Our Lady of the Ice

  “He said he’s from the city,” Eliana said. “And given what I’ve seen of him, he looks like a city man. It doesn’t seem like something worth lying over, anyway.”

  Marianella frowned. She didn’t look as put-together as she usually did. Her hair hung loose, her clothes were wrinkled. But she was still beautiful, and her unhappiness only magnified that. “If he’s from the city,” she said, “that would make sense, actually.”

  “Why?”

  Marianella looked to some point in the distance, toward the overgrown gardens. “Do you know where the maintenance drones come from?” she said.

  “The city builds them? Marianella, look, I’m sorry, but I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Yes.” A stillness settled over Marianella that made her seem less human. “The city builds them. Do you know where the parts come from?”

  Dread crept into Eliana’s stomach. She didn’t know where this was going, and that made her nervous. “The mainland?”

  Marianella shook her head.

  “Then where—”

  “From here.” Marianella gestured with one hand. “From the amusement park. From the robots who live in the amusement park.”

  Eliana fell silent.

  “I’m not sure why they didn’t dismantle them all at once—too big of an undertaking, I suppose. They’ve been coming here for years, although they don’t come around so much anymore. Partly because there aren’t as many robots to cull from, but partly because Sofia learned how to stop them. The androids in particular—they were the first of the robots here to gain intelligence, and they were being mutilated and destroyed so the city could make more drones. So she hid them away, where they can’t be destroyed further. She plans on repairing them someday, when it’s safe.” Marianella smiled again. Wistful. “And that makes the city very unhappy with her.”

  Eliana didn’t know what to say. The robots had gained intelligence? Luciano and Sofia weren’t meant to be that way?

  “If the man’s from the city, it’s just as dangerous as if he’s from Cabrera,” Marianella continued. “For Sofia and for me. The city will want to know why I’m living down here. It will arouse suspicion.” She grabbed Eliana’s hands. Her palms were warm. Human. “Please, Eliana. Feed him false information if you like, but nothing that could bring them here. Will you promise me that?”

  Marianella’s eyes were bright and imploring. Eliana couldn’t say no.

  * * * *

  Eliana trudged up the stairs to her apartment, the cold air lingering on her skin. Marianella had put her on a train back into the city, and she was vibrating from leftover adrenaline. She’d have to write up a bit of false information to feed to Mr. Gonzalez—she’d gone down to the park but hadn’t seen anything except old steam-style maintenance drones. That should be safe enough, and she’d at least get her doubled daily fees.

  Eliana had the vague idea that she could string Mr. Gonzalez along for a few weeks. Could be more lucrative than just giving him the information in one go. But it was also the sort of thing she would have done last summer for kicks. Now she understood just how dangerous that was. For herself, for her goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Mr. Cabrera had Sala killed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What happened!”

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

  “You got shot?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Guess not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Eliana closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MARIANELLA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Will it match?” Luciano asked.

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

  Luciano nodded.

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

  “Of course.” Luciano didn’t move.

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

  “I understand.”

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

  “Stop the repair box.”

  “Good. That’s perfect.”

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

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

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

  “And she still gives it?”

  “It has all the necessary information.”

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

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

  “All right.”

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

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

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

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

  “Ready?” Araceli asked.

  “Yes, I’m ready.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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