Persona Read Free Page A

thirty seconds, Daniel could think.
    He’d mapped out routes across three bridges, and angled toward the busiest (Notre-Dame tourists were easy to disappear into, if he could just get there), and they were on a narrow side street nearly at the main route to Pont Saint Louis when the panic set in.
    It didn’t even feel like panic, really—his knees just buckled between one step and the next like all the muscle had fallen out of them. He stumbled, reached for the nearest wall to keep from falling over.
    Suyana pulled up beside him, and turned to keep her bad shoulder out of sight of the rest of the street. It brought them face-to-face. She was breathing hard, and her jaw was clenched like she was trying not to be sick.
    Her eyes were wide and dark, but her eyebrows were fixed carefully without expression. Absently he thought about Halloween, streets full of masks.
    She was losing blood. She couldn’t run for much longer. He hoped she wasn’t thinking of asking for his help to get to a hospital; things were bad enough without her trying some teary-eyed bid for sympathy the way IA girls did on TV when they were asking for humanitarian aid.
    There were no tears. She looked him over a second, said, “If you can’t keep going, I’ll go on alone.”
    He nearly laughed. What diplomat talked this way to someone they’d barely met? What Face talked this way to anyone at all?
    â€œI’m not the one who’s been shot.”
    She flinched and looked over her shoulder as if people would hear and come running. “I’ll make it.”
    â€œMake it where? You’re bleeding all over your shirt.”
    She shrugged with her good shoulder, gritted her teeth against the pain. “I’m short on supplies and no one’s offered me a coat.”
    Well, he wasn’t about to do it just because she’d needled him. But he might have to change his appearance if things caught up to him, and it wouldn’t matter much where his coat went after that—on her or in the garbage.
    Under all the sounds of the crowd and his pulse banging against his ears, he was listening for someone following them. He’d outrun trouble before, plenty. It was always a matter of hearing them before they saw you.
    He ran a hand through his hair as an excuse to look behind them. Two silhouettes passed, paused, and moved on. It could be anybody.
    Suyana said, “I’ll give you this necklace if you can get me to Montmartre.”
    That was interesting. At least it wasn’t a sympathy ploy. Bald barter was unusual, but more honest.
    â€œThat thing looks like a fake,” he said, shrugged. “Pass.”
    She looked at him, said, “You know it’s not.”
    Suddenly all his breath was missing. He blinked, licked his lips.
    There was a flicker of a smile at one corner of her mouth, but it vanished. “You were already in the alley when they shot me. You heard us.”
    When they shot me, she said, calm as if she were talking about cameras. But she wasn’t entirely in control. Her face was sallow, and the hand pressed against her arm was starting to shake.
    He didn’t like how this was going. Maybe it was better to cut things off at the knees.
    He leaned a little closer, pitched his voice low. “Maybe I was in on it.”
    She tensed up when he moved toward her, but there was no surprise, no moment of horror setting in. The idea must have already occurred to her. Not a lot of trust among diplomats.
    But she was still looking at him, and she narrowed her eyes a little before she said, “Then why did you panic?”
    Daniel wished he’d picked a dumber Face to follow.
    It occurred to him to point out that this could all be a ploy to slow her down—it’s not like he’d panicked, really, it was just that he had stopped to consider—but if she really believed that, she’d have run for it five turns back, going it alone halfway across the