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Eliana stood up, walked around the desk, and sat down in the empty chair beside Lady Luna. She rested her hand on top of Lady Luna’s, the glove soft and velvety against her fingers. Lady Luna looked at their hands, unmoving.
“I’m not going to take you to the cops,” Eliana said. “I know you can’t help what he did. But anything you can tell me about Cabrera, about your husband’s involvement—”
“I don’t know.” Lady Luna tilted her head down, a strand of hair falling across her eyes. “Well, I don’t know the details. It wasn’t something we—discussed.”
“But you did know about it. Before he died.”
“A little. It involved the winter supply ships. Bringing in drugs from the mainland.” She shrugged. “I didn’t want to tell you. I debated back and forth. But it was Cabrera, wasn’t it, who stole the documents? I don’t know why—”
Eliana bet she knew why. Nothing would put Cabrera out of the smuggling business more quickly than agricultural domes that actually produced agriculture. The documents probably protected Lady Luna from city censure if Cabrera exposed her co
“Look.” Eliana pushed her chair around so she could look Lady Luna in the eye. “I may seem like I’m new to this whole investigation scene, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I’m used to dealing with Cabrera.” This wasn’t entirely true, but Eliana was willing to count her dalliances with Diego. “So no worries there. You gave me that big stack of cash”—she pointed at the desk—“to get your documents back. I’ll get ’em back. Maybe that’s all I’ll do for you, but I’ll get them back without peeking and without letting them leak. Sound fair?”
Lady Luna nodded and drew a forefinger across the underside of her right eye, as if to wipe away a tear. Her makeup didn’t smear at all. “Thank you, Miss Gomez.”
“I’ll come by your house this afternoon, take a look around, maybe talk to the robot. It does, uh, talk, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good.” Eliana leaned back. “Was there anyone else at the house last night?”
“Oh, no.” Lady Luna shook her head. “The android is the only staff I have.”
Eliana nodded, although she didn’t say anything. That was a bit eccentric.
“I let my human staff go when my husband died,” Lady Luna said. “Things were—easier that way.”
Eliana smiled politely. Excitement sparked in her blood. The first case of the winter. Mr. Vasquez had warned her about the winter cases. They were trickier, he said. Dangerous. She should expect to run into Cabrera.
Eliana wasn’t worried. She had Diego. And the money on the desk was a lot to add to her visa funds.
Lady Luna stood up, smoothing out her skirt, rearranging the fur around her shoulders. “I look forward to working with you,” she said. She had collected herself and was back to being the woman on television. “That money is only your retainer, of course. I’ll pay you the rest when my documents are returned to me. Would you like me to write down the name of my house?”
At first, Eliana only registered the question about the house. She ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed it to Lady Luna along with a pen. As Lady Luna wrote in elegant, practiced strokes, Eliana glanced down at the money on the desk. Lady Luna’s voice echoed in her head. I’ll pay you the rest. That wasn’t all of it.
Eliana wondered what the hell those documents could be.
* * * *
That afternoon, Eliana took the Sunlight Express, the train that left from the docks. She’d never ridden on it before. This was a rich person’s train.
It was nicer than the city trains, she supposed, although the compartments were windowless and the decor was the same overwrought turn-of-the-century style as the amusement park. Eliana sat down at a table, lit a cigarette, and splurged on a fernet coffee and watched the little flames flickering in their glass globes on the tables. Seemed a stupid idea to her, letting fires burn on a moving train.
The train was mostly empty. No one was in the dining car but her and the bartender, who leaned up against the wall and flipped through a newspaper. When Eliana had seen that Lady Luna’s house had a name, Southstar, instead of an address, it hadn’t surprised her. Of course she lived in one of those domes that lay outside the main city dome. A private dome for the privately wealthy, with its own private maintenance drones, its own private power plant. One of those things no one even bothered to complain about, because complaining was just a reminder that the people who ran the city didn’t have to give a shit whether or not the heat was turned up enough, whether or not the power blacked out.
Eliana smoked her cigarette down to the filter, lit another one. The bartender turned the pages of his newspaper. A bell chimed, the lights blinked twice. The bartender sighed, tossed the paper onto the bar, and sat down.
“Better hold on,” he said.
A pause. Then he leaned over and blew out the flame on the candle burning next to the cash register.
“What?” said Eliana.
The bell chimed again.
The train began to rattle and whine. The chairs and tables knocked against the floor. Eliana jammed her cigarette into her ashtray and blew out her own candle too. The polar winds shrieked on the other side of the wall. Now she understood why there were no windows—it was bad enough feeling the Antarctic air slipping in through the invisible cracks in the train’s construction.
Eliana set one hand over the top of her drink glass, her bones vibrating inside her skin. She curled the fingers of her free hand against the seat of her chair. The bartender looked up at the bottles of liquor shaking against the mirror like he hoped they’d fall.
The rattling stopped.
Another chime, like an exhalation of breath. The bartender stood up, swiped his newspaper off the counter, and resumed his previous position as if the rattling interlude had never occurred. Eliana sat for a moment, breathing hard.
“First time?” the bartender asked without looking up.
“Yeah.” With shaking hands, Eliana lit another cigarette.
“You get used to it.” The bartender turned a page of his newspaper.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Eliana was the only person who got off at Southstar Station. The platform was empty too, and small, although well kept-up, with a metal bench and a wisteria tree dropping dots of purple. No ticket counter. It took Eliana a moment to co
“Jesus,” she said.
A house loomed in the distance, emerging out of a field of golden grass. Eliana stepped off the platform. She was surrounded by a quiet, arrhythmic susurration, the grass rippling in tandem—false wind. She felt it on her skin, that dry, artificial warmth. It wrapped around her as she cut a path toward the house, trampling down the grass. There was probably a designated way, some stone path leading to the front door, but Eliana was too overwhelmed, and too determined, to figure out where it was.
The grass brushed feather-soft against her bare hands, making her jump. She hated its constant, babbling whisper, like it was trying to tell her something that she couldn’t understand.
She was grateful to arrive at the house. It was large, as she’d expected, although quite contemporary, with lots of flat modernist lines and gray brick and huge windows. It was hard to imagine that it existed in the same city as the little shanty houses where Eliana had grown up.
She pressed her thumb against the doorbell and waited.
The rustle of the grass was sounding more and more likes voices. Eliana rang the doorbell again.