Page 11 of Poster Girl

Everyone—Easton, Petra, Amy, all the journalists and security guards behind them, even Mrs. Pritchard—laughs.

Sonya reaches for a response and comes up empty-handed. She moves to the side with her stepladder as the group passes her, Nikhil squeezing her shoulder as he walks by. Journalists thrust Elicits in her direction. She recognizes one as Rose Parker, the one who wrote the Children of the Delegation article.

When the hallway is empty again, it’s quiet except for her ragged breaths.

Later that evening, she goes to Nikhil’s apartment for dinner, and Nikhil is in his robe and slippers, holding a cup of tea. Mary Pritchard grows chamomile in her apartment and dries it on her kitchen counters. He must have traded tomatoes for the tea, or green beans.

She holds up the can of beans she brought, and he gestures to the kitchen, where a pot of rice waits on the stove, already cooked. Nikhil gets out another mug and pours half the chamomile tea into it.

“I heard you had a visitor this morning,” he says, offering the mug to her.

She pours the beans into a pot and turns on the burner beneath them, then sits at Mr. Nadir’s old dining room table. After Mr. Nadir died of heart failure, Nikhil went to his apartment to unscrew the legs and carry the tabletop up four flights of stairs to his living room. By that time, the apartment was already picked over and stripped bare. Sonya put the legs back on for him—facing the wrong direction, but Nikhil said he liked them that way, so they left it.

The underside of the table held a surprise: a picture of Mr. Nadir’s daughter Priya as a teenager, taped right in the middle. During the uprising, Priya betrayed her father in exchange for her own freedom.

Nikhil and Sonya left the picture where it was.

“Visitoris a kind word for it. I would say I had anintruderthis morning,” she says. “How was your meeting?”

“Fine. Useless,” Nikhil says. He leans back against the counter. “Tell me what happened with your intruder.”

Despite the closeness between their families before, she saw Nikhil only occasionally after they were first locked in. But then David died, and one night she came home to a man waiting for her in their empty apartment. She knew him, but only in the distant way she knew many people in the Aperture. He attacked her, and she jammed her thumb in his eye socket. She didn’t feel safe there afterward, so Nikhil persuaded the people of Building 4 to let her in.

She still sees the man sometimes. He wears an eye patch now.

Sonya shrugs. “Some resistance goon was just sitting in my apartment when I got back this morning.”

“Some resistance goon.”

She hesitates a little before answering. “Yes.”

“And they offered you a way out.”

“If I do their little dance, yes.”

“But you didn’t accept.”

“No.”

Nikhil gives her a long, searching look.

“Why not?” he says.

“You heard how those Triumvirate people talked to me,” she says. “Even if I could complete whatever task they give me, what kind of life could I have out there? There was a time when my face was everywhere.”

“And there will come a time when no one will remember it,” Nikhil says. “You just have to endure until then.”

“I’m tired of enduring things,” Sonya says.

He replies, “I don’t accept that.”

Most of the time she forgets that she’s not an old woman. If grief pares a person down, she is whittled just as slim as the rest of Building 4. She belongs with the widows, settled in for a long wait. But now she sees the shadows that have collected in the lines of Nikhil’s face, and she remembers his age, and her own.

“This is a gift, Sonya,” he says. He sets his hand on her arm, gently. “Just think about it.”

She receives the notification the next morning. Her Insight’s constant light pulses, once, and then a sentence unrolls before her like a banner.Mandatory Medical Check.For a moment the words are layered over what she sees, the suds in the sink, the sponge in her hand. And then they’re gone.

It is a sensation at once familiar and strange. Her parents had theInsight implanted in her brain when she was an infant, in accordance with both law and custom. It was a brutal procedure, in a sense—a thick needle stuck in the corner of a newborn’s eye. But cultures have always embraced brutality in service of a greater good, sometimes long after it was still necessary. Immersive baptism. Circumcision. Initiation rites.

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