Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"
Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ELIANA
Eliana watched the footage on Luciano’s television, the sound turned down so she wouldn’t have to listen to the newsman prattling on. Images flashed by: An enormous, shattered dome, the glass blackened from the explosion. Ice that had melted and refrozen after the fire had been put out, into eerie, indefinable shapes.
And the crops.
The rows and rows of crops, now all dead and wilted. They were throwing them out into the desert to be covered over by snow and ice. That was on the television too, the ice-drones carting the crops over the barren landscape until they disappeared from the sphere of the camera’s light. A year’s supply of food, the newsman had said. Eliana had watched with her hand at her throat, hardly believing.
All those stupid advertisements the past year, with Marianella smiling into the camera as Lady Luna, Alejo Ortiz beaming at her side. They were asking for money to build domes just like this one, domes that could sustain the city without interference from the mainland.
“We kept it a secret,” Marianella explained later that afternoon.
“Why?” Eliana said, sitting on an old reproduction of a Queen Anne chair, the white brocade yellow with age.
Marianella shrugged. A food tray was balanced on her knees, and she took a bite of watery beef soup, the best they could get so late in the season. And all those crops were frozen.
“It was Alejo’s idea,” she said. “All politics are theater, when you get down to it. He wanted to have a fully functioning dome when we made our announcement, rather than just the plans for one.” She shook her head, her face blank. “I’d been looking forward to that moment for months. And now—” Her voice cracked. Eliana leaned over and put her hand on her arm, but Marianella didn’t acknowledge the gesture. “I just wanted to help the people of Hope City. So I designed it, I funded it.” She threw her spoon onto the tray. “And now it’s dead.”
“You can rebuild,” Eliana said, although she had no idea if that was true. “I mean, if you already had plans for others. And the whole city knows it’s possible now. It’s not as if it broke down.”
“It was sabotaged,” Marianella said flatly. She set her tray aside, her food half-finished. The silence in the room grew thick.
“I’m sure it was Ignacio Cabrera,” Marianella said. “Who else would bomb the agricultural dome?”
Eliana’s heart twisted at the mention of Cabrera’s name, at the reminder of who Diego really was.
“Other than Sofia,” Marianella said.
Eliana looked up. Marianella stared into space. She looked pale and haggard. Not like herself at all.
Eliana stayed a few moments longer, but when it was clear that Marianella didn’t want to talk further, Eliana said her good-byes and left.
Eliana’s footsteps rattled through the corridor. The Ice Palace was confusing, all those twisting mazelike hallways, leading into rooms filled with old robotics equipment or stacks of ceramic amusement park statues. She wandered for ten minutes until she found a sunroom that looked out over the garden. Luciano was there in the room, reading one of his books.
She stopped in the doorway, surprised to see him. He glanced up at her, and the uncanniness of his movement ruined the illusion of his humanity.
“Eliana,” he said. “Did Marianella enjoy her meal?” He shut the book and set it aside.
“She ate it.”
There was a pause. Then Luciano looked at her like he had all the answers to her racing, miserable thoughts, like he knew how to make her forget about Diego and his betrayal, like he was willing to listen to her confusion about the agricultural domes and her fear about Cabrera.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Eliana slumped up against the doorframe. She hesitated. “Everything.”
He sat very still, watching her, his head tilted to the side. “You can tell me about it if you wish.”
She knew he was programmed to do that. That’s how all the amusement park robots worked. They were programmed for certain things. Luciano had been programmed to help people.
And maybe she needed help.
“You really don’t mind?”
He shook his head. “I’m happy to help a friend.”
A friend. Maybe it wasn’t just the program.
And at any rate, she didn’t want to walk away. She didn’t want to be alone.
And so she sat down in the dusty wicker chair beside him. When he looked at her expectantly, she realized this was what she’d hoped to find with Marianella, because Marianella had been at the gala when Diego had pulled his gun and revealed who he was. But Marianella had reacted exactly as you should when confronting a monster.
And that was the problem.
“It’s about my boyfriend,” Eliana started, and she didn’t intend to say much more than that, but everything poured out anyway. He’d lied to her about the sort of work he did. He’d lied about owning a gun. His eyes had glittered with a cold and terrifying light that had seemed to reveal more about him than any moment they’d spent together ever could have.
When the words finally dried up, her eyes were wet.
