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“Where's yours? I didn't see her.”

Bo shook his head, unflappable but unhappy. “She went in through the caterers' entrance—two others with her, waiting for IDs now, but it's too late to follow. No idea why she's trying to play it under the radar, it's not like she can change the movie by staying invisible. Got the shots, though.”

For all the good it would do. Li Zhao never seemed to find a buyer for Margot's shots, which seemed strange for the head of the Central Committee. Either Li Zhao was creating scarcity to drive up prices—which Daniel had never dared suggest to Bo, who tended to be very stolid about work and wasn't ready for the idea that Li Zhao was playing the market—or she was waiting for an international scandal to sell the lot. In the meantime, Bo spied on the most powerful diplomat in the world for no return on investment.

“When are you off duty?”

“Now. Our man in Catering clocked Margot inside, and Reg takes over in ten minutes. You?”

“Same,” said Daniel. “Magdalena should already be inside when Suyana finally snaps and murders Ethan. You want dinner?”

“Sure.” Bo barely frowned; Bo was hard to rattle.

They set off together down Broadway, Daniel using the only-slightly-embarrassing gait he'd adopted to keep up with Bo's mountainous strides. But Bo wasn't in a hurry, so it was easy enough.

Daniel wasn't in a hurry either. Suyana had given the signal. She couldn't meet her Chordata contact until two
a.m.; Daniel had hours to spare.

Every time Suyana kissed him, she saw lights.

Not romantically. God forbid. Flashbulbs.

(At an official luncheon Kipa had asked, “What's it like to kiss Ethan?” She'd cut that line of inquiry short. From Grace it might have been a tactical question, but Kipa had sounded too hopeful. Suyana didn't want Kipa ever doing what she was doing now.)

There were the national photographers—the UARC government had assigned her a few as her profile improved, and they'd started agitating for candid shots of her daily life as part of some future biography, but Ethan had dozens and had always had dozens and they recorded
everything
.

He went swimming and three cameras were going; he went out to a movie and they made him walk up to the marquee four times until they caught him in the right light. He barely looked at them; he moved through and around them like you would a pack of hunting dogs you kept in the house. He was a fool not to realize what he was handing over, but she didn't have much room to talk about what sorts of privacy people were willing to give up.

There was the international press, who lined up outside the fund-raisers they attended and the hotels they stayed in and his apartment in New York, to see if they could get a quick word from the couple on the events of the day.

(
Global
magazine had asked them about the news that Hae Soo-jin was being forcibly recalled in favor of a new Korean Face, and she'd been so surprised she'd forgotten her official stance of being too calm to care about anything, and said she'd miss her. She'd had to spend three nights of polite, awkward clubbing with Bin Mee-yon before the Korean press stopped being angry at her for possibly suggesting Hae Soo-jin was the best Korea could do. Bin Mee-yon had reacted as pretty much anyone would; she hadn't spoken to Suyana since.)

And then, everybody else. Tourists in Paris caught them at the Louvre and cooed about the way they'd dressed—him in black and a trench coat, her in a dress of burnished
gold—as if it was an accident they looked like a matched set impossibly at home among moody Impressionist studies and gilded frames.

Closer
had paid a record amount for a candid for their next cover. In the shot, they were standing in front of one of the crowd-scene oils with their heads bent in conversation, pretending not to see the cluster of tourists behind them taking pictures. The photographer had caught their images in the screen of every phone, two characters as posed as any in the painting.
Closer
put
THE ART OF LOVE
as the headline, neon-pink graffiti across the painting that loomed behind them. It had already been parodied on four late-night talk shows.

It was one of Daniel's best shots ever. It must have stung something awful not to be able to take credit.

(She'd seen Daniel, in the instant Ethan was leaning in, and had tilted her head to make the most of her jawline—the longest arch she could manage, leading right to Ethan's half-closed eyes, his cologne heavy in her nostrils and voices echoing as everyone taking photos decided how sweet they were.)

