Page 48 of Poster Girl

“What if something goes wrong?” Sonya says, and Knox shrugs.

“Take off the audio disruptor and pray to whatever god you believe in that Alexander is listening in,” she says. “I sure as hell can’t do anything for you.”

“You’re a real peach,” Sonya says, repeating what Marie told her the day before.

“Aren’t I?” Knox grins. “You know, you ordered like a five-year-old. It’s embarrassing.”

“You would too, if you hadn’t had cheese or chocolate in a decade.”

Knox tips the last drops of coffee into her mouth, and sighs.

“Careful,” she says. “You’re almost making me feel bad for you.”

The nightclub is called the Loop. The name is a cheeky reference to Delegation evasion, Sonya is certain—as Knox told her, the only way to manipulate the Insight was to loop harmless footage for an hour or two. Loops meant gaps in the Delegation’s attention, which for them meant safety. But an aperture is a gap, too, and Sonya has only ever experienced it as disappearing. As ceasing to matter.

Though it’s getting dark, she wears sunglasses as she approaches the entrance, so her Insight doesn’t attract attention. The thick man at the door stops her, a hand on her arm.

“Glasses off,” he says.

She sighs and slides them off her nose. He stares at the Insight glow around her right iris, a beacon in the dark. Then he smiles in the way that some men smile when they catch a woman in a mistake.

“Go on in, Ms. Kantor,” he says. “Someone’s expecting you.”

Sonya jerks her arm away from him, and walks in. A hall of fractured mirrors greets her, each one offering a jagged reflection. She stumbles, unable to discern depth, or shape. There are just bits of her everywhere, here a dark eye, there a soft chin, there a tight fist at her side. Then a woman walks around the bend in the mosaic, laughing, another woman trailing behind her; both wear tight dresses and highboots and wide grins. They don’t pay Sonya any attention, but they show her a path.

On the other side of the mirrored hallway is an expansive space, two stories high. Everything is lit from beneath—white one moment, blue another, pink the next—and everything is mirrored. Mirrors hang from the ceiling above a wide dance floor tiled with mirrors; mirrors wrap around the circular bar in the center of the room; mirrors form curved partitions between chrome booths on the raised platform along the right side of the room. A circular bar stands in the middle of the space, and there’s a glass dance floor on one side. Sonya stands, blinking, at the sight of herself a thousand times over, a pale woman in a dark dress that no longer looks right on her.

The light in her eye, though strange, is not the only glow in the room. Some of the dancers have it in their arms, rectangles of light, Elicits buried under their skin. Illegal tech, Sonya realizes—all implanted technology is illegal under the Triumvirate. There are others wearing circlets in their hair that look almost like crowns from behind, but when they turn toward her, she sees that there is a sheen of light projected over their faces, as iridescent as a bubble. They don’t want to be recognized here.

Sonya moves toward the tables on the right side of the room. Once her eyes adjust to the light, they find a lone woman at one of the high tables near the back, a glass in hand. Her face is blurred, warped by a layer of shifting light. The rest of her looks out of place, in a gray sweater that climbs all the way up to her chin, her limp, dark hair pulled back in a knot. Sonya’s head buzzes, a reminder that the headband is doing its work, as she weaves between the tables. The idea that the Insight wouldn’t attract attention in a dark nightclub is proving incorrect; everyone she passes stares at her, and keeps staring at her after she’s gone.

“Eleanor?” she says to the woman.

The woman’s featureless face shifts up, and then down, as if she’s looking Sonya over, and Sonya remembers to be what she’s expected to be instead of who she is.

“Yes,” Eleanor says.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Lowry,” Sonya says, as she eases herself into the chair opposite Eleanor. She crosses her legs at the ankle, and folds her hands in her lap. “Thank you for agreeing to this.”

“You really do look the same,” Eleanor says to her.

“Should I take that as a compliment?” Sonya says, light as air. She smiles, as if she’s decided that it is. “Maybe time moves more slowly in the Aperture. So much has changed out here.”

“Not enough,somewould say,” Eleanor replies. Her voice is toneless.

“Right, that’s your organization’s whole...” Sonya flaps her hand at Eleanor. “Thing,right? I read a manifesto the other day. Something about Elicits, maybe.”

“Yes, it’s ourthing,” Eleanor says. “If you weren’t sure what ourthingwas, why did you arrange a meeting?”

“Oh, that was because of Bob,” Sonya replies.

“Bob.”

“Yes, Bob.” Sonya looks around the room, eyes lingering on the Elicits that glow in some people’s arms, like a window to their muscle and bone. “I wonder why you chose this place, if it’s so full of people who are not... like-minded.” She turns back to Eleanor. “Surely you do not approve of those.” She touches her forearm.

“Sometimes we must keep company with those who do not share our worldview,” Eleanor says. “Not that you would know anything about that, living in the Aperture.”

Sonya laughs. A fluttering thing.

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