Persona (9 page)

Someone in the IA stood to benefit from discrediting the UARC, then, in case she should suddenly appear and make any damning statements.

She tried to forget about the Chordata strangers in the living room, about Daniel in the bedroom. She opened drawers in the cabinet where nothing touched.

Face relationships were kept under wraps until papers were signed, in case negotiations broke down. The only people from the IA who'd even known about her meeting with Ethan were the IA Ethics Committee that had looked over the contract, Magnus, and Ethan's team.

Chordata could have wanted to kill her, if they thought she'd been compromised. They'd want her to take her secrets to the grave.

But Chordata was a secret that mattered; a secret she'd kept even from Hakan.

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He might have guessed, once, the morning three years ago when he woke her to tell her Chordata had struck the American mining outpost and there was nothing left.

When she asked, “Was anyone hurt?” he gave her an odd look before he said, “The buildings were empty, don't worry.”

After that it was a scramble to look decent before Margot arrived with the Central Committee's comments, and Hakan watched her tying back her ponytail, took breath for half a dozen sentences he never uttered.

(If he'd ever guessed, it must have been just at that moment; he had the face of a man who had underestimated someone he loved.)

The Committee's comments were specific. Margot delivered them herself.

“You must condemn this action,” Margot said, her face expressionless, her voice like a radio spot. “Terrorist activity will not be tolerated in the IA. It's bad enough that this has happened at such a delicate time for the UARC's reputation—Hakan, we'll discuss this later. There will have to be an immediate response. We've scheduled a press conference for you in an hour—we'll send a stylist up.”

“Thank you,” said Hakan, at the same time Suyana said, “No.”

She'd been so terrified that it was hardly a word, more a desperate breath she pressed her lips around, but it sounded like a shot in the little sitting room, and when Margot turned to look at her Suyana felt like she'd fired a weapon.

“I beg your pardon?”

But Suyana couldn't take it back. There was only forward, into an anger that was becoming an obstacle, but she wouldn't condemn them. She wouldn't.

“If this is a delicate time for our reputation, going on television for such a small thing will only make us look more troubled.” It occurred to her only after she'd spoken that it was what Margot had intended. She set her teeth.

Margot narrowed her eyes. “Small thing?”

“It was property damage. No one was hurt. Why would I go on television to condemn vandalism?”

“Because these are terrorists,” Margot said, utterly reasonable. “They're out to harm your country.”

“Oh, that's different,” said Suyana. “But the list is incomplete. Four years ago the Americans came over to revitalize Altamina silver mine. When they left, they buried two tons of waste. When my government complained it was leaking into the groundwater, they covered it with sand. That's harmed more lives than this explosion. I'm happy to go on TV and talk about threats to my country, if you insist, but if I do, I want to be thorough.”

She could hardly breathe as she said it; her bravery was drying up.

For an awful second, nobody moved, as if she'd been so angry she'd managed to stop time.

Then Margot turned to Hakan. “And this is how you've trained the Face of the United Amazonian Rainforest Con–federation?”

Hakan looked at Suyana with an expression she didn't understand, and said, “I train diplomats, not puppets. She must know her own mind.”

“I see that,” said Margot, raising an eyebrow. After a moment longer of looking at Suyana, waiting for a change of heart, she stood. “Well, we certainly wouldn't drag her to the podium against her will, and there's no need to make this a laundry list of complaints. We'll issue a general statement denouncing terrorism. I assume you stand with us?”

“Of course,” said Hakan.

When they were alone, Suyana said, “I'm sorry.” She felt like she'd been punched in the stomach. Her hands were trembling.

Hakan shook his head. “You're a better diplomat than that.”

“Margot was trying to lower us. No matter what I did it would have been wrong.”

“You can find ways out of that, Suyana.”

“I got angry.”

“The UARC isn't in a position to be angry. Too much still relies on the Big Nine. Chordata are terrorists.”

