Our Lady of the Ice

  Eliana’s heart clenched.

  No, she decided, Mr. Gonzalez wasn’t working for Cabrera. But who, then? Who else would even know about Sofia?

  She checked the home address again. 5894 Prieto. She didn’t recog­nize it, so she dug around in her bottom drawer and pulled out her big paper map of Hope City and spread it on top of her desk. It was dotted with marks and notes from old cases, but she ignored them, scanning down the list of street names on the side until she found Prieto. D-5 on the map. She checked the location, a residential area called Gray Mountains. Not a rich part of town, but not the smokestack district either. One of those neat little neighborhoods where the low-ranked city workers started up their families.

  A fifteen-minute train ride, and she’d be there. If Mr. Gonzalez caught her, she’d just lie and say she’d reconsidered, then worm her way out of it later.

  It didn’t seem like a good plan, but it was something to do.

  So Eliana folded up the map and the information sheet and stuck them both into her purse. She left her gun. She’d had enough of guns, enough of violence, for this lifetime.

  The train was crowded, and Eliana had to stand, scrunched up against the cold metal wall. It vibrated against her spine. She didn’t want to look at anyone, because looking at people made her feel connected to them, and that, for some reason, made her immeasurably sad. And so she pulled out the information sheet, unfolded it, and read over the address again and again until the conductor announced her stop.

  Stepping off that train was like breathing for the first time. No one was on the platform, and after the unnerving experience of being so close to other human beings, that emptiness was a relief. Eliana pulled out the map and checked the direction, then set off toward 5894 Prieto.

  The walk didn’t take long.

  The house was a squat little stone thing, with a postage-stamp yard and a single pine tree growing next to the sidewalk. The neighbor­hood had been built later—shortly before the amusement park had closed down, when the park officials had been desperately trying to lure in new employees. The houses had been thrown up quickly, and that shoddy workmanship was apparent in the dark foundation cracks and shabby roofs of most of the houses Eliana had passed. Mr. Gonzalez’s house was no different. If anything, it looked worse than the others. One of the windows was a piece of plywood instead of glass, and the end of his sidewalk was ­crumbling into chunks.

  The grass was mowed, though. Weird.

  The house had a driveway and a carport, but they were both empty. All the lights were turned off, as well. Eliana stood on the sidewalk and stared up at the house, trying to decide if she wanted to risk breaking in.

  Mr. Gonzalez nagged at her. The bland name and the bland suits and his obsession with Sofia—something wasn’t right here. Or at the very least, something wasn’t clear.

  “You lost?”

  Eliana jumped. The voice belonged to a little girl, her hair braided into pigtails. She blinked up at Eliana.

  “Do you know the man who lives here?” Eliana pointed at the house.

  The little girl frowned. “No one lives there, miss.”

  Eliana felt a surge of triumph—she was right. Something was off about Mr. Gonzalez.

  “You sure?” She wanted to find out as much as she could. “A man I work with listed this as his address.”

  The girl shrugged. “I’m sure. Sometimes these guys show up here at night, and there will be all these cars around. My mom makes me come in when that happens. But most of the time the house is just empty. I can show you.”

  Before Eliana could respond, the girl took off running across the yard, her pigtails streaming out behind her. Eliana hesitated for a moment, then followed. Men showing up in groups at night? Could be Cabrera after all. Except he didn’t keep houses, as far as she knew. His whole base of operation had been the Florencia. An empty house wouldn’t be enough of a smoke screen for a man like him.

  A man like Diego.

  She shoved the thought aside. The girl was waiting for her on the porch. Now that Eliana was closer, she had to agree the house had the air of something abandoned. The porch was coated in a thick layer of dust, and the windows were grimy.

  “Here.” The girl pressed her face against the glass. “Look in. You’ll see. Nothing there.”

  Eliana crouched beside her and peered in, her hands cupped around her eyes to block out the light. The girl was right. She was looking into a sizable room that was empty save for a stack of folding metal chairs leaning up against the wall.

  “See?”

  Eliana pulled away from the window. The girl stared at her with her hands on her hips. “I told you,” she said. “Nobody lives there. Your friend lied to you.” Her eyes glittered mischievously. “Is he one of the guys that shows up here?”

  “I doubt it. He probably just wrote the number down wrong.” Eliana smiled. “Thanks for your help, though.”

  The girl shrugged. “My mom says the guys won’t hurt me, but she doesn’t want me hanging around them. It’s a bad crowd.”

  “Oh yeah? What else does she say?”

  “I dunno. Not a whole lot. Just that they got too many wild ideas and they’ll get people killed. But I don’t see ’em killing anybody when they’re here. Just talking.”

  The Independents. The word rang like a struck chord in Eliana’s head, and suddenly things made more sense. Not just the Independents, of course. The Antarctican Freedom Fighters. Cabrera had enough money to disguise his work, but Independent terrorists didn’t. And they met out here, in some shabby little house no one cared about.

  And Juan Gonzalez had actually fucking written the address down on his information form.

