Page 72 of Poster Girl

They go to a little shop for water, sleeping bags that buckle to the front of their backpacks, and NeverFail, a brand of campfire fuel thatlights even when damp. The man at the counter stares at Sonya. She stares back.

The backpack is heavy on her shoulders. It bumps against the small of her back every time she takes a step. They start toward the tree line. Low hills rise up in the distance, rippling green clothed in mist.

His strides are longer than hers, and she has to grab his elbow to get him to slow down, breathless already and they’re only at the beginning. He obliges. He carries most of the weight in his bag, stuffed to the brim. She holds the map tight in her left hand, so tight her fingertips turn white from the pressure.

They walk for a long time in silence, until Gilman disappears from view behind them, until sweat builds up under Sonya’s arms and she unzips her coat. The mist in the air is cool against her cheeks.

“When did you join the uprising?” she says.

He gives her a startled look. “I’m not sure we should talk about this.”

“It’s just sitting here between us all the time. You want to keep pretending it isn’t?”

He sighs. Adjusts the straps on his shoulders.

“Late,” he says. “I joined it late. Just a few months before the Delegation was overthrown. I got them access to Nikhil’s work records. Everything that was stored on the Insight servers was also stored separately, in the department heads’ offices. It was easy, really. He wasn’t on guard with me.”

“Well,” she says, quietly, “you were his son.”

“Is that how he talks about me?” he says, bitterly. “Like Iwashis son?”

She frowns at him. She sees a flicker of movement in the trees, but when she looks at it, there’s nothing. A deer, she thinks, or a squirrel.

“No, he doesn’t say that,” she says. “I used to, though.”

“And now?”

“Now,” she says, “I wonder how you ever knew that what your family was doing was wrong, when everything around you said it was right.”

His arm brushes against hers as they walk. She twitches away. Her jaw aches from clenching it.

His eyes soften.

“I just felt it,” he says. “I would look up the people he sentenced, afterward. He called them criminals... but all I could see was desperation. And I was desperate, too.” He sighs in a cloud of vapor. “I tried to ignore it. But I couldn’t.”

“I never felt anything like that.”

“You did,” he says, and he pauses, touching her arm to stop her. He stands a little too close. She doesn’t move away. She should, though; she knows she should. Just like she knew that she shouldn’t go into his room, all those years ago, and breathe in the scent of orange peel, and let him show her glimpses into other worlds. Just like she knew that she should never, ever touch him. He betrayed his family. And hers.

“I know you did,” he says, his hand slipping away. “You think I didn’t see you, then? The way you listened. The faces you made when Aaron talked, sometimes. Like you didn’t like what he said. I saw that. You felt it, but you taught yourself to ignore it, because it was everywhere, because you didn’t trust yourself. Because theytold you not totrust yourself. ‘Set aside the lies that you’ve held dear,’ right?”

He frowns, his dark brow creasing in the middle. There are lines around his eyes already. He’s not a teenager playing at revolution anymore. He’s a Triumvirate lackey, a shabby thirtysomething with bits and pieces of relationships scattered behind him. She tries,triesto see him that way.

“You knew what your father was,” he says, softly. “He gave poison to his own wife, his own daughters. Do you ever think about what kind of man that made him?” His voice shakes. “Do you ever think about why you didn’t swallow it?”

She feels an answer rising like bile in her throat. But she doesn’t give it.

They keep walking.

After a few hours, they stop for a bathroom break. Alexander disappears into the woods to the right; Sonya goes into the woodson the left. She sets her backpack down and opens one of the water bottles to sip from it. It’s not quiet in the forest, or still. Everywhere, the wind rushes through the trees, making leaves flutter like confetti, and squirrels scramble from branch to branch, and birds launch into the sky.

Alexander’s question tugs at her mind. She thinks of her father passing out the pills, one yellow capsule for each of them. In her memory, it glows against her palm. He tells her he loves her. She knows the uprising is coming, knows it’s a wave that will overtake them all. Her mother squeezes her hand, one last time. She knows what the pills are, what they’ll do. The painless end they offer.

At what point does she decide not to take it?

She leans back against a tree and pulls her pants down to relieve herself. The bark scrapes at the back of her coat. When she’s pulling up her zipper, she frowns. She hasn’t heard Alexander’s footsteps in a long time.

“Sasha?” she calls out, and she moves back into the road. She creeps closer to the trees, aware that she left her backpack behind her, along with the water. “Are you decent?”

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