Luciano sat still for a moment. She wondered, stupidly, if she had broken him. But then he put his hand on her knee.
“That must be difficult,” he said.
It was such a stupid platitude, but no one, not even Marianella, had said anything approximating it in her time here. Her boyfriend had almost killed her, almost killed her friend, and no one had remotely tried to sympathize.
“I don’t know what to do!”
“What can you do?” asked Luciano. “None of this is your fault. You can’t blame yourself for seeing good in him. That’s a quality more humans should have, the ability to see the good in others.”
“But there wasn’t any good in him.”
“Of course there was.” Luciano smiled, an easy smile that calmed her like a drug. “You were with him for over a year, yes? And he never hurt you. In fact, he tried to put you out of harm’s way as best he could, from what I can tell. It seems to me you brought the good out in him.”
Eliana sniffled. The sunroom’s windows heated up the thin dome light outside, generating a warmth that felt far more organic than anything from a radiator. She’d never considered the possibility that she might have been the reason Diego seemed like a good person. She didn’t know if it was true or not, but she did know this was the first time she had seen him with Cabrera, and the first time she’d seen that cold glitter in his eyes.
“He still lied to me,” she said.
“Everyone lies,” said Luciano.
Eliana laughed at his bluntness. “Did you say that to clients when the park was open?”
“Of course not. I was programmed to lie. That’s how I know everyone does it.” He smiled again. “I’m not lying now, however.”
This time, Eliana returned his smile. She drew her knees up to her chin and looked out into the garden. Weeds were sprouting up in the cracks between the stones in the path, everything wild and green and beautiful. She tried to imagine it as it would have looked when the park was still open, the growth neat and orderly, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“I’ve never been to the mainland,” she said distractedly, still looking out at the garden. “I’ve wanted to, my entire life. Ever since my parents told me stories about it.”
“It’s difficult to acquire visas, from what I understand.”
Eliana shrugged. “Not difficult, just expensive. I’ve got the money now, you know. I just have to make it to the spring. I hope the ships start running again. All this.” She swooped one hand around, taking in the park, the city itself, the explosions and the failing power and the terror of the past winter. “I don’t know what it means for me. I’ve got the money now, or close to it, but part of me is scared that it’s going to take more than money. That the city’s changing, and they’ll stop the visas, and I won’t be able to get out.”
They fell into silence.
“Would you like to see the mainland?” Luciano asked.
His question startled her. “Sure. Really, I’d like to see something that’s not the dome. When I saw Diego’s gun, after I got over the initial shock, you know, of what he was, I thought—and this is so stupid, but I thought that I’ve never seen anything outside the dome.” She laughed, hard and bitter.
Luciano frowned. “You’ve really never seen outside the dome?”
Eliana sighed. “Technically I have. Once. It was when I was a kid. There was a program that would take us out on the boats so we could see what the sun was like and all that.” She lay her head on her knee. Luciano didn’t ask her for anything more—he seemed trained (programmed, she reminded herself) to listen only to what she wanted to say, all his questions carefully selected. It would be unnerving, if it wasn’t such a comfort to have someone listen.
“It was in the summer,” Eliana said. “You know, when the sun never sets? You can’t tell from the dome, of course, but we learned about it. I remember we were all crowded onto the boat, bundled up in our emergency parkas. All families have them. Did you know that? In case of disaster? They started selling them again when the electricity began flickering.”
“I did know that. I’m sure we have some of our own here in the park.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Eliana leaned back in her chair. “God, it was something to see, this huge ball of fire in the sky. They told us not to look straight at it, but of course everyone did, until we couldn’t anymore.” Eliana smiled and remembered how her eyes had stung and watered, and little black splotches had appeared in her vision. She’d thought she was going blind. And maybe she had, momentarily.
She was thirteen on that trip, and she had stood at the bow of the icebreaker with her head thrown back, promising to herself that someday she would live in a place where she could see the sun all the time.
Christ, she hadn’t thought about that in years.
“It sounds lovely.” Luciano paused. “I’ve never seen the sun myself, at least not directly.”
Eliana looked at him. He wore the same unflappable expression as always, but he was watching her closely.
“Really?”
“Yes. I was produced in Brazil, of course. We didn’t spend much time there before we were shipped to Antarctica. They deactivated us for the journey.” He went quiet. Eliana didn’t know what to say.
