Persona (2 page)

Magnus scanned the square for a moment before he reached back into the car, to call Suyana out.

[
Submission 35178, Frame 7: Magnus Samuelsson standing beside a black sedan sitting around the corner from the front entrance to the Chanson Hotel. Subject in profile and three-quarters length, hand extended into the backseat of the car, looking at something out of frame.
]

Weird, Daniel thought, risking a glance up from the viewfinder. Magnus didn't seem the type to get swept up in scenery, and it wasn't as though Ethan Chambers would be standing with flowers at the balcony to greet the girl he might be about to contract to date.

He didn't know much about most of the IA handlers—you weren't supposed to, that's why countries had Faces, to give you something to look at—but something seemed off. Had they fought in the car? Was Magnus just cautious? Had he arranged for official nation-affiliated photographers to catch the first moments of budding romance, and Daniel was going to be without an exclusive after all this?

But then Suyana stepped out of the car, and Daniel forgot everything in the queasy thrill of a scoop.

[
Submission 35178, Frame 18: Suyana Sapaki (Face UARC), sliding out of the backseat of a sedan. Large necklace—appears genuine (ID and trail of ownership TK). Face three-quarters, turned to the hotel. Has not taken Samuelsson's hand.
]

Daniel had, once or twice in his research for this, questioned why Suyana had been considered the best option for the Face of the UARC. She was Peruvian, and the Brazilian contingent had given her flak for it—they were a much bigger slice of that pie, and a Quechua was playing even harder against the numbers, unless you were going after diversity points. She was a little stocky in a world that liked its Faces tall and thin, a little hard around the eyes in an organization that prized girls who could fawn when the cameras were going. Even from here it looked like she was suffering a punishment. No way that was true—if she could get Ethan to sign on the dotted line, it was a PR coup the UARC could only dream of.

But her brown skin and knotted black hair and sharp eyes made a decent picture when the light hit her, and she moved with more purpose than Daniel saw from a lot of IA girls. (Wasn't much purpose for her to have, except look good and do as she was told. Handlers did the real work. Faces just made it look sharp to the masses. Though nobody wanted a Face getting ideas, as they'd reminded him plenty back home.)

Once the car pulled away, Magnus looked Suyana over with the focus of an auctioneer. He lifted his chin as if inviting her to do the same; Suyana stared through him and didn't move. Magnus straightened the collar of her shirt, tweaked one of the careless gems on her necklace so that it lay right side up against her collarbone.

Daniel raised his eyebrow into the viewfinder, took a few shots as fast as he could.

He'd seen backstage prep on the Korean Face, Hae Soo-jin, when he was still apprenticing as a licensed photographer. Most of it looked like grooming animals for auction, if you were being honest. This was something different; some message passing back and forth through a necklace that was laughably out of place on her.

Suyana glanced at Magnus for a moment with a frown that was gone before Daniel could catch it. Then she turned her head, as if she was used to being altered by people she didn't look at.

That was about right. The ideal combination of
hanbok
and national designers a Face should wear to present the correct ratio of tradition and modernism had been a hot topic at home when he left. The news had a segment on it at least once a week. Historians were weighing in; fashion-industry insiders staged demonstrations. Hae Soo-jin hadn't been called on for an opinion. Decision making happened before anything ever reached them. You could measure the length of a Face's career by seeing how good they were at agreeing with other people's outcomes.

But Suyana had looked at Magnus so strangely. Maybe it bothered her to know how far on the sidelines she stood.

[
Submission 35178, Frame 39: Magnus Samuelsson, back to the camera (identified in Frames 1–13). Facing the camera, Suyana Sapaki. Samuelsson has his hand extended toward Sapaki's elbow. Sapaki looking off-frame (object of gaze unknown), hands in pockets. No acknowledgment.
]

“It doesn't matter,” Suyana said. “He'll know it's not mine.” Her voice floated a little around the square before it settled on Daniel.

“We're impressing an ally, not a jeweler,” said Magnus. “You need all the help you can get. No use looking shabby first thing. Are you ready to be charming?”