The story inside
Closer
was cobbled-together press-release fluff about how the relationship had coaxed him down from his playboy years and steadied her at a time when she needed it most.

Magnus had fed them the quote about how she was steadier now, complete with the reminder that she'd lost her first handler
and Ethan had come along just when she needed a strong man the most. Magnus was practically every “Staffers close to the couple say.” He made up enough stories for ten men.

× × × × × × ×

Twenty minutes in, Suyana decided
Longitude
was actually an impressive movie.

It didn't get everything right—that would take ten years and be postwar bureaucracy interrupted with periodic wretchedness—but it made her care about the formation of the IA, which was more than the actual IA often managed. Plus, Margot had left an hour in, when the Founding Fifteen discussed how to appoint the chair of the Central Committee, and the actress playing Priyanka Lal had her big scene warning everyone against lifelong appointments.

“That way lies the seed of deepest corruption,” she said as the music struck a minor chord and the actress's eyes filled with tears of righteous anger, and Suyana had been painfully careful not to look around to see how the room was taking it. Margot was behind her three rows and over her left shoulder, and it would be impossibly obvious to turn. But Margot had made the mistake of wearing two bracelets, and when she got up three minutes later and left, Suyana heard her just fine.

It was mostly a romance, of course; Priyanka and Brynolf's breakup had affected the personal-relationship bylaws of the IA more than international policies ever had.
(It was one of the reasons Faces were discouraged from marry­ing; Brynolf might have forgiven Priyanka for voting in his stead, but the bylaws hadn't.) But the director had clearly wanted verisimilitude in politics, such as it was, unfolding in a movie-ready Assembly Hall twice as grand as the real thing; the Assembly hadn't let them film, and the studio had clearly balked at reconstructing an awkward, drafty room with inexplicable bubbles in the carpet.

But for all that, it was engaging: it even had a Peruvian and a Brazilian Face—not important enough to have names, but their countries were subtitled in a very serious font as they were recruited to the Second-Wave Seventy in montage.

“You all right?” whispered Ethan.

She hated him. It still astonished her how much she could, out of nowhere.

She held still a breath longer, grateful for the dark. (It subsided—she forced it to, she wasn't good enough to wholly despise him and still sleep with him—but when it rose it buried everything.)

“Of course,” she said after a pause she knew was too long. She smoothed her hand where she'd been picking at a loose thread on her loaner dress; the scented shimmer Oona had spread on her arms had left a spot on the black, a comet on a star map. Horrible tell. Hakan would have been mortified. “You try sitting through a movie in a dress this tight.”

He huffed a laugh; he glanced at her, then away like he hadn't meant to. A moment later he took her hand.

She let him. She spread her fingers slowly, let them sink between his fingers as his breath caught, let the tips of her fingernails just barely scrape the underside of his palm as he curled his fingers around her, brushing the last of the sparkles off.

She'd stepped on her anger, and all was well, and the end of all this was too far away to start counting the minutes now.

× × × × × × ×

The theater lights came up slowly enough that Suyana could gauge the mood of the room without getting caught actually looking around. India and Finland and the rest of the Founding Fifteen looked pleased with themselves. Exceptions: Ethan, who straightened the hem of his jacket twice in a row as he stood, and Grace, who was already sidling toward the exit next to Martine.

(
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSEMBLY REMAINS THE MOST POWERFUL DIPLOMATIC ASSOCIATION IN THE WORLD. IT INCLUDES 227 COUNTRIES AND HOLDS AN INTERNATIONAL STANDING ARMY
, the closing title read. Suyana wasn't sure if that was praise or disappointment. Grace seemed to have decided.)

“I'm starving,” Suyana said. “Do we know the menu at
Bridge View?”

“Salad of microgreens and spiced nuts,” Ethan recited. “Then sea bass for me, with slices of sweet potato, I swear to God just because Harold doesn't trust me with any food that could roll off the plate. For you, eggplant medallions with potato puree. Fruit sorbet. Champagne.”

