Our Lady of the Ice

  Being with Sofia in that way had been an abomination unto itself. A sin. And yet Marianella had seen the beauty of their relationship, eventually, even if it still left her shaky with guilt sometimes, in a way her tryst with Alejo Ortiz never had. But seeing that beauty in the abomination of herself, the abomination of her machine parts—

  That was impossible.

  “—really going to take all day?” Sofia was saying.

  Marianella blinked out of her reverie. Araceli stretched out a piece of ticker tape, and she and Sofia hunched over it.

  “I don’t remember it taking that long when I had it done,” Sofia said.

  “Did you ever have to repair your face?”

  “Well, no.”

  “That’s why.” Araceli dropped the ticker tape back into the pile. “It’s not just a matter of stretching some false skin over the frame. The gunshot blasted away a lot of the muscle, too—I don’t want any paralysis when we’re done.”

  Sofia nodded. She glanced over at Marianella. “You hear that? Your little friend almost caused Luciano’s face to become paralyzed.”

  “She didn’t do it on purpose,” Marianella said. “She panicked.”

  “Humans always cause destruction when they panic. I suppose it’s a good thing for your friend that Luciano’s not human. He just lost a few hours instead of his whole life.”

  Marianella didn’t say anything. Eliana had apologized to Luciano when they’d walked her back to the train station, stuttering and looking at her feet. Luciano had told her he was fine and handed back her gun. And he’d meant it too. But Sofia was right; Eliana was lucky she hadn’t panicked and shot a human man.

  They fell into silence after that. The repair box hummed and trembled, and Luciano’s code spilled out on strips of ticker tape. The three of them watched it pool onto the floor. As far as Marianella could tell, nothing was out of the ordinary with Luciano’s system. Nothing was going wrong.

  And then one of the park Klaxons began to wail.

  At first Marianella thought it was from Luciano’s repairs, that the machine had broken him. Her eyes flew to the ticker-tape machine, but it still tapped out the same unending rhythm.

  Sofia and Araceli both leapt to their feet.

  “We have to get to operations,” Sofia said. “I told you we should have installed the surveillance computer here as well.”

  “That was impossible. We didn’t have the parts.” Araceli jogged over to the repair box speaker. “Luciano! It’s Araceli. We’re not taking you out—it could mess up the re-musculature. But we’ll lock up the workshop and I’ll stay here to watch over you.”

  “What’s going on?” Marianella asked, her heart hammering, her computers reining it in, suppressing that very human fear. Her hand went to her necklace. “Lock up the workshop?”

  “It’s a culling.” Sofia was standing by the door, putting codes into the locking system. She looked at Marianella from across the room. “You’ve never seen one before.”

  “A culling,” Marianella whispered.

  “You don’t need to worry. Their scanners will see you as a human.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Marianella’s voice was breathy with panic.

  Sofia put in the last of the codes, and the doors slid open, a red light blinking overhead. She looked at Marianella. “Because I know the sort of scanners they use. They’re primitive. But you need to come with me. We have to draw the cullers away from the workshop.”

  “We?” Marianella looked back at Araceli and the repair box, and then she understood. They’d come here first otherwise, because they’d see the steam belching into the air.

  And then they’d take Luciano.

  “Yes, we. I told you, they aren’t looking for cyborgs.” Sofia marched across the workshop and grabbed Marianella by the hand. The light above the door was still blinking red, blinking faster now. “The whole workshop’s about to go on lockdown. Come on.”

  “They could be looking for me,” Marianella said. “Ignacio could have seen me, he could have figured it out. An anonymous tip, that’s all it would take.”

  Sofia took her by the hand. “It’s a culling. I wouldn’t do anything to put you in danger.”

  And she yanked Marianella out of the workshop just as the blinking light went solid. The doors slammed closed with a loud reverberating clang, and Marianella and Sofia stood out in the bright floodlights.

  The park was silent and still. No Klaxons, no robots, no men from the city.

