Page 60 of Poster Girl

He seems almost dazed. He nods to her, to Nikhil, and leaves.

Sonya closes the door and then leans against it, sighing. Nikhil is busy in the kitchen already, reheating a pot of—something. Lentils and tomatoes—canned, this time. A hunk of bread the size of her fist.

“What happened?” Nikhil says.

“I got in over my head.” She doesn’t want to tell him how, or why. She’ll only feel stupid. She already feels stupid. “He helped me.”

“Good,” Nikhil says, and he sets her place at the table.

She doesn’t know she’s hungry until she lifts a spoon to her mouth. Then she eats fast, to soothe the ache of emptiness. Placatia. An evil drug, she thinks, and she wonders how she never heard of it before. Maybe because she didn’t attend any demonstrations—just saw them come up in her Insight’s newsfeed from time to time, or heard her mother scoff at them over the dinner table.Freedom fighters, they call themselves. Freedom fromwhat,I’d like to know.

She uses the bread to wipe the bowl clean. Nikhil sits across from her, his glasses now folded in front of him.

“Do you ever...” She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“Do I ever what?”

She swallows the last bite of bread, and carries the empty bowl to the sink. She stands there without turning on the water. “Do you think the Delegation was good?”

“No government is perfect,” he says. “But overall... yes. I do.”

She looks up at the glass above the sink: eight blocks arranged in a rectangular grid. The red light from an emergency breaker bounces around inside them.

“The Analog Army drugged me and tried to cut out my Insight,” she says. “The drug they used, it was developed by the Delegation. Placatia.”

“Well, that was intended for use in extreme situations, dear.”

“It’s not just that.” She braces herself on the edge of the sink. “It’s . . . the DesCoin value of tampons, or the penalty of naming your child after your family instead of Nora’s, or draining the parents’ accounts of DesCoin because their kid rebels—points for posture, points for listening to their music, points forsleeping with your spouse—” She chokes back a laugh.

“Those are such little things—”

“Thechildren,Nikhil!” She slaps the edge of the counter, hard. “The fucking children, taken from their parents.”

She chokes again, not on a laugh this time. She closes her eyes.

“Sonya,” he says. He moves closer to her, leaning into the counter beside her. “You’ve had a hard day—”

“This has nothing to do with the day I’ve had.” She scowls down at her hands. “I keep finding out things I don’t like.”

“Then perhaps you should ask yourself: is the Triumvirate better?”

“The Triumvirate has nothing to do with whether or not the Delegation was good.”

“In an ideal world, maybe not. But we are not talking about ideals, we are talking about practicality, we are talking aboutreality.” There’s a light in his eyes she doesn’t recognize. A tear leaks from the corner of his eye and spills down his cheek. He wipes it away. “If perfect systems are impossible, we must look at possible systems instead. And I would rather live under the Delegation than under...that.” He waves at the outside wall of the apartment, where the megalopolis is hidden behind a curtain made out of a bedsheet.

“The Delegation was good to us,” she says.

He smiles. “It was.”

“But it wasn’t good to everyone.”

“The Delegation wasn’t good to people who worked to destroy order and safety, or people who flouted society’s rules with no purpose,” Nikhil says. “Forgive me for not being particularly concerned with those people.”

“You had Aaron just because. Because you wanted a second child,” she says. “So did the woman I talked to the other day, the one whose son was taken from her.”

“The difference is that Nora and I went through the properchannels—”

“The difference is that those channels were open to you, Nikhil. They weren’t open to everyone.”

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