Our Lady of the Ice

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

The drones came out in the morning. She knew that much. They came out in the morning, when the dome lit itself up from inside like a beacon.

  She pressed against the glass and whispered another prayer to the Mother of the Ice, and closed her eyes, and waited.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ELIANA

  Eliana poured the last of her office coffee. No sugar, no cream. She’d asked Diego if he could get some coffee from Cabrera’s shipments, and he’d looked at her and said, “I could. But do you really want to buy food from him?”

  “Is there any way to avoid it?”

  He’d shrugged, and that had been the end of the conversation. But as she stared at the crumpled-up bag sitting in the trashcan, she wished she’d pushed the matter further.

  Eliana was in her office, prepping for one of the new cases she’d gotten from attending Marianella’s party. Three days, and two people had already called her, one hoping to find a son who’d run away and the other looking for information about a piece of property near the docks. Easy work, and neither with any connections to Cabrera. She was looking forward to both jobs—and looking forward to the cash they would bring in too. Money for a mainland visa.

  Funny that she wasn’t as excited about that as she used to be. It was because of Diego. She might be able to leave Antarctica when the spring came, but it would mean leaving Diego. She hadn’t really thought, when they’d started seeing each other, that she’d still be seeing him when she left the city.

  The bell over the door rang.

  Eliana looked up from her files. A man stood in the doorway. He was handsome, his eyes a striking golden-brown color, like caramel. He wore a gray flannel suit, a black trench coat tossed over one arm. Expensive shoes. He wasn’t someone she’d met at Lady Luna’s party.

  “Miss Gomez?” He slipped off his fedora and dropped it onto the coatrack beside the door, then draped his trench coat beside it.

  “That’s me.” Eliana took a sip of coffee. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you really a private investigator?”

  “Yes. I can show you my license.”

  He was looking around the office, studying the walls and her shabby furniture. “That won’t be necessary. I’d like to hire you.”

  Three cases in three days. Well.

  Eliana drained the last of her coffee. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me about it?”

  He nodded and sat down. Eliana slid behind her desk and pulled out her pad and pen. The man watched her, his face pleasant and unexceptional save for his eyes. Eliana really hoped this wouldn’t have anything to do with Cabrera. She wouldn’t hear the end of it from Diego.

  “So what do you need?” Eliana smiled. “Think your wife’s stepping out?”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  Over in the corner, the radiator rattled, banging up against the wall.

  “My name’s Juan Gonzalez. I work for the city.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to Eliana. She accepted and leaned over the desk so he could light it. Then he lit his own and blew out a haze of smoke before continuing. “But this is a private matter. I expect discretion.”

  Everyone expects discretion these days, Eliana thought, but she said, “Discretion is my specialty.”

  “So I heard.” Another curl of smoke. “It should be a simple matter. I need you to find out all you can about this—person.” He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a photograph, and laid it on the table. It was at least thirty years old, yellowed and crumbling at the edges. A head shot, the woman staring at the camera with wide dewy eyes, her dark hair pinned away from her face in a fountain of jewels, feathers floating around her bare shoulders.

  “Her name is Sofia,” the man said, dragging on his cigarette. “She isn’t human.”

  “A robot?” Eliana picked up the photograph. She thought of the andie at Lady Luna’s party. You probably couldn’t tell what he was in a picture either. It was only when he was moving that he gave himself away.

  “Yes. She was a performer and comfort girl when the amusement park was open. She’s still around.”

  “In the city?” Eliana dropped the photograph onto the desk. “I thought all the andies got shipped out—” She stopped. “Most of them, anyway.”

  The man shook his head. “It was part of the entire collapse of Autômatos Teixeira. They stayed. In the park, for city use. Most have been dismantled by now, or have been deactivated and locked away.” He shrugged.

  “The park.” Eliana thought of all the stories she’d heard about the ruins of the amusement park, mostly when she’d been younger. Snatches of reports on the evening news as her mother set the table for dinner, about people disappearing. The assumption was always that they had gone into the park for some unsavory purpose that was never clearly explained. Or there was that time one of the roller coasters started up without warning and rumbled over its track until someone from the city went and stopped it—a rumor went around that there had been a decapitated human body in one of the cars, the head rolling around next to the body’s feet. Eliana knew, like all children of Hope City, that the park was a place You Did Not Go.

  “Yes, the park. There’s a train that runs into the old underground station. You’ll want to go during the day, I imagine.”

  “And do what, exactly?”

  Mr. Gonzalez smoked his cigarette, giving away nothing. “Do what you do. Investigate her. I want to know anything you can find out.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  He shook his head. “No. Anything at all.”

  Eliana sighed, frustrated. “It really helps if you give me a little more to go on.”

  Mr. Gonzalez stared at her through the wreath of smoke. Then he jabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. His hands were long and graceful. Office hands. Not with the power plants, then.

  “Find her,” he said. “Watch her. And tell me what she does.”

  “She’s gonna see me if I go into the amusement park.”

  “That’s not my concern.” Mr. Gonzalez reached into his coat and pulled out a thick white envelope. “Fifty up front.” He set the envelope down on the desk. “Another twenty a day when you report back to me. If you find anything interesting, I’ll double that.”

