Page 83 of Poster Girl

Faced with the array of stones that are placed too close together to be headstones for adult bodies, Sonya kneels. The ground is cold beneath her knees, and wet, and this place is too quiet, too lovely for what is buried beneath the surface. If the wordsacredreally means “set apart,” then she supposes this place is sacred, in that it can only be a place forthis.This horror.

And she belongs here with it.

Seventeen

Later, Sonya sits at the kitchen table again, a mug of tea in front of her that she hasn’t touched. She watches a spider outside pick a careful path across its web, and she thinks about sitting next to her father on the Flicker, his shoulder brushing hers as he took a plastic comb from his pocket along with a square of parchment paper. She saw him standing by an open drawer in the kitchen earlier that morning and didn’t think to question it, but he must have been preparing the paper just for her, just for that. He wrapped the paper around the comb and held it up to his mouth, his eyes crinkling at the corners from a smile.

He breathed a single note into the comb. The sound wasloud,squeaky. Everyone else on the train turned to look. A man across the aisle from them scowled at her with bushy eyebrows. August sang “Our Hollows”—another Delegation song—into the comb, and she let out a high giggle.

She remembers that his hands were gentle as he tipped the Sol into his palm, and he didn’t fumble with the cap on the bottle. There was such ease in him, even at the end. Even as he gave his daughters poison to swallow.

The string from the tea bag is wet, and sticks to the mug. She leaves it there and walks through the living room, running her fingers over the wire-vines dangling over the shelves, the multicolored plugs with multipronged ends. She goes upstairs, and at the end of the hallway that feels like a coffin, she can hear Alexander and Naomi sweeping up glass in the laboratory.

“...tell you why?” Alexander is saying.

“I was interