Our Lady of the Ice

  Still, she sat there for a long time. When she finally stood up, her clothes were soaked through and her hair was plastered like wet ribbons to the side of her face. Her thoughts were cloudy, except for one, a single sentence that repeated over and over—

  Everything is lost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ELIANA

  Eliana watched the footage on Luciano’s television, the sound turned down so she wouldn’t have to listen to the newsman ­prattling on. Images flashed by: An enormous, shattered dome, the glass blackened from the explosion. Ice that had melted and refrozen after the fire had been put out, into eerie, indefinable shapes.

  And the crops.

  The rows and rows of crops, now all dead and wilted. They were throwing them out into the desert to be covered over by snow and ice. That was on the television too, the ice-drones carting the crops over the barren landscape until they disappeared from the sphere of the camera’s light. A year’s supply of food, the newsman had said. Eliana had watched with her hand at her throat, hardly believing.

  All those stupid advertisements the past year, with Marianella smiling into the camera as Lady Luna, Alejo Ortiz beaming at her side. They were asking for money to build domes just like this one, domes that could sustain the city without interference from the mainland.

  “We kept it a secret,” Marianella explained later that afternoon.

  “Why?” Eliana said, sitting on an old reproduction of a Queen Anne chair, the white brocade yellow with age.

  Marianella shrugged. A food tray was balanced on her knees, and she took a bite of watery beef soup, the best they could get so late in the season. And all those crops were frozen.

  “It was Alejo’s idea,” she said. “All politics are theater, when you get down to it. He wanted to have a fully functioning dome when we made our announcement, rather than just the plans for one.” She shook her head, her face blank. “I’d been looking forward to that moment for months. And now—” Her voice cracked. Eliana leaned over and put her hand on her arm, but Marianella didn’t acknowledge the gesture. “I just wanted to help the people of Hope City. So I designed it, I funded it.” She threw her spoon onto the tray. “And now it’s dead.”

  “You can rebuild,” Eliana said, although she had no idea if that was true. “I mean, if you already had plans for others. And the whole city knows it’s possible now. It’s not as if it broke down.”

  “It was sabotaged,” Marianella said flatly. She set her tray aside, her food half-finished. The silence in the room grew thick.

  “I’m sure it was Ignacio Cabrera,” Marianella said. “Who else would bomb the agricultural dome?”

  Eliana’s heart twisted at the mention of Cabrera’s name, at the reminder of who Diego really was.

  “Other than Sofia,” Marianella said.

  Eliana looked up. Marianella stared into space. She looked pale and haggard. Not like herself at all.

  Eliana stayed a few moments longer, but when it was clear that Marianella didn’t want to talk further, Eliana said her good-byes and left.

  Eliana’s footsteps rattled through the corridor. The Ice Palace was confusing, all those twisting mazelike hallways, leading into rooms filled with old robotics equipment or stacks of ceramic amusement park statues. She wandered for ten minutes until she found a sunroom that looked out over the garden. Luciano was there in the room, reading one of his books.

  She stopped in the doorway, surprised to see him. He glanced up at her, and the uncanniness of his movement ruined the illusion of his humanity.

  “Eliana,” he said. “Did Marianella enjoy her meal?” He shut the book and set it aside.

  “She ate it.”

  There was a pause. Then Luciano looked at her like he had all the answers to her racing, miserable thoughts, like he knew how to make her forget about Diego and his betrayal, like he was willing to listen to her confusion about the agricultural domes and her fear about Cabrera.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Eliana slumped up against the doorframe. She hesitated. “Every­thing.”

  He sat very still, watching her, his head tilted to the side. “You can tell me about it if you wish.”

  She knew he was programmed to do that. That’s how all the amusement park robots worked. They were programmed for certain things. Luciano had been programmed to help people.

  And maybe she needed help.

  “You really don’t mind?”

  He shook his head. “I’m happy to help a friend.”

  A friend. Maybe it wasn’t just the program.

  And at any rate, she didn’t want to walk away. She didn’t want to be alone.

  And so she sat down in the dusty wicker chair beside him. When he looked at her expectantly, she realized this was what she’d hoped to find with Marianella, because Marianella had been at the gala when Diego had pulled his gun and revealed who he was. But Marianella had reacted exactly as you should when confronting a monster.

  And that was the problem.

  “It’s about my boyfriend,” Eliana started, and she didn’t intend to say much more than that, but everything poured out anyway. He’d lied to her about the sort of work he did. He’d lied about owning a gun. His eyes had glittered with a cold and terrifying light that had seemed to reveal more about him than any moment they’d spent together ever could have.

  When the words finally dried up, her eyes were wet.

  Luciano sat still for a moment. She wondered, stupidly, if she had broken him. But then he put his hand on her knee.

  “That must be difficult,” he said.

  It was such a stupid platitude, but no one, not even Marianella, had said anything approximating it in her time here. Her boyfriend had almost killed her, almost killed her friend, and no one had remotely tried to sympathize.

  “I don’t know what to do!”

  “What can you do?” asked Luciano. “None of this is your fault. You can’t blame yourself for seeing good in him. That’s a quality more humans should have, the ability to see the good in others.”

  “But there wasn’t any good in him.”

  “Of course there was.” Luciano smiled, an easy smile that calmed her like a drug. “You were with him for over a year, yes? And he never hurt you. In fact, he tried to put you out of harm’s way as best he could, from what I can tell. It seems to me you brought the good out in him.”

  Eliana sniffled. The sunroom’s windows heated up the thin dome light outside, generating a warmth that felt far more organic than anything from a radiator. She’d never considered the possi­bility that she might have been the reason Diego seemed like a good person. She didn’t know if it was true or not, but she did know this was the first time she had seen him with Cabrera, and the first time she’d seen that cold glitter in his eyes.

  “He still lied to me,” she said.

  “Everyone lies,” said Luciano.

  Eliana laughed at his bluntness. “Did you say that to clients when the park was open?”

  “Of course not. I was programmed to lie. That’s how I know everyone does it.” He smiled again. “I’m not lying now, however.”

  This time, Eliana returned his smile. She drew her knees up to her chin and looked out into the garden. Weeds were sprouting up in the cracks between the stones in the path, everything wild and green and beautiful. She tried to imagine it as it would have looked when the park was still open, the growth neat and orderly, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “I’ve never been to the mainland,” she said distractedly, still looking out at the garden. “I’ve wanted to, my entire life. Ever since my parents told me stories about it.”

  “It’s difficult to acquire visas, from what I understand.”

  Eliana shrugged. “Not difficult, just expensive. I’ve got the money now, you know. I just have to make
it to the spring. I hope the ships start running again. All this.” She swooped one hand around, taking in the park, the city itself, the explosions and the failing power and the terror of the past winter. “I don’t know what it means for me. I’ve got the money now, or close to it, but part of me is scared that it’s going to take more than money. That the city’s changing, and they’ll stop the visas, and I won’t be able to get out.”

  They fell into silence.

  “Would you like to see the mainland?” Luciano asked.

  His question startled her. “Sure. Really, I’d like to see something that’s not the dome. When I saw Diego’s gun, after I got over the initial shock, you know, of what he was, I thought—and this is so stupid, but I thought that I’ve never seen anything outside the dome.” She laughed, hard and bitter.

  Luciano frowned. “You’ve really never seen outside the dome?”

  Eliana sighed. “Technically I have. Once. It was when I was a kid. There was a program that would take us out on the boats so we could see what the sun was like and all that.” She lay her head on her knee. Luciano didn’t ask her for anything more—he seemed trained (programmed, she reminded herself) to listen only to what she wanted to say, all his questions carefully selected. It would be unnerving, if it wasn’t such a comfort to have someone listen.

  “It was in the summer,” Eliana said. “You know, when the sun never sets? You can’t tell from the dome, of course, but we learned about it. I remember we were all crowded onto the boat, bundled up in our emergency parkas. All families have them. Did you know that? In case of disaster? They started selling them again when the electricity began flickering.”

  “I did know that. I’m sure we have some of our own here in the park.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Eliana leaned back in her chair. “God, it was something to see, this huge ball of fire in the sky. They told us not to look straight at it, but of course everyone did, until we couldn’t anymore.” Eliana smiled and remembered how her eyes had stung and watered, and little black splotches had appeared in her vision. She’d thought she was going blind. And maybe she had, momentarily.

  She was thirteen on that trip, and she had stood at the bow of the icebreaker with her head thrown back, promising to herself that someday she would live in a place where she could see the sun all the time.

  Christ, she hadn’t thought about that in years.

  “It sounds lovely.” Luciano paused. “I’ve never seen the sun myself, at least not directly.”

  Eliana looked at him. He wore the same unflappable expression as always, but he was watching her closely.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I was produced in Brazil, of course. We didn’t spend much time there before we were shipped to Antarctica. They deactivated us for the journey.” He went quiet. Eliana didn’t know what to say.

  “I did see a rainstorm, though,” he said, after a time.

  “A rainstorm!” Eliana had seen rainstorms on television programs—gentle ones where the rain rustled through the trees, and wild thrashing ones that ripped the trees from the ground. She could never fathom such a thing happening in real life, though. She couldn’t imagine water falling freely from the open sky without freezing. The closest Hope City had to rainstorms were the fire extinguishers that activated whenever the maintenance drones detected smoke.

  “What was it like?” Eliana sounded more excited than she’d intended to.

  “It’s difficult to describe. But I can show you.”

  “Show me?” Eliana frowned. “Oh, did you, um, record it?”

  “I record everything.” A brief smile passed over Luciano’s lips. “But I am quite discreet, so you don’t need to worry. And after a year has passed, a subroutine purges all unnecessary memory files, unless I mark them to be saved.” He stopped. “I marked the rainstorm, which is why you can see it.”

  Eliana nodded. Her skin prickled. This all felt vaguely trans­gressive, talking to a robot about those things that separated him from being human. And watching one of his recordings—

  She felt uncomfortable with the idea. But that discomfort excited her at the same time.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can show me.”

  Luciano smiled. “Exciting! We’ll have to go to the robodeon. It’s on the third floor of the palace.” He paused, and his eyes seemed to twinkle. “Sofia won’t like it. She hates the idea of us doing any of the things we did in the park. But we won’t have to tell her, will we?”

  Eliana laughed and nodded. She and Luciano left the sunroom and walked together through the hallways. They didn’t speak, and Eliana wondered if Luciano felt the awkwardness of their silence. Would his programming dictate something like that? She wasn’t sure. He was so much more complex than the maintenance drones. Their jobs were obvious. But robots like Luciano and Sofia left her not knowing what to think. And Luciano keeping secrets from Sofia—Eliana didn’t know what to think of that, either.

  Their footsteps echoed as they walked up the stairs. Eliana had never been to the third floor, but it looked the same as the rest of the palace, everything faded and dusty.

  “Here we are.” Luciano stopped in front of a pair of wooden doors, carved with the swirling art nouveau women that had been so popular during the park’s heyday. He pushed them open. Eliana had been expecting a cinema, like the one on Lucia Avenue, but there was no big blank screen or velvet curtains. Even the seats were arranged differently. They sat in pairs, facing each other.

  “When the park was open, there was an entire fleet of robots who worked in this room.” Luciano gestured for her to enter, and she did. “They were programmed with hundreds of different scenarios to choose from.” He sounded like he was reciting from a travel brochure. Eliana wondered if he used to give this speech to his guests. “The guest sits in one chair; the robot sits across from her. They connect with the viewing harness. It’s quite harmless, don’t worry.”

  It definitely sounded like a travel brochure. Eliana sat down on the cleanest, least ripped of the chairs. She could vaguely recall older people talking about this, the robodeon at the amusement park, although she had never been clear how it worked. Luciano disappeared behind a paper screen for a few seconds and emerged carrying a hat trailing cables. Eliana frowned at it.

  “Wait,” she said. “You mean we’re going to do it like they did in the park?”

  Luciano stopped. “How else would we do it?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you’d—project—the memory—”

  Luciano tilted his head. “But that would be the same as seeing it on television, and you wanted to experience it, correct?”

  Eliana hesitated. She thought she’d been humoring him, letting him show her his rainstorm.

  “I can experience it?” she finally said, feeling stupid.

  “Yes, of course.” Luciano sat down in the chair across from her and handed her the hat. “It’s quite safe. Thousands of people parti­cipated every year.” He smiled, his eyes glinting. “And Marianella would be extremely upset if anything happened to you.”

  Eliana wasn’t so sure about that anymore. She looked down at the hat. It was a fearsome thing, not a hat so much as a helmet, with blacked-out goggles and a bronzed metal exterior. She knocked on it, listening to the sound reverberate inside.

  “I swear to you,” Luciano said, “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  Eliana felt suddenly warm. She looked up at him. He was staring at her, unblinking. She thought of all the times Diego had said that. She’d always believed him, and she couldn’t anymore.

  But she believed Luciano. She had to believe someone wanted to keep her safe.

  “All right,” she said, and she slipped the helmet on. The goggles blocked out her vision. She was aware of Luciano’s hands fiddling with the wires, looping them over her head, pressing something cold against the top of her spine.


  “Luciano?” Her voice echoed, amplifying her nervousness.

  “I’m here.” The helmet covered her ears, and so his voice was muffled. “Can you see anything? Any light, anything?”

  “No.” Her answer trembled against the inside of the helmet.

  “Good. You aren’t supposed to.” He fell silent. She resisted the urge to reach over and feel for him, to put her hand on his knee, to make sure he was there.

  Light flooded her vision.

  Eliana screamed and moved to yank off the helmet, but Luciano stopped her. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I wasn’t specifically programmed for this, and it’s been some time since I’ve done it.”

  Eliana took a deep breath. The light was settling into shapes: trees and little wooden houses and stone paths leading into a forest. “Oh my God,” she whispered, because as the shapes settled, the other senses caught up—a breeze ran through the trees and caressed against her skin, warm in a way she had never known. It was not the dry heat of a radiator, but damp and hazy and so thick, it seemed alive. She could smell dirt and sweet green scents, and everything was so overwhelming that she was almost dizzy.

  “Luciano?” she said, her voice wavering.

  “I’m here.” He sounded far away. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  The sky overhead was a dark purplish gray, a color she had never known a sky to be. Suddenly she was walking forward, following one of the paths.

  “This is my memory,” Luciano said. “I walked, so you’re walking.”

  “I’m you?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  A line of light cracked across the sky. Eliana shrieked.

  “Lightning,” Luciano said. “Remember, nothing happening here will hurt you.”

  Eliana nodded, although the Eliana in the memory did not. A sound rumbled in from everywhere, dark and threatening. The lightning flashed again. Eliana jumped, but she was growing used to it.