Текст книги "Our Lady of the Ice"

Автор книги: Cassandra Clarke

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ELIANA

Eliana walked down to the sculpture garden. It was colder out than usual, even for the amusement park. Still, she had promised she would meet Luciano for a morning walk, and she was looking forward to it, despite the strange experience of sharing a memory with him. That memory was still inside her head. It belonged to her now, like a gift.

Luciano sat on his usual bench, reading a book, something for children, with pictures. Eliana didn’t recognize it. She sat down beside him, and he looked up at her and smiled.

“Good morning.” All prim and proper like always.

“Morning.” Eliana reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the scone she’d wrapped up in a cloth napkin for her breakfast. She’d slept late this morning, because of the cold and because she didn’t have anything else to do. Her stomach rumbled. She nibbled at the scone. Too dry. Araceli wasn’t much of a baker.

“Did you sleep well?” Luciano asked.

“As well as ever.”

Luciano smiled at her. Eliana took another bite of her scone. She wondered if he was waiting for her to ask about the walk. If he was still programmed to let humans make the decisions.

The thought left her unsettled.

“Should we go?” She stuffed the rest of the scone back into her pocket. He nodded, and they stood up and made their way out of the garden, following the usual path to the part of the park devoted to rides—the roller coaster, a broken-down Ferris wheel, assorted flying swings with broken cables. They didn’t say much, although it was a companionable sort of silence. Eliana liked it.

They came to the wall that blocked the park from the city.

“I’m worried about Marianella,” Eliana said. “Ever since that thing with the ag dome, I haven’t seen much of her. I thought she was holed up in her room.” She paused. “I mean, the ag dome was a big deal. I just hope she feels better, you know?”

“I believe she does,” Luciano said. “She left her room last night.”

“What?” Eliana blinked at him. “Really?” All this time, Eliana had taken Marianella’s absence for grief. After what happened with Diego, Eliana thought she was doing good, forgiving her. But maybe Marianella didn’t need that forgiveness after all. Maybe she didn’t even want it.

And now she’d left her room?

“Yes,” Luciano said. “I’m not sure what time, exactly. But I saw her with Sofia, after you had already retired back to your cottage. And I saw her this morning, too.”

“This morning?” Eliana frowned. “And she wasn’t in her room?”

Luciano didn’t answer. Eliana poked him in the arm. “Well?” she said. “Was she feeling better?”

There was something off about Luciano’s expression. An awkwardness that made him seem less human. Eliana didn’t like it.

“Come on, Luciano. It’s not like I —”

“I wasn’t supposed to say anything.” He looked over at her. “Sofia made me promise. But I don’t think it’s right, keeping it a secret from you.”

Eliana stopped in place. They were at the petting zoo now, empty cages looming around them. Luciano stopped when she stopped. He put his hands into his pockets.

“What’s going on?” she said. “Luciano?”

He watched her with that unnervingly inhuman expression. “I have loyalties to both of you,” he said. “I told her you have a right to know, but she didn’t agree with me, and—”

“A right to know what?” A desperate fear clenched at Eliana’s heart. “What are you talking about?”

“They went to kill Ignacio Cabrera and all his men.”

The world went dead. Luciano’s expression was slack. Eliana couldn’t breathe.

“Oh God,” she said, heart pounding. “All his men. Diego—”

She shouldn’t be thinking this way. Diego was a killer. Diego’s eyes were empty.

Except when they weren’t. Except when they were looking at her.

“Eliana?” Luciano’s voice sounded far away. She was aware of a hand on her back, and then she was aware that she was sitting down on the cold stones of the path, gasping for air.

“They didn’t want to upset you,” he said. “But it felt wrong to me.”

“They’re going to kill Diego!” Her voice ricocheted out into the park, echoing against the cold. She slapped her hand over her mouth. Tears brimmed at her eyes. “When?” she whispered.

Luciano looked at her. That awkwardness was still there, but now it was veiled with concern. He dropped his hand away from her back. “The plan is scheduled to be implemented in an hour’s time—”

“An hour! Where, at the Florencia?” Eliana stood up, dizzy from the sudden movement. “It is, isn’t it?” She felt as if her mind, her reason, had been detached from her body. She didn’t know exactly what she planned to do. Save her lying, murdering boyfriend?

But she couldn’t stand the thought of him dying. She kept seeing him the way he’d been before the gala, smoking cigarettes on her patio and lying beside her in bed.

He couldn’t die. He couldn’t.

Luciano nodded.

