by Malka Older
Maybe she’s wrong to go.
It hardly matters. Thinking narratively as she always does, she can’t turn away from the mission; parts of her character have long since hardened into place. And if it’s dangerous, she’s been in danger before. She can take care of herself. She always has.
Ken might not believe that, but that’s because he’s emotionally compromised, predisposed to want to protect her. Traumatized, too, by his childhood loss.
He doesn’t have to believe her, as long as she can justify it to herself.
She’s definitely not ready to go home yet.
Mishima keeps remembering a moment, years ago, when she and Ken first met, when she stabbed him in the leg. It was due to a reasonable misunderstanding—she thought he was an enemy asset who had seduced her into a private vacation to get her out of the way while his colleagues overthrew the world order—and when she realized that she was wrong, she immediately gave him medical assistance. It’s been a long time since she noticed the almost-imperceptible scar on his thigh with anything but the slightest vestigial memory of guilt.
Now Mishima keeps replaying that moment, except she is the one staring at a weapon protruding from her body, shocked by the rapid change in a relationship she thought she understood. It’s a shitty analogy, she castigates herself; it’s her narrative disorder insisting on a false symmetry. In the present (and she has to rub tiredness out of her eyes), Ken is entirely justified. He didn’t attack her out of nowhere; he was responding to something that she did, that she’s been doing for years. That might be what stings the most: all the time while she thought they were happy, while she imagined she had finally found someone who could forgive her for who she is, he’s been feeling this way and smothering it.
Mishima’s hands are fists. She keeps walking.
* * *
The tourist crow is set to an agonizing crawl, ostensibly to let the passengers see everything but in fact, Maryam suspects, to allow the driver to scan Information for location data on their target celebrities. It takes a stultifying hour and fourteen minutes before the guide’s ongoing monologue, broadcast directly into her earpiece, squeals the name Cynthia Halliday with unnerving excitement. Maryam cranes her neck with the rest of them to see the “harridan of Heritage, William Pressman’s final undoing, the head of state who almost splintered micro-democracy” sipping from an imported Nestlé water bottle at an outdoor café along the waterfront, white tablecloth fluttering in the wind. Figures. Maryam talks her way off the bus and, relieved to be back in the cool offshore breeze, saunters over to Halliday’s table.
Halliday is sitting with a man Maryam doesn’t know. His public Information shows nothing beyond his (instantly forgettable) name, but he’s extremely, blandly attractive and has his hand on Halliday’s thigh, so she assumes he’s the replacement for her husband, left behind in the land of the unindicted.
As Maryam walks up, Halliday says, “No autographs, no vids,” and forks a neat triangle of frittata between her shimmering pink lips.
“Actually, I was hoping we could speak briefly,” Maryam says, pulling out a chair.
Halliday’s first glance is to the centenal cop standing on the corner. His eyes are on her, but before giving him the nod, she looks at Maryam, taking in her clothes and style and settling on the space next to her face where “Information” is listed under “employment” on her public Information. “Have a seat, then,” she says, ignoring the fact that Maryam already has. She dabs at her mouth with a cloth napkin, briefly disrupting the projected shimmer effect on her lipstick. “Well? What do you people want now?”
Maryam wonders how often Information gets in touch with fugitive criminals. “We had some questions about your communications channel.” She has no idea how to approach an interrogation; might as well dive right in.
“Hmm,” Halliday murmurs, sipping at her coffee, which is served in a large china teacup instead of Cuban-style.
“We found the tunnel,” Maryam tries.
Halliday bursts out laughing. “Finally!” She laughs so hard that her companion starts chuckling along sympathetically. “That was Pressman’s deal. He had to find a way to stay in control, even if it meant digging into the mantle of the Earth, the entitled sonofabitch.”
Maryam hopes her face doesn’t show what she thinks of that display of hypocrisy. “So you’re saying you never used that tunnel?”
“Of course I used it; why wouldn’t I? It was already there.” She takes a sip of her coffee, followed by a sip from her water. “It wasn’t that useful.”
Maryam frowns.
“Well, think about it!” Halliday snaps. “You can communicate secretly with a single location. Yes, it’s clandestine, but at some point it loses its appeal.”
“If that one location is in a null state,” Maryam points out, “secret communications can easily branch out from there.”
“Still.” Halliday waves her hand dismissively. “Null states are so limited. As you can see, they haven’t been very helpful to me in my hour of need.”
Did she expect Russia to offer her asylum? Bust her out of Guantánamo? “Who’s in charge of the tunnel now?” Halliday’s eyes flicker up at her; Maryam can’t tell if it’s amusement or a challenge. Next to her, Male Companion is leaning back in his chair, watching the pedestrians along the waterfront.
“What makes you think it’s even in use?” Halliday asks.
“We’ve seen the transmissions,” Maryam says, trying to sound bored rather than excited that this is going better than she hoped.
“Then you know more about it than I do.” Halliday leans back in her chair and takes another sip of her coffee, letting her eyes drift to the dark shine of the Caribbean against the horizon. Attentive now that she’s stopped talking above his pay grade, Male Companion puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes; she ignores him.