There was something about the dip in his delivery right around “puree” that made her look him in the eye. “You want to skip it and get pizza?”

He considered it for three seconds, looked at his wristband for another three. Tallying messages, maybe. Maybe calculating the logistics of redirecting the cameras waiting outside the restaurant.

“Yeah,” he said, mostly to the wristband. The gesture looked strangely serious, even though he was smiling. “Let's ditch and get pizza. We can still make cocktails, right?”

“Oh, the UARC has two cameras scheduled at cocktails. Magnus would shoot me if I wasn't there.”

His head snapped up. “That's not funny.”

He was wrong. His vigilance about the
S
word was one of the few things about him that didn't feel grown in a lab.

“We'll be back by then,” she promised, trying not to grin so close on the heels of the shooting joke.

He tugged on his jacket (third time, she set her teeth against something without knowing what) and took her arm. “An hour for pizza, then. There's a place not too far from Bridge View.”

As they passed, she caught Magnus's eye and shook her head once in answer to his raised eyebrows. He slid his hands in his pockets, watched them go.

“How are your heels?” Ethan asked at the door.

“I'm not walking, if that's the question. Did you want me to describe them?”

He flushed, just at the tips of his ears, when you caught him out. “Nope, that's the question. I already know how they look.”

He was so predictable it worried her. Black pumps, some stockings, long hair, a little lip gloss. That was it. He never even joked about the contract when he was flirting with her.

(“If he does . . . invoke the terms in an inappropriate way, let me know and I'll speak to his handlers about it. It's bad form,” Magnus had told her, not meeting her eyes, just before her first overnight date with Ethan.

Grace told her, “If he shouts the clause number when he comes, run for it.”)

It stung to slide into the backseat of the car. Of course she could walk there; she didn't wear any shoes she couldn't run for her life in. But it was no good reminding anyone you were a fighter. She sat back and let the fifteen blocks slide by, carefully not thinking of anything at all.

She goaded him into getting a mushroom pizza (“The whole thing?” “Harold can't see you. You afraid of looking
hungry?” “. . . We'll take the whole thing”), and as they ate he told her about a high school visit he'd made where they gave up on lunchtime crowd control as people lined up for his appearance and just threw a school-wide pizza party before he got there.

“It was my first leftover pizza! It was delicious. Maybe I was just really hungry—I'd been at a photo shoot all day—but it was like, stuck to the cardboard a little and the cheese had kind of dried up, and I swear, it was the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. It was cool to sort of connect with them that way.”

“Were they watching you eat?” Louis XVI had done that—eaten in front of the court, ten courses to prove he could, and let the courtiers dive for the scraps.

He cracked up around a mouthful of pizza. “God, no, that would be so weird! I had a meet and greet with the Model Assembly team. They'd made regionals or something because of their debate on the water crisis. They were really into it. It really made me think about the water crisis, actually. Those were smart kids.”

Suyana had grown up in a water crisis. Crops had failed two years in a row, and that was all it took for riots to start. The government had sent out the military, here and there. By the time the land-rights groups were marching, it was too late.

“I was fifteen the first time I saw a body of water I couldn't walk across,” she said.

It was a strange thing to tell him. Too honest; she hadn't thought about it before she admitted it. But when she had her pleasant smile back on and looked up, he was watching her steadily, unblinking, looking for a moment sharper and more present than she thought of him.

“Sorry,” she said. “I stepped on your story.”

“No, you didn't.” He wiped his fingers. “I know so little about you. Whenever you tell me something, I try to pay attention.”

“Oh.”

While she was trying to think of a way to deflect him without sounding dismissive, he leaned forward, tracing the ridge of her knuckles where they met the back of her hand.

“I remember the mountain range you showed me the night we met,” he said, with a pretty uncertain smile for a guy who had gotten her on a silver platter a few weeks later. “Where you grew up.”

Where she was born, maybe. She'd grown up in the aisles of the IA, severed from home and watching the games people played to pretend they had power, but she wasn't here to ruin the mood. “I hoped you'd notice me.”