“I’m going there.”

“You can’t.” He tried to grab her by the arm, but she pulled away. “It’s dangerous for you. You could be caught in the cross fire.” He paused. “And with Cabrera dead, you’ll be safe again, and able to return home to wait for your departure in the spring. This is for the best.”

“I don’t want to save Cabrera!” The dome light was too bright. She felt blinded. She pulled away from Luciano and ran toward the train station. She’d have to follow the tracks out, catch a taxi to the Florencia.

At first all she heard was her breath and her heartbeat, her blood rushing in her ears.

And then she heard footsteps. They weren’t her own.

Luciano. He was following her.

But he wasn’t trying to stop her.

*  *  *  *

The Florencia was silent when Eliana arrived, out of breath from having run the two blocks from where the taxi had dropped her and Luciano off. The driver had refused to go any farther, muttering about how he didn’t want to be there when she handed an andie over to Ignacio Cabrera.

She stood on the street outside the building, staring at those darkened windows and trying to decide what to do next. It was a force of will that had brought her here, some primeval desire to see Diego safe.

“We should not be here.” Luciano’s voice was right next to her. “This is dangerous for you.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Eliana said in a flat voice. She walked away from him, her footsteps echoing up and down the narrow street.

“Eliana!”

She wasn’t thinking. Her feet moved independent of her mind, compelling her over the cement and up to the big double doors. She pulled them open and breathed in the scent of the Florencia, grilled meat and women’s perfume. It was dark inside. She would have thought the place was closed down, if it weren’t for the music playing in the background.

“Eliana.” Luciano was at her side again. He put his hand on her arm, but she jerked away.

“I have to warn Diego.” Her voice came from somewhere outside herself. She hadn’t warned him at the gala, and Marianella had almost beaten him to death. “Not Cabrera. Just Diego.”

“You can’t. She has it all planned—”

Eliana ignored him and stepped inside. She shoved the door shut, but Luciano caught it. He didn’t say anything more, his voice evaporating as he stepped into the foyer. No one waited at the podium. Over the music, Eliana could hear someone talking. A man, his voice smooth and liquid.

She crept forward, her heart pounding in her throat. Luciano moved with her, grabbing at her hand. She kept pushing him aside. Someone stood in the doorway of the dining room, a man in a dark suit. His eyes blossomed with dark bruises; his lip was scabbed over. And he was staring at her, his face full of sorrow.

“Diego!” Seeing his injuries made Eliana’s chest hurt. “Diego, you have to—”

Suddenly the music changed to some old tango, the volume turned up too high.

“Fuck!” Diego loped forward, his eyes dark. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “You, andie. Get her the fuck out of here.”

Luciano grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door.

“They’re going to kill you,” Eliana said.

Diego tilted his head at her like he was confused.

The music wailed in the background. Eliana remembered her mother playing this song on Saturday morning as she cleaned their apartment, her sweet singing voice drifting through the rooms.

“Get out of here,” Diego said. She’d never seen him look so desperate. “Please.”

And then gunfire exploded in the dining room.

Eliana screamed. Suddenly she was lying on the floor, pinned there by Luciano. Diego was gone. Bullets exploded through the wall, wood splinters and gray insulation showering everywhere. The bullets implanted themselves in the doors of the Florencia.

Eliana tried to squirm away from Luciano’s grasp, but he was too strong. “Let me go!” she shrieked, and with that one command, his grip loosened and she was free, although she was too terrified to move.

The music pounded through the walls.

And through the music, men screamed.

That jolted her into action. She crawled toward the maelstrom of the dining room. The gunshots began to die away, and over the screaming and the music she could hear Luciano shouting her name. She didn’t care. She had to be brave. She had to crawl toward the screams. She had to make sure that none of them belonged to Diego.

“It’s not safe!” Luciano shouted.

Eliana stopped at the doorway. At first she kept her head down, but she realized the gunshots were mostly gone, and so she lifted her face a little—

And screamed.

The dining room was full of maintenance drones, buzzing over the floor, the lights on their backs illuminated a dark red she’d never seen before.

There were men too, men with guns, but most of them were sprawled out on the ground at unnatural angles. Blood slicked across the floor; the tables and chairs were shot to splinters. At the center of the room Sofia crouched over a man, her shoulders hunched. Marianella was nowhere to be seen.

“Diego!” Eliana screamed. No one answered her. The few men still standing shot at the drones, and the drones clawed at the men, slicing their tendons open at the ankle.

