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Over the comm in his ear, Bo said, “It's a nice town. Busier than I expected. So far no trouble keeping them in sight.”

“You're the world's most boring person,” Daniel said, “and when I find out how you ever got into killing people for a living, I'm going to die of shock,” and muted the connection for the next five minutes just so he didn't have to hear whatever Bo was yelling at him.

After Martine and Margot had spent the requisite amount of time gracing local boutiques, they got into a single car to go to dinner, and Daniel went back to the room he and Bo were sharing undercover as a couple so he could crash before the late shift.

The trade-off happened just shy of midnight, as Daniel took up his post at the outdoor café opposite the glass-walled bar where Margot and Martine were deep in conversation.

“What are they plotting, do we know?”

From inside the bar, Bo glanced casually at his phone, wrote back,
Sounds like Martine's in line for Central Committee thanks to this
, and took a sip of wine that Daniel resented
him for having. Bo was going to trail Margot home soon and get in bed and sleep the sleep of the just, and Daniel was going to be stuck out in the chilly night for however long it took Martine to finish her mandatory clubbing and go to bed.

It took three espressos on his end, and he lost track of how much wine on Martine's, before anything happened. When Margot seemed satisfied and left, Bo did his magic trick of disappearing in plain sight, and Daniel was left following Martine and her hired muscle wherever she was headed next.

He fell in line behind her and let the tide carry him. He'd pinpointed the six most exclusive clubs in Bergen, but it was dangerous to try to overthink your target. Daniel just haunted them down the streets, between the couples on dates and the groups of young people, until they reached Sessrúmnir. It had been third on his list by rank of probability; he needed to work harder.

That was the problem of stepping in on someone else's beat cold—you had to start up the hill all over again. He could tell without thinking when Suyana had wound up too tight under the cameras and was planning to slide out the kitchen door and meet with Chordata just to pretend she still had a reason to keep going. That pattern he had nailed down to the day.

At the door, Martine whispered something to her hired
man, and after some hesitation he nodded and went inside. As soon as she was alone, she yanked her fake cigarette out of her jeans, shook it awake, and sucked in a pull so deep he heard her breath from down the block. The lights outside the club were blue, and she looked like an ice statue with her chin tilted up toward the dark.

Still staring at the sky, she held a hand and crooked a finger toward him.

Goddammit. He thought about vanishing, but there was no point, once you'd been made. At least if Martine had him murdered, Li Zhao would have to admit he'd been right about Martine having bad blood.

He approached slowly, not wanting to put himself between Martine and the bodyguard inside, but she waited until he was within arm's reach without looking over, and even then she exhaled another lungful of vapor before she said, “A little far afield for a taxi dancer, isn't it?”

“I go where the dancing is.”

She pulled a face. “Jesus, that's terrible. I was debating whether to disappear you, but you might have just made up my mind.”

“Can it wait two weeks?” he asked, when the air had come back to his lungs. “I'm expecting news from someone.”

She frowned. Then she said, “So why aren't you
with her?”

It had somehow never occurred to him that Suyana must have explained him away enough to avoid disaster. It should have—there was obviously a reason Martine hadn't gone to the national press with an exposé on snaps sneaking into the Faces' inner sanctums, and her goodwill toward the press wasn't it—but he couldn't picture Suyana and Martine having a civil conversation for long enough. Good for them, he thought vaguely, above the drum of his pulse.

He said, “Couldn't resist a chance to see you in your element, I guess.”

Martine shot him a look that made him feel like the false ashes from her cigarette—that hatred that came right before someone admitted something, and before he could think, he brushed his hair down over the camera to obscure her.

It took Martine all of two seconds to figure everything out, and she lit up as soon as she realized it, positively delighted in her disdain. “Wait. What the fuck do you all think I'm going to be doing up here that's more important than the show she's putting on down there?”