  Eliana stared at him, her heart banging in her ears. With all the extra money from Lady Luna and her contacts, Eliana was closer to having enough money for a visa than she’d ever been. Than her own parents had ever been, and they’d scrimped and saved up until their deaths. At this rate, she might even be able to begin her application for the visa before the end of the winter, and be on her way to the mainland on the first ship setting out from the docks.

  She didn’t let herself think about Diego.

  “Well?” Mr. Gonzales said. “What do you think?”

  Eliana picked up the envelope and opened it. She ran her thumb over the edges of the bills, her breath hitching in her throat. “What do you mean by ‘interesting’?” she asked.

  “I’ll let you know if I hear it.” Mr. Gonzalez stared at her, his gaze heavy, stifling. “Will this arrangement work for you, Miss Gomez? If not, I can take my business elsewhere.”

  Eliana kept running her thumb over the bills. She thought of Diego, lying naked in her bed, the sheets draped over his waist, frowning at her, telling her for the hundredth time not to take cases that involved Cabrera. She remembered racing out of the Florencia, her heart pounding so fast, she thought it would hurt her.

  “One question,” Eliana said. “Does this have anything to do with Ignacio Cabrera?”

  “The gangster? Don’t be absurd.”

  Eliana nodded. She tossed the money onto the desk like it didn’t concern her. “Good. I’ll take the assignment.”

  * * * *

  A few days went by while Eliana thought about the job. Mr. Gonzalez had said he’d come back to her office
in a week to see what she’d learned. But a fucking robot would notice her wandering around the amusement park, so it wasn’t as if she could borrow Essie’s car and case the neighborhood. Eliana sat at her desk, ­doodling on her notebook paper, underneath the place where she had written Sofia and andie and amusement park. The photograph stared at her, Sofia’s eyes dark and glossy. She really didn’t look like an andie at all.

  Meanwhile, Eliana scrounged up the deed to that storefront by the docks, and Mrs. Quiroga actually conjured a smile when she stopped by the office for the meeting. It was more satisfying than Eliana had expected.

  Finding the runaway son was trickier—mostly, Eliana suspected, because he didn’t want to be found. As she rode around town, asking questions about the runaway, half her thoughts were always with that beautiful andie Sofia. She couldn’t turn the job down. The fifty-dollar retainer wasn’t enough money on its own.

  One afternoon, Eliana was holed up in her office, making phone calls to all the bars on Hope City’s east side, since she’d gotten a lead about the runaway taking up work as a dishwasher. But so far, she hadn’t found anything.

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s got brown hair, tallish—” The bell chimed. Eliana glanced up. At first she couldn’t place what she was seeing. A woman. A familiar woman.

  Lady Luna.

  The man on the other end was saying that their only dishwasher had black hair, and Eliana managed to sputter out a “That’s not him” before dropping the telephone back into the receiver. It was Lady Luna, dressed in sleek mainland clothes, her blond hair hanging loose to her shoulders.

  She was coated in ice.

  The ice sparkled across her skin as she stepped into the office and closed the door behind her. Her steps were slow and jerky and punctuated by a horrible cracking sound, like her body was falling apart.

  “Hello?” Her voice was rough and whispery. “Ms. Gomez?”

  “Lady Luna?” Eliana stood up, kicking her chair away from the desk. “Are you—are you okay?” Her voice echoed in her head.

  Lady Luna focused in on her.

  “There you are,” she said.

  Eliana opened her mouth. Lady Luna shuffled forward. Her hair clinked as she moved, catching the light, throwing off sparkles.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” Eliana said, voice shaking, “what happened to you?”

  Lady Luna shambled up to the desk. She looked around the room with a dazed, empty expression. Then she looked toward Eliana, and her pupils contracted into points. Creepy.

  “Why did I come here?” She collapsed into the client chair. The dome light hit her, and dots of white light appeared all over the walls of the room. “I should have—” She looked at Eliana again. “I hope you’ll help me.”

  “Lady Luna?” Eliana couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. “What— Are you okay?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” Lady Luna put on a strained, painful-looking smile. “I would be—very much obliged.”

  A request for a cigarette was so normal that Eliana knew exactly what to do. She fumbled around in her purse and pulled out her pack and her lighter. Lady Luna didn’t move. It seemed like it hurt her, moving. So Eliana stood up, walked around the desk, and placed the cigarette between Lady Luna’s lips. Lady Luna gazed up at her. Her pupils were still contracted, and something about her eyes seemed wrong. Dull. Distant.

  Eliana stared at her, looking for the tells she had found on Luciano, but Lady Luna didn’t give herself away as a robot. Of course not; she’d never had those tells. Eliana flicked the lighter, touched it to the tip of Lady Luna’s cigarette. The ember flared; smoke twisted toward the ceiling.

  Lady Luna took the cigarette from her mouth and blew out a stream of smoke.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m a bit in need of fire at the moment.” She reached distractedly for her hair and pulled on a thin frozen chunk. It broke in half.

  Eliana jumped.

  “Fuck.” The word sounded elegant in Lady Luna’s soft voice. She tossed the broken hair to the floor. It hit with a clank.

