Persona (7 page)

High heels are made to distract—distract the person wearing them, distract people who like them. When she stands on her balcony in them, it feels like she's going to tip into the sea.

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Two years later, she got polished by a room full of dour women so she looked glamorous enough to deserve a dress she never chose, smiled into television cameras she'd never been told about, and said how honored she would be to become the UARC representative. She got interviewed in a parlor by someone who looked like he belonged to a committee—or six committees, judging by the pins on his lapel.

“What do you think of your opponent?”

She hadn't known she had one.

“I don't like to say
opponent
,” she said. “We're all united in our dedication to the UARC. Whoever gets appointed will represent the confederation admirably.”

He made a note (with pen and paper, how much more staged could this get?). “How do you feel about Hakan withholding from you that you have an opponent?”

That made more sense. She smiled, corners of the mouth stretched up in the way they'd taught her looked most natural on camera, and said, “I suspect a Face in the International Assembly knows that sometimes the people above you have their reasons.”

There were fifteen more questions. None of them mattered; she'd answered the only two they'd wanted to ask her.

In the car she said, “They told me I had a rival.”

Hakan looked at her in the way she thought might be unconscious, one frown line drawn between his brows as if willing her to understand him. “I know. I watched the interview.”

“Do I have one?”

“No,” he said, and she never knew if he meant there had been one, or if there wasn't one anymore.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

They took her to Pucallpa for her official picture, because the UARC wanted to remind people of the resource they were protecting.

She'd never seen so much low land and water and bright, muggy green all in one place. It was too beautiful to be diplomatic about. As they flew over it she pressed her forehead to the window; as the stylists (a different team from the last team, more polished, she'd moved up in the world) tried to settle her in for the shoot, she was craning her neck to catch the black-headed herons, the jewel-toned flash of parrots. Shadows moved between the trees; she tried to keep her eyes open and her gaze focused long enough to get a good look at whatever was hiding.

The outfit they'd put her in was ridiculous—some faux-Incan beaded thing that might have been meant for her to look attractive, but took on water like a sack of rocks and snagged the dual braids they'd draped over her shoulders. (“Very cultural,” one of the women said in Spanish with an accent Suyana didn't recognize.) The man who took her picture never wiped the look of disgust off his face.

Suyana gritted her teeth, counted her breaths, tried not to agree with him. She imagined holding out her hand and watching him vanish.

After the man handed his camera off and left, Hakan said something quiet to the assistant. She nodded and motioned Suyana a little forward, took a few photos. Suyana felt like her anger could crack her face in half, but Hakan's polite smile got a little bigger, and he wandered off.

“Beautiful forest,” the assistant said.

Suyana took it as a cue to smile more. “Yes.”

“First time seeing it?”

“Yes.”

The assistant looked up from the camera. “I have someone who can take you inside, if you want. It's disappearing. The mines, the roads. You should see it while you can.”

It was the first time in three years Suyana had heard “if you want” in a way that sounded like the other person wasn't sure of her answer.

“What's there to see?” she asked. A trap, she thought. It's a trap. Hakan.

But the assistant's eyes gleamed, and she said, “Everything.”

Recruitment, Suyana realized. She was an official Face now; people would be trying to recruit her to their side if they thought she could do them any good. This might not be a cause that would live long. She didn't think she could do much good to anybody, but there was no knowing that until she tried to do anything at all.

She looked at the sharp line of the river against the tangle of the forest, felt like she was standing somewhere higher, somewhere dry where nothing touched her.

Here, she thought as if from far away; here and no farther.

Suyana said, “Yes.”

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

They made cards out of one of the shots she took. Suyana looked angry—too angry, said the state secretary who looked at it—but it showed up in
Profile
magazine and they called her “Sultry Suyana,” and that must have been enough to please the Confederation. She didn't have to reshoot until the next year. That was in a studio. They'd put her into the same background, they said, so there was no need for her to go home.

The photographer shook her hand, told her it was an honor; he said, “I loved the exotic-sexy thing you were doing, let's see that again.”

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

As she stepped out of the water from the first picture she ever took, Hakan asked her a question in Quechua. She looked up at him and couldn't answer; she didn't know what he was saying.

That's how it happens. They fill you with the things they want from you, and you can't hold on.

Of the things Daniel had ever suspected Suyana Sapaki of being, while he made guesses about Magnus and her intelligence and her plans and her taste, being a mole for an ecoterrorist organization had not fucking been one.

He kept his hands open at his sides. The last thing he wanted was to give them an excuse to pat him down. The camera card was burning a hole in his pocket.

“You all right?” Suyana asked.

It could have been gloating—maybe it would be, later—but right now she had a stone face on, and her mouth was tight, and he knew the real question was: Are you going to betray me and do something stupid?

She'd given him fair warning. In some distant part of his mind, he rewound to the door of Café de Troyes and wished her good luck and walked across the bridge and into the night. Maybe he stole another camera and set his sights on a Face who was less trouble. Why hadn't he done that?

Because this story could change countries. Because it would be the making of him.

Because in the hospital she'd looked at him and, just for a second, had been happier to see him than anyone had ever been.

“Mostly,” he said.

She looked at him a moment longer, and he could see her doubts multiplying.

Then the woman (he'd forgotten her code name, he needed to pull himself together and start playing this game) was showing them to a bedroom with one bed, and a sturdy desk piled high with paper and pens and glossy magazines. It had a distinctly penitential feeling, and only Suyana's calm kept him from panicking when the woman closed the door behind them. He held his breath, listened for anything that sounded like a bolt sliding shut.

