Free Persona by Genevieve Valentine Page B

you?”
    â€œFind us” hung unsaid.
    Suyana closed her eyes a beat too long, like she was looking out for a far-off ship and had gotten tired. “Give me a minute. I need to decide what to do. Please don’t trouble yourselves in the meantime; I won’t ask for your support until I’m sure I’ll need it.”
    There was just enough condemnation in the words that Daniel flinched.
    Nattereri asked, “And your friend?”
    Daniel held his breath.
    â€œHe’s with me,” she said.
    His chest went tight for a second. He tried not to let it mean anything. Didn’t work.
    He didn’t dare speak—she’d been clear—but she had to know he’d offer his help the minute she asked. His stomach was going sour. Help was still help even if he wanted something from it; she still needed him; it wasn’t as though she was thick on friends.
    â€œWait for me,” she said to him as she passed him. “I won’t be long.”
    It was her diplomatic voice, smooth and distant and impenetrable, trying to stave off the worst.
    As he closed the bedroom door, she was standing in the galley kitchen across the way, silhouetted in the yellow light from the street below, looking like a tower of ash left behind from where disaster had struck.
    She deserves better, he thought suddenly, fiercely. Better than me, better than all of this.
    Then his phone buzzed.

9
    Suyana leaned against the kitchen counter, propped on her arms (ignored the throb of the wound), gripped it until the edges stung her palms.
    It was stuffy—she needed fresh air, she needed to breathe —but she fought the urge to go to the window. No use in getting spotted like that after all this trouble. She’d be back in the line of fire soon enough.
    The street was silent. She felt so lonely her eyelids ached.
    The information fanned out in front of her, a fractal of choice. The biggest threat was Chordata’s potential unwillingness to shelter her if her information had dried up and she was nothing but a target. Those branches were short, and their ends blunt. It made her so angry she had to take a breath because her lungs were going tight. Hadn’t she been everything they’d asked? Hadn’t they acted like a family?
    But her loyalties weren’t anyone else’s loyalties. She had to remember that or this was all over. She brushed those options aside. It would do no good to press them from a place of no advantage; she’d have to think of some other card to play.
    But trees could overwhelm if you tried to see through them too much. There was what the Americans would do to the UARC if it was shaken and vulnerable. There was the stranger in her room now, who had helped her and was lying to her. There was the question of whose words Magnus was reading on television; there were questions about the subterranean search team that may or may not be his.
    There was the question of the shooting.
    It seemed almost nostalgic, given what had happened since. When she thought about the moments before the first shot, standing in the shadows of a contract while Magnus looked her over as though she’d been born to worry him, the moment had the sepia quiet of an old photograph.
    Had it been Magnus?
    Below her, someone on the street was calling out—a woman answered, laughing, and two sets of footsteps moved under the kitchen window and into the night.
    No, Suyana thought. She could picture Magnus writing the message that had gone out on the underground line—lightly, so there would be no traces on the blotter. He wouldn’t have trusted a verbal message. Some things were too important. She could picture Magnus meeting Margot and the IA Central Committee, and calmly accepting their ruling that she had to be cut loose. She could even, if she was being honest, imagine Magnus suggesting to Margot that trying to retrieve Suyana would be effort for nothing, and it would be easier if she just