Persona

by Genevieve Valentine

  “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.

  7

  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 jo
b,” 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.)

  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.

  × × × × × × ×

  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.

  8

  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 give
n 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?”