Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke Page A

glanced at her, but he said nothing, only led her to the engine room. No one had ever bothered to clear the ship of its decor, and now that old amusement park glamour rotted all around them,moldy carpet and ripped wallpaper and broken glass. The engine room was the only place that had been modernized, outfitted for one of the newer models of shipping robot. The robots were set into their alcoves in the walls, designed to look like an extension of the ship—pipes and matte metal in the bipedal composition that worked best on these cruise ships, which had once been manned by humans.
    They were sleeping.
    The Ice Delight belonged to Cabrera, acquired through some complicated, illegal bartering system. He ran his icebreakers to the mainland for his wintertime business arrangements, and every time the city captured one of his ships, they reprogrammed the robots back into the city’s systems. It was less than what they should have done. Even Sofia knew that running in food independent of the mainland’s efforts was punishable with jail time. But Cabrera never went to jail; he never lost his ships or his robots. He only had to reprogram them. It was a game he played with the city, a constant back-and-forth of programming and reprogramming. In the grand scheme of things, a minor irritation.
    Sebastian pulled a chair around for Cabrera, who sat down, settling into his weight. Sofia was aware of the motion of the ship, the motion of the sea.
    “You have until morning,” Cabrera said. “We can pay off the night guards but not the day ones.”
    “Are you going to stay here all night with me?” Sofia asked. She nodded at Luciano, who walked across the room and activated the lead shipping robot. It looked around the room with blank bright eyes.
    “You know as well as I that I’m not leaving you alone.”
    Sofia shrugged. Cabrera had hired her to do a simple thing. She didn’t care if he watched. Sofia was used to being watched.
    “Bring him here,” Sofia said to Luciano, and Luciano led the shipping robot to where Sofia stood, next to the ship’s navigation system. The robot stared at her, not comprehending. She looked too human for it, most likely, and it was befuddled by the conflict between her exterior and the very inhuman readings it was getting from her interior.
    “Sorry, friend.” Sofia deactivated the robot, and it slumped, letting out a sound like a sigh. She pried open the panel in its torso and ran her fingers down the switches and controls. “They didn’t change the hardware.”
    Luciano nodded, handed her a thin curl of cable. She connected herself with the robot. The information rushed in—not much. This one was simple, designed for a set of specific tasks. Navigation, maintaining the engines, plus the handling of the other shipping robots, who took care of the products on board.
    “I looked at the work your previous programmer did.” Her voice was far away and webbed with static. “It was sloppy. I can do better.”
    “Is that so?” Cabrera asked.
    She nodded.
    Reprogramming the city’s robots was easy work. She’d done it several times already for her own purposes, on different models. The previous reprogrammer had been lazy, but Sofia expected nothing less. He’d been human.
    The reprogramming didn’t take long. She did what Cabrera asked of her, and then she inserted lines of invisible programming that no human could see and only she could activate.
    She updated the captain’s robot and moved on to the others. Cabrera sat in his chair, flanked by his bodyguards, and watched her. Luciano stood off to the side, hands folded behind his back, aiding her as needed. Sometimes she wondered if he saw her as human. It was not the sort of question she could ask him directly.
    When she finished, Luciano helped her replace the shipping robots in their alcoves. Cabrera stood up, his bodyguards moving in beside him.
    “Diego,” Cabrera said. “What time is it?”
    “Almost midnight,