Persona (23 page)

(She'd seen terror back home, when police broke up protests; she'd seen it in the mirror the night she spent in prison, when she thought she was going to disappear.)

Daniel was terrified now, and whatever he feared, he was searching for her.

She'd been ready to kill him for what he'd done. Right now, he looked ready to die.

He skidded to a stop in the center of the open square, but his right ankle locked up, and he half crashed to the ground, supporting himself on his arms and scrabbling to get back up.

He hadn't even called her name; he was just looking at her as if he was barely in time. Her stomach sank.

Daniel was twisting as he stood, focused on something else.

She followed his gaze and saw a man (Magnus's man?) moving forward as if time was short and he wanted to get it over with.

The stranger was sliding something back inside his jacket, chest-high.

A gun, she thought. He had a gun. He was planning to use it on her. That was what Daniel knew. Her hands spasmed.

Magnus had told him she'd be easy to find, and so his man had found her, and now he meant to clean up someone's mess, under someone's orders.

(Oh Magnus, she thought, as dizzy as if she'd been struck in the temple. Not you. Please not you.)

She breathed in—how long had she been holding her breath? How many seconds had passed while she was trapped in her body?—and saw that it was too late for her to run. The stranger was bearing down on Daniel.

The two of them were swallowed in a blur of motion; Daniel was swinging the stranger off balance, yanking at his jacket, the stranger's fists flying.

Then she heard the crack of an elbow against a skull, and Daniel made one sickening whimper before he dropped like a stone.

Suyana's mouth went dry.

The stranger stood up and stepped out of the puddle of what had been Daniel.

“He was going to kill you,” the stranger said.

His voice was flat, purged of whatever accent he'd started with, and overlaid with one that sounded like he'd made it up to avoid where he'd started from.

“Was he?” said Suyana. Her voice was steady. “Thank God you got here in time.”

The man was moving around Daniel's body (Daniel's body, Daniel's body, no), extending his right hand to shake with her. His gun hand.

Magnus should have hired someone better for his dirty work, she thought. She gritted her teeth to keep her expression neutral as they shook hands as pleasantly as any two people who weren't carrying a knife and a gun.

Before she could mention Normandy, he said, “There's a room waiting at the hotel where you can get cleaned up before we talk about what's next. Magnus set it up for you, he'll meet us there.”

No, she thought. No; to her bones.

She'd stood in Grace's flat, watching ghosts move across Magnus's face. Magnus would never set foot in that hotel again, he'd said, and meant it.

Magnus would have told as much to any man he'd actually hired; this stranger wasn't one of them. This stranger was just trying to get her somewhere he could kill her quietly and pin it on whoever needed something pinned on them.

(It wasn't Magnus. There was a flicker of relief that kept her from tipping into panic. This man wasn't working for Magnus.)

“Very thoughtful,” she said, smiled a little, just politeness. “I'd love a bath.”

She stepped aside and indicated the alleyway as if it were a grand foyer. She could just see Daniel's body in her periphery, sprawled and still on the stones.

The knife blade pressed against the small of her back as she moved.

She could hardly hear anything over the sound of saliva as she swallowed, and the tips of her fingers were going numb, but it was the smallest of her worries.

She was ready to do what she had to do.

(It was the first thing she always thought: how to get them out of the way.)

The stranger moved as if to walk ahead of her, but as he passed he grabbed her left wrist, twisted, pulled. It mangled the wound on her arm, and she hissed as he yanked her toward him, staggering two steps into striking range. He can't see the knife, she thought. If he sees the knife, this is over.

It overwhelmed her.

She threw her head back as hard as she could.

He was quick—she only caught him on the jaw, not the nose—but still he grunted with pain and swung her a little out of range as he turned her to face him.

They were already halfway down the alley, and now he was blocking the way back to Daniel, but it was an open shot to the hotel behind her.

