Page 15 of Poster Girl

“How convenient that you never let us remove them,” she says. “Even though you made them illegal for everyone else.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“You’re thegovernment,and you couldn’t find her,” she says. “What makes you think I can?”

“I’m an administrator, not an investigator,” he says. “I wasn’t authorized to dedicate that much time to this. You, however... have all the time in the world.”

She hears a door opening down the hallway—Mr. Teed leaving for his afternoon walk. He tips his hat to her and ambles toward the stairwell.

Nikhil said this was a gift. Nicole saw it that way. She was so relieved when she was approved for release that she burst into tears. She debated her new alias for days.Do I look more like a Victoria or a Rebecca?She talked about how she’d always wanted to live in Portland, anyway; how she didn’t mind working at the new Phillips factory at all, better to do menial labor than wear away at time in the Aperture.

But Sonya’s future feels blank. A wall of white light.

“Tell me,” she says. “Why should I want what you have?”

“Excuse me?”

“You come in here in secondhand clothes”—she’s only guessing by the uneven stitching on his shirt, mended by unskilled fingers—“with a thankless job as a Triumvirate lackey, and no wedding ring on your finger, and you tell me I should want to be free of this place. Well—for what? What will I get out there? Heckled in the street by people who recognize me from a decade-old poster? A job at a factory? What?”

He presses the paper flat to the countertop between them.

“You are...” He laughs a little. “You are a fucking piece of work, you know that? You want to stay here and eat cold beans out of a can and watch some old people die one by one? Be my guest.”

He picks up his glass and drinks the last of his water. Sonya looks down at the paper on the countertop.

Written at the top of it is a name:

Grace Ward

Beneath it is a photograph of the Wards, black-and-white and grainy. They stand shoulder to shoulder in front of a white wall. Mr. Ward is tall and thin, and Mrs. Ward is small and stout. Both look like people who smile easily, the lines in their faces still shaped by mirth, though neither is smiling here. There’s no photograph of Grace.

Alexander slams his glass down, and walks around the countertop, toward Sonya and the door.

“All right,” Sonya says.

She stares at the name at the top of the page.

“All rightwhat?” he says, scowling at her.

“I’ll do it.” Grace’s address, her date of birth, a description of her appearance, are all written on the paper. Sonya folds it in half and tucks it into her back pocket, then steps to the side to clear a path for Alexander to leave.

“Are you... What?”

“I’m not sure how to make it much clearer for you. I accept your offer.”

“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “I’ll... leave your pass at the guard station. You can pick it up tomorrow morning.”

His fingers skim the wall on his way to the door, tracing faint lines in the whitewash. There’s powder on his fingertips when he pulls them away. He turns back to her once he’s in the hallway.

“What changed your mind?” he says.

“Well,” she says, “do they still make those butter cookies? You know, the ones that come in that red packaging with the little dog on it? They were shaped like bones.”

“Arf’s. Packaging’s blue now,” he says.

“Yeah, those. God, I miss those,” she says.

She closes the door between them.

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