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by Genevieve Valentine

So much would go wrong if they really turned on her. But her anger at Daniel had burned away the last of her fear, and the inconvenient flickers of self-preservation were gone. Some habits were hard to shake, and the first thing she’d ever done when she looked at an enemy was to imagine them vanishing.

  She saw Columbina first—clumsy, moving into a puddle of light—and before she’d decided whether it was more strategic to pretend not to see, Suyana was staring. Then it was too late, and she decided she might as well level a look at them as they crossed the room through the pockets of the crowd, Columbina occasionally glancing at Suyana and then away.

  But the first person who actually approached her was Grace, who delicately dropped two glasses on the table and availed herself of a third chair she seemed to conjure at the edge of her fingers.

  “Grace.” Suyana didn’t look over, nearly sorry for how rude it looked. “I thought we had a plan. That wasn’t even close to an hour.”

  From the corner of Suyana’s eye, Grace stabbed the lime wedge in the bottom of her glass with her straw and pulled it out, wringing it to death between two fingers. “It’s not that I don’t believe you when you say you’re in trouble—last time you told me that, Colin had to rescue me from IA Peacekeeper custody in my own bolt-hole flat, so trust me, I damn well believe you.”

  Grace had never mentioned that before. She sounded like she hadn’t wanted to mention it now, like nerves had wormed it out of her. Suyana’s stomach turned over absently, like she was sorry for someone she’d never heard of.

  “But,” Grace went on, her pleasant smoothness back in place, “I’m increasingly worried about being kept in the dark, and I’m not sure I’d be much safer at the bar than I would at this table.”

  “It’s worth your life.”

  Grace looked at her, on the verge of saying something, and Suyana waited for her good sense to win out. But she only settled her back against the wall. “Being caught in your wake has a way of altering one’s evening,” she said, and flashed one of the grins Suyana used to think was masterful practice and turned out to be just the way Grace smiled. If it weren’t for the tightness of her hands in her lap, you’d never know she was nervous.

  Grace had always had more faith in Suyana’s reasons than Suyana’s reasons deserved.

  Kipa and her guest had paused when they saw Suyana wasn’t alone, and the back of her neck started to itch. She looked over at Grace.

  Who was staring at Columbina.

  She’d always been a bit slow about where people’s hearts lay, so it took Suyana a full ten seconds to guess why Grace’s lips had parted slightly like she was about to call a name, or was having trouble breathing.

  “How long ago?” Suyana asked, trying to keep an eye on Grace and still watch Kipa and Columbina approaching.

  “Two years. It was in Paris.”

  She wondered why Columbina had gone to Paris when Chordata had a presence there and probably some operatives who would have been ready to seduce an asset, but it was better not to guess how far Chordata would go for that kind of thing. It was enough to know they’d found someone who fit Grace’s tastes (beautiful, cold, hurts), the way they’d found Zenaida to take Suyana aside and mother her in drops.

  By the time Kipa took the empty seat, Grace was lounging so deliberately Suyana heard something in her back pop, and Suyana could feel the heft of Grace’s breaths through the few inches that separated them.

  As she sat, Kipa whispered the all clear, “Violet,” with a glance at Grace.

  “It had better be. Don’t look at her.”

  Then Kipa smiled—too small to register unless you knew her. “No worries. You have them running scared—she wants to make sure you’re not angry. They think something’s wrong and they’re going to lose you.” Kipa’s face never broke its gormless sincerity.

  Suyana couldn’t believe it. “That’s why she’s here?”

  “Yep. Columbina must want to keep the peace something terrible to risk this. She said you wouldn’t talk to her?”

  Grace’s fingers twitched a quarter inch, brushed Suyana’s knuckles as if she wanted to grip Suyana’s hand and lost her nerve.

  “Oh, I’m sure she did.” Suyana let her face relax, let herself look halfway between smug and charmed. Chordata wanted to make good. She’d loved them all her life, even when she knew better. Of course she’d let them apologize. They were expecting it.

  She’d settle, back in the fold and out of danger. They’d all walk away clean. Suyana could swallow her tongue and agree; there was less than a week until the Paris session, and plenty to do until then. Better to bury the hatchet and not have to look behind her.

  Grace breathed in too long, out too long.

  “Take Grace to the bar,” Suyana said. “I’ll talk to Columbina. If I put my right hand on the table, hit Grace’s panic button and get out.”

  Kipa blinked.

  “Good idea,” said Grace a beat too late. “My throat’s gone a little dry.”

  When Suyana was alone, she indicated the chair, and Columbina moved forward and sat.

  “Grace doesn’t know what I really am,” Columbina said. “It was just reconnaissance. Didn’t work out.”

  “Interesting. Did you ask?”

  “No point.” Columbina shrugged, and Suyana watched her try not to look over at the bar, where Kipa was doing her routine for Grace, telling stories younger than she was to get smiles out of people old enough to know better. Grace was letting her pretend it worked.

  She waited, let the silence and Columbina’s blinders settle, until Columbina said, “Some people just aren’t looking for a cause.”

  So Columbina had a soft stomach after all. Suyana tucked her right hand farther under her, sensed more than saw Kipa relaxing at the bar.

  Suyana made a small, sympathetic noise and waited until Columbina remembered herself. The pause was longer than she expected; Columbina must be very sure of her success.

  “I’m very angry,” she said then, without venom.

  “I understand,” Columbina said, almost good enough to be true. “We made a mistake.”

  “That means a lot.” Suyana let a smile of relief flicker around the edges of her mouth until Columbina was matching it. Then she began negotiations.

  × × × × × × ×

  Suyana looked appropriately solemn for the camera on her way out, not quite arm in arm with Grace, who made a vague approximation of a smile that would have looked a little queasy if they were holding still.

  As soon as the car door closed behind them, she called Magnus.

  “Ethan and I should take some engagement photos,” she said. “Go to Paris a few days early, play up the romance. It’ll be good press.”

  After a moment Magnus said, “All right. I’ll get started.”

  Suyana must have been biting the inside of her mouth; she could taste blood. “It should look like his idea.”

  “Oh. Of course. Why?”

  The silence went on too long. At the far end of the seat, Grace was looking at her like a pin at a moth.

  “I’ll be home later,” Suyana said, hung up.

  The divider was up and the speaker was off, but Grace was still careful when she said, “So what did I escape, when Columbina left me?”

  She blinked. Columbina must have been sure of success to give Grace the operative name. However Chordata had lost Grace, it had been a near miss.

  “A lot of trouble.”

  “Suyana.”

  She looked at the speaker switch, at the reassuring OFF she never believed.

  “I was young, and they gave me a cause. I never betrayed my country—I tried to protect it—but.”

  But she had betrayed Hakan, and betrayed Daniel and Grace and herself, and by now it was a lie so precisely constructed that she’d betray everyone who knew her as long as she lived.

  “This last problem”—and she paused a beat for Grace to catch up to the “this” she meant—“was against my will. The rest has only been against good
advice, and the problems I’ve had I made for myself. Not everybody’s born wise.”

  Grace watched her through three stoplights. Suyana looked away after the first one, could only look sidelong at Grace’s reflection in the window and wait.

  “I’m not sure how wise it is to fall for someone who turns out to be a covert agent,” Grace said after a while. “I don’t know about the UARC, but for the Big Nine you have to watch movies about it in training. You go to seminars about organizations they think are recruiting. We’re targets. It’s why Colin had to fight so hard for my privacy; the UK wanted to make sure no one was taking advantage of me.”

  “Did she ever plead her case?”

  Grace huffed, cleared her throat. “I don’t remember. I never got the sales pitch. It felt like she was waiting for something, I thought a declaration, maybe. Then she stopped waiting.”

