Page 54 of Poster Girl

There’s symmetry here, too.

She walks back to the Loop empty-handed. The tech hidden in her wrist cuff is a Remote Magnetic Resonance Duplicator—or “a leech,” as Knox calls it. When Sonya finds the server that houses the Delegation’s data—and Knox assures her it will be obvious, because the power supply required to maintain it will be conspicuous—she’ll unbutton the wrist cuff, and press it flat to part of the server. Once it’s in place, it will take days, perhaps weeks, to transmit everything—but if she’s stealthy enough, the Army won’t know anything about it until it’s too late.

She bided some time in Knox’s apartment, and some wandering the city streets, walking down the aisles of grocery stores to look at the things she couldn’t buy, wandering through an Elicit shop to see all the flat screens with their multicolored cases, some iridescent, some glittery, some studded with metal. The world is full of new things that look old: printed books and piles of newspapers, the Insight’s functions fragmented into half a dozen devices, cameras and keyboards and music players.

On the way to the Loop, she listens. To the distant blare of train horns. To the snap of shoes on wet pavement. To the dry screech of bicycle brakes. To a low voice humming somewhere behind her. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of the jacket and feels something in the right one. A slim, papery thing. She takes it out, lets the light of her Insight wrap around it. A cigarette. An old one, stored in the pocket for safekeeping.

She stands in front of the nightclub. The sign is in pink neon, a strip of light meant to look like a thread curling around itself—a literal loophole. It disappears around the edge of the building. It’s seven o’clock, which means it will take an hour before the guard at the Aperture realizes she hasn’t checked in after twelve hours, as she’s supposed to, and contacts Alexander. She takes her hands out of her pockets and waits.

She recognizes Eleanor only by the incongruity of her conservative clothes and the Veil shimmering across her face. She’s with twoothers—men, judging by their build, their clothing nondescript, their faces also shielded. Eleanor doesn’t greet her, she just shoves a circlet into Sonya’s hands and says, “Put it on.”

Sonya crowns herself with the circlet, and when her hands leave it, it activates automatically, the Veil draping across her face. It is not the same gossamer as the one that covers Eleanor and the others; it is opaque, a wall of darkness that obscures her vision. She puts her hands up to her head to remove it, and Eleanor grabs her wrists instead.

“Did you think we were just going to let you see where our headquarters are?” Eleanor’s breath is sharp with alcohol. “Leave it on, or the meeting is off.”

Sonya takes her hands away from the circlet. Eleanor grabs her by the elbow and turns her, once, twice, like they’re dancing. Sonya tries to hold fast to the layout of the street in her mind, the pink glow of the Loop’s sign, the dark warehouses that surround it. Eleanor tugs her to the right, and she stumbles along, splashing through a puddle. The chatter of people outside the nightclub fades into echoes. She feels the heat of the two men behind her, their footsteps hounding hers. The sounds of the city are muted here, the HiTrain just a whisper, the bicycles and footsteps and tinkling of opening shop doors absent.

“Curb,” Eleanor says, and Sonya trips over it. They’re on a sidewalk. Eleanor’s hand is firm around her arm. The leech squeezes Sonya’s wrist. She tries to steady her breath—it’s too loud, coming in sharp bursts. A betrayal of her body, the ferocity of an hour ago lost behind the Veil.

They walk through a doorway. Sonya hears the door open, feels the air change as she moves into a building. As Eleanor takes the circlet from Sonya’s head, she looks over her shoulder and sees a sliver of the street as the door closes, the moon high, the city skyline muddy against the ever-darkening sky. She’s in a wide hallway with a cement floor. The walls are rough brick, crumbling, with sloppy mortar. The windows behind her are blacked out by paint.

There’s a light above them, a single bulb hanging from a high ceiling, and far ahead of them, lines of light outlining a doorway, but between the two is darkness. Eleanor turns to her.

“Feet apart, arms out,” she says. When Sonya just stares at her, she makes an impatient noise. “I’m not risking you bringing weapons in here.”