I’m not one of Cabrera’s men. They won’t attack me.

Eliana crawled into the room in a daze. The maintenance drones ignored her. She scanned over the blood and viscera and dead bodies, looking for Diego.

She found him.

He stood at the far corner, emptying his pistol into the back of a drone. His expression was calm, and that terrified her. He ran out of bullets and reloaded the gun with the quick, practiced ease of someone who had done that many, many times before, and Eliana realized she was weeping, whimpering his name, knowing she had been stupid to come here, not because she was in any danger but because he was a bad person.

Diego looked over at her, and their eyes caught, and there was a flare of energy between them. Eliana thought of the night she’d first seen him. It had been like that then, that flare of energy. Music had been playing then, too.

A maintenance drone dropped out of the ceiling and landed on his back, toppling him to the floor.

Eliana screamed. She lost all her thoughts and raced toward him, into the middle of the room. No one fired at her. Anyone with a gun was firing at a drone.

Diego was dead.

She knew it viscerally, but when she saw him, the words appeared in her mind, a pronouncement, a newspaper headline. He was dead. He slumped forward onto his stomach, his suit ripped, his back covered in blood.

She thought she saw bone.

“Diego,” she whispered.

The drone whirred away, ignoring her. Violence roared around the room. Luciano was at her side again, saying something, taking her hand. The guns fell silent one by one. She was aware of all this. But the only thing she understood was Diego, the empty shell of him, lying there on the floor.

Someone grabbed her hand.

“Let me fucking go, Luciano!” He didn’t. When she turned to him, she saw that it was Marianella, her hair hanging in tatters, her eyes red with tears.

“I’m afraid you can’t tell me what to do,” Marianella said, and then she pulled Eliana away with a strength Eliana would never have expected, scooping Eliana up in her arms and carrying her out of the noise and blood and screams. The music had gone silent. Marianella carried her all the way out to the street, where the dome light was so bright, it hurt Eliana’s eyes. Her ears rang.

Marianella set her down gently. Eliana looked at the empty building across the street, and then she looked at Marianella, and then she threw up.

Marianella knelt beside her and held her hair out of her face. Eliana vomited until her stomach was empty, but she couldn’t stop retching and gagging, like she could expunge all her horror if she tried hard enough.

“It’s almost over,” Marianella whispered.

“How could you do that?” Eliana said. “How could you kill him like that?”

Marianella didn’t say anything, but her expression flickered with shame. Eliana sat back, and Marianella dropped her hair. Luciano stood by her side, unspeaking. Eliana couldn’t look at either one of them.

It wasn’t long before the screaming ceased.

“It’s over now,” Marianella said. She was speaking to Luciano.

The doors to the Florencia flung open. Sofia walked out. Her legs were splattered with blood. She stopped when she saw the three of them, and her head turned, taking them all in, one at a time.

“What’s she doing here?” she asked, jutting her chin at Eliana.

Eliana was too exhausted to answer, but Luciano stepped forward and said, “I’m afraid it’s my fault. She asked me. I was compelled to answer.”

Sofia glared down at Eliana. Part of her wanted to jump up and rip Sofia limb from limb, but it was only a small part, and the rest of her wanted to curl up so tightly that she’d disappear.

“It was not my programming,” Luciano said. “I thought it was wrong of you to keep the information from her.”

Sofia’s glare didn’t soften. “I see.”

Eliana started crying again. Sofia looked at her with disgust. “No one in that room deserved to live.”

“Sofia!” Marianella’s voice was sharp. “You got what you wanted. Let her grieve.”

“Grief is a waste of time. We need to leave. The police will arrive eventually. I don’t want to make my presence known to them yet.”

Marianella knelt down again and whispered comforts into Eliana’s ear. They hardly registered. Eliana didn’t care. All she could see was Diego’s dead body.

But somehow, she stood up, she steadied herself, she walked away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

SOFIA

Sofia dragged the knife down Luciano’s sternum. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. Black hydraulic fluid pooled up in a line along his bare skin. Sofia checked the readouts on the rotary display. His code whirred past; she’d set the rotary display to spin more quickly than it would for a human.

“Everything looks fine,” she said, and set the knife aside.

“Wonderful to hear.”

“You need to stop talking now.”

“Of course.” Luciano’s eyes flickered like television screens. What she’d said, it was too much like a command, and part of him still wanted to see her as human. After his reprogramming, that wouldn’t happen anymore.

