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“Fuck!” Diego loped forward, his eyes dark. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “You, andie. Get her the fuck out of here.”
Luciano grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door.
“They’re going to kill you,” Eliana said.
Diego tilted his head at her like he was confused.
The music wailed in the background. Eliana remembered her mother playing this song on Saturday morning as she cleaned their apartment, her sweet singing voice drifting through the rooms.
“Get out of here,” Diego said. She’d never seen him look so desperate. “Please.”
And then gunfire exploded in the dining room.
Eliana screamed. Suddenly she was lying on the floor, pi
Eliana tried to squirm away from Luciano’s grasp, but he was too strong. “Let me go!” she shrieked, and with that one command, his grip loosened and she was free, although she was too terrified to move.
The music pounded through the walls.
And through the music, men screamed.
That jolted her into action. She crawled toward the maelstrom of the dining room. The gunshots began to die away, and over the screaming and the music she could hear Luciano shouting her name. She didn’t care. She had to be brave. She had to crawl toward the screams. She had to make sure that none of them belonged to Diego.
“It’s not safe!” Luciano shouted.
Eliana stopped at the doorway. At first she kept her head down, but she realized the gunshots were mostly gone, and so she lifted her face a little—
And screamed.
The dining room was full of maintenance drones, buzzing over the floor, the lights on their backs illuminated a dark red she’d never seen before.
There were men too, men with guns, but most of them were sprawled out on the ground at u
“Diego!” Eliana screamed. No one answered her. The few men still standing shot at the drones, and the drones clawed at the men, slicing their tendons open at the ankle.
I’m not one of Cabrera’s men. They won’t attack me.
Eliana crawled into the room in a daze. The maintenance drones ignored her. She sca
She found him.
He stood at the far corner, emptying his pistol into the back of a drone. His expression was calm, and that terrified her. He ran out of bullets and reloaded the gun with the quick, practiced ease of someone who had done that many, many times before, and Eliana realized she was weeping, whimpering his name, knowing she had been stupid to come here, not because she was in any danger but because he was a bad person.
Diego looked over at her, and their eyes caught, and there was a flare of energy between them. Eliana thought of the night she’d first seen him. It had been like that then, that flare of energy. Music had been playing then, too.
A maintenance drone dropped out of the ceiling and landed on his back, toppling him to the floor.
Eliana screamed. She lost all her thoughts and raced toward him, into the middle of the room. No one fired at her. Anyone with a gun was firing at a drone.
Diego was dead.
She knew it viscerally, but when she saw him, the words appeared in her mind, a pronouncement, a newspaper headline. He was dead. He slumped forward onto his stomach, his suit ripped, his back covered in blood.
She thought she saw bone.
“Diego,” she whispered.
The drone whirred away, ignoring her. Violence roared around the room. Luciano was at her side again, saying something, taking her hand. The guns fell silent one by one. She was aware of all this. But the only thing she understood was Diego, the empty shell of him, lying there on the floor.
Someone grabbed her hand.
“Let me fucking go, Luciano!” He didn’t. When she turned to him, she saw that it was Marianella, her hair hanging in tatters, her eyes red with tears.
“I’m afraid you can’t tell me what to do,” Marianella said, and then she pulled Eliana away with a strength Eliana would never have expected, scooping Eliana up in her arms and carrying her out of the noise and blood and screams. The music had gone silent. Marianella carried her all the way out to the street, where the dome light was so bright, it hurt Eliana’s eyes. Her ears rang.
Marianella set her down gently. Eliana looked at the empty building across the street, and then she looked at Marianella, and then she threw up.
Marianella knelt beside her and held her hair out of her face. Eliana vomited until her stomach was empty, but she couldn’t stop retching and gagging, like she could expunge all her horror if she tried hard enough.
“It’s almost over,” Marianella whispered.
“How could you do that?” Eliana said. “How could you kill him like that?”
Marianella didn’t say anything, but her expression flickered with shame. Eliana sat back, and Marianella dropped her hair. Luciano stood by her side, unspeaking. Eliana couldn’t look at either one of them.
It wasn’t long before the screaming ceased.
“It’s over now,” Marianella said. She was speaking to Luciano.
The doors to the Florencia flung open. Sofia walked out. Her legs were splattered with blood. She stopped when she saw the three of them, and her head turned, taking them all in, one at a time.
“What’s she doing here?” she asked, jutting her chin at Eliana.
Eliana was too exhausted to answer, but Luciano stepped forward and said, “I’m afraid it’s my fault. She asked me. I was compelled to answer.”
Sofia glared down at Eliana. Part of her wanted to jump up and rip Sofia limb from limb, but it was only a small part, and the rest of her wanted to curl up so tightly that she’d disappear.
“It was not my programming,” Luciano said. “I thought it was wrong of you to keep the information from her.”
Sofia’s glare didn’t soften. “I see.”
Eliana started crying again. Sofia looked at her with disgust. “No one in that room deserved to live.”
“Sofia!” Marianella’s voice was sharp. “You got what you wanted. Let her grieve.”
“Grief is a waste of time. We need to leave. The police will arrive eventually. I don’t want to make my presence known to them yet.”
Marianella knelt down again and whispered comforts into Eliana’s ear. They hardly registered. Eliana didn’t care. All she could see was Diego’s dead body.
But somehow, she stood up, she steadied herself, she walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SOFIA
Sofia dragged the knife down Luciano’s sternum. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. Black hydraulic fluid pooled up in a line along his bare skin. Sofia checked the readouts on the rotary display. His code whirred past; she’d set the rotary display to spin more quickly than it would for a human.
“Everything looks fine,” she said, and set the knife aside.
“Wonderful to hear.”
“You need to stop talking now.”
“Of course.” Luciano’s eyes flickered like television screens. What she’d said, it was too much like a command, and part of him still wanted to see her as human. After his reprogramming, that wouldn’t happen anymore.
Sofia pried Luciano’s sternum open. The wiring sparked and flickered through the murk of the hydraulic fluid. It was odd to see another android like that. Sofia had seen the inside of the maintenance drones, but they were different enough from her that she didn’t feel empathy. She would need to get used to it. Soon, when she had the city and she had the necessary supplies, she would begin repairing the broken androids locked away in the storage facility.