Page 22 of Poster Girl

“You asked me if it was some resistance goon,” she says. “And that’s what he is.”

Nikhil nods.

“You don’t need to protect me from my son,” Nikhil says.

“I don’t think of him as your son.” Sonya sweeps the tomato stems from the table and into her palm.

“How is he?”

Nikhil has Alexander’s and Aaron’s eyes, though his are watery, like he’s always on the verge of tears. She has only ever seen him cry on the anniversary of Aaron’s and Nora’s deaths. He was devoted to her, to Nora; he even took her name when they got married, a rare thing.

She thinks all the time about why Alexander turned on them, on all of them. It certainly wasn’t because his parents didn’t love him enough.

“The same,” Sonya says. “He’s the same.”

She gets up and throws the tomato stems in the trash.

Later they sit in silence, Sonya in the kitchen and Nikhil in the chair beside his bed, a pile of socks in his lap. He mends them for everyone in the building; he says it’s good for an old man to have responsibilities.

The radio is on the table in front of her. She took the plastic case off the back, so its parts are visible, like she’s doing a dissection for a science class. She has removed the worn wires and is trying to find replacements in a second radio, this one broken beyond repair, that she found in the late Mr. Wu’s apartment on the second floor.

She has her soldering iron and an array of screwdrivers she traded for a quilt five years ago. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but trial and error has worked for her before.

Sonya stares hard at the tangled wires inside the radio, a habit from a lifetime of using the Insight at its full capacity. In times past, that kind of stare would have prompted the implant to present information in the ocular display. The Insight would have taught her how to fix the radio.

But the Insight only watches her now, it doesn’t help her. She pries the plastic casing away from the end of the wire, exposing the twisted metal strands beneath it. She begins the delicate process of reattaching it to the newer radio, strand by strand, with the soldering iron.

Nikhil starts to whistle. The first few notes have Sonya drawing up straight, her spine rigid. Her hands freeze over the wires.

The song is “The Narrow Way,” a Delegation song.

“Nikhil,” she says.

He looks up.

“Don’t.”

He looks at her for a long moment, and then nods, returning to his work in silence.

It was the song her mother hummed, right before.

“Wait, wait, I have a good one,” Sonya said to David once, as they sat on the floor in his apartment. Tokens carved out of wood litter the ground between them. Lined up between their knees are five small teacups from a child’s tea set, and a bottle of cloudy moonshine that tastes like glue.

She reaches out and taps his nose and recites:

Four Delegationers sit as the world blows up.

Four pills in hand and four water cups

Count down from four and it’s bottoms up

One Delegationer sits as the world blows up.

The way they joke, sometimes, is like digging a hole. Who can go deeper, who can go darker. If you can laugh while you’re drowning, David says, who’s to say you’re not going for a swim?

This time, her eyes burn with tears. She tries to laugh, and her chest heaves instead. David reaches for her, pulls her against him. A wooden token digs into her hip. She buries her face in his T-shirt, and breathes in the smell of his soap until she steadies again.

Five

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