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  But for all that, it was engaging: it even had a Peruvian and a Brazilian Face—not important enough to have names, but their countries were subtitled in a very serious font as they were recruited to the Second-Wave Seventy in montage.

  “You all right?” whispered Ethan.

  She hated him. It still astonished her how much she could, out of nowhere.

  She held still a breath longer, grateful for the dark. (It subsided—she forced it to, she wasn’t good enough to wholly despise him and still sleep with him—but when it rose it buried everything.)

  “Of course,” she said after a pause she knew was too long. She smoothed her hand where she’d been picking at a loose thread on her loaner dress; the scented shimmer Oona had spread on her arms had left a spot on the black, a comet on a star map. Horrible tell. Hakan would have been mortified. “You try sitting through a movie in a dress this tight.”

  He huffed a laugh; he glanced at her, then away like he hadn’t meant to. A moment later he took her hand.

  She let him. She spread her fingers slowly, let them sink between his fingers as his breath caught, let the tips of her fingernails just barely scrape the underside of his palm as he curled his fingers around her, brushing the last of the sparkles off.

  She’d stepped on her anger, and all was well, and the end of all this was too far away to start counting the minutes now.

  × × × × × × ×

  The theater lights came up slowly enough that Suyana could gauge the mood of the room without getting caught actually looking around. India and Finland and the rest of the Founding Fifteen looked pleased with themselves. Exceptions: Ethan, who straightened the hem of his jacket twice in a row as he stood, and Grace, who was already sidling toward the exit next to Martine.

  (THE INTERNATIONAL ASSEMBLY REMAINS THE MOST POWERFUL DIPLOMATIC ASSOCIATION IN THE WORLD. IT INCLUDES 227 COUNTRIES AND HOLDS AN INTERNATIONAL STANDING ARMY, the closing title read. Suyana wasn’t sure if that was praise or disappointment. Grace seemed to have decided.)

  “I’m starving,” Suyana said. “Do we know the menu at Bridge View?”

  “Salad of microgreens and spiced nuts,” Ethan recited. “Then sea bass for me, with slices of sweet potato, I swear to God just because Harold doesn’t trust me with any food that could roll off the plate. For you, eggplant medallions with potato puree. Fruit sorbet. Champagne.”

  There was something about the dip in his delivery right around “puree” that made her look him in the eye. “You want to skip it and get pizza?”

  He considered it for three seconds, looked at his wristband for another three. Tallying messages, maybe. Maybe calculating the logistics of redirecting the cameras waiting outside the restaurant.

  “Yeah,” he said, mostly to the wristband. The gesture looked strangely serious, even though he was smiling. “Let’s ditch and get pizza. We can still make cocktails, right?”

  “Oh, the UARC has two cameras scheduled at cocktails. Magnus would shoot me if I wasn’t there.”

  His head snapped up. “That’s not funny.”

  He was wrong. His vigilance about the S word was one of the few things about him that didn’t feel grown in a lab.

  “We’ll be back by then,” she promised, trying not to grin so close on the heels of the shooting joke.

  He tugged on his jacket (third time, she set her teeth against something without knowing what) and took her arm. “An hour for pizza, then. There’s a place not too far from Bridge View.”

  As they passed, she caught Magnus’s eye and shook her head once in answer to his raised eyebrows. He slid his hands in his pockets, watched them go.

  “How are your heels?” Ethan asked at the door.

  “I’m not walking, if that’s the question. Did you want me to describe them?”

  He flushed, just at the tips of his ears, when you caught him out. “Nope, that’s the question. I already know how they look.”

  He was so predictable it worried her. Black pumps, some stockings, long hair, a little lip gloss. That was it. He never even joked about the contract when he was flirting with her.

  (“If he does . . . invoke the terms in an inappropriate way, let me know and I’ll speak to his handlers about it. It’s bad form,” Magnus had told her, not meeting her eyes, just before her first overnight date with Ethan.

  Grace told her, “If he shouts the clause number when he comes, run for it.”)

  It stung to slide into the backseat of the car. Of course she could walk there; she didn’t wear any shoes she couldn’t run for her life in. But it was no good reminding anyone you were a fighter. She sat back and let the fifteen blocks slide by, carefully not thinking of anything at all.

  She goaded him into getting a mushroom pizza (“The whole thing?” “Harold can’t see you. You afraid of looking hungry?” “. . . We’ll take the whole thing”), and as they ate he told her about a high school visit he’d made where they gave up on lunchtime crowd control as people lined up for his appearance and just threw a school-wide pizza party before he got there.

  “It was my first leftover pizza! It was delicious. Maybe I was just really hungry—I’d been at a photo shoot all day—but it was like, stuck to the cardboard a little and the cheese had kind of dried up, and I swear, it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. It was cool to sort of connect with them that way.”

  “Were they watching you eat?” Louis XVI had done that—eaten in front of the court, ten courses to prove he could, and let the courtiers dive for the scraps.

  He cracked up around a mouthful of pizza. “God, no, that would be so weird! I had a meet and greet with the Model Assembly team. They’d made regionals or something because of their debate on the water crisis. They were really into it. It really made me think about the water crisis, actually. Those were smart kids.”