  “You know what?” Eliana said to the little girl. “You’ve been a huge help.”

  The girl smiled, big and bright. “You’re welcome!”

  Eliana left the house, her thoughts in a whir. She wasn’t exactly pro-Argentina, just pro-not-living-in-Antarctica, but that didn’t mean she trusted a group of terrorists. Still, the underlying danger struck a fire inside her chest.

  She rode the train to the city offices, not caring that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was unbrushed. At the receptionist’s desk in the lobby, she asked if she could speak to Maria Nuñez.

  “She works up in budgets,” Eliana explained as the receptionist ran her finger down the list of extensions. New, probably. “She’s an office manager. I’m a friend, and I just stopped by to say hello.”

  “Oh, the budget office!” The receptionist entered in the extension and tilted her head against the phone receiver. Eliana could hear it ringing, distantly, and there was a burst of static when Maria answered.

  “You can go on up,” the receptionist said brightly.

  Eliana did. Her body was thrumming with something close to excitement, something other than sorrow or horror or fear for the future, and that was good.

  Maria had worked her way up enough that her desk wasn’t in the steno pool, which Eliana had expected, but rather was tucked away in a room at the end of a little hallway on her floor. The typewriter clattered as Eliana approached, drowning out the buzz of voices from the cluster of desks in the center of the room. The door was open. Eliana stopped in the doorway, and Maria looked up.

  “You disappeared again,” she said, “and now I bet you want another favor.”

  “I won’t be disappearing again.” Eliana sat down in front of Maria’s desk. The office was cramped, the wall squeezing them both in tight. But Maria was smiling. “At least not until spring.”

  “That’s not exactly disappearing,” Maria said. “You’ll stay in touch.”

  “Of course, yes.” Eliana looked down at her hands. If she even could stay in touch. “You know it’s not too late to start saving for a visa of your own. I can lend you some money—”

  “Stop it,” said Maria. “We’re
not having this conversation again.”

  “I’m just saying. Things are going to get bad.”

  “Things are always bad here,” Maria said. “But that’s the thing about a home. You stick around even when nothing’s going right.”

  “They’re going to get worse,” Eliana said, but she could already see Maria’s expression glazing over, and she knew it was hopeless, trying to convince Maria to leave. Essie, too. There’d be no way of explaining what was coming in a way that they would actually believe.

  “Just think about it, okay? Promise?”

  “Sure, whatever. Is that why you came by here?”

  Eliana shook her head. “I have to go by the records office. You want to come with?”

  “You don’t need me. You’ve got the PI license.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Eliana shrugged. She realized she had come by to warn Maria. To try one more time to get her to see the truth.

  “I always want a break,” Maria said. “But let me finish this up first.”

  Eliana nodded. Maria turned back to the typewriter and worked for a few moments more. Then she stood up and grabbed her purse. They walked to the elevator together. Eliana reminded herself that this was what it was like before Diego, when it was just her and her girlfriends and she didn’t need anyone else.

  Maybe things could be normal again, on the mainland.

  Maybe.

  The records office was on the seventh floor. It wasn’t much to look at. The lights weren’t bright and clean like on Maria’s floor, and there was no rhythm of the typewriters or human voices, just the low fluorescent humming of the bulbs overhead. Eliana’d been up here a handful of times before, and she always forgot how still it was. Like a mausoleum built of paper.

  A tall man stood waiting behind a counter, along with shelves and shelves of files. He was younger than the other man who worked here, although he already stooped a little, like the weight of information was bearing down on him.

  “Hi, Javier.” Maria smiled brightly at him, and he returned her smile with a quiver. “This is my friend Eliana. She’s a PI.”

  “That so?” Javier squinted at her. “Have you been in here before? I remember Leo talking about a lady PI.”

  “Yeah, it was probably me.” Eliana pulled Mr. Gonzalez’s information sheet out of her purse and folded it over so that only the address was visible. She set it on the counter. “I need to find out who owns the house at this address. Here’s my license.” She slid that slim laminated card out of her wallet and set it next to the information sheet. Javier picked it up and held it to the light and made a great show of examining its legitimacy.

  “Oh, come off it, Javier,” Maria said. “She’s real.”

  “Got to be sure.” Javier tossed the license onto the counter and then wrote the address down on a piece of scrap paper. “Give me a moment.”

  He disappeared into the files.

  “It always takes forever,” Maria said, sighing.

  “Yeah, I know.” Eliana leaned her elbows against the counter. Maybe this wouldn’t amount to anything. Maybe Javier would return and hand her a card with the name Juan Gonzalez written across it and she would be back where she’d started. She supposed she could take it to the police then, tell them about an AFF meeting place. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. She trusted the police about as much as she trusted Independent terrorists.

  Time passed. Ten minutes, maybe. Maria checked her watch. “This is taking a lot longer than it normally does,” she said.

  “You can go back up if you need to.”

  “Oh, that’s definitely not necessary.” She smiled over at Eliana. They were still leaning up against the counter, as there weren’t any chairs set up anywhere in the room. Maria started in on a story about Essie, who’d taken up with a new boyfriend, another Independent. Eliana half-listened, nodding her head at appropriate intervals. What was taking so long?

