She reached her hand into the copper wires. Her skin sparked. The robot’s code rode over her—this robot’s code, and the code of all the other robots. One was the same as any other. They shared an intelligence.
The rustle of the plants became a harsh mechanical slur in the buzz of information. She closed her eyes, and the world went dark except for the little robot revealing itself to her. Its programming flashed across the interior of her machine brain, and her human brain interpreted that information as streaks of light.
This went on for a long time.
When it finished, Marianella’s eyes flew open and she stared out at the corn, waiting for her mind to return to itself. She slid her hand out of the robot’s wires. It was unchanged, her skin pale and unblemished, her nails filed into perfect curves and French-tipped. Not even a mainland style. European. She went so overboard in trying to prove she was normal.
Marianella settled back into herself. Her mind was still on fire, though, bright with the memory of the robot.
She closed him up, turned him over, twisted the lights in the opposite direction. The robot came back on, and then so did all the others. They looked at her expectantly.
“Just what I thought,” she said, her voice shimmering on the wind. “Your programming remains unbroken.”
The robots didn’t react, and Marianella left them so she could walk the paths through the dome, slow and meditative, her head bowed in prayer.
She always did this when she came here alone.
* * * *
When Marianella finally arrived back at Southstar, night was falling, winter-early. Hector had installed moonlights in their dome, dots of silvery brightness that leached the color out of everything and cast long, unfamiliar shadows in the wheat. They had come to Hope City together from the mainland, both looking for new lives—Marianella so she could hide her nature and start over with a clean slate of humanity, Hector because he had followed the promise of wealth from the atomic plants—and so both of them had remembered the moon and the stars. But the moonlights were not the moon, and she’d always intended to have them turned off now that Hector was gone. She just hadn’t done it yet.
The wheat rustled its sad soft song, and Marianella unlocked her front door and stepped inside. The door swung shut behind her. She took off her coat. Turned on the lights.
And froze.
Something was wrong. She could sense it, a disruption in the circulation of the house’s air.
The hallway light was white and dazzling, as if it were refracting off a thousand mirrors. But Marianella could sense shadows amid all that brightness. A shadow. A man.
Someone was in the house, waiting for her.
“Who’s here!” she shouted. She took off her scarf. She kept on her gloves. “I know you’re here! Who is it!”
God, why hadn’t her maintenance drones intercepted her? She should have asked Luciano to stay. He’d offered. But she’d said no and told him she could take care of herself.
“Mother of mercy,” she whispered.
The house answered her with silence.
“Who’s here!” she shouted, and this time, she caught a scent on the air. Cigar smoke and wool and aftershave and the faint, faint trace of women’s perfume.
He was here.
Not just one of his enforcers but him.
“Where are you?” she shouted. “I know you’re in here!”
Silence. Brightness.
Footsteps.
“Brave, brave woman,” said a silken voice. “I gave you time to run.”
Marianella stood ramrod straight. Ignacio Cabrera stepped out of the parlor doorway, looking like a businessman in his gray suit and his black fedora. He cradled one of her maintenance drones in his arms, its wires hanging out in loops and tangles. Her stomach turned over at the sight of it.
“You’re in my house,” she said.
He dropped the drone, and it broke when it hit the floor, parts scattering across the tile.
“So it would appear.” An easy smile. Marianella knew not to look at it. She looked at his eyes instead, cold and empty, to remind herself of what he was.
“It’s been a while.” He ambled toward her. Marianella didn’t move. She caught the scent of others in the house.
“I missed this place,” Ignacio said. “Miss Hector, too.” He stopped a few paces from her and smiled. “I’ve seen your commercials on the television. An agricultural dome, Marianella? You don’t think that’s going to work, do you?”
“What do you want?”
He didn’t answer right away. Every muscle in Marianella’s body was taut. Her heart raced and raced. He’d come to collect her documents himself this time. She still didn’t understand why Hector would have betrayed her like that, why he would have alerted Ignacio to the possibility of a weakness. She should never have told Hector her secret, all those years ago. But she had been young and stupid.
“That’s no way to treat a guest,” he said.
“You aren’t a guest.”
He gave her a long, inscrutable look. “No,” he said. “I suppose I’m not. But I had a message I wanted to deliver myself. I figured I owe that much to Hector.”
She knew the men were coming. She heard the distant fall of their footsteps against the carpet. She felt their heat closing in on her. But she panicked, and she didn’t know what to do.
One of them grabbed both of her arms and jerked her back; the other shoved the barrel of a gun into her side. Cold metal locked around her wrists. She didn’t try to fight back. Her heart was beating too fast, as fast as a hummingbird’s. The machine parts of her body reinforced the rest of her for what was to come.
Ignacio leaned in close, and Marianella remembered the first time she’d seen him. They’d just moved to Hope City, and her husband had thrown a summer solstice party and Ignacio had been there. She’d taken one look at him and known he was a murderer.