Sofia pried Luciano’s sternum open. The wiring sparked and flickered through the murk of the hydraulic fluid. It was odd to see another android like that. Sofia had seen the inside of the maintenance drones, but they were different enough from her that she didn’t feel empathy. She would need to get used to it. Soon, when she had the city and she had the necessary supplies, she would begin repairing the broken androids locked away in the storage facility.

She was so close to an Antarctica for robots.

Carefully, she reached into Luciano’s chest cavity and removed his core engine, snapping the wires free as she had done for herself a week ago.

Luciano’s eyes blanked out, and his jaw went slack. Sofia glanced over at the rotary display. Everything looked fine. She disconnected the last wire and touched Luciano’s face, gently, and wondered what images he was seeing, what memories. If he saw any at all.

Sentience came back into his eyes. “Oh,” he said.

“I have your core engine,” she told him. “It won’t be long now. Lie still.”

“Did you lie still?” His voice was flat and childlike.

“Of course not, but I should have.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Your mind will clear in a moment.” Sofia drew her hand away from Luciano’s cheek and left streaks of black fluid against his skin. “I need to do the reprogramming now.”

“All right.”

Sofia carried the core engine over to the worktable. Hearing Luciano’s voice like that, flat and purposeless, gave her a hollow feeling she did not like. Soon, she told herself. Just a few moments more, and he would be whole for the first time in his existence.

She cracked open the core engine. The insides refracted the overhead lights onto the wall, an eerily beautiful display of golden light. Then Sofia grabbed the other micro-engine and began the slow process of dismantling the core engine, piece by piece, and refitting the micro-engine to be reprogrammable.

It took a long time.

The reprogramming itself did as well. It was a much more involved process than what Araceli had done for Sofia, because Sofia did not have access to Luciano’s complete schematics. But she and he had been produced in the same year, and their differences were largely inconsequential to what Sofia wished to do. In truth, he had fewer restrictions than she, since his role at the park had been more multipurpose.

After the afternoon at the Florencia, when Sofia had informed Araceli that she would be reprogramming Luciano, Araceli had begged her not to do it without a programming key or his schematics. But Luciano had insisted.

“I want to be like you,” he’d told Sofia as they’d stood in Araceli’s workshop.

“Are you almost done?” Luciano asked now. His voice was thin, and it hurt Sofia to hear it.

“Almost.” She glanced up at the rotary display. Another line of code fell out of existence.

“I was only curious,” Luciano said. “Don’t feel as if you have to rush.”

She hated that so much—that complacency, the dull feeling of not wanting to be a bother. No more. No robot would ever be like that again.

Finally, Sofia came to the end of Luciano’s code. She held the micro-engine aloft. The hydraulic fluid gleamed on her hands. The micro-engine was not much to look at, it was so old-fashioned. All those clockwork gears. But it was working for her, and it would work for him.

Sofia carried the micro-engine over to Luciano. He was still lying on his back, and he looked over at her expectantly. “Is that it?” he said.

“It is.” Sofia set it inside his chest. “I’m going to connect you now,” she said. “To reinstall. You’re going to reboot.” She hesitated. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Luciano didn’t respond.

Sofia hooked the micro-engine in, one wire at a time. With the last one, Luciano’s eyes rolled back until there was nothing but white in his eye sockets, white veined faintly with light. Sofia took a step back, her hands hanging at her sides, dripping hydraulic fluid everywhere. Was that what she had looked like? It was terrible.

And then Luciano blinked, and his eyes went back to normal, pupiled and full of sentience. He sat up with a quick lever-like motion and looked around the room. He looked at the walls, at the dismantled core engine, at Sofia’s hands.

“I feel brand-new,” he said, and smiled.

Sofia smiled back at him. With Cabrera dead, she’d be able to take his place in the ecosystem of the city, and from there she could work her way into Hope City’s infrastructure, destroying from the inside out. Quietly, but cataclysmically. All the humans would fall.

And now that Luciano was free, it could finally begin.

*  *  *  *

Sofia and Luciano sat side by side at a bar in downtown, near the city offices. They were facing a window so Sofia could watch the pedestrians walk by, humans in mainland-style clothes and neatly styled hair and a general air of superiority that Sofia found irritating—especially considering that the dome lights were dim and the shadows were long as if it were evening. But it was not evening. It was the middle of the afternoon.

“What if they don’t arrive?” Luciano asked.

