“Here’s your speech,” said Magnus from beside her.
Her speech: The trip had been so wonderful that she chose to remember the kindness and openhearted welcome she’d found everywhere, rather than the actions of an angry few. She wished the injured man a swift recovery, and the UARC’s IA budget would be covering his hospital bill. She planned to do her utmost here at the IA to bring peace to the UARC and the world. It was everything expected of her, and still said nothing.
“Let Ethan condemn. He can afford it.” Then he cleared his throat. “I assume you called him.”
“He offered, in the car. I thought it couldn’t hurt.”
Magnus was looking at her the way he did from time to time—through her, not at her. It was the same look he gave her whenever someone mentioned the Incident (the Disappearance, the Problem); it made her wonder what he really thought happened a year ago, between losing her and running into the alley where she was standing over the body of the man she killed.
She’d never said a word about what had happened to her. He’d wanted her confidence—he knew it was a lie but not how, and it was always the how that fascinated Magnus—but he was just decent enough not to ask, and she’d never offered. Once or twice she’d mentioned offhand that some public event made her uncomfortable, and he’d given her that look, and then changed her schedule.
He said, “Not a bad move to call Ethan, all told.”
“Tell me that if I survive the night,” she said. “If we’re only making Margot angry by joining forces, I may have wasted him on this.”
Someone knocked on the door and summoned them to the cameras, which gave her an excuse to turn away from his expression.
“Oona’s on her way, but—” Magnus started, and then fell silent, watching her as she pinched her cheeks and dragged her teeth over her lips while everyone else filed out. After they were all out of sight, she ground her knuckles into her eyes until the sockets looked red and leftover-weepy.
“Is it enough?” she asked, blinking back tears.
He was still watching her. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said, holding the door open for her. “I think you know what’s enough.”
At the press conference, she stood behind Ethan and looked out at the bleachers full of people with cameras for heads, and she brushed Ethan’s hand as she stepped up to join him at the podium for her remarks, and she cleared her throat but didn’t cry, and she fell silent here and there but her voice never broke.
One of the Daily World journalists asked her about the last attack on an outpost, and she said, “I was so young, but I remember the toll it took—I hope the next Face of the UARC, whoever they are, will never have to experience anything like this.”
One of the American national press asked if it brought back any memories of her captivity, and before she could even summon an expression that neared surprise, Ethan stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder and said they weren’t taking any further questions.
Ethan’s team was waiting in the greenroom to drag him to the car. They faded in a cloud of tense advice, with Ethan giving one look over his shoulder, so she caught the words, “. . . shouldn’t Suyana . . . ?”
Magnus held out his tablet; their approval rating was up five points in fifteen minutes. She wondered how high the numbers had to be before you were too important to kill. It was hard to tell from the inside. She wondered if you could bring down Margot’s numbers enough.
She handed it back to him.
“Didn’t waste him after all,” he said.
She said, “Let’s find out if Grace is free for dinner.”
13
“—and I promise to work not just for greater peace within the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation, but even more closely with the International Assembly, which has put so much trust in me.”
Daniel reached up and turned off the television.
“That’s not your television,” said Bo.
Everyone around them in the cramped counter joint was eating, their faces eclipsed by enormous bowls of noodle soup, and nobody even looked over.
“Yeah, they were all relying on that news. Sorry to cause such an uproar.”
Bo shrugged, caught the same noodle at five points so it made a single tidy knot on the way to his mouth.
“I don’t need to see the rest either,” Daniel said, like that was what Bo had asked. “They’ll answer some preplanned questions about what all this means for her tenure at the IA, and then Ethan will step in and be gallant and that will be the end of it. You don’t need to see that. Nobody does.”
Bo made another careful tangle of a single noodle and ate it in silence.
Technically he and Bo were still in the middle of an argument that Bo didn’t realize they were having, about whether Bo should have told him Li Zhao had come to New York, and why. The argument would officially begin when Li Zhao told Bo that Daniel had spoken with her. Then Bo would have to say something about it and they could get started.
So far, she hadn’t said anything. It was proving to be a very interesting argument.
Still, if Bo wanted to keep a few secrets for now, he could. They’d come out eventually. Bo was too much of a company man to hide anything for long.
“Have we heard from Nicodema?”
Bo raised an eyebrow on we, but said, “Nothing to hear. She flew out when Suyana and Ethan took off. She’s back in Paris, waiting for seasonal work.”
“Think Li Zhao’s going to start booking overlap for things like this?”
He shrugged. “Things like this don’t happen for anyone except Suyana. I don’t think the boss is concerned.”
Daniel looked over to see if Bo was warning him, but Bo looked as calm and sincere as a lumberjack on a bag of cough drops.
He closed his mouth over the question: Is that because no one expects her to make it?
“I’d better go,” he said instead, yanking on his jacket as he stood. “They’ll be getting the hell off IA property as soon as this circus is over. Thanks for paying for lunch.”
“What? No,” Bo said, but Daniel was quicker than he looked, and he was already long gone.
