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Magnus said, “What do you think he knows?”

She couldn't answer that, and he knew it. He smiled thinly, a saint accustomed to suffering. “Apologies. It's late.”

“Of course.”

“Starting over. Let's try this. How are you feeling about him? About all this? Did you—had you two actually considered the marriage as—”

“No,” she said, as lightly as she could. “We never discussed it. But you never know when someone will get nerves about aging out of the job and try to go out with a bang. Do we know who's in line after him?”

He looked through her, not at her.

“Leili,” he said. “Sixteen; old enough that Ethan
should be concerned. Charming in the Kipa mold, from the photos. Chosen partially for ethnically ambiguous appeal, I suspect, given how ready they are to get the spotlight on her the instant Ethan retires. Right now they're on the brink of having her tap-dance on TV, they're at such a loss as to what to do with her while Ethan's still going. But I've looked into her grades before the Face mentorship program, and if someone isn't getting her an advanced degree in the sciences on the sly, they're wasting her time.”

There was a flicker of jealousy somewhere—she hadn't heard that much praise for herself in their entire joint tenure—but she was too tired to hang on to it. She wanted the information; he'd had it ready. Faithlessness wasn't worth worrying over.

“Sounds like I'm marrying the wrong American Face.”

“No argument.” Magnus folded his arms, dragged his lip over his bottom teeth, and glanced at the door like Ethan would be opening it to see what Magnus thought of him.

“So, you say she's ready. How ready would the Americans say she is?”

He looked at her a long time before he said, “They've bought her a ticket to Paris.”

A long time ago, Suyana had heard Grace's handler, Colin, talking to her when he thought they were alone. He knew
things a handler always knew; he guessed the rest; he was very good.

Sometimes the things Magnus knew felt like things he had gathered through means he shouldn't have, because he knew she'd need them.

She was still trying to decide if that was an asset or a warning when he said, “Tell me what needs to happen before the session starts.”

“That depends on your wedding priorities,” she said with a smile, an open gate. “We have a lot of photo shoots to get through.”

“Suyana. You know what my priorities are.”

His brows had been knotted together, exhaustion and concentration pushing his face in on itself, the words rolling out uneven, like they hurt. But his expression opened and softened—pale skin shifting back across the bones, blue eyes fixed on her. It was that same bliss of being cornered he'd worn when she'd pressed him to a wall a year ago and threatened to kill him for keeping secrets.

It was hard to look at him. He was staring at her—she felt its weight and warmth like a palm pressed to the back of her head—but she looked at his mouth, then his ear, then the door behind him, before she got up the nerve to meet his eye.

A smart Face forgave what they were asked to
forgive—most of it was above your security clearance, and the rest was out of your control. But Suyana had never stopped seeing him as the man on the edge of Hakan's desk where there were still rectangles of dust from vanished things, Magnus in his impeccable suit holding her file half-open like it stung him and looking her up and down to decide if anything could be done with her.

He was young, still; when she got in the habit of hating him, she tended to forget.

Her fifth thought, which was the one she told him: “We'll have to find out if Ethan will really go through with this.”

Her fourth thought: Ethan was a spy, he must have been on Margot's side to believe he could win against her, and I can't tell if that's changed, and I need to do something about it while there's still enough time for little Leili to fly across the ocean and be what I need her to be.

Her third thought: My new snap is the tall one with red hair, and I'll need to make sure he's in Paris before we do the shoot with the veil. They'll make six figures off the candids, and I'll need a favor to remind them of when I come asking for their help.

He second thought: I need to decide once and for all whether I can trust you, because not knowing is going to kill me.

Her first thought, deep and vicious and impossible to say: If I'm going to live through this, Margot has to disappear.

× × × × × × ×

They took the outdoors engagement photos two days into their stay in Paris, just long enough for everyone to be rested and for national press to “accidentally” be present wherever they ended up.

“It's so phony,” Ethan said with real distaste as they settled onto the wall overlooking the Seine, Suyana in the crook of his arm.

About fifty yards away, one of the bookstalls was selling some of its most artfully beat-up books for Suyana to hold. (Ethan didn't need to; wherever he went, everyone assumed he had all the education he needed.) Ten minutes earlier, the stand had sold a book to a man who'd vanished into the sparse crowd despite his height and his hair. She wished he was easier to track—she angled herself toward the narrow alley where he was mostly likely to get a clear frame. It was all she could do.

Oona handed her the books and reached to affix the veil, but Suyana whispered, “Leave it,” and gave Oona a conspiratorial look.

The veil would fall, and she'd catch it in her hands and turn to Ethan and grin at him. He'd laugh, and he'd curl her hand over and across his knuckles, and maybe if she could keep close enough, he'd lean in to kiss her temple and make the only photo of them that would matter—the
one that Margot would be unable to decode, whenever she was deciding whether Ethan was still a willing soldier.

“Look at these,” she said, held up one of the books. “Thomas Hardy,
A Manual for Secretaries
, and a book about how to sail. What exactly am I studying for?”

Ethan raised his eyebrows, smiled just enough not to ruin the line of his jaw. “Just don't go sailing if you're sad. You know how that ends for everyone in Hardy novels.”

“I do now,” she said, and when the breeze picked up and tugged her veil out of the slip of her hair, she pressed the novel flat to his chest and caught the veil with both hands, and as Ethan clutched the novel and looked over the wall at the fallen books and Suyana angled her arms to pull away the veil without blocking her face, one of the photographers started his shutter.

× × × × × × ×

They did an indoor shoot in formal dress four days later, when no inconvenient breezes could ruin what the Americans had in mind.

