Our Lady of the Ice

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “Oh my God,” Marianella said.

  Her voice trembled. Whatever ferocity had driven her to rip a door from its hinges was gone. Eliana squeezed into the doorway beside her. Looked into the room.

  Froze.

  There was no bed, only a worktable spread with fragments of metal. At first Eliana thought she was just staring at robot parts. But then Marianella covered her mouth with her hand and let out a low, keening sound.

  “That monster,” she whispered. Tears shimmered on her eyelashes. “That monster.”

  And that’s when Eliana saw it. The wires, the empty canisters. Not robot parts.

  Explosives.

  Eliana couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

  She had to think.

  “Don’t touch anything!” she said. “I mean, I know you touched the door, but the explosives, don’t—”

  “That son of a bitch,” Marianella said.

  Eliana wavered.

  “That filthy, traitorous son of a whore.” Her cheeks were flushed. “Do you know what this means?”

  “Not really.” Eliana was dizzy at the thought of standing in an apartment full of explosives. She couldn’t think straight.

  “Alejo did it. When Sala fell through, he found another way to betray me.” Her hands curled into fists. Eliana took a step back.

  “Maybe Costa is just part of some faction. Maybe Alejo doesn’t know.” But Eliana didn’t believe that either.

  “Look what happened when the dome burned down,” Marianella said. Her voice hummed with quiet rage. “He removed me from the project and he got the support of the people.” She was trembling. “Maybe he was planning it all along, to steal my work—”

  Eliana placed one hand on Marianella’s arm. Marianella closed her eyes. A tear streaked down her cheek.

  “We should go to the police,” Eliana said. “Call it in as an anony­mous tip—”

  “No!” Marianella’s voice was stronger than Eliana had expected. “Absolutely not.”

  “Oh. Jesus.” Of course, the stalemate. “Then what do we do?” Eliana asked.

  Marianella opened her eyes. Took a deep breath. She looked at the explosives like she could ignite them herself.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said, and her voice made Eliana shiver.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  MARIANELLA

  Marianella sat in Alejo’s office, staring at his secretary typing over at her desk. She hadn’t told Eliana she was coming here—hadn’t told Eliana anything. They’d sped away from Andres’s apartment in that hulking old-fashioned car, and Marianella had gripped the steering wheel tightly enough that her fingers ached. But she’d taken Eliana back to her apartment in the smokestack district. “Stay here,” she’d said. “Don’t answer the door.”

  “What! Why!”

  Marianella shook her head. “Because it’s not safe yet.”

  And then she’d driven to Alejo’s office.

  He was in there, tucked away in the back hallway. She could sense him—smell him, with her activated machine parts. Pine trees and European cologne wafting through the recycled air.

  “How much longer will it be?” Marianella asked. She’d been waiting for five minutes, and it had been torture waiting even that long.

  “I told you, Lady Luna, he’s meeting with some men from the city. Without an appointment—” The secretary lifted her hands, question­ing. “He’s a busy man these days.”

  “Yes, I imagine he is.” Marianella crossed her legs, patted the side of her hair. Adrenaline surged through her. Seeing that business card calling for her disposal had coalesced into the strength she’d used to rip the door from its hinges. But that one act hadn’t been enough to burn up all her anger.

  She stood up.

  The secretary glanced at her over the typewriter, agitation making her vibrate.

  “I told you, it will only be a few moments,” she said.

  “No, it won’t.” Marianella strode forward. She walked quickly and purposefully, and she kept her head held high. The secretary shrieked behind her and followed.

  “Lady Luna, he doesn’t want to be disturbed!”

  “I don’t care.” Marianella flung his office door open. There were no city men in there. Just Alejo. He looked up at her, his face blank. The secretary babbled apologies at Marianella’s side, and for a moment Marianella felt sorry for her.

  “See?” Marianella said, in as sweet a voice as she could muster. “His meeting’s all finished up.”

  Alejo glared at her. Marianella went in and shut the door, leaving the secretary out in the hallway.

  “You’re a liar,” she said.

  “Technically,” he said, “Rosa is.”

  Marianella walked forward and sat down across from his desk. Her heart pounded; heat flushed in her cheeks. She kept seeing the bomb in Andres’s apartment. Alejo had done that. Alejo had asked for that.

  Alejo was a monster.

  “What do you want?” he said. “Is this about another donation? You know you can just send them—”

  “You destroyed the agriculture dome,” she said.

  Alejo fell quiet, and his face went slack. The silence in the room buzzed.

  “You tried to have me deported,” she whispered. “And then you destroyed all my work.”

  Alejo shifted in his seat. He brushed his hair back with one hand. Looked at one of the walls.

  “It was brave of you,” he finally said, “to come here. To accuse me of that.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. You did it.”

  He looked at her. There was that glitter in his eyes that should have told her all those months ago that something was wrong with him. He was no better than Ignacio.

  “Someone’s been snooping,” he said.

  Marianella let out a long breath. “Why did you do it?” she whispered.

