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by Genevieve Valentine

  “Is this your first time visiting one of these?” she asked, her voice so calm it must belong to someone else.

  “Yeah, in person, but Margot and I did a bunch of funny-­looking photo ops they’re going to roll out in the news once these facilities are all established and there are results to publicize. Some of them went out with the first round of press announcements like we were actually working there. They’re so embarrassing. In one of them they made me look into a microscope and make a really serious face, as if anyone would believe anything I had to say about microscopic anything.”

  “I saw that first picture. You looked very believable.”

  “Why do you ask?” His smile had fallen off; his eyes were narrowed. “Are you not interested in this?”

  She wished there were cameras. She wished there were a dozen. Why weren’t there any cameras?

  “Oh, no, I’m very interested. This is for the benefit of the country I represent to my utmost duty,” she repeated, as if it was something Magnus had told her. As if it bored her.

  His smile came back. “It won’t take long, I promise. We have the president’s dinner to get to, and I promised Stevens I wouldn’t be late.”

  That improved her chances, then; you didn’t kill people on the way to presidential dinners unless you wanted a bigger storm than this was worth. It was just smart planning on Margot’s part, to keep her off balance; Margot knew Suyana liked witnesses, and Suyana shuddered from the chill of being known. Magnus wouldn’t get there; they’d never let him reach her when he could still do any good, he’d still be in full diplomatic fury with Stevens by the time they came back—and by then she’d already have been separated from whatever they didn’t want her to see.

  × × × × × × ×

  Columbina was tall, so tall that Suyana had wondered about the logistics of having her for a contact (how could they keep quiet if Suyana had to strain to hear her?), but she soon saw the game. Columbina had olive skin and sharp green eyes and dark hair cut into a bob that swung against her jaw as she moved, and when they went out together, no one gave Suyana a second glance.

  She’d given up Zenaida after the shooting; it wasn’t safe to go back to old comforts. But they had been invisible together because Zenaida acted like her mother. Columbina made her invisible just by showing up.

  (“I see,” Suyana had said, when Columbina introduced herself, and Columbina had laughed and steered her into the crowd at the flea market. Suyana had developed a taste for flea markets that bored Magnus, just around the time Columbina appeared.)

  “Everyone’s suspicious of the whole venture,” Columbina had confided that first day, setting down a pair of opera glasses. “They say it’s for the environment, but that’s what they always say. Someone on the inside says it’s the thin end of a corporate wedge. Even if it isn’t mining, we want to . . . discourage it.”

  “We already discouraged corporate interests,” Suyana had said. There was a basket of baby dolls at her feet, their eyes staring hopefully up at her, and she stepped aside before she kicked it.

  “We might have to do it again.”

  “That doesn’t seem wise.”

  “Maybe not, but if we let in one problem, where will it stop? They can’t grow roots there.”

  “I barely survived the last time,” Suyana said, trying to sound wry and light, and failing just at the end.

  (Zenaida would have bought her a little animal from the brass collection, some figure that had nothing to do with her work—a deer, a dog, a polar bear—and given it to her as a keepsake, and told her quietly, “No one can force you to agree.”)

  Columbina nodded slowly. “I understand,” she said. “But we’d like you to make the opportunity, if you can. We want more information. That’s all.”

  Two strikes in five years, on a country that had been under scrutiny too long for a year of magazine spreads to make people forget. All it would do was make her a scandal instead of a victim. Chordata made sure incidents were happening everywhere; the world was a wide place, and little discontents were always brewing—oil pipelines broke down in the Arctic, waste dumpers found their barrels lined up on the lawns of their estates. But two hits as obvious as this, the second so soon after the first and in the same place, would become points in a pattern.

  And if she said no, they might act anyway. The last strike had been clean, no human injury and no spreading fires, because she had looked out for all of it and they had known how to plan.

  If they acted and she hadn’t seen the place first, she’d never know if they had been right about needing to remove it. She was struggling to find a conscience these days, and before she trusted anyone, she was going to have to see it in the flesh.

  She’d survived Chordata last year, but not because Chordata’s terms were kind. She had survived because Onca had seen her in the flesh, and in that cramped apartment in Paris, the moment Onca had her orders and a gun in her hand, Suyana had made her believe.

  (She didn’t know if Onca was still alive; she was something else Suyana could never go back to.)

  It had been easier to be young, and to not care if Zenaida was directing her where she needed to be led, and to assume Chordata was clear-thinking and honorable. Easier to be young, when a woman had lowered her camera and pointed at the forest and told her she could save it all. Suyana hadn’t believed it even then, but it was something to fight for, and that had been enough.

  “Let me know when we need to move,” she’d said. “I’ll work on Ethan. We’ll get over there. Then I’ll meet whoever I need to meet. No other promises.”

  Columbina grinned. “After your premiere, then. We’ll talk about Sotalia. See you soon.”

