Persona (15 page)

“Ow! Jesus! I was shouting for you, are you trying to kill me?”

Suyana froze, yanked back the arm that had already been arcing down for another blow.

That voice was no stranger. It was Grace.

“Martine made us,” said Bo, when they were outside. “We have to go. There's a car waiting.”

Unbelievable how calm some people could be.

Take a hint, Daniel thought as they headed down the street. Don't get angry. If you get angry you lose.

“We should talk about what just happened, I think,” he managed. His voice sounded a little tight, but it wasn't even a fraction of how he was feeling, which was that he wanted to watch Martine's security guys plant a bullet in Bo's chest.

Bo sighed with the air of a man who'd been recruiting under duress a while. “I did what I had to do to bring you in.”

“I have the right to refuse a job offer.”

“Usually,” said Bo, edged. “But you started this, and you can't get mad that we don't choose the stories.”

The crowd was flowing out behind them. Someone was shouldering through, headed their way.

Bo stepped closer. His expression shifted—the false calm vanished, and his words pushed past the cold. “You have nothing, and Sapaki wants you dead. You going to oblige her?”

He'd dropped the act; the words came out bare, and Daniel thought that, not long ago, someone might have dragged Bo from a story he loved by reminding him that snaps had no bridges worth burning.

And when something was laid out by a con man who'd reached the end of his con, a lot of arguments dried up. Sapaki had been a story. The story was over.

(The farther away he kept from her now, the better for both of them.)

“Point,” he said, pulled his lips thin like it counted as a smile, and picked up the pace.

If his chest clenched like his ribs were caving in as he slid into the backseat of the waiting car, Daniel figured it was no better than he deserved.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

She'd known something was wrong as soon as he kissed her (stupid move, rookie move). It had felt like slow motion as Bo showed up and little disasters cast shadows on her face. Daniel watched as if from underwater as she realized what had been going on, that whole time she'd let him promise he meant her no harm.

He thought he was prepared for how she'd look at him, until she did. Then he remembered all at once that Suyana dealt with problems, not people, and he was looking at someone who knew how assassinations worked.

It was the best way for her to have looked at him. It would do him good to remember.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

The car was new and sleek, and had a fixed barrier between the front and back seats so the driver couldn't snoop. Daniel watched through tinted windows as they slid past groups of people out for the night, groups of tourists hopping lightly from the street to the curb, couples laughing in one another's arms.

“Sorry about that,” Bo said.

It was calm, and so vague that Daniel wondered if the backseat was bugged, but there was that same edge of loss that reminded Daniel more than one person could be played in a con like this.

“Not a problem.” He tried to summon some charm. After a moment he added, “I'll always remember what you did for me back there.”

“I bet.” But he didn't move, and he didn't speak to defend himself, and after another heartbeat he turned to look out his window.

So that's enough, Daniel thought, even though his chest was tight. Be done, until you can do something about it. Fight one thing at a time, if you're planning to win.

He looked out the window and took a couple of breaths, tried to focus. Outside, a knot of girls dressed in sequins sparkled for a moment under a streetlight.

“So,” Daniel said, “we're headed to a job interview?”

“You had your interview. We're going to meet the team.” Absently, like it was reflex, Bo touched his temple where the camera was.

No wonder Bo had been so careful about what he said. Of course there would be audio. Snaps were always recording. Snaps never missed a story.

To stave off panic, Daniel reminded himself that friendless wasn't the same as powerless. A snap who joined an agency had advantages; transparency was a decent excuse. A snap could be in a position to profit anytime things fell apart.

Maybe his new boss wanted to see what a young Face would do when you baited her with her worst enemy.

After too long, he said, “All right.”

Suyana paused outside the car.

Grace frowned. “Problem?” She was anxious, glancing left and right as far as she could without drawing attention. (Faces developed good peripheral vision.)

“A lot of people have put me in the crosshairs in the last twelve hours. I'm sort of hitting the ceiling on people trying to kill me.”

Grace's expression cooled a few degrees. “Nice way to accept an invitation.”

Suyana didn't apologize. Diplomacy wasn't always politeness. “I'm dog food to the IA. You have more to gain turning me in. Why would I believe you're sheltering me?”

There was a second where Grace seemed confused, as if she was casting about for the sort of insult Martine would give, if she were here. Then she gave up.

“Yes, you're worth more dead,” she said. “But if I've got this right, you've been shot, you can't even walk straight, you're blacklist, and you break into a place full of enemies to warn someone you hardly know.”

Now she was facing Suyana over the roof of the car, eye to eye. She looked serious. She looked honest.

Grace said, “That's why.”

Something skittered over the roof of the car; Suyana caught it, wondered how tired she was to be catching projectiles. Careless. If it was a grenade, she deserved it.

When she opened her hands, she was holding Grace's comm.

“In case you think I'll call the cavalry,” Grace said, and sank into the car. It was enormous; the United Kingdom could afford the best.

Suyana gripped the phone tightly, and followed.

Inside, she started shaking—fatigue. Relief. She crossed her arms, embarrassed Grace might see.

Grace was looking studiously out the window. Suyana would take what she could get.

Dawn was edging over the roofs, and it was light enough to make out faces in the crowd, but Suyana didn't look as the car pulled away; there was no one left to look for.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Times Suyana Sapaki had met Grace Charles:

At her welcome reception the night before her swearing in, when the Big Nine showed up and had to shake hands with all the new inductees.