  Alejo sighed. He threw up one hand, pinched the bridge of his nose. Shook his head. Stupid human politician tics. “I had to,” he finally said. “When Cabrera tried to kill you at the Midwinter Ball, I knew I couldn’t fuck around anymore.”

  Marianella stared at him in horror. Then she leapt to her feet and pressed her hands into the top of his desk and leaned close to him, pressing so hard, her hands indented the wood.

  Alejo jumped, glanced down at the marred desk.

  “You bombed the dome.” Saying it aloud was painful. It made the truth become real.

  He didn’t answer.

  “All our work.” Marianella stumbled away from the desk. “All my work. You destroyed it—because of Cabrera?” She looked up at Alejo. The room spun. “I don’t understand. What did you think this was going to accomplish? That you could just beat him to it, and that would be okay?”

  “No!” Alejo shook his head. “I wanted to blame him for it, don’t you understand? Show the people that the dome was possible, and turn the tide against him. Show them they don’t need his food. All politics are theater, remember?”

  Marianella collapsed back down in her chair. Her mechanical parts clicked and whirred inside her, trying to calm her heartbeat.

  “I wanted to make a deal,” Alejo said. “But you kept refusing. I knew this was going to happen. If Sala had just done his job—”

  “Yes,” Marianella snapped. “I’d love to hear your justifications for that, too.”

  Alejo slumped back in his chair. He looked tired. Old. “It’s the same thing,” he said. “I knew it was going to be a danger, your involvement with Cabrera—”

  “It wasn’t my involvement!”

  “Your husband’s, then! Christ, does it matter? I thought if I could get you sent to Asia, it would smooth things over for all of us, and you’d have a happier life there anyway, getting to live with your own kind.”

  Her own kind. Marianella glared at h
im. “Did it ever occur to you that I consider humans my own kind? That that was the reason I was helping you in the first place?”

  “I didn’t think about it that much, for God’s sake. I just needed to get you out of the city before Cabrera found out. I knew you wouldn’t go on your own. I’m sorry that Sala turned out to be a selfish prick. He was trying to get paid twice, I figure, once from me and once from Cabrera. I paid him up front to get the documents. Big mistake.” Alejo rolled his eyes. “This was supposed to be easy.”

  “Easy?” Marianella took a deep breath. Alejo was still hunched up in his chair, his eyes wide. He was pulling away from her, like he was afraid of her. And why wouldn’t he be? He was right, she wasn’t human—humans had never been her kind. At least he hadn’t killed her. At least he’d thought he’d been trying to protect her.

  “Is there anything else you need to tell me?” she said, her voice sharp and cold. “The virus that makes the maintenance robots malfunction, was that you too?”

  She had spat the question without thinking, but she realized, as soon as she asked it, that the suspicion had always been there, in the back of her mind. And when Alejo gasped and stared at her, she knew she was right. He was responsible for the blackouts. It had never been Sofia, had never even been the maintenance drones.

  She stood up, forcing her movements to be slow and measured despite her surging anger.

  “Why?” she said. “What good could that possibly do?”

  “It makes the people realize they need us.” Alejo peered over the desk at her. “Same as with the explosion.”

  “The city was right.” Marianella could hardly think straight. “All this time—it really was the AFF.” She turned away from Alejo, her heart pounding. Her feet didn’t seem to touch the floor. “But you made me check up on the ag drones, you were so worried.”

  “I thought they might have gotten infected.”

  Marianella looked at him over her shoulder. He gave a shrug. “It’s a hard thing to control. And at that point I didn’t want the ag domes failing. The explosion had always been the contingency plan, you know. In case we couldn’t buy off Cabrera.”

  “I don’t understand.” Marianella shook her head, trying to jostle her thoughts free. “I can’t believe you would do that and put all those people in danger just to convince them of something they already know—”

  “Actually, a lot of them don’t already know it. And what the fuck do you care, living out in your private dome? This is why I didn’t tell you about it from the beginning. You don’t even live in Hope City. You don’t know how desperate things are here.”

  “I know you’ve only made things worse. You’ve thrown the city into chaos.”

  “I did what I had to.” He looked up at her. “So tell me, are you going to kill me yourself, or are you going to get that robot bitch to do it for you?”

  “Her name’s Sofia,” Marianella said. “Which you would know. You’ve been investigating her.”

  Alejo laughed. “You have been busy playing detective! Well, yes, I was investigating her. At first it was because I needed her robots, the ones she’s got squirreled away in park storage—”

  “The broken androids,” Marianella said. “Why? What possible good could—”

  “Their parts, Marianella. I was trying to stockpile my own supply to help with Independence. The city didn’t want to bother getting to them. That’s how I first met Pablo, may he rest in peace, even if he was a greedy bastard. He’d been the one to tell me about those poor little broken-down androids and how they were guarded by a sentient comfort girl. So I looked into it.” He shrugged.

  “You killed Inéz,” she said, “because you wanted robot parts? Why didn’t you just take hers?”

