Page 59 of Poster Girl

“Better?” Therese asks her, and she’s not sure how to answer.

“She’s better,” Alexander says. He has his arms crossed. “Wouldn’t be looking at me that way unless she was.”

Sonya raises an eyebrow at him. He rubs the back of his neck and looks away.

Therese cleans the cut on her hand and the one on her cheek. She glues both shut, and bandages them. She offers Sonya an ice pack for her swollen jaw, presses a few doses of a painkiller into her hand, and leaves. In the quiet before the peace officers return, Sonya looks at the metal tray on the ground. There’s a cautery pen beside it—for flesh, not for wires like the soldering iron in her apartment. A pile of gauze. A small jar.

She brings a shaking hand up to her forehead.

“How did you find me?” she says to him. “Using my Insight?”

“Can’t track you without your UIA,” he says. “But when you didn’t check in at the Aperture, I was alerted. Right in the middle of developing some negatives, by the way, which is why I probably smell like rotten eggs—anyway, I watched your feed. There was a moment, before the door closed behind you—you looked at the moon.” He takes the Elicit out of his pocket, taps it a few times, and shows her an image. It’s a still from her Insight feed. A narrow view of the street, the moon, the skyline fading into the sky.

“I went to the club you were at,” he says, “and I tried to recreate this angle. Took me a while.”

Sonya laughs a little, the narrowness of her escape sinking in. She brings both hands to her face and leans back against the gritty wall.

“Awfully nice of you to save my life, Price,” she says.

“Anytime,” he says, shifting a little.

She nods, and tears open one of the packets of painkillers. Her head is starting to throb.

One of the peace officers takes them back to the Aperture. The last time she was in a personal-use vehicle was after her arrest. After the uprising found her surrounded by bodies in a cabin in the woods, they zip-tied her wrists together a little too tightly and put her in the back of a beige sedan. She doesn’t remember much about the journey, just trees turning into houses and houses turning into buildings, just a few images of bodies in the streets and broken glass and smoke, the aftermath of the Delegation’s overthrow.

She forgot how odd it is to move through a city teeming with footsteps and voices and trains and bicycles in a bubble of silence. She stares out the window, her nose almost pressed to the cold glass, until the car pulls up to the Aperture gate.

She feels heavy with what happened, like she came in from a storm with soaked clothes. Alexander gets out with her, and she doesn’t argue like she did last time he tried to walk her home. He doesn’t touch her, but she can feel his hand hovering at her back as they pass through the Aperture gate, as if its shadow has substance.

Renee and Douglas are standing just inside with Jack, passing around a bottle of moonshine. Jack has his notebook tucked underhis arm. They all go silent as she steps into the tunnel that takes her to Building 4’s courtyard.

Mrs. Pritchard’s floral print dresses—there are three of them—hang in the courtyard, drying on the clothesline. Alexander sidesteps one to get to the door, folding his body around it.

He says, “Where does he live?”

She knows who he means. “Fourth floor.”

Her injuries are on her face, her hand, but the rest of her feels sore, too. Fear is hard on the body. She climbs the stairs slowly. His hand really does touch her then, his palm steady at the middle of her back. She smells his shampoo, grassy and fresh. They reach the fourth-floor landing, and she keeps expecting him to turn back, to avoid the awkward reunion with his father, but he doesn’t. He stands at the door with her and waits for Nikhil to answer.

Nikhil is wearing his favorite cardigan, gray with the brown buttons, and his reading glasses, which magnify his watery brown eyes. For a moment, he doesn’t even see her. He just stares at his son. They may not have spoken in years, she thinks, but Alexander is still the thing that reoriented Nikhil’s entire universe, when he came into being. Nikhil sags; he looks old and gray and tired. Then he looks at her.

“Oh my,” he says. “Come in, come in.”

He ushers her into his apartment. He’s listening to her radio. She still hasn’t finished repairing it—the wires are spilling out the back. There’s a worn book facedown on the bed. Alexander stays in the doorway, his hands on either side of the door frame, like it’s threatening to buckle and crush him.

“I didn’t think she should be alone,” he says. “That’s all.”

“Good.” Nikhil doesn’t look at him. “Thank you.”

Alexander says, to Sonya this time, “I’ll come by in a couple days to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’ll be fine.” It comes out colder than she means it to. Something like hurt passes over his face, only for a moment.

Impulse drives her toward him. She reaches for his hand. Loops her fingers around his strict knuckles. Squeezes. Lets go.

She never touched him, before. Every time she went over to hishouse, she hugged Nora, she hugged Nikhil, she kissed Aaron’s cheek, but she never touched Alexander, not in greeting, not to squeeze past him in the kitchen, not ever. It felt like something bad would happen if she did.

And maybe it will.

---