  After she was gone, Suyana stood a long time just at the edge of the stalls under the shade of a tree, where no one could tell what she was looking at. Daniel was across the street. He had looked very carefully at Suyana all the time Columbina was leaving, like he was trying to make sure Columbina wouldn’t register to anyone checking the feed. Some girl had excused herself to walk past Daniel’s mark, and that was all.

  When Magnus came to pick her up, she’d been sitting on a bench, looking at the dot of green the park made among the towers of cement.

  “Didn’t you buy anything?” Magnus asked as he opened the door for her, an edge in his voice.

  She didn’t look for Daniel then; if he was worrying for her, it wouldn’t do her any good.

  “Nothing’s worth it,” she said.

  × × × × × × ×

  She left the white jacket in the car. Her earrings—silver, purchased in Lima—brushed her shoulders, and as they walked from the car up the dirt path to the facility, her heels sank a little into the ground with every step.

  It was ridiculous, but it worked enough as cover; grumbling about the soil gave her the chance to lean close to Ethan’s side for a moment, so he couldn’t see her looking around like there was some better path, so she could mark where the perimeter cameras were and see where the brush was deepest around them.

  The canopy rose up behind the squat, bulging facility like it was trying to wave her over; the tops of the trees were swaying slightly from monkeys or the wind, and there were so many insects on the trunks that out of the corner of your eye it looked like the forest was breathing.

  It was just as she’d remembered it, a long time ago.

  “How’d they get this place so deep into the jungle?” Ethan wondered, frowning at the pile of lumber beside the facility (made of the interlocking-pod system ecologists usually used on uneven terrain, lumps of unrisen bread dough three stories high).

  “The lumber roads were probably already here,” she said. “Or the path for the gas pipeline.”

  Ethan glanced at her sidelong, just keenly enough to worry her, and she bristled and shrugged and said, “What? Magnus tells me the news!” as if she was offended and not terrified, and he cracked a smile a second too late.

  Their guides were waiting just inside the doors. He was a poli
tician, you could tell from a hundred feet, and she was an administrator in the genetics division who looked like she hated them being there and was afraid of saying something she shouldn’t. The photographer, who had a site pass but no national badge, took four or five pictures that wouldn’t come close to print quality and then vanished into the open hatch between two pods.

  As they went inside, Suyana messaged Magnus: Are you trying to get here?

  Both of the guides were very helpful and very enthusiastic, and talked at great length about their plans for seed preservation, and steered Suyana and Ethan away from any of the pods where people were working and any meeting room that had a whiteboard in it. Windows opened onto the forest everywhere you looked. In three directions it felt like the green had walked up and pressed its face against the glass, the plants were so crowded. In the fourth, the mud flat sat outside the window like an accusation.

  “So, uh, you guys piggyback this location off the pipeline?” Ethan asked, peering out. He winked at Suyana when their guides glanced at each other.

  “The pipeline was fifty years ago,” said the man, and the woman said, “It wouldn’t be safe to build near the pipeline, actually. Since it was installed, we’ve been playing a losing game with the soil.”

  Magnus: I’m sorry. I can’t.

  Suyana’s throat was thick. “Oh?”

  “The erosion caused the loss of so much trees and brush cover that the birds had to move on, so the seeds aren’t traveling the way they used to,” the woman explained, as the politician got silently redder. “This year the Yanesha Reserve has reported markedly low levels of deer. The monkeys are leaving.”

  Suyana already knew. The scraped-bare land had been a line of rotting flesh you could see from the plane.

  Ethan frowned. “And so you’re researching how to fix the erosion?”

  “Unfortunately, the damage is just too far gone to reverse quickly, even if the budget for such a large-scale fix was ­possible. At this point we’re researching how to encourage corpo­rate activism to raise the money to grow and replant ground cover, until we can reintroduce seed growth more naturally.”

  It was rehearsed, a return to the prescribed track from that moment of accidental information, and Suyana tried not to curl her lip at the idea of corporate activism. It might work—growing seeds in a greenhouse that would take up acres, trying to replant in stages what had been lost. Of course, it would be sponsored by an American company—the UARC couldn’t afford to sustain a several-year project on that scale. They’d be asking the Americans to take point. They’d be handing it over.

  That was the whole point of the venture, then: make the UARC grateful for a solution they couldn’t afford to a problem caused by someone else.

  She wasn’t a fool—whatever was happening in the labs they couldn’t see meant that pharmaceutical companies and nutrition conglomerates would descend on whatever this group found, looking for patents the government would have to fight across international lines and exerting pressure to own it all, in exchange for keeping it alive.

  But that might not happen until after the plants had taken hold. It might be the reason there were enough plants in the first place; cultivation and domestication on something that might be wasteland otherwise. The UARC was getting better trade deals now that she was dating Ethan; they might be able to buy back some of the land rights before the corporations could close their fists around it all. And until then, what was to be done that was better than trying to hold on to the dirt? Should she give the word to let the place burn, and let the ground eat its fill of the trees?

  (Once she thought, Did Margot know there would be mitigating factors? Did she let me see this just to find out what I would do?)

