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“You fucking liar. You know there was a culling—”
“That wasn’t the city. Outside my jurisdiction, I’m afraid.”
Sofia darkened. Marianella had seen one of Alejo Ortiz’s men that day. The AFF, then? Sofia hated the idea that another group of humans could force themselves into the park. She would have to investigate further.
“I had a problem a few weeks back, however. It happens. I thought I was successful in dispatching with it. My methods have never failed me before.”
“Your methods?” Sofia loosened her grip on the armrests. Her programming was well suited to making her seem to know less than she did.
“You don’t want to hear about this, do you?” Cabrera waved his hand. “You’re programmed to be a lady. I wouldn’t want to upset you.” Another cold glittering grin. “Suffice it to say, my problem is still very much alive. Plus, she left one of my best men bleeding in an alley last night, despite her small stature. Putting all that together, I’m forced to conclude that she must be one of yours.” He leaned forward, pressing his hands into the desk. “I’m really rather upset that you didn’t mention her, especially considering how high-profile she is. This is what I mean, about you not understanding our partnership.”
“Maybe your methods aren’t as successful as you think.” Sofia’s brain churned, wild with information and the memory of Marianella’s face.
Cabrera stared at Sofia for a moment. Then he laughed. “I locked her outside the dome, Sofia. That’s what I do. A human would have frozen to death in under an hour. Hardly enough time to find her way back inside. And yet.” He spread his hands over the desk. “Here we are. I saw her last night at a fund-raising gala for the agricultural domes. Now, why would a robot—or in this case, a cyborg—want to build an agricultural dome?”
“Why does a robot want anything?” Sofia folded her hands in her lap. Marianella was a fool, going to that party. She still had too much human in her.
“I have an answer to your question.” Cabrera tapped his fingers against the desk, one finger at a time, slowly and then quickly. The rhythm of a tango. Sofia watched his fingers and wanted to rip his hand from his arm.
“The answer to what?” The rhythm was already beating into her brain, luring the programming out.
“To what a robot wants.” Slow, slow. Quick, quick, slow. “It’s whatever a human wants. Isn’t that right, Sofia?”
Sofia closed her eyes. The tapping stopped. “You’re talking about Marianella Luna, I suppose? The woman on the advertisements?”
“Ah, so you do watch our television.”
Sofia opened her eyes. “She’s an heiress. An aristocrat. She’s not a cyborg.”
Cabrera tapped the rhythm out again. Slow, slow. Quick, quick, slow. “Aristocrats can’t survive the frozen desert.”
“Are you sure?” Sofia said. “Your sort certainly treats them as if they can.”
Cabrera paused, then roared with laughter. “Amusing, Sofia. Very amusing. I’ve never much gone in for that sort of thing myself. Landed gentry and the like. Too European. I’d rather find a new way of doing things.” He pushed back in his chair, turning toward the record player.
“No,” Sofia whispered.
“It’s just music, my dear.”
The record crackled and the music started, and Sofia flushed with relief because it was an old song but not one she’d ever been programmed to.
“See?” Cabrera smiled. “Just music. Now. Back to my proposition. Marianella Luna. I need her dead.”
“Then kill her.” The words were flat and ti
“I can’t,” Cabrera snapped. “That’s my entire fucking point. I toss her out into the snow, and she shows up a few weeks later, not even missing any of her fingers or toes. She carries on like nothing happened. I only know one sort of creature that can survive in that type of weather.”
“A penguin?” Sofia said.
Cabrera fixed her with a cold stare. “Last night I sent Diego to shoot her in the heart. Even cyborgs have hearts. But she left him bruised and bleeding on the cement. Then disappeared.” He paused. “Do you know where she ran off to?”
“No.”
The music crackled in the background.
“I thought you might say that.” Cabrera reached over and lifted the needle and then dropped it.
Music exploded in Sofia’s thoughts, and then her thoughts didn’t belong to her anymore.
It was “Yo Soy La Morocha,” and it shot desire through her like a poison. Her whole body was burning, and when she looked at the man behind the desk, with his cold smile, she saw only a client.
“What would you like me to do?” she said sweetly.
The room was too hot. She began to undress, unbuttoning her blouse, slipping off her shoes. She unrolled her stockings, pulled them off one by one. The client stared at her, unmoving. She wondered if she had displeased him in some way.
“What would you like me to do?” she asked.
The client reached over and pulled up the record needle.
The silence was beautiful and terrible. Sofia gasped and pulled her blouse closed. Rage coursed through her.
“I’ll kill you,” she hissed.
“No,” Cabrera said. “You’ll kill her. Marianella Luna. Kill the human in her and then get that little human freak who lives with you to dismantle the rest of her. Otherwise—” He dropped the needle, and the music came back in and Sofia forgot herself, desire burning her up from the inside.
Silence again.
“Do you understand?”
Sofia glared at him, fury hot inside her.
“This should be easy for you, shouldn’t it, my dear? Just imagine she’s all human.” He dropped the needle, and the music prickled over her skin and she stood up and shimmied out of her skirt.
Back to silence.
“Do you understand?” Cabrera said.
Sofia felt whiplashed, slung back and forth between independence and slavery. Her clothes lay in puddles around her. Cabrera still held the needle, the record still spun in slow treacherous circles, like a shark swimming around and around a sinking boat.
“I will always have this,” Cabrera said lightly. “You do realize that, correct?”
Sofia didn’t answer.
“I’m actually giving you a choice,” he went on. “You like that, don’t you? Thinking you have a choice. Would you like to hear what that choice is?”
Sofia gathered up her skirt and stockings, her arms shaking.
“Would you?”
“Yes,” she said, grinding her teeth together until they sparked inside her head.
“You leave my office and you find her in this icebox we call a city and you kill her for me. And everything carries on the way it was before. That’s option A. Option B is you leave my office and you don’t do anything and I use my secret weapon here”—he nodded at the record player—“to get you nice and compliant so that one of my engineers can reprogram a new song into your pretty little robot brain, a song that’ll force you to kill her. That’s your choice.”
He dropped the needle again, only this time the music was safe. It didn’t transmit any hidden codes.
Cabrera looked at Sofia. She pulled her clothes to her chest, trying to cover her bare skin. The room was no longer too hot, but too cold. Even though Sofia didn’t feel the cold.
“Well?” said Cabrera. “Which option do you choose?”
Sofia considered her options, robotically, one by one. She considered every possible angle. Cabrera was wrong, as he so often was—he had given her more than two choices. Because he didn’t realize how adept she was at obfuscation.
“I’ll kill her,” Sofia said.
Cabrera smiled.
* * * *
Sofia rapped on Marianella’s bedroom door without stopping, a bang, bang, bang that no human could manage without hurting herself. She was numb—from the music, from Cabrera’s threat. She’d either be a murderer or a murder weapon.
No. No. She banged harder on Marianella’s door. No human would ever tell her what to do again.