× × × × × × ×
Suyana stayed in the IA building longer than Daniel would have believed she could stand it. At first he thought it was to avoid the ten rows of photographers and reporters who had their faces pressed to the glass. There was a side exit in case of emergency, but he could see it from the corner, and there were so many cameras there he doubted she’d risk looking so guilty unless someone was actually chasing her out.
It wasn’t an impossible image. The last time Margot had tried to rid herself of Suyana, she and Daniel had covered half of Paris trying not to be killed. Now her profile had risen, but somehow the danger was worse. When she was C-list, her biggest problem was that no one would have noticed if she disappeared. Now the biggest problem was how many people had their eye on her.
What a waste of a year. Why go through this if you wouldn’t end up any safer? Why go through this for a group who ignored you the first time you ever told them no, and put you in this much trouble without caring what happened to you after? Suyana wanted to believe in Chordata; even a year ago, standing in the safe house with people who were waiting for orders about whether or not to kill her, she’d looked like she hoped she was home.
Now here she was, and neither side seemed very interested in her survival.
Daniel wished he was better at looking forward. Suyana always seemed to be able to pluck the future from a tangle of thread and then pull. But he’d only ever been good at noticing when things were more than what they seemed, and that was practically always, with this job—enough instinct to point your camera the moment before the gunshots went off, that was all. Diplomacy was something else, and building a spyglass was a skill he’d never developed.
The foot traffic was light this time of day, when the IA was out of session and most people who weren’t desperately conducting state business just visited their embassie
s instead, to take a few pictures and sign a few asylum requests and then head out to dinner. It was easy enough to keep an eye out across the street from the IA offices for anyone with their head low and their scarf pulled up too high.
When Suyana finally came out the front doors (slowly and without looking over her shoulder, which Daniel chalked up as a mercy), she’d changed from the penitent press conference outfit. Now her hair was pulled back into a messy knot, and she wore black pants and a sleeveless tunic and a complicated necklace of dark stones that made his heart turn over heavy in his chest.
Grace was beside her, wearing something that suggested she’d been called out of the house at the last minute, which meant that choosing her loose jeans and too-big button-up shirt must have taken an hour.
For a moment Daniel was baffled—who headed out for a quiet dinner after news like this, when you needed to be in front of cameras to keep people feeling sorry for you?—but it was time away from Ethan and Magnus, and Daniel imagined it was useful to demonstrate you had allies in the Big Nine when Margot was breathing down your throat. He hoped Grace was in on it; he didn’t like the idea of Suyana using her, somehow.
Shit. Was all this an operation? Did Grace know what Suyana was, on top of everything else? Was he the only person ever left out in the cold anymore?
The nationally sanctioned cameras swarmed them as soon as the doors were open. The photographers didn’t ask questions (not their brief), but they were all under orders and took pictures of whatever they were told. Daniel sympathized.
He hailed a cab just as they were closing the car doors, but it cut across traffic so fast it blocked a car that was trying to pull out, and it took twenty seconds for the drivers to give up shouting at each other and slide through traffic.
As Daniel turned to see where Suyana’s car was going, he caught sight of Kipa coming out of the offices.
She was ignored by the cameras—she hadn’t done anything to earn them except be sweet, and sweet only worked if you were dressed to the nines somewhere near interesting people—but as she crossed the street and hailed a downtown cab at the far corner of the block, a stranger slid in after her. A woman, moving fast, just a glimpse of heeled boots and a bob that swung in a curtain across her face as she ducked inside.
He couldn’t think about it—he had to focus, to think about how many places Suyana and Grace could go if they started out heading downtown, where they would be most likely to be left alone except for key people, and decided if Suyana had walked out looking like that, she was going to play some politics over dinner.
By the time Daniel was settled in his own cab, he’d decided. “Follow that car,” he said, and pointed at Kipa’s taxi.
He suspected where Suyana and Grace would be for the next several hours, and there was time for him to catch up there. If he waited any longer, Kipa and Columbina were going to disappear.
× × × × × × ×
Sometimes you knew a Face was going to go underground because they wore the same thing two or three days in a row, so the press couldn’t run any story on it without looking like they were spinning tales. If the Face vanished for a day or two, it was hard to make it a story when your audience remembered you making shit up about them twenty hours ahead of time.
It wasn’t going to work as a tactic for long—readers were starting to get wise to the trick, and now a good photographer could tip his magazine off to illicit vacations a day early. It was amazing, though, what the mind skipped over if it saw the same person wearing the same thing. It made you both more distinctive and more invisible, so by the third day everyone recognized you but you could almost get past the cameras before anyone remembered they were supposed to be taking pictures.
Daniel wasn’t going to pass up any trick that worked. He wore black pants and a charcoal button-down, no matter what, and a coat whenever it was cool enough to warrant one. It was a smart move—it looked expected pretty much anywhere you were, and no one ever gave him a second glance.
Kipa and Columbina were walking through Central Park, and Daniel hung back just far enough that they didn’t notice his pacing them. (Just in case, he bought a hot dog from one of the park vendors and took occasional thoughtful bites while staring at nothing on his phone. In this crowd, it was close enough to blending in.)