  “You wouldn’t put me in danger,” Marianella whispered, “but you’d put yourself.”

  Sofia pulled her forward on the path, heading in the direction of the Ice Palace. “The Klaxons sound anytime someone unauthorized opens the gate.” Sofia walked more quickly, and Marianella stumbled after her, terrified. She was too vulnerable out here in the open. “Every robot here has the alert system worked into their programming. Even the stupid little entertainment robots. So they know to hide.”

  They were jogging now, their feet pounding with panicked urgency against the cobblestone paths.

  Marianella felt dizzy.

  Sofia stopped abruptly. She closed her eyes. For a moment Marianella felt a disturbance on the air, a transmission she couldn’t quite see.

  “Inéz will help.” Sofia nodded, and then pulled Marianella along. “We need to get to the operations room so we can see where they are.”

  “Inéz?” Marianella’s thoughts spun around and around. She clutched at her cross. “I thought she was out of the park! Why wasn’t she helping Araceli?”

  “Because she was tending to the robots in storage.”

  They came to the garden at the edge of the Ice Palace. Marianella’s machine parts were doing all the breathing for her, her lungs expanding and contracting so that she wouldn’t be out of breath. She didn’t believe these city men would see her as human. She wasn’t human.

  Inéz stepped out from behind the trees and smiled at Marianella like she wanted to ask if Marianella needed anything.

  “Stay here,” Sofia commanded. “Inéz, I’ll transmit to you where to find the cullers. They should be headed for the workshop, but it’ll be another fifteen minutes before they make it.”

  Inéz nodded. Sofia didn’t explain anything further to her; she must have done it through the transmission while they’d been running to the Ice Palace. Sofia turned and jogged down the path to the palace’s doors, and Marianella wanted to call out for her not to leave. Marianella had already almost died. It was too soon to go through all this again.

  But Luciano. She wouldn’t let them take Luciano.

  Sofia disappeared around the bend.

  “Don’t let them see your face,” Inéz said.

  “What?” Marianella’s chest rose and fell. She stared at the place where Sofia had been. “My face?”

  “You’re famous,” Inéz said calmly.

  Marianella looked at her.

  “They’ll recognize you as Lady Luna. That would be unfortunate, yes?”

  Marianella nodded. Her whole body was shaking. She’d faced down Ignacio Cabrera and yet she couldn’t stop shaking.

  Because this was different. Ignacio only wished to kill her. These men—they could learn her secret. They could destroy her.

  “The roller coaster,” Inéz said, voice sharp. “Come.”

  She took off down the path.

  Marianella hesitated. It happened too fast, the transmission from Sofia. She stared at the path, hoping Sofia would reappear. But there was only stillness.

  “Marianella!” Inéz called out. “Come! Please! There are three paths away from the workshop. We need one for each path.”

  Of course. One for each path. Marianella choked back her fear and joined Inéz on the path toward the roller coaster. She could already see it, twisting up over the park, dark wood against the
white sky.

  “Where’s Sofia?” Marianella asked. “Do you know?”

  “Intercepting them at the penguin pond,” Inéz said. She stared straight ahead, focused. “She’s going to bring them to the roller coaster, and then we’ll fan out, drawing them away from the workshop.”

  The plan didn’t make any sense to Marianella. It wouldn’t coalesce inside her head. She only saw fragments of it—vulnerable Luciano, Sofia racing through the open park, a man in a gray suit cutting Marianella open and finding the machinery that took away her humanity.

  Marianella whispered a Hail Mary, the prayer that always brought her the most comfort. The Virgin had once appeared to a pair of Antarctic explorers trapped on the ice, in the years before the city was built. She came to them covered in ice and wrapped in furs, a mother of Antarctica. Marianella wondered if the Virgin ever came to cyborgs, her holiness shot through with machinery. Robots didn’t need her. But a cyborg was not a robot.

  Maybe she would come to Marianella today.

