Our Lady of the Ice

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Mr. Gonzalez didn’t move. “Is that true?”

  Thank God. He didn’t have access to the park files himself. She might be able to salvage this after all.

  “Of course it’s true. You’re paying me, right?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Gonzalez rapped his fingers against the wallet. “I’d like to see those files very much, Miss Gomez. I’ll pay you thirty dollars for visiting the park, and then five hundred if you can bring me any information about her programming.”

  Eliana didn’t flinch. Five hundred dollars. With her savings, that brought her up to the three thousand she needed for a visa, although not a ticket on one of the ships. Not yet.

  Her ears buzzed as she answered him, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “That sounds excellent,” Eliana said. “I’ll put in the call this afternoon, and I’ll let you know just as soon as I find anything out.”

  For a moment Mr. Gonzalez didn’t move. Then he extracted a thin stack of bills from his wallet and laid them on the desk.

  “Would you like a receipt?”

  “No, Miss Gomez, that won’t be necessary.” Mr. Gonzalez stood up. He had a graceful way of moving. Sophisticated. Cultured. He didn’t seem like a city man at all.

  Eliana stood up too and they shook hands over the desk. His palm was cool and dry. Maybe he was with Cabrera after all. No matter. She was going to get rid of him after she handed off the files, and she was going to be rid of this city not long after that.

  “Have a good day, Miss Gomez.” He tilted his head down, a ­genteel sort of bow, and then turned and left the office.

  She watched him leave. When the bell twinkled into silence, and his shadow had disappeared from the window in her door, she dialed Maria’s work number. Maria answered on the second ring, her voice harried.

  “Hope City budget office, how may I direct your call?”

  “Maria?”

  “Eliana? Jesus, I haven’t talked to you in ages. Thought you might have finally caught that ship to the mainland without saying good-bye.”

  “I’ve been busy. I do have a favor. I can pay. A lot.”

  “Oh, I can’t talk right now, sweetie! Listen, I’m meeting Essie at some party down at the warehouse district tonight. Why don’t you come? Better than just calling me up at work asking for favors, right?”

  Eliana laughed. “Sure, yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve just been so busy—”

  “Hey, working girl, I’ve got it.” Maria’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I seriously can’t talk right now, though. Party’s at the old Azevedo supply warehouse. Eight o’clock. I’ll meet you out front.”

  “Sure thing.”

  They said their good-byes, and Eliana set the receiver back into the cradle. Her office seemed empty and cold, like Mr. Gonzalez had turned it into a vacuum. She shivered, then stood up and adjusted the radiator. It rattled more insistently against the wall.

  A warehouse party tonight. This was the last thing she needed, to go hanging around the warehouse district. But Maria’d be more inclined to help her if Eliana showed up in person, and she wanted those documents. She wanted to get rid of Mr. Gonzalez.

  * * * *

  Eliana took the train into the warehouse district. It was crowded with people looking to celebrate the start of the weekend—women in furs and shiny sparkling dresses, men in Italian suits. Most were riding the train to its final destination at the docks. Hardly anyone stepped off with Eliana at the warehouse district.

  The Azevedo warehouse was located in the middle of things, a big stone building that was probably among the first built here, when Hope City was to be just an amusement park. The warehouses had stored building materials and robots for the park, and then when the park had closed, the warehouses had mostly closed down as well, save for a scattered handful along the edges of the district that were used for storing supplies for the power plants. Eliana’d been to the Azevedo warehouse once or twice before; Essie’s artist friends threw parties there when they could wheedle someone from the city into giving them a permit. Essie’d claimed it was easier to do in the winter. Bread and circuses, she’d said, knocking back her drink. Eliana didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she figured she had the general idea.

  The Azevedo warehouse was hung with strings of multicolored lightbulbs. Light poured out the windows and flooded over the sidewalk. Music thumped distantly in the background. Something modern and unlistenable, no doubt, rock and roll from America and folk songs from Argentina, all of it run through cheap speakers for that Antarctican Independence distortion.

  Maria wasn’t there yet. Eliana leaned up against a broken street­lamp and lit a cigarette. People emerged out of the street’s darkness in groups of threes and fours, all pressed close for warmth. Half of them were in fashionable mainland-style clothes, sheath dresses and skinny ties, and the other half wore the sealskin coats and handmade sweaters favored by the pro-Independence movement. Most of the artists in Hope City were pro-­Independence, from what Eliana could gather. Personally, she didn’t care enough to take sides, and she’d thrown on a simple black mainland dress herself. No sealskin for her.

  Eliana was almost done with her cigarette when Maria spilled out of the warehouse entrance, her hair already damp and shining with sweat. “Sorry, sorry!” she cried, running over to join Eliana. “I lost track of time in there.” Her heels clicked on the cement. She was dressed more or less the same as she had been on Last Night.

  “It’s fine. I was just about to go in and look for you.” Eliana smiled. “So what exactly is happening with this party? Some of Essie’s friends?”

