Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

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“Then it’s a good thing you came to me and not those PI firms downtown. I specialize in discretion.” Eliana gestured at the chairs set up in front of her desk. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me about it?”

The woman gave a thin, elegant smile, frustratingly familiar. She floated across the room and draped herself in one of the chairs. Eliana felt clumsy and graceless by comparison as she took her own seat.

“My name’s Marianella Luna,” the woman said, “and some important documents of mine have gone missing.”

Marianella Luna. Immediately Eliana remembered where she’d seen the woman before—on television. She was that Argentinian aristocrat, the one all the Independents loved, the one in those advertisements with the city councilman Alejo Ortiz, raising money for his Hope City agricultural domes. We have the strength to run our own city. Atomic power should be ours! End Antarctican dependence on Argentina! As if that was ever going to happen.

Marianella Luna stared at Eliana, her pale eyes framed in thick dark lashes.

Eliana found her voice. “Well, that’s certainly a shame, Lady Luna.”

Lady Luna sat with perfect posture, her hands folded in her lap. “More than you could know, I’m afraid. Will you be able to help me?”

“I’ll certainly try.” Eliana pulled a notepad and a pen out of her desk. “So. These documents. When did you notice they’d disappeared?”

“This morning. I woke up and found someone had broken into the safe in my library. It was—distressing.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

Eliana kept her voice neutral, but she watched Lady Luna closely, looking for clues. Always start an investigation with the client—one of the few pieces of advice Mr. Vasquez had given her.

Lady Luna took a deep breath and toyed with her necklace.

“The contents of these documents,” she said, “are sensitive.”

“Sensitive.”

“Yes, Miss Gomez. I don’t wish to give the impression that I don’t have faith in the city’s police department, and I’m sure they would never betray me intentionally, but if some newly minted detective were to glance at these documents, it would be—” She dropped her necklace. “Disastrous. If I hired you, it would be as much for your discretion as for your investigative skills. I do hope you understand, Miss Gomez.”

When she said Eliana’s name, her voice softened, her eyes took on a soft aristocratic glow.

“That’s why people come to me,” Eliana said, floundering a little. “Discretion and investigation.” She felt stupid saying this, but she didn’t want to risk Lady Luna taking her business downtown. And people did come to Eliana for discretion. It wasn’t a lie.

Eliana leaned back in her chair, trying to smooth out her awkwardness, and sipped at her coffee. “I won’t even charge you extra. Ten bucks a day, just like all my clients.”

Another light smile. “I’ve every intention of paying you handsomely for your work. Speed is another issue we’ll need to discuss, of course, and another reason I didn’t contact the police. They can be dreadfully slow with these things, as I learned when my late husband’s office was robbed.” She sighed. Eliana tried to remember who her husband was, but she’d never followed gossip about the aristocracy. She’d have to ask Maria later.

“I’ll get them back as fast as I can,” Eliana said.

“It’s important that you do so, yes. As I said, I can’t have the contents of these documents released to the public.”

“Of course not.” Eliana wondered what the documents were for. Immigration? Something tying Lady Luna to the mainland? She was palling around with Alejo Ortiz, after all, with his hypocritical mainland suits and his speeches about Hope City growing her own food. If Lady Luna wanted to hold on to the Independents’ good graces, it wouldn’t serve her well for word to get out that she still owned property back in Argentina proper.

“I’ll need you to tell me everything you know about the robbery,” Eliana said, pen poised over her notebook. Lady Luna watched her without moving. “When I say ‘everything,’ I mean everything. Even if it doesn’t seem important to you, it may damn well be important to me, so I want to hear about it.”

“Yes, of course.” Lady Luna glanced past Eliana’s shoulder, toward the narrow, grimy window that looked down onto the street below. Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t hear anything last night. The house has a security system, as well as a mechanical butler. An android, I mean, left over from the amusement park.”

Eliana paused in her note-taking, surprised. She glanced up at Lady Luna, who smiled back.

“You told me to tell you everything. I do hope you won’t judge me too harshly. I know they’ve fallen out of fashion.”

“I won’t judge you at all. Go on.” Eliana wrote andie on the notepad. She’d never seen one before, although she remembered her father talking about them—complaining about them, really, calling them unnatural. As far as Eliana knew, most of them had been dismantled since the park’s closing, and the ones left behind weren’t supposed to leave the old center of the city. She supposed if you had the sort of money the Lunas did, exceptions were made.

“I only mention it because he’s better equipped than you or I to notice intruders. And he heard and saw nothing last night.”

“Didn’t get shut off, did he?”

Lady Luna gave her a strange look, hard and glittering like Antarctic ice. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to shut off an android, Miss Gomez?”

Eliana’s cheeks burned. “Look, I’m just covering my bases here. I’ve never seen one before, so I have no idea how they work.”

Lady Luna shook her head. “He wasn’t shut off. I’m certain of it. I found the safe myself this morning, around eight o’clock. It was after I had dressed and eaten breakfast. I take care of my correspondence in the library every morning, and when I came in, I found the safe hanging open, empty.” Her voice died away, and she sat trembling in the worn-out leather chair. She possessed a fragile sort of loveliness that intensified with her anxiety. Eliana imagined this routine worked wonders on men.

