Page 61 of Poster Girl

The look he gives her now takes her back in time, to the night she stayed out too late with Aaron and he tried to sneak into his house after curfew. Nikhil was awake, in his robe and slippers, and he turned on the porch light. He didn’t shout at them, just looked at Sonya, watching from the curb, and Aaron, frozen on the front steps, with such profound disappointment that Sonya wanted to wither and die.

They didn’t stay out late again, after that.

“You are changing,” he says, “just because the world wants you to.”

He turns away and moves into the living room. Sonya, face hot, turns on the faucet and sticks her uninjured hand into the cold water. She scrubs her bowl and leaves it to dry on a towel. She walks out of the apartment without thanking him.

Twelve

The next morning Sonya wakes to aches and pains and panic. She doesn’t remember dreaming anything, but her heart races anyway; she puts her head between her knees and steadies her breaths. Then she sticks her head under the kitchen faucet.

She dresses, and cooks some oatmeal, and boils water for coffee. As she eats, she looks at the sunlight glowing through the tapestry, the shapes of the buildings beyond it casting faint shadows. She scrapes the bottom of the bowl to get the last of the oats, then pulls back the tapestry and opens one of her windows.

The windows don’t open all the way, but they open enough to let in a stream of cold air. She stares down at the street below, empty now, too early for spectators or corner store customers. She grabs her knife with the taped-up handle, wraps it in a dishcloth, and tosses it out the window, aiming a few inches beyond the curl of barbed wire a few stories below her.

It lands on the broken sidewalk just outside the Aperture wall. She closes her window and pulls the tapestry across it again.

She picks it up a few minutes later, her Aperture exit pass in hand. She holds the knife in her pocket as she walks to the train station, her shoulders tense, her body wary and ready. She keeps her hood up. She stands on the train with her back to the wall. The city smears past, one building melting into another.

She gets off near the market and as she nears Artemis Tower, she’s more aware of her heart than before. The CAD proselytizer on thecorner thrusts a pamphlet at her as she passes; she doesn’t take it, and it falls at her feet. She slips on it, a little, in her haste to get away.

Artemis Tower glints in the sun like a gold filling in the back of someone’s mouth. She ducks under a vine that has fallen across the entryway, and steps into the lobby. The guard recognizes her, and waves her through.

Sonya’s hand is sweaty around the knife handle. She steps into the elevator. The leech Knox gave her is in her pocket. She pounds on Knox’s door with it clenched in her fist. The mechanical eyeball in the middle of the door swivels toward her. It blinks, and the door opens. “Guest: Kantor, Sonya. Clearance level two,” the computerized voice announces, as Sonya’s name creeps across the ceiling in red light.

Knox’s black hair is piled high on her head, and she’s standing at the window in a pair of gray sweatpants. She glances back at Sonya, and stiffens. Her eyes skip from the bruise along her jaw to the cut on her cheek to the leech in her hand.

“Oh good,” she says. “You made it.”

“I did,” Sonya says. “Thanks ever so much for the help.”

Knox smiles a little, and wheels around. Her feet are bare, and leave sticky footprints on the polished tile.

“I did tell you that you would be on your own, didn’t I? Did you think I was bluffing?”

“Why don’t you tell me what this does?” Sonya tosses the leech at her. “The truth this time.”

“What do you mean, ‘what it does’?” Knox opens the band and stretches it flat, looking at the flexible tech inside it. “It copies and transmits data. I didn’t lie to you about that.”

“Then whatdidyou lie to me about?”

Knox gives her that little smile again, and Sonya surges forward, taking the knife out of her pocket and holding it up to Knox’s throat, the blade just beneath her jaw. She backs up against the window, showing her palms, and Sonya follows her, knife still high.

“Don’t fucking smile at me,” Sonya says.

“Calm down, okay? God, I didn’t think they would even let you outof the Aperture with that thing.” She sounds steady enough, but her next swallow is labored.

“Not sure why I should calm down,” Sonya says. “You’ve been playing with me this whole time.”

“I haven’t,” Knox says. “All right, maybe I have, a little—but if you kill me, you won’t get the information you need, and that was really the point of all this, wasn’t it?”

“You’ve all but ensured that I won’t get that information!” Sonya says. “You knew that wasn’t the Army’s headquarters, didn’t you? You knew there would be no server, you knew it was a fool’s errand, so why did you send me in there? Just for fun? Make the Delegation girl dance, now that you’ve made her sing?”

“Get that fucking knife away from my neck and I’ll tell you.”

Sonya stares at the place where skin and blade meet, and wonders if she could do it. It’s the feeling of standing on top of a building: all that separates her from an ending is a moment and a choice. Like when she didn’t swallow the pill. Like when she stuck her thumb in that man’s eye. She can know herself backward and forward, but in moments like those, she’s still a surprise.

She lowers her hand, and steps back. Knox rubs her throat, pulling away from the window. She looks like a cat recovering from some small indignity, picking her way across the tile and perching on the edge of her desk.

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