Page 32 of Poster Girl

Then Knox’s eyes glitter strangely, and she drags the headphones toward her, gathering the cord in her palm as she leans in to say—quiet enough to make their conversation private at last—“You know what I’ve never told anyone?”

She straightens the headband of the headphones, and drapes them over the back of her neck.

“I actually miss it sometimes, the Delegation,” she says. “Well, not the Delegation exactly, but the Insights. I was so good at Insights. I’m good at a lot of things, but they were such lovely little toys, so difficult to misdirect.”

“Misdirect?” Sonya says. She’s still trembling from the song.

“Yeah, you can’t turn them off, once they’re on,” Knox says. “It’s an extremely resilient technology. Mine is still on right now, taking in data. It’s just not connected to the rest of me; same with everyone else’s in this city.” She runs a fingertip over her temple, right on top of the scar along her hairline. “But it emits a signal. They all do. I’ve tried to tell people, but they all think I’m a little nuts. Or—a ‘radical.’” She performs quotations on either side of her face. “I think it’s more that they don’twantto believe it.”

Sonya doesn’t know whether to believe her or not either. If she’s right, the Triumvirate is lying to everyone in the megalopolis about their Insights. But she could just as easily be toying with Sonya.

“Why don’t they just remove them?” Sonya says.

“By the time you reach adulthood, your brain has developed around the implant,” Knox says. “You can’t remove it without doing serious damage. At least that’s what Naomi said.”

“Naomi.”

“Naomi Proctor,” Knox says. “My former teacher.”

If Sonya’s Insight had been fully functional, it would have given her information about Naomi Proctor, but it would have been unnecessary; every person brought up by the Delegation knew that name. She was hailed in all the history books as the one who made paradise possible, who made great strides in improving public safety, who brought them the order and safety of the Insight. She never worked for the Delegation—instead, she taught at the university.She died when Sonya was a child. Sonya’s mother took them to the public procession, the slow march of the coffin through the streets. Sonya gave her handkerchief to an old woman with tears streaming down her cheeks—an act that earned her one hundred DesCoin, just as she knew it would.

Naomi’s death cemented her legacy, made her famous in a way that slowly fading away couldn’t have. The great inventor, a brilliant light who gave her all to the Delegation.

“I was told people came to you to have their Insights temporarily disabled,” Sonya says. “But you’re saying that’s not possible?”

“Insights can’t be killed, but they can be deceived,” Knox says. “When people came to me, I redirected their feeds for a few hours—looping, we called it. The Delegation would receive some repurposed footage, which I pulled from the person’s history—a night at home with spouse and child, usually. But the person’s actual feed would pour into my own servers.”

“I’m sure that was useful to you.”

Knox grins.

“It certainly was.” She puts the headphones on, and presses the power button with her thumb. Her fingernails are bitten down to the quick.

Sonya watches her as she listens. Her eyes narrow, at first, and then drop to her glass, the ice melting at the bottom. Knox listens to the message once, then begins it again, her head tilting. Sonya can hear the door slamming in the background of the recording through the earpieces, and she remembers how Grace’s voice broke on the wordsI’m scared.Finally Knox takes the headphones off, folding them.

“What’s the name of this kid again?” she asks Alexander, the playful quality gone from her voice.

“Grace Ward,” Sonya says. “Alice is just a nickname.”

“Grace Ward,” Knox says. “An exemplary name. Worth one thousand DesCoin at least.” At Sonya’s blank expression, she continues. “Oh, you didn’t know that different names could earn different DesCoin amounts? Your parents could have bettered their scores considerably if they had chosen something less Russian and more common.”She points at Alexander with her thumb. “Like that one over there.Alexander.”

Sonya thinks of her parents arguing about tampons in the kitchen. Some things, her father had insisted, were just arbitrary, the result of little forethought on the part of the Delegation.

“I don’t understand,” Sonya says finally.

“Of course you don’t.” Knox rolls her eyes. “A name suggests anorigin.The Delegation wanted all those origins to be disguised by homogeneity. Which means that the most highly rewarded names were common ones... for a particular subset of the population, anyway.” She smirks. “Which is why your brown-skinned friend over there has hismother’sname, Price, instead of his father’s, which was Mishra, and why I”—she waves a hand over her face to indicate the epicanthic fold of her eyes—“am walking around with a name likeEmily Knox.”

Knox had told Alexander he had his father’s face and his mother’s name. Nora Price had been a diminutive woman with thick red hair worn in a braid that trailed over one shoulder; she had played with the end of it when she was daydreaming, which was often. Alexander looked more like her than Aaron had, though both of her sons resembled their father more: light brown skin, black hair, dark eyes.

Sonya remembers something she overheard at a dinner party once, about Nikhil taking his wife’s name when they got married.A good choice,their neighbor, Ms. Perez, said.It’ll save him a lot of trouble.

“So Grace Ward,” Sonya says.

“Not sure why they bothered naming her that, if she was an illegal second child,” Knox says. “They didn’t earn anything by having her. They must be boring by accident, and not on purpose. How old was she when she was taken?”

“Three,” Alexander replies.

“Three.” Knox lets out a low whistle. “Now, that’s impressive. Shouldn’t be possible, really, with how Insights register each other.”

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