Which meant he couldn't see that Daniel was struggling to prop himself up on one elbow, that Daniel had something in his outstretched hand.

“I hope I was worth a lot of money,” she said, “for all the trouble you've gone to.”

The stranger's mouth pinched thin—it was the only indicator she'd seen that he had any opinions about his work; this was a professional duty. There was no grandstanding here.

“I'll make it quick,” he said, reaching into his jacket for the gun.

Daniel threw a stone.

His hand was shaking, he didn't have any balance, it was a miss from the moment it was out of his fingers—but the stranger couldn't see that, and at the sound of the rock hitting the wall he froze for a second, just reflex.

For an instant, his attention faltered.

She locked her left leg to gain an inch of traction, reached behind her with her free hand for the knife, and brought it up between them as hard as she could.

The blade connected with something, sank into warm clay with a wet, sickening sound, driving up and up until it crunched against rock and lodged there.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the stranger's weight sank forward onto her.

She sucked in a horrified breath, twisted aside so he wouldn't crush her. Then, between one step and the next, as he fought for equilibrium, she bore forward as hard as she could, so close to him that the end of the hilt pinched against her sternum. The smell of blood was everywhere.

I'm going to be sick, she thought, and then for a terrible moment, We're going to fall together.

But it was enough to push him free of her. With the knife still in his chest, he took two or three shaky steps. On the fourth he faltered; at the mouth of the alley, he fell. He was gasping for breath. Red froth filled his open mouth. Suyana pressed her lips against bile; she wasn't sorry and wasn't sorry and wasn't sorry.

At last, his head dropped back, and he was still.

Someone was calling her name, from far away, but Suyana was walking forward as if in a dream. She stepped over his outstretched arm and into the square, so when she looked at him his face was upside down.

There was a bruise forming along his jaw, where she'd struck him. Blood was pooling everywhere. The hilt of the knife was covered.

When she looked down, her hands were covered in blood—on the left from her wound, on the right from his. She brushed them absently, one against the other.

She was cold, maybe. Maybe she was just standing in shadow, that was all.

Had this been what the assassin had felt three days ago, when he propped his rifle on the windowsill and prepared to fire?

“Suyana. Suyana.”

Someone was touching her shoulder, gently, as if they knew she was wounded. She looked up, slowly, from the body.

It was Daniel. Half his face was swollen and already turning blue. When he saw her expression, he flinched and brought a hand to his temple, but on the opposite side, covering a little dark spot that looked like a freckle.

Somehow, that broke the shock—that little gesture that gave him away.

It was a camera.

That was how snaps got the footage they got. Their whole bodies were cameras, and their every waking moment was a spy. He'd covered it so no one could see her.

Her chest felt like it would crack open.

He didn't say anything. He was looking at her with an expression she'd never seen from him. Not even the moment before the kiss had looked like this.

He looked alone.

Finally he said, “Is any of the blood yours?”

“Some. Is it still recording sound?”

“I don't care. Are you all right?”

“You came back to warn me?”

Daniel tried to smile. “Nah, I came back for my camera.”

The words scratched his throat, and his breath faltered in the middle. She watched him for a second.

“Hand me the gun,” she said.

She wiped it absently on the hem of her shirt, and set it near the outstretched fingers of the corpse. It should be in his hand if it was really going to be convincing, but she couldn't bear to touch his fingers, and this would fool who it needed to fool.

“He killed Magnus's man before he got here,” she said as she stood. “Whose man was he?”

“Margot's.”

She looked at him, went cold down to her toes.

Margot, the head of the IA Committee that had burned her out three days ahead of protocol. Margot, who must know something she shouldn't.

“Was it . . . just her?” Her voice sounded like she'd swallowed sand.

Daniel shrugged. “I hope so.”

He didn't have to say,
Because otherwise, the whole IA wants you dead.