  She had been waiting for a declaration, Suyana was nearly sure. It would have been a sign of dissatisfaction with the Assembly, some glimmer of rebellion she could have tended into fire. She nearly said, Columbina left because it was something you’d never give. (There might have been something else—Columbina might have seen what Suyana had seen in Grace, and realized Grace was someone not to be wasted on their line of work—but it was better not to make guesses about lost causes.)

  “Then you were smarter than I’ve ever been,” Suyana said. “And you won.”

  There were shadows passing across her eyes, but at night it was easy to find shadows, and otherwise Grace’s face never changed. Later, she said, “All right.”

  Even in her sadness, Grace had some essential surety that Suyana missed, a tooth that had rotted through. She made kindness look sincere, and mistakes look noble, and watching her, Suyana’s dark thoughts had no name.

  It had surprised Suyana, in the last year, to realize how much of being a Face was just muscle memory. There was strain in building up the endurance to reach as high as she had reached, but beyond that climb your body was honed for what you found at the top. You looked the way you were meant to and said great things that meant nothing, and you shook hands with anyone presented to you and slid your hand in the crook of your boyfriend’s elbow, and eventually your body could do all of it without you.

  You could disappear inside yourself and never come out again, if you wanted. No one would notice a thing.

  She had fallen under the eye of an organization she could never fully trust again. For their sake, she’d put herself under the eye of the most powerful politician in the world. The last time she’d chosen between them she’d nearly died, and now she had lost an asset.

  Sloppy to have cut Daniel that way; embarrassing to expect him to linger. She knew better than to hold on to pride when there was something you needed. Pride you only used when you had the luxury of losing.

  She hadn’t been thinking, though—she’d been relieved and terrified and hot-skin angry, and hadn’t treated him like an asset should be treated. That had always been the problem with Daniel: He made her want to be honest.

  At the door of her building, four photographers had settled in to photograph her homecoming and Magnus was hovering just inside, waiting to take her arm and remove her from other countries’ unwanted eyes. She risked a glance over her shoulder to see who was watching from across the way. (It wouldn’t be Daniel, of course—Daniel was long gone.)

  Then she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear like it was getting in the way of her dignified thinking, and headed up the stairs and inside.

  Maybe it was better to lose Daniel. Too much history, habits that were hard to break. She could start over with the next one and be who they expected her to be. That one wouldn’t know to look for anything behind her ambition; she’d deliver nothing less. She had the muscle for it now.

  15

  Grace was astonishingly balanced. Daniel spent four days in New York following her on shopping trips with her handler Colin and dinners with promising B-listers and nights at clubs that had memberships. She was better at ignoring Daniel than Martine had ever been, but without giving away any tells, she nearly always managed to be facing away from him, or moving too much, or silhouetted too brightly to make a decent shot.

  “God, what happened to you?” asked Kate over the line, which was as close as she got to complimenting his usual work.

  They still made second-page news—the shops she’d visited had paid top dollar for them and planted them in news stories right next to ads for their stores. Diplomacy at work. Good money, anyway. Li Zhao was happy.

  But Grace greeted fans openly; she argued openly with Colin about matters of state.

  “This dress is a little insulting,” she said in Bergdorf, putting back a gown in Union Jack colors, and when he said, “But a little nationalism—” she cut him off with, “Is unnecessary between two free countries who are trading well.”

  “Well, white is surrender,” Colin said, thumbing the rack, “purple’s too obvious, gray is depressing.”

  “I’ll wear blue—plain blue—or wear those enormous gold and emerald earrings with the gray. Can’t call it depressing then.”

  “Independent Scotland has a lot to prove. They’re going to be easily put out.”

  Grace’s face softened a little. “Colin. It’s just Annella. A week ago I held her hair back in the bathroom at Hypatia. She’s going to hug me no matter what color I’m wearing.”

  “Or else,” Colin muttered, but he was mostly joking, and Grace grinned.

  She had a real smile—not always, but often enough. Daniel had always wondered if Faces hung on to those, but she’d been in the IA going on ten years, and there it was.

