Persona (3 page)

Someone was coming up behind them—lightweight, carrying metal, in a hurry.

Her eyes went wide as saucers. She backed up two steps, grimacing against the pain, and turned to bolt.

“Hold it,” Daniel hissed.

A moment later, a teenager raced past them, clutching a familiar camera tight by the strap as it rattled against his fist. (Daniel knew exactly what making a break for it with a stolen camera sounded like.)

After the kid rounded the corner, Suyana held still longer than she had to. Her eyes unfocused for a second; she blinked slowly, took a breath that sounded like it cost her. He wondered if this was one of the things they taught you to do—if diplomacy was half smiles and firm handshakes and the other half was pretending you were about to be sick to get out of a bad situation.

“Okay, I'm not in on it, you got me,” he said, just to say something, and smiled just to have something for his face to do.

If he was lucky, she thought he was a busboy who went out for a smoke and got caught in the crossfire. If she figured out he was a snap, he was in trouble. For all the time they spent in the public eye, Faces didn't like the idea they were being watched, and the IA-approved national photographers didn't stand for competitive press.

And if she left him, he'd lose this chance. The next he'd hear about her would be on the news, with IA press taking portraits of her in blood-spattered clothes as she emerged from the alleys of Paris, having escaped the gunmen she'd hired for show. Or the gunmen were real, and she'd be dead. Either way, he'd miss the story.

“You need a hospital,” he said.

She shook her head. “I'm fine. We need to get going.”

Every sentence that came out of her mouth made her stranger. “Well, then let's call”—he bit off
your handler
, he wasn't supposed to know that—“someone.”

“My handler can wait,” she said, the way she'd talked about the necklace—sharp, angry at him for playing dumb.

He shrugged off his jacket and draped it across her shoulders. As he moved closer she tensed, but he stood beside her as though they were a couple, wrapped an arm around her to help hold her up. She was solid as stone under his hand. He could feel her fingers still pressing tight against the wound. She seemed awkward more than afraid, as if it had been a long time since she'd hugged anyone.

“We'll have to keep to the small streets if you can't run,” he said.

She tested her right leg. Her lips thinned. “Fine.”

Wherever she was going, she was damn fixed on getting there. If he could manage this story, it would be the making of him. He was smarter than he'd been when he'd fled home. He could wring the truth out of Suyana Sapaki.

If his heart was still pounding, that made sense. If the worst of his panic had vanished while he was talking to her, he didn't think about it.

“What is there in Montmartre, anyway?”

She smiled. “I'll show you.”

It was the smile she'd given Magnus, wide and false, when she was right in the middle of a lie. Oh, he thought, we'll see about that.

“All right,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder against the flow of blood. The fabric under his fingertips was damp.

They turned onto the avenue, ducked into the narrow street across the way, and headed north, where the sun was just beginning to set on Montmartre.

Suyana weighed her options.

It was difficult—she was light-headed from bleeding, and a stranger was steering her through the streets of Paris as fast as she could manage, which was more frightening than being shot at.

When you signed up for the IA, they told you over and over to think about the possibility, just to get you used to the idea that someday you'd be facing down the barrel of a gun. They never told you to expect help; not something you got much of.

She was letting it happen because she needed to get to Montmartre more than she needed to break free, just now. She had to make it to the apartment without bleeding to death on foreign soil. The IA would have a field day with that.

Maybe not. The IA might might have ordered it; maybe writing up her untimely end on the soft-focus streets of Paris was just what they were hoping for.

It was terrifying just to imagine it, but you couldn't shrink from the truth if it illuminated what needed to be done. It was the IA, or the Americans, or Magnus acting on orders from home.

(She'd made the list as soon as she registered what was happening. Then she'd thought, I have to get north and warn them, with a twinge like homesickness. Then pain.)

If it was the Americans or her own country, it would be messy. Her own country she might be able to handle; accusing the Americans would mean some serious diplomatic incidents for not a lot of gain—the Americans had a way of avoiding consequences.

If the IA had moved against her, she was probably a dead woman, but she fought it. You rose to the need. She took a breath, counted her pulse like Hakan had taught her when she was thirteen and hadn't even seen the floor of the IA yet.

(“Some of them are born into this. They'll see weaknesses—they're bred on arguments. Think about whether your anger is productive.”

“My anger's why you brought me here,” she'd said.

He'd smiled. He had laugh lines, which surprised her: How could you be happy inside a machine? But he was. “Then make the most of your chances,” he'd said, “so you live long enough to be back home again.”

It was good advice; advice he hadn't followed.)

Suyana had lost the advantage of anonymity to the stranger, which was too bad. Even when it was necessary, it was a shame to give first. But you had to weigh the cost of anything, and it had been more important to take his measure than to feign ignorance. Now she knew two things: what he looked like when he was lying, and what he looked like when he was truly surprised.

“You all right?” he asked. They were nearing an enormous intersection.

She glanced toward the pavement at their feet. “How much blood am I trailing?”

“I'm surprised you have any left,” he said. His jaw was set, and he didn't look down.

That meant he'd already looked at her and she hadn't seen it. No good. She needed to stay sharp. She could lay out her options later, when she had any options besides Live or Mistake.

“I just need to make it to the stairs on rue Foyatier,” she said. Her voice was light—she was dizzy—and she didn't like it. To make it come off more girlish than weak, she gave him half a smile, as if the stairs were a whim in which he'd be kind enough to indulge her, and later they'd go out for coffee and laugh about it. Grace used it sometimes, when she was in front of the full Assembly.

He flexed his fingers around her shoulder absently, the sort of reflex you had when you remembered a hidden weapon you were planning to use. “So you wanted to jog your way up to the church?”

It was a false question, just filling space.