“They're not,” she said. “Not like Margot says. You know they're not.”

“They're not helping you,” he said.

It was the closest he got to telling her, if he knew.

“Margot isn't helping us,” she said, but the venom was already gone. She was looking down the limbs of a tree that had nothing but Margot at the end of every branch.

After a moment he said, “Not anymore.”

He left after that, to talk to Bolivia about some chance at positive PR that could help drown out the noise this would make for them.

The IA's official denunciation of terrorism in the heart of a troubled, unstable UARC ran without them, on every channel.

Three weeks later, Hakan was gone.

Suyana had gotten better at seeming docile since.

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One of the things that kept her up at night was wondering if she would ever have told him, or if she would have kept it secret, something that was hers.

She'd told no one else about Chordata, until tonight. Then she'd shown it to a stranger, a stranger under her protection, because he was the reason she was still breathing.

She was in a bad way now, having let him help her, having walked across Paris in the shelter of his arm, having fallen asleep in front of him, an unforgivable weakness. No good would come of Daniel. But if it came to that and the IA swallowed her up as punishment, only she and Daniel were at stake.

No, she thought suddenly, with a rush of fear so tense that her arms spasmed.

Kipa knew.

Kipa, Face of New Zealand, was young and unassuming and knew more than she let on. Chordata had already made contact, to see if she might be an asset.

(Suyana wasn't supposed to know that—recruitment wasn't her brief, and Chordata liked to keep the left hand ignorant of the right hand—but Zenaida had confided.)

If the IA had tried to kill Suyana because they'd found out about Chordata, then Kipa was in danger too. She'd have to be warned. The IA had a clear path to Kipa if they wanted to remove her. She was so young still, and even more alone than Suyana.

The warning would have to be in person; Kipa wouldn't believe the news from anyone else's mouth. She was smarter than she looked.

If you were going to work with Chordata, you had to be.

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Chordata wasn't a terrorist organization—not like some. They hit empty buildings; they sabotaged equipment; they were careful not to take a human toll.

But Chordata had grown, and they were more fractious now than when they'd first taken her aside. They might not risk a loose end if they thought she'd been compromised. They couldn't afford to. She understood.

(She got so tired sometimes from looking at things from every angle, as if her eyes would split.)

That meant she wasn't safe here. She was persona non grata with the IA, too, unless she showed up at their doorstep with an airtight story.

It would have to leave out both Chordata and the Americans, explain how she had been targeted but had escaped alive, and catch Magnus where he was vulnerable—his reputation. It would have to leave out Daniel.

Her arm stung where the wound had started to tear. She folded her hand against it.

Daniel shouldn't be here. It was her fault; because it was easy to use people when you were desperate, and because, once or twice, it had felt less like recruiting a civilian and more like having a friend. What happened to him now depended on how she could use him best.

“Onca,” she called. “If you have a moment.”

At the door, Nattereri startled, tightened his hand around his knife.

Onca came into the kitchen on stockinged feet. She'd removed the leopard pin, and she seemed wary, as if she'd been called in for a fight.

Suyana wished that Zenaida had met her instead. Suyana wished that she had armed herself before she'd called on Onca.

(No; Hakan would have called it a weakness, to draw a weapon first.)

Suyana decided to skip the diplomatic runarounds. This wasn't the IA floor. “What's your rank?”

“Lieutenant.”

Not bad, for a member who was barely thirty. Most people Suyana knew of who ranked that high in the emergency operations of Chordata were Hakan's age.

“How many are you in charge of?”

She looked uncomfortable at the question; Suyana guessed Chordata wasn't supposed to betray its full methods, not even to her.

“Ten in Paris,” Onca said finally, “a dozen others in the countryside.”

That was a fair number, and far-flung. Panthera Onca had been embraced into the inner workings, then; no way to know how far up, but Suyana was relieved to be dealing with someone who'd made tough decisions.