“I did see a rainstorm, though,” he said, after a time.
“A rainstorm!” Eliana had seen rainstorms on television programs—gentle ones where the rain rustled through the trees, and wild thrashing ones that ripped the trees from the ground. She could never fathom such a thing happening in real life, though. She couldn’t imagine water falling freely from the open sky without freezing. The closest Hope City had to rainstorms were the fire extinguishers that activated whenever the maintenance drones detected smoke.
“What was it like?” Eliana sounded more excited than she’d intended to.
“It’s difficult to describe. But I can show you.”
“Show me?” Eliana frowned. “Oh, did you, um, record it?”
“I record everything.” A brief smile passed over Luciano’s lips. “But I am quite discreet, so you don’t need to worry. And after a year has passed, a subroutine purges all unnecessary memory files, unless I mark them to be saved.” He stopped. “I marked the rainstorm, which is why you can see it.”
Eliana nodded. Her skin prickled. This all felt vaguely transgressive, talking to a robot about those things that separated him from being human. And watching one of his recordings—
She felt uncomfortable with the idea. But that discomfort excited her at the same time.
“Okay,” she said. “You can show me.”
Luciano smiled. “Exciting! We’ll have to go to the robodeon. It’s on the third floor of the palace.” He paused, and his eyes seemed to twinkle. “Sofia won’t like it. She hates the idea of us doing any of the things we did in the park. But we won’t have to tell her, will we?”
Eliana laughed and nodded. She and Luciano left the sunroom and walked together through the hallways. They didn’t speak, and Eliana wondered if Luciano felt the awkwardness of their silence. Would his programming dictate something like that? She wasn’t sure. He was so much more complex than the maintenance drones. Their jobs were obvious. But robots like Luciano and Sofia left her not knowing what to think. And Luciano keeping secrets from Sofia—Eliana didn’t know what to think of that, either.
Their footsteps echoed as they walked up the stairs. Eliana had never been to the third floor, but it looked the same as the rest of the palace, everything faded and dusty.
“Here we are.” Luciano stopped in front of a pair of wooden doors, carved with the swirling art nouveau women that had been so popular during the park’s heyday. He pushed them open. Eliana had been expecting a cinema, like the one on Lucia Avenue, but there was no big blank screen or velvet curtains. Even the seats were arranged differently. They sat in pairs, facing each other.
“When the park was open, there was an entire fleet of robots who worked in this room.” Luciano gestured for her to enter, and she did. “They were programmed with hundreds of different scenarios to choose from.” He sounded like he was reciting from a travel brochure. Eliana wondered if he used to give this speech to his guests. “The guest sits in one chair; the robot sits across from her. They connect with the viewing harness. It’s quite harmless, don’t worry.”
It definitely sounded like a travel brochure. Eliana sat down on the cleanest, least ripped of the chairs. She could vaguely recall older people talking about this, the robodeon at the amusement park, although she had never been clear how it worked. Luciano disappeared behind a paper screen for a few seconds and emerged carrying a hat trailing cables. Eliana frowned at it.
“Wait,” she said. “You mean we’re going to do it like they did in the park?”
Luciano stopped. “How else would we do it?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d—project—the memory—”
Luciano tilted his head. “But that would be the same as seeing it on television, and you wanted to experience it, correct?”
Eliana hesitated. She thought she’d been humoring him, letting him show her his rainstorm.
“I can experience it?” she finally said, feeling stupid.
“Yes, of course.” Luciano sat down in the chair across from her and handed her the hat. “It’s quite safe. Thousands of people participated every year.” He smiled, his eyes glinting. “And Marianella would be extremely upset if anything happened to you.”
Eliana wasn’t so sure about that anymore. She looked down at the hat. It was a fearsome thing, not a hat so much as a helmet, with blacked-out goggles and a bronzed metal exterior. She knocked on it, listening to the sound reverberate inside.
“I swear to you,” Luciano said, “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
Eliana felt suddenly warm. She looked up at him. He was staring at her, unblinking. She thought of all the times Diego had said that. She’d always believed him, and she couldn’t anymore.
But she believed Luciano. She had to believe someone wanted to keep her safe.
“All right,” she said, and she slipped the helmet on. The goggles blocked out her vision. She was aware of Luciano’s hands fiddling with the wires, looping them over her head, pressing something cold against the top of her spine.
