Page 57 of Poster Girl

Sonya’s hands go limp in her lap.

“I suppose I don’t know,” she says, and her voice feels like it’s coming from someone else.

“We would never invite someone there,” he says. “Just how naive are you?”

He lifts his head and nods, not to Sonya, but to Eleanor, still standing behind her.

“Please escort our guest to the holding area,” he says. “Let’s put her to good use.”

Fear prickles in her throat. In her hands. Sonya gets to her feet, and starts toward the door. The guards stand in her way, two inhuman hulks, faces hidden, clothing identical. She stares up at them, each one in turn.

“Let me through,” she says.

“Come, now,” Myth says. He’s closer than she expected; he’s standing right behind her. “This is unbecoming of a daughter of the Delegation.”

He puts his hands on her shoulders, and his dry, gentle touch makes her shudder. She doesn’t think to scream. She twists and drives her elbow toward the Veil that shields him. It is just a projection, an illusion; her blow moves right through it, hitting some hard part of his face. He yells, and one of the guards hurls Sonya to the ground. Her head smacks into the cement; she drags herself to her feet, feeling the cold trickle of blood down her temple. She is surrounded, outnumbered, overpowered, but she loses her grasp on rationality. She claws at the guard who tries to pick her up from the ground, digging her fingernails as deep into his flesh as she can manage. He brings his fist down on her face, and everything goes soft at the edges.

They drag her out into the dark hallway she walked down on her way in, and then they follow the bundle of wires into the room whereshe thought she might find the server. They’re holding her tightly enough to bruise. The bundle of wires ends at a generator, buzzing like a beehive in the corner of an alcove. Across from it is a door, a room; the guards muscle her into it, and shut it behind her.

The room is small and empty except for a steel table. It looks like it used to be a storage closet; there are bolt holes, faded lines on the walls where shelves were. It smells like mildew. There’s broken glass swept into the corner in a pile of dust. A cloudy window no larger than Sonya’s head lets in yellow light from the street. She left her jacket behind on the sofa, so she’s cold, trembling.

Once the shaking starts, it overtakes her, arms, chest, legs shuddering with terror. She doesn’t know what they’ll do to her here, but she knows it will be bad, she knows it won’t end with Grace Ward’s UIA and the relative comfort of the Aperture. She curses Knox, ripping off the cuff and hurling it at the wall before sinking into the corner, her hand against her throbbing jaw.

“Price,” she says, out loud, hoping he’ll somehow hear her, that he’s listening at this exact moment. “Alexander, if you’re listening, please help me.”

But even if he’s listening, he won’t know how to find her.

Eleven

The chill hasn’t yet settled into her skin by the time they return: both guards, as indistinguishable from each other now as they were before, Eleanor, and Myth. All with their Veils in place, the same iridescent sheen four times over. Sonya stands, still wedged into the corner.

“You don’t have to keep me here,” she says. “I haven’t seen anything important, I’m nobody, you can just let me go and nothing will come of it, you don’t—”

“Please.” Myth holds up a hand. His palm is bright pink. “I am not here to listen to you plead your case. I am here to find out how we can contact Emily Knox and let her know that you are here. Perhaps she will agree to a trade.”

Sonya doesn’t expect to feel hope. She knows Knox, knows the disdain she has for Sonya, for everyone in the Aperture. And she knows people, too; knows enough to have stopped believing in them a long time ago, knows the allure of comfort and safety is like a fishing hook through the lip, dragging a person through life. But as it turns out, hope lives inside her, a pilot light not yet gone out. Maybe Knox is more than Sonya assumes, maybe she’s grown to like Sonya more than she thought, maybe—

“She lives in Artemis Tower,” Sonya says. “Near the market.”

“Very good,” Myth says, his voice soft, soothing. “Now, I know Ms. Knox well enough to understand that she needs more than the mereawareness of you being here. She needs that awareness to become concrete. Which is why we will be sending her your eye.”

“My eye,” Sonya repeats.

“Well, we can’t fully remove your Insight here without causing significant brain damage, but your eye is symbolic enough,” Myth says. “Don’t worry, there will be a sedative.”

Myth walks out of the room, followed by the guards, one by one. Eleanor pauses before passing through the door and drops something on the concrete, almost like she’s tossing it out the window. It’s a metal canister about the size of an apple.

She leaves, and closes the door behind her. The canister springs open, and white vapor spills into the room like the early morning fog. Sonya stares down at it for a moment. She feels her heartbeat in her throat, so fast and strong she feels for a mad moment like she might taste it, and then she covers her mouth and nose to keep herself from breathing in whatever this gas is.

Her lungs burn, her eyes burn. She’s desperate to scream but has to keep herself silent. She sinks to her knees on the cement floor, in pain, in terror, desperate for air and desperate to stop needing it.

In the end, she drops her hands with a strangled cry and gulps fog into her lungs.

The effects are immediate. Sonya’s mind empties. Her muscles go slack. She stares at the opposite wall and sees the bright halo of the Insight. When the door opens again, she’s transfixed by the luminous Veil on Myth’s face. It reminds her of a soap bubble. She knows—distantly, as if in a dream—that she should feel something. But she’s a drained water glass, a well gone dry.

“Sonya?” Myth says. “How do you feel?”

She just looks up at him. Nothing comes to mind.

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