Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke

“Easy.”
    Eliana’d promised her ten dollars for her trouble. Maria liked helping because she found it exciting, and Eliana found it much easier to give money to a friend than to one of Mr. Vasquez’s contacts. Paying for information was part of the job cost, but if Eliana couldn’t save the money for her visa, she’d rather see it go to Maria.
    It was only six o’clock now, the dome lights just starting to dim over the city. Diego had called Eliana too, much to Eliana’s surprise. She really hadn’t expected to see him for another couple of weeks.
    “Meet me for drinks,” he’d said, and had hung up without waiting for an answer.
    Fortunately, “drinks” always meant Julio’s, no matter who Eliana was meeting. She found Diego there easily enough, sitting atthe bar in the pool of blue light from the television. It was warmer here, with an actual fire in the fireplace, and mostly empty. Eliana sat down beside him and ordered a beer and a plate of fish strips.
    “I could’ve been doing something,” she said.
    “What?” Diego dragged on his cigarette. He was staring at the television like he expected something interesting to happen. It was just the news broadcast right now, talking about the Peronists and the elections on the mainland.
    “When you called, asshole. You just told me to show up. I could’ve been doing something.”
    Smoke wreathed Diego’s hand, filtering the light of the television. He glanced at her. “You weren’t, though.”
    “How do you know?’
    “You showed up.” He grinned and turned back to the television.
    Eliana grinned back at him, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lit one. He kept staring at the television. They weren’t talking about the mainland anymore but the blackout on Last Night. The maintenance drone that malfunctioned. They were about to dismantle it.
    “Is this why you called me over here?” Eliana asked, pointing at the television with her cigarette. “You wanted to watch this?”
    “Nah, the bartender wanted it on. I was down here, felt like seeing you.” He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “Might have been thinking about this morning.”
    Eliana laughed. “I’ll bet you were.”
    Diego grinned. Eliana took a long drink of beer, broke the end off one of her fish strips. The dismantling hadn’t happened yet; it was just some man in a white coat talking to the camera. Diego idly watched the television, one finger wiping at the condensation on his glass. He wasn’t one for the news, although she’d seen him pick up a paper whenever Cabrera’s name showed up in the headlines. It was sweet in its way. Eliana knew that Diego’s involvement with Cabrera consisted of running errands and distributing contraband, an obligation born from the fact that Cabrera had taken Diego in after his parents had died when he was a teenager. That was another thing she and Diego had in common—they were both orphans.
    Eliana shivered and remembered Maria chastising her after she’d first met Diego. Dating a gangster! she’d shouted, when the two of them had been alone. What had Eliana said in response? This is the smokestack district. What do you expect? But that had been the glib response. The truth was, Diego had made her feel safe. Her parents were dead; she didn’t have any other relatives. And here was Diego, who was constant and inconstant at the same time. For Eliana, that was ideal. Too many men wanted a wife, but marriage and children were just traps keeping people in Hope City. She’d seen it with her parents. Diego wouldn’t do that to her.
    Still, sometimes she wondered how dangerous Diego was. She wondered that now, sitting with him in front of the television. But she didn’t pull away.
    On-screen, they had wheeled out the robot. It was an old enough model that Eliana remembered learning about it in a grade-school civics lesson. It looked sort of like a millipede, segmented and