  “Yeah, the musicians.” Maria looped her arm in Eliana’s, and together they walked inside. The sound blasted across Eliana as soon as she crossed the threshold; it was as bright and riotous as the multicolored lights hanging outside. Old park equipment was stacked up around the edge of the building so that people could dance in the center of the room, although the music was difficult to dance to.

  “Jesus Christ,” Eliana said, shouting.

  “Tell me about it.” Maria led Eliana through the crush to a ­cluster of tables built out of old brass pipes. A white bedsheet hung on the wall behind them, and someone was projecting slides of the Antarctic desert onto it, the snow painted over with garish, unnatural colors. Every now and then words flashed on the screen: Their power plants are our cancer! Their blood should freeze!

  Essie sat at the table alone, drinking a beer.

  “She’s here!” Maria cried, and Essie lifted her head and waved. She was in full Independence regalia tonight, her boxy dress cut out of sealskin and shaped at the waist with a rough-hewn, handmade belt.

  “Oh my God,” Maria said. “I’m so glad you could make it. It’s been forever. And with all the blackouts lately, I was starting to get worried.”

  “Me too.” Essie peered up from her drink as Eliana slid into the seat next to her. “It’s the mainland, you know. They’ve got the city under their thumb. They want us to know who really controls the power out here.”

  “Politics.” Maria rolled her eyes. “Couldn’t we escape it for just five minutes?”

  “You’re at an Independence party,” Essie pointed out.

  “It wasn’t the blackouts. I’ve just been busy.” Eliana didn’t feel like listening to the two of them bicker. At least it was easier to talk here—the music was across the room, swallowed up by the big empty space of the warehouse. Essie waved her hand, and a bar girl came over and took their orders.

  “So busy with what, exactly?” Essie asked. “Saving up money to sell out to the mainland?”

  “It’s not about selling out,” Maria said. “She just doesn’t get that this place is home. Isn’t that right, Eliana?” She leaned close. “Why have you been ignoring us? Is it Diego?”

  “No.” Eliana made a face at her. “I haven’t seen that much of him lately.” This
wasn’t entirely true; she had, after all, seen more of Diego than she had of either of her friends. But that was because he showed up unannounced at her apartment. “I’ve been working.”

  “So my guess was right, then.” Essie frowned and looked away. She always got like that when Eliana talked about leaving for the mainland.

  “You break any big cases lately?” Maria leaned forward. “Anything—­interesting?”

  “No, not really.” Eliana tried to make her voice sound bored. She’d already learned that if she didn’t answer that question in the negative, Maria would hound her for details until she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I do need your help with something, though.”

  “What? A case?” Maria perked up. Even Essie seemed more interested now.

  “Yeah, I need a fake of something. To serve as a kind of—plant—for this thing I’m working on.”

  “A plant?”

  “Yeah, like a decoy.”

  Maria leaned back in her chair. The lights from the projection spilled across her face. “A plant of what, exactly?”

  “Schematics for an old amusement park robot. They don’t have to be real. I just need you to make them look official.”

  “Oh.” Maria slumped down. “I thought you wanted something exciting. Like you were going to take down half the city council. But just some robot schematics?”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  Maria laughed. “I’m teasing! Sure, I could probably do something. Honestly, I’d probably be able to find the original without a lot of trouble.”

  Eliana blinked. Mr. Gonzalez was willing to pay five hundred dollars for something Maria could pick up on her own? She’d thought the park robot schematics would be more closely guarded, that Maria would have to sneak around—

  If Mr. Gonzalez was a city man, why didn’t he get them himself?

  “I don’t need the original,” Eliana said quickly. “But if you want to find it and copy it and change up the schematics somehow—that’d be perfect.”

  Maria grinned. “I feel like I’m doing something illegal.”

  “That’s because you are,” Essie said.

  “Not really,” Eliana said. “Giving me the real schematics probably is, but she’s not, and it sounds like no one would care anyway.”

  “Whoever hired you cares.”

  “Yeah, but he’s—” Eliana waved her hand through the air. “I shouldn’t talk about this, you know.”

  “Oh, come on,” Maria said.

  “I really shouldn’t. But there’s something off about him.”

  “Hence the fake schematics,” Essie said. “Interesting.”

  The bar girl brought them their drinks. The music had shifted into something resembling a traditional tango, although it was still filtered through with feedback from the speakers. Essie listened intently, nodding her head as if she were at a speech or a lecture.

  “People are trying to dance,” Maria said, pointing at a couple weaving their way across the empty space.

  “Of course they are,” Essie said. “That’s the entire point. To force people to perform a dance to a culture they should have no part of.”

  Eliana resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Maria didn’t, and Essie frowned when she saw.

  “You don’t understand anything.”

  “It’s just a tango! And they’re messing it all up!”

  Essie screeched with frustration. Maria laughed and said, “I’m sorry. I just don’t care about all this stuff—”

  “Stuff! It’s your whole life!”

  Eliana tuned out their argument. Her thoughts went back to Mr. Gonzalez. She should have the fake schematics soon enough, and she’d definitely slip Maria a bit of payment for helping out.