  Suyana had grown up in a water crisis. Crops had failed two years in a row, and that was all it took for riots to start. The government had sent out the military, here and there. By the time the land-rights groups were marching, it was too late.

  “I was fifteen the first time I saw a body of water I couldn’t walk across,” she said.

  It was a strange thing to tell him. Too honest; she hadn’t thought about it before she admitted it. But when she had her pleasant smile back on and looked up, he was watching her steadily, unblinking, looking for a moment sharper and more present than she thought of him.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I stepped on your story.”

  “No, you didn’t.” He wiped his fingers. “I know so little about you. Whenever you tell me something, I try to pay attention.”

  “Oh.”

  While she was trying to think of a way to deflect him without sounding dismissive, he leaned forward, tracing the ridge of her knuckles where they met the back of her hand.

  “I remember the mountain range you showed me the night we met,” he said, with a pretty uncertain smile for a guy who had gotten her on a silver platter a few weeks later. “Where you grew up.”

  Where she was born, maybe. She’d grown up in the aisles of the IA, severed from home and watching the games people played to pretend they had power, but she wasn’t here to ruin the mood. “I hoped you’d notice me.”

  “I figured.”

  She glanced up from his finger, which was resting on the knuckle of her index finger like he was claiming it for Spain. He was grinning.

  “If you say that’s because all the girls want you to notice them, I will pelt you with mushrooms until your ego is small enough that we can walk out of here.”

  His grin melted into a laugh so big they drew a few stares. Her fingertips suddenly felt sensitive against the table, some horrible fondness creeping up on her as she looked at the line of his throat. (This surprised her too, always; it surprised her as much as her anger.)

  “We should go,” she said.

  The car was several blocks north—New York didn’t care how famous you were, you had to park like everybody else—and they
made it a block and a half before the first round of flashbulbs.

  Ethan tucked her under his arm—she gently pushed away the half of his jacket he was trying to wrap around her like he was the Phantom of the Opera—and they picked up the pace. She counted four photographers, all offering advice in English. They could be hers, speaking English for Ethan’s sake, but it was unlikely. Magnus would never want pictures of her walking out of a pizza place. Ethan could slum it sometimes if he wanted; she had to prove her sophistication, every time.

  “I told him not to call cameras,” Ethan muttered. He never got angry (angry was bad for business) but he sounded like he really had wanted a night alone.

  God forbid.

  “Better make the most of it,” she said quietly, and when he looked down at her, he had on the smile he only wore when other people could see, and she met it with the smile she’d grown just to match. He pressed a kiss to her temple as they walked, and she tucked her head an inch into the crook of his shoulder, where she could feel the heat from his body through the fabric, and it would make a better angle for the cameras.

  3

  The ID came through halfway into burgers and fries, and it was enough that Bo raised his eyebrows.

  “If she’s talking to more killers for hire, I nominate the night team,” Daniel said.

  Bo glanced up at him, back at the phone.

  “Shit. No. You’re kidding. No.”

  “No,” Bo agreed, setting it down before Daniel could decide whether to smack it out of his hand. “We got some audio off her conversations during the party. Whatever the US and Norway are working on right now is turning into the poster child for international cooperation. The boss wants to increase surveillance on Martine and Ethan in case Margot starts courting them under the table.”

  “What does Margot have on Martine?”

  “Whatever she needs, I guess.”

  They sat hunched over the little table, silently deciding the same thing: if Margot wanted you on her side, you were going to end up there, and how much of your life she ruined first was sort of up to you.

  If Martine was smart, she’d be more selectively social and make her weaknesses disappear until she was wherever Margot wanted her to be. And if Ethan was smart, he’d know that any offer from Margot was going to include a clause that left Suyana in the dirt.

  Daniel checked his watch.

  × × × × × × ×

  He got rid of Bo with nearly an hour to spare, because Bo would accept your first invitation but never your second, so after burgers it was going to be good-bye no matter how hard Daniel tried to make it look like he wanted company.

  “The bar’s supposed to be decent, and the river’s really lovely at night,” Daniel tried, with passable enthusiasm, but Bo had only said, “I know. I’m all right, thanks. Enjoy it.”

  “Someday I’m going to do something you’ve never done and you’ll die of surprise,” Daniel muttered.

  “You’ve done a lot of things I haven’t done,” said Bo, looking at him sidelong.

  Daniel exhaled carefully. “Just—go home, Bo. Good night.”

  The crowd was thin this late, but it took him a few seconds to pinpoint Bo. Skill was skill. A guy who could vanish like that kept you up nights.

  Daniel hit the bar anyway and nursed a beer for a while. Technically he was off duty and his feed would be archived unless he alerted them to a story, but Kate might be awake in Paris. When Kate was watching, he did exactly what he said he was going to do.

  After the beer, he walked around with something that could map like aimlessness, a loose spiral that would bring him one block north of Suyana’s apartment building.

