Page 71 of Poster Girl

“No,” he says, looking confused. “Like who?”

“I don’t know.” Sonya taps the woman in the photograph, the one next to the water. “Her?”

“Just a friend. Ryan is her name,” he says. “That’s her baby grabbing the dog, actually.”

Sonya nods.

“I wasn’t always alone,” he says. “Mostly I haven’t been. But—no one serious.”

Alexander is still for a moment before holding up the map, folded up now so it’s only as big as his hand. He unfolds it, and lays it flat on the kitchen table, knocking over one of the bud vases. It shows their sector, the megalopolis that stretches from the water to the very edge of the forest preserve, the wilderness beyond it, the river on the other side of it that separates them from the next sector over, ruled by some other group of politicians, some other system.

She takes the slip of paper with Grace Ward’s coordinates written on it out of her pocket, and she finds the latitude while he finds the longitude. Their knuckles knock together when they find the point where latitude and longitude meet. It’s a place in the forest, near a lake, in the shadow of a peak. Alexander draws a red dot there with a pen, and folds the map so that part is facing out.

“Looks like we can take the Flicker eastbound, to the end of the line,” he says. “And then we’re in for a long walk. If we go right now, they might not be looking for us yet.”

Sonya doesn’t know who “they” are exactly. But they’re in the Triumvirate, which means if they access her Insight feed, they can piece together where she is, wherever she is. So she and Alexander need to get there first.

An hour later she sits on the Flicker in the seat next to Alexander. He stretches his legs long, under the seats in front of them. His backpack is between his knees. Together they stare at the advertisements on the bright screen in front of them. The pixels coalesce into a woman’s face.Live life without limits,she says, her smile wide and white. The pixels spray apart, and then realign into the wordsFocusil: for those who strive.

Alexander makes a face.

“Do they always do that?” she says. “Advertise a product without saying what it is?”

“It’s a medicine,” he says. “But it’s for the healthy, not the sick. Which is in fashion lately.”

She remembers the graffiti she saw when she first left the Aperture:Unmedicationfor All.She wonders if the two are related.

“Are you on any?” she says.

“I’m on one for the sick,” he says, tapping the side of his head. “Uptiq.”

“Wouldn’t describe you as ‘sick,’” she says.

He glances at her.

“Do I seem well?” he says.

She thinks of the mood score Dr. Shannon always asks her for—her constant “fifty,” the number for “fine.”Most people aren’t fine all the time, Sonya.But she is—she has to be. When she wasn’t fine, she was trying as hard as she could to make time pass as quickly as possible, and it scared her. She scared herself.

Alexander—perpetually unkempt, uneasy in his own body—doesn’t scare her like that. But there’s a lot she doesn’t know about him. Where he’s been. What he’s seen. What he wants.

“I’m all right, mostly. I’ve got friends, a job—well, up until a couple hours ago, anyway. I go on dates. Take pictures. Go on runs.” He shrugs. “But for a long time, I’d see certain things, hear certain things, and—I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.” He clears his throat. Shrugs again. “It may not seem right to you, that I would be affected by what happened to them. But I am.”

He stares ahead at the next advertisement, which is for synthetictrees that grow without light.Bring life to your gloomy apartment!

She doesn’t answer. All her words have dried up. She rests a hand on his arm instead. A moment’s touch, and then she opens the backpack at her feet to see what’s in it, just to cover the awkwardness.

When she straightens, she feels heat at the back of her neck, and it’s not embarrassment. She looks over her shoulder at the train car behind her. There are clusters of teenagers, an older couple sharing a meal bar, a few men in starched shirts, typing away on Elicits. No one is paying attention to them.

Still, she touches the knife in her pocket, to make sure it’s still there.

By the time they get off the Flicker, their car is empty. An announcement informs them that all passengers must exit here, at Gilman. It’s a sleepy place, a sprawl of low buildings, half of which were once occupied by little stores and fast-food restaurants, before the Delegation pushed for centralization in the megalopolis. Now their windows are covered with plywood. A peace officer cruises past on a motorbike, patrolling the empty buildings to make sure no one is squatting.

Two people get off the train behind them: a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a woman in shoes that snap. All of them move down the same road. Sonya feels them at her back, though they seem to be walking toward Gilman’s only neighborhood, a little cluster of houses near the tree line.

Alexander takes the map out of his backpack and unfolds it enough to pinpoint their location. He points to the wide road bisecting Gilman—six lanes across, with a gap in the middle for grass and trees that are now overgrown, splitting the pavement where their roots are too thick.

“We take this,” he says, of the road. “For a while. A day’s worth of walking, at least. Then we’ll have to make camp. Hope it doesn’t rain.”

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