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“Of course they are,” Essie said. “That’s the entire point. To force people to perform a dance to a culture they should have no part of.”
Eliana resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Maria didn’t, and Essie frowned when she saw.
“You don’t understand anything.”
“It’s just a tango! And they’re messing it all up!”
Essie screeched with frustration. Maria laughed and said, “I’m sorry. I just don’t care about all this stuff—”
“Stuff! It’s your whole life!”
Eliana tuned out their argument. Her thoughts went back to Mr. Gonzalez. She should have the fake schematics soon enough, and she’d definitely slip Maria a bit of payment for helping out.
An eruption of noise filled the warehouse, so loud that the walls rattled.
Eliana thought it was the music at first, reverberating through the speakers, but when the noise faded away, it was replaced by screaming, although the screaming sounded distant and far away. Her ears were buzzing. People were crouching down on the floor, and some were ru
“What happened?” Maria was right next to her, but her voice was muffled, like she was speaking through a wall. “What was that?”
Essie shook her head. Her eyes were wide.
Eliana smelled something burning.
“We should go,” she said, pushing away from the table. Maria and Essie followed, their hands linked. People rushed toward the doors, cramming up against one another—like during the power failure on Last Night. But all the lights were still on, and the projector still ran its bright images against the wall, and there had been enough flickers in electricity that people were used to them by now.
Eliana, Maria, and Essie pushed through the doorway, out onto the street. The chaos was worse here, people shouting and ru
“Look!” Although muffled, Maria’s voice was sharp and shrill. She jabbed her finger off to the side. Eliana whirled around. She didn’t see anything at first, just more people dressed in party clothes. And it was snowing.
Snow.
Fear paralyzed her. If it was snowing, then the dome had broken open. But no. This wasn’t snow. It was gray and smoldering. It was ash.
“There!” Maria shrieked. “Can’t you see it?”
“I don’t—” Eliana shook her head and stumbled backward. Everyone was looking where Maria was pointing, but Eliana only saw the drifts of ash.
Overhead, the dome glass had gone dark with the rush of maintenance robots.
“God, you call yourself an investigator? There.”
And then Eliana saw it flickering through the building.
The glow of fire.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MARIANELLA
Marianella woke from a dream she couldn’t remember. She lay in her bed, afraid to move. The palace was silent save for the soft whir of the generators, but Marianella was certain that she should listen for something. Something had woken her. She was sure of it.
She slid out of bed and pulled on an old silk dressing gown, left over from one of the old park hotels, and peered out her window. She had a view of the southern half of the park, but she didn’t see anything unusual, only the soft glow of the garden below.
Marianella closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the glass. If she were a robot she could play back through her files and find whatever had woken her. But she wasn’t a robot.
Something was wrong.
Then she heard the wail of a siren.
Immediately, Marianella opened her eyes. She saw nothing outside but darkness. The siren wailed and wailed and then faded away.
Something had happened.
But it hadn’t happened here.
Marianella breathed with relief, and her breath clouded the glass. She had been afraid of another culling, another death. She had gone to sleep thinking of Inéz, and now that she was awake, she thought about her again. Inéz was gone, the roots of weeds and flowers growing around her. The cullers—the city’s men, Alejo’s men, Marianella still wasn’t sure what to think—had never come back for her.
Marianella took a deep breath. When she had told Sofia about the wires, about recognizing the culler, Sofia had frowned and said, “This has happened before. We have an entire warehouse of broken androids because of men like that. That you recognized him means nothing. You spend your days with humans.”
Another siren picked up, far away in the distance. The siren was joined by another, and then they both faded away.
It was probably nothing. A car collision, an accident with one of the icebreakers at the docks—
Then why had she woken up?
The feeling of wrongness lingered. Marianella pushed her hair away from her eyes. Sofia kept radios down in the command center, but didn’t Luciano have a television set tucked away somewhere? She knew he liked to watch the mainland telenovelas sometimes.
She left her room, her bare feet padding softly against the cold tile floor. The palace was dark, and not even the nighttime maintenance drones were wheeling about. Perhaps they were still unsettled from the culling too. Inasmuch as they could feel unsettled.
It didn’t take Marianella long to find Luciano’s television set. He didn’t frequent many rooms in the palace—mostly the operations room, when Sofia needed him, and the kitchen, and the little suite of rooms that had once made up the palace tearoom. She found the television in the Rose Room, perched precariously on a stack of old display cases. Luciano wasn’t there. Marianella had gathered from Sofia that he was spending his time down at the frozen lake, alone. She wondered if he was mourning Inéz.
Marianella switched on the television.
The reception was not good here, and the picture shimmered with static. But it was a news program, the word “LIVE” blinking across the bottom of the screen. Marianella let out a little gasp and turned up the sound.
“Still no word on the source of the explosion, although the city will begin its investigation as soon as the wreckage is clear.”
Explosion?
Marianella thumped the side of the television, and it went momentarily gray from the shock. “Where?” she shouted. “Who?”
The newsman looked at the camera as he spoke. “Alejo Ortiz has already appeared publicly to deny rumors that the explosion was tied in any way to the Independence movement. We go now to footage from his press conference.”
Marianella took a step backward, shivering. Alejo materialized on-screen, standing on the dais in front of the city office, doused in white light. He looked as if he had been dragged out of bed. Seeing him was like being dropped into cold water.
“I swear to you that this tragedy was not wrought by those seeking Independence for our city. We fight for our freedom not with weapons and bombs but with words and ideas—”
He went on and on, his usual rhetoric seeming empty and hollow. Marianella only listened so that she could piece together clues as to what had happened, her heart beating more quickly than it should.
She knew how to discern truth from Alejo’s political confabulations, and so she learned that an electrical power plant had exploded a little over an hour ago. No doubt the sound of it was what had woken her. It was located on the edge of the city, over in the warehouse district, and there had been several eyewitnesses despite the late hour. Why, Alejo did not say. The power plant was small, routing energy to businesses in the area, mostly suppliers for the summer icebreakers.
Marianella listened with a growing sense of dread. Alejo told beautiful stories, but that didn’t change the fact that there would be an investigation in the next few days. An explosion like this didn’t simply happen. Maybe the Independents had planted a bomb, maybe the robots had arranged for a fire. Her human side and her machine side. Either culprit would co