Page 44 of Poster Girl

“I never had access to the Insights, they were in a secure room at the hospital,” Kevin says. “My job was to make sure supply was good, make sure the logs were accurate.”

“And when they weren’t?”

“Dunno. I would submit a report to my bosses and move on.”

Marie clears her throat.

“I might know something.” She wipes her hands off on her sweatshirt, leaving streaky handprints. “I worked in the morgue. You know—with that freak Graham Carter, the reason I’m in here.”

Sonya remembers Charlotte mentioning that. The morgue is the right place to put someone like Marie—the daughter of important Delegation members, her mother the head of Education, her father a prominent speech writer, but Marie herself, unrefined, all edges.

“Met your dad a couple times, too. He used tostarea lot, just like you. Like there’s nothing going on upstairs.” Marie whistles and gestures in front of her forehead. “Couldn’t bear to look at the corpses, like he thought they would leap up and bite him.”

“Most people wouldn’t consider it odd to be uncomfortable around corpses,” Sonya says.

“Yeah, well. Most people who are weird about corpses wouldn’t go to the goddamn morgue that often. To seeGraham,no less.”

Sonya knew her father’s friends. They came over once a month to play backgammon; they brought their wives with them for dinner parties; they greeted her when she walked past their houses on her way to school. She doesn’t remember Graham Carter being one of them. It’s strange to think of her father with a life she didn’t know anything about.

She says, “You’re here just because you worked for Graham?”

“No, plenty of his peons escaped unscathed,” Marie says. “But I was higher status than they were. He told me to keep quiet about some autopsy results. Delegation sweethearts who died by suicide or overdose or whatever. Can’t have the general public find out that model citizens are anything other than perfect, right?”

“Well,” Sonya says, “you didn’t have to do as he said.”

“What a peach you are.” Marie’s mouth puckers. “You didn’t have to pose for that poster, either.”

“No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Anyway, I’m pretty sure I saw him sneak Insights out of the storage area a couple times, creepy bastard.” She tosses her sponge into the sink and hoists herself onto the counter. “Insights grow, did you know that? We inject them when they’re tiny, and they expand and wrap around the brain.”

Renee wrinkles her nose. “God, I really don’t want to know this.”

Marie snorts and continues: “You have to extract them within twenty-four hours of dying, because they shrink into themselves, like they’re aging backward. Then they can be wiped and reimplanted—they’re recyclable. Part of the marvel of them.”

She wiggles her fingers theatrically.

“But taking them out is a delicate operation, because they’re so embedded in the brain,” she says. “Still not sure how the Triumvirate figured out how to remove them.”

Sonya thinks of Knox telling her that every person on the outsidewho thinks they’re free of their Insight is deluding themselves. Maybe she’s telling the truth.

“Sometimes the shrunken ones would get lost,” Marie says. “Nobody paid much attention to that, because they’re so goddamn small at that point, who wouldn’t lose track of a few of them? Except, you know, Graham was a real nickel-and-dimer, never lost track of a single minute of my break time, was always hassling me about putting equipment backrightwhere I found it. Can’t see him losing track of anything.”

“So you think he took them to sell them?”

“Either that, or he was running some weird experiments in his basement,” Marie says. “If that man didn’t have a bunch of brains in jars somewhere before the uprising, I’d be shocked.”

Kevin laughs.

“Thank you,” Sonya says. “That’s useful.”

“I think I need to burn that knowledge from my brain with alcohol,” Renee says. “Who else wants a drink?”

As Sonya descends the steps to the ground floor a few minutes later, she thinks of her father, and whether he really had such a blank stare. Whether she has it, too. August took his time with things. Sometimes she stood by the front door on her way out just to watch him tie his shoes with only his fingertips, like he was plucking harp strings. When he helped her mother in the kitchen, she complained about how long it took him to chop vegetables, but they were always in perfect cubes. Perfect rows.

The memories buoy her all the way home. She stops in her apartment to light the end of the cigarette, and then climbs with it pinched between thumb and index finger to the roof, where the garden she shares with Nikhil sags under the weight of that morning’s rain. She checks the radish leaves to make sure bugs haven’t gotten to them, then goes to the edge of the roof and leans into the half wall. Below her is the same view she gets from her apartment. The corner store with its voyeurs; the dirty street.

She sticks the cigarette between her lips and takes a tentative drag. Fire surges into her lungs and she coughs, coughs until tears spring into her eyes. Her mouth tastes like ash.

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