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by Genevieve Valentine

  When Grace came outside, she must have thought the same thing, because when she saw Columbina she looked over her shoulder like someone who knew what her snap looked like. Daniel glanced away a degree or two, as if it would help. Colin took the UK national photographer aside and began a list of questions about the condition of her equipment.

  Columbina gripped a notebook and approached like a fan, pen in hand.

  Grace said, cold and a touch louder than necessary, “You’re bloody joking.”

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Columbina said, then ran out of words. She shook her head a few times, held the notebook in a death grip. “I never—I didn’t tell anyone that—it’s all forgotten.”

  Grace smiled (a false one), plucked the notebook from Columbina’s hands, and signed. “You stalking me to say so hardly fills me with comfort,” she said pleasantly. Grace’s thumb trembled, just at the point it met her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Columbina said. “I would have told Suyana—I would have talked to you, you and I were friends once, but . . . things are different with her now.”

  Grace looked up. “Is that what was between you two?”

  It sounded every inch the scorned lover, and Columbina reached for Grace’s elbow as if to comfort her before she remembered herself and settled for taking back her notebook instead.

  Daniel put together a lot of things in short order before he decided that whatever else happened after this, he could say he’d seen how it went when a real diplomat conducted an interrogation: the mark never even noticed.

  “No. Nothing like that, ever, with anyone—”

  “With anyone but me? It’s enough you lied to me once, Columbina.”

  “Grace. Please.”

  Grace hesitated, relented, shrugged. “You’re right. Hardly does any good to be jealous now. I don’t know what it was I saw. I know how charming you can be, and she’s a pretty enough girl.”

  “Not my type. And the thing we had in common is over.”

  “Flatterer,” said Grace as she stepped back, shyly, an attitude so alien Daniel was surprised Columbina swallowed it. “It’s good to see you. Thank you for—well, for the reassurance.”

  Grace gave her one more, “Take care of yourself,” with half a glance over her shoulder, before she met up with Colin, waiting politely beside the photographer, who looked ready to quit.

  The photographer hadn’t taken a single picture. The last thing the UK wanted was pictures of their Face with her old flings.

  It was masterfully done. Not even Suyana could smooth-talk someone like that; she tended to just make you feel lesser until you wanted to prove yourself, and half of that was probably by accident. Ethan just had his team take care of whatever it was and showed up to smile and shake hands. Only Martine delivered her threats with that kind of finesse. The IA was a nervous bunch.

  Grace had angled Columbina so subtly that Columbina had come back to deliver a message and ended up right back on whatever hook she’d slipped off. She’d also given away how Chordata felt about Suyana, which was pretty clumsy for a solitary agent. Maybe sleeping with Grace had that effect on a girl.

  Grace had breakfast with the retiring Face from Sweden, who looked ten years younger now that he was off the job, and it was just enough time that when Grace stepped outside a moment before the car pulled around and made a phone call, Daniel wasn’t thinking much of it.

  “Listen,” Grace said, “the weather’s getting awful here. I hope you can still get on the plane today? Good. Well, it’s not any better in Paris, I hear, so be careful what you bring with you to keep the rain off. I’m moving up my flight as well, so perhaps we could have dinner before you turn into a married woman. Right. Exactly. See you then, Suyana.”

  She said the last with her face turned not quite toward Daniel the way it had been not quite turned to Columbina, a thing she wanted to pretend she hadn’t meant you to hear.

  16

  The first time Suyana had flown to Paris, it was business class. It was the first time she’d been on a plane outside the UARC, and it had all impressed her terribly—the seats that reclined nearly into beds, the food that came on real plates and was tailored to her needs (Hakan wanted her to look as if she minded her figure; it was good publicity, even if she never lost a pound).

  Her first act as a diplomat had been pretending it was something she’d expected. She thought she’d done all right until four hours into the journey, when Hakan said gently, “It’s good never to seem better than your company—that sort of populism goes over well. But it’s best for most things to pretend you expect them. Doesn’t do to look too grateful. We’re selling the dream of a nation.”

