Our Lady of the Ice (34 page)

“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.

And then there was a rustling, all around her, like the trees were trying to talk. She felt like she should hold her breath.

Water poured out of the sky.

It fell in raging, riotous sheets, soaking through her thin gray coveralls, plastering her short hair to her head. It dripped into her eyes. Little yellow lamps glowed at each of the houses, and their light caught the raindrops and made them shimmer like static. When the lightning flashed, it turned the whole world white. Eliana—Luciano—did not move from that spot.

“I wasn’t supposed to be outside,” Luciano said, his voice closer than she’d expected. “They activated us to ensure there weren’t any problems, but we weren’t supposed to leave our quarters. However, they never programmed the command into us, because it would have been a problem once we arrived at the park, and so I left anyway. I didn’t know it was going to rain. I understood what was happening, but I still found it—” He stopped. “I found it beautiful, I suppose.”

“It is beautiful.” The rain fell harder and harder. The water seemed to soak through her skin. She wondered if he’d worried about that, the water damaging him. Or maybe water couldn’t damage androids. She wasn’t sure.

Off to the side, someone shouted, an angry bark. A man appeared, wearing a plastic raincoat and a yellow hat, shouting Luciano’s name and then a string of Portuguese.

Everything faded away.

Eliana yanked off her helmet, expecting to find her clothes soaked and her hair dripping, but she was as dry as when she had walked into the room. Luciano sat across from her with his hands folded in his lap, a cable draped over one shoulder. It disappeared into some unfathomable place behind his ear.

“A rainstorm,” Luciano said.

“Thank you,” Eliana said.

Luciano smiled.

The rainstorm was implanted in Eliana’s memory. She could think back on it and remember the feel of the rain across her arm. It was strange, having Luciano’s memory inside her head. But she didn’t want it gone.

Rainstorms. Wind. The scent of a jungle.

She only wished those memories were hers, and hers alone. Because that would mean she had accomplished what her mother could not, what her father could not.

It would mean she had actually left Hope City.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

MARIANELLA

Downtown was colder than Marianella expected. They stood waiting in front of the city building, the dais a few paces away. It was decorated with little blue-and-white flags that hung limply in the still air.

Marianella pulled her coat more tightly around her chest. She couldn’t believe how biting and cold it was out here. At least the dome lights were bright. There hadn’t been a single flicker all day.

A crowd fanned out from the dais, reporters with notebooks and flashbulb cameras. The rest of the crowd seemed to be Independents, given the number of sealskin coats.

“Are you ready?” Alejo appeared beside her, straightening his tie. “Ready to blow them all away?”

Marianella nodded, even if she found his choice of words unfortunate. Alejo turned and muttered something to his entourage, all his assistants in their own gray suits.

“Showtime,” Alejo said, and he looped his arm through Marianella’s and they walked out onto the dais.

The Independence crowd erupted into cheers. The news reporters scribbled in their notebooks. A film camera stared at her with its dark, unblinking eye.

Marianella scanned across the crowd, her chest tight. Alejo planned to run Ignacio out of town, but he hadn’t done it yet. One of Ignacio’s men might turn up here, with a gun aimed straight at her head. One shot, and everyone would know what she was, and that would be the end of it.

Except Alejo had brought in bodyguards, like he’d promised. Big, hulking men who ambled around the dais with their hands tucked into their jackets.
AFF
members. Marianella tried not to think about it, reminding herself that they were here to protect her.

Alejo and Marianella took their places at the front of the dais, in front of the microphone. His entourage settled into a half circle of chairs around them.

Marianella took a deep breath. Now was not the time to think about Ignacio.

“Good afternoon,” she said. Her voice echoed with electronic feedback. “We have something very exciting to share with you.”

“The city doesn’t want us to tell you this,” Alejo said.

Marianella smiled, and the audience tittered. She took a step back; they had agreed that he would do most of the speaking. As he was the politician, it only made sense.

“You’ve all seen the advertisements for the agricultural domes, I’m sure, the ones with myself and the lovely Lady Luna.” He gestured at Marianella, and she gave a little wave. “And of course now you all know that the domes are a reality—or rather, were a reality. My team and I were successful in building one fully operational agricultural dome out in the Antarctic desert, and we kept it running until some madman decided to destroy our hard work.”

His team? Marianella gave a strained smile. She wouldn’t say it was a
team
.

“The question of who destroyed the dome is not why we’re here. But I will say this: there are those who would blame the bombing on the Antarctican Freedom Fighters.”

Boos and hisses erupted out of the crowd beyond the reporters. Alejo lifted one hand.

