Persona

by Genevieve Valentine

  “It’s just a guess.”

  Grace looked her up and down. “You never said what you were warning Kipa about.”

  Suyana actually thought about confiding. Maybe Grace would be in her corner. She’d be an asset. She had the power to change things. Colin, the mouth of England, might have her personal life on a leash, but when she stood up in the IA, the cameras were always, always on.

  Then again, Suyana had trusted someone else about it, because she’d hoped for the best. Don’t repeat mistakes; unforgivable. She slid the impulse to confide where it could never touch another thing, locked it shut.

  “No, I never did.”

  Grace’s face hardened. “I’ve done a pretty significant opening volley, here. It’s best practice to reciprocate.”

  “This is safe with me.”

  “But not worth anything in return.”

  That wasn’t true, they knew it wasn’t. Grace had shown Suyana something that could end Grace’s career.

  But at worst, that meant Grace went home with a pension and lived mostly anonymously in some city that saw its share of washed-up celebrities, and every once in a while someone from the press would hound her for a wistful quote about her fall from the IA’s upper echelons.

  Suyana had no fallback. She was enough of a liability that they’d replaced her handler to keep her in line.

  (Magnus, who took his job seriously. Magnus, who was looking for her on radio channels no one talked about.)

  She’d been arranging an affair with the American because without a friendship to call on, the last pretense of home rule in her country would vanish. She’d been prepared to sleep with a stranger for the public eye, while she ransacked his offices and passed information to the people who would do what it took to prevent the last of the green from going. And someone who knew about that had shot her twice.

  She looked up at Grace.

  “It’s worth your life,” she said, “what I know.”

  It was an offer. Grace thought it over.

  Suyana watched some conflicts flicker across the face of a natural diplomat with the same envy she always had when she was around those born to their work. They learned to weigh risks with an ease you never quite managed if you came late and had to negotiate power from the bottom.

  “That’s a different kind of best practice,” Grace said finally. “Keep it. Let me know what I can do.”

  Suyana let out a breath of relief. Then she had to catch herself on stiff arms to keep from falling backward; her adrenaline had vanished, and her strength with it.

  Safe. She was safe, here, for a little while. She had to go soon—Chordata needed to know about Daniel. But she couldn’t think about it; it wasn’t the kind of thing you had the courage to do, if you thought about it much.

  “You could get me gauze and antiseptic, if you can stomach first aid on bullet wounds. And I need caffeine.” Her vision was starting to get bright clouds just at the edges, whenever she moved.

  Grace looked her over. “When was the last time you slept?”

  She’d passed out back in Montmartre, before the hospital. And she’d closed her eyes for a little while in the narrow bed with Daniel, trusting where she shouldn’t have trusted. Maybe as she slept he’d lain beside her, taking notes for the cover story this would make.

  She’d need a corpse to point to, if she was ever getting back home. Daniel’s was at the top of the list.

  “I’ll manage,” she said.

  “I don’t mean this unkindly, but honestly, it doesn’t look it. We’ll clean your wounds, and then you should get a few hours of sleep. Seek vengeance in the morning.”

  Grace said it archly, but her eyes were serious and still.

  Suyana was shaking with exhaustion, and she could feel her fingers trembling against her legs even where she stood braced against the wall. If she were wearing any jewelry, she’d be rattling.

  “I have to be on the move by nightfall.”

  It was capitulation. Grace smiled. “Sit down. I’ll see what I have in the cupboard.”

  Suyana sank onto the bed. Immediately, pain slid from her feet through her calves, sharp and red and throbbing. The gunshot wound itself had gone past painful to numb, and she decided not to look at it until she had to. It would probably be all right. The wound was clean, mostly. It hadn’t come through the bone.

  (It was a flesh wound, and not a shattered bone, because Daniel had moved into the gunman’s view when he ran out to help her and muddied the shot.)

  When she tried to tug her sleeve free of the dried blood, she yelped through clamped teeth, and for a moment there was an explosion of sparks behind her eyes.

