And Suyana was scrambling up from the ground, favoring one leg but already trying to bolt for the nearest cover. She looked young, in her terror, but her jaw was set—she would live, if she could.
Too bad he’d missed that shot, Daniel thought as he pocketed his memory card and shoved the camera into the trash. He wasn’t going to get arrested for unauthorized photography, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get shot in some publicity stunt. She was coming his way, and he knew when to exit the scene.
But as Suyana dove toward the alley, there was another shot. She staggered and cried out—once, sharp—and he saw she had a bloody hand pressed to her left arm, that now the right leg of her jeans was blooming dark with blood.
He had to get out of there.
But she was running for the alley—lurching, really. She wasn’t going to make it in time to avoid a kill shot if it came, if this wasn’t a stunt. It might be a stunt. Either way, snaps didn’t get involved. The hair on his arms was standing up.
Magnus was shouting, somewhere out of sight (the hotel?). A car engine flared to life (the cab?).
Suyana was gasping for breath.
You’re a sucker, Daniel thought, you’re a sucker, don’t you dare, but by then he was already out in the square, scooping her under her good shoulder.
There was a bottle-cap pop from somewhere far away that he knew must be a bullet. Then they were running a three-legged race into the safety of the alley.
He let go as soon as she was in the shadows, but she caught hold of his elbow with more force than he’d have guessed she could manage. The tips of her fingers were rough; they caught on his sleeve.
“Save it,” he said, eyeing the street on the far side of the alley, to make sure it was clear when he ran for it, but then he made a mistake and looked back at her.
Either she was a damn good actress or she was tougher than he’d thought. Her mouth was pulled tight with panic, but she looked at him like she was sizing him up.
“Thanks,” she said, and somehow it was a demand for information, which was funny coming from someone who was bleeding in two places.
He couldn’t believe he’d gone out there. This was a handler’s job, if the shooting was even real—where the hell was Magnus?—and not one damn second of this was his business except behind a lens. This story had played out, and he was in enough trouble. He’d come back for the camera later. Maybe.
He said, “I have to go.”
Tires screeched around the corner, and from somewhere came the echo of footsteps, and the hair on Daniel’s neck stood up—his heart was in his throat, this was amateur hour, this was chaos.
Who knew this was happening today besides me? he wondered, from some suspicion he didn’t want to examine.
Suyana swayed, braced herself on her good arm against the wall like a sprinter on the starting line, her eyes fixed on the far end of the alley. There were footsteps, voices shouting. They’re looking for us, Daniel realized, and his blood went cold.
Suyana looked up at him, and for a moment he remembered the footage from a few years back, right after terrorists hit the UARC, and she’d bored holes at any camera that crossed her like she was daring them to ask.
She said, “Run.”
3
He’d cased the neighborhood—it would have been a rookie mistake to go into something like that without an exit ready—so for thirty seconds he knew where he was going, and it was just another practice run.
For thirty seconds he focused on the uneven pavement under his feet, on avoiding the tables that littered the sidewalk, on cutting across tricky intersections in a way that made it hard for, say, a police car to follow you.
They saw few people, thank goodness—a tabac owner who peered at them through the window, an old woman who saw them and startled, a musician who got one look at them and spun on his heels the other way, his black bag banging against his back in his haste. Otherwise, for thirty seconds, Daniel could think.
He’d mapped out routes across three bridges, and angled toward the busiest (Notre-Dame tourists were easy to disappear into, if he could just get there), and they were on a narrow side street nearly at the main route to Pont Saint Louis when the panic set in.
It didn’t even feel like panic, really—his knees just buckled between one step and the next like all the muscle had fallen out of them. He stumbled, reached for the nearest wall to keep from falling over.
Suyana pulled up beside him, and turned to keep her bad shoulder out of sight of the rest of the street. It brought them face-to-face. She was breathing hard, and her jaw was clenched like she was trying not to be sick.
Her eyes were wide and dark, but her eyebrows were fixed carefully without expression. Absently he thought about Halloween, streets full of masks.
She was losing blood. She couldn’t run for much longer. He hoped she wasn’t thinking of asking for his help to get to a hospital; things were bad enough without her trying some teary-eyed bid for sympathy the way IA girls did on TV when they were asking for humanitarian aid.
There were no tears. She looked him over a second, said, “If you can’t keep going, I’ll go on alone.”
He nearly laughed. What diplomat talked this way to someone they’d barely met? What Face talked this way to anyone at all?
“I’m not the one who’s been shot.”
She flinched and looked over her shoulder as if people would hear and come running. “I’ll make it.”
“Make it where? You’re bleeding all over your shirt.”
She shrugged with her good shoulder, gritted her teeth against the pain. “I’m short on supplies and no one’s offered me a coat.”
Well, he wasn’t about to do it just because she’d needled him. But he might have to change his appearance if things caught up to him, and it wouldn’t matter much where his coat went after that—on her or in the garbage.