“Do you have any idea who might have taken the documents?” Eliana asked.

Lady Luna hesitated.

“If you don’t answer me truthfully, I won’t be able to help you.”

The air in the room was silent and cold and unmoving. Lady Luna studied Eliana for a moment, then reached into her glossy little handbag and pulled out a stack of bills. She laid them on the desk. Eliana didn’t have to count them to know they added up to payment for far more days than she’d actually need to solve the case. And it was all up front.

A visa to the mainland, acquired legally, cost nearly three thousand dollars. An illegal one cost even more, and neither would get you a ticket for the reinforced ships sailing back and forth across stormy Drake Passage, which could cost as much as a thousand, depending on the time of year. She’d been saving idly for a visa and a ticket ever since her parents had died, but with this kind of money she might actually start to make headway.

“I realize that you’re professionally obligated to report criminal activity,” Lady Luna said softly. “But I hope your discretion can extend a bit further than you’re used to.”

Eliana shoved the notepad aside. Now the case was getting interesting. “What is it? You in trouble, Lady Luna?”

Her eyes were luminous. “It’s not me,” she said. “It was my husband. But I don’t want word to get out, you understand. He passed away six months ago, and I would hate for all this to come out now—”

“I won’t go to the cops. But if you want your documents back, you’ve got to tell me.”

Lady Luna drew herself up, her spine as straight as a doll’s. As an andie’s. “He occasionally did business with Ignacio Cabrera.”

The words rang out against the cold of the room. But Eliana had been seeing Diego for the last year. She wasn’t exactly shocked by people’s involvement with Cabrera.

“A bit more scandalous than owning a mechanical butler,” Lady Luna said. “I hope this won’t sully our arrangement, Miss Gomez. I never had dealings with the man myself, barely even spoke to him, but I knew about my husband’s arrangement, and I—” She looked off to the corner of the room.

Eliana’s chest twinged. She realized she actually felt sorry for Lady Luna, even if the woman was rich and beautiful and could get out of this city in a heartbeat if she wanted to. Lady Luna took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling, and Eliana knew it was time to remind Lady Luna that she wasn’t hiring just any private investigator.

Eliana stood up, walked around the desk, and sat down in the empty chair beside Lady Luna. She rested her hand on top of Lady Luna’s, the glove soft and velvety against her fingers. Lady Luna looked at their hands, unmoving.

“I’m not going to take you to the cops,” Eliana said. “I know you can’t help what he did. But anything you can tell me about Cabrera, about your husband’s involvement—”

“I don’t know.” Lady Luna tilted her head down, a strand of hair falling across her eyes. “Well, I don’t know the details. It wasn’t something we—discussed.”

“But you did know about it. Before he died.”

“A little. It involved the winter supply ships. Bringing in drugs from the mainland.” She shrugged. “I didn’t want to tell you. I debated back and forth. But it was Cabrera, wasn’t it, who stole the documents? I don’t know why—”

Eliana bet she knew why. Nothing would put Cabrera out of the smuggling business more quickly than agricultural domes that actually produced agriculture. The documents probably protected Lady Luna from city censure if Cabrera exposed her connection to him—that would explain why she didn’t want to go to the police too. Probably he was going to hold them over her head as leverage. Eliana had a hard time believing that Lady Luna couldn’t figure all that out on her own, but she didn’t say anything about it. That was a lot of money on the desk.

“Look.” Eliana pushed her chair around so she could look Lady Luna in the eye. “I may seem like I’m new to this whole investigation scene, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I’m used to dealing with Cabrera.” This wasn’t entirely true, but Eliana was willing to count her dalliances with Diego. “So no worries there. You gave me that big stack of cash”—she pointed at the desk—“to get your documents back. I’ll get ’em back. Maybe that’s all I’ll do for you, but I’ll get them back without peeking and without letting them leak. Sound fair?”

Lady Luna nodded and drew a forefinger across the underside of her right eye, as if to wipe away a tear. Her makeup didn’t smear at all. “Thank you, Miss Gomez.”

“I’ll come by your house this afternoon, take a look around, maybe talk to the robot. It does, uh, talk, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good.” Eliana leaned back. “Was there anyone else at the house last night?”

“Oh, no.” Lady Luna shook her head. “The android is the only staff I have.”

Eliana nodded, although she didn’t say anything. That was a bit eccentric.

“I let my human staff go when my husband died,” Lady Luna said. “Things were—easier that way.”

Eliana smiled politely. Excitement sparked in her blood. The first case of the winter. Mr. Vasquez had warned her about the winter cases. They were trickier, he said. Dangerous. She should expect to run into Cabrera.

Eliana wasn’t worried. She had Diego. And the money on the desk was a lot to add to her visa funds.

Lady Luna stood up, smoothing out her skirt, rearranging the fur around her shoulders. “I look forward to working with you,” she said. She had collected herself and was back to being the woman on television. “That money is only your retainer, of course. I’ll pay you the rest when my documents are returned to me. Would you like me to write down the name of my house?”