“I’m here to say—
we’re
here to say”—he gestured once again at Marianella—“that we know those who support independence for
Antarctica would never destroy that thing which could give her independence.”

The boos and hisses turned to applause. Marianella clapped politely. No, the
AFF
hadn’t bombed the dome. Neither had Sofia. Marianella had already gone through the files on the maintenance drones, looking for a sign of betrayal. But Marianella wasn’t willing to celebrate the fact that Cabrera had destroyed their work.

“But we are choosing today not to focus on the past but to focus on the future. That’s what Lady Luna and I are doing.” He smiled. “Everyone give a round of applause for Lady Luna. She’s been much more than a pretty face for the commercials. Her financial contributions to the Independent cause have been tremendous.”

Applause thundered up from the crowd. It turned to an ocean’s roaring inside Marianella’s head. She forced a smile out to the crowd and waved, swiveling her wrist back and forth. It was hard to make out individual faces, even with her machine parts, and that made her nervous.

The applause died down. Marianella stepped back. She was dimly aware that something was
off
, not in the crowd but in Alejo, but she couldn’t quite tease it out.

“The real tragedy in all this is not just the loss of the dome but the loss of the hours of hard work that was put into its creation by my men.”

Men? The buzzing intensified in Marianella’s head. What men? The dome had been built by robots. Robots that she’d designed, that she’d built.

“But even so, we remain secure in the knowledge that if we built the dome once, we can build it again!”

A thunderous round of applause. Camera bulbs flashed, one after another. Something was wrong. There had been no
men
.

When he had introduced her, he’d only talked of her financial contributions, not of her intellectual ones.

Marianella suddenly couldn’t breathe.

“Here they are,” he said, and gestured to the men in gray suits, the
ones Marianella had thought were assistants. “The best engineers our city has to offer. That ag dome was not built by mainland ingenuity but by Antarctican brilliance.”

Marianella’s vision filled with a blinding white light. She dug her nails into her palm, deep enough that her robot brain took over and siphoned the pain away. Distantly, she was aware of Alejo’s voice, rising and falling over a buzz of static feedback.

“This is a setback, certainly. But it will not curtail us completely. I can assure you that the explosion was not caused by a malfunction but by a terrorist, set on stopping us on our path for self-sufficiency. This entire city was built out of human ingenuity, and it was human ingenuity that built the food dome.”

He glanced at her when he said “human ingenuity.” She was certain of it.

“It will be human ingenuity that will rebuild it. For those of you who thought Independence was a logistical possibility, I give you the wreckage of my creation”—Marianella took a deep, gasping breath—“as proof that we can build our own nation here on the ice of Antarctica. Don’t look at this as a tragedy but as a victory. The terrorists who bombed the agricultural dome killed no one, because death was not their intention. Only destruction. Destruction of a dream made real. We will build that dream again.”

For a moment, there was only stunned silence and the wind whistling through the buildings. Then the cameras lit up, and the reporters surged forward, shouting Alejo’s name. Marianella didn’t move. The men in gray suits stood up and waved at the crowd as they had their pictures taken over and over.

“Lady Luna! Lady Luna!”

Marianella turned toward the reporters. Lights flashed at her in quick succession and she had to stop herself from throwing up her arm and running away. Alejo leaned over the edge of the dais, pointing to reporters and answering their questions. She stared at him, ignoring the people calling out her name. She hated him. She hated his team of actors posing as engineers. She hated the humans applauding him as if he’d done any of the work, as if he’d programmed the robots or planned the architecture.

She realized she was money, she was a pretty face for the advertisements, she was nothing.

“Lady Luna, will you be sponsoring the next dome? Lady Lu—”

Marianella stepped off the dais and walked away from the crowd. Her scarf fluttered behind her, and her quick steps loosened her hair from its bouffant. A tear streaked down her cheek; she reached up and wiped it away. Mascara smeared across her fingers. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this, and she knew that if she stayed out in the open much longer, someone would chase her down.

She walked to the end of the block and hailed a taxi. The tears fell faster now, leaving hot trails on her face. The taxi pulled up to the curb, and the driver did a double take when he saw her.

“Uh, where to?” he asked, averting his eyes. Marianella climbed in.

“Alejo Ortiz’s office,” she said. “At the corner of Main and Fifty-Seventh Street.”

The driver nodded and jerked back the handle on the meter. Marianella watched the number click upward through the haze of her tears.

“Everything okay?” the driver asked.

“Everything’s fine.” She said it as sharply as she could, and he didn’t ask any more questions.

After ten minutes, they came to Alejo’s office.

The building glinted in the dome light. The windows were darkened, but Marianella knew he’d be back soon enough. Alejo always came up to the office to regroup after press conferences.

