Page 25 of Poster Girl

“First, I want the address,” Sonya says. “Emily Knox’s address.”

“You don’t trust me?”

Sonya stares at her, hard, Insight aglow, the way she would have in the time before, to find out Rose’s Desirability score, the level to which she was trusted by the government. No number presents itself.

“No,” Sonya says. “I don’t know why I would.”

Rose smiles a little. She tears off the bottom of her scrap of paper and writes something on it. But she keeps it pinched between thumb and forefinger, waiting.

“My father asked me if I wanted to do it,” Sonya says. “My sister, Susanna, she was always better at everything—better at math, better at history. At dancing. At talking to people. Everything. So when heasked me . . .” Sonya sighs. “It was my chance to have something that she didn’t have. I was sixteen. I just wanted . . . something that was mine.”

She plucks the paper from Rose Parker’s grasp.

“It backfired,” she adds.

She stands and walks across the room, toward the glass door where she can see the receptionist with an apple core balanced on the edge of her desk, her book still in hand, the security guard still slumped against the wall near the elevators. Her face, her ears, are warm. She’s dizzy.

She thinks of the guitar pick Alexander took from her. She found it wedged between the floorboards in the living room, where Susanna liked to practice. Susanna was a competent musician, nothing special. What Sonya had liked more than the songs she played was the sound of her fingers slipping along the frets, a sticky slide.

For a moment, outside the office building where Rose Parker works, Sonya can’t remember which direction she came from. All the buildings look the same. All the people who pass are loud and sharp, wrinkled brows and nylon-covered elbows, boots splashing through puddles and splattering her trousers. She unfolds the scrap of paper, and doesn’t recognize the address. She isn’t sure if the street names have changed, or if she just doesn’t remember them.

She stands at the edge of the sidewalk, where curb meets road. Behind her is the Aperture, a rooftop garden in pots, a broken radio, a roof that leaks every time her upstairs neighbor, Laura, takes a shower. In front of her is the HiTrain, a churning sea of people moving in all different directions, a criminal named Emily Knox. She wonders if it’s as good as they say, to take out the Insight, to be all alone.

A body rushes toward her, and she flinches before realizing it’s Alexander, his collar turned up against the chill, his cheeks dotted with mist.

“There you are,” he says. “Something happened, come on.”

He puts a hand on her elbow, and she jerks it free. He doesn’t seemto notice, leading her to an alley with an open dumpster. A mangled wooden chair stands beside it, the legs twisting in all directions, splintering.

“Are you following me?” she says.

“I told you we would monitor your Insight,” he says, fumbling in his pocket for something. “The Wards got in touch with me this morning.”

“The Wards?”

“Yes, you know, the Wards, the people whose daughter you’re trying to find by consulting with a notorious criminal?” He takes a tangle of wire out of his pocket with a silver device at the end of it. “They reached out to me and they sent me this audio file—”

At the other end of the tangle of wire is a headband with two foam pads at either end, folded in half. He straightens the headband and claps the foam pads over her ears with a snap. She winces.

The cord stretches taut between them. She notices for the first time that his eyes are wild, his hair piled on one side of his head, curling into the air.

He presses a button on the device, and she remembers standing across the HiTrain platform from Aaron after school, her on her way home and him on his way to his father’s office, how he liked to beam songs directly to her Insight. The prompt would come up on the display,Aaron Price would like to share a song, do you accept?And she would nod, and the song would play, the deep connectors of the Insight translating sound into electricity in her brain, as if it was whispering into her ears. They listened together on separate trains, moving in opposite directions.

The sound in her ears now is faint. She covers the earpieces with her palms, pressing the voice closer.

“...reached the voicemail of Eugenia Ward, please leave your name and a way to contact you and I will get back to you as soon as possible...”Eugenia’s voice is low and even, a voice accustomed to soothing. Sonya looks up at Alexander, frowning, as the beep sounds, and a new voice crackles to life.

“Hello?”

It is low, too, for a woman’s voice, and unsteady, breaking—

“This is... this is your Alice.”

Sonya’s hands tighten around the earpieces, around her ears.

“They told me you were gone, they told me you were dead and I believed them, I believed them, but I saw you in the paper and I—”The voice whispers, urgent now in its quiet.“What kind of a person says that if it isn’t true, says that to a child? What kind of a person—”In the background, a door slams.“I’m scared. I don’t know—I don’t know what to do, I can’t—I have to go. I have to go.”

Scuffling, a crackle against the mouthpiece.

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