  “That,” Alejo said, “was a scare tactic. I said I was only concerned about the parts at first. I knew about Sofia, sure, but then I started hearing things, rumors about an android working for Cabrera. And I never ignore a rumor, Marianella. That’s why I asked my men to destroy Inéz. I wanted to scare Sofia into submission. I thought it might work on a sentient robot. When it didn’t, I went after her schematics. I needed to know what I was up against.”

  Something snapped inside Marianella, a key turning into place. She froze into a cold resolve. He’d known about Sofia all this time and he’d played games. He’d toyed with all of them.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Alejo said, after a pause. “Are you going to kill me, or are you going to get Sofia to do it?”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Marianella said.

  “If you go public with this,” he said, “you know exactly what information I’ll be taking to the city.”

  They stared at each other across the desk. Marianella thought of Sofia, sitting in operations, watching Hope City unfold in front of her. Marianella had chosen her side correctly after all.

  “Good-bye, Alejo,” Marianella said, and then she walked out of the office, climbed into her car, and drove back to the amusement park.

  * * * *

  Marianella didn’t bother with the locator. It would have been faster, but she wanted the time to meditate on everything she’d learned. She wanted time to assuage her anger. To decide what to do about Alejo.

  Right now, he stood in the way of Sofia taking over the city. Sofia still had not cemented her hold on the Independents, which meant there were gaps in her control sprinkled throughout the city authorities. If Alejo continued unencumbered, his deviousness would win him the support of the city. No doubt he planned on swinging in with a solution to the power outages at some point in the future. And so Alejo couldn’t stay.

  He could be killed. The thought made her squeamish, the way it always did. Cabrera’s men had been enough death.

  But there was another way, a way of giving up the stalemate. It would fit within Sofia’s framework, of destroying the city from the inside out, and it would remove Alejo in only a few days’ time, without having to worry about interference from those authorities not on Sofia’s payroll.

  But that was one of the things she had to think on as she wandered through the worn-down paths of the amusement park, through the gardens and clumps of cottages, past the lake, through the palace, into the operations room. She didn’t find Sofia, and that was good. The walk calmed her and helped her think straight.

  The plan, her idea, bubbled in the back of her head. She stopped in the ballroom. It was empty, dust floating through the dome light. She walked over to the windows, knelt down, said a brief prayer. She hadn’t spoken to God in a long time, but she needed to right now. She asked Him if her decision was the right one, and the dome light was warm against her skin, and she knew that yes, it was, because it was the only way that wasn’t evil.

  Marianella lifted her head. She looked across the ballroom and thought about the night she had danced here with Sofia, and she smiled to herself. The dust looked like flecks of gold, like fragments drifting down from heaven. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for strength, and then she checked the last place in the palace that she hadn’t—the kitchens.

  That was where Marianella found Sofia, hunched over a maintenance drone, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Marianella stood in the doorway and watched her work, watched her hands moving in a blur over the drone.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  Only then did Sofia look up, her face pale in the bright lights.

  “It’s infected by the virus,” she said. “It’s not sentient. The other drones brought it to me.”

  The mention of the virus twisted Marianella’s stomach.

  “It’s not exactly a virus, you know,” she said.

  Sofia frowned. She knew that, of course she did, but Marianella also knew that admitting to the truth meant admitting that a human had found another way to overcome a robot.

  “And as it is,” Marianella said carefully, “you might want to leave
it.”

  Sofia went very still. She almost looked as if she’d been turned off. Marianella took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen, and Sofia followed her with just her eyes, dark and unblinking.

  “Why?” she said when Marianella had come to the counter.

  Marianella looked down at the black-and-white marble of the countertop. It gleamed in the lights.

  “Alejo did it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Alejo is responsible for the blackouts.”

  Sofia’s hands still hovered above the drone. She had been in the process of taking out its motherboard, and the lights blinked back and forth in twin rows.

  “I should have seen it.” Marianella touched one hand to her forehead. “It was so similar to the way I programmed the drones in the ag dome. He stole the idea from me.” She laughed, once, bitterness rising up in the back of her throat. “That’s not all he stole from me either.”

  Without speaking, Sofia slid the motherboard back into the drone, although she didn’t bother to close the shell. Then she walked over to Marianella and looked her straight in the eye.

  “What,” she said, “are you talking about?”

  Marianella drank in Sofia’s features. “I’m afraid I did something rather ill-advised.”

  “Will it be a problem?”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  Sofia stepped away. She was beautiful in her old housedress, her hair pulled back. Marianella wanted to reach out and rub her thumb against Sofia’s jawline. Wanted to touch her one last time.

  “What’s going on?” Sofia asked.

  The room was too hot. Marianella wished her robot parts would activate and bring her body temperature down.

  “Eliana and I broke into the apartment of one of Alejo’s aides.”

  “Why? Because you were investigating the viruses?”

  Marianella nodded. And then she told her what they’d found.

  Sofia listened with her head tilted to the side. She twisted a lock of hair back and forth between her fingers. Marianella watched that hair as she spoke. It was a metronome that counted the time to her story.