  Eliana slumped back against the desk.

  Lady Luna smoked her cigarette without speaking. Eliana watched her. When the cigarette was burned down almost to the filter, Eliana handed her the ashtray, and Lady Luna snubbed it out.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Are you a robot?” Eliana blurted.

  Lady Luna took a long time to answer.

  “No,” she said. She traced her fingers over her hair again. The ice was starting to melt and it left dark puddles on the floor. “No, not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  Lady Luna closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have come here.” Her voice wavered and her eyes opened. “You were right to warn me about Ignacio.”

  “Cabrera?” Eliana felt cold.

  “Yes, he tried to kill me.” A pause. “But he was unsuccessful.”

  Dread gnawed at Eliana’s stomach. “Did he throw you out of the dome?” God, did Cabrera do that? Did Diego? Eliana tried not to think about Pablo Sala. Mr. Cabrera had him killed. If Diego was just an errand-runner, he shouldn’t know that. Should he?

  Lady Luna nodded.

  “And you survived?” Eliana was dizzy. “This has to do with your stolen documents, doesn’t it?”

  Another pause. A drop of water slid down Lady Luna’s hair. “Yes,” she said.

  “I don’t understand. It’s fine if you want to tell me you’re a robot. I won’t—”

  Then Eliana gasped.

  Lady Luna looked away, her face blank.

  “You’re part-robot.”

  The faintest hint of a smile, bitter and hard. “Part-robot. I like that better than the official term. But yes, that’s what I am.”

  The office went silent save for the rattle of the radiator, the drip of melting ice. Eliana stared at Lady Luna. Cyborg, that was the official term. She’d heard about cyborgs before. They were banned in Hope City, banned in Argentina in general. Banned in most places, across the Americas, in Africa, in Europe. The only place where cyborgs were accepted was in certain countries in Asia—Japan, Korea, China. She’d never given them much thought beyond a ripple of discomfort whenever they were mentioned on the news. She understood robots and she understood humans, but she had never been able to understand both at the same time.

  “Does it shock you?” Lady Luna’s voice was soft and melodious, the voice of a human.

  “No.” Eliana wanted to seem polite.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Lady Luna pressed her hands against her lap. “I really didn’t mean to burden you with this. I can, of course, pay for your discretion, as I did with the documents.”

  Eliana almost said that wasn’t necessary, but she caught herself at the last moment. It was good business sense, to take the money to keep a secret she would have otherwise.

  “You do understand what would happen if you told anyone?”

  Eliana nodded. She thought of a scandal that had broken when she was a little girl—no, not a scandal, exactly, but a news story, something her parents had talked about at dinner. A cyborg had made its way into the city. It—and everyone had called it it, she remembered, although she couldn’t imagine anyone calling Lady Luna it—had been involved in an automobile accident. A fluke. That was how the authorities found it.

  The cyborg had been deported, kicked back to Japan where it had come from. But she remembered people saying it should have been dismantled, that it was unnatural. No one ever explained why, but as an adult she understood—because people wanted to know where the robots were. And a cyborg was enough of a human that you couldn’t tell from looking at it.

  Lady Luna was staring at her.

  “Why did you come here?” Eliana asked.

  Lady Luna blinked. “I don’t know. I couldn’t st
and the thought of going home.” She pressed her hand to her mouth, her eyes glittering with intensity. “Really, I’m just afraid that Ignacio’s men might still be at the house. I should have fought them when they came. Why I didn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off, and her expression glazed over. “Of course, I didn’t want them to know what I was—but they’ll wonder how I survived out in the desert—”

  Lady Luna seemed to recede into herself. She slumped against the chair, her face blank. Eliana jumped up and ran over and shook her shoulder. Lady Luna stirred, blinking.

  “Are you okay?”

  Lady Luna turned to Eliana. “No. I’m not sure. I feel strange.” She pressed her hand against her forehead. “I think it’s passing.”

  “We should go to a hospital.”

  “No!” Lady Luna’s shout echoed around the office. “No,” she said softly. “We can’t do that.”

  Eliana’s cheeks burned. She felt stupid. An automobile accident. “No, of course not. But if you’re hurt—”

  “I’m fine.”

  Eliana didn’t believe that. “Okay. But you’re probably cold, right?” She could hear the brightness in her voice, trying to pretend like this was normal.

  Lady Luna hesitated. “It’s uncomfortable, yes. I’d like some dry clothes, at the very least.” One of those small smiles. “I’m afraid this dress is probably ruined.”

  Eliana’s laughter twanged with discomfort. “My apartment’s only a fifteen-minute walk from here. You can borrow some of my clothes and get warm, and we can figure out—something.”

  Lady Luna shook her head. “You don’t have to help me. Your silence is all I ask.”

  Eliana considered this. Why did she want to help Lady Luna? The woman was just some aristocrat, after all, with her own private dome.

  Except she wasn’t.

  Lady Luna stared blankly off into space. Eliana wondered if Diego had been there, if he’d seen it happen and hadn’t stopped it.

  If he’d pushed her out himself.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Eliana said. “You showed up here. You obviously don’t want to be alone.”