Page 35 of Poster Girl

Her father took her on the Flicker when she was ten years old. He signed her out of school for it, telling her it was worth the DesCoin to spend some time with her alone. They walked to the station together, hand in hand, and rode the Flicker south, to Tacoma, where her grandmother lived. He sat next to her on the way, and instead of working, as he normally would have, he ignored the occasional flutter of his Insight—notifications from work—to point out different parts of the city on a map for her. The smell of pipe tobacco and soap enveloped her every time he shifted in his seat. He showed her how to make a comb into a harmonica by laying a piece of paper on top of it and making it flutter as he sang.

It’s an hour before the train will arrive, but instead of waiting inside, surrounded by people reading newspapers, she goes outside to the platform. The train tracks are straight, surrounded on all sides by concrete.The Flicker tracks were built under an old road,her father told her on their way to the station, and she can see it now, the wide stretch of land carved into the city as if by the point of a knife, the same way Babs drew her name on the side of the table in her apartment, working her name into the wood.

She takes the business card out of her pocket and looks at it again,Alexander Price, Department of Restoration.It’s a strange job for someone so intent on leaving the old world behind, a job that wraps itself around the past. She wonders if he chose it or if it was given to him as a kind of punishment, the way the Aperture was given to her. He betrayed the Delegation, but maybe, in the eyes of the uprising, he didn’t betray it thoroughly enough.

She descends to the train when the gate springs open, automatically, at its arrival. She’s one of the first to board, so she chooses a forward-facing seat near the front of the car and folds her hands in her lap, spine straight, ankles together. People move into the car and settle in. It’s a late-morning train, so it isn’t packed with commuters—there are two solo parents pushing their respective strollers, three university students with backpacks in their laps, two old men with a magnetic chess set.

The vacuum tube doesn’t allow for windows, so along each side of the train are screens for advertisements, lit up in brilliant colors. A woman tosses her hair over her shoulder, holding up a shampoo bottle the size of a finger.Just one drop does the trick!A child holds a bright blue camera up to his eye and points it at his dog.The Memory Keeper: all the feeling of analog with the convenience of digital.A man stares at a heap of dishes in his sink and heaves a sigh.Tired of doing dishes?In the next frame, his sink is empty, and he’s holding up a pill the size of a fingernail.Nourishment can be dish free withNutriNeatMeal Replacer.

A voice announces that the train will be leaving soon, and encourages Sonya to buckle herself in, as a precaution. She does, tightening the belt over her lap. She remembers the sudden acceleration from her childhood, throwing her back against the seat and making her ears pop. The acceleration is more gradual now, but she still feels the pressure against the sides of her head, the force that fights her every movement.

She looks over at the university students, taking books out of their backpacks and laughing. They aren’t paying attention to her, and neither are the chatty parents a few rows behind her, a woman with a shaved head and a man with a lip ring. She loosens her seat belt, and, watching the advertisements shift to some kind of luminous vodka, slumps down and stretches her legs out, her ankles cracking.

No one looks at her.

An hour later, Sonya is in Olympia, on Union Mills Road, a set of old, rusted train tracks behind her and a dilapidated apartment building across the road from her. The number on the building, 2501, matches the one Alexander wrote on the business card. Ray and Cara Eliot. And Cara is expecting her.

She crosses the street. The Eliots live in unit 1A. Their name is written on a sticker on their mailbox, so she knows she’s at the right place. In the side yard is a clothesline with sheets hanging from it, and a boy sitting in an old sandbox. He is too old for playing in sand—his limbs too long and too skinny, maybe eleven years old. One of the containing walls has collapsed, so sand spills into the sparse grass of the yard, wet and dark where it mingles with the dirt. The boy holds a stick and stabs repeatedly at the sand with it, poking holes over and over. She knocks on the door.

A woman answers. She wears loose jeans and a green men’s work shirt with a collar. Cara Eliot.

“Hello, Ms. Eliot,” Sonya says, her Delegation manners filling the space for her. “My name is—”

Cara Eliot gives a mirthless hiccup of a laugh.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “I used to stare at your face every morning on the way to work. Come in.”

She walks away from the door, leaving it open. Sonya opens the screen door and follows her into a cramped living room with a pea-green sofa in it, sagging in the middle where the springs have worn out over time. A homescreen the size of a textbook stands on a beat-up coffee table across from the couch. The carpet is beige and stained here and there, red and brown and blue. Cara has moved into the kitchen, adjacent to the living room, which teems over with plastic bowls and cups, pots with cooked food burned into the bottom of them, cereal boxes and cracker boxes and boxes of dried noodles.

“Ignore the mess. Have a seat,” Cara says, gesturing to the little table that stands between living room and kitchen, the rooms all bleeding together. She busies herself at the stove, where a pot of water is heating. “Gosh, I don’t know what to offer someone like you. Tea?”

“Yes, please,” Sonya says.

“It’s nothing fancy,” Cara warns her, and the words seem to encompass not just the tea, but the entire apartment, worn and stained and collapsing.

“I live in the Aperture,” Sonya says. “I haven’t had tea in years.”

“Right.” Cara laughs a little. “Almost forgot.”

Across from where Sonya sits is the door that opens up to the side yard. Through the window beside it, she can see the boy in the sandbox, still stabbing at the ground with his stick.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Cara says, when she sees Sonya looking. “Sam. We got him back last year, thanks to your friend Mr. Price.”

Sonya thinks of Nikhil when she hears “Mr. Price.”

“It’s still strange to hear someone call him that,” she says.

“Well, whatever you call him, he asked me if I would talk to you. I was pretty surprised.” Cara pours hot water from the kettle on the stove into two mugs, and carries them over to the table, setting one down in front of Sonya. “Delegation’s poster girl, inmyhouse?”

“Alexander told you I’m trying to find a girl?” Sonya remembers Knox’s insistence on avoiding Delegation euphemisms. “A girl who was taken, like your son.”

“He did,” Cara says, settling back in her chair. “He didn’t say what you needed to know, though.”

“I’m curious about how you hide someone when Insights make that impossible.”

“Well, we didn’t do such a good job of it.” Cara looks out the window at her son, blurred by the distortion of the glass. “Only made it a couple weeks before they took him.” The corners of her mouth pull down. “We didn’t get pregnant on purpose. There’s no infallible birth control. And we knew if I went to the doctor, they would tell me to terminate. I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?” Sonya says, and the look Cara gives her is all edges.

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