  “Miss Sapaki, would you like to see some of our seed practices?” the woman was asking, and Suyana watched the politician draw Ethan aside to meet with some people in one of the forbidden meeting rooms, full of the people she needed to know and never would.

  “Sure,” said Suyana finally. She felt heavy everywhere. “I’d love to see the seeds.”

  I’m just the girlfriend, Suyana reminded herself as she nodded over little envelopes and tiny seedlings being grown under hot lamps. I’m the local celebrity, and the girlfriend of the powerful man. I’m not a threat. No one will remember me except as a pair of earrings and high heels covered in mud. I’m a host, and I’m a shell in order to be safe, and anything I need to know I’m going to have to take.

  She took it in the small talk she made with the biologists, joking about the chaos of her office back home amid their tidy rows in different bins, noting which species went into which bin (some went into a smaller box, selected for review by whoever was coming later to sort through them and decide which to patent). She chatted with one of the preservationists about their favorite animals, and Suyana pretended to be fascinated by the photos of birds the preservationist had taken.

  Suyana mimed her heels sinking into the dirt until everyone was laughing, and reapplied her gloss using the selfie camera on her phone; behind her, across the room, were lists of species grouped on a whiteboard that they hadn’t bothered to cover, because it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

  And it wouldn’t. To her.

  If she gave it over to Chordata—how was it an if, but the deer were vanishing and sometimes help was help—someone would know whether you could grow those plants on the open seam of mud, or if this was merely another logging venture with someone else’s blessing.

  It would wait; the danger was farther away. Still, she stayed close enough to a door or a window that no one could get to her without her having a way out, and by the time they took the stairs back down to where Ethan was shaking hands with the people who mattered, Suyana was counting forward and backward from five with every breath to make sure they were long enough and steady enough not to draw attention.

  She walked outside a little ahead of him, shook hands a little faster than he did, and the moment she was clear of the crowd she opened the call, said, “Keep that video,” and hung up on Magnus, before anyone else was close enough to hear.

  × × × × × × ×

  In the car on the way back to the hotel, Suyana watched the road—there was so much mud, it would be so easy to slip—until Ethan rested his hand on her leg. Then she remembered herself and laid her fingers in the spaces between his fingers, rolled her head along the seat back to face him.

  “I’m glad you were here,” she said, and meant it. She’d embraced him outside the facility just before they got in the car, her head tucked against his chest; the blanket of green had stung her eyes for a second, and she hadn’t wanted anyone to see.

  He looked at their hands. “What did you see when they pulled me aside? Was it more fun than what I saw?”

  “I don’t know. How fun do you find seed packets?” He smiled, and she gambled and said, “They were setting aside a lot of potential patent seeds for that one guy, though.”

  “It’s not one guy, it’s just the name of the company,” he said.

  Anger flared heavy and wretched just behind her ears when she realized he wasn’t going to tell her whatever he’d been told, and her empty palm itched.

  But she let embarrassment wash over her face and said, “Don’t tell Magnus. I have to give him a full report for the budget, and he’ll be so mad that I wasn’t paying attention to something.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You promise?”

  “Of course,” he said, some lie worrying at him that he couldn’t quite conceal. It seemed new, or newly sharpened, and Suyana watched it and wondered what the hell she was going to do to save herself if he really was an enemy. When he leaned in toward her, she met him smiling for the kiss and thought of knives.

  × × × × × × ×

  Magnus was waiting up when she came back to the suite, carry­ing her earrings in one hand and her shoes in the other, and he watched her and held perfectly still.

  In the elevator lobby outside Ethan’s suite, she�
�d glanced at the street and seen two men in suits hovering near the back door of the hotel. When she’d looked up at the head of the stairs, Stevens was at the turn that went back to Ethan’s suite, watching her get in and descend. No telling what they suspected—maybe nothing, maybe this was just heightened security after an off-camera site visit—but all the way to her room, she was being watched.

  (She wished she knew what her new snap looked like; she could use them now.)

  Suyana stood beside the dining table, so close that Magnus had to tilt his head up to meet her eye. She felt like a mountaintop, far away and useless.

  “What did Margot tell you about the research post, when you called her and asked why they’d kept you out?”

  She so rarely asked him a direct question that when he answered, it sounded like she’d surprised the truth out of him.

  “Her office told me it was underwritten by the Inter­national Assembly Ecology Committee, and until it was established in all the countries where it had gotten approval, it wasn’t open to press. Ethan got in as a favor, because of the work the US has been doing, and it was not my place to dictate the terms of the visit.”

  “But someone took our picture. Who approved Ethan and me?”

  He shook his head, that controlled back-and-forth that suggested a lifetime of practice at not feeling anything too much. “The committee votes are private. It was a yes vote. I don’t know who was involved.”

  Then he looked right at her and said, “What frightened you?”

  “I thought about how easy it would be to kill me while I was out there. No press, no handlers. I remember how easy it is to disappear.”

  Magnus flinched for a second before he could get it under control. “I’m sorry. I had no idea of their plans, I called—”