“Luciano?” Her voice echoed, amplifying her nervousness.
“I’m here.” The helmet covered her ears, and so his voice was muffled. “Can you see anything? Any light, anything?”
“No.” Her answer trembled against the inside of the helmet.
“Good. You aren’t supposed to.” He fell silent. She resisted the urge to reach over and feel for him, to put her hand on his knee, to make sure he was there.
Light flooded her vision.
Eliana screamed and moved to yank off the helmet, but Luciano stopped her. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I wasn’t specifically programmed for this, and it’s been some time since I’ve done it.”
Eliana took a deep breath. The light was settling into shapes: trees and little wooden houses and stone paths leading into a forest. “Oh my God,” she whispered, because as the shapes settled, the other senses caught up—a breeze ran through the trees and caressed against her skin, warm in a way she had never known. It was not the dry heat of a radiator, but damp and hazy and so thick, it seemed alive. She could smell dirt and sweet green scents, and everything was so overwhelming that she was almost dizzy.
“Luciano?” she said, her voice wavering.
“I’m here.” He sounded far away. “Can you see it?”
“Yes.”
The sky overhead was a dark purplish gray, a color she had never known a sky to be. Suddenly she was walking forward, following one of the paths.
“This is my memory,” Luciano said. “I walked, so you’re walking.”
“I’m you?”
“In a sense, yes.”
A line of light cracked across the sky. Eliana shrieked.
“Lightning,” Luciano said. “Remember, nothing happening here will hurt you.”
Eliana nodded, although the Eliana in the memory did not. A sound rumbled in from everywhere, dark and threatening. The lightning flashed again. Eliana jumped, but she was growing used to it.
And then there was a rustling, all around her, like the trees were trying to talk. She felt like she should hold her breath.
Water poured out of the sky.
It fell in raging, riotous sheets, soaking through her thin gray coveralls, plastering her short hair to her head. It dripped into her eyes. Little yellow lamps glowed at each of the houses, and their light caught the raindrops and made them shimmer like static. When the lightning flashed, it turned the whole world white. Eliana—Luciano—did not move from that spot.
“I wasn’t supposed to be outside,” Luciano said, his voice closer than she’d expected. “They activated us to ensure there weren’t any problems, but we weren’t supposed to leave our quarters. However, they never programmed the command into us, because it would have been a problem once we arrived at the park, and so I left anyway. I didn’t know it was going to rain. I understood what was happening, but I still found it—” He stopped. “I found it beautiful, I suppose.”
“It is beautiful.” The rain fell harder and harder. The water seemed to soak through her skin. She wondered if he’d worried about that, the water damaging him. Or maybe water couldn’t damage androids. She wasn’t sure.
Off to the side, someone shouted, an angry bark. A man appeared, wearing a plastic raincoat and a yellow hat, shouting Luciano’s name and then a string of Portuguese.
Everything faded away.
Eliana yanked off her helmet, expecting to find her clothes soaked and her hair dripping, but she was as dry as when she had walked into the room. Luciano sat across from her with his hands folded in his lap, a cable draped over one shoulder. It disappeared into some unfathomable place behind his ear.
“A rainstorm,” Luciano said.
“Thank you,” Eliana said.
Luciano smiled.
The rainstorm was implanted in Eliana’s memory. She could think back on it and remember the feel of the rain across her arm. It was strange, having Luciano’s memory inside her head. But she didn’t want it gone.
Rainstorms. Wind. The scent of a jungle.
She only wished those memories were hers, and hers alone. Because that would mean she had accomplished what her mother could not, what her father could not.
It would mean she had actually left Hope City.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARIANELLA
Downtown was colder than Marianella expected. They stood waiting in front of the city building, the dais a few paces away. It was decorated with little blue-and-white flags that hung limply in the still air.
Marianella pulled her coat more tightly around her chest. She couldn’t believe how biting and cold it was out here. At least the dome lights were bright. There hadn’t been a single flicker all day.
A crowd fanned out from the dais, reporters with notebooks and flashbulb cameras. The rest of the crowd seemed to be Independents, given the number of sealskin coats.
“Are you ready?” Alejo appeared beside her, straightening his tie. “Ready to blow them all away?”