  “I thought I was supposed to be playing things innocent for my first Paris session,” she said, and had the thrill of startling him by being right.

  “Just let them underestimate you for a year, until you understand the geography. But Suyana, with eyes like yours, you’re never going to be seen as young. Better to pretend like you know what to expect.”

  It was a good lesson, as those went—she’d saved face at a lot of parties by walking in as if she was expecting something more lavish than she got. It didn’t do you much good after the first few minutes, but the first few minutes were all most people ever saw. She got invited to more events her first year than she did any year after.

  On that plane, at breakfast, she’d thought about sending her omelet for reheating just to prove a point, and hadn’t. Hakan hadn’t asked her to—he preferred the gentle correction when it was least likely to do her harm—but she’d lost a chance to show him she understood the lesson.

  She thought about it sometimes, when an impossible trade-off presented itself (the poor man’s lady and the tiger, at thirty thousand feet), but she’d never imagined another outcome. A lukewarm omelet was nobody’s fault, and Hakan’s praise would have come and gone, and she was still too hungry then to turn away anything that would feed her.

  What she had learned since—that the praise would have fed her better, and for longer—she wouldn’t have wanted to know, back then. She wouldn’t have wanted to know anything that was coming. It was better for her to imagine Hakan at her side. The rest of those years were decisions she wouldn’t want to think about taking back.

  Six years after that first flight, sitting next to Hakan with a French phrase book and a single suitcase, she took Ethan Chambers’s private plane to Paris, alongside her handler and her stylist and so many people from his team that the plane’s bedroom had been turned into storage.

  “Sorry about this,” Ethan said as they pulled out one of the bench couches in the lounge into a bed. “I didn’t realize how much space we take up.”

  “I just feel sorry for Grace trying to travel on the same plane as Martine,” Suyana said, and he smiled.

  Usually he laughed at anything that had to do with Martine. Nervous about the engagement shoot, maybe. Still shaken up from the spotlight in New York, maybe; it had improved since the press conference, but they both knew she owed him for that in a way she couldn’t explain to him.

  (He’d tried to make her, with one long searching look in the elevator on the way out of the Assembly building, and she’d said, “Thank God you came,” and held him tight, her chin tucked so her face was out of sight of the cameras. She pressed an open hand to his chest, where his heart was beating, steady and solid and wrong.)

  “Are you all right?” she asked, before she could stop herself. Never ask a question someone can best you by not answering.

  Ethan worried his lower lip with his teeth, then steeled himself. “Yeah. No. There’s something we should talk about.”

  She sat on the edge of the makeshift bed and waited, breathing in for a five-count and out for a five-count. But he didn’t say anything—he cast a glance farther up the length of the plane, where Stevens and Magnus were bent over an itinerary. Both had refused to sit facing away from the happy couple, so they sat side by side. Suyana wasn’t sure what Stevens was trying t
o keep an eye on, given that they were sleeping in full view of a dozen people. She had a better idea what Magnus was watching for.

  “Maybe not now,” Ethan said, with a smile that had no light behind it. “But it’s not something to talk about on the ground, either.”

  It must be Stevens keeping him quiet, though Ethan had no trouble doing as he pleased. The only time others had won out against his own inclinations was the proposal, and even then, he’d stood behind it more than he had to. Maybe that was the problem.

  “Ethan, if you’re having second thoughts, I understand. This has been a lot of trouble for you. You shouldn’t have to get caught up. If America is asking you to back out—”

  “No, nothing like that.” He picked at his cuticles when he was nervous. He was so rarely nervous that most people never realized the tell. “I just want everything to go well in Paris, with us, and I’m—I don’t know how to do it.”

  Wrong, she thought, something inside him a sounding bell.

  “I don’t know either. There’s no way to make sure everything goes well. It will be nothing but trouble for me on the ground—I’ll be working so much just to get back to where I was. Magnus is trying to sell fashion editorials of me to the wedding magazines that called while we were in the UARC. Nobody’s calling him back.”

  Ethan nodded; no surprise. “Do you need help?”

  “Oona has a plan to have our engagement photo shoot be me in jeans and a T-shirt and a veil. It sounds terrible, I know, but if you don’t mind going along with it, that might catch some editor’s eye.”

  (It had sounded like Kipa’s photo spread a year ago, a tutu in the sand; Suyana had objected to Oona’s idea of the engagement outfits for a shoot that was designed to be positively toothless. Magnus told her, “You could stand to look a little toothless.”)

  “I didn’t really mean the photo shoot,” Ethan said after a second, and it was so unexpected—he took any out she gave him from the truth—that she waited in surprised silence for what he actually meant.

  It never came. Stevens said something that half carried down the plane, and Ethan shook himself like a dog coming out of the water, and it was gone.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” he said. “We have to look rested for the cameras, and it’s going to be hard enough without Stevens and Samuelsson yelling at us that we’ve stayed up too long.”

  “You know, I’m the Face of a country. I make my own bedtime, this is not what I signed up for,” she said as they lay down under the thin blanket and settled in side by side—Ethan with a little wave to the rest of the plane that was still awake, and one arm chastely around her waist.

  That one got her a laugh, at least, which was enough that she could fall asleep.

  × × × × × × ×

  She dreamed she stood in the center of the green, Panthera Onca on one side of her and Zenaida on the other, a kerchief pulled up around her mouth so that only they would know that it was her. Chordata had the research facility surrounded; in the dark, with nothing but the dim lights on inside, it looked like a sleeping beast. There was movement inside—the security guard. Suyana held up a fist.

  “Wait for me,” she said, and ran for it, and she knew it was a dream because they waited.

  In the silence of the forest (that silence that teems with the clicks of insects and the calling of birds and the rustling of animals through the leaves), Suyana’s feet made no sound even as stems snapped under her feet and animals scrambled from her path, and though her heart pounded in her throat, she didn’t so much as take a breath until she was slipping inside through a door that opened in the wall without any searching, like most doors do in dreams.

  There was no security guard pacing in the open central pod. There was no sound from upstairs, either; the only light came from a side office Suyana remembered.

  The door to the preservation room was thrown open—what had he to fear, alone in the wild?—and she watched him for a long time as he sorted and plucked and muttered to himself, and when she said his name, Ethan turned around with nothing in his hands but an envelope of seeds.

  If she would be surprised to be seeing this awake—and she didn’t think she would be—

  “I hoped it would be you,” he said, and the knife she wasn’t holding went through his ribs without her ever coming closer.

  × × × × × × ×

  Magnus was awake—Magnus hardly slept, and would never risk being disconnected from the news after this latest disaster. As soon as he saw her stand, he followed her into the bedroom and closed the door behind them.

  (There were people to whom something like this would seem clandestine, sneaking off from your boyfriend’s bed in the middle of the night alongside the man you live with. Sometimes she tried to picture it, to see if she could imagine life after all this, where you did only as you wanted and had solitude as your regular state. She never could. She’d stopped thinking about it; better not to worry about things you’d never see.)

  Magnus said, “What do you think he knows?”

  She couldn’t answer that, and he knew it. He smiled thinly, a saint accustomed to suffering. “Apologies. It’s late.”

  “Of course.”

  “Starting over. Let’s try this. How are you feeling about him? About all this? Did you—had you two actually considered the marriage as—”

  “No,” she said, as lightly as she could. “We never discussed it. But you never know when someone will get nerves about aging out of the job and try to go out with a bang. Do we know who’s in line after him?”

  He looked through her, not at her.