  An eruption of noise filled the warehouse, so loud that the walls rattled.

  Eliana thought it was the music at first, reverberating through the speakers, but when the noise faded away, it was replaced by screaming, although the screaming sounded distant and far away. Her ears were buzzing. People were crouching down on the floor, and some were running toward the exit, and everyone was panicking.

  “What happened?” Maria was right next to her, but her voice was muffled, like she was speaking through a wall. “What was that?”

  Essie shook her head. Her eyes were wide.

  Eliana smelled something burning.

  “We should go,” she said, pushing away from the table. Maria and Essie followed, their hands linked. People rushed toward the doors, cramming up against one another—like during the power failure on Last Night. But all the lights were still on, and the projector still ran its bright images against the wall, and there had been enough flickers in electricity that people were used to them by now.

  Eliana, Maria, and Essie pushed through the doorway, out onto the street. The chaos was worse here, people shouting and running into the alleyways. Gray smoke hung thickly on the air, and the scent of burning was stronger, more pervasive. Alarms clanged wildly.

  “Look!” Although muffled, Maria’s voice was sharp and shrill. She jabbed her finger off to the side. Eliana whirled around. She didn’t see anything at first, just more people dressed in party clothes. And it was snowing.

  Snow.

  Fear paralyzed her. If it was snowing, then the dome had broken open. But no. This wasn’t snow. It was gray and smoldering. It was ash.

  “There!” Maria shrieked. “Can’t you see it?”

  “I don’t—” Eliana shook her head and stumbled backward. Every­one was looking where Maria was pointing, but Eliana only saw the drifts of ash.

  Overhead, the dome glass had gone dark with the rush of maintenance robots.

  “God, you call yourself an investigator? There.”

  And then Eliana saw it flickering through the building.

  The glow of fire.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MARIANELLA

  Marianella woke from a dream she couldn’t remember. She lay in her bed, afraid to move. The palace was silent save for the soft whir of the generators, but Marianella was certain that she should listen for something. Something had woken her. She was sure of it.

  She slid out of bed and pulled on an old silk dressing gown, left over from one of the old park hotels, and peered out her window. She had a view of the southern half of the park, but she didn’t see anything unusual, only the soft glow of the garden below.

  Marianella closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the glass. If she were a robot she could play back through her files and find whatever had woken her. But she wasn’t a robot.

  Something was wrong.

  Then she heard the wail of a siren.

  Immediately, Marianella opened her eyes. She saw nothing outside but darkness. The siren wailed and wailed and then faded away.

  Something had happened.

  But it hadn’t happened here.

  Marianella breathed with relief, and her breath clouded the glass. She had been afraid of another culling, another death. She had gone to sleep thinking of Inéz, and now that she was awake, she thought about her again. Inéz was gone, the roots of weeds and flowers growing around her. The cullers—the city’s men, Alejo’s men, Marianella still wasn’t sure what to think—had never come back for her.

  Marianella took a deep breath. When she had told Sofia about the wires, about recognizing the culler, Sofia had frowned and said, “This has happened before. We have an entire warehouse of broken androids because of men like that. That you recognized him means nothing. You spend your days with humans.”

  Another siren picked up, far away in the distance. The siren was joined by another, and then they both faded away.

  It was probably nothing. A car collision, an accident with one of the icebreakers at the docks—

  Then why had she woken up?

  The feeling of wrongne
ss lingered. Marianella pushed her hair away from her eyes. Sofia kept radios down in the command center, but didn’t Luciano have a television set tucked away somewhere? She knew he liked to watch the mainland telenovelas sometimes.

  She left her room, her bare feet padding softly against the cold tile floor. The palace was dark, and not even the nighttime main­tenance drones were wheeling about. Perhaps they were still ­unsettled from the culling too. Inasmuch as they could feel unsettled.

  It didn’t take Marianella long to find Luciano’s television set. He didn’t frequent many rooms in the palace—mostly the operations room, when Sofia needed him, and the kitchen, and the little suite of rooms that had once made up the palace tearoom. She found the television in the Rose Room, perched precariously on a stack of old display cases. Luciano wasn’t there. Marianella had gathered from Sofia that he was spending his time down at the frozen lake, alone. She wondered if he was mourning Inéz.

  Marianella switched on the television.

  The reception was not good here, and the picture shimmered with static. But it was a news program, the word “LIVE” blinking across the bottom of the screen. Marianella let out a little gasp and turned up the sound.

  “Still no word on the source of the explosion, although the city will begin its investigation as soon as the wreckage is clear.”

  Explosion?

  Marianella thumped the side of the television, and it went momentarily gray from the shock. “Where?” she shouted. “Who?”

  The newsman looked at the camera as he spoke. “Alejo Ortiz has already appeared publicly to deny rumors that the explosion was tied in any way to the Independence movement. We go now to footage from his press conference.”

  Marianella took a step backward, shivering. Alejo materialized on-screen, standing on the dais in front of the city office, doused in white light. He looked as if he had been dragged out of bed. Seeing him was like being dropped into cold water.