At first, Eliana only registered the question about the house. She ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed it to Lady Luna along with a pen. As Lady Luna wrote in elegant, practiced strokes, Eliana glanced down at the money on the desk. Lady Luna’s voice echoed in her head. I’ll pay you the rest. That wasn’t all of it.

Eliana wondered what the hell those documents could be.

*  *  *  *

That afternoon, Eliana took the Sunlight Express, the train that left from the docks. She’d never ridden on it before. This was a rich person’s train.

It was nicer than the city trains, she supposed, although the compartments were windowless and the decor was the same overwrought turn-of-the-century style as the amusement park. Eliana sat down at a table, lit a cigarette, and splurged on a fernet coffee and watched the little flames flickering in their glass globes on the tables. Seemed a stupid idea to her, letting fires burn on a moving train.

The train was mostly empty. No one was in the dining car but her and the bartender, who leaned up against the wall and flipped through a newspaper. When Eliana had seen that Lady Luna’s house had a name, Southstar, instead of an address, it hadn’t surprised her. Of course she lived in one of those domes that lay outside the main city dome. A private dome for the privately wealthy, with its own private maintenance drones, its own private power plant. One of those things no one even bothered to complain about, because complaining was just a reminder that the people who ran the city didn’t have to give a shit whether or not the heat was turned up enough, whether or not the power blacked out.

Eliana smoked her cigarette down to the filter, lit another one. The bartender turned the pages of his newspaper. A bell chimed, the lights blinked twice. The bartender sighed, tossed the paper onto the bar, and sat down.

“Better hold on,” he said.

A pause. Then he leaned over and blew out the flame on the candle burning next to the cash register.

“What?” said Eliana.

The bell chimed again.

The train began to rattle and whine. The chairs and tables knocked against the floor. Eliana jammed her cigarette into her ashtray and blew out her own candle too. The polar winds shrieked on the other side of the wall. Now she understood why there were no windows—it was bad enough feeling the Antarctic air slipping in through the invisible cracks in the train’s construction.

Eliana set one hand over the top of her drink glass, her bones vibrating inside her skin. She curled the fingers of her free hand against the seat of her chair. The bartender looked up at the bottles of liquor shaking against the mirror like he hoped they’d fall.

The rattling stopped.

Another chime, like an exhalation of breath. The bartender stood up, swiped his newspaper off the counter, and resumed his previous position as if the rattling interlude had never occurred. Eliana sat for a moment, breathing hard.

“First time?” the bartender asked without looking up.

“Yeah.” With shaking hands, Eliana lit another cigarette.

“You get used to it.” The bartender turned a page of his newspaper.

The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Eliana was the only person who got off at Southstar Station. The platform was empty too, and small, although well kept-up, with a metal bench and a wisteria tree dropping dots of purple. No ticket counter. It took Eliana a moment to connect the names and realize this was a private station.

“Jesus,” she said.

A house loomed in the distance, emerging out of a field of golden grass. Eliana stepped off the platform. She was surrounded by a quiet, arrhythmic susurration, the grass rippling in tandem—false wind. She felt it on her skin, that dry, artificial warmth. It wrapped around her as she cut a path toward the house, trampling down the grass. There was probably a designated way, some stone path leading to the front door, but Eliana was too overwhelmed, and too determined, to figure out where it was.

The grass brushed feather-soft against her bare hands, making her jump. She hated its constant, babbling whisper, like it was trying to tell her something that she couldn’t understand.

She was grateful to arrive at the house. It was large, as she’d expected, although quite contemporary, with lots of flat modernist lines and gray brick and huge windows. It was hard to imagine that it existed in the same city as the little shanty houses where Eliana had grown up.

She pressed her thumb against the doorbell and waited.

The rustle of the grass was sounding more and more likes voices. Eliana rang the doorbell again.

This time, someone answered.

It was a man, tall and slim and dressed in simple cotton clothing. He blinked at Eliana and said, “How can I help you?”

As soon as he spoke, Eliana saw it. The andie. He had almost fooled her, but his voice was too measured, too soft, too pleasant. She remembered her mother saying once that they unsettled you if you looked too closely, and she thought she could see why now—there was something too much about him. Too much of what humans thought made them human.

“I need to speak with Marianella Luna. I told her I’d be coming by.”

“Ah yes, of course.” The robot smiled. “Eliana Gomez, yes? Come in. I can show you to the library. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

He stepped back, still holding the door open. Eliana went inside. The lighting was the same as it had been out in the golden grass, muted and indistinct. The robot led Eliana into the library, past a parlor with a mirrored chandelier and a series of closed doors. Above one of the doors hung a cross wrapped in red lace; Eliana blinked, not expecting something like that in such a wealthy house.

The library was almost all window. Hardly any books, just a table looking out over the ocean of grass. The safe was set into the lone non-windowed wall, its door hanging open at an angle.

“I didn’t touch anything.”

Lady Luna’s voice was like a wind chime. Eliana turned around. Lady Luna stood in the doorway, her hair falling around her shoulders.

“That helps. Thanks.”

“This is Luciano,” she said, walking forward. “You said you might want to talk to him.”

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.