He needed to run—he needed to get out of here before she got bored with him or before he told her anything he couldn't justify—but he couldn't afford to make her angry, and he was too stung to lie. “Nothing, apparently. You smile and pretend you can stand Margot, and I watch you and
worry about somebody else.”

She tapped the cigarette off; it became a shivering ember between her fingers, an aftereffect of her grin. “Oh, friend, that Amazon's going to eat you alive.”

Daniel had no argument to make. He'd been doing the math on that for a year.

“Tomorrow we're taking separate cars to Dovrefjell,” she said, so casually it sounded at first like she was making travel plans with him. “There's a photo op outside. Then Margot tours the site, and I go right to the Kongsvold Hotel and drink myself stupid overnight. Then I go to Oslo and party for a week and pretend I care about ecology for an hour or two a day during meetings. My laziness about it all will get me a place in the Central Committee, once Spain gets off his ass and retires as press liaison. Who knows from there?”

She slid the cigarette back into her pocket, kept two fingers on the tip like it was a homing beacon. “And I don't care about anything she's asked me to do. I'd agree to worse things than ignorance. But if she wants me out of the way for that site visit, and I'm the one she
trusts
, then I don't know what that means for the other site.”

When she turned to look at him, her irises vanished into the wash of blue light above her. She looked blank-eyed and distant and helpless as a ghost. He wished he'd left the camera clear; he was missing a beautiful shot.

“I'm going to be here for a few hours,” she said. “You can try to follow me if you want, but you won't get in. This place has standards. Have a good night watching for me and worry­ing.”

The door closed behind her. If the bodyguard came out to clean up, Daniel didn't stick around to see it.

Oona dressed her in white and blue for the visit.

“You should look like the evening sky coming down to bless whatever cement block they're taking you to,” she said as she plaited Suyana's hair into a single complicated knot at the back of her neck.

“It's an ecological research facility.”

“God, we'd better get you some jewelry, then. And a jacket.”

From the dining table of the suite, Magnus smiled down at his paperwork.

She ended up in a navy-blue silk jumpsuit that looked like a sleeveless mockery of a scientist's smock, and a white linen jacket that only made it worse, and Magnus looked her
over skeptically as they waited in the lobby.

“It's the best of bad options,” she said. “I wanted the work boots and jeans, but she begged me to look like I cared.” She tried a smile. “I'll end up in a cocktail dress if she keeps going.”

Magnus looked as though he wasn't sure it could be worse, but he just smoothed his own lapel and said, “It will do. We'll leave the jacket in the car. It will be more . . . subtle.”

She nearly laughed before she caught it, and Magnus glanced at her, surprised, just as the car pulled up and Ethan and Stevens got out.

“Morning, Samuelsson,” said Stevens, mostly to his tablet. “Morning, Suyana. Ethan, be back here by four, please. You have the dinner scheduled.”

“Roger that,” said Ethan, scooping Suyana gently by the elbow, and she must have made a face she couldn't help, because he said, “Don't worry, it's fine. I'll get you back in one piece.”

Suyana's stomach lurched, and without thinking she leaned back to make herself heavier. “But Magnus—” she began, and looked behind her, where Magnus was beginning to move in her direction, though Stevens was stepping in front of him and saying something about security clearance that didn't come through.

“I'm not going either,” Stevens pointed out in the tone
handlers used when they knew they were talking about people they'd outlive.

“This is unacceptable,” Magnus was saying as Ethan helped her into the car, as it pulled away from the curb, and when she looked out the window as they turned the corner. Magnus was staring after her, one fist held tight to his side and his phone already to his ear.

Too late, she thought, the queasy feeling settling and sliding into something else that felt far away. She calculated, briefly, the chances the Americans had arranged for something to happen to her on-site, and was comforted by the low number. She was less comforted by the chances that Margot had arranged for something to happen, but she concentrated on how unlikely it was that Margot would get rid of a perfectly biddable American Face in the bargain—because for Margot to keep clear of a disaster, they'd both of them have to go.