  She thought about how cramped and tired she’d been yesterday afternoon, someone else’s pricey necklace weighing on her, Magnus not quite looking at her all the way up to the hotel to meet Ethan, and Daniel crouched in the alley filming it all. It felt like years ago, like she’d been wading through someone else’s mistakes.

  She cut that train of thought short. That was fatigue. If there were mistakes, they were hers; if she was going to survive, she had to stop thinking about things it was too late to change.

  It was getting harder to think, anyway; how cloudy her mind was now, how it was like an empty boat on the river, knocking against the shore with no purpose or power.

  She was dizzy, she realized, now that it was quiet enough to focus; her spine was gnarled. She had to roll up her pant leg to find the wound. She had to lie down for a moment, just until her arms were strong enough to reach. Almost against her will she stretched across the bed, which smelled like hotel sheets.

  Something tugged at her—something about that was dangerous, wrong.

  But she was falling fast, crashing so hard into sleep it stung her fingertips and her eye sockets, and whether Grace brought back first aid or had a knife in her hand to finish the job, Suyana couldn’t tell.

  18

  When Daniel came out of Li Zhao’s office, Bo was waiting, hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels like he hadn’t expected to be waiting long.

  It cut Daniel to the quick, somehow, that the guy who’d ruined his life a few hours ago was still treating this like a babysitting gig.

  “I must have been a sure thing.”

  Bo shrugged. “Not much to lose,” he said. “I figured she wouldn’t have to fight too much to get you on board.”

  It was an honest answer, but it lacked a certain comfort.

  Bo turned. “Let’s go downstairs and meet some of the tech team.”

  “Downstairs” turned out to be a warren of rooms in the basement, which you reached via lift behind a bookcase in the flat (of course you did). As they entered, Daniel realized the space was big enough to be encroaching under the buildings left and right (there were closed doors that must lead elsewhere—maybe they’d just gone for the brass ring and eaten up an entire city block of cellars).

  Computer screens stood in banks on sharp white desks with open steel cabinets beneath them, drives whirring.

  So all their data came to Li Zhao’s people in real time, with no lag or download or opportunity to tamper. That was depressingly informative.

  The whole place was lit with crisp fluorescents, except for an open sitting area in one corner illuminated with brass floor lamps standing sentinel behind couches. Li Zhao must have insisted there be some space down here that didn’t look like where robotics went to die.

  There was no photography equipment on any of the shelves, and it took Daniel a second to remember why.

  “Kate, Dev,” Bo said. “We have a recruit.”

  Two heads appeared from behind monitors along a bank of desks at the back of the room. The girl had black hair and earrings along the edge of both ears; the boy was cast a little green in the monitor glow, and his glasses looked like two independent screens hovering in front of him.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Kate. “You owe me twenty.”

  Dev pulled a face and reached into his pocket. “We didn’t
set a time frame defining success. If he washes out in six weeks that doesn’t count.”

  “Certainly something for you to learn from, but irrelevant to the subject at hand,” said Kate, stretching out her arm to snag the cash.

  “The subject wants to know what the bet was, exactly,” Daniel said.

  Kate grinned in a way that made Daniel a little nervous. “Whether Bo could find you and bring you in before the week was out,” she said.

  “Unfortunately that was the whole bet,” said Dev. “Don’t wash out, please, or I’ve wasted a twenty.”

  Bo was frowning at both of them. “You thought it would take me until the end of the week?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Kate. “Dev’s the nonbeliever.”

  Dev raised his eyebrows, long-suffering, at Bo.

  “Guess I should have put up more of a fight,” Daniel said.

  He’d thought a warm welcome would be better than not, but the idea that he had been somebody’s side bet left a bad taste in his mouth. He’d already been somebody’s side bet once. He wasn’t eager for a reminder.

  “Not worth it,” said Kate. “It would just make it harder to be where you are now.” She was back to looking at her screen, and her fingers were flying over the keys.

