Persona (6 page)

They'd gone over what should happen if Suyana ever hit real trouble. Zenaida had never mentioned what happened after. Did they have to start over? Would she ever even see Zenaida again, now?

How many people would she have to lose, just to stay above water?

A shiver went through her; Daniel started to reach out. She ignored him, closed her eyes, imagined opening the drawer she needed, and let everything else fall away.

This woman was tall and slender, with light-brown skin and dark hair pulled back into a bun, and her black coat hung so long it made her look a little sepulchral. “I'm lost,” she said.

“You should turn left at the river,” Suyana said.

“But how do you know where I'm going?”

“There's only one rue Onca in Paris,” Suyana said.

The woman nodded, and Suyana felt like someone had loosened a vise around her lungs.

“We've been waiting,” Onca said. “Glad you made it.”

Onca's face hardened as she looked at Daniel, and Suyana saw she was already thinking the worst, that any second Onca's unseen colleague would show up and make Daniel disappear.

Suyana had no strategy—she didn't even look over her shoulder, there was no time. She just held out her good arm toward him, palm facing him, as if warding off evil.

“He's with me,” she said.

Then his hand slid into her hand. His skin was warm and dry, and there was the press of his palm, his fingers brushing her fingers; she tensed, and then he was slipping away and her hand was empty.

It was just enough to suggest something—to suggest anything the woman needed to see.

“I was told you would come alone,” Onca said.

Suyana raised her eyebrows. “Circumstances changed. Help was necessary. You've seen the news.”

She sighed. “You've been compromised. It's . . . worrying.”

“So was getting shot,” said Suyana.

Daniel smothered a nervous cough in his sleeve.

The woman looked at Suyana a moment longer. Then she smiled a little, said, “This way. There's a car near the bridge.”

As they moved to follow, Daniel scanned the sidewalk in both directions, and walked close enough to Suyana that she felt as though he expected to prop her up. Under his breath, he asked, “So, how are things going?”

There were a couple of answers to that, but his presence had shifted the frame of everything (circumstances had changed), and the worst thing about politics was how often your worst-case scenarios were true.

“If anything happens,” she said, “run for it.”

He didn't say another word, and all the way across the bridge, she carefully didn't look at him; she could practically hear him regretting it all.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

The nondescript building had no elevator. Suyana leaned hard on the banister as they climbed, but she never once looked at Daniel for help. When she appeared at their door, she had to be standing under her own power. Still, he stayed beside her all the way up, hovering.

The place was a well-curtained nothing, with a little couch facing a few shabby armchairs and a television on an old coffee table. There were two desks against the walls, computer equipment and books piled high. Their cover must be students.

One man was at a computer. Another was sitting on the couch too casually, and she could only guess what weapon he was holding half-hidden behind his right leg. She hoped it was a knife. They frowned on guns, Zenaida said. But Suyana had never been in the field, and who knew how principles like that held up when you were in the mud.

She'd made some decisions today she never would have made in theory. Circumstances dictate, sometimes.

“Weren't expecting company,” the man on the couch said.

Onca said, “Couldn't be helped. She couldn't get out alone.”

“The stitches might have come out,” Suyana said. “You have a medic?”

The man at the computer raised his hand without looking up.

The point man gestured at the TV. “They're talking about you. It's not good.”

“Stories change,” Suyana said. “When can I talk to Zenaida?”

“We're trying to determine if it's safe,” said Onca. “You must be very tired. You should rest.”

The last time Suyana had met Zenaida had been at the perfume section of Printemps, where Zenaida had made very knowledgeable faces at a shopgirl for fifteen minutes and talked about the drawbacks of osmanthus. She'd bought two bottles, and handed them to Suyana as soon as they'd left. “Don't have a sense of smell,” she'd said, grinning, and Suyana had laughed and taken them and admired how well Zenaida could play her, that she enjoyed it.

Suyana filed it away as The Last Time I Ever Saw Zenaida. The words felt heavy, like she was going to tip over. But she was tired, that must be why; she had to take care of herself while she could.

“We'd love to sleep a while,” she said. Daniel shifted his weight beside her. She added, “And eat. I'll get my stitches looked at after.”

Onca nodded. “This is Ocyale”—the man at the computer raised his hand again—“and Nattereri.” She tossed her coat on one of the chairs and crossed to the desk, leaning over Ocyale. Nattereri stood up and slid his knife into his belt.

Daniel didn't freeze up, which meant he'd seen it. Suyana was proud. She hoped it meant he'd last the night.

She was sometimes still a fool, and got friendly with the people she was using; they'd have no such problems taking care of any trouble.

“Tell your friend to take his hands out of his pockets before we pull them out,” Nattereri said casually. “I'll see what there is in the kitchen.”

Suyana glanced over her shoulder, where Daniel was standing with his hands at his sides, looking as if he'd been hit by a sack of bricks.

“Welcome to Chordata,” she said.

It happens slowly, which they must have known to do. Things like that aren't accidental. When she thinks about it later, she gets a taste at the back of her throat like she put out a cigarette there.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

They moved to Huánuco when Suyana was young; her memory of their first home was just the sun across the hill. Her mother sold trinkets to tourists. When Suyana wasn't in school she'd sit on the blanket beside her mother and watch the sea of faces and think things about them—their heights and their clothes, who was too loud and who was a thief—very carefully, long lists, in Spanish. (She shouldn't speak her mother's Quechua; school said so, her mother said so.)

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

She started losing words, little sudden empty places, when she was nine or ten. It worried her, worried her more that she could remember them at home and lost them again on the walk to school.

