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She rode the train to the city offices, not caring that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was unbrushed. At the receptionist’s desk in the lobby, she asked if she could speak to Maria Nuñez.
“She works up in budgets,” Eliana explained as the receptionist ran her finger down the list of extensions. New, probably. “She’s an office manager. I’m a friend, and I just stopped by to say hello.”
“Oh, the budget office!” The receptionist entered in the extension and tilted her head against the phone receiver. Eliana could hear it ringing, distantly, and there was a burst of static when Maria answered.
“You can go on up,” the receptionist said brightly.
Eliana did. Her body was thrumming with something close to excitement, something other than sorrow or horror or fear for the future, and that was good.
Maria had worked her way up enough that her desk wasn’t in the steno pool, which Eliana had expected, but rather was tucked away in a room at the end of a little hallway on her floor. The typewriter clattered as Eliana approached, drowning out the buzz of voices from the cluster of desks in the center of the room. The door was open. Eliana stopped in the doorway, and Maria looked up.
“You disappeared again,” she said, “and now I bet you want another favor.”
“I won’t be disappearing again.” Eliana sat down in front of Maria’s desk. The office was cramped, the wall squeezing them both in tight. But Maria was smiling. “At least not until spring.”
“That’s not exactly disappearing,” Maria said. “You’ll stay in touch.”
“Of course, yes.” Eliana looked down at her hands. If she even could stay in touch. “You know it’s not too late to start saving for a visa of your own. I can lend you some money—”
“Stop it,” said Maria. “We’re not having this conversation again.”
“I’m just saying. Things are going to get bad.”
“Things are always bad here,” Maria said. “But that’s the thing about a home. You stick around even when nothing’s going right.”
“They’re going to get worse,” Eliana said, but she could already see Maria’s expression glazing over, and she knew it was hopeless, trying to convince Maria to leave. Essie, too. There’d be no way of explaining what was coming in a way that they would actually believe.
“Just think about it, okay? Promise?”
“Sure, whatever. Is that why you came by here?”
Eliana shook her head. “I have to go by the records office. You want to come with?”
“You don’t need me. You’ve got the PI license.”
“Yeah, I know.” Eliana shrugged. She realized she had come by to warn Maria. To try one more time to get her to see the truth.
“I always want a break,” Maria said. “But let me finish this up first.”
Eliana nodded. Maria turned back to the typewriter and worked for a few moments more. Then she stood up and grabbed her purse. They walked to the elevator together. Eliana reminded herself that this was what it was like before Diego, when it was just her and her girlfriends and she didn’t need anyone else.
Maybe things could be normal again, on the mainland.
Maybe.
The records office was on the seventh floor. It wasn’t much to look at. The lights weren’t bright and clean like on Maria’s floor, and there was no rhythm of the typewriters or human voices, just the low fluorescent humming of the bulbs overhead. Eliana’d been up here a handful of times before, and she always forgot how still it was. Like a mausoleum built of paper.
A tall man stood waiting behind a counter, along with shelves and shelves of files. He was younger than the other man who worked here, although he already stooped a little, like the weight of information was bearing down on him.
“Hi, Javier.” Maria smiled brightly at him, and he returned her smile with a quiver. “This is my friend Eliana. She’s a PI.”
“That so?” Javier squinted at her. “Have you been in here before? I remember Leo talking about a lady PI.”
“Yeah, it was probably me.” Eliana pulled Mr. Gonzalez’s information sheet out of her purse and folded it over so that only the address was visible. She set it on the counter. “I need to find out who owns the house at this address. Here’s my license.” She slid that slim laminated card out of her wallet and set it next to the information sheet. Javier picked it up and held it to the light and made a great show of examining its legitimacy.
“Oh, come off it, Javier,” Maria said. “She’s real.”
“Got to be sure.” Javier tossed the license onto the counter and then wrote the address down on a piece of scrap paper. “Give me a moment.”
He disappeared into the files.
“It always takes forever,” Maria said, sighing.
“Yeah, I know.” Eliana leaned her elbows against the counter. Maybe this wouldn’t amount to anything. Maybe Javier would return and hand her a card with the name Juan Gonzalez written across it and she would be back where she’d started. She supposed she could take it to the police then, tell them about an AFF meeting place. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. She trusted the police about as much as she trusted Independent terrorists.
Time passed. Ten minutes, maybe. Maria checked her watch. “This is taking a lot longer than it normally does,” she said.
“You can go back up if you need to.”
“Oh, that’s definitely not necessary.” She smiled over at Eliana. They were still leaning up against the counter, as there weren’t any chairs set up anywhere in the room. Maria started in on a story about Essie, who’d taken up with a new boyfriend, another Independent. Eliana half-listened, nodding her head at appropriate intervals. What was taking so long?
Finally, Javier emerged from the stacks. Maria straightened up. “Finally!” she said, teasing.
“Sorry about the wait,” he said. “I had to cross-reference. The address you were after was missing about half its paperwork.”
Eliana frowned. Maybe this would be complicated after all.
“Really?” said Maria.
“It happens sometimes. There’s so much here. But the house’s purchase date was back when we used the old registry. You remember that, Maria, before we switched all the records over to the computer?”
“I do indeed.”
Eliana didn’t care about any of this. “Did you find out the name?”
“Yeah, I did. It’s, ah—well, a bit unexpected.” Javier laid a notecard on the counter. Eliana picked it up. When she read the name, all the air went out of her body.
“Well?” Maria asked. “Who is it?”
“Alejo Ortiz,” Eliana said. “The house belongs to Alejo Ortiz.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MARIANELLA
The stairs leading to Eliana’s office were colder than outside. Marianella stopped in the middle of the stairway and tightened her coat. She wondered if she had any right to ask Eliana to do this, after everything that had happened. It had been Marianella’s fault that Eliana had gotten so entangled in Sofia’s plans in the first place. Did she really want to entangle her further?
She told herself there was no harm in asking. And of course she intended to pay Eliana. But they needed to find out where that code had come from. The maintenance drones had no idea. Marianella and Sofia had both sat down with them, rummaged through their memory banks, asked them questions in the language of computers. The answers had been strange, utterly inhuman, but they’d still been clear enough that the answer was no.
And so Marianella continued up the stairs. The office light was on, and the muffled clatter of a typewriter spilled into the hallway. Marianella ran one hand over her hair and opened the door. She remembered the first time she’d walked into this room, how terrified she’d been that her entire life was about to unravel.
Fu