Marianella nodded, even if she found his choice of words unfortunate. Alejo turned and muttered something to his entourage, all his assistants in their own gray suits.
“Showtime,” Alejo said, and he looped his arm through Marianella’s and they walked out onto the dais.
The Independence crowd erupted into cheers. The news reporters scribbled in their notebooks. A film camera stared at her with its dark, unblinking eye.
Marianella scanned across the crowd, her chest tight. Alejo planned to run Ignacio out of town, but he hadn’t done it yet. One of Ignacio’s men might turn up here, with a gun aimed straight at her head. One shot, and everyone would know what she was, and that would be the end of it.
Except Alejo had brought in bodyguards, like he’d promised. Big, hulking men who ambled around the dais with their hands tucked into their jackets. AFF members. Marianella tried not to think about it, reminding herself that they were here to protect her.
Alejo and Marianella took their places at the front of the dais, in front of the microphone. His entourage settled into a half circle of chairs around them.
Marianella took a deep breath. Now was not the time to think about Ignacio.
“Good afternoon,” she said. Her voice echoed with electronic feedback. “We have something very exciting to share with you.”
“The city doesn’t want us to tell you this,” Alejo said.
Marianella smiled, and the audience tittered. She took a step back; they had agreed that he would do most of the speaking. As he was the politician, it only made sense.
“You’ve all seen the advertisements for the agricultural domes, I’m sure, the ones with myself and the lovely Lady Luna.” He gestured at Marianella, and she gave a little wave. “And of course now you all know that the domes are a reality—or rather, were a reality. My team and I were successful in building one fully operational agricultural dome out in the Antarctic desert, and we kept it running until some madman decided to destroy our hard work.”
His team? Marianella gave a strained smile. She wouldn’t say it was a team.
“The question of who destroyed the dome is not why we’re here. But I will say this: there are those who would blame the bombing on the Antarctican Freedom Fighters.”
Boos and hisses erupted out of the crowd beyond the reporters. Alejo lifted one hand.
“I’m here to say—we’re here to say”—he gestured once again at Marianella—“that we know those who support independence for Antarctica would never destroy that thing which could give her independence.”
The boos and hisses turned to applause. Marianella clapped politely. No, the AFF hadn’t bombed the dome. Neither had Sofia. Marianella had already gone through the files on the maintenance drones, looking for a sign of betrayal. But Marianella wasn’t willing to celebrate the fact that Cabrera had destroyed their work.
“But we are choosing today not to focus on the past but to focus on the future. That’s what Lady Luna and I are doing.” He smiled. “Everyone give a round of applause for Lady Luna. She’s been much more than a pretty face for the commercials. Her financial contributions to the Independent cause have been tremendous.”
Applause thundered up from the crowd. It turned to an ocean’s roaring inside Marianella’s head. She forced a smile out to the crowd and waved, swiveling her wrist back and forth. It was hard to make out individual faces, even with her machine parts, and that made her nervous.
The applause died down. Marianella stepped back. She was dimly aware that something was off, not in the crowd but in Alejo, but she couldn’t quite tease it out.
“The real tragedy in all this is not just the loss of the dome but the loss of the hours of hard work that was put into its creation by my men.”
Men? The buzzing intensified in Marianella’s head. What men? The dome had been built by robots. Robots that she’d designed, that she’d built.
“But even so, we remain secure in the knowledge that if we built the dome once, we can build it again!”
A thunderous round of applause. Camera bulbs flashed, one after another. Something was wrong. There had been no men.
When he had introduced her, he’d only talked of her financial contributions, not of her intellectual ones.
Marianella suddenly couldn’t breathe.
“Here they are,” he said, and gestured to the men in gray suits, the ones Marianella had thought were assistants. “The best engineers our city has to offer. That ag dome was not built by mainland ingenuity but by Antarctican brilliance.”
Marianella’s vision filled with a blinding white light. She dug her nails into her palm, deep enough that her robot brain took over and siphoned the pain away. Distantly, she was aware of Alejo’s voice, rising and falling over a buzz of static feedback.
“This is a setback, certainly. But it will not curtail us completely. I can assure you that the explosion was not caused by a malfunction but by a terrorist, set on stopping us on our path for self-sufficiency. This entire city was built out of human ingenuity, and it was human ingenuity that built the food dome.”