Her mother shook her head when Suyana asked, and she knew better than to ask the teacher, but on the walk from the market she'd pass tourist kiosks and feel a fist in her stomach going tight. She remembers postcards of Machu Picchu now, green and deep blue and clouds like cigar smoke.

She's forgotten what the land-rights group was called in Quechua. Aqui, No Mas in Spanish. They told her later.

She's forgotten what made her mother go—if it was some great crisis or a series of little yeses. (They'd probably meant her to forget the reason; it's the kind of thing they want you to set aside.)

She marched alongside her mother, and her mother was smiling, and the fist in her stomach loosened every time they turned a corner and people were waiting to join them.

The police waited around a corner too. Her mother told her to run. It hadn't lasted long.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Hakan told her later he'd been informed there was a potential recruit in the cells, and Suyana figures she must have looked so angry some government toady thought she'd have the stamina for what was coming.

He wore a suit, and he was Quechua; the first thing he ever said to her was to ask if she was all right.

She knew when an adult was feigning kindness. In Spanish, she said, “What do you want?”

He smiled. He had laugh lines.

He made it sound exciting to be in the International Assembly; it sounded like she could be powerful (Suyana imagined bracing her hand palm-out, watching the police vanish). There was free school and new clothes and living like a movie star, and when she gave him a blank look he switched to talking about how she'd get to decide how her country was treated. He waited a long time to mention how it would be good for her mother not to work in the market, not to worry about jail again.

It was like instructions for taking a test in school; a lot of things that sounded helpful, about something you had no choice in. He sat very still. He wasn't nervous about what she would decide.

He had a pen in his handkerchief pocket. She thought what would happen if she reached for it, turned it so it stabbed him in the heart.

“You're a smart girl,” he said finally, looking her in the eye, and it sounded at last like he was talking to her and not to a child. “This is a good offer.”

It wasn't—you didn't have to talk so long about a good offer—but she wasn't going to get many others.

“All right,” she said.

He smiled just at the edges of his mouth, said, “It's a pleasure to meet you,” with a hanging pause at the end where her name would go. She counted to thirty before he grinned in earnest, held out a hand to help her up.

“I'm Hakan,” he said, and his smile was full of little tests she already knew she'd be looking for, all the rest of her life.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Math and science and literature was the tutor.

How to handle ridiculous utensils and how to walk in high heels was the deportment teacher, who came so rarely Suyana could tell she was valuable, and paid attention so she wouldn't have to come back often. She brought a posture yoke with her, to teach Suyana how a diplomat looks. Every lesson she had her shoulders ached, the yoke straining around her as if she were a wild creature.

At home, she watched discs of other Faces being officially introduced and giving interviews after disasters and some clips of Faces on dates together who looked like they were being spied on, but was all stamped
OFFICIAL
in a lower corner by their national press.

Home was a studio apartment in Lima. When she looked outside, she could see the ocean. It was beautiful and spread out into nothing, and even though the waves came and went, the horizon never changed. She tried to remember when she picked up the wrong fork that the little waves were less important than the smooth emptiness you reached farther out.

Hakan taught her IA regulations and voting procedures and the history of the UARC.

“It's younger than you,” she said with surprise when she looked at the dates, and he raised his eyebrows and said, “Perhaps not something you should say out loud,” and she closed her lips around a test she'd failed.

The governments had decided to go ahead over the people. Now they were partners with Brazil, and neither of them particularly liked the other, so the only real comfort was how much they both distrusted outside miners and harvesters and how it was easier, now, to coordinate refusals and use local resources. (
Local
was the wrong word, she learned early; if too much money crossed the border that no one had really forgotten, then it was grumbling and protests on both sides.)

Still, it wasn't so bad, Suyana thought. You could probably manage if you just hated the same things for long enough.

“What about when I marched? Who was trying to take our land? The Americans?”

Hakan looked at her a moment. Then he told her about the cabinet he wanted her to imagine, in which she should put things that shouldn't touch anything else.

“Faces don't march unless their government would like them to,” he said. “They have never marched against their government.”

Now she knew. (She took note of the way Hakan had given her the truth.) And that meant he'd lied about where he found her; he must have lied about her to everyone. He was taking a risk with her. They shared a secret.

“It can't be just me for this job,” she said. “Brazil must want somebody.”

He smiled—the polite one, empty. “Brazil and Peru are united in their vision of a shared future. And the selection isn't for two years.”

At night she sat in her room, practiced that smile in the mirror.

Soon school was in Portuguese.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Things she memorizes and puts away in a vast cabinet that casts shadows over her, things that can only be looked at one at a time:

All the countries in the IA. Their current Faces.

Extant relationships between Faces, possible relationships between Faces, relationships that had broken badly and were not to be spoken of, and the relative rate of return on the underlying diplomatic matter.

Who among the Faces are their allies. It's a short list. When she says, “Jesus, we're all alone out there, what's Carlos been doing at the Assembly?” Hakan gives her a look, says, “I wouldn't know, I requested a home assignment when I heard he'd been appointed Face,” which tells her everything.

The fork on the far right of a place setting means to expect oysters. They'll already be shucked. If they aren't, look for a young man to shuck them for you. Shuck them yourself only if you're alone with a dignitary in front of whom you want to appear effortlessly competent. (Too bad; slipping the knife inside and cracking it open in a single motion was the only thing she could do right the first time.) Then the only problem was pretending you could stand oysters.

Everything in the newspapers. Thirty a day, maybe more: most from the UARC to determine how they felt about today's disasters, and then a few from the outside, to determine how everyone else thought the UARC should feel about today's disasters. (Thing she didn't learn until later: how rare it was to see the news without it being filtered through an attaché or a handler. Half the Faces she met were only meant to read what their handlers gave them. Hakan was putting faith in her.)