Page 51 of Poster Girl

She thinks of the boy with the photo negatives pinched between his long fingers, his knee jiggling under the desk.

“I am notthreateningyou, I am reminding you that I’m not the only one watching,” he says. “Emily Knox has as many enemies in the Triumvirate as she has friends. She made a lot of bad behavior possible under the Delegation. She blackmailed a lot of people. When I tell you she’s dangerous, I’m not kidding. She obviously wants something from you now, but if you don’t give it to her...” He shakes his head. “To her, you’re disposable.”

“And you think I am unfamiliar,” Sonya says, “with being disposable.”

Alexander raises his eyes to hers.

“You think I don’t know about people who only want to take,” she goes on. “Here in this place where there are no locks and there’s nothing to lose.”

She drinks the entire glass of water in one long swallow and puts it back down again.

“There’s a one-eyed man in the Aperture,” she says. “Ask him where the other one went.”

When they were younger, Sonya and Aaron, twelve, occasionally teamed up against Alexander, then fourteen, in games of checkers.Aaron hated to lose, so when he did, he often stormed out of the room, and Sonya stayed behind to play again, just her against Alexander. Their games were quieter, slower. Sonya never touched a piece unless she knew where it would go, and Alexander took his time to think things through. Whenever either of them made a move, their eyes would lock over the board, and he was so focused, like he was staring at her through a pinhole.

He looks at her like that now.

“Grace Ward is out there, lost and afraid,” Sonya says. “Don’t tell me you don’t hear her voice in your head, sayingit’s your Alice.”

“Of course I do,” he says, his voice softening a little. “I guess I’m surprised to hear that you do.”

She’s never been aware of her own expressions—on the day of the photo shoot, she thought she looked soft and contemplative, but the result, on the poster, was a cold declaration.What’s right is right,the text mirrored in her expression. Even after over a decade, she’s still startled by the discrepancy between her insides and her outsides, how no one can see the tumult of her.

“You couldn’t find her through conventional means,” she says. “So I’m going to find her through unconventional ones. And you’re not going to stand in my way.”

He frowns, and for a moment the only sound is the drip of the faucet, the distant conversation of people at the market across the street, Laura’s footsteps in the apartment above hers, preparing dinner. Sonya looks at the apartment behind him, quantifying DesCoin right away, minus twenty-five for leaving the bed unmade, minus one hundred for the cigarette butt in the trash can, minus ten for the empty fingerprint-marked glass on the coffee table made of crates.

“Do you really care about getting out of here?” he asks. “Sometimes I wonder if you don’t have a different reason for doing all this.”

Laura is tapping her toes. Sonya can’t hear her singing right now, but she knows she must be; Laura always sings when she’s alone.

Sonya flaps an arm at the rest of the apartment. “Wouldn’tyouwant to get out of here?”

He’s still frowning.

“Whatever you’re doing, get it done quickly,” he says, finally. “Before someone with a grievance against Emily Knox notices.”

“I have no interest in dragging it out.”

He nods. Buttons his coat. Turns up the collar at the back, to protect his neck from the cold. Pushes a hand through his hair to keep it off his forehead.

“I looked up my file after the uprising, too, you know,” he says. “There wasn’t much in there that I liked. We have that in common, I think.”

He moves toward the door, but he stops with his hand on the knob. Sonya didn’t realize he had closed it behind him when he came in.

“We don’t have to believe what they said about us,” he says.

He goes. In the silence he leaves behind, Sonya can finally hear Laura singing in a warbling soprano.

The next morning, there’s a note waiting for her at the guard station on plain white card stock:

Tonight at 7 at the Loop. Don’t be late. Come alone.

“Didn’t read that one, see?” Williams says to her.

“I noticed,” she says. “Any particular reason you’ve decided to respect my privacy?”

He shrugs.

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