Page 33 of Poster Girl

“But she probably didn’t have an Insight if she was illegal.”

“Oh, she must have had an Insight,” Knox says. “When Insights lock on each other, they register each other’s presence—but they are also designed to search out human faces, and to detect human voices.Even if you can tend to an infant blindfolded, you can’t keep them silent for three years.”

Knox’s glass has a layer of water in it now, from the melted ice cube. She tips it back, swallows.

“It’s time for you to go, Ms. Kantor,” Knox says. “I’d like to have another drink without the phrase ‘The Narrow Way’ rattling around in my head, thanks. I’ll get in touch with you if I find anything on this.”

She doesn’t say how, and Sonya doesn’t ask. Knox tucks the silver device into her pocket, unplugs the headphones, and tosses them at Sonya. It’s a dismissal.

Everything inside the HiTrain car is bathed in greenish light. Most of the seats are occupied, but the car is quiet, full of people with heads bowed toward their Elicits; people leaning against the glass barriers with eyes closed; people with books held between thumb and pinkie; people with slumped posture and scarred hairlines. The only two seats available are side by side, so Sonya and Alexander sit with their shoulders brushing together every time the car sways, and she pulls her arms in, squeezing her hands between her knees.

He taps his fingers, pinkie, then ring finger, middle, index, and thumb, in a ripple.

She always got to the Price house early on Wednesdays, before Aaron got home from soccer practice. When she did, she went straight upstairs to wait in his room for him—usually posed on his bed, her head angled just so, so he’d tell her she looked like a painting. But she could never stop herself from slowing down as she passed Alexander’s door, where he inevitably sat at his desk, hunched over his homework. One night, though, she saw him with photo negatives. Each strip of them, acquired at vintage stores and donation centers, cost fifty DesCoin—the Delegation didn’t reward nostalgia. Alexander had stacked them on his desk, and one by one he held them up to his task lamp.

He noticed her standing there, watching.Want to see,he asked her, almost like it wasn’t a question. She stepped into his room, over the soft blue carpet. It smelled like orange—there was a peel in the trashcan. She took one of the negatives from him and held it up to the light, closing her right eye so the Insight’s light wouldn’t interfere. She saw a collection of aluminum cans in one, a man and woman with their arms wrapped around each other in another, a dog with its tongue curled around its nose in the third. And beside her, Alexander sat with his fingers tapping, waiting to hear what she said.

Each one’s a world,she said, because it sounded like it might be profound. She wanted to steady his hands.

When she thinks of it now, after everything he did, she feels uneasy, like she might be sick. She tries not to bump him with her knee.

No one on the train speaks to her, but everyone looks at her, their attention drawn by the glow in her right eye, the glow that once assigned value to every choice. Now those small choices—posture, the length of a stare, the activity one chooses to pass the time on the train—are empty of value, and the people are ruled by whim instead.

She never wanted to be rid of the Insight, before. Before the uprising, it was like a friend, one who kept her from getting too lonely. She spoke to it sometimes, knowing it couldn’t read her thoughts; told it benign secrets, like how much she loved the smell of pipe tobacco and how stupid Aaron made her feel when he talked politics and which people at school she sometimes thought about kissing. She told herself it understood her private indiscretions, the way she cursed to herself when she was alone in her house and made a mistake, the urge to touch herself when she couldn’t fall asleep, the smug feeling of seeing the billboard of her own face on the way to school every morning. It knew her during a time when she was desperate to be known.

But now all it does is watch in silence. All the Insight does is make people stare at her.

The car empties as they go. As soon as another seat opens up, Sonya comes to her feet, rearranges her coat around her, and moves away from Alexander. She thinks it will be a clear enough sign. But when her stop comes, he gets off the train with her.

“I didn’t realize you lived so close to the Aperture,” she says.

She doesn’t move toward the stairs.

“I don’t,” he says. “But it’s dark, so I’m going to walk you there.”

“Go home, Alexander.”

“You don’t have to be so—”

“How many times do you want me to debase myself in front of you?” she demands. “How many times will be enough?”

His hands are tucked in his pockets. His skin glows orange under the lights on the platform, which flicker a little as she waits for his answer. He seems stunned.

Finally, he clears his throat and speaks:

“I’ll get you the contact information of one of the families that’s been reunited with their child. I’ll leave it for you at the gate.”

She’s tempted to ask what changed his mind, what made him think that her face will no longer be a torment inflicted on people who have already suffered enough, as he suggested earlier. But she doesn’t. She leaves instead, turning toward the steps and descending, cold air rushing into the worn spots in her shoes. Her socks are damp, and she makes a plan: leave her shoes by the door, hang her socks on the clothesline in the bathroom, wrap herself in the quilt that covers her bed, sleep until morning. Maybe she’ll be lucky and Nikhil will have left food in her kitchen; maybe tonight is the night he decided it was time to open a can of chicken soup instead of beans or corn or peas.

The streets are empty and dark on the way to the Aperture, and her Insight lights the way.

Seven

Sonya sits at Mr. Nadir’s table with the radio again. Charlotte is playing cards with Nikhil, a slow, sedate game that requires a firm grasp of strategy. Sometimes minutes go by without either of them taking a turn. Sonya lines up the wires she’s ripped from the radio and stripped of their plastic casings. Charlotte is humming, but it’s not a Delegation song—it’s something older, probably classical.

Everyone in the building has something that everyone else wants, and Charlotte’s is a music player. It plays digital files, stored on little devices like the one Alexander played Grace Ward’s voicemail on earlier. Charlotte has spent years acquiring as many of them as she can, and every month the other residents gather in her little apartment and make requests. Each of the old devices has a name—Johnny, Margot, Belinda, Pete, the list goes on. Charlotte’s favorite is Margot, which holds an impressive collection of orchestral music recorded by the Sea-Port Symphonic. Sonya’s favorite is Katherine, an eclectic collection of genres, most of them harder-edged. No one else ever wants to listen to Katherine, but Charlotte lets her in sometimes to listen to it by herself.

“I wonder if there’s anyone in the Aperture that could help you,” Nikhil says. “Someone who worked in Insight assignation, perhaps—maybe they sold Insights on the sly.”

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