“Time to go,” Ignacio said, and then one of the men threw a bag over her head. The material was thick enough that the world blinked out. She was jerked backward, stumbling, not out the front door as she’d expected but through the familiar pattern of her house’s rooms. Her hip banged against a table. Glass rattled. The mechanical parts of her brain tracked their progress—down the hallway, through the living room, the dining room. Toward the patio door.
She knew she should fight back, but she didn’t want to, because she wouldn’t be able to muffle her strength. She didn’t want to risk revealing her secret to Ignacio if he didn’t already know—and she suspected, with the way his men had come in here unarmed save for their guns, the way they’d tossed a bag over her head, that he didn’t.
She only prayed that he or his men wouldn’t find the secret lockbox hidden behind the refrigerator, where she’d tucked the documents away after the first break-in. If he learned what she was, she would have to kill him herself.
And she didn’t think she could do that.
A sudden rush of wheat-scented wind told her they were outside. She smelled car exhaust.
“What?” she said, breaking her silence out of surprise. Her lips rubbed against the rough fabric of the bag. “A car. How did you get a car out of the main dome?”
“You know I have my ways, Lady Luna.”
They dragged her through the wheat. Not far. A car door opened. She was shoved inside, pushed onto the seat. The gun was still in her side. The door closed. Another opened. She tracked these sounds and she tracked the scent of the men, and in her head she saw a picture of herself, still dressed for travel in the city, her arms lashed behind her, flanked by two men with guns.
“You have a lovely home,” Ignacio said. His voice was close by, coming from in front of her, like he was facing her. “But it’s always much better to do business on my own turf. Don’t you think?”
“You don’t do business.”
Ignacio laughed. The car’s engine started, a rumbling beneath her seat. They were moving. She could hear the wheat scraping against the windows.
“Of course I do business,” he said. “That’s all I do. Your husband understood that.”
“Hector is dead.”
“So he is. And with him went my monthly checks from the Luna family.”
Marianella’s heart lurched. Was it possible that could be the only reason he was here?
“It’s only been six months.” Every time Marianella opened her mouth, the bag stuck to her lips. “Surely you haven’t fallen on hard times already?”
“Cut the bullshit, Lady Luna. That was a minor irritation, to be certain, but the new manager at the plant has taken up Hector’s donation habits. He appreciates the protection I give them. Paying me is cheaper than paying all those taxes to the city.” The wind whistled through the windows. Cold. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for the last two years. I was willing to look away from your work with Alejo Ortiz when Hector was alive, but if you can’t even see fit to send a few donations my way to make up for stirring up the Independents, well, I guess my relationship with the Luna family is, sadly, over.”
Marianella didn’t respond. The air inside the bag was thick and humid from her breath. Her heart raced.
“The city government isn’t the only group who distributes food in the winter. I get food to the people of Hope City too,” he said. “Delicacies like they couldn’t imagine. And you want to take all that away from me.”
“You get food to the people who can pay,” she snapped. “You starve everyone else.”
“I’m a businessman, Lady, and it’s not my fault that I follow the price of goods. The mainland wouldn’t provide half the things I can provide if we left it to them. They don’t care about us. They have their own problems.”
“It seems you and Alejo agree on something, then.”
Ignacio laughed. “It doesn’t matter what we agree on,” he said, switching his dialect from the sharp vowels of Antarctican Spanish over to the whispery lisp of mainland Castilian. “I don’t want Independence any more than the assholes up at the city offices.”
Marianella worked at the binds around her wrists, but they were much too tight for her to believably pull them free.
“But I’m not here to talk politics.” Back to Antarctican again. “I won’t worry about the ag domes until I’ve seen one.”
Relief flooded through her body, and she sat still in the moving darkness, hands cramping behind her. He doesn’t know, she thought. Thank the sweet Mother, he doesn’t know.
“I’m here to talk about a man named Pablo Sala.”
And with that, every part of Marianella’s system froze into place.
“Who?” she lied, her voice strained.
“He paid a visit to you a week or so ago and took something from you. Unfortunately, I never got to see it.”
She would not give him the pleasure of hearing her sputter and struggle for the right words. The car bumped along, the tires thumping against the ground, and the wind was louder now. And colder.
Beneath the straw scent of the bag, she smelled snow.
“Some whore stole those documents out from under him—at least, that’s what he claimed. I’d have him steal them again, given how he managed well enough the first time, but sadly, Sala’s dead now. You can thank Diego for that.”
A bead of sweat formed between Marianella’s shoulder blades and fell in a straight path down her spine.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sweated.
“I assure you Sala’s death is not my fault,” Cabrera said. “I don’t want you thinking I’m some sort of monster. But Diego, bless him, got a bit overenthusiastic while questioning him. Isn’t that right, Diego?”
There was a heavy silence in the car, and then a quiet male voice said, “Yes.”
“See? All Diego’s fault. But I still don’t know what was in those documents. Do you care to tell me yourself?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The car stopped. For a moment no one spoke, and there was only the sound of the idling engine.
And then that cut off too.
