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“Okay, good.” Eliana slid the telephone slip back into the envelope. “Thank you,” she said. “This really helps a lot.”
“Of course.” Maria laughed. “What friends are for, right?”
“Right.”
All three of them clinked their glasses together.
The Brazilian variety show had gone to commercial. An advertisement for hand soap. Eliana watched it as she drank her beer and mulled over the case, Essie and Maria laughing beside her. The next step was the difficult one. Sala had either stolen the documents himself or been forced to program the robot to do so. The other option was that Cabrera had already gotten his hands on one of these robots, and Sala had nothing to do with it. Eliana hoped that wasn’t the case. Otherwise, she’d have to start from scratch, and deal with Cabrera besides. Diego wouldn’t like it. Neither, in all honesty, would Eliana. She might have a license for her gun, but she didn’t want to have to shoot it.
The soap commercial ended, and it was replaced by an image of Marianella Luna, speaking directly to the camera.
Eliana immediately reached over and turned up the sound.
“—feed the city,” Lady Luna said. “Your donation will go toward research and development of a series of agricultural domes, based on modern dome design, that will help Hope City, and all of Antarctica, achieve her independence.”
She looked even more like a movie star than she had in Eliana’s office, her hair twisted up on top of her head in an elaborate bouffant, a diamond necklace shimmering at her throat. A cluster of white albatross feathers was pi
“Support for the agricultural domes comes from all walks of life here in Hope City,” he said. Everything about him was styled, molded into place, including his own albatross charm. Eliana found it off-putting. “Donation centers can be found in several convenient locations across the city. Please call to locate your nearest one.”
A phone number flashed on-screen.
“I hate these commercials,” Essie said. “They’re so fake. Independence isn’t about helping politicians and the aristocracy.” She glowered. “Juan thinks food prices will triple if they actually build the things, because they’ll be controlled by the wealthy.”
“Juan’s from the mainland,” Maria said. “Of course he’d say that.”
Essie gave her a dirty look.
“What?” Maria leaned back in her chair. “Am I wrong, little Miss AFF?”
“I’m not part of the AFF, and you know it.”
Maria laughed. She was just teasing, Eliana knew. Even Essie wasn’t so radical as to get involved with the AFF. She’d say Independence wasn’t about killing people, it was about reaping the benefits of the atomic power they risked their lives manufacturing out here, selling the energy themselves and using the profits to make a home of their own in the ice. Reviving the glory of old Hope City, when it had been the most advanced city of its time. A nice idea, but Eliana would still rather live on the mainland. Her mother used to tell her that was real freedom.
The variety show came back on, and Eliana switched off the television set. An afterimage of Lady Luna’s bright smile seared into her head.
She wondered again what those missing documents could be.
* * * *
Eliana pulled Essie’s car up to the curb and turned off the engine. It had taken another fifteen dollars to convince Essie to let her borrow it, but Eliana knew she might need a quick escape. And the city trains weren’t going to cut it.
Sala’s neighborhood was exactly the sort of place you’d expect a Hope City bureaucrat to live. The houses here were tall and narrow and pressed close together, with small patchwork yards full of cheap grass and stunted Hope City trees. No one was out, despite the warmth on the air. Space-heater warm, almost. Eliana shrugged out of her coat and tossed it into the backseat of Essie’s car.
She walked the three blocks to Sala’s house.
It was nine thirty in the morning. Eliana had selected the time because she knew most of the people living in this neighborhood would be at work. Specifically, she figured Sala would be at work, hunched over his fancy atomic-powered robots. And she needed his house empty.
Breaking and entering wasn’t much of a crime for a girl who had grown up in the smokestack district, even though she knew it could get her license revoked and land her in jail for a few months. And normally she would have waited, just like Mr. Vasquez had taught her, biding her time and asking questions. But Lady Luna was paying her for speed as well as discretion, and so Eliana slipped back into her favorite secondary-school hobby.
Sala’s house looked like all the other houses, only his yard didn’t have any trees in it, just some patchy grass and a couple of empty flowerpots. Eliana walked around to the side of the house as if she lived there. A metal gate led into the back garden. It wasn’t locked. She stepped through the gate, letting it click shut behind her. The back garden was small and cramped and overgrown. Still nicer than Eliana’s crappy tenement apartment.
At the back door, Eliana slipped the metal file out of her purse. After a second or two of fumbling, the motions came back to her: insert, twist, flick your wrist. The lock snapped. Eliana pushed the door open and stepped inside, pocketing the file. At least she was wearing a pair of her mother’s cotton gloves. More than she’d ever remembered to do when she was younger.
The house was darkened, the air still. Not a lot of clutter. Eliana sca
Something caught her eye.
Eliana tossed the memos aside. A matchbook lay on the desk, crammed up next to a cup of pens. Black background, a flame-colored flower twisting across the surface. It was the same design as the one on the sign at the Florencia, that popular bar on the edge of the docks.
A bar owned by Ignacio Cabrera.
Eliana flipped the matchbook over. Opened it. She didn’t find anything.
She was numb. Christ, if Cabrera already had the documents, Eliana would never be able to get them back. Not unless she asked Diego, and she knew what he would say—
Downstairs, a door slammed.
Eliana froze. All the breath poured out of her body. Footsteps echoed across the bottom floor.
Get out, she thought.
She slipped out of the office. The footsteps were still downstairs. She took a deep breath, trying to calm the rattle of her nerves. She’d done this before, been inside a house when the owner came home. A couple of times she’d even managed to escape.
She crept down the stairs, pressing her feet against the baseboards so they wouldn’t squeak. She went a couple of steps and stopped to listen. Silence. She went two more and stopped again. This time she heard the murmur of a voice. One voice. The occasional pause. Maybe he was on the telephone.
Eliana crept the rest of the way down. Nothing was waiting for her at the landing except a clear two-meter shot to the front door. She peered around the banister. Didn’t see anybody. But she could hear the voice more clearly now.
“—on the list today? . . . Listen, it’s imperative I hand it over directly. . . . No, I won’t tell you what it says. It’s for his eyes only—”
For a moment Eliana was torn. She knew she needed to get the fuck out of the house, but part of her wanted to linger, listen in on the conversation, see what she could learn.