He glanced at her when he said “human ingenuity.” She was certain of it.
“It will be human ingenuity that will rebuild it. For those of you who thought Independence was a logistical possibility, I give you the wreckage of my creation”—Marianella took a deep, gasping breath—“as proof that we can build our own nation here on the ice of Antarctica. Don’t look at this as a tragedy but as a victory. The terrorists who bombed the agricultural dome killed no one, because death was not their intention. Only destruction. Destruction of a dream made real. We will build that dream again.”
For a moment, there was only stunned silence and the wind whistling through the buildings. Then the cameras lit up, and the reporters surged forward, shouting Alejo’s name. Marianella didn’t move. The men in gray suits stood up and waved at the crowd as they had their pictures taken over and over.
“Lady Luna! Lady Luna!”
Marianella turned toward the reporters. Lights flashed at her in quick succession and she had to stop herself from throwing up her arm and running away. Alejo leaned over the edge of the dais, pointing to reporters and answering their questions. She stared at him, ignoring the people calling out her name. She hated him. She hated his team of actors posing as engineers. She hated the humans applauding him as if he’d done any of the work, as if he’d programmed the robots or planned the architecture.
She realized she was money, she was a pretty face for the advertisements, she was nothing.
“Lady Luna, will you be sponsoring the next dome? Lady Lu—”
Marianella stepped off the dais and walked away from the crowd. Her scarf fluttered behind her, and her quick steps loosened her hair from its bouffant. A tear streaked down her cheek; she reached up and wiped it away. Mascara smeared across her fingers. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this, and she knew that if she stayed out in the open much longer, someone would chase her down.
She walked to the end of the block and hailed a taxi. The tears fell faster now, leaving hot trails on her face. The taxi pulled up to the curb, and the driver did a double take when he saw her.
“Uh, where to?” he asked, averting his eyes. Marianella climbed in.
“Alejo Ortiz’s office,” she said. “At the corner of Main and Fifty-Seventh Street.”
The driver nodded and jerked back the handle on the meter. Marianella watched the number click upward through the haze of her tears.
“Everything okay?” the driver asked.
“Everything’s fine.” She said it as sharply as she could, and he didn’t ask any more questions.
After ten minutes, they came to Alejo’s office.
The building glinted in the dome light. The windows were darkened, but Marianella knew he’d be back soon enough. Alejo always came up to the office to regroup after press conferences.
She walked up to the office’s big glass door and pulled it open. The receptionist was gone, the lobby empty. The building had the abandoned feel of an office closed down for a holiday weekend.
All the lights were off, but Marianella had been here enough times that she didn’t need them. She followed the hallway until she came to Alejo’s office. The door was locked with a city-style electronic lock, and Marianella pressed her hand against it and sparked it open.
Inside, she flicked on the light and then turned the chair at his desk around so that she was facing the door. She sat down.
And waited.
She didn’t wait long. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. As much as Alejo liked being the center of attention, he knew how important it was for him to come back to his office, to strategize, to see how he could swing the explosion to his advantage.
She wondered if he’d even noticed she’d disappeared.
When she heard the voices out in the hallway—male voices, gibbering with excitement—her anger flared again. She straightened her back, crossed her legs.
“What the– Did you forget and leave the light on, Ivan?” Alejo appeared in the doorway, although he was staring down the hallway. “Get Ruben. This might be some kind of—” He turned his face toward his office. “Oh,” he said.
“Hello, Alejo.” Marianella’s voice was cold and flat, and it made her feel more inhuman than she already did by Alejo’s hand.
“I was worried about you.” He smiled, his voice smoothed over. He stepped into the office and clicked the door shut behind him, but he didn’t walk closer to her. “I was afraid you’d gotten snatched off the street. I was about to send the bodyguards out to look for you. Figured you wouldn’t want me to call the police.”
“Shut up,” Marianella said.
Alejo blinked. Her anger surged inside her, rushing through her veins.
“You cut me out,” she said. “You gave credit to a bunch of actors. They were actors, weren’t they? You and I both know there aren’t enough Independent engineers in the city to do that kind of work. That’s why I designed the robots in the first place.”
He didn’t look away from her. She had to give him credit for that.
“Yes,” he said. “They were actors.”
It was the answer Marianella had expected, but hearing it still felt like a punch in the stomach.