Sonya stretches out her arms and Eleanor runs her hands over Sonya’s body, kneeling first to feel around her ankles and up her legs. Sonya feels her heartbeat in her throat, in her cheeks; the leech is right there on her wrist, pressing into the bones. Eleanor skims Sonya’s sides, her arms, and feels the pockets over Sonya’s belly. When she gets to the wrist cuff, she runs her fingers over it, but doesn’t give it another look.

Eleanor gestures for Sonya to follow her, and she does, with the feeling of plunging into a void. The silent men behind her walk just a little too close, within reach. A thick bundle of cable runs along the side of the hallway, and Sonya thinks of what Knox told her about the server’s power supply. The bundle of cables disappears into a room just off the hallway, but she can’t follow it and she isn’t sure why she ever thought she would be able to; she’s hemmed in on all sides; she was a fool to think that years living in the chaos of Building 2 had prepared her for this.

Eleanor opens the door at the end of the hallway, and what lies behind it isn’t what Sonya expects. It’s a wide, cavernous space with the same brick walls as the hallway behind her, but it’s stuffed full ofthings.Stacks of books; tables full of old record players, which Sonya recognizes only from history texts; television sets with busted screens as thick as her torso; piles of calculators, bowls of car keys, crates full of hair dryers, vacuum cleaner tubes, headphones that are more like helmets. Almost everything still looks grayish, speckled with dust too caked on to clean. In the corner of the room is a rug made of animal skin with a head at one end—a bear with a snarling snout. On top of it are sofas clustered around a heater. If Knox’s apartment is a shrine to her love of recent technology, this place is a shrine of the opposite—every inch of it betrays a reverence for what came before.

It looks like Sonya’s apartment.

Perched in the center of one of the sofas is a slim man, Veiled, his legs crossed. His socks are bright yellow tartan. She can hear the smile in his voice as he speaks.

“Miss Kantor! Welcome. Please, come and sit.”

He gestures to the sofa opposite him. Its cushions are oversized and limp, all the life gone out of them, and patterned in sky-blue brocade. Eleanor steps away from Sonya, leaving her path clear. The man—Myth, obviously, or at least that’s what she’s meant to believe—sits casually, his arm stretched along the back of the sofa, his head cocked to the side. She sees hints of him through the Veil, not enough to know anything about him. His hands, however, betray him, creased and dotted with age spots.

Sonya sits on the edge of the cushion, her legs folded to the side. The heater in front of her is on, and a wave of warmth washes over her.

“Won’t you stay awhile?” Myth asks. His voice is almost musical, like a performer rather than the leader of an organization that regularly plants explosives. Sonya recognizes the cue to remove her jacket. For a moment she considers protesting. She feels Eleanor at her back. She worries that taking the jacket off will draw attention to the bracelet, but refusing will draw more. She unzips it, and drapes it over her lap.

“I have heard so much about you,” Myth says. “As you have undoubtedly heard about me.”

Sonya has heard almost nothing. Myth is the leader of the Analog Army, feared, but not understood. Some people seem to be unconvinced that he actually exists, and she wonders if he does, or if the members of the organization take turns playing him, each one donning the Veil and taking on a different personality. She knows that demanding to speak with him was the only way to be admitted into this warehouse. That’s all Knox told her, and she spares a moment to resent her for it, Knox preying on her ineffectuality, aware that she was unprepared for this.

“Of course,” Sonya says, and she remembers the advice to be what Myth expects her to be. “I’m surprised you even agreed to meet with me.”

“And why should I object to a visit from such a special guest?”

Despite his warmth, his lively voice, there’s an edge to the question, as if he’s testing her.

“Oh, just—because I’m carrying an Insight into your building,”Sonya says, with a careless wave of her hand. Her fingers are trembling. “It causes a stir everywhere I go these days, so I thought it would only be worse here.”

“You have my sympathy,” he says. “Everyone else in this city has the option of getting that thing removed, free of charge. But you don’t.” His head tilts. “I suppose I shouldn’t assume that you would, if you could.”

He folds his hands over his knee.

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