Icon by Genevieve Valentine

Author:Genevieve Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press

14

Grace always entered a nightclub looking like whatever she was wearing was a lucky plume of smoke from which she had just emerged via some other, better realm.

Before the assassination attempt, Suyana had mostly been concerned about scoring invitations to enter the nightclub at all. Since the assassination attempt, Suyana knew she entered clubs like she was daring them to throw her out. She couldn’t help it.

She’d worried at first that it looked too aggressive, that it looked like she was hiding something and she was sure to be found out, but it turned out that in pictures it just looked like she was a stocky newcomer, suitably aware of how close she was standing to Grace or Martine—a lucky C-lister raised up through the goodwill of others until she could stand next to her betters.

As she and Grace posed on their way into Empire, Suyana cheated her scar forward.

The Empire (“That’s terribly pointed,” Grace said on opening night, at the same time Martine said, “They cannot fucking be serious,” and all along the gauntlet of photographers on the red carpet, the three of them were careful to pose so that no one got them and the sign in the same shot) was a nightclub of the old kind. Inside, it was a comforting maze of small tables and dim light and breaks in conversation as the bandstand introduced a singer for a handful of low-key torch numbers at a time. It was the sort of nightclub you could go to right after an explosion on your home soil, and magazine readers would believe you’d wanted to go there to think.

Grace headed for the bar. Suyana headed for the tables on the low, deep mezzanine, where she could sit facing the door. One chair she left open opposite her for anyone who wanted to take their chances.

(“You won’t want to be involved in what happens,” Suyana had explained in the car, and Grace had looked at her, the thin silver necklace at her neck casting a constellation against her dark skin, and said, “A bit late for that, don’t you think?”)

It was relatively early in the evening, as IA parties went, and Suyana could rake through the crowd for Kipa and Columbina. Not that she could prepare for much—if Kipa had fallen in this tightly with Chordata, there was little Suyana could do without disaster—but there was no allure in being taken by surprise.

Suyana wished she’d ignored Zenaida’s warnings and been closer with Kipa. They talked at a brunch here or a charity bowling tournament there, but it was dangerous for anyone to connect them, so Suyana had never connected. And Kipa had done her one better; while Suyana had been hurling herself into the limelight, no one knew anything more about Kipa than they had a year ago. That took a kind of quiet skill you had to be born with. Suyana admired it and feared it in equal measure; there was something thrilling about someone she couldn’t read.

(Grace

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