She walked up to the office’s big glass door and pulled it open. The receptionist was gone, the lobby empty. The building had the abandoned feel of an office closed down for a holiday weekend.

All the lights were off, but Marianella had been here enough times that she didn’t need them. She followed the hallway until she came to Alejo’s office. The door was locked with a city-style electronic lock, and Marianella pressed her hand against it and sparked it open.

Inside, she flicked on the light and then turned the chair at his desk around so that she was facing the door. She sat down.

And waited.

She didn’t wait long. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. As much as Alejo liked being the center of attention, he knew how important it was for him to come back to his office, to strategize, to see how he could swing the explosion to his advantage.

She wondered if he’d even noticed she’d disappeared.

When she heard the voices out in the hallway—male voices, gibbering with excitement—her anger flared again. She straightened her back, crossed her legs.

“What the— Did you forget and leave the light on, Ivan?” Alejo appeared in the doorway, although he was staring down the hallway. “Get Ruben. This might be some kind of—” He turned his face toward his office. “Oh,” he said.

“Hello, Alejo.” Marianella’s voice was cold and flat, and it made her feel more inhuman than she already did by Alejo’s hand.

“I was worried about you.” He smiled, his voice smoothed over. He stepped into the office and clicked the door shut behind him, but he didn’t walk closer to her. “I was afraid you’d gotten snatched off the street. I was about to send the bodyguards out to look for you. Figured you wouldn’t want me to call the police.”

“Shut up,” Marianella said.

Alejo blinked. Her anger surged inside her, rushing through her veins.

“You cut me out,” she said. “You gave credit to a bunch of actors. They were actors, weren’t they? You and I both know there aren’t enough Independent engineers in the city to do that kind of work. That’s why I designed the robots in the first place.”

He didn’t look away from her. She had to give him credit for that.

“Yes,” he said. “They were actors.”

It was the answer Marianella had expected, but hearing it still felt like a punch in the stomach.

“I’m sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear.” He peeled himself away from the door and walked over to his desk. Marianella followed him with her gaze. He sat down. She turned her chair around and faced him. Her heart beat too quickly, and her machine parts were already kicking in to calm it.

“Why?” Her voice cracked.

“I thought the truth would raise too many questions. Don’t you think it’s better this way, that you’re the financial contributor? It fits in more with the whole Lady Luna eccentric heiress thing.” He waved his hand around.

“You could have at least made me part of the team.”

Alejo sighed. “Look,” he said. “People know what exploded. The city tried to rein it in, but people figured it out.” He stared at her, unwavering. “And they’re impressed. Really fucking impressed. No one thought it was possible.”

Marianella felt a twinge of pride.

“I was getting calls two hours after it happened. Everybody knew I’d been campaigning for it, and God, the thrill of hearing them talk as if I’d done it, as if I’d—”

“I can only imagine,” she snapped.

He fell silent and leaned back in his chair. He reminded her of a shark, something lean and dangerous.

“The point I’m trying to make,” he said, shrugging, “is that—well, I guess I don’t need you anymore.”

The buzzing started up again. Marianella blinked. Of course he needed her. This was as much her project as it was his.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“We were doing it in secret, Marianella! That was the whole point! We couldn’t hire city engineers to program the robots, and, like you said, there aren’t enough Independent engineers for that kind of project. You had the money and you had the—the skills, and I’m grateful for them, I am, but—”

Marianella couldn’t breathe. “But the design, the plants, all of it—they were all my ideas. I—”

“It was my idea,” said Alejo. “It was my whole damn platform during the election! Build agricultural domes, build self-sufficiency. I know you remember.”

“That’s not what I mean!” Marianella’s voice was shrill, nearly hysterical. He didn’t understand, or he didn’t
want
to understand—she had used her nature to build something to help humans, to show she wasn’t a robot. And now Alejo Ortiz was going to tear it away from her. “It’s my design,” she said, which came nowhere
close to expressing the rage she felt in this moment. “You can’t cut me out of my own design. At least say I was part of the engineering team.”

“No one would believe that!” Alejo said. “Some pretty socialite who knows enough to build a dome? Come off it, Marianella.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

Alejo paused. He fixed her with a cold, unnerving gaze.

“What?” she said.

“I’m guessing you took a stroll in the snow and saw your
design
. Am I right?”

Marianella glared at him.

“I know I am. I had to go look at it too. So you know that half of your design has been blown to hell and the other half is frozen. Now, who do we know who would do something like that?” He tilted his head, smiled at her. “Who do we know who has the capacity to blow up parts of Hope City?”