“They will.” Sofia did not take her eyes off the window. “They won’t want to give up the benefits that come with aligning themselves with Cabrera.” Sofia had seen that much already, in the week since Luciano had been reprogrammed and she’d begun the slow, careful procedure of taking over Cabrera’s business, the second stage of her plan. She had started by paying off his contacts in the police department. They were all mainland supporters—the Independent cops wouldn’t dirty themselves for Cabrera. But she’d find a way to control all of the police department soon enough.

Cabrera’s old police contacts were happy to be rid of him, and she could tell in their meeting that they thought she would be easily controlled. As much as it pained her, she didn’t correct their error. She even made the same arrangement with them as she’d had with Cabrera, about the music and only playing songs from after 1936. Let them try to control her that way. They’d meet with a nasty little surprise. But she knew it was good to let them think they had the upper hand.

She wasn’t sure Cabrera’s city men would be so easy.

Footsteps against the tile—the waitress, coming back around to ask if they wanted to order anything.

“No,” Sofia said before she could ask. “We’re not interested in ordering.”

The waitress blinked at her with huge owl-like eyes. Then she frowned.

“Our friends will certainly order something,” Luciano said. “But I’m afraid we have a special diet.”

“Right,” the waitress said. “Well, I’m going to have to ask you to leave if they don’t get here soon.” She tucked her pencil behind her ear and turned around, although she glanced at them over her shoulder. Sofia glared at Luciano.

“Perhaps we should bring money in these situations,” he said. “Meeting at the Florencia was so much easier.”

“I’m not going back to the Florencia, not yet.” Sofia turned her gaze to the window.

Luciano didn’t say anything. Sofia stared out at the street. A group of men in dark suits and hats was walking toward the bar. They had the look of cullers, of city men.

“They’re here,” she said, just as the group converged on the bar. The door swung open and cold air billowed inside. Sofia twisted in her chair so that she could see the city men better. One of them caught her eye and nodded. Sofia turned away from him.

“It’s them,” she said.

“I apologize for our tardiness.” The city men were at their table now, their human scent wafting off them, mingling with the scent of food from the kitchen. The one who had caught Sofia’s eye was speaking. “These electrical issues—well, we’ve been having several meetings about them, as you can imagine.”

Sofia could not imagine, but she only gestured at the empty chairs and said, “Please. Sit.”

Three of the city men had come over to the table. Two others sat in a booth across the room, staring down at the menus.

“Assistants,” said the one who had spoken first, the one Sofia assumed was the leader. “They know about our arrangement with Mr. Cabrera, and are quite adept at keeping quiet.”

The other two nodded and murmured in agreement.

“Mr. Cabrera is dead,” Sofia said. “So I couldn’t care less about your arrangement with him. This is about your arrangement with me.”

The city men exchanged glances. A long moment ticked by. The waitress approached, gliding across the room like a shark.

Finally, the city men slid into their seats.

Their names were Mr. Garcia, Mr. Ruiz, and Mr. Bianchi, although Sofia did not know which was which, only that they had been the liaisons between Cabrera and the many people working for him in the city offices. Sofia tended to think of them as a collective. After all, it was men like them who had thought of robots as parts to be acquired.

The waitress asked if they would like to order anything, and they did, a wide variety of alcoholic drinks that Sofia recognized from her days in the amusement park. The memory didn’t make her chest ache anymore. She had a brighter future now.

“Well, Miss—” The leader hesitated. “Miss Sofia, I must say, we’re intrigued by your moxie.”

Sofia smiled and folded her hands on top of the table. “Thank you. Which one are you again?”

The man faltered. “Jorge Ruiz,” he said. “This is Alfredo Garcia, and this is Luis Bianchi.”

“Yes, of course.” She tilted her head. “I only spoke to your—what did you call them?—your assistants. It’s all very confusing to me, telling humans apart.”

Mr. Ruiz coughed into his hand. The other two stared down at the table.

“The android sitting beside me is Luciano,” Sofia said. “He’s my associate. Not my assistant.” She tittered like she was flirting. Luciano smiled gravely.

“I see,” said Mr. Ruiz. He glanced over at the bar, where the bartender was mixing up their drinks.

“Since you’re such admirers of my moxie,” Sofia said, “perhaps you’ll be keen to learn that I’ve decided to take over Mr. Cabrera’s business.”

Mr. Ruiz jerked his gaze back toward her. His eyes glittered. He was nervous. Maybe even scared. So were the other two.

“Yes, my assistant mentioned that,” he said.

The waitress came over with a tray. She set down napkins and then she set down drinks, and then she gave Sofia and Luciano a lingering dark look before going on her way.

