Page 38 of Poster Girl

It’s Williams. He’s never said her name; she’s surprised he even knows it. His hat is askew on his head, and he’s holding an envelope with her name scrawled across it in unfamiliar writing—cursive, slanted in the opposite direction to Alexander’s.

“Somebody left this for you,” Williams says. His eyes drop to the newspaper under her arm. “Reading the paper, are you?”

Sonya looks him over carefully. She wonders if he’ll take it from her.

“Maybe,” Sonya says. “Is that a problem?”

Williams shrugs, and offers her the envelope. It’s already torn open.

In the early days of the Aperture, the guards were more involved. They patrolled Green Street and Gray Street. Every time Sonya went anywhere, they walked alongside her, asking her what she liked, what she would do. No one went anywhere alone. Then one of the young men turned restless, and a guard beat him so badly he died. After that the Triumvirate came up with the nonintervention policy: the Aperture would police itself, for better or worse, and the guards would keep their distance.

“What?” he says. “You’re not technically supposed to get messages, you can’t blame me for taking a peek.”

“I suppose not,” she says. “Thank you for passing it along.”

She slips it into her pocket and walks toward Building 4. A group lingers at the gate end of Gray Street—Marie, Douglas, and Renee, passing a hand-rolled cigarette around. Marie blows smoke rings; Douglas and Renee are arm in arm.

Sonya went to their wedding, two years ago, in the courtyard of Building 3. Nicole opened one of the stairwell windows and theyleaned out of it together, shoulder to shoulder, to watch the ceremony from above.

She could take the Flicker to visit Nicole. No one would stop her. But she won’t.

“Hey there, Detective Kantor,” Douglas says to her, as she approaches. “Any news from the outside?”

Just a boy shuttled from one family to another and back again,she thinks. But she only shrugs. “Same old.”

“Now, that just can’t be true,” Marie says, the cigarette pinched between two fingers. She takes a long drag from it. “Come on, Poster Girl, give us something to work with.”

Sonya passes the rolled-up newspaper under her arm to Renee, whose eyes widen at the sight of it.

“Thank you,” she says, as if a discarded newspaper is a precious thing. She unrolls it. It’s one of the newspapers that competes with theChronicle—theMegalopolis Gazette.The front-page headline isrelaxed travel restrictions on the horizon?And the subheading:Representative Archer Meets with Sector 3 Leaders to Discuss Easing of Delegation-Era Travel Restrictions, Citing Stabilization of Triumvirate Government.

“You know, if you called me by my actual name, I might be inclined to do you a favor,” Sonya says to Marie.

“Oh, fuck you,” Marie says, but there’s no heat in it. She offers Sonya the cigarette. “Want some?”

“No, thank you,” Sonya says. “Where’s Kevin?”

“He’s got a cold, so he’s lying in bed with a washcloth on his face like a fainting Victorian maiden,” Marie says. “Why?”

“Just need to ask him about something.”

Marie shrugs. “So ask him. It’s not like our door’s locked.”

“Can you bring back another newspaper?” Douglas says.

“Depends on what you’ll give me.”

“My good favor?” Douglas says, grinning.

“What do you want?” Marie says.

Sonya considers this.

“Save me a cigarette,” she says.

Renee snorts a little, but as Sonya passes through the tunnel, she hears “Deal!” behind her. She reaches up to touch the brick with David’s name on it, crunching dried wax from other mourners’ candles beneath her soles. No one is in the courtyard today; it’s too cold for that. She steps into the stairwell and leans against the concrete wall, taking the envelope from her pocket to read the letter inside it.

Ms. Kantor,

---