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They walked along. The only sounds were their footsteps and Eliana’s crying. Marianella wondered if Eliana was in shock. Already it felt as though Eliana were walking through some other plane of existence, like she wasn’t aware of Marianella’s presence at all.
Finally, the Ice Palace appeared in the distance, the spotlights turned on as if to act as a beacon. Sofia and her generators. Marianella guided Eliana along. A maintenance drone slid across the pathway, chirping once to acknowledge Marianella before it disappeared into the shrubbery, on its way to whatever it’d been programmed to do. Marianella wondered if it was one of the newly sentient ones, if it had tripped the wires that had caught fire and exploded in that power plant.
A figure moved up ahead on the path. Marianella’s machine eyes kicked in, and through the darkness she saw that the figure was Sofia. Eliana stirred against Marianella. The muscles in her shoulders tightened.
“No,” Eliana said, and her voice pitched more loudly into a shriek. “No, no! She’s going to hurt me.”
“It’s just Sofia,” Marianella said. Sofia stopped and gave Eliana a cold look.
“What’s going on here?” Sofia said. She looked at Marianella’s dress. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s not my blood,” Marianella said automatically. Eliana gave a sob, and Marianella immediately regretted saying it.
“What happened?” Sofia’s eyes swung back and forth between Marianella and Eliana. “Was it Cabrera? Did he hurt you?”
“He tried, yes.” Marianella squeezed Eliana tighter. “Please, Sofia. She’s very upset. Let me put her up in one of the palace rooms.”
Sofia’s eyes narrowed. She studied Eliana, who was shaking more violently now, her head buried in Marianella’s shoulder.
“Please,” Marianella said.
“You’d do it even if I said no,” Sofia said. “Get her out of here.”
Marianella sighed with relief. “Come along,” she whispered to Eliana, and together they shuffled up the path.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Eliana said when they were finally inside the palace. “I don’t—just let me go home.” She struggled against Marianella, but Marianella held her tight.
“It’s not safe,” she said. “You’ll need to stay here, at least until we know what to do about Ignacio.”
“Diego will keep me safe!” Her shout bounced off the walls. Then she covered her face with her hands and crumpled down onto the floor. Marianella stood there, awkward, watching Eliana’s shoulders shake. Marianella doubted that Diego had ever been able to keep Eliana safe, but she didn’t dare say that out loud.
* * * *
Marianella didn’t bother to sleep that night. She took a long, scalding shower, rubbing hard at the places on her skin stained by Diego’s blood. Afterward, she sat in the place beside her window where she liked to pray. She said the rosary three times, once for Diego and once for Eliana and once for herself, for forgiveness. When she finished, she dropped the rosary into a shining pile of beads on the sill and stared out at the gloomy park.
The dome lights came on, that slow mechanical sunrise.
A maintenance drone buzzed into the room. Marianella jumped at the sound of it, her nerves raw after last night. It was a park drone, still ru
“What is it?” Marianella said, anxiety turning her clammy. She stood up and walked over to the drone and knelt down at its side. It chimed again.
“I know, I know,” she muttered, even as her thoughts trembled. Why was a drone coming to her room? Sofia wouldn’t have sent it; she always visited herself. It certainly wasn’t bringing word of a culling. Ignacio?
Marianella removed the paneling on the shell and hooked herself into the drone’s system. Immediately she was flooded with a message in the jittery ones and zeros of the drone’s language: she had a visitor at the gate. Alejo Ortiz.
Marianella withdrew her hand and let out a long sigh of relief. In the aftermath of the attack, she hadn’t once thought of him. He wasn’t going to be happy with her, ru
“Thank you,” Marianella said to the drone, replacing its panel. She changed out of her dressing gown and into a pair of slim trousers and an old sweater, the two items of clothing that were closest at hand. The dress from last night was puddled on the floor, the fabric arranged so she couldn’t see the blood.
Marianella went out into the park and made her way toward the front gates. Out in the freezing air, she felt a flicker of fear that this might be a trap—that it hadn’t been a park drone who’d come for her, but one of Cabrera’s drones, programmed to lie. But then, there was no way Sofia would let that happen. She might be radical and antihuman, but she wouldn’t let any harm come to Marianella. Of that much, Marianella was certain.
Still, Marianella slowed her pace as she neared the gates, and took a meandering path through one of the overgrown gardens so she could see the person waiting at the gate before he could see her. She moved as lightly as she could, weaving through the vines and tangled branches like a dancer. Soon, the gate materialized into view, all those wrought-iron fairies guarding the entrance. Marianella felt a pang of regret, seeing them and remembering how she had walked through them last night with Eliana weeping at her side.
A man waited on the city side of the gate. Tall, television-star handsome. Alejo.
Marianella let out a deep breath of relief and pushed out of the garden, onto the path. Alejo looked up at her in surprise. She reached up to smooth her hair away and found a dead leaf crackling beside her temple.
“Good God, Marianella,” Alejo said. He wrapped his fingers around the bars and pressed up against the gate. “Did you sleep out here?”
“No, of course not.” Marianella arrived at the gate, where she undid the lock. The gate popped open. Alejo gave a gasp of surprise and lifted his hands away.
“That’s quite a trick,” he said, gri
“What happened to you last night?” he said softly. “You just ran off.”
“I had to,” Marianella said. “You ought to come inside, by the way. It’s not safe on the boundaries.”
“What? Why not?” Alejo squeezed through the open gate, and Marianella pushed it shut, relishing the comfort of that metallic twang as the latch sank into place.
“Ignacio,” Marianella said. “Cabrera. We can talk in the garden.”
She began walking toward the interior of the park, but Alejo hung back, marveling up at the bursts of colored blossoms decorating the trees.
“This place,” he said, shaking his head.
She waited for him, let him relish whatever childhood memories he had of the park. His nostalgia didn’t last long. He dropped his gaze back down to her and said, “Now, what’s this about Ignacio Cabrera?”
“He was at the ball last night.”
Alejo’s expression didn’t change. Always the consummate politician. “That’s not possible. He certainly didn’t receive an invitation.”
“He must have come uninvited.” Marianella walked toward the garden again, and this time Alejo jogged to catch up with her. The overgrown trees arced, unmoving, overhead—filtering dapples of green and white across the path. “At any rate, he saw me.” She told Alejo the rest of the story as they walked. Her voice sounded like it came from outside her head, like it was humming with a peculiar feedback. She told Alejo everything, even about how she had beat Diego in the alley, because he was the closest she had to a confessor in this moment.
She finished just as they arrived at the entrance to the garden. One of the metal gates hung sideways, broken in its frame.
“That’s terrible,” Alejo said in a low voice. “Absolutely terrible. You should have come to me. My associates were there. You didn’t have to put yourself at risk like that.”