Kipa had grown in the last year. Suyana didn’t see her often, so Daniel often went months without really noticing her, but she’d seemed to square her shoulders in the IA. She appeared at parties where you least expected her; he must have half a dozen shots of Kipa in a floaty skirt and impossibly charming top gliding into the VIP section as Suyana carefully never looked over. Daniel had suspected something was wrong—that Kipa knew more than she should, maybe, that during that fight in Terrain a year ago Martine had made a lucky guess and now Suyana had to manage three more people who knew.
But he’d never considered Kipa as Chordata material, which he realized now had probably been the point. Kipa was on an environmental subcommittee that voted to save whales and owl habitats once a year, and never said a word otherwise. She made herself forgettable, and then showed up and listened.
Daniel was impressed and embarrassed. It was one thing to miss the person Suyana had come to save in the middle of a loud nightclub a year ago, as a stranger was explaining what your life would look like now. It was another thing to keep missing a connection for a year. That’s what tunnel vision got you.
He got as close as he dared and moved as quietly as he could.
“It doesn’t sound like her to not want to know the reasoning behind anything.” Kipa was frowning.
“Hi, Daniel,” said Dev over the comm. “So, what the hell is happening, exactly?”
Columbina sighed. “I thought so too, but she was so angry—you know how angry Aurelia gets.”
“Aurelia?”
Columbina looked long-suffering. “Lachesis.”
“Oh, sure,” Kipa said, and if the hair on Daniel’s neck wasn’t already up, the tone of Kipa’s voice would have done it, as they realized in the same moment that Suyana’s old name had been blanked. There was a replacement, but no one recognized it—that name meant nothing. Daniel knew how easily people disappeared: even Suyana, even Chordata. He cleaned his hands three times on a napkin.
“Yes! And she accused me! Like a setup, like that is something we would do.”
“Mmm.” Kipa stared past Columbina into middle space for a second, as if remembering something. “And of course you never would.”
“Daniel, repeat, you are off target. Can you read me? Where are you? Where the hell is Suyana?”
Smack between them, he thought, right in the center of it all; can’t you tell?
“Of course we wouldn’t just abandon her—we’d never betray anyone kind enough to help us,” said Columbina, very nearly as politely as she’d sounded before.
“Oh. Good. I thought so. I don’t like to think of you—of us—being that sort of place.” Kipa’s thumbnail was picking at the polish on her index finger, on the far side of her body, where Columbina couldn’t see.
“I’m just concerned that’s the impression she has. She seemed very upset, and she wouldn’t even listen to me when I tried to explain. I was hoping you might be able to help me talk to her.”
“Sure. What did you say, when you explained? I mean, what would you be saying differently now?”
Daniel buried his smile in a napkin.
“I’m not kidding,” said Dev through the comm. “This is off assignment, seriously. If you think this is a story of its own, alert us and we’ll get someone on it. Suyana could be launching a rocket to the moon right now and you’d miss the story.”
“This is the story,” Daniel murmured. “Don’t worry about her.”
She’d never go to the moon without saying good-bye.
“—so we can speak to her tonight,” Kipa was saying. “I’ll find out where she’s going from her handler. But I don’t know if this will carry much weight unless there are—I
mean, it’s a big apology. Do they have plans to show they’re sorry? If I bring you to her, can you make this right?”
Columbina drew up to her full height and looked straight down at Kipa, who had actually dug the heels of her hands into her skirt like she was a precocious nine-year-old who knew she was in the right and was going to be adorably staunch about it. It crawled up Daniel’s spine to look at it—she was too young to be looking so young—but he supposed that whole affect had the potential to be disgustingly effective in the right room. Old men with savior complexes. Handlers who liked the idea of anyone too innocent to have a hidden agenda.
And, apparently, women who were playing the big-
sister control agent on the side. Columbina’s shoulders softened and she hooked her thumbs absently into her pockets, mirroring Kipa, as she said, “Yes. The Norwegian outposts have promised to see what comes of it before they do anything. At least a year. It will look like another local problem, if it has to be handled. We’ll help it blow over, however we can, and she’ll have plenty of breathing room while we try to fix this.”
Daniel wasn’t hungry anymore; the rest of the hot dog went in the garbage as he turned and walked back to Fifth. Whatever happened next, Suyana was setting the destination, and that was his primary concern.
She wouldn’t be safe for long, the way things were going. Bo was her best option; ex-killers made the most useful snaps in situations like this. (Daniel could pull someone out of the crosshairs once, but doubted he’d be dumb enough to do it again.) Daniel just had to get himself fired before they left New York, while Li Zhao was too focused on Margot to let Bo have her. With Bo doing swing shift, it would be easy for her to move Bo to Suyana—a steady eye instead of the guy who was going to pieces. Bo liked Suyana more than he’d say. That was all Daniel needed to know.
“Dev, what the hell’s going on?” he said as he cleared the line of trees. “That wasn’t Suyana! Why didn’t you tell me? Now I’ve lost her, I can’t believe this, I rely on you for this intel.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Dev said, and Daniel pulled his lips back from his teeth in a fuck-you smile as he peered into the tinted windows of the parked cars along the sidewalk, just to make sure Dev would see.
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