  He realized after a few days of covering her how Li Zhao could afford to have so many Faces followed. He’d assumed the whole network looked like him and Bo, strung out on lack of sleep and racing after their assignments and desperate to avoid disaster. If most of the Big Nine were like Grace, the snap might not even need overlap coverage. She was in bed by midnight, most nights, and never left the house before ten. That was nearly a day job.

  Daniel would have mentioned all that free time to Bo, but Grace never went to see Suyana, so there wasn’t much chance. Daniel doubted he’d have the heart to mock Bo much even if they ran into each other. He knew what it was like to look after Suyana; Bo needed all the rest he could come by.

  × × × × × × ×

  The Paris travel prep meeting was held in Bonnaire offices on two continents at an hour in New York when everyone’s Faces were probably asleep.

  Bo wasn’t there. Suyana was probably at Ethan’s and would be sneaking back home just before dawn to play her other part with Magnus. Maybe Suyana was just now concluding a farewell meeting with Columbina before she got on a plane to Paris and the IA session and let Chordata betray her again on the first continent they’d tried it, for old times’ sake.

  On the television, Kate and Dev and a dozen strangers sat in the Paris headquarters, all trying to look serious while arranged around a single velvet sofa in camera range. The chair Li Zhao occupied had been kept studiously empty. When he saw it, Daniel—who was crowded with the New York snaps in what pretended to be a dining room—shot Li Zhao a look that she returned with such wickedness he tore a divot of skin off his lip trying not to laugh.

  “Our sources at the three major airports have confirmed everyone flying commercial,” Kate said. She and Dev were still at their stations; they had no interest in being anywhere near the Paris also-rans who were only good enough to cover the session rush. “We’re reassigning so no one’s cover identity ends up on the same manifest as their usual assignment. For charter flights, all we can do is have someone at the airport as close as possible to the most likely times of travel. Scheduling and assignments will be finalized as they happen—obviously it gets tricky.”

  It sounded like they were planning a rendezvous with one of the space stations, but not even Daniel thought it was very funny. He looked around at the bleary faces of the Paris team and
wondered which poor soul would be living in the airport until the Faces started to show.

  Li Zhao added, “Four New Faces will be flying directly to Paris from home countries: Sweden, Indonesia, Iran, and Ghana. We’ll assign from there if necessary.”

  No names were attached to new recruits. They hadn’t earned any until they did something noteworthy. Dev had shown him the archives once; everybody had cross-checks once the footage got back to Bonnaire, but it got sent in tagged by country, not by name.

  Daniel did it too. There was no difference after a while, and it was easier to talk about Norway than it was to think about Martine’s hand shaking around her cigarette.

  The meeting went on and someone in Paris actually had a question, which made Li Zhao look like spoiled milk, and by degrees Daniel stopped paying attention. Grace was already scheduled for a charter flight with Martine, so Daniel’s schedule would burn out soon. He’d hop a flight and pick up again when he landed. He hadn’t seen his new flat, which he’d be sharing with Bo because life was a joke, but that was his only concern. Everything else was settled.

  Bo would get there first. Suyana was traveling by private jet, thanks to Ethan, and getting photo shoots out of the way in Paris before the stores started keeping lists of who wore what to avoid repeats. Daniel hoped Nicodema would be her interim snap until Bo’s plane landed. The last thing Suyana needed was more strangers. (He had utter faith she’d made Nicodema. If he’d been good for anything, it was teaching her how to look for people who were about to betray her.)

  Daniel ducked out—he didn’t care about introductions, if there were any—and was at Grace’s building an hour before she was scheduled for anything.

  Columbina had beaten him there; she was hovering at the breakfast cart across the way, picking at a doughnut with the expression of someone who’d eaten four doughnuts already just for an excuse to stay nearby.

  Daniel’s stomach dropped out from under him. Chordata here for Grace—goddamn, he couldn’t imagine what for. Grace didn’t have so much as a toe out of line, and you didn’t recruit for your covert organization by ambushing a stranger at ten in the morning.