The first time she'd really met Ethan—a party at Terrain—he'd done the same thing, so when he lurched forward with his elbows on his knees and knuckles bumping the table and asked, “So what's it like to live so close to the rainforest?” she thought he knew more than he should.

But he was just a diplomat, trained not to leave empty space in a conversation unless he was trying to intimidate. She'd laughed and explained where she was really from, ghosting her fingers on his knuckles as she sketched the mountains with her hands along the table.

He'd dropped his gaze to her fingers, taken a second too long to answer. Later, she'd wonder if this was the moment she began to think about the contract—the moment he'd been caught off guard, and had considered it quietly without pushing back. It was unexpected; it was promising.

She'd left before he could get restless. (If the Americans had arranged the hit, that would probably answer the question of dating Ethan.)

But Ethan asked empty questions because he had nothing else to say. This one was asking empty questions to distract her.

Thieves, the people who skim across things that way; thieves and people who are lying to you. Fair enough. It wasn't as though any of this had been a humanitarian gesture, and there was no future in it. Even as he'd yanked her out of the line of fire, he had the face of someone who regretted it. This one was out for himself.

She understood. She could handle that.

They were nearly at Foyatier now—she recognized the neighborhood from the pictures in her IA dossier. Almost there, she thought, as if it were home.

She took a breath, counted her pulse, and set about planning the best way to lose him.

A few blocks later he turned them abruptly down a side street—what had he seen? No way anyone could have followed them through this labyrinth in dusk—and she pivoted on her bad leg, grinding her foot into the ground for balance.

There was a burst of pain; her vision clouded. She moved faster, so he couldn't tell anything was wrong.

“We're almost there,” he said. “There were just police that way. We're going up the next street.”

Good. The last thing she could afford was to be seen by police. They'd send her back to Magnus.

She didn't know where Magnus was when the first shot came—those memories were muddled. But by the time she was scrambling from the gunfire, she'd seen the little square. Magnus had vanished. No use, trusting some.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

It was almost too dark to read by the time they finally reached the stairs.

“You're not going to actually try to climb them, are you?”

She'd take it as a compliment that he thought she still could. “Hang on,” she said. “My ankle.”

He glanced down and shifted his grip on her shoulders (pain lanced down her arm), but she ignored it and scanned the flat cobbles that framed the stairs until she had what she needed. It was white chalk, hard to see if you weren't looking, and she'd have been in trouble if it rained.

“I don't see your friends.” He was setting her down on a bench, more gently than she would have expected.

“They'll be here,” she said. “Thank you so much for everything. I need to pay you before you go. Except—I can't reach, sorry.” She ducked her head. “You'll have to do it.”

She watched his feet. He shifted his weight, moving forward and pulling back. There was a pause that was longer than it should have been. Then his fingers brushed against her neck, and the necklace swung free.

It was a relief; she didn't realize how heavy it had been. When she looked up, she caught a strange expression on his face. She was reminded, just for a second, of Magnus as he'd pushed the last stone along her collarbone so she'd look presentable when she met the Americans.

“Well.” He frowned at the necklace, slid it into his pocket. “I can't just go. I wouldn't feel right leaving you. For a tip like this, you should get full service.” He gave her a smile like when he'd bullshitted her about what he'd heard in the alley, some old chestnut he knew would work.

He couldn't be serious. Who wouldn't take a prize like that and run? Someone who wasn't in it for the money, she thought, and her fingertips went cold. Who was he?

She'd never had to work to get rid of people—in the IA, it was always work to keep them talking. She had to get him out of the way long enough to disappear.

“Well,” she said, “you can wait with me if you feel like being a gentleman.”

He took a seat, settled in. She thought about her angle. The place was close enough—three blocks, the marking indicated, three or four, she could walk three or four still. All she needed was to get there, and she'd be taken care of. She'd crawl that far, to be safe.

“So,” he said, “what do you think of Paris?”

He wasn't filling the silence now; now he was glancing at her sidelong, and she heard the hundred questions behind the question.

“Lovely city to get shot in,” she said.

He laughed once, real and surprised.

She had to put some distance between them. What she had to do now was too dangerous for anyone else, even if she did trust him farther than she could throw him. She closed her eyes, swayed a little (not too much—just closing her eyes made the street spin).

“Shit, hey,” he said, one hand on her shoulder. “You have to get these looked at.”

“No hospitals,” she said, sharp. Hospitals meant police and Magnus, and she couldn't risk either.

He didn't push it, and she wondered if he guessed that she didn't want to make herself known to her handler. Somehow that was worse than anything.

“Are your friends medics, at least?”

Some of them had better be. “Could you—” She looked around the square. “I need water, I'm so dizzy.”

There was a moment's hesitation before he nodded—not stupid, this one. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“No, I'm going to jog the stairs a few times to get the blood going.”

He half smiled. “Be right back.”

Why she should feel guilty about this, she had no idea. He'd been paid more than enough for his labors. He had to know this was temporary.

He took off at a good clip, dodging tourists who were passing, and ducked into a tabac at the corner. He'd be back in two minutes. Less. She'd have to make a run for it.

She gritted her teeth and lurched off the bench. Her leg was burning, and there was a starry jolt as though she'd been punched in the nose, but she put as much weight on it as she dared, tried to walk normally.

Her jeans were crusted with blood—it was too dark for anyone to tell now, but they'd gone stiff, and scratched the wound with every step. She crossed her arms as if she was cold, wrapped one hand over her sleeve as hard as she could. She hoped the guy had another jacket at home; he was never getting this one back.

Two blocks. She'd made it two blocks. She could make it. She just had to keep an eye out for the right street—they knew who she was, they would have as much to lose as she did. She'd be all right, as soon as she was with them.