Our Lady of the Ice

  She pulled the scarf away from her hair. Closed her eyes. Breathed in the scent of the park.

  She heard footsteps.

  Marianella opened her eyes and tensed, afraid that Ignacio had found her after all. But it was only Luciano. Her shoulders sagged, anxiety slipping out of her body.

  “Luciano,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  He stopped and looked at her. In the bright dome light she could see the scar from his repairs, a thin line that cut diagonally across his face.

  “I feel quite well,” he said. “Things have been changing for me.”

  Marianella smiled. He was evolving, she knew. An organic word to describe an oddly inorganic process, as it was happening to robots. In the midst of all this turmoil Luciano was still becoming something new.

  “Why were you outside the park?” he asked.

  Marianella hesitated. “I needed to speak with Alejo,” she said. “About the cull—about Inéz’s death. I was afraid Alejo might have been involved.”

  “Was he?”

  She shook her head.

  They stood in silence for a moment. Then Luciano said, “It was dangerous for you to leave the park. Ignacio Cabrera could have found you.”

  Marianella’s chest tightened at the sound of Ignacio’s name. “I disguised myself. And he didn’t, anyway, so—” She forced a smile at Luciano. “I made it back without trouble.”

  Luciano studied her. He seemed to be considering something, although Marianella did not know what. She wanted to go back to the Ice Palace and throw herself onto her bed and try to sort out what Alejo had told her, but she thought it would be rude to walk away from Luciano, particularly after everything that had happened.

  “We could have protected you,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” Her mind was on the cullings, on Inéz, and she almost said, No you couldn’t.

  “From Cabrera,” he said.

  She blinked. “Cabrera? What are you talking about?”

  Luciano frowned. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he said carefully, “but I’ve grown more comfortable making my own decisions since the night at your house.”

  Marianella blinked. Her house? What had happened at her house?

  “I feel this is an extenuating circumstance,” he said. “You needing to leave the park to meet with Alejo Ortiz, I mean. We could have protected you from Ignacio Cabrera.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Marianella’s question about her house disappeared, replaced by a cold panic rising up in her throat. “How could you protect me from Ignacio?”

  Luciano’s expression went blank. His eyes flicked back and forth.

  “Luciano?” Marianella said, her voice shaking. “Is there something I should know?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” he said flatly. “I just wanted to help you stay safe.”

  Marianella pressed her hand against his cheek, an expression of solidarity. His eyes focused on her.

  “You can tell me,” she said softly.

  There was a long pause. Marianella waited, her heart pounding, afraid of what she was going to hear.

  “Sofia has entered into an arrangement with Ignacio Cabrera,” Luciano finally said. “It’s only a means to an end—to help her with her goals—but she could find a way to protect you—”

  Marianella dropped her hand to her side. She felt numb.

  “I’m sorry,” Luciano said. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Marianella stared past him, into the tangle of the park. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Only Sofia.

  First Alejo, now Sofia—she didn’t know who she could trust anymore. Her world was made of glass.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SOFIA

  Sofia waited on the dock, the wind cold against her bare arms. More parts had arrived, although still not all of them. Sofia cursed the incompetence of humans.

  A low dark car crawled over the damp asphalt, white steam pouring out of its exhaust pipe and curling over the choppy water slapping up against the pier. Sofia watched it, waiting. It stopped. She couldn’t see through the glass in the windows, but she knew who was inside. She hated that she had to be here alone, after the encounter with the record player, but Inéz was gone, and Luciano had refused to accompany her, for reasons he wouldn’t reveal. And she did not have the equipment to reactivate any of the broken androids locked away in the park. Yet.

  The back door of the car opened and Cabrera stepped out, dressed in a long dark trench coat. Sebastian followed, a gun shining in one hand. She waited for Diego, but he never emerged.

  “Sofia,” Cabrera said. “Why would you want to meet out here? It’s so much warmer in my office.”

  “I don’t care about warmth.” Sofia walked toward him, her senses alert.

  “I can see that.” Cabrera nodded at her bare arms, her bare legs. “This isn’t about our little lesson last time?”

  “Lesson?” Sofia stopped. “That wasn’t a lesson.”

  “Music, my dear. I was trying to teach you about music—”

  “I know what you were trying to do. Don’t pretend with me.”

  Cabrera’s mocking smile faded away. “You think you’re such a clever robot.”

  Sofia began to walk again, heading toward the trunk of the car. But when she passed Cabrera, he grabbed her by the arm. She stopped and glared at him.

  “My payment,” she said. “I want to see it.”

  “You will.” Something in his expression unsettled her.

  “What is it?” She yanked her arm away. “You’re that upset that you couldn’t force me to dance again?”

  “I’ll force you to dance when I want to.”

  Sofia felt hollow. She didn’t dare take her eyes off Cabrera. “Excuse me?”

  Cabrera smiled at her again, a lazy serpentine smile that activated the programming in charge of self-preservation. Sofia took a step back.

  “What are you going to do?” Sofia kept her voice hard. Steely. Cabrera seemed unaffected.