They'd rented out a wing of the Louvre so she and Ethan could stand under enormous paintings of royalty and mythical garden parties and look both diminished and everlasting. Some were so big that a single whorl in the gilded frame was the size of Suyana's head, and the photographer was forced to remove to the adjacent gallery just trying to get it all in the frame.

“Not facing each other yet, please,” the photographer called. She saw Magnus's lips form
Too marital
, but was too far away to know if he'd actually spoken.

Suyana hadn't been aware they were facing each other, but they were, that forty-five-degree angle they'd been practicing for a year.

Ethan rolled his eyes and plucked at the edges of his collar to make sure they were tipped outward—he'd gotten a round of instructions before the stylists would let him tend himself between shots. Suyana envied him. Her dress was so complicated she wasn't allowed to touch it; Oona had to reach under the bell she made and confirm structural stability and correct drape of fifteen layers before Suyana was allowed to do anything more than shift her weight.

“Side by side, straight and tall, please,” the photographer ordered, and they stood an arm's length apart and looked straight ahead. Suyana felt like the first time she'd ever had her picture taken, waist-deep in the river in front of a forest she'd never seen, young and already tired and refusing to look as inviting as she was meant to.

“All right, take hands,” called the photographer, and they reached out at the same time without looking. Something else they had worked on.

“No, I mean step closer,” the photographer said, but Magnus was looking up at them on the verge of moving for
the camera, and saying “No, don't, hold it,” with an urgency Suyana hadn't expected. But he was a handler, and for a few heartbeats everybody listened. The photographer's camera went off three times automatically before he could make himself disobey, or before Ethan could recover from the outburst and step closer.

That was the frame she and Magnus insisted go out in the press package, despite American objections that it looked awkward among all the handclasps and the single chaste kiss on the cheek Ethan was giving her in one of the frames, her eyes closed in polite bliss.

“It's our only request, and if it's so awkward, then none of the magazines will use it and you've won your point,” Magnus pointed out finally, after which it was difficult for them to argue.

Four magazines used it. Two made it the cover. Suyana's random-sample image recognition went up by seventeen points in the weekly polls.

In the UARC's cramped flat, which had no adornments, Suyana pinned both covers side by side on the wall across from their bedroom doors—the candid cover closer to her door, the formal cover closer to his. His insistence on that pose had felt like loyalty. Strategy, she told herself every time she opened her bedroom door and saw them.

Suyana and Ethan stood an arm's length apart, hands
connected by the stiff V of their arms. Ethan was just beginning to frown, which made him look troubled in an intriguing way, and Suyana's face was set as grim as the queen above her head, her dress taking on some majesty that went beyond meeting him at the altar; two statues made of stone, dwarfed at the foot of a painting that would outlive them both.

For the first week Suyana was in Paris, everyone at Bonnaire avoided saying anything to Daniel about the engagement.

Suyana and Ethan were running around outside posing for pictures before he even got there, which meant handlers everywhere, news outlets desperate for orchestrated behind-the-scenes kissing, and black-market IA types desperate for any unnatural collusion between representatives of the state. Notices went out over the wire at all hours.

But no one ever asked him what he thought Suyana would do if there were four parties and she and Ethan could only make it to two each but would attend at least one together, and he never offered because it wasn't
his business anymore. For a week he followed Grace to burger joints and the Diplomatic Corps building and clocked when her light went out and never had to think about anything he didn't want to.

But by the time Daniel landed in Paris—two days after the first round of engagement photos—Bo had spent three twenty-hour days in a row following Ethan and Suyana around and trying to track which of them went home when from what party. He'd put in a call for late-night cover that Li Zhao hadn't granted, and Daniel thought it was only good business to swing by Bonnaire straight from the airport just in case.

“Good morning, Daniel, absolutely not,” Li Zhao called from her office as soon as he was at the top of the stairs. The echo of a laugh floated faintly up from the elevator shaft, which meant Kate was on duty.

“I'm here as a motivated member of a crucial team that monitors international relationships with the public,” he said, crossing his arms. She was working; the screen gave a blue cast to her red lipstick and reflected in her glasses, and it erased any truth in her expression.

“I never talk like that about the work.”

His tongue was heavy behind his teeth, his throat a little dry. Long flight.

“No,” he said, more quietly than he'd meant
to, “you just make us sound like hand-selected martyrs whenever you're signing us up.”

After a moment, she looked up over the rim of her glasses. “You flatter me.”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“Grace lands in thirteen hours,” Li Zhao said. “Kate has the address for your flat and for hers. Take a shower, get some sleep, do your job.”

And he did. Grace ate a sandwich at a café packed with students and met with Colin for dessert crepes on the street like father and daughter, their conversation drowned out by the crowd. Grace stopped by Martine's apartment, which faced a courtyard except for a corner living room, but by now Martine knew better than to turn on the light and let them be seen, which meant Daniel spent an hour reading the newspaper in the square across the way. Grace was home in bed by eleven.

Daniel walked north and sat for a while near the stairs in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur. After a while Dev came over the comm and said, “Time check, two a.m.,” like it was something Daniel had requested, and absently he answered, “Thanks. Is Bo covered?” as if there had been a reason for him to be out so late, waiting for something that wasn't coming.

“Yep, uh, they're all set.” Dev never said her name, but there were holes where it should be, which was worse than
Kate's laughing somehow.

So Daniel stood up and went home before anyone could think to ask why he'd been at the bottom of a staircase in the middle of the night, on a bench five streets away from an apartment he'd never dare look for, where some people who might help her had been living, a long time ago.

× × × × × × ×

Bo got three engagement photos into
Closer
, and nearly thirty seconds of footage onto the New York nightly news. It was incredible money—so much that Li Zhao called in the usual suspects to watch the broadcast, and Kate and Dev and a few faces Daniel vaguely recognized gathered around the velvet couch to watch their salaries being made.