  Marianella whispered the prayer over and over. Inéz said nothing about it, out of deference, most likely, because, like Luciano, she would see Marianella as mostly human. The prayer calmed Marianella’s nerves, enough that she became aware of her surroundings again. Aware that they were at the base of the roller coaster.

  “Quiet, Marianella,” Inéz said politely, laying one hand on Marianella’s wrist.

  Marianella tensed. Her body shuddered as it drew her defense mechanisms to the fore. She took a deep breath. The white paint covering the asphalt glittered beneath the dome lights. The roller coaster lurked like a sleeping dragon.

  “They’re approaching soon,” Inéz whispered. “Sofia is bringing them straight to us. Be prepared to run.”

  Marianella nodded. Her muscles were imbued with a sudden energy from her computer parts.

  Silence.

  Stillness.

  And then, Marianella’s ears perked—footsteps. She heard footsteps.

  Sofia burst out of the path, her dark hair streaming out behind her like a comet.

  Two men followed.

  For a moment Sofia was there in the light, a blazing streak of power, and then she disappeared into the overgrown path leading to the gardens.

  “Now!” Inéz broke away from Marianella and leapt across the roller coaster platform. She hit the asphalt and ran, faster than a human could. The men shouted.

  “Split up!” the taller said. “Follow the other one.”

  The shorter nodded and veered off into the tangle of vines, after Sofia. Inéz looped around the base of the roller coaster, the taller man following her.

  Sofia.

  Sofia was in danger.

  This was enough to spur Marianella into action, and she leapt out of the path and raced across the platform, not thinking about anything but Sofia, and saving Sofia, and keeping the shorter man from hurting her—

  A woman screamed.

  The sound jarred Marianella out of her trance. Sofia didn’t need her help; Sofia had survived the cullings for years. But Marianella could not let either of these men see her face.

  Another scream. It was close, and Marianella knew it belonged to Inéz. She dove into the vines, hiding in the shadows.

  More screaming.

  She peered through the vines, her breath coming short and fast. The taller man stood directly in her line of sight, his back to her. He was hunched over the fallen figure of Inéz. He wore a businessman’s gray suit. The fabric shone a little in the sun, and that meant the suit was expensive.

  Marianella didn’t dare move, afraid of making noise. She didn’t understand why a man with an expensive suit would be culling robots in the park—hadn’t Sofia said they came from the city? No one running errands for the city wore a suit like that.

  The man pulled a radio out of his pocket. “Echo to Swan. You got the other one?”

  Marianella’s entire body turned to ice, but the radio crackled and the voice on the end said, “Negative. Lost her. Not sure where I am—the old hotels, maybe. Don’t see anything else, though. They’re smarter than we expected.”

  The other end of the park from the workshop. Marianella closed her eyes. Luciano was safe. Sofia too. But Inéz—

  The man shifted his weight. “Too bad. I got one andie. Not sure how much use it’ll be. Spotted the third one, but I can’t see where it went.”

  He kicked at Inéz’s body.

  Horror spread through Marianella’s system. She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. The man stepped away and tilted his head up at the sky. She still couldn’t see his face.

  “Not seeing much of anything here. Where’d you say you are again, the hotels?”

  Crackle. “Looks like it.”

  The man didn’t say anything else. He slipped the radio back into his pocket and looked down at Inéz’s body. Walked around it in a circle, like he was appraising her for slaughter.

  And, like that, Marianella recognized him.

  She had seen him at parties before, galas she and Alejo Ortiz threw for their fund-raisers, for the agricultural domes. His name was Andres Costa. He was one of Alejo’s many political aides, young men in suits who petitioned the city and helped plan Alejo’s reelection campaigns.

  He did not work for the city.

  He should not be here, culling robots. That was not part of Alejo’s work.

  Marianella felt like she was sinking into the soil. Andres walked around Inéz’s body; then he pulled out the radio and said “Halo Codex Marrow” and dropped it back into his pocket. Inéz didn’t move.

