Page 17 of Poster Girl

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Rose begins. “I never got to speak with you, before.”

“I remember.”

Rose wanted to interview her along with the others. She was in the market, a recording device in hand, calling out to every young person she could find in the Aperture. She was a magnet with the same polarity, a repulsive force surrounding her. She had spoken to Sonya by name.Ms. Kantor, if you have a moment to talk about—

Sonya hadn’t had a moment.

“Well,” Rose says. “Mr. Price said I could maybe buy your cooperation with these.”

She reaches into a bag hanging at her side and takes out a slim blue box that saysarf’swith a cartoon dalmatian perched on top of theF.Butter cookies.

Sonya frowns. She doesn’t take them, even though she wants them. She can already feel them crumbling over her tongue.

“My cooperation,” she says.

Rose takes out a black device with a fuzzy microphone about the size of a walnut at the end of it. “I was hoping to write a piece about you, one of the Delegation’s famous faces, and—”

“No,” Sonya says.

“I could tell everyone about your mission, let them know that you’re trying to do good—”

Sonya laughs.

“Playing puppet for your new government on an impossible errand is not ‘trying to do good,’” Sonya says. “If you’ll excuse me, please.”

She moves toward the end of the alley. She doesn’t know where she is, her thoughts too scattered to remember the geography of the city. But she has to get away.

“Wait.” Rose offers her a business card. Her name, phone number, and address are written on it. “Just in case you change your mind.”

Sonya’s mind often feels, to her, like clay hardened by the sun, left out too long to take a new shape. But she takes the card anyway.

The city is loud. Everywhere is the shriek of the HiTrain over rails, the honking of buses telling pedestrians to scatter, bike bells tinkling behind her, beside her, in front of her, and voices—shouting, chattering, laughing, ranting voices. It takes her a half hour to understand that she is listening for something else: the shush of car tires, personal vehicles allocated only to those with the highest Desirability scores. They are nowhere in sight.

She climbs the steps to a HiTrain platform, not to ride it, but to look at one of the maps. The HiTrain was built during a push forpublic transportation, long before she was born. It’s not as fast as the Flicker, a vacuum tube train that connects each segment of the megalopolis, but it’s better for short distances. She pulls her hood low over her right eye. The Insight’s glow stands out here.

Looking at the map, she begins to remember where she is. The Aperture is in the middle of the Seattle branch of the megalopolis, where the jagged line of skyscrapers tapers off to more moderate buildings. Nearby, all along the seawall that contains the waterfront, are the neighborhoods people used to clamor to live in. It was a privilege to move away from the noise of the city center, a mark of loyalty and service.

She is just a few neighborhoods away from Washington Park, where her family lived. The piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it is in her pocket, folded into fourths. She stands on the platform and watches the next HiTrain come in, its wheels whistling on the rails. A crowd waits near the edge of the platform. Their clothes are a full spectrum of color, from neon bright to drab beige. One girl, a teenager, wears a tight bodysuit splattered with paint. Her hair is stained pink. Sonya can’t stop staring at her as she snaps gum between her teeth and bounces on her toes, eager for the train doors to open. An outfit like that used to cost a person at least five hundred DesCoin for the day—a penalty for being disruptive. Most people didn’t bother.

When the doors open, everyone piles on. They have no Insights to scan at the door, and Sonya begins to wonder ifshecan ride the HiTrain. It used to cost DesCoin. It doesn’t seem to cost anything anymore.

She waits for the next train to come, standing beside a woman with a shopping bag between her feet. Pinched between her thumb and forefinger is a paperback book. Sonya reads it over her shoulder. It’s poetry:

Do you recall that feeling

of steering your eyes away—

of steering your mind away?

The woman sees Sonya looking; she picks up her bag and moves away. The HiTrain coasts into the station, and Sonya follows the others on, half expecting an alarm to go off when she passes through the doors. But they only close behind her with a snap, and the train lurches away from the station, swaying like a boat in a wake.

Sonya stays on her feet, near the door. The other passengers settle into stained, cracked seats. A boy no older than twelve slurps Coca-Cola from the can; Sonya resists the urge to scold him for breaking the rules, to add a few DesCoin to her count. A man jostles an older woman for more space; she scowls at him, but pulls her arm tighter to her body. A woman in ragged clothing walks the aisle on unsteady feet. Sonya stares at the map on the HiTrain wall. There are only two stops separating her from Thirty-Fourth, where she needs to get off.

Outside, the city is shrouded in fog—not the heavy fog of pollution, but the mist of a typical morning. The streets are busy and there are signs of disrepair everywhere, as if nothing has been mended since the day she stepped into the Aperture. Perhaps nothing has. A stoplight dangles from a pole, precarious, its light flickering. A crack in the road has grown so wide it could swallow a man; a woman steers her child around it. The Delegation was good at keeping things tidy, but the Triumvirate, it seems, is not.

The train brakes, and a robotic voice calls out Sonya’s stop. She steps onto the sagging platform alone. She’s been here so many times—she took the HiTrain to school every morning, and to Aaron’s every other day, and to her friend Tana’s on Saturday afternoons to see C-rated movies at the theater near her house. It made her feel grown up, riding the train alone; she pretended she was on her way to work, or to pick up her kids from school.

Now she feels ancient. A specter haunting a graveyard.

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