  “You’ll notice that one of our usual number is missing this evening.” Cabrera gestured at Sebastian, who shifted his gaze off to the side but didn’t react otherwise. “Mr. Amitrano has elected to stay home.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Cabrera tilted his head. “I don’t kill people, Sofia.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I hire others to do it for me. But no, Diego is not dead. He’s injured.”

  Antarctic wind swirled over the water. Sofia could taste the ice on it, like shards of broken glass. Cabrera seemed to be waiting for her to respond. She would not play into his game. She said nothing.

  Cabrera shifted his weight. “Injured,” he said, “but not by my hand.”

  Sofia blinked at him. Her programming whirred behind her eyes, sifting through the fighting programs Araceli had uploaded, the protocols about when to stay and when to run. She thought about her equipment, her payment, waiting in the trunk of that car.

  “Don’t you want to hear the story?” Cabrera said.

  “What does this have to do with me?” She spoke more sharply than she’d intended, and her question rang out in the cold air. Cabrera stared at her like he’d just uncovered something.

  “My God,” he said. “You don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” She did not like this. Sebastian had his gun out—he never kept his gun out. It had been Sofia’s suggestion to meet on the docks, so she could avoid the record player, but it occurred to her that Cabrera had agreed to the change of terms too quickly. “Just tell me, Mr. Cabrera.”

  “Your man shot Diego.”

  “My man?”

  “Your assistant. Luciano.”

  Sofia’s programming did not know how to deal with this new information
. Luciano, the butler Luciano—he’d shot someone? Shot Diego?

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “When would he have even seen Diego?”

  “A week ago,” Cabrera said. “At Marianella Luna’s house.”

  Sofia locked on to the mention of Marianella’s name. Was she in danger, Marianella? Had Cabrera learned of her survival yet?

  Sofia would kill him if she had to.

  “I dispatched Lady Luna last week,” Cabrera said, in the patient, even tones of a schoolteacher. “I sent Diego to her home the night after to search for some documents she’s rumored to have.”

  Anger flared in Sofia’s system, but she didn’t allow her body to react. Diego did not have the documents, she knew that. They were tucked safely away in the bowels of the amusement park, guarded by maintenance drones she had programmed herself.

  “While Diego was there, your man arrived, with a maintenance robot. He shot at Diego, and Diego fled. Survived, of course, but I’m curious why a robot that I’ve been working with, who has reportedly helped you aboard my icebreakers, would shoot a human he’d seen on more than one occasion. Why? Why would that happen?”

  Luciano had shot Diego. No wonder he had refused to come to the meeting. His programming shouldn’t have allowed that. He was designed to serve, to heal, to protect, not to injure.

  And he hadn’t mentioned any of this to Sofia. The memory of that night, a week ago, ran uninterrupted in her thoughts. Luciano had returned three hours after leaving the amusement park, with a suitcase full of clean clothes and beauty supplies and Marianella’s documents and the envelope of bills she kept hidden away in her kitchen. He had delivered the suitcase to Marianella’s room in the Ice Palace, and then he’d found Sofia in the operations room and he had not said a word about any of this.

  He’d lied to her. He’d potentially ruined everything. And why? For the cheap thrill of firing off a gun at a human being? Why had he even taken a gun with him? He must have found it in the security closet in operations, but what had possessed him to think it was necessary?

  Sofia’s mind worked quickly, formulating a lie.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Sofia said, using the sweet, apologetic voice that had worked so often on clients. “Those of us from the amusement park often scavenge the houses of the dead, looking for supplies.” She smiled at Cabrera. “There was a report on Lady Luna’s disappearance on the wireless the other day. We intercepted it.”

  Cabrera watched her, listening.

  “Luciano didn’t tell me he would be going to her house, but that’s no matter. He doesn’t tell me everything. It’s dangerous work, scavenging. Dangerous for us to leave the park, even robots like Luciano who so closely resemble humans.”

  It was impossible to tell if Cabrera believed the story. She couldn’t read him as she could other humans.

  “I’ve gone on such trips myself,” Sofia added. “I doubt Luciano saw Diego, or understood that it was him. Most likely he thought it was someone from the city, looking to cull him. Do you know what it is to be culled, Mr. Cabrera?”

  “I’ve done it myself,” Cabrera said. “You know that.”

  “But you don’t live with the threat of having it happen to you, as I do, as Luciano does. We often take guns to protect ourselves on scavenges. Luciano wasn’t originally designed for espionage. We’re limited by our programming, Mr. Cabrera. And Luciano was never programmed to steal. Or to shoot.” She paused. “He isn’t good at it.”

  Cabrera stared at her. Sofia didn’t move; she was lucky, in that her position at the amusement park had required her to lie. Not to obfuscate, of course, but to flatter and cajole. Still, the programming was in place, and she’d just made good use of it.

  Sofia knew Cabrera wasn’t like other humans. He could see through deception, being so skilled at it himself. But after a moment’s pause, he nodded, seeming satisfied.

  “Isn’t that a shame,” he said, a cold grin playing at the corner of his mouth. “Technological marvels reduced to scavengers.”