  Inéz was dead.

  Andres scanned over the roller coaster platform, his hands tucked into his pockets. Then he kicked at Inéz’s body again—Marianella stiffened with disgust—and walked away. He strolled past the vines where Marianella was hiding, but he didn’t look at them. He didn’t look at her.

  She listened to his footsteps falling away. Tears streaked over her face and dropped onto her blouse. She folded her hands and whispered a death prayer: “Saints of God, come to her aid. Come to meet her, angels of the Lord.” It was probably heresy. She didn’t care. The Church was changing anyway, pulling itself into the modern world. Spanish masses and Protestant hymns. If God could accept that, then certainly He would accept a prayer for an android.

  She finished the prayer and listened again for the sound of humans. But there was only silence.

  Marianella crawled out of the vines, leaves sticking to her hair and dirt staining the hem of her skirt. Inéz lay in a crumpled heap on the asphalt. Her stomach had been split open, and wires spilled out, illuminated golden-white by the dome light. Marianella had seen the inside of a robot before—she had seen the inside of an android before, in fact. But this left her cold and afraid.

  She knelt down beside Inéz. The wires were sliced in half. Severed. There was no way of repairing her.

  Marianella leaned back on her heels. She was still crying, slowly and silently. She said the Memorare and an Our Father. Then she stood up, shaking. Andres might have ordered maintenance drones to come here, to collect Inéz in some way. Marianella wasn’t sure if the park drones could stop them. She shouldn’t be here if they arrived.

  She stumbled away, sticking close to the vines in case she needed to dive into the shadows again. She could not escape the feeling, subtle and insidious, that Inéz was dead because she, Marianella, was a coward. Because she did not want to be discovered.

  And yet it was one of Alejo’s men—

  She was too terrified to sort out mysteries right now. But the mysteries came to her anyway, questions made to look like pieces of information. And there was one piece of information that kept coming to her, over and over.

  The wires that had been severed in Inéz’s stomach were some of the most expensive and sophisticated technology in the world, despi
te their age. In fact, it was because of that age that they were irreplaceable. If someone were culling androids for parts, they would never cut them. Never.

  Marianella stumbled her way toward the Ice Palace, a single question blazing in her head:

  What the hell was Alejo doing?

  * * * *

  Marianella paced in her bedroom, her rosary wound around her wrists—Luciano had brought it back with her clothes and documents. She hadn’t asked for it, but he’d told her that he thought she might want it. Then he’d added, “And your house is quite secure,” although she hadn’t asked about that, either, and he hadn’t explained further.

  Marianella rubbed at the beads thoughtlessly. She wasn’t praying. That had been her intention, when she’d pulled the rosary out of the top drawer of her vanity—to pray for Inéz. But her mind was too caught up in the possibility of Alejo’s involvement.

  If he had sent Andres, he had known she would be here. But maybe he’d assumed she would hide when the cullers came in; maybe he’d wanted her to see.

  But then, it could just be some city work, something unavoidable. He hadn’t meant to put her in danger.

  Or maybe Andres had come here on his own, for reasons unrelated to Alejo.

  Marianella kept moving, walking back and forth across the length of her room. Her motions were mechanical, rote. She was hardly aware she was doing it.

  In her head, she replayed the moment of Inéz’s death. She thought of the scream, the wires glittering in the dome light. She thought of Andres kicking at the body.

  Anger bubbled up inside her, startling in its intensity. She stopped. She was in front of the window, the curtain dragged back to reveal the view of the garden outside, ghosted over by her reflection. The rosary beads looked like stars twining around her wrists.

  Marianella had stayed hidden in the vines long after Andres had left, too afraid to move. Sofia eventually found her and told her it was safe. When Marianella stepped out of the vines, the dome light was too bright. She couldn’t look at Inéz’s body. Sofia wouldn’t look anywhere else. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest, staring down at the shining tangle of wires.