaceable. If someone were culling androids for parts, they would never cut them. Never.

Marianella stumbled her way toward the Ice Palace, a single question blazing in her head:

What the hell was Alejo doing?

*  *  *  *

Marianella paced in her bedroom, her rosary wound around her wrists—Luciano had brought it back with her clothes and documents. She hadn’t asked for it, but he’d told her that he thought she might want it. Then he’d added, “And your house is quite secure,” although she hadn’t asked about that, either, and he hadn’t explained further.