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“Diego?” Eliana stopped a few paces away. He squinted up at her, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from one lip. That was the hitch in her plan to leave Hope City. Even with all the extra money, she still didn’t want to accept the reality that it would mean leaving Diego.
“Been waiting long enough.” He pushed up to standing and shoved the flowers in her direction. “These are for you.”
Eliana hesitated, but then she reached out and took the flowers from him. They were bright orange-red, the color garish against the muted backdrop of her tenement building.
“How did you afford these?” she asked, turning them over in her hands. He’d never bought her flowers before. Ru
Mr. Cabrera had Sala killed.
“I had some cash saved up,” Diego said. “Thought I should get you a present. Can we go inside? It’s fucking freezing out here. The power was out for a few minutes.”
“God, again?” Eliana shivered. She decided to believe him, that he’d been saving his money. It was so much easier that way. Maybe he’d done something terrible. But she wanted to fall back into him anyway, wanted to lay her head on his chest and listen to his heart beating.
Eliana dug the keys out of her purse and pushed open the door to her apartment.
It wasn’t much warmer inside, and she kicked on the space heater as she walked past. The flowers seemed to light up the whole apartment. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Not long. Twenty minutes.” Diego smoked down his cigarette and dropped it into the ashtray. “I should’ve called first, but I didn’t feel like dragging the flowers to my place and then back here. Lady at the store said the cold could freeze ’em out, make ’em die faster.”
She wished he’d stop saying the word “freeze.”
“You’re supposed to put them in water,” he said.
Eliana smiled. “Every girl knows what to do with hothouse flowers, Diego.”
“Yeah? Anybody ever get them for you before?”
She shook her head.
“Good.” Diego started to shrug out of his jacket, and Eliana disappeared into the kitchen. She took the gun out of her coat pocket and slid it into the silverware drawer, far into the back where she wouldn’t have to look at it or think about what she’d done with it.
Maybe she was the one capable of violence after all, and not Diego.
She didn’t have a vase, but she filled up a juice pitcher with water and put the flowers in that. They fa
“So where were you?” Diego’s voice drifted in from the living room.
“Working.” She walked out of the kitchen, holding the pitcher in both hands so she didn’t accidentally drop it. She didn’t tell him how close she was to having enough money to purchase her visa. She didn’t want to have that conversation. Not today. Not after everything that had happened. “It was just some case with a city man—”
Eliana stopped. Diego looked up at her from the couch. His arm was wrapped in white gauze.
“What happened!”
Diego kept his face blank. “Got shot. Not a big deal. Bullet just grazed me, but it’s still healing up.” He nodded at the flowers. “They look nice. Where are you going to put them?”
“You got shot?”
“Yeah. It happens.” He laughed. “It’s not a big deal, Eliana. It really isn’t. Put the damn flowers down and come over here and I’ll show you.”
The flowers were heavier than Eliana had expected, and she put them down on the table. But she didn’t move to join Diego. He’d never gotten shot before, not in the year that she’d been seeing him. He just ran errands. Errand-ru
“Did you go to the hospital?” she said.
“I’m fine! All patched up.” He patted the white gauze. “It’s nothing you have to worry about.”
But of course Eliana was worried. She looked at him stretched out on the sofa, and she knew that she loved him, even as she realized she might not completely know him. She’d only ever seen pieces of him. The good pieces.
“Come on,” he said, playful. He gestured with his good hand.
And Eliana wanted to go to him. Wanted to be as close to him as she could before she left for the mainland. He was involved with Cabrera, but that didn’t mean he had tried to kill Marianella. He probably didn’t even know about it. He was just an errand-ru
Eliana slid onto the couch beside him. It felt right, the way their bodies locked together. It gave her a peace she needed after what had happened at the amusement park.
Diego pressed one hand against the side of her face, then leaned in and kissed her.
“So what were you doing this afternoon?” he asked as he pulled away. “Better not have been anything that would get you shot.”
“Hypocrite,” Eliana said, but her thoughts had turned brittle. She remembered how the metal beneath Luciano’s skin had gleamed. The moment the gun went off, she was certain her own heart had stopped.
Diego kissed her again, and she was grateful he didn’t want a real answer. The kiss melted everything away. Diego lay down on his back, and she straddled him at the waist, never breaking the kiss. It didn’t take long before she started to undress him, moving cautiously around his arm. This normalcy was exactly what she needed right now. It was as deadening as a narcotic, and already she could feel it seeping through her, turning her thoughts away from Cabrera and the amusement park and Marianella. None of that had to touch her life, not if she wouldn’t let it.
She told herself that, and she decided to believe it too.
Despite how cold the apartment was, their bodies warmed each other up. The sex was intense and passionate, and afterward, Eliana drew an afghan over them both. She rested her head on Diego’s bare chest.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Diego asked, toying with her hair.
“Guess not.”
“You really don’t have to worry about me.”
Eliana propped herself up on one elbow. She looked him hard in the eye. “And you don’t have to worry about me.”
Diego laughed, held up his hands. “Fine, we’re even.”
Eliana lay her head back down. She studied the couch’s fabric. The threads were worn down enough that bits of stuffing poked through. She’d never noticed that before.
Diego stroked her hair, humming tunelessly to himself. In that calmness Eliana’s thoughts once again began to wander away from Diego’s warmth and back into the cold of the amusement park. Cabrera (and only Cabrera) trying to kill Marianella. Sofia stopping the city from culling robots. Luciano dragging her across the park like he meant to kill her.
The world was so dangerous. Her man was dangerous, her job was dangerous. But here she was, still alive, with a way to the mainland hanging on the spring light of the horizon. Maybe she could even convince Diego to give up his dangerous life and come with her.
Eliana closed her eyes and fell asleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MARIANELLA
The workshop buzzed with electricity. Luciano sat sideways on the conveyor belt, stripped down to the waist. The light was dim from the energy drain of the repair box, but even in the shadows Marianella could make out the thin imprint of the Autômatos Teixeira logo stamped on his chest.
She had no such logo herself, having been a private project of her father’s. Her family’s wealth had come from beef exports during the nineteenth century, but by the time Marianella was born, in the 1930s, it was already becoming clear that that income stream couldn’t last forever. Her father hadn’t been much for cattle anyway; having grown up surrounded by grazing fields, he’d rejected them in his adolescence and gone off to Buenos Aires to study engineering. It had caused a scandal, from what Marianella understood. At the turn of the century, science represented change, and there was nothing the aristocracy hated more than that.