She looked right at Magnus, and Daniel flinched at her expression (murderer, he thought wildly, like he was watching a movie) and wished for a concurrent video function so he could try to capture what the hell was even going on.

Then she blinked, and her eyes softened, and her smile broke wide and white across her face. “Of course,” she said, in a voice that sounded barely hers. “Are you ready to chaperone?”

Magnus's jaw twitched—surprised, maybe, or put out—and he looked back toward the street like he was thinking of making a run for it. “Let's go.”

Suyana pushed her shoulders back, licked her lips, and headed for the front door of the hotel like she was on her way to a prison sentence. Magnus followed a little behind; most handlers did when their Faces were onstage. There was no good in the policymakers hogging the spotlight.

Daniel should have kept better track of how the light was moving; shadows giving way to the flood of sunlight across the white hotel made him blink into the viewfinder, and he took pictures by reflex as he waited for his eyes to adjust.

He was still waiting when the gunshot rang out.

All the sound was sucked out of the square for a second in the wake of the shot. His finger never stopped moving. He hoped against all luck that he'd managed to catch the moment the bullet hit. If there was a bullet.

There were publicity stunts like this, sometimes, when someone needed the sympathy. They made front pages, no matter how horrible and obvious a ploy it was.

As the shutter clicked, the sound washed back—people shouting behind the closed door of the restaurant, Magnus staggering back with one arm out toward Suyana, casting an eye around the rooftops (why wasn't he in front of her? Why wasn't he protecting his charge?).

And Suyana was scrambling up from the ground, favoring one leg but already trying to bolt for the nearest cover. She looked young, in her terror, but her jaw was set—she would live, if she could.

Too bad he'd missed that shot, Daniel thought as he pocketed his memory card and shoved the camera into the trash. He wasn't going to get arrested for unauthorized photography, and he sure as hell wasn't going to get shot in some publicity stunt. She was coming his way, and he knew when to exit the scene.

But as Suyana dove toward the alley, there was another shot. She staggered and cried out—once, sharp—and he saw she had a bloody hand pressed to her left arm, that now the right leg of her jeans was blooming dark with blood.

He had to get out of there.

But she was running for the alley—lurching, really. She wasn't going to make it in time to avoid a kill shot if it came, if this wasn't a stunt. It might be a stunt. Either way, snaps didn't get involved. The hair on his arms was standing up.

Magnus was shouting, somewhere out of sight (the hotel?). A car engine flared to life (the cab?).

Suyana was gasping for breath.

You're a sucker, Daniel thought, you're a sucker, don't you dare, but by then he was already out in the square, scooping her under her good shoulder.

There was a bottle-cap pop from somewhere far away that he knew must be a bullet. Then they were running a three-legged race into the safety of the alley.

He let go as soon as she was in the shadows, but she caught hold of his elbow with more force than he'd have guessed she could manage. The tips of her fingers were rough; they caught on his sleeve.

“Save it,” he said, eyeing the street on the far side of the alley, to make sure it was clear when he ran for it, but then he made a mistake and looked back at her.

Either she was a damn good actress or she was tougher than he'd thought. Her mouth was pulled tight with panic, but she looked at him like she was sizing him up.

“Thanks,” she said, and somehow it was a demand for information, which was funny coming from someone who was bleeding in two places.

He couldn't believe he'd gone out there. This was a handler's job, if the shooting was even real—where the hell was Magnus?—and not one damn second of this was his business except behind a lens. This story had played out, and he was in enough trouble. He'd come back for the camera later. Maybe.

He said, “I have to go.”

Tires screeched around the corner, and from somewhere came the echo of footsteps, and the hair on Daniel's neck stood up—his heart was in his throat, this was amateur hour, this was chaos.

Who knew this was happening today besides me? he wondered, from some suspicion he didn't want to examine.

Suyana swayed, braced herself on her good arm against the wall like a sprinter on the starting line, her eyes fixed on the far end of the alley. There were footsteps, voices shouting. They're looking for us, Daniel realized, and his blood went cold.

