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Eliana had been kind, at least. Not disgusted or terrified or likely to turn her into the authorities, although Marianella remained on edge. Because Eliana knew her secret, and because Ignacio had finally tried to kill her.
If it had been summer, she would have fled to the mainland. But it wasn’t summer, and no city ship would allow her to board, much less ride north. Because according to the city, she was 100 percent human.
“Approaching park entrance,” the train said in a soft automated voice with a slushy European accent, like half-melted snow. The lights dimmed. At least the train was empty. It was a relic of the amusement park, its walls covered in storybook paintings of penguins and narwhals and orcas and sea lions. Most people didn’t even know it still ran. However, all city trains were automatic, and shutting them down completely, including the one into the park, would be an inconvenience to the city, as they still went mining for robots in the amusement park. Luciano and Sofia called those mining raids the cullings.
She shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. The train passed into the tu
The train pulled up to its one stop, the only station in the park. Marianella stepped onto the platform. It hadn’t changed since the last time she’d been here, almost three years ago. The paint was still faded, the lights were still broken, the air still smelled of mildew.
The train puffed steam into the station. Marianella’s hair curled from the humidity. Frozen and thawed and curled. She’d be lucky if she didn’t have to shave it all off and start over.
She climbed the broken escalator to the surface.
The station was located on the edge of the park, near the towering wooden roller coaster that had, forty years ago, been the most i
She walked.
Marianella had never visited Antarctica when the amusement park was open. It had closed in 1943, when she was ten, and her parents had considered it vulgar. She was a daughter of the aristocracy and as such was expected to spend her time horseback riding and practicing her social graces. At ten her father hadn’t yet taken her humanity away from her—that was still two years off, a transformation that occurred simultaneously with puberty—and never seeing the park before it closed had been her childhood’s greatest tragedy.
Because Marianella, like all former little girls, was familiar with the amusement park’s magic. It had been called Hope City too, just like the surrounding settlement where its employees had lived, but unlike the current Hope City, it had been designed to appear cut from the ice and snow of the Antarctic desert. Marianella vaguely recalled that was its entire gimmick: a true Antarctic civilization, tamed and temperature-controlled for your delight and appreciation.
It didn’t appear cut out of ice anymore. The buildings still sparkled a little in the floodlights, but they were no longer white, only the same grimy yellowed-bone color as the cobblestone. Most of the buildings were falling apart. No humans lived here. Well, except Araceli, but she had disavowed all loyalties to humans a long time ago. The city had fired and then blacklisted her because she’d refused to utilize parts pulled from the old amusement park robots—robots she had once tended to, before the park had closed. She couldn’t find any engineering work in Hope City, and she didn’t have the money to go to the mainland. Eventually, it was Sofia who offered Araceli a place to stay. The maintenance drones told Sofia about how Araceli had stood up to the city and their culling practices. Sofia actually invited Araceli to stay in the park, the one human she was willing to trust.
Finding Araceli had been a miracle when Marianella had first come to Hope City. Hector had learned about her somehow. He told Marianella over di
Still, Marianella had gone to the park after a fall, and Araceli had treated her. That was also the day that Marianella first encountered Sofia. She had seen her watching from one of the gardens, dressed in a tattered old dress, plants growing wild around her. Marianella had registered her as an android immediately, but there had been a sentience, a spark, burning in Sofia’s eyes that haunted her even after she arrived back at Southstar. She had not been able to fall asleep that night, staring up in the dark with Hector snoring beside her.
Marianella went back to the park three days later. To see Sofia, not Araceli. That had been the start of things.
Now Marianella walked for another twenty minutes. Her thoughts kept drifting in and out: Eliana and her cramped, homey apartment; Ignacio looming in the headlights of his car; the maintenance drone who had found her shivering beside the dome, its eyes sca
That moment of disorientation as she stepped back into the heat, at the edge of a park built into one of the middle-class neighborhoods. Everything green. That blinding, bleeding, terrible green.
Her thoughts were as diaphanous as spun sugar.
She was deep into the amusement park now, away from the rides and the shops, into the section once devoted to guest cottages and restaurants. Araceli lived in the nicest of the cottages. SUGAR SNOW COTTAGE a
Marianella knocked on the front door. No one answered. She pressed her thumb against the doorbell. A melodic chiming echoed deep inside the house, and then a miniature door sprang open next to the true door, and a tiny mechanical ballerina wobbled out and spun around once.
“She’s at the workshop,” the ballerina said in a singsong voice. “The workshop, the workshop, the worksh—”
“I understand.” Marianella had never liked Araceli’s little toys. More amusement park relics.
The ballerina curtsied and wobbled back inside.
The workshop. Marianella should have known.
The workshop was part of the amusement park’s operations center, which was located in the basement of the Ice Palace, at the center of the park. Another twenty-minute walk. Marianella followed the cobblestone path to the main road. The wooden gate of the cottage banged shut behind her. She was dizzy and light-headed. The cold. No, not the cold—the thaw. The machinery embedded in her brain was wearing down.
She found a bench nearby, wrought iron and once painted silver, and collapsed onto it. The cottages glittered dully around her. She wondered how many robots were lurking inside them, watching her through the windows, trying to make sense of this stranger in their cast-off kingdom. Most were like the ballerina, mechanical performers from the amusement park’s heyday. They didn’t have the intelligence that Sofia and Luciano and Inéz did, but they were slowly developing it, the way all the robots had in the park, day by day, moment by moment. And unlike the maintenance drone, they couldn’t see through skin to learn that Marianella was part of them.