  The neighborhood was halfway to trendy and still had the occasional snarl of taxis at the bigger intersections. Daniel bet Magnus just loved working around tourist glut. But he knew Suyana had insisted on something a little farther away from IA’s residential territory, and Daniel suspected that in the wake of Suyana’s good publicity, Magnus could find no reason to deny her.

  He suspected Magnus could find no reason to deny Suyana much of anything; in public, so close it was hard to keep him out of the shot, Magnus watched Suyana like the gunshots would start any second. Understandable for a guy who’d lost his Face in broad daylight. Daniel was a little surprised Suyana hadn’t traded him in, but she must have reasons. Who knew these days.

  There had been a time she’d have told him what was going on, or he could have looked at her and known. But these days she looked like nothing; like a lantern, thin and ready to burn. Maybe Magnus could love her that way, made of nothing but paper. Some people don’t notice those things.

  The car pulled around the front of the hotel five minutes before time, and the half-dozen official photographers started their flashbulbs as Ethan helped Suyana out of the car. The two of them walked slowly enough not to ruin the shot, and waited until the lobby—better light, warm wood, mirrors, the Deco mosaic behind them—before she kissed Ethan good night, sliding her left hand around his neck to pull him closer. He tightened both arms around her and bent her slightly backward; her scar curving around his shoulder gleamed like a missing tile.

  They separated soft and slow, as she looked up at him with hooded eyes. A year ago Suyana wouldn’t so much end a kiss as break it, like she was surprised to realize what she was doing, and Ethan would be left closing his mouth around air and trying to get his dignity back before anyone could line up a shot of it. They’d worked it out since. Daniel never really thought about it. It did what they needed it to do.

  As Ethan walked back to the car, the photographers walked out with him (shift was over), so they missed the shot in the lobby mirror of Suyana turning away from them, her face dropping back into a mask that looked like a stranger as she punched the button for the elevator.

  Daniel didn’t miss it. He held perfectly still, to make sure he got it all.

  He moved on before the elevator came; she wasn’t going to get in, and that shouldn’t be on camera.

  “All right,” he said to no one, “guess I’m signing off.” He made a show of looking at his watch, and then pulled up the hood of his jacket, just far enough over the camera to cast a shadow over any images it picked up.

  Suyana came out the back door of the building, prompt to the minute.

  (She’d explained it the first time they’d met in New York, not long after Suyana had been officially returned to the fold. There was a storage unit in the basement under someone else’s name, paid in cash, where she kept her things and changed when she was planning to disappear. If she ever died, she told him, the police should break into the storage unit for 5D, and Daniel should have half a dozen snaps nearby so nothing could get swept under the rug.)

  She was wearing jeans and a thin coat with a high collar. Her scarf obscured the edge of her jaw that made her recognizable, and nobody so much as glanced at her as she headed west.

  Daniel crept up to a block behind her after about a quarter mile, just enough for her to sense that he was behind her and the coast was clear. He trailed her west and south, until the city gave way in a single breath to the piers and the park and the flat black water.

  He had the strangest impression, just for a second, that she was going to keep walking right into the river and vanish. His mouth went dry; he clenched his fists like he was going to run, but never moved.

  She watched the water for a little while, like this had been her reason all along, to come to the edge of a river and stare at nothing until dawn. Her shoulders were rigid—Faces had postures like statues—and he didn’t dare get closer. The breeze worried the edge of her scarf where it covered her ears.

  When she turned again and headed down the line of the park, he didn’t have the heart to follow very far. He found a bench under a light that would flood out whatever the shadows couldn’t hide, and close enough to a busker that the audio feed would be laced with terrible electric guitar covers of sixties hits, and waited.

  When she sat down next to h
im, he could just catch the last of her perfume.

  “Lovely terrain,” she said quietly. The all’s-well; it was his turn to reply with something about the light for all’s-well, or something about the temperature if it wasn’t safe.

  “I think the Beatles have us covered,” he said. “You can speak up.”

  Her hesitation was brief—diplomats knew how to rally after rudeness. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course.”

  He waited for her to ask him what was wrong. In his peripheral vision she was a smear of color, the burgundy scarf and her black hair. Something silver was still caught in it—she’d gotten sloppy taking the bun out. Her breathing was too steady and too calm; she was working at it. Chordata must have had bad news for her.

  He’d have felt better if she was breathing heavy. If she’d cracked and told him what was wrong. He’d like her more if she felt like a person at all, and not some memory he sat beside for old times’ sake, in a cloud of someone else’s perfume. He hadn’t met with her in three months. He hadn’t looked her in the eye in nearly a year. She could send a stranger to this bench, and he didn’t know how long he might be fooled.

  That wasn’t fair, he made himself think a second later. But she could look at him in a way he couldn’t look at her; the fairness came a second too late.

  She settled her shoulders, started to stand.

  “Your boyfriend’s going to be under more surveillance,” he said. “Margot’s following up on America’s environmental research partnership with Norway.”

  She stayed perched at the edge of the bench, her hand braced behind her. She was in his field of view, nearly—he glanced over and watched her shoulders collapsing. An inch, no more; even with two bullet wounds, in a cramped room in a cramped quarter of Paris where she thought she was going to die, they’d never dropped farther than that.