Page 70 of Poster Girl

He doesn’t actually look that much like Aaron, she thinks, and maybe she only thinks that because it’s been so long since she’s seen Aaron’s face. His features are harsher, longer. Time has sharpened him—sharpened her and Alexander both.

He moves closer, and so does she. The street is empty except for the guard at the Aperture gate and the man working the counter at the corner store. They’re in a pocket of silence.

“The Triumvirate,” he says, “has officially revoked their offer.”

The words settle inside her. Not heavy, exactly, but strange. “Oh.”

“They’ve commanded you to return to the Aperture now,” he says, “where you’re to stay for as long as it exists.”

“Did they give you a reason?”

“They said it’s time to move on. They’ll be eliminating my department entirely, and reassigning everyone,” he says. “I think it’s pretty clear now that whoever wants to stop us from finding Grace Ward is working for them.”

She nods. She looks at the gate, the interlocking segments closed now. She hears what he said again, and it sounds new this time.

“Working forthem.” She looks up at him. “Notus?Didn’t they reassign you?”

“No, I’ve been fired, actually.”

“Fired.”

“Well, I argued with them,” he says, “and I may have become insubordinate. And I may have purged all your Insight data from the system so they can’t use it against you later.” He tilts his head. “Don’t worry, I kept a copy.”

She thinks this should scare her, or upset her. The hope of freedom is gone. Knox is dead. Whoever wants her to stop, to leave Grace Ward alone, is desperate and powerful.

But she feels steady. She knows what she’s doing. She knows where she’s going.

“Do you have a map?” she says. “Of our entire district, woods and all?”

One of his thick eyebrows pops up. “Yes.”

“Good,” she says.

“Are you—you know where she is?”

She likes the light in his eyes when it dawns on him. She nods.

“Knox held up her end of the deal,” she says. “I’d understand if you don’t want to come, if you just want to be done with all this and go back to your life, but—”

“I’m coming,” he says. “I’m not done, Sonya.”

She likes, too, the way his voice softens over her name. She smiles alittle, and together they walk away from the Aperture gate, and toward the HiTrain.

Alexander’s apartment, located just one stop away from hers, is a cramped place full of objects. He collects things: chess pieces litter his bookshelf, little glass figurines decorate the table by the door, a cluster of bud vases with dried flowers sticking out of them populates the middle of his dining room table. Picture frames cover his walls, but the photographs are all buildings: grids of windows, the hexagon-within-diamond-patterned face of the King County Administration Building, where he worked, the stacked stripes of the Space Needle’s squat belly. His bookshelves are full of cameras, old and dusty, new and polished, some in-between.

She stands still while he busies himself grabbing two empty backpacks from his hall closet, full of hangers with no coats on them; going into the kitchen to collect a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter; burying his head in his chest of drawers in pursuit of sweaters. While he packs, Sonya wanders into the kitchen, which has the grimy feeling of a place that will never be clean, no matter how many times a person scrubs it. The countertops are white Formica, with circles burnt into it here and there from hot pans. There are photographs on the refrigerator, too: groups of people laughing, or smiling at the camera with their arms around each other; a woman at the water’s edge, in sunglasses; a baby holding a dog’s tail in his fat little hand. She never thinks about Alexander Price having friends, or a girlfriend. She spends her time at odds with him instead.

She came into the kitchen for a reason. Sonya opens one of his drawers and finds measuring cups and spoons, a spatula, a garlic press. She opens another one and finds a paring knife in a plastic sheath. She slips it into her pocket.

Knox is dead. It doesn’t hurt to have a knife.

Alexander walks in and offers her a backpack. It’s full, but not stuffed. She settles it over her shoulders, and he hands her a hat, a pair of gloves, and a pair of sunglasses that slant up at the corners.

“Cat eyes, huh?” she says.

“Old girlfriend left them here,” he says. “As well as a couple bras I don’t have a use for, aside from maybe—slingshots?”

“Interesting idea,” she says, as she puts the sunglasses on her nose. “Do you need to let anyone know you’ll be gone?”

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