Page 68 of Poster Girl

“Aaron, huh?” Douglas says. “Your friend, from before?”

“Friend? Hard to say,” Sonya says. “Assigned Life Partner, more like.”

She turns to face the city. The grid of lights blurs in front of her. The air is cold.

“Fuck you!” she yells. She holds the cold bottle against her cheek, and it comes away wet with a tear. She touches her face. She hasn’t cried in years. She licks the side of the bottle to see if it’s salty. All she tastes is dust.

It would be easy to fall forward. Easier in some ways than swallowing Sol. In the moments before she almost died with her family, she worried that the pill would get stuck in her throat. That she would spill water down her front, like she sometimes did when she was nervous. It had mattered, to die without a wet sweater. To die upright and without difficulty. They said Sol was painless, but how could they be sure?

I’m glad you’re still alive,Alexander Price said, and she wonders if it’s him she’s saying “fuck you” to, or if it’s Emily Knox, or the three family members she got to say goodbye to but never quite forgave for dying, or David, because he didn’t even leave a fucking note.

Regardless, she steps down, and Douglas wraps her in her coat. Marie takes the moonshine. Renee puts an arm across her shoulders, and pulls her in close.

The next morning, she’s still dizzy from the alcohol, though all the edges it softened are sharp again. She drags herself through her morning routine, achy and nervous, and before too long she’s on the HiTrain again, coasting to a stop near Emily Knox’s apartment.

She’s here on a hunch. A memory of Knox in her kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal when the door admitted Sonya—she hadn’t let Sonya in; the door knew her, the way one Insight flashed in recognition of another.

There’s also no other place to pay her respects. Sonya doesn’t usually have bodies to grieve, so this isn’t new.

She stands outside Knox’s building, under the vines, and digs her fingers into her eye sockets to relieve some of the pressure. Her stomach threatens rebellion, but the cold air helps to calm it. She walks into the lobby, and the security guard raises an eyebrow.

“You heard?” he says.

Sonya nods.

“It’s a fucking shame,” he says. “Brilliant mind like that, gone.”

“It is.”

“Her door’s not gonna open, you know.”

“The door itself is good enough.”

He doesn’t stop her from walking past him to the elevator. She leans against the back wall to steady herself as the elevator lifts from the ground. The pressure change almost makes her vomit. The doors open again, and she trips into the hallway, swearing off moonshine.

Her heart races as she approaches the door. She pauses with her hand on the frame, sucks down a breath, then steps in front of the mechanical eye. A ring of white light around the pupil glows. The lock clicks, and the door springs open.

“Guest: Kantor, Sonya. Clearance level four.”

Sonya stands still, her hands trembling.

She steps inside.

Part of her expects to find the woman herself inside, barefoot and drinking espresso, having faked her own death by planting a bloated corpse in the water.

She walks from room to room, kitchen to living space to bedroom to bathroom, and finds them all empty. There are plates and bowls and mugs here and there, bits of food still on them. Knox didn’t make her bed; the blankets are still rumpled from her body, the pillow still scattered with long black hair.

Sonya picks up the bar of soap in her shower. There are pink flowers pressed into it. Her shampoo is apple-scented. She’s out of toilet paper, and left the cardboard roll on the holder. A bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet reads “Uptiq,” a common antidepressant. A container for contact lenses sits on the edge of the sink.

She wanders into the living area, with its wide desk and array of screens, dark now. Sonya doesn’t have much computer knowledge. Everything she knew how to do, before, was done with the Insight. She sits in Knox’s chair, anyway, and feels along the edge of the desk for the button to turn on the pink lights.

At last, she dares to touch the keyboard. She taps the space bar, and waits. Hope is a gnat. Hard as she tries to kill it, it always evades her. She hates it, and hates that it buzzes around her now as the screens flicker to life and she stares at the black expanse of Knox’s terminal.

Then her name appears in the terminal box. Well, not her name, exactly.

Hello, Poster Girl.

C:\FortKnox\directory>cd

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