“We're not prisoners,” Suyana said. “This door only locks from the inside.”

He wasn't sure which was less comforting: that she'd read his mind, or that she'd been looking for locks.

She sat heavily on the bed, leaned her good shoulder on the wall, breathed out as she closed her eyes. It was deep and low, and more than just a respite from running with wounds. It was the sound of someone resting for the first time in a long time. What was your life like, when your work as a terrorist spy was the most comfortable you got?

“So,” he said, then didn't know how you brought up the topic. He settled on, “Friends of yours?”

She smiled, just at the edges. “Not these three. I meet a friend, sometimes. These are strangers I'm supposed to go to in an emergency.”

Well. That explained the knife. He sat beside her, his hand an inch short of touching her hand, and looked at the space between their fingers. She was too pale, still.

“We should have stolen you a pint of blood from the hospital.”

“Good idea.”

There was a moment's quiet. She opened one eye and looked him over, like she was a dragon and he was doomed. “Why did you come back there to get me?”

There were plenty of flippant answers, but he couldn't really think of any. The back of his neck was hot. “It seemed wrong to leave you there,” he said, shrugged. “I didn't think you'd want to live through a shooting just to get poisoned in a hospital.” (Anyone who reacted like that to her handler's face was well aware of how short life could be.)

She licked her lips, like she was preparing for an even worse question, but she must have thought better of it. She was looking at the ceiling now, breathing like she was fighting sleep. She said, as if she was asking herself, “Where did you even come from?”

Seoul, he almost told her. Seoul, where I abandoned my career, where I took the right picture at the wrong time and had to run. She'd understand.

“The alley across from the hotel,” he said, tried not to feel like a coward.

She didn't even open her eyes. He hoped the Chordata people left them alone long enough that Suyana could rest.

He looked at the door. “How bad into this are you?”

She thought a moment. Settled on “It's been a long time.”

He didn't know what to say. He'd never guessed. She'd shown some initiative here and there, but not enough to make her a subject of interest; in all his research there had never been a breath of anything suspicious. Good for her.

She turned to face him, winced as her leg shifted. Her stolen boots were too small in the calf—he'd had to pull out four eyelets and tie them lower—and he wondered if they hurt.

She watched him. “Hakan warned me people would try to recruit me for everything. Mining partnerships, bases for military operations on our borders.” She frowned, glanced at her foot and then out at the far wall. “He found me after a protest, so maybe we both should have known, but I don't think it ever occurred to him someone would try to recruit me for something I wanted.”

He recognized what was happening. She was so tired she was telling him things she shouldn't; she was telling him the truth because there was a good chance he wouldn't live long enough to tell on her.

He should have been terrified. He was—he liked to think he was reckless, but there was reckless and there was being held at knifepoint. Mostly, though, he looked at her bloodless face and her trembling hands and the eyelids she couldn't keep open, and was sorry for her. He wanted to lock them in until she'd really rested. Everything else could wait.

He cleared his throat. He must be getting tired too, if he was going soft. “How long?”

“A Face five years. Chordata the same.”

Shit. “So you knew them when they blew up the American outpost three years back.”

Suyana looked at him and raised one eyebrow, just an inch. It felt like someone had doused him in water.

Of course she knew them then. She'd told them.

She didn't say anything, but she looked lonelier than he'd thought possible, and hopeless.

I can't tell, he thought, sudden and heavy. I can't tell anyone. She'd lost her handler to that fallout. She'd nearly been deposed. Her country had almost been ruined. All to save some forest for a little while from a country that didn't know how to take no for an answer. What a thing, when you're nineteen—how do you carry something like that and keep going?

She'd dozed off—or passed out—and for a few minutes he sat in the quiet, listening to her breathing and the sound of his heartbeat in his ears.

Maybe she'd lost blood. He could call the medic.

But he didn't call out, and he never moved. She could use a little quiet with someone who didn't want to kill her.

Then she started awake, looked around with that hesitation you get when you're always waking up in strange places. He knew that feeling. His gut twisted.

“How old were you at the protest?”

“Almost thirteen,” she said.

He thought about that for a second.

“I was sixteen when I saw you on TV,” he said. “The welcome for new Faces. You were in a beaded dress.”

She rolled her eyes, inched up a little from the bed. The distraction had galvanized her. “The IA stylists have shoved me into more beaded dresses and shawls than should ever exist. I never got higher than a C-minus red carpet grade.”

He smiled. “Ouch.”

“The PR materials always say it's highlighting our national identity,” she said. “Like there's only one. Like anyone's interested in helping us protect it. It can be pretty funny, so long as you don't think about it, but once you're in the chair it's not funny anymore. Some countries get their own stylists, but if you're using the IA stable, they don't much care who they're working for, and you end up looking the way they assume everyone assumes you look.”

He'd rewatched that ceremony when he was reading up on Faces the first time. He was looking for Hae Soo-jin, but he remembered Suyana. She walked like someone had warned her she'd teeter and she'd been determined to prove them wrong, heels banging against the stage until she was in the center.

Then she'd stood, in her ugly beaded gown with impressionist rainforest designs across the skirt, and said in a clear, low voice, “I, Suyana Sapaki, vow to represent the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation to my utmost, to protect and preserve it, and to aid the International Assembly in the creation of a greater and a finer world.” You could see how much she meant it—too much for the pageant she was in. (He wondered what he had been doing three years before that, when she was getting arrested.)

“You looked like you were too good for the room,” he said, without meaning to.