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Sofia sent out a message to the drones, telling them her location. Then she said, “Three maintenance drones are on their way.”
Marianella and Araceli looked over at her. Araceli held an empanada halfway to her mouth.
“What?” she said. “Why? Has something happened?”
“I don’t know.”
Marianella frowned. Luciano set his book down in his lap and looked over at Sofia with a calm expression. She should not have come out here with Marianella and Araceli. It was stupid—she didn’t need to eat. Marianella barely did. And yet she held on to those silly human practices anyway.
Her thoughts flickered. The maintenance drones were nearby. Sofia tilted her head back and saw them sliding across the top of the dome, dark against the white lights. They dropped down, rotors whirring and stirring up a faint, chilly wind that rippled across the garden’s plants. As they moved closer, Sofia could see that the drone in the middle was propped up by the other two, wires strung around their bodies so that they carried it in a sort of net.
“What is this?” She stood up, anxiety twisting in her system. Araceli and Marianella gathered up the remains of their lunch and stepped back, giving the drones space to land.
“One of them’s been damaged,” Marianella said.
“Then why didn’t the city take care of it?” Sofia frowned. “These are city drones.”
“If they’re sentient,” Luciano said, “perhaps they don’t trust the city.”
Sofia glanced at him. Yes, she supposed that was a possibility, but the sentient drones had been good about keeping their sentience a secret.
The three drones landed, the metal of their exteriors gleaming. Sofia rushed forward and knelt beside them. She pressed her hand to the closest drone’s back, looking for any information.
Damaged, the drone told her, in the zero-one language of computers. Virus.
Sofia went still. “A virus,” she whispered. Then she shook her head, sent the question surging through her fingers. What sort of virus?
Never seen before. You must look.
“What is it?” Araceli moved closed. “Is something happening?”
“They say the middle one is damaged.” Sofia kept her hand on the drone’s back. “A virus.”
“Like the virus that’s causing the blackouts?” Marianella frowned. “Alejo—” Her voice trembled a little. “Alejo told me that’s what the city thought was causing it.”
“I haven’t seen anything like that.” Sofia hadn’t taken her hand away, and the drone was still surging information up into her brain, A virus, you must check. “We need to look at it. Araceli, you’ll help. I don’t want to risk uploading it into myself somehow.”
She pulled her hand away. Her fingers tingled. The infected drone looked the same as the others. But she knew the problem wouldn’t manifest itself on the drone’s exterior.
“Take it to the workshop,” she said, and straightened up. Then, to the other two drones, she used the city command: “Stay. Await instructions.”
Their lights fluttered, an unusual pattern she’d only seen in the sentient drones. It meant affirmation.
Araceli unwound the wires from the infected drone. It was too heavy for her to carry on her own, but when Luciano moved to help her, Marianella stepped forward and said, “Please, let me. I doubt I can get infected.”
“But you don’t know for sure,” Sofia said.
Marianella looked over at her. “It’s less likely than with Luciano.”
Sofia didn’t say anything. This virus wasn’t going to move through external contact; robotic viruses never did. They didn’t work that way. But Sofia was always irrational around Marianella.
Marianella and Araceli lifted the drone and carted it toward the workshop. Sofia and Luciano followed, unspeaking. Sofia was nervous about what they were going to find. She should have done this much earlier. But none of the maintenance drones had ever mentioned a virus until today.
Luciano opened up the workshop door so Marianella and Araceli could take the drone inside. They set it on the worktable. The drone’s lights flickered and sputtered to life after a few seconds’ pause, and the maintenance drone’s metal shell gleamed.
Araceli pulled over a rotary display. “Safer than hooking any of you to it directly,” she said, and she took a deep breath and plugged in the display. The code clicked into place, all the usual lines of it, all those instructions for how to care for the city. The sentient drones knew to hide their sentience deep down—you had to go looking for it. That was how they’d stayed hidden from the city.
“I don’t see anything,” Sofia said.
Araceli didn’t answer. She crouched down so that she was eye level with the rotary display, frowning at it. The code clicked by. Sofia stood behind her, watching, looking for anomalies.
“There!” Sofia said, and her hand slammed the stop button. The display froze midchange, but she could still see the line. “That’s not supposed to be there.”
“You’re right.” Araceli turned back the code manually. Marianella crowded in next to her. “That is weird. It’s definitely not something that sprang up naturally—”
Something not related to sentience, she meant. Sofia could have told her that.
“—but it’s not typical code for the maintenance drones. It’s not telling the drone to do anything. That’s what’s strange.”
“It’s a portal,” Marianella said.
Sofia looked at her. “What do you mean, a portal?”
“I put something similar in my own drones,” Marianella said. “It’s an easy way of reprogramming them, a way of hiding the reprogramming so that no one else can get to it. It’s not a virus, though. Fu
Because it’s making them sick, Sofia thought, although she didn’t say it out loud. “Can you access the portal?”
“I think so. I’ll just need a keyboard.”
Araceli nodded and sprang up to grab one. But Luciano had beat her to it. Araceli plugged the keyboard into the drone, and Marianella started tapping away. The rotary display clicked out her progress. This was deep, almost as deep as the sentience.
“There,” she said. Then, “Oh my God.”
“Christ,” Araceli said.
Sofia didn’t say anything, even though she saw it too. Such a simple thing, a short line, instructions like the sort that had been inside her for years and years, instructions she couldn’t help but listen to.
It was an override, and rather clumsily done, which meant it could only have been entered in by a human. An override on the instructions to maintain the city’s power supplies.
Don’t maintain, those instructions said. Destroy.
Destroy a little at a time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ELIANA
Eliana opened the door to her office for the first time in over a month. The air smelled musty and old, despite the lingering chill. It was as cold as outside, since the radiator had been shut off in her absence.
Everything looked the same as she had left it. The files were still stacked on her desk, waiting to be tucked away in the metal cabinet. The empty coffee bag still sat on the counter next to the sink. The chair behind her desk was still pushed out from when she’d stood up.
It was disconcerting, being back here, starting work again, when Diego was dead. She’d put it off for weeks after she’d left the amusement park, and for a while she thought she might not go back at all. She had her money, didn’t she? Money to get her off the mainland—something Diego would never get to do now. But she needed something to fill her time, because otherwise, she worried about the future.
She’d tried filing for her visa, but a week later, she’d received a typed note politely informing her that all applications would be held until the start of spring, when the passenger ships began ru