“Have you ever killed anyone for Chordata?”

It felt like longer than it was before Onca said, “Yes. Once.”

“Why?”

“Self-defense,” Onca said, shifting her weight as if to better defend her position. (Did Suyana look like she was in any shape to attack?) “It had to be done.”

Suyana had known a long time that the sunny dreams that recruit you are the lip of a long, slippery stair into what they really wanted from you. Chordata had asked her to kill, once; mostly, she suspected, just to see what she would say. From the safety of the perfume department, she'd refused. She could guess the situation Onca had run into, where someone was lying and word had to be stopped before it spread. That was always a danger; it was why she'd never breathed a word to Hakan.

She didn't want to make any other guesses about what Onca might have done, when Chordata asked her to.

Suyana said, “What do you know about me?”

“That I'm to preserve you.”

But that was just parroting the order Onca had been given; in between Onca's breath and her words, there was a glance away that betrayed her.

Suyana tilted her head a little forward. “And what do you suspect about me?”

Onca looked at her sidelong. “That you're Lachesis.”

Suyana knew the name. She'd used it a hundred times; she'd
chosen
it. Still, something about the way Onca said it made the hair on Suyana's neck stand up.

(Lachesis were the pit vipers. They had no rattles in their tails, so you didn't even know you were near one until it had its teeth in you. Zenaida had said, “That's why I chose you as my asset. A sense of humor.”

Zenaida hadn't smiled. Suyana hadn't either.)

Suyana kept her face blank. “What makes you think I'm Lachesis? You must meet with assets all the time, if you're doing emergency work. I could be anyone.”

In the streetlights Onca's skin was bronze, and her eyes were wide and bottle-green. “No. Once I saw you, I never doubted it was you.”

“Why?”

Onca smiled. “Because you were shot, and you still made your target just to tell us what you knew.”

Suyana blinked twice, tried to breathe.

She could not fail.

Chordata existed in a dozen countries with no real leader to collect them, just groups of believers borrowing the network: organized units or loose affiliations or a handful of people guarding what was left of nature, whatever it meant.

To the IA, Chordata was a cell of anarchists near the rainforest that occasionally took UARC matters into their own hands. It was unimaginable to the IA that this wide a network even existed. To them, any serious revolution would want to announce itself as a worthy combatant. A group like Chordata worked smaller, most of the time; it was easy to miss. The irrigation projects in Turkey were held up by faulty equipment until the legal appeal stopped the digging, but that could happen to any project that big; phone-cam footage of illegal waste dumping in Canada went viral online, but any shithead teenager with a phone could manage that. It was a series of unfortunate coincidences that robbed corporations of their peace of mind, but so far, there was no pattern most people could see. (Suyana wondered sometimes about Margot; Margot hadn't gotten to where she was by being slow to see patterns in a possibility.)

Chordata would be hunted down by every soldier the IA could spare if they realized what they were up against. If Suyana were revealed as the spy under whom they flourished, the IA would get a witch hunt on top of it.

“Why were you chosen to meet me if things went wrong?”

“I had some trouble when I was younger,” Onca said, a hint of pride. “I've worked with partners, but often I was alone in dangerous places. I carry that with me.”

There was more to be gained with Onca by leveling, then.

“I'm in a dangerous place,” Suyana said.

Onca nodded. “Do you know who shot you?”

“Do you?”

She blinked, recoiled an inch. “No.”

“I had to ask,” said Suyana. “I'd understand, if Chordata had heard something about me being outed and loose ends had to be cut.”

Onca was quiet for a second. “You'll have to keep thinking, then,” she said, prim. “We don't set up emergency protocols for people we're trying to kill.”

“I'm sure, but I'll admit I was hoping. It would be easier to discuss things with you. Everyone else on my list will be a lot less happy to see me alive, and a lot less likely to listen.”

Onca seemed to sympathize with that. She thought it over a moment, sighed.