During a Women in Politics brunch in New York for teenage girls who won a contest, two years into Suyana's tenure. Everyone gave a statement about how much they loved being a woman in politics. Grace talked wryly about how not everything about being a politician is photo shoots and free food—“Though you should take advantage whenever you can,” she said, gesturing at the stacks of pastries on the tables, and everyone laughed. Suyana's was a piece Hakan had gotten approved by someone, about how her involvement in IA politics had opened her eyes to a better world than the one she'd come from. She hadn't read it ahead of time (no point); she had to take a sip of water twice to get through it. When she sat down again at the head table, Grace had handed her a pastry and a Bloody Mary.

In chambers during session, a few times, exchanging careful greetings in the halls.

The annual Gala, when Grace waited until about midnight to start acting sloshed and making loud, laughing conversation with C-listers who didn't understand why they'd been granted the chance but told every joke they had ready. Suyana had offered Grace a glass of water, the first time, and the act had dropped as Grace raised her eyebrows and took it. She hadn't tried it on Suyana since.

Three open houses Grace threw, over the course of three years. She'd gotten four invitations from Grace this year, but had gone only once; if a C-list said yes to every invitation, it looked like grubbing. Then the explosion had happened back home, and the UARC had fallen off the map, and she'd have gladly grubbed at whatever invitations came, if any had come. Grace's had been first, six months after the explosion; Magnus looked like he was going to cry from relief when he opened it.

In chambers, that morning, when Suyana had voted the way she'd been told, and at the tone of her voice Grace had turned around, just for a second, and looked her right in the eye.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

“I'd like to see the lights, please, Paul,” Grace said to the driver, after they were on the avenue.

He nodded. Grace pressed a button on her armrest, and a tinted-glass panel rose between them and Paul, until it looked like they'd fallen back into night.

Suyana rested a hand on the door.

“If you're thinking of jumping, don't,” said Grace, her archness back in place. “It's just the signal that I'm bringing a girl to the annex.” She glanced over, as if she was daring Suyana to disapprove.

Suyana said, “You get an annex?”

A tiny smile flickered across Grace's face, and vanished. “Woman does not live on official quarters alone.”

“When we're in session I live in a hotel room, and it's nowhere I'd bring someone back to,” Suyana said.

“Colin negotiated it for me a while back. It's out of the surveillance radius.” She shrugged. “If I don't let anything interfere with politics, everyone back home is willing to subsidize me seeing a girl or two on the quiet.”

“So what, you having a private life depends on you doing what they say?”

She'd meant for it to sound sympathetic, persuasive, but she was too tired, and it came out the way she actually felt about it.

Grace, who wasn't as tired, and was excellent at hiding her real meaning, looked her over. “I'm fortunate enough to be in a position within the IA where I can have some influence over my country's well-being, and I'm willing to be discreet if it means I'm better able to enact change.”

Must be nice.

“I did a public service announcement a few years ago,” she said. “It was about the importance of agriculture to the global economy, and I thanked America for its contribution. American Farming, Worldwide Growth.”

Grace blinked, impassive.

“They had to film it in a wheat field outside Chinon two years back, because the American agricorporate outpost they built outside Aurum back home was burned to the ground, and they couldn't get enough money to build it again. The Americans were threatening to embargo the UARC because of it. That's why I had to do the ad.”

Suyana had visited Aurum and toured the outpost with Hakan as an undocumented affair of state, a month before it burned down. She wondered if Hakan had hoped to match her with Ethan back then, too.

She gave Chordata the layout and security notes to destroy the place without loss of life.

(Except Hakan, who vanished into the teeth of the IA, and whoever had died back home when the American investigators came. Zenaida never told her if the UARC lost anyone in the aftermath; collateral damage, she said, when Suyana asked.)

Suyana said, “That PSA was the closest I've ever come to having influence over my country's well-being.”

The thing went on heavy rotation on worldwide channels and made her shake with anger every time it aired, and had prevented the embargo; it was really the second closest she'd come, which was the only reason she ever got through it.

(Neither thing had helped her sleep since. Hakan was gone. It was her doing. She could live with it—barely—but that didn't mean it didn't scrape at her in the meantime.)

Grace was looking at her, her dark eyes steady in the false twilight of the car.

“I can't imagine telling the IA how you want to be treated, and then being treated that way,” Suyana said, after a while.

The driver turned. They were in an older area of the city now, where nights were quiet. All the shops were shuttered except a florist, just beginning to set out tubs of blooms for the morning.

Grace was looking out the window with a mixture of fondness and distaste as dawn crept over the buildings. She said, “I've found it works best if you have a secret you need to keep, and only ask them for things they're willing to give.”

Suyana glanced down at the mobile in her hands that contained Grace's expense account and her top-tier database and her personal stylist's contact and her private-driver intercom and the panic button she hadn't pressed when she saw a blacklisted operative threatening Martine.

Strange, Suyana thought. The United Kingdom was Big Nine. Grace and Martine and Ethan, and the others who had stable economies and agriculture and militaries not given to coups, sat amid the IA chaos without having to worry that their countries would fall apart underneath them.

(When Ethan's camp had sent word back that the USA and the UARC could certainly use better relations, and they'd consider Suyana's offer, a handler had written in the margin: “Ethan thinks she's lovely. —A. Stevens.”

It was a strange note to write on a contract where a physical-rights clause was on the table. Even Magnus the unflappable had gotten an odd, tight look on his face as he handed it to her. “Congratulations. I'll tell the stylists not to cut your hair. No point taking chances if he likes you as you are,” in the tone that meant he hoped she'd rise to the occasion.

She'd thought it odd that he'd shown her.)

Grace had never had to pray she could catch the eye of a man in power. The United Kingdom was positioned better. Not that Grace would have had to worry; her dark skin glowed in the pink dawn, and even after a long night her eyes were wide and dark and shining. She had the look of a woman born into power she intended to make good use of.