Page 49 of Poster Girl

“Sometimes we do disagree,” she says. “Just the other day I had a polite disagreement with Mrs. Pritchard about how frequently to dispose of my trash bags.”

The lights shift colors. As they do, they show different parts of Eleanor’s face—the edge of her jaw, square; the corner of her thin eyebrow; the curve of her nostril. Sonya tries to piece the features together, and can’t. She wonders how a woman who wears a turtleneck to a nightclub fell in with extremists. Or found fervor in herself for anything.

“What did you do before?” Sonya asks.

“Before?”

“Before the Delegation fell.”

Eleanor taps her fingers on the edge of the table.

“I worked for a company that analyzed Insight data,” she says. “One ofmanythat analyzed Insight data.”

“Oh,” Sonya says. “I didn’t realize that work was done by companies.”

“You didn’t think the Delegation had enough manpower to watch every single person at every single moment of their lives, did you?” Eleanor laughs a little. “They outsourced. My job was to write programs that would recognize furtive movement.”

“Furtive movement.”

“Yes, people tend to move a particular way when they are trying to get away with something,” Eleanor says. “I analyzed thousands of hours of footage, consulted with dozens of behavioral psychologists employed by the Delegation, and taught the computers to recognize that movement. The more automated the Insights became, the fewer people were needed to watch the footage. The programs could simply recognize wrongdoing on their own.”

The lights—suddenly red—disguise Sonya’s flush. All those years, and she never thought about who she was speaking to when she spoke to the Insight in her head.

As it turns out,she thinks,you were speaking to no one.

“And yet these people who despise Insights... they’ve welcomed you?” she says.

“I fed a lot of information to the uprising over a period of many years,” Eleanor replies. “I thought we were going to have a true revolution. A brand-new society. But most of them were content to disable the Insights and give themselves comfortable government jobs and keep everything the same. So I sought out the people who would give me the change I was promised.”

Eleanor sits forward and folds her hands on the table in front of her.

“So you see... if it had been up to me,” she says, “you and all your little friends in the Aperture would have been killed in the street instead of locked away to bicker about garbage day.”

Sonya flinches.

Aaron died in the street. He was found facedown, a few yards away from his house, a knife in his back, and a frying pan just out of reach.

“Tell me, Ms. Kantor,” Eleanor says, sitting back in her chair. “What do you want from us, and why should we give it to you?”

“I was introduced to Bob because I’m investigating the missing girl, Grace Ward,” Sonya says, the unctuous quality gone from her voice. She squeezes her hands together in her lap as the lights shift from red to purple.

“Introduced by whom?”

“Surely you don’t expect me to remember everyone I’ve encountered during this investigation,” Sonya says. “Anyway, something Bob said about your little organization made me think you could help me.”

“And that was?”

Sonya smiles. “I’m not going to give myself away that easily, Eleanor. I have but a humble existence in the Aperture. I have nothing to offer anyone except for information. So I’m going to be careful about who I give it to. And if I give it to you, there’s no guarantee it will get where it needs to go. Which is to Myth.”

Eleanor waits for a few moments before speaking again.

“You don’t trust me?” she asks.

“Why would I trust you?” Sonya says, eyebrows raised. “I don’t even know what you look like.”

“Yet you’re asking me to trust you by letting you know the identity of our leader,” Eleanor says. “And not just you, but whoever is watching you with that... thing.”

“We both know there are ways around my Insightandways to disguise your leader’s identity,” Sonya says. “As for trusting me, well, this comes down to risk. It’s a great risk for me to trust you. It was a risk for me to even come here alone. There is no risk at all for you, in trusting me. All I want is to find the girl, get my freedom, and disappear from everyone’s notice.”

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