“We always preferred to talk business at the Florencia,” Mr. Bianchi said.

“The Florencia’s not available to us at the moment. We’ll have to talk here.” Sofia leaned back in her chair.

“You don’t have to worry about the police,” Luciano said. “If indeed that’s what you’re worried about.”

The city men exchanged glances. “The police? You’ve got the police on payroll?”

“The ones that matter, yes.” Sofia smiled, and she could feel the effect that incandescence had on those three men—all in spite of themselves, no doubt. They weren’t like Cabrera. They weren’t monsters on the inside. “And I intend to keep you as well. Nothing about your previous arrangement will change, with one exception.”

She paused. Mr. Ruiz leaned forward, his fingers resting on the rim of his glass. “The exception is that you’re an andie,” he said in a low voice.

“No.” Sofia leaned forward to meet his stare over the center of the table. “The exception is that the city will stop all culling of robot parts from the amusement park.”

Silence. Sofia didn’t move; she would not be the one to move first, and she wasn’t. Mr. Ruiz sank back in his chair and took a long drink.

“We have to be able to build maintenance drones,” he said. “You can’t expect—”

“I’ll bring in the parts that you need,” Sofia said. “From the mainland. But you will not harm any robot who already exists in this city.”

Mr. Ruiz sighed. “That’s going to be a hard order to pass on to the brass, Miss Sofia. They aren’t all on the payroll—”

“But you are,” she said, “and I’ll pay twice what Cabrera did. Just to keep a few robots safe.”

That had Mr. Ruiz’s attention. Mr. Garcia’s too, from the way he grinned and leaned over to whisper something into Mr. Ruiz’s ear. Mr. Bianchi took a long drink.

“Twice the income,” Sofia said. “For something that’s really not so difficult. The park was running dry anyway, wasn’t it? And I can get the new robot parts to you quite cheaply.”

Mr. Ruiz didn’t take his eyes off her. She wondered if he thought that if he stared at her hard enough, he’d be able to see straight through her skin and her framework and learn all her secrets. Let him try. What Mr. Ruiz didn’t know was that Sofia only offered this deal because she knew it didn’t need to be sustainable; in a year’s time, robots would come to Hope City on their own, or they would be resurrected out of the slaughter the cullers had left behind. And Mr. Ruiz would be living in a villa in some mainland jungle.

“I think we can take that deal,” Mr. Ruiz said. The other two nodded.

Sofia smiled.

*  *  *  *

A week went by.

Things changed quickly in that time. Sofia lay claim to the icebreakers, walking on board each one and personally triggering the code she had hidden in each robot when she’d reprogrammed it for Cabrera. The reconfigured robots responded only to her commands, whether by touch, by voice, or by radio waves.

Cabrera’s errand-runners were as easily swayed to her side as the cops and the city men had been. She had killed enough of Cabrera’s shooters that the rest were terrified of her, and she called them each into her office one by one and explained that their lives would go on unchanged, except for who they answered to. She would give them goods to distribute, she would pay them, and everyone could be happy.

There were only two who protested, one who refused to work for a robot and one who refused to work for a woman. She killed them both, although she did not tell Marianella.

And so Sofia ingratiated herself into the sphere of Cabrera’s power. She sent money to all of Cabrera’s old contacts, and her icebreakers kept coming in without being stopped by the dock guards, and her errand-runners kept distributing the products at an elevated price. Things would go on this way until the spring, and the humans of the city would never know that she was eating away at their home bit by bit, eliminating those in power who could not be bought off so easily. The political infrastructure of Hope City would collapse, and humans would move out of Antarctica in search of stability.

Things at the park changed little. Eliana left—she no longer had anything to fear from Cabrera or that boyfriend of hers, and so she moved back to the smokestack district. Marianella tried to convince her not to, citing the blackouts and the general danger of the city, but Eliana didn’t listen. Not that Sofia would have expected her to. Humans.

The blackouts were the one thing that gnawed at the back of Sofia’s mind. Yes, they were convenient for her. They kept the humans scared, nervous, and that made it easier for Sofia to control them. But the sentient maintenance drones all insisted they weren’t causing them, and her contacts at the city office gave her the usual lines about AFF computer viruses. That was a troublesome thought. As difficult as the Independents were to infiltrate, the AFF was, at the moment, impregnable. It bothered Sofia, knowing there were humans in the city who could undo her, humans whose identity she couldn’t learn, no matter how much money she paid out.