Page 81 of Poster Girl

Sonya notes, in the back of her mind, that Alexander has been gone a long time. She gets up, and moves toward the kitchen.

“Can I have some water?” she says.

“Let me,” Naomi says, coming to her feet. But Sonya is already standing in the kitchen, between Naomi and the gun that’s leaning against the wall. Naomi frowns at her. Sonya frowns back.

Alexander steps into the doorway.

“There is a room upstairs with a very heavy, very locked door,” he says. “Maybe you could give us a tour?”

Sonya and Naomi both move at the same time. Sonya gets to the gun first, grabbing it by the barrel. Naomi gets a hand on it and tries to wrench it from her grasp, but Sonya is young and strong; she holds onto it, swinging the other woman around so her shoulder slams into the wall. Naomi lets go, grabbing her shoulder in pain, and Sonya turns the gun around to hold it the way Naomi did. She points it at Naomi, holding it up to her eye so the other woman is staring down the barrel.

“You don’t know how to use that,” Naomi says.

“You know, it’s really not that hard to figure out,” Sonya says. “Worse comes to worse, I can still bash you over the head with it.”

It’s startling, actually, how easy it is. How her finger slides into place over the trigger, how the weight balances on her hand.

She says, “We came here looking for a girl. Her UIA led us here. Grace Ward is her name.”

Naomi’s face contorts. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Don’t lie to me. You told us yourself, Insights need hardware to function. Her Insight would have stopped broadcasting a signal if she wasn’t physically here.”

“If I show you what’s in that room, will you believe me?” Naomi says. Her hands are up, palms facing Sonya.

Sonya jerks her chin. “We’ll see.”

The gun warms in Sonya’s hands as she follows Naomi Proctor down the narrow hallway to the front door, and then around the bend and up the flight of stairs that leads to the second level of the house. Alexander is close at her back. She can hear his breaths, coming in sharp bursts.

The weapon is heavier than she thought it would be, and more cumbersome. After a day of walking—or after a few minutes of struggling with every ounce of strength against a man much larger than she is—her muscles are sore and she wants to set the gun down. But she doesn’t. Won’t.

At the top of the stairs is another hallway that stretches in both directions. The walls here, like the ones downstairs, are wood paneled. There are no pictures hanging, no tapestries. There were no flowers downstairs, no vases, no little figurines. No sense of this woman beyond her fondness for wires. She takes them to the right, and the doorAlexander noticed is obvious: white, unlike the wooden doors in the rest of the house, with a substantial handle and a keypad lock.

Naomi types in a seven-digit code, and then looks back at Sonya with her hand on the handle. She doesn’t look frightened, or ashamed.

Her eyes are full of pity.

She opens the door, and beyond her is a long, bright room. Everything in it is white. A white countertop wraps around the edge of the room, and there are machines positioned on top of it, black or red or gray blocks, as big as a torso, that Sonya doesn’t understand. There are racks of vials labeled in spiky script. Screens stick out of the walls here and there, dark now. At the back of the room are metal racks stacked with supplies: boxes of rubber gloves, an array of beakers and glass flasks, pipettes, syringes, boxes with labels she can’t read from here, an old centrifuge, a scale.

In the center of the room is a table, rectangular, with two rows of glass cylinders atop it, positioned two feet apart. They’re lit from beneath. The solution inside them is faintly blue. Suspended in the solution, in each one, is something small and silvery that winks in the light.

Sonya draws closer. Whatever the thing is, it’s about as big as her thumb, with tendrils hanging on the back, like the lappet of a jellyfish. At its head is something round and convex, like the lens of a human eye. She would have thought this was some kind of sea creature, if not for the circle of light at the top of the container, projected from the almost-iris.

The same circle of light burns in her own eye. These are Insights.

“You followed a UIA here,” Naomi says, “because these Insights are suspended in a solution that tricks them into thinking they’re still inside a body. I have kept them that way, for my research. I’m still determined to use this technology to grow organs that are half-synthetic, half-organic.”

An Insight, Sonya thinks to herself, as she stares at the thing floating in the liquid. Naomi said that her Insight washer,injected as a kind of tadpole into her body as an infant, where it cobbled together a larger, more mature body from the minerals in her blood. This is its adultstate, organic in shape but synthetic in color, like a child that inherited something different from each parent. It floats unmoving, as if it’s waiting—but maybe she’s the one waiting, waiting for the dread of the truth to settle into her body.

“So you’re telling me,” she says, “one of these Insights is Grace’s.”

“Yes.”

The only way to remove an Insight from a person’s brain is if they’re dead. Knox told her so. Naomi told her so.

“Where thefuck,” Sonya says, “did you get it?”

“I think you know the answer to that already,” Naomi says, in hardly more than a whisper.

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