“You’re a lovely woman,” Ignacio said, “but I’m afraid I’ve never really warmed to you.”
A door opened. Cold air rushed in, smelling of metal and ice.
The edge.
A hand gripped Marianella’s arm and dragged her out of the car. The ground was hard and gravelly, and the wind stirring at her skirt wasn’t the artificial air that pumped through the dome’s wind generators but the real thing, a trickle of it through the cracks.
The hood came off in an explosion of light. Marianella’s pupils contracted. Ignacio stood in front of her, his hat shrouding his eyes.
Behind him: glass.
It was full dark now, with no fake stars or fake moon this far out. The car’s headlights shone on Ignacio, casting his shadow across the dark, ice-encrusted glass.
Marianella’s fear was a poison, breaking her down.
“It was easier to get here than I expected,” Ignacio said. “I have a spot in the main dome I favor, a place where I control the guard robots.” His voice was flat, emotionless, and his coat kept blowing in the wind, back and forth. Marianella stared at it and felt a metallic hollowness inside her chest.
“But you don’t pay much mind to the edges out here,” he went on. “Funny that you won’t depend on the city for your light or your heat but you’ll depend on it to keep the entrances locked.”
“Why are you doing this?” Marianella’s voice didn’t shake. She was proud of that.
Ignacio looked at her. “I haven’t done anything, Lady. Yet. If you want to stop me, just tell me what was in those documents.”
Nothing moved except the wind, whistling as it slid over the glass, a mournful, plaintive sound that reminded Marianella of weeping.
“A deed to an estate on the mainland,” she said.
“Don’t lie, Lady Luna. It doesn’t suit you.”
“I’m not lying.”
“So if we drive back to Southstar and you pull them out of the file, that’s all I’ll find? A deed?” Ignacio smiled, showing all his teeth. “I doubt it very much.”
Hector, Marianella thought. Why did you do this to me?
“I was promised a way to destroy you, but I don’t need papers to do that, really. And killing you helps with another problem of mine.”
Marianella glared at him. She shook with fear, with the rage of Hector’s betrayal.
“That problem being Alejo Ortiz, of course. I just can’t get to him yet. He’s too protected. That’s the problem with politicians. I kill him, I’ve just got a martyr on my hands. The Independence movement has gained enough traction for it. But if I kill you, well, I’ve managed to send Ortiz a message, haven’t I? Especially doing it this way, where it looks like an accident, maybe even a suicide—the poor Lady Luna, distraught over the death of her husband.”
Marianella did not turn away.
“You really are a brave woman,” Ignacio said. “You do this with men, and they scream and beg for their lives.” He tilted his head. “It must be that aristocratic blood. You would never do anything so undignified.”
“It’s not my title keeping me dignified.”
Ignacio stared at her for a moment, then laughed. “Whatever it is, I find it admirable. Don’t worry, Lady. It’ll be like going to sleep. We’re long into winter. I imagine death will be a short time coming.”
Marianella was numb, as if she were already out in the cold. She thought about the black howling winds, the expanse of white desert. Anxiety crawled over her skin.
“May Hector forgive me,” Ignacio said, and one of the men in dark suits stepped away from her and walked up to the dome wall.
&n
bsp; “May God forgive you too,” Marianella said.
“There is no God.”
The man tapped a code into the glass. The pattern reverberated through Marianella’s bones.
She held her breath.
The glass slid away with a loud screeching clang, and the snow billowed in, sparking and glittering in the yellow headlights. It scattered across the cement ground, spilled over Marianella’s shoes. The wind shoved her hair away from her face and plastered her clothes to her body, and she turned her head against the stinging in her eyes. The man with the gun shoved her forward. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ignacio watching her, the collar of his jacket turned up, one hand holding on to his fedora. He didn’t speak. She didn’t speak. Her entire body was shaking.
A weight pressed into the small of her back. A shove.
And then she was outside the dome.
She whirled around, the cold clinging to her legs, to her face, to her hair, to everything. The opening to the dome slid shut, and through the iced-over glass she saw the haze of the car lights.
And then those pulled away, and she saw only darkness.
She stood, not moving. Her hands were still lashed behind her back. At the moment, this was more troubling to her than the cold. She edged forward, forcing her way through the freezing, slicing winds, until she bumped up against the dome glass. Marianella could withstand the cold, but if she wandered off into the desert, she would never find her way back, and she’d starve instead. I imagine death will be a short time coming, he’d said, in his dead devil’s voice.
For her, it would. Sometimes strength had its weaknesses.
She leaned up against the glass and took deep, gulping breaths. “Our Lady of the Ice,” she whispered, breath solidifying in the air in front of her. “Protect us from the cold. Draw us into the warmth of the Lord. Our Lady of the Ice, deliver us from evil’s winter darkness. Amen.”
The prayer gave her strength, but her body was shivering so hard that it was difficult for her to keep her thoughts in order. The maintenance drones. If she could find one, just one, with ties to Sofia and Luciano—