  Sofia smiled back politely.

  “I’m glad to have helped you rise above all that,” he said.

  Sofia rankled at the idea that he had helped her. Even though he had. She didn’t want to think that she owed her success to any human.

  “Still, I don’t want to see Luciano again.” His face went cold. “If I do, I’ll dismantle him myself. Find someone else if you need assistance.”

  Sofia nodded, grateful that she had convinced Cabrera the gunshot was an accident. Luciano might not have been programmed to fire weapons, but that didn’t mean he would make a mistake if he ever did.

  “Understandable,” she said.

  “You agree?”

  “Yes.”

  They stood in the cold wind. Cabrera studied her for a second longer, and Sofia was afraid he would change his mind, or that his offer of peace had been some elaborate ruse.

  He snapped his fingers and said, “Sebastian. Open the trunk.”

  Sofia tensed, no longer convinced the trunk contained her supplies. Sebastian pulled out a banker’s box and set it down at Sofia’s feet. He pulled off the lid.

  Inside were the micro-engines, wrapped in cloudy plastic, and a box of vacuum tubes.

  “The programming key isn’t here,” Sofia said.

  “I’m working on it. You asked for some unusual things.”

  Sofia put on her amusement park mask. “They aren’t so unusual to me.” She looked over at Cabrera. “Thank you, sir,” she added. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Sofia.” He didn’t sound like it was his pleasure; his voice was cold, hard, like the wind. “But I don’t like to be double-­crossed.”

  “No one does.” She picked up one of the tubes and held it up to the golden lamplight. It gleamed against the darkness.

  “I’m glad you understand that. I take it you don’t need a car to drive you home?”

  Sofia replaced the tube and picked up the box. “No. I don’t mind walking.”

  “Not many ladies would care to drag a box through the city streets at night.” Another cold smile. Was he threatening her?

  “I’m not a lady,” she told him, and then she said good night and went on her way.

  * * * *

  Sofia was walking back to the amusement park when all the lights on the street guttered like candles.

  She frowned. She still didn’t know why this was happening, even if it didn’t affect her plans. The park was on its own generators, something she had made sure of. The maintenance drones claimed they weren’t responsible, but she suspected some of them had developed their own sentience and were trying out the concept of lying.

  It made her nervous, this idea of the maintenance drones acting of their own accord. She didn’t like feeling powerless.

  When she returned to the amusement park, Sofia carried the box of supplies to Araceli’s cottage. Araceli was asleep, the cottage shut up tight for the night, but Sofia could unlock the door with a burst of energy from her palm. She left the supplies sitting in the foyer and then went to find Luciano.

  Finding a robot in the amusement park was simple, assuming you had access to the control center, as Sofia did. When the park first closed and the cullings began, all those years ago, the city men would go straight to the operations room and locate the robot types they wished to capture. In those early days, so many had been lost, and it was Sofia who had realized that if they barred the city men’s entrance to operations, then the cullings would be much less effective. Luciano had been the first robot to help her, and she’d always assumed it was due to his programming, his inbuilt need to serve. But learning that he’d shot Diego Amitrano suggested to her that maybe something else was at work, a transformation she hadn’t quite let herself see.

  Sofia laid her hand against the operations room’s
lock and kept it there until the latch clicked open. She stepped inside. She used to spend all her time here, but ever since Marianella had come to stay, she found herself spending more and more time upstairs, in the Ice Palace proper. Operations was a comfort because it was a relic of control, filled with ancient computers instead of ancient murals—but Marianella was upstairs.

  No. Sofia would not think about Marianella. Not right now.

  She sat down at the computer and entered in Luciano’s identification number. It didn’t take long; there were so few functional robots left. She hoped to change that, of course, when her plan was fully implemented. She would resurrect the shattered androids currently locked away in storage. Victims of the cullings that she had managed to save—to salvage would perhaps be the better word, as they were dysfunctional, certain key parts missing from their bodies. But unlike with Inéz, none of those key parts was the ancient wires that made them run. Inéz had been severed in totality; that was why Sofia had buried her instead of cutting her up for parts. She had died a true death, and so she deserved to be honored, and not picked apart as if she’d been dragged away by the city.

  But Inéz’s death would not be in vain. Antarctica would be home to all robots, not just those repaired park androids. When the time was right, Sofia would call robots from all over the world to live here, in a place free of humans. No one would ever die as Inéz had. It would be beautiful.

  Luciano was by the Antarctic Mountain, the roller coaster that had, during the park’s heyday, branded itself the first roller coaster in Antarctica. As if any other roller coasters had been built on the continent.

  Sofia left operations and walked across the park. She wasn’t angry, exactly, but she was confused as to why Luciano thought shooting Diego had been a wise decision.

  The Antarctic Mountain rose up like a leviathan in the darkness, twisting and curving over the rest of the amusement park. She found Luciano sitting on a bench beside its entrance, reading a book. Reading was not in his programming, but Sofia knew what it was to be bored.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice loud in the silence.