Page 24 of Poster Girl

“I might,” Rose says. “But I’d love to hear howyouchoose to explain it.”

Sonya senses she’s about to walk into a trap, but there’s no way to avoid it. “I’m supposed to find a girl. She’s a teenager now, I guess. The Delegation rehomed her because her parents violated reproductive legislation—”

“What a fascinating word,rehomed,” Rose says, leaning forward so Sonya can see the tangle of capillaries at the corner of one of her eyes. “Because what it means is that a child was ripped from her parents because they weren’t quite indoctrinated enough to the Delegation to find favor. A cruel euphemism, don’t you think?”

Sonya straightens in her chair. Even after all this time, she still waits for the alert that her DesCoin levels have dropped, their conversation deemed Undesirable. But though the glow of the Insight continues unabated, the display remains dark.

“Have I offended you?” Rose asks, again with that head tilt.

“I went to look at the Delegation records.” Sonya’s throat is tight. “There’s no record of her existence in the old files.”

“Ah, so you’ve been there already,” Rose says. “Did you look at your own?”

Sonya thinks of the wiry carpet beneath her, the cold shelf behind her, the weight of the file in her lap. The paragraph that declared herto be docile but mediocre. She thinks of her father’s file, her mother’s, her sister’s, all lined up in alphabetical order—

All lined up in black bags on the moss—

“So you did,” Rose says, her voice softening a little. “We’ve all done it, you know—”

“I think it’s odd there’s no record of Grace Ward at all, not even a mention in her parents’ files,” Sonya says. “I know you probably don’t know anything about Grace, but I thought of someone who might. Emily Knox.”

Rose sighs.

“Yeah, I know her,” Rose says. “Pretty sure every journalist in the city does; she’s not shy.”

“Can you tell me where to find her?”

“CanI? Yes.” Rose smiles. “But I’d like a trade of my own.”

Under the Delegation, everything was quantified; everything that a person said or did warranted either a positive or negative quantity of DesCoin. But that trade was conducted with the Delegation, not between users of the Insight system. If you did something good, you were rewarded by the Delegation, not by the person you did it for; your gift had intrinsic value whether the receiver appreciated it or not. The Delegation was a straightforward intermediary, the arbiter of worth.

In her first days in the Aperture, it was confusing to barter—to get something you wanted only if the other person believed you had given them what you promised. It required, among other things, trust—that if you gave first, you would receive. Rose expects that trust now, and Sonya is not sure she can give it.

“A trade for what?”

“An interview. Just five questions, nothing big.”

Rose opens a drawer and takes out the recording device Sonya saw her with in the Aperture, a black box with a microphone at the end of it, covered in foam. She sets it upright on the desk, between them.

“Two questions,” Sonya says.

“Okay, but no one-word answers. I want complete sentences.”

Sonya clenches her hands. She nods. She wonders how much of herself she will have to give away to find Grace Ward, if it will be worthit in the end. Rose presses a button on the recorder, and it lights up from within, blue shining from the holes in the black casing.

“Okay, first: tell me how it feels to be back in the world again, after so long away from it.”

“How itfeels?How is that newsworthy?”

“I’m the one who gets to decide what’s newsworthy,” Rose says. “Answer the question.”

Sonya feels hot. She touches a cool palm to one of her cheeks. She moves to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear before realizing her hair is too short for that now, and has been for years.

“It feels confusing,” she says. Rose gestures for her to go on, and she sighs. “It’s like everyone is speaking a different language. I understand the words, but I don’t know what they mean anymore. Triumvirate this and Analog that and—none of the books are the same, the stores, the brands, thepackaging,the—You say I’m ‘back in the world’... but it’s not my world, is it?” She swallows hard. “My world is gone.”

Rose writes on one of the little scraps of paper on her desk. Her writing is too tight, too slanted for Sonya to read it from where she sits, not without leaning closer, which she doesn’t do.

“Second question,” Rose says. “Something I’ve wondered since I first saw you in the Aperture. You were getting a lot of attention there; you get a lot of attention here. You don’t seem to enjoy it. So why did you even agree to do that propaganda poster to begin with?”

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