“What were you working on with the null states before you left?” Maryam tries. She has trouble imagining that Halliday has given up all her ambitions for a life of tropical leisure.
Suddenly, Halliday turns her hard gaze back to Maryam, eyes narrowing. “You’re that techie she was with, aren’t you?”
Maryam is startled; unlike the subsequent relationship with Vera Kubugli, her own entanglement with Nougaz didn’t make the tabloids. It wasn’t secret, by any means, but she hadn’t thought it was widely known beyond the Information circles in Paris and Doha. Then again, Halliday is exactly the kind of ambitious social-capital climber who would track that sort of thing. And maybe it wasn’t the horizon she was looking at after all but search results. “Yes,” Maryam says without thinking. “And I’d like to know why you tried to kill her.”
Halliday smirks. “I would have thought you’d appreciate it.”
Maryam, too furious to speak, lets her stare bore through Halliday’s obnoxious expression.
“You should be thanking me,” the former head of state snaps. “That double-crossing bitch.”
Maryam has an unexpected impulse to slap the woman. “What did she do to you?” she asks instead.
Halliday leans back in her seat, back under control and smarmy as usual. “Let’s just say that if you want to know about that tunnel, you should ask her.”
CHAPTER 20
The farewell is almost unnoticeable, a meager bridge that signals an ellipsis in the fight without advancing it in either direction. Mishima is dry-eyed but raw, exhausted to the point of apathy. Ken comes off slightly better: he is calm without seeming hollow. Sayaka, fortunately, is too sleepy to say much; what she notices and folds away into her ever-expanding brain is another question.
Mishima walks from the apartment to the Saigon Hub. It would have been more efficient to pick up the crow first, but it feels better to walk away than climb aboard an extravagant personal crow. She didn’t tell Ken much about the mission before he exploded, and doesn’t want to inspire any questions or speculation at this point.
The personal crow is an unusual luxury for her these days
. She’s gotten used to flying commercial, and she spends the first part of the flight prowling around the crow: standing up from the controls to walk around the space; tapping the edges of the bunkbeds; stepping into the bathroom, seeing her face in the mirror, and stepping out again. She is passing Sardegna before she realizes what she’s doing.
Years ago, Mishima had her own crow, on loan to her from Information. She arranged it for her own comfort and ease; it was her living space as well as her means of travel. This crow, a standard Information vehicle, is nothing like that. The bed in the cabin is a single with a thin mattress and basic climate control. The main room, behind the control space, is obstructed by a set of bunkbeds meant for missions where multiple people need to sleep on the road. There’s a small climate-controlled locker with energy chews, desalination kits, and other basic supplies, but no facilities for food prep.
Layout, comfort level, personal touches—it’s all different. And yet, she finds herself looking for her old crow, expecting it every time she glances up from her content. Mishima throws herself on one of the bunkbeds, which is less jarring, somehow, than the uncomfortable single bed situated where she once kept a duvet-covered double futon.
It wasn’t just the romance of living on the road; she spent long enough based out of her crow to know that it suited her. At home yet detached; sheltered yet in motion. She hasn’t thought of it much over the busy past five years. She loves her apartment in Saigon, and the fact that she knows the woman at the bánh mì takeaway and the outdoor dance instructors and even some of her neighbors. Sayaka has friends there, although at that age, friends are little more than other toddlers that she comes in contact with repeatedly. But Mishima is feeling the itch to move. Is it possible some semblance of rootlessness would be enough for her, even without the espionage and the danger? Mishima starts imagining what a family layout might look like in a crow, and goes so far as to look at prices, which sobers her. Maybe they could afford a small one. But would Ken agree? Would she have to guarantee him a safe, crisis-free life in exchange?
That thread of thought quickly becomes untenable, and Mishima diverts to a related one, also inspired by memories of her previous crow: what Information owes her, and what she owes them. From there she gets to the question of what Information owes the world, or at least its staff. She fumes again over what Nejime said about Nakia, with an anger that’s only partially displaced. The way she evaded the issue during the debate still rankles her, and it only makes it worse that Nougaz provided such a complete contrast. Mishima was not only wrong but timid, a characteristic she’s not used to associating with herself. That reminds her of the disastrous interview after the null-states debate attack. Why doesn’t her fear-delay mechanism function for speech as well as action?
She will play to her strengths, then, and take action. Feeling doubly the spy, Mishima redirects the crow toward New York City.
* * *
Maryam has no desire to write her report. She isn’t sure she’s able to repeat Halliday’s accusation against Nougaz. It might, she tells herself, be slander. Halliday is the sort of underhanded politician who would make something up to get what she wants. She tried to poison Nougaz; it’s not a stretch to imagine she would falsely accuse her of treason.
Maryam takes another lap around her small hotel room. It’s a single-story hotel, a group of rooms opening directly on a small courtyard. Moths and other bugs are fluttering up to the porch light outside her door, crashing against the windows.
Telling Nejime about the accusations feels like admitting her own wrongdoing. If it’s true, then Maryam misjudged Nougaz when they first went out, then fell for her wiles again when they got back together.
