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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.
    Ã— × × × × × ×
    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.)
    â€œEveryone’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.”
    â€œWe 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 beforeshe kicked it.
    â€œWe might have to do it again.”
    â€œThat doesn’t seem wise.”
    â€œMaybe not, but if we let in one problem, where will it stop? They can’t grow roots there.”
    â€œI 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 strikehad 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.
    She’d survived Chordata last year, but not because Chordata’s terms were kind. She had survived because Onca had seen her in the flesh, and in that cramped apartment in Paris, the moment Onca had her orders and a gun in her hand, Suyana had made her believe.
    (She didn’t know if Onca was still alive; she was something else Suyana could never go back to.)
    It had been easier to be young, and to not care if Zenaida was directing her where she needed to be led, and to assume Chordata was clear-thinking and honorable. Easier to be