  Finally, Javier emerged from the stacks. Maria straightened up. “Finally!” she said, teasing.

  “Sorry about the wait,” he said. “I had to cross-reference. The address you were after was missing about half its paperwork.”

  Eliana frowned. Maybe this would be complicated after all.

  “Really?” said Maria.

  “It happens sometimes. There’s so much here. But the house’s purchase date was back when we used the old registry. You remember that, Maria, before we switched all the records over to the computer?”

  “I do indeed.”

  Eliana didn’t care about any of this. “Did you find out the name?”

  “Yeah, I did. It’s, ah—well, a bit unexpected.” Javier laid a notecard on the counter. Eliana picked it up. When she read the name, all the air went out of her body.

  “Well?” Maria asked. “Who is it?”

  “Alejo Ortiz,” Eliana said. “The house belongs to Alejo Ortiz.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  MARIANELLA

  The stairs leading to Eliana’s office were colder than outside. Maria­nella stopped in the middle of the stairway and tightened her coat. She wondered if she had any right to ask Eliana to do this, after everything that had happened. It had been Marianella’s fault that Eliana had gotten so entangled in Sofia’s plans in the first place. Did she really want to entangle her further?

  She told herself there was no harm in asking. And of course she intended to pay Eliana. But they needed to find out where that code had come from. The maintenance drones had no idea. Marianella and Sofia had both sat down with them, rummaged through their memory banks, asked them questions in the language of ­computers. The answers had been strange, utterly inhuman, but they’d still been clear enough that the answer was no.

  And so Marianella continued up the stairs. The office light was on, and the muffled clatter of a typewriter spilled into the hallway. Marianella ran one hand over her hair and opened the door. She remembered the first time she’d walked into this room, how terrified she’d been that her entire life was about to unravel.

  Funny that a simple line of code in a maintenance drone could make her feel that way again.

  Eliana looked up from her typewriter, hands still poised over the keys. Her eyes went wide.

  “Marianella,” she said.

  “Hello.” Marianella shut the door and slipped out of her coat, an old out-of-style thing, nothing like the furs she’d worn her first time here. “How are you?”

  Eliana looked away.

  For a moment, they stayed like that, posed. The sunlight illuminated the side of Eliana’s face. Marianella watched her.

  It was the moment before a conversation. The moment, too, before an apology, which Marianella realized she would have to offer before she asked anything of Eliana.

  “I’m sorry there wasn’t a proper funeral for Diego.” Marianella’s voice was harsher in the silence than the typewriter. “I didn’t know what she was doing until after she had done it.” She didn’t say the rest—that she had screamed at Sofia for her sacrilege, that she had gone to one of the empty cottages and said a rosary for each man who had been killed, twenty-eight in total, including Ignacio Cabrera. It had taken so long that the human parts of her body could no longer support her, and so the mechanical parts had activated, and she had finished her prayers almost entirely as a machine. She had emerged from the cottage, shaking and trembling, after saying the final rosary for Diego.

  “He wasn’t religious. It doesn’t matter.”

  Eliana didn’t seem to mean it. Marianella took a hesitant step forward. When Eliana didn’t protest, she walked the rest of the way to the desk. Eliana watched her and didn’t speak. Marianella sat down, and Eliana slid the typewriter to the side, opening up the space between them.

  “I prayed for him,” Marianella said.

  “Why?”

  “Because everyone deserves to have a
prayer said for them when they die. Especially when—” Marianella stopped. She knew it was a silly superstition, about the smoke and the souls of the dead, but she believed it anyway. Believing superstitions kept her closer to human, and she wanted to be as human as possible right now. “Especially when they aren’t given a proper funeral.”

  “I doubt he noticed.”

  “Don’t speak that way.” Marianella said it before she could stop herself. Eliana frowned, and Marianella leaned forward, her palms damp with anxiety. “Eliana, I didn’t just come here to apologize for the funeral. I came—I have a job for you, although I understand if you won’t take it, but more than that I want to apologize. For everything. For Diego’s death. For putting you in danger.”

  “A job.” Eliana’s voice was small, far away. “What kind of job? One for Sofia? I’m getting pretty tired of doing things for her when she clearly hates me.”

  They looked at each other across the desk.

  “She doesn’t hate you,” Marianella said, but she didn’t bother explaining further. It wasn’t hatred, only bitterness. Humans were the enemy.

  “Things have gotten worse since she took over,” Eliana said. “The power flickers more often. Food’s more expensive.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t exactly great to start out with, but I get the feeling she doesn’t have the city’s interests at heart.”

  Marianella wasn’t going to lie.

  “No,” she said, “she doesn’t.”

  “You’re not going to stop her.”

  “She doesn’t intend to kill anyone,” Marianella said. “She only wants to send the humans away, back to the mainland.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  Marianella hesitated. After all, Sofia had ordered the deaths of Cabrera’s men without hesitation.