  Dev frowned over at her. “What are you doing?”

  “Telling the others.”

  Daniel blinked. “How many of you are there?”

  “We’re the third watch,” said Dev. “And then the off-sites.”

  Off-sites. Tailoring and Atelier and everything else, plus backup in an undisclosed location, with another set of eyes. Well.

  The good news was that no one would ever miss giving him credit for a story he broke. The bad news was that he was starting to itch just thinking about it.

  “Mention how hard I fought,” Daniel said.

  One corner of Kate’s mouth turned up. She never stopped typing. Dev’s glasses flickered as he scanned through photos.

  “Do I get a tour of the goods?”

  Bo and Kate exchanged looks. Then Kate shrugged and swiveled a monitor toward him, turned her wheelchair to face the computer from the new angle. She had silver braces on her legs, sleek and gleaming as the rings laddered up her ears.

  “This is it,” she said, about an interface that looked like it could pilot a starship. “Here’s our feeds, facial recognition scanning for untagged subjects, date stamper, snap ID and location, captions are for Watch notes.”

  “Can I see?”

  Kate shot him a look. Her eyes were black in this light, and keen. “Sure.”

  She hit a button, and a thumbnail blew up in the center of the monitor. It was the picture he’d taken of Suyana getting shot. He forced himself not to react.

  This big, he could see it was the moment after the shot, when her shock had faded and horror was dawning; the moment she must have thought she was going to die.

  Underneath it was an ID number and the date, and a slug line: PARIS: SUYANA SAPAKI, F-UARC, shot by unknown assailant. Out of frame—Magnus Samuelsson (handler), Daniel Park (snap). NOTE: Park intervened after this photo was taken. Mixed results.

  There were reference numbers—probably to the frames where his focus was off, because he’d already been lowering the camera, realizing he had to do something.

  “The note’s a bit much.”

  “We’re watching feeds for eight hours a day,” Dev said, unconcerned. “You get editorial.”

  “It’s not just you,” Kate said. The photo vanished into a sea of photos scrolling past, being cataloged in real time. He saw a few other pictures of Suyana at public events before the feed expanded to include other Faces, their events speeding by, the search moving outward in fractals.

  There was quite a bit of Martine over the transom. In every shot, she seemed like she knew she was in front of a camera, but he couldn’t tell if she was onto them or that was just how she looked.

  If he was being honest, he’d admit there was something visceral about looking at the sheer volume of secrets that Bonnaire Atelier and Fine Tailoring was holding on to. This was unfiltered, live, prime evidence from fifteen countries, each photo waiting for the right moment to trap a hypocrite or sink a shady deal or tip the scales of public opinion.

  People in charge were only ever honest when they thought they were being watched. And there was a sea of watchful waiting power, right in front of him. All he had to do was be willing to give in; be a part instead of a whole.

  He felt, for just a second, what Suyana might have felt in the moment before she crossed the stage and became the Face of her country.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, blinking back to attention and leaning in. “Hold there a second?”

  “A born snap, can’t mind his own business,” Kate said, but she scrolled back a few frames.

  At first he wasn’t sure what about the photo had arrested him. It was a crowd scene—no real motion. Groups of people were laughing and talking. To the right of the frame, a blonde in a hat was talking to a man with dark hair.

  Maybe her expression had been what caught his eye—amid the smiles, her face was drawn, her mouth slightly downturned.

  The crowd was pressed in close around the edges of the lens, and her profile was slightly out of focus, but Daniel finally recognized Margot, head of the IA Central Committee.

  It took him a moment, though. On the magazine covers that usually featured her (Elan, sometimes the Weekly Global) she was so carefully styled she looked like an Impressionist painting. Here her hair was pulled sharply back, her face shaded by the brim of her hat.

  She’d been the Committee head who shook Suyana’s hand when Suyana crossed the stage in her ugly dress to accept her post, all those years back. He’d watched it a dozen times. If it weren’t for that, he might not have known Margot at all.