She can’t stop rehearing Halliday say “double-crossing bitch.” She sounded angry, unfakeably angry. Nejime said they never figured out why Halliday wanted to kill Nougaz. The anger could come from betrayal if Nougaz threatened to give Halliday away, and now Halliday is trying to smear her.
But if Nougaz was in a position to give Halliday away, why didn’t she?
Maryam keeps hearing it over and over. The memory makes her squirm. Could what Valérie did to her be considered double-crossing, or was it just normal relationship fallout? You want someone, they leave you because you’re their superior, you get back together, but it’s long-distance and you fall for someone else. This happens, it’s understandable, it’s not treason.
Treason. She sighs and sits down in the ancient wooden chair provided for her use. Is that the nerve this is hitting? Does she think Valérie is a traitor?
Yes, Valérie is calculating. She can be deceptive. She gives the impression of being cold, and although Maryam knows that’s a front, it’s a front that over time has become deep and mostly real. But for all her faults, Maryam can’t believe that Nougaz would betray Information—she loves it far too much. Probably more than she loved Maryam, or maybe that’s the self-pity talking.
Still, it’s not worth telling Nejime until she’s sure. If Valérie does know something about these communications, she may have a good reason for keeping it to herself. Maryam gives up on the report and drops into the cool, climate-controlled bed instead. She falls asleep to the relentless rhythm of Halliday’s angry epithet running through her head.
CHAPTER 21
Nakia moved out of her apartment before the trial, out of the whole centenal, based on what Mishima heard, and she has understandably kept her new address closely guarded. Mishima doesn’t want to try to initiate comms and leave a data trail. Instead, she flies directly to the Hub, which will bolster her shoddy cover story of needing some intel from the team there before she proceeds to her primary mission. Fortunately, when she comes out of the stairway from the crow mooring area into the lobby, she finds Velazquez on the twenty-four-hour desk. He knows her and Nakia well enough that he’s willing to give her his colleague’s new address, in an Académe centenal in uptown Manhattan.
The apartment is up a narrow flight of steps, the fluoron banister glowing faintly in the dimness. At the top, Mishima knocks on the only door without a number. She never visited Nakia’s old apartment, but she can feel the comparison like a ghost: where she would have been if she hadn’t been driven away.
Mishima knocks again, and then remembers: if Nakia had ever been the type to answer an unexpected guest in the night, she’s certainly not now. Swallowing away her fear of giving herself away to the wrong person, Mishima leans her head in close to the ancient door and calls out, pitched as low as she can: “Nakia! It’s me, Mishima. Are you there?”
The door opens so quickly, Mishima leaps back, nearly propelling herself down the stairs. Nakia is inside, wearing an oversized T-shirt and a haunted expression and looking as if she’s just climbed out of bed but couldn’t sleep anyway. “Mishima!” she hisses. “What are you doing here?” She glances quickly around the hallway and drags Mishima in. “Of all the people who would get in trouble for seeing me, you have got to be the one it would hurt the worst!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mishima says. The door opened onto a midsized living room, worn varnish on the wood floors and peeling plaster on the ceiling. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose the election regardless.” There’s a thick mattress folded up on one side of the room, and Mishima wonders if she’s supposed to sit on that.
“Well, in that case,” Nakia says. “What can I do for you? Coffee?”
“I’m fine,” Mishima says automatically.
“Obviously not, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Hard to argue with that. “I’m…” Mishima cuts herself off before she can explain that she’s made a clandestine stop on the way to a clandestine mission. “If I’m losing anyway, I thought I might as well check up on you.”
“And lose in style?” Nakia responds with a smile. “If you say so.”
“So, how are you, then?” Mishima asks. She thinks again about sitting on the folded mattress, but Nakia is still standing.
“Ahh, it could be worse, I suppose,” Naki
a says. “Come on, sit down; I’m not mad at you.” She settles herself on the folded mattress and pats the space next to her. “Sorry about the—” She waves at the room. “I put my good stuff in storage because, I don’t know, I guess I’m still expecting a Molotov cocktail through the window.”
“This,” says Mishima, “does not sound like it could be worse.”
“It’s gotten a little better since the election drowned out the trial. Although I’m thinking of moving out of the city.”
“Have you talked to Information about a transfer?” Once she’s reinstated. Assuming she will be.
“I haven’t decided.” Nakia looks down at her hands. “I love New York City. Parts of it, anyway. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s time for a change.” She looks up again. “So. How are you? I have to say, your campaign didn’t exactly make me want to run for office.”
Nakia softens it with a grin, but it’s not necessary: Mishima thinks that’s one of the nicest things anyone has said to her about the whole debacle. “You shouldn’t!” she answers. “It was awful. The only comfort is that winning might have been worse.”
Nakia laughs. “Before I got distracted by my own life, I was trying to figure out why you would do it, give up espionage for life on a committee, but I guess once you’re famous, you might as well.” Her smile cuts off: she’s famous now too, but not in a way that gives her the option of running for office.
“You saw the debate?” Mishima doesn’t want to ask, but she can’t help it. “I feel terrible…”
“Why?” Nakia asks, surprised. “What, the question about me?” She shudders. “You didn’t say anything wrong. It was a terrible question and you were right not to try to answer it.”