  “Leili,” he said. “Sixteen; old enough that Ethan should be concerned. Charming in the Kipa mold, from the photos. Chosen partially for ethnically ambiguous appeal, I suspect, given how ready they are to get the spotlight on her the instant Ethan retires. Right now they’re on the brink of having her tap-dance on TV, they’re at such a loss as to what to do with her while Ethan’s still going. But I’ve looked into her grades before the Face mentorship program, and if someone isn’t getting her an advanced degree in the sciences on the sly, they’re wasting her time.”

  There was a flicker of jealousy somewhere—she hadn’t heard that much praise for herself in their entire joint tenure—but she was too tired to hang on to it. She wanted the information; he’d had it ready. Faithlessness wasn’t worth worrying over.

  “Sounds like I’m marrying the wrong American Face.”

  “No argument.” Magnus folded his arms, dragged his lip over his bottom teeth, and glanced at the door like Ethan would be opening it to see what Magnus thought of him.

  “So, you say she’s ready. How ready would the Americans say she is?”

  He looked at her a long time before he said, “They’ve bought her a ticket to Paris.”

  A long time ago, Suyana had heard Grace’s handler, Colin, talking to her when he thought they were alone. He knew things a handler always knew; he guessed the rest; he was very good.

  Sometimes the things Magnus knew felt like things he had gathered through means he shouldn’t have, because he knew she’d need them.

  She was still trying to decide if that was an asset or a warning when he said, “Tell me what needs to happen before the session starts.”

  “That depends on your wedding priorities,” she said with a smile, an open gate. “We have a lot of photo shoots to get through.”

  “Suyana. You know what my priorities are.”

  His brows had been knotted together, exhaustion and concentration pushing his face in on itself, the words rolling out uneven, like they hurt. But his expression opened and softened—pale skin shifting back across the bones, blue eyes fixed on her. It was that same bliss of being cornered he’d worn when she’d pressed him to a wall a year ago and threatened to kill him for keeping secrets.

  It was hard to look at him. He was staring at her—she felt its weight and warmth like a palm pressed to the back of her head—but she looked at his mouth, then his ear, then t
he door behind him, before she got up the nerve to meet his eye.

  A smart Face forgave what they were asked to forgive—most of it was above your security clearance, and the rest was out of your control. But Suyana had never stopped seeing him as the man on the edge of Hakan’s desk where there were still rectangles of dust from vanished things, Magnus in his impeccable suit holding her file half-open like it stung him and looking her up and down to decide if anything could be done with her.

  He was young, still; when she got in the habit of hating him, she tended to forget.

  Her fifth thought, which was the one she told him: “We’ll have to find out if Ethan will really go through with this.”

  Her fourth thought: Ethan was a spy, he must have been on Margot’s side to believe he could win against her, and I can’t tell if that’s changed, and I need to do something about it while there’s still enough time for little Leili to fly across the ocean and be what I need her to be.

  Her third thought: My new snap is the tall one with red hair, and I’ll need to make sure he’s in Paris before we do the shoot with the veil. They’ll make six figures off the candids, and I’ll need a favor to remind them of when I come asking for their help.

  He second thought: I need to decide once and for all whether I can trust you, because not knowing is going to kill me.

  Her first thought, deep and vicious and impossible to say: If I’m going to live through this, Margot has to disappear.

  × × × × × × ×

  They took the outdoors engagement photos two days into their stay in Paris, just long enough for everyone to be rested and for national press to “accidentally” be present wherever they ended up.

  “It’s so phony,” Ethan said with real distaste as they settled onto the wall overlooking the Seine, Suyana in the crook of his arm.

  About fifty yards away, one of the bookstalls was selling some of its most artfully beat-up books for Suyana to hold. (Ethan didn’t need to; wherever he went, everyone assumed he had all the education he needed.) Ten minutes earlier, the stand had sold a book to a man who’d vanished into the sparse crowd despite his height and his hair. She wished he was easier to track—she angled herself toward the narrow alley where he was mostly likely to get a clear frame. It was all she could do.