Page 65 of Poster Girl

“I’m still not,” he says. “I tried to be a photographer for a while, you know—didn’t really want to work for the Triumvirate. But a key component of being a photographer is dealing with clients. And nobody wants a sullen weirdo at their wedding.”

She suppresses a smile.

“So,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

He closes the door behind him and uses the toe of his shoe to drag the other stool out from under the workbench. He sits across from her, his hands clasped between his knees.

“Emily Knox is dead,” he says.

The song plays in her head, not hummed in the rich voice of her mother, but sung in a reedy voice to a bar full of strangers.

“Dead,” she repeats.

Alexander nods. He looks at the seedlings, even now tilting toward the windows, toward the light. It’s cold enough now to see his breaths.

“Peace officers found her body last night,” he says. “In the water. There was... evidence of foul play. An investigator came to talk to me this morning; he knew I’d seen her recently. He might want to speak to you, too.”

“I don’t... I don’t understand.” Sonya closes her eyes. She can’t take the sight of him anymore, brow furrowed in concern—can’t take the way she can hear it in his voice, either, but there’s nothing she can do about that—“I just saw her yesterday.”

“You saw her yesterday?”

Sonya nods. The last sight of her—sweatpants, bare feet, arms crossed, hair unkempt, watching Sonya leave the apartment. She doesn’t know how to feel now. Knox sent her into the meeting withMyth with no regard for her life. Knox helped her, too, understood that finding Grace was what really mattered.

And now she’s dead.

“It must have been the Army,” Sonya says. “She sent me to them as a decoy so she could break into their actual headquarters and copy their data while they were distracted. They knew she sent me. They must have found out about what she did, and come after her.”

“Theirdata,” he says.

“The Delegation data,” she says. “They have it. That’s why I was—that’s why IthoughtI was going there, to steal it.”

Alexander’s fingers creep across his wrist, like he’s remembering the leech cuff.

For a while they sit facing each other, their knees a few inches apart.

“Do you know what time it happened?” she says.

“Late last night,” he says. “But they don’t know where. No one can get into her apartment.”

“They can’t getin?”

“She has an impenetrable security system,” he says. “Are you surprised?”

Sonya shakes her head. She hasn’t thought about it. The mechanical eyeball in the door seemed too cheeky to be a real obstacle, but it can’t be the only measure someone like Knox has in place.

A line appears between Alexander’s eyebrows.

“There’s something... not right,” he says. “When the Army killed in the past, they claimed it. There were...theatrics.”

Sonya remembers. “The list of a person’s crimes pinned to their chest.”

“Yes, exactly. But this time—one of the most well-known people in the tech world, the infamousEmily Knox,and they kill her in the street and dump her in the water? You don’t think this is something they would have proudly claimed?”

“Maybe they were desperate. They didn’t have time to plan.”

“Maybe,” he says. “But why? What was she working on that made it time sensitive? She already had their data—if it was just about retaliation, why not wait until they could make a huge headline?”

“She didn’t have all the data yet, the leech transmits slowly,” Sonya says. “Maybe there was something they didn’t want her to find.”

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