Page 20 of Poster Girl

“This isn’t about the time; it’s about your priorities. There’s a family out there that hasn’t seen their daughter in a decade. If you think it’s okay to—”

“What I think is that your Triumvirate doesn’t expect me to find her,” Sonya says. “So I’d better take all the time I can get outside the Aperture.”

“Fucking typical. You never even considered trying to help these people, did you?”

“Of course I did. But I also considered that the person who gave me a decade-old cold case to solve in exchange for my freedom wasn’t really interested in megettingmy freedom, he just wanted a publicity stunt that makes the Triumvirate look merciful.”

Alexander steps closer to her, and stares at her for a long moment before he speaks again.

“Empty your pockets.”

Eat shit,she thinks.You fucking asshole, you—

“No,” she says. “Get out of my apartment.”

“This is notyour apartment,this is a cell that belongs to the citizens of this sector, funded by their tax dollars, and they generously permit you to live in it instead of in the maximum security prison.” He moves closer to her, and this time, she doesn’t back away. She thinks of the knife in the kitchen drawer, with its taped-up handle.

“Empty your pockets,” he says again.

She used to think she had nothing to lose. That’s the philosophy of the crowd she and David used to hang out with, too. And they’re right—they have life sentences in the Aperture, after all; no more severe consequences await them for whatever they do to each other. They could be moved to the prison along with the Triumvirate’s murderers and thieves, perhaps, but that’s never happened, and so they think,Go ahead and watch,as they defy the rules of their imprisonment.Go ahead and stop me.And no one does, no one has.

Sonya has something to lose now. So she gathers up the bits of things that are in her pockets. The pieces of the dish she made her father, Susanna’s guitar pick, Julia’s napkin ring, the spare key to the house, August’s bottle cap. She drops them all on the kitchen counter beside her with a clatter.

Seeing those things through his eyes, now, they look like garbage. She could have found them in an alley.

He sneers a little, sweeps them into his hand, and drops them in his coat pocket.

“You shouldn’t pine for your old life,” he says. “Everything you enjoyed about it came at someone else’s expense.”

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything to anyone.”

He snorts.

“I have nothing left of my family,” she says. “That’s all I have left of them.”

“It’s a pile ofjunk,Sonya.” He scowls at her. “You want to know whether I ever went back to my family’s house? Sure I did. But I didn’t take anything they bought with other people’s suffering.”

He’s close. He smells like mint gum. His teeth are white and gritted.

“I helped the uprising burn it down,” he says.

“I...” She tries not to choke. She looks up at him. “I used to wish you had died instead of him.” She laughs a little. “God, I used to fantasize about it every night... inventing a whole world where he was alive instead of you. Where we were together in the Aperture, or where he had been spared somehow, and he was free, married to some other woman, two kids, a little house...”

She remembers the glow of the Insight against the cracked ceilingin her first Aperture apartment, a light that never went out, though power in the Aperture cut off at ten p.m.

She goes on: “Now, though, I hope you keep living for a long time. I hope you think of him every minute. I hope you inhale the pain of missing him and exhale the guilt of betraying him.”

He and Aaron had the same dark eyes. Long eyelashes. He blinks at her, and then he steps around her. The bits and pieces of her old life clack together in his pocket as he walks.

She turns to watch him go. Over his shoulder, she sees Nikhil, pausing mid-step in the hallway, a handful of tomatoes clutched to his stomach.

The two men are still, staring at each other. Then Alexander shoves open the door to the staircase and disappears.

They eat the tomatoes raw, whole, no question of cooking them. Cooking them would mean not feeling the tension of the skin giving way, and that’s half the joy of eating a tomato. They’re not the only plants ready for eating—there’s cabbage and green beans, now, and carrots and radishes, for the colder months. They tried to grow bell peppers one year, and the plants withered in the sun.

Sonya heats up rice and beans, cooked the other night and kept cold in her little refrigerator, one of the only ones in Building 4. Sonya had wondered, as she dragged the refrigerator upstairs from Mr. Nadir’s apartment, whether such an act would have earned her DesCoin—for recycling—or lost them—for pilfering from the dead. As with so many things these days, it was hard to say.

She left the paper with Grace Ward’s name on it on the table. Nikhil unfolds it and looks it over.

---