Страница 28 из 99
“I know you’re fine,” she murmured under her breath. “But I suppose we can never be too careful.”
She reached her hand into the copper wires. Her skin sparked. The robot’s code rode over her—this robot’s code, and the code of all the other robots. One was the same as any other. They shared an intelligence.
The rustle of the plants became a harsh mechanical slur in the buzz of information. She closed her eyes, and the world went dark except for the little robot revealing itself to her. Its programming flashed across the interior of her machine brain, and her human brain interpreted that information as streaks of light.
This went on for a long time.
When it finished, Marianella’s eyes flew open and she stared out at the corn, waiting for her mind to return to itself. She slid her hand out of the robot’s wires. It was unchanged, her skin pale and unblemished, her nails filed into perfect curves and French-tipped. Not even a mainland style. European. She went so overboard in trying to prove she was normal.
Marianella settled back into herself. Her mind was still on fire, though, bright with the memory of the robot.
She closed him up, turned him over, twisted the lights in the opposite direction. The robot came back on, and then so did all the others. They looked at her expectantly.
“Just what I thought,” she said, her voice shimmering on the wind. “Your programming remains unbroken.”
The robots didn’t react, and Marianella left them so she could walk the paths through the dome, slow and meditative, her head bowed in prayer.
She always did this when she came here alone.
* * * *
When Marianella finally arrived back at Southstar, night was falling, winter-early. Hector had installed moonlights in their dome, dots of silvery brightness that leached the color out of everything and cast long, unfamiliar shadows in the wheat. They had come to Hope City together from the mainland, both looking for new lives—Marianella so she could hide her nature and start over with a clean slate of humanity, Hector because he had followed the promise of wealth from the atomic plants—and so both of them had remembered the moon and the stars. But the moonlights were not the moon, and she’d always intended to have them turned off now that Hector was gone. She just hadn’t done it yet.
The wheat rustled its sad soft song, and Marianella unlocked her front door and stepped inside. The door swung shut behind her. She took off her coat. Turned on the lights.
And froze.
Something was wrong. She could sense it, a disruption in the circulation of the house’s air.
The hallway light was white and dazzling, as if it were refracting off a thousand mirrors. But Marianella could sense shadows amid all that brightness. A shadow. A man.
Someone was in the house, waiting for her.
“Who’s here!” she shouted. She took off her scarf. She kept on her gloves. “I know you’re here! Who is it!”
God, why hadn’t her maintenance drones intercepted her? She should have asked Luciano to stay. He’d offered. But she’d said no and told him she could take care of herself.
“Mother of mercy,” she whispered.
The house answered her with silence.
“Who’s here!” she shouted, and this time, she caught a scent on the air. Cigar smoke and wool and aftershave and the faint, faint trace of women’s perfume.
He was here.
Not just one of his enforcers but him.
“Where are you?” she shouted. “I know you’re in here!”
Silence. Brightness.
Footsteps.
“Brave, brave woman,” said a silken voice. “I gave you time to run.”
Marianella stood ramrod straight. Ignacio Cabrera stepped out of the parlor doorway, looking like a businessman in his gray suit and his black fedora. He cradled one of her maintenance drones in his arms, its wires hanging out in loops and tangles. Her stomach turned over at the sight of it.
“You’re in my house,” she said.
He dropped the drone, and it broke when it hit the floor, parts scattering across the tile.
“So it would appear.” An easy smile. Marianella knew not to look at it. She looked at his eyes instead, cold and empty, to remind herself of what he was.
“It’s been a while.” He ambled toward her. Marianella didn’t move. She caught the scent of others in the house.
“I missed this place,” Ignacio said. “Miss Hector, too.” He stopped a few paces from her and smiled. “I’ve seen your commercials on the television. An agricultural dome, Marianella? You don’t think that’s going to work, do you?”
“What do you want?”
He didn’t answer right away. Every muscle in Marianella’s body was taut. Her heart raced and raced. He’d come to collect her documents himself this time. She still didn’t understand why Hector would have betrayed her like that, why he would have alerted Ignacio to the possibility of a weakness. She should never have told Hector her secret, all those years ago. But she had been young and stupid.
“That’s no way to treat a guest,” he said.
“You aren’t a guest.”
He gave her a long, inscrutable look. “No,” he said. “I suppose I’m not. But I had a message I wanted to deliver myself. I figured I owe that much to Hector.”
She knew the men were coming. She heard the distant fall of their footsteps against the carpet. She felt their heat closing in on her. But she panicked, and she didn’t know what to do.
One of them grabbed both of her arms and jerked her back; the other shoved the barrel of a gun into her side. Cold metal locked around her wrists. She didn’t try to fight back. Her heart was beating too fast, as fast as a hummingbird’s. The machine parts of her body reinforced the rest of her for what was to come.
Ignacio leaned in close, and Marianella remembered the first time she’d seen him. They’d just moved to Hope City, and her husband had thrown a summer solstice party and Ignacio had been there. She’d taken one look at him and known he was a murderer.
“Time to go,” Ignacio said, and then one of the men threw a bag over her head. The material was thick enough that the world blinked out. She was jerked backward, stumbling, not out the front door as she’d expected but through the familiar pattern of her house’s rooms. Her hip banged against a table. Glass rattled. The mechanical parts of her brain tracked their progress—down the hallway, through the living room, the dining room. Toward the patio door.
She knew she should fight back, but she didn’t want to, because she wouldn’t be able to muffle her strength. She didn’t want to risk revealing her secret to Ignacio if he didn’t already know—and she suspected, with the way his men had come in here unarmed save for their guns, the way they’d tossed a bag over her head, that he didn’t.
She only prayed that he or his men wouldn’t find the secret lockbox hidden behind the refrigerator, where she’d tucked the documents away after the first break-in. If he learned what she was, she would have to kill him herself.
And she didn’t think she could do that.
A sudden rush of wheat-scented wind told her they were outside. She smelled car exhaust.
“What?” she said, breaking her silence out of surprise. Her lips rubbed against the rough fabric of the bag. “A car. How did you get a car out of the main dome?”
“You know I have my ways, Lady Luna.”
They dragged her through the wheat. Not far. A car door opened. She was shoved inside, pushed onto the seat. The gun was still in her side. The door closed. Another opened. She tracked these sounds and she tracked the scent of the men, and in her head she saw a picture of herself, still dressed for travel in the city, her arms lashed behind her, flanked by two men with guns.
“You have a lovely home,” Ignacio said. His voice was close by, coming from in front of her, like he was facing her. “But it’s always much better to do business on my own turf. Don’t you think?”