Someday, she’d have no programs to override. That was why she was here.

Even though it was the dinner hour, the restaurant was only half-full, and most of the patrons sat talking and eating and ignoring the poor dancing girl. Sofia watched her, remembering the years of the amusement park, her own time on a stage.

“Perhaps we should come back,” Luciano said. “He shouldn’t make us wait.”

“He makes everyone wait.” She turned away from the dancing girl. Luciano stared guilelessly at her through the golden lamplight. “It’s how he makes himself feel powerful.”

“They all have their ways of establishing power.”

“Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. Although she would not admit this to Luciano, she was also angered by Cabrera’s rudeness. Unfortunately, he was an integral part of her plan. She could slip into her old role of servile robot easily enough, knowing payment was coming. Cabrera was the only person in Hope City, human or not, who could acquire the parts she needed to cut out her treacherous programming once and for all.

A waitress approached the table, a liquid shadow in her black uniform. “He’s ready to see you,” she said.

Luciano and Sofia nodded at each other, then stood up and followed the waitress through the dining room, then into the narrow dimly lit hall that led to the back of the building. The music from the show thumped through the walls, setting Sofia on edge.

The waitress stopped at the metal door leading out to the docks. She looked at Luciano and Sofia. Sofia doubted she knew what they were. She was young. She wouldn’t remember a time when robots looked like humans.

“Have a nice talk,” the waitress said, and pushed the door open.

It was cold, the way it always was at the docks, the freezing outside wind coming in through the big dome gates with the ships. Cabrera was standing beside his car with his two bodyguards, Diego Amitrano and Sebastian Calvo. She’d learned their names when she’d first decided to target him. She’d learned everything she could.

“Sofia, my dear,” he said. “I’m sorry for my lateness, but I had a bit of business to attend to.”

“Nothing distressing, I hope,” Sofia said. A gust of wind blew off the water, smelling of the Weddell Sea. A ship was entering the dome, although too far away for them to see.

“I’ve had easier business in my time.” He smiled. His smile wasn’t like most humans’. No kindness or sincerity ever informed it. “But we don’t need to talk about that, do we? We’re here about the icebreaker.”

“The icebreaker,” Sofia said. “Was another one captured?” She knew that it had been; she monitored the transmissions out of the city offices from the operations room at the park. But she also knew how to keep a secret.

“Of course. Don’t you listen to the news broadcast there in your robot park?”

“No.”

Cabrera shrugged. “I suppose the affairs of humans aren’t much of your concern, are they?” He smiled again, flicked his gaze between Sofia and Luciano. “Come on, then. Ship’s waiting. The Ice Delight. Fine vessel. You’ll like it. Left over from the amusement park.”

Sofia and Luciano trailed behind Cabrera and his bodyguards as they walked along the rickety dock. Sofia liked nothing from the days of the amusement park, but she didn’t expect Cabrera to understand that. Whether Luciano agreed or not, she couldn’t say—she had difficulty understanding Luciano sometimes, the way she had difficulty understanding the maintenance drones. He had been built to serve in more traditional ways, to prepare food and lay out clothes. That disconnect existed between all robots. She suspected Autômatos Teixeira had designed them that way on purpose. It made it difficult for them to band together. But a generation after the company had fallen and Bruno Teixeira had vanished with the knowledge about how to build androids like Sofia and Luciano, they had banded together anyway.

The Ice Delight was a cruise ship, one of the smaller ones that had run only between Hope City and Ushuaia. Sofia had never been installed on this one, although when she climbed up the gangplank, she saw it was identical to several of the cruise ships she had been installed on—the same maze of cabins and corridors, the same cramped dining room with its cramped stage. She shivered.

“Are you cold, my dear?” Cabrera asked, hand on her shoulder, directing her to turn left, toward the bow of the ship.

“I don’t get cold.”

Cabrera 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.