Under all the sounds of the crowd and his pulse banging against his ears, he was listening for someone following them. He’d outrun trouble before, plenty. It was always a matter of hearing them before they saw you.
He ran a hand through his hair as an excuse to look behind them. Two silhouettes passed, paused, and moved on. It could be anybody.
Suyana said, “I’ll give you this necklace if you can get me to Montmartre.”
That was interesting. At least it wasn’t a sympathy ploy. Bald barter was unusual, but more honest.
“That thing looks like a fake,” he said, shrugged. “Pass.”
She looked at him, said, “You know it’s not.”
Suddenly all his breath was missing. He blinked, licked his lips.
There was a flicker of a smile at one corner of her mouth, but it vanished. “You were already in the alley when they shot me. You heard us.”
When they shot me, she said, calm as if she were talking about cameras. But she wasn’t entirely in control. Her face was sallow, and the hand pressed against her arm was starting to shake.
He didn’t like how this was going. Maybe it was better to cut things off at the knees.
He leaned a little closer, pitched his voice low. “Maybe I was in on it.”
She tensed up when he moved toward her, but there was no surprise, no moment of horror setting in. The idea must have already occurred to her. Not a lot of trust among diplomats.
But she was still looking at him, and she narrowed her eyes a little before she said, “Then why did you panic?”
Daniel wished he’d picked a dumber Face to follow.
It occurred to him to point out that this could all be a ploy to slow her down—it’s not like he’d panicked, really, it was just that he had stopped to consider—but if she really believed that, she’d have run for it five turns back, going it alone halfway across the bridge by now. He could see her leaving a blood trail straight through the cathedral and out the other side.
Someone was coming up behind them—lightweight, carrying metal, in a hurry.
Her eyes went wide as saucers. She
backed up two steps, grimacing against the pain, and turned to bolt.
“Hold it,” Daniel hissed.
A moment later, a teenager raced past them, clutching a familiar camera tight by the strap as it rattled against his fist. (Daniel knew exactly what making a break for it with a stolen camera sounded like.)
After the kid rounded the corner, Suyana held still longer than she had to. Her eyes unfocused for a second; she blinked slowly, took a breath that sounded like it cost her. He wondered if this was one of the things they taught you to do—if diplomacy was half smiles and firm handshakes and the other half was pretending you were about to be sick to get out of a bad situation.
“Okay, I’m not in on it, you got me,” he said, just to say something, and smiled just to have something for his face to do.
If he was lucky, she thought he was a busboy who went out for a smoke and got caught in the crossfire. If she figured out he was a snap, he was in trouble. For all the time they spent in the public eye, Faces didn’t like the idea they were being watched, and the IA-approved national photographers didn’t stand for competitive press.
And if she left him, he’d lose this chance. The next he’d hear about her would be on the news, with IA press taking portraits of her in blood-spattered clothes as she emerged from the alleys of Paris, having escaped the gunmen she’d hired for show. Or the gunmen were real, and she’d be dead. Either way, he’d miss the story.
“You need a hospital,” he said.
She shook her head. “I’m fine. We need to get going.”
Every sentence that came out of her mouth made her stranger. “Well, then let’s call”—he bit off your handler, he wasn’t supposed to know that—“someone.”
“My handler can wait,” she said, the way she’d talked about the necklace—sharp, angry at him for playing dumb.
He shrugged off his jacket and draped it across her shoulders. As he moved closer she tensed, but he stood beside her as though they were a couple, wrapped an arm around her to help hold her up. She was solid as stone under his hand. He could feel her fingers still pressing tight against the wound. She seemed awkward more than afraid, as if it had been a long time since she’d hugged anyone.
“We’ll have to keep to the small streets if you can’t run,” he said.
She tested her right leg. Her lips thinned. “Fine.”
Wherever she was going, she was damn fixed on getting there. If he could manage this story, it would be the making of him. He was smarter than he’d been when he’d fled home. He could wring the truth out of Suyana Sapaki.
If his heart was still pounding, that made sense. If the worst of his panic had vanished while he was talking to her, he didn’t think about it.
“What is there in Montmartre, anyway?”
She smiled. “I’ll show you.”
It was the smile she’d given Magnus, wide and false, when she was right in the middle of a lie. Oh, he thought, we’ll see about that.
“All right,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder against the flow of blood. The fabric under his fingertips was damp.
They turned onto the avenue, ducked into the narrow street across the way, and headed north, where the sun was just beginning to set on Montmartre.
4
Suyana weighed her options.
It was difficult—she was light-headed from bleeding, and a stranger was steering her through the streets of Paris as fast as she could manage, which was more frightening than being shot at.
When you signed up for the IA, they told you over and over to think about the possibility, just to get you used to the idea that someday you’d be facing down the barrel of a gun. They never told you to expect help; not something you got much of.
She was letting it happen because she needed to get to Montmartre more than she needed to break free, just now. She had to make it to the apartment without bleeding to death on foreign soil. The IA would have a field day with that.