  The man had dark hair, and someone’s hairdo in the foreground was obscuring part of his profile, but still, something about that face set off some alarm bell. He didn’t know why. His heart thudded against his ears.

  After a second he managed, “Who took these? How do you even find Margot?”

  Kate shot a look over her shoulder. “Bo did. He hunts big game.”

  “Yeah, great, thanks,” said Bo, smoothing down his hair self-consciously. But he didn’t argue the point, and he looked at the photo with a certain focus, as if he could remember exactly what the air had smelled like the moment he took that picture.

  Daniel asked, carefully casual, “What was she talking to this guy about?”

  Kate keyed up the video, but it was a wall of crowd noise, and their voices were lost.

  “When did you say these were taken?”

  “Five, six days back,” Bo said. “Before I got assigned to recruitment duty.”

  Daniel shot a grin over his shoulder. “I’m your best work of the week, then.”

  Dev choked. Kate’s eyes were wide as she rolled back to her station and pointedly turned the monitor away from him.

  Bo said, “You have a lot of confidence for a guy who doesn’t know who’s putting his camera in.”

  Shit. “Point. Sorry. Don’t let me bleed to death, please.”

  “No hard feelings,” Bo said after a moment. “Let’s get your camera lined up, then. As soon as you’re done we’ll get going. There’s work we need to do.”

  Bo vanished behind one of the open doors like a film of smoke, and even when the light went on in the little exam room, it took Daniel a second to place where Bo was inside it. He needed to stop snapping at Bo. Bo was six inches taller than Daniel and could disappear in a room in which he was the only occupant. He’d have to learn how to be invisible. Bo was a good teacher.

  This was what he wanted, Daniel reminded himself. This was what it took.

  He’d handled his passage; he’d handled the theft of a camera worth half what his passage had been; he’d handled setup for his first assignment alone. He could handle this.

  “Nice shot,” Dev said to his computer. �
�Kate, it’s headed your way.”

  A moment later, Kate said, “Oh, nice. Put it with the personals.”

  “Can I see?” Daniel leaned over. Three figures were standing together in the narrow alley between a noodle place and a shabby, low-rent temple; there was a smear of neon filtering in from one corner, left over from the camera turning away too quickly from a sign. It was a good picture—it suggested a story about the people in it.

  “What are they talking about?”

  “Doesn’t concern you,” said Kate.

  “Well, I’ll know when whoever’s in this picture gets busted.” He peered closer, trying to figure out who exactly was in it.

  Dev smiled. “That’s the problem. Doesn’t matter how it looks. You want confirmed IDs first, everything else second. Sometimes we get to pass on a great shot right to the papers, but most of the time . . .” He waved his left hand vaguely as he moused the photo back into the stream it had come from.

  “So we don’t try to make it look good?”

  Dev looked at him a second. Then he said, “That’s not really the job description.”

  Daniel couldn’t decide if it was better or worse not to have much say about which frames made it into the world. He knew how to take a picture, but that was a job for photographers; he was a just a walking camera now.

  “Go ahead, Bo, I’ve keyed it,” said Kate. “He’s 35178.”

  In the other room, Bo was lifting a pill out of a metal canister.

  “Oh no,” Daniel murmured.

  “It hardly hurts,” said Dev.

  His voice was kind. Daniel looked over. Dev smiled and tapped his temple, where there was a bump so small Daniel had missed it.

  “I’m just feeling sorry for my poor handsome face,” Daniel said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Kate without looking up. “We’ll still get to see it every time you look in a mirror.”

  The hair on his neck stood up.

  The idea of it filled his mind as he took the chair in the operating room, and Bo injected the anesthetic, and even in the moment before he fell into the twilight sleep and remembered where he’d seen the man in the photo, his dreams caught on the image of him looking into the mirror and seeing an empty face, save the little black mole and the camera’s whirring eye.