“Is this your first time visiting one of these?” she asked, her voice so calm it must belong to someone else.

“Yeah, in person, but Margot and I did a bunch of funny-­looking photo ops they're going to roll out in the news once these facilities are all established and there are results to publicize. Some of them went out with the first round of press announcements like we were actually working there. They're so embarrassing. In one of them they made me look into
a microscope and make a really serious face, as if anyone would believe anything I had to say about microscopic anything.”

“I saw that first picture. You looked very believable.”

“Why do you ask?” His smile had fallen off; his eyes were narrowed. “Are you not interested in this?”

She wished there were cameras. She wished there were a dozen. Why weren't there any cameras?

“Oh, no, I'm very interested. This is for the benefit of the country I represent to my utmost duty,” she repeated, as if it was something Magnus had told her. As if it bored her.

His smile came back. “It won't take long, I promise. We have the president's dinner to get to, and I promised Stevens I wouldn't be late.”

That improved her chances, then; you didn't kill people on the way to presidential dinners unless you wanted a bigger storm than this was worth. It was just smart planning on Margot's part, to keep her off balance; Margot knew Suyana liked witnesses, and Suyana shuddered from the chill of being known. Magnus wouldn't get there; they'd never let him reach her when he could still do any good, he'd still be in full diplomatic fury with Stevens by the time they came back—and by then she'd already have been separated from whatever they didn't want her to see.

× × × × × × ×

Columbina was tall, so tall that Suyana had wondered about the logistics of having her for a contact (how could they keep quiet if Suyana had to strain to hear her?), but she soon saw the game. Columbina had olive skin and sharp green eyes and dark hair cut into a bob that swung against her jaw as she moved, and when they went out together, no one gave Suyana a second glance.

She'd given up Zenaida after the shooting; it wasn't safe to go back to old comforts. But they had been invisible together because Zenaida acted like her mother. Columbina made her invisible just by showing up.

(“I see,” Suyana had said, when Columbina introduced herself, and Columbina had laughed and steered her into the crowd at the flea market. Suyana had developed a taste for flea markets that bored Magnus, just around the time Columbina appeared.)

“Everyone's suspicious of the whole venture,” Columbina had confided that first day, setting down a pair of opera glasses. “They say it's for the environment, but that's what they always say. Someone on the inside says it's the thin end of a corporate wedge. Even if it isn't mining, we want to . . . discourage it.”

“We already discouraged corporate interests,” Suyana had said. There was a basket of baby dolls at her feet, their eyes staring hopefully up at her, and she stepped aside before
she kicked it.

“We might have to do it again.”

“That doesn't seem wise.”

“Maybe not, but if we let in one problem, where will it stop? They can't grow roots there.”

“I barely survived the last time,” Suyana said, trying to sound wry and light, and failing just at the end.

(Zenaida would have bought her a little animal from the brass collection, some figure that had nothing to do with her work—a deer, a dog, a polar bear—and given it to her as a keepsake, and told her quietly, “No one can force you to agree.”)

Columbina nodded slowly. “I understand,” she said. “But we'd like you to make the opportunity, if you can. We want more information. That's all.”

Two strikes in five years, on a country that had been under scrutiny too long for a year of magazine spreads to make people forget. All it would do was make her a scandal instead of a victim. Chordata made sure incidents were happening everywhere; the world was a wide place, and little discontents were always brewing—oil pipelines broke down in the Arctic, waste dumpers found their barrels lined up on the lawns of their estates. But two hits as obvious as this, the second so soon after the first and in the same place, would become points in a pattern.

And if she said no, they might act anyway. The last strike
had been clean, no human injury and no spreading fires, because she had looked out for all of it and they had known how to plan.

If they acted and she hadn't seen the place first, she'd never know if they had been right about needing to remove it. She was struggling to find a conscience these days, and before she trusted anyone, she was going to have to see it in the flesh.