Suyana looked up at him, and for a moment he remembered the footage from a few years back, right after terrorists hit the UARC, and she'd bored holes at any camera that crossed her like she was daring them to ask.

She said, “Run.”

He'd cased the neighborhood—it would have been a rookie mistake to go into something like that without an exit ready—so for thirty seconds he knew where he was going, and it was just another practice run.

For thirty seconds he focused on the uneven pavement under his feet, on avoiding the tables that littered the sidewalk, on cutting across tricky intersections in a way that made it hard for, say, a police car to follow you.

They saw few people, thank goodness—a tabac owner who peered at them through the window, an old woman who saw them and startled, a musician who got one look at them and spun on his heels the other way, his black bag banging against his back in his haste. Otherwise, for thirty seconds, Daniel could think.

He'd mapped out routes across three bridges, and angled toward the busiest (Notre-Dame tourists were easy to disappear into, if he could just get there), and they were on a narrow side street nearly at the main route to Pont Saint Louis when the panic set in.

It didn't even feel like panic, really—his knees just buckled between one step and the next like all the muscle had fallen out of them. He stumbled, reached for the nearest wall to keep from falling over.

Suyana pulled up beside him, and turned to keep her bad shoulder out of sight of the rest of the street. It brought them face-to-face. She was breathing hard, and her jaw was clenched like she was trying not to be sick.

Her eyes were wide and dark, but her eyebrows were fixed carefully without expression. Absently he thought about Halloween, streets full of masks.

She was losing blood. She couldn't run for much longer. He hoped she wasn't thinking of asking for his help to get to a hospital; things were bad enough without her trying some teary-eyed bid for sympathy the way IA girls did on TV when they were asking for humanitarian aid.

There were no tears. She looked him over a second, said, “If you can't keep going, I'll go on alone.”

He nearly laughed. What diplomat talked this way to someone they'd barely met? What Face talked this way to anyone at all?

“I'm not the one who's been shot.”

She flinched and looked over her shoulder as if people would hear and come running. “I'll make it.”

“Make it where? You're bleeding all over your shirt.”

She shrugged with her good shoulder, gritted her teeth against the pain. “I'm short on supplies and no one's offered me a coat.”

Well, he wasn't about to do it just because she'd needled him. But he might have to change his appearance if things caught up to him, and it wouldn't matter much where his coat went after that—on her or in the garbage.

Under all the sounds of the crowd and his pulse banging against his ears, he was listening for someone following them. He'd outrun trouble before, plenty. It was always a matter of hearing them before they saw you.

He ran a hand through his hair as an excuse to look behind them. Two silhouettes passed, paused, and moved on. It could be anybody.

Suyana said, “I'll give you this necklace if you can get me to Montmartre.”

That was interesting. At least it wasn't a sympathy ploy. Bald barter was unusual, but more honest.

“That thing looks like a fake,” he said, shrugged. “Pass.”

She looked at him, said, “You know it's not.”

Suddenly all his breath was missing. He blinked, licked his lips.

There was a flicker of a smile at one corner of her mouth, but it vanished. “You were already in the alley when they shot me. You heard us.”

When they shot me, she said, calm as if she were talking about cameras. But she wasn't entirely in control. Her face was sallow, and the hand pressed against her arm was starting to shake.

He didn't like how this was going. Maybe it was better to cut things off at the knees.

He leaned a little closer, pitched his voice low. “Maybe I was in on it.”

She tensed up when he moved toward her, but there was no surprise, no moment of horror setting in. The idea must have already occurred to her. Not a lot of trust among diplomats.

But she was still looking at him, and she narrowed her eyes a little before she said, “Then why did you panic?”

Daniel wished he'd picked a dumber Face to follow.

It occurred to him to point out that this could all be a ploy to slow her down—it's not like he'd panicked, really, it was just that he had stopped to consider—but if she really believed that, she'd have run for it five turns back, going it alone halfway across the bridge by now. He could see her leaving a blood trail straight through the cathedral and out the other side.