26. Morning
MORNING
MARINA
Marina woke up before anyone else did—to be more accurate, her stomach woke up and she woke up afterward.
She raced to the bathroom with overwhelming, sudden nausea. She got sick, quietly, and flushed. The water was working, thankfully. She wiped her brow with her wrist until her watch caught her eye. The date was at the top: it was the sixth.
The sixth of the month.
She sat back on her heels on the cold tile and made herself breathe. In the flat, someone's alarm hadn't gone off yet. She had maybe twenty minutes before Giovanni started the coffee machine's death rattle in the kitchen, before Aya's door opened, before she had to have a face on.
She counted backward. She always counted backward — it was a habit from work, from timelines, from when did the badge log show him entering, when did the camera feed drop. Twenty-eight days was the number she used, the number every pamphlet used, the number that had governed her body.
She counted, and counted again, and got the same answer both times.
There was only one week in the whole span that mattered.
It wasn't a wide window. It wasn't a window she could blur or round off or misremember her way out of.
It was a single, specific run of afternoons in a room with no windows, and she knew exactly which afternoons, because she'd logged the frequency sweeps herself, dated them, initialed them, filed them where anyone with clearance could pull them and lay them end to end.
If it comes to that. If anyone ever needs to reconstruct it. There is already a paper trail.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, like she could keep the thought from climbing any higher.
She washed her hands slowly and watched her reflection in the mirror, drying her hands by pulling her hair back from her face. She still looked the same. She checked her silhouette. She still looked the same.
It couldn't be true, but her period was a week late, and if she wasn't mistaken, she'd just had morning sickness.
She pulled down her pajama shorts, baring the lower half of her belly. No change. Nothing.
It wasn't until later that she knew.
She thought, with the flat practicality she used for everything else, I could just find out. And then, in the same breath, dismantled the thought piece by piece, the way she'd been trained to dismantle any plan before she committed to it.
There was no pharmacy she could walk into.
There was no clinic she could walk into either — not without Miss Park or Miss Wu logging the destination, not without a doctor here reporting straight up a chain she had no way of tracing, not without the word foreigner attached to whatever result came back, in a building where results like that had a way of becoming someone else's problem to solve.
She thought of Brussels, uselessly — a test bought at a corner pharmacy with her own cash, a locked bathroom door, five private minutes.
She thought of Esmee, and discarded that too, fast, the way she'd discard a dropped weapon on a range — get it out of reach before she talked herself into picking it back up.
Esmee collected tells. Esmee would collect this one and turn it into leverage, or worse, into something she felt obligated to report, and Marina did not yet know which of those two things worried her more.
She got a glass of water, and drank. Then poured herself another, and realized: she had a deep-down body thirst that she'd never felt before.
She poured herself a third glass and it went down easily, too, and she stood at the sink with the glass empty in her hand and let herself, for exactly as long as it took the tap to stop dripping, be afraid.
The timeline was the problem. Her passport carried an exit stamp with a date on it, an EU medical file indicated she was not pregnant when she left.
The baby’s age was easily determined by sonogram.
The dates were irrefutable. Anyone who cared to do the arithmetic could point to one country, one building, one room with no windows.
No. She’d have to tell them that the father was Giovanni, even if he and Aya protested. Or Sven, who had been in an apartment alone with her, just once.
She sighed. The entire team was going to hate her.
She had spent her whole career teaching people how not to leave a trail. She had just become the trail.
Outside, Pyongyang was waking up. A streetsweeper on foot was brooming the edges of the road, unhurried, the same three meters he probably swept every morning at this hour, the kind of consistency she used to find reassuring in a city and now found unbearable.
She saw herself reflected in the glass, and stared at it. She wasn't just thirsty. She was bone-deep thirsty.
A car pulled up along the road and parked out front. Ri was driving, Miss Park and Miss Wu were in the back.
Ri.
She downed the rest of the glass and set it down without a sound, the way she'd learned to set everything down here — carefully, like the room was listening, because it was.
She'd tell him. She'd watch his face when she did, because his face was the only instrument she had left that she trusted completely. But if this was real, it changed everything, and there was no version of everything that ended somewhere safe for either of them.
She went to get dressed.