Suyana had stood up for Chordata a long time ago; Margot wasn't the kind of diplomat who forgot a thing like that. Margot didn't let problems linger. Had she found proof of Chordata somewhere, or had she just gotten tired of waiting for any, and just wanted to plug a leak?

Well, Suyana thought, her insides knotting tight. They could try again to kill her, if they wanted to take their chances, but she was going to crawl out of this, and higher.

“I have to go,” Daniel said.

Right, she thought. Of course. He's leaving. Of course. Out of habit, she nodded as if it made sense.

She wanted to thank him; she wanted to forgive him the way he looked like he needed to be forgiven. She opened her mouth.

But someone was moving out into the center of the square (another snap, she guessed—the light was better from the far angle) and they were out of time.

She rested her hand on his shoulder, just for a second, where he'd kept her from falling on that first long run. There was someone else's blood on her hand, but it didn't matter. Everything else about them had started in blood; forgiveness could too.

He covered her hand with his, a heavy pressure on her knuckles.

He said, “Look for me.”

It wasn't much of a farewell—it was a warning—but still she pressed the flat of her hand to his coat as if she could reach his heartbeat.

He'd been a traitor, but he'd come back to warn her.

(She'd woken in the bed in Montmartre and seen him standing guard at the door, and something in her heart had turned over. She'd needed a friend, then. She still did.)

She leaned in, close enough that the sound wouldn't carry to the camera, breathed, “I'll see you.”

His hand tightened around hers. Then he was gone, vanishing between breaths, and the next time she saw him he'd be a stranger.

She stood where she was, after Daniel had gone. She didn't look over at the shadows of the opposite building where the gentleman from Terrain was standing, trying not to be seen. From there, he had the best shot of her standing over the body of the man who'd tried to kill her; her hair and eyes were wild, her face scratched, one leg was shaking and ready to buckle, and her hands were smeared with blood.

Her mind whirred.

When the IA got hold of this, she'd tell them how the man who tried to shoot her had dragged her away from the hospital—had vanished with her and blindfolded her in a room she never saw, threatening to kill her in retaliation for the formation of the UARC.

(It was a safe threat for the IA; a madman's threat, a thirty-year-old grudge, a goal that would galvanize national pride. It kept the threats from sounding personal.

There would be no personal threats. She wouldn't invent physical harms where there had been none, not even for television.)

He'd have brought her back to kill her in front of the hotel where she was meeting the boy she loved, the American boy, in secret. He'd have hated her freedom of choice, in picking a boy so far above her station.

The Americans would honor their relationship contract after that. The public would give them no choice.

Magnus would never breathe a word about it; no diplomat would dare look so taken in.

Margot was a different story. Facing down Margot would have to wait until Suyana was too big to disappear. Until then, Suyana would be careful not to suggest anyone from within the IA could have known a thing. Margot had seen her as a threat just for disobeying once, and had guessed close to the mark when she'd called for Suyana to disappear; Suyana had to be careful to be too famous for even Margot to dare.

The stranger's eyes were glassy, by now, and his fingertips stiff and turning waxen.

She wanted to be colder than this, and crueler. She tried to imagine Martine slicing someone's throat one-handed without spilling her drink. But it didn't help, just now; a man was dead, and she had done it.

It's just as well, she thought, numbness spreading through her. I needed a corpse.

Behind her was a rush of sound, as the first IA press photographers arrived.

In the upstairs offices of Bonnaire Atelier, Daniel sat with Bo and Dev and Kate and Li Zhao and watched the evening news.

It was the American channel, because their first few hyperbolic minutes on a topic were usually the best way to gauge how the story was going to be shaped for consumption by other nations.

Someone's shaky camera footage of Suyana standing over the stranger's body was playing with the volume too high—the sound of shutters clicking flooded out the audio. Reporters were calling to her in French, in Mandarin, in German.

“What happened? Ms. Sapaki? Ms. Sapaki, what happened?” the cameraman was asking her in English, panning back and forth from the corpse to her face.