Maybe not. The IA might might have ordered it; maybe writing up her untimely end on the soft-focus streets of Paris was just what they were hoping for.
It was terrifying just to imagine it, but you couldn’t shrink from the truth if it illuminated what needed to be done. It was the IA, or the Americans, or Magnus acting on orders from home.
(She’d made the list as soon as she registered what was happening. Then she’d thought, I have to get north and warn them, with a twinge like homesickness. Then pain.)
If it was the Americans or her own country, it would be messy. Her own country she might be able to handle; accusing the Americans would mean some serious diplomatic incidents for not a lot of gain—the Americans had a way of avoiding consequences.
If the IA had moved against her, she was probably a dead woman, but she fought it. You rose to the need. She took a breath, counted her pulse like Hakan had taught her when she was thirteen and hadn’t even seen the floor of the IA yet.
(“Some of them are born into this. They’ll see weaknesses—they’re bred on arguments. Think about whether your anger is productive.”
“My anger’s why you brought me here,” she’d said.
He’d smiled. He had laugh lines, which surprised her: How could you be happy inside a machine? But he was. “Then make the most of your chances,” he’d said, “so you live long enough to be back home again.”
It was good advice; advice he hadn’t followed.)
Suyana had lost the advantage of anonymity to the stranger, which was too bad. Even when it was necessary, it was a shame to give first. But you had to weigh the cost of anything, and it had been more important to take his measure than to feign ignorance. Now she knew two things: what he looked like when he was lying, and what he looked like when he was truly surprised.
“You all right?” he asked. They were nearing an enormous intersection.
She glanced toward the pavement at their feet. “How much blood am I trailing?”
“I’m surprised you have any left,” he said. His jaw was set, and he didn’t look down.
That meant he’d already looked at her and she hadn’t seen it. No good. She needed to stay sharp. She could lay out her options later, when she had any options besides Live or Mistake.
“I just need to make it to the stairs on rue Foyatier,” she said. Her voice was light—she was dizzy—and she didn’t like it. To make it come off more girlish than weak, she gave him half a smile, as if the stairs were a whim in which he’d be kind enough to indulge her, and later they’d go out for coffee and laugh about it. Grace used it sometimes, when she was in front of the full Assembly.
He flexed his fingers around her shoulder absently, the sort of reflex you had when you remembered a hidden weapon you were planning to use. “So you wanted to jog your way up to the church?”
It was a false question, just filling space.
The first time she’d really met Ethan—a party at Terrain—he’d done the same thing, so when he lurched forward with his elbows on his knees and knuckles bumping the table and asked, “So what’s it like to live so close to the rainforest?” she thought he knew more than he should.
But he was just a diplomat, trained not to leave empty space in a conversation unless he was trying to intimidate. She’d laughed and explained where she was really from, ghosting her fingers on his knuckles as she sketched the mountains with her hands along the table.
He’d dropped his gaze to her fingers, taken a second too long to answer. Later, she’d wonder if this was the moment she began to think about the contract—the moment he’d been caught off guard, and had considered it quietly without pushing back. It was unexpected; it was promising.
She’d left before he could get restless. (If the Americans had arranged the hit, that would probably answer the question of dating Ethan.)
But Ethan asked empty questions because he had nothing else to say. This one was asking empty questions to distract her.
Thieves, the people who skim across things that way; thieves and people who are ly
ing to you. Fair enough. It wasn’t as though any of this had been a humanitarian gesture, and there was no future in it. Even as he’d yanked her out of the line of fire, he had the face of someone who regretted it. This one was out for himself.
She understood. She could handle that.
They were nearly at Foyatier now—she recognized the neighborhood from the pictures in her IA dossier. Almost there, she thought, as if it were home.
She took a breath, counted her pulse, and set about planning the best way to lose him.
A few blocks later he turned them abruptly down a side street—what had he seen? No way anyone could have followed them through this labyrinth in dusk—and she pivoted on her bad leg, grinding her foot into the ground for balance.
There was a burst of pain; her vision clouded. She moved faster, so he couldn’t tell anything was wrong.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “There were just police that way. We’re going up the next street.”
Good. The last thing she could afford was to be seen by police. They’d send her back to Magnus.
She didn’t know where Magnus was when the first shot came—those memories were muddled. But by the time she was scrambling from the gunfire, she’d seen the little square. Magnus had vanished. No use, trusting some.
× × × × × × ×
It was almost too dark to read by the time they finally reached the stairs.
“You’re not going to actually try to climb them, are you?”
She’d take it as a compliment that he thought she still could. “Hang on,” she said. “My ankle.”
He glanced down and shifted his grip on her shoulders (pain lanced down her arm), but she ignored it and scanned the flat cobbles that framed the stairs until she had what she needed. It was white chalk, hard to see if you weren’t looking, and she’d have been in trouble if it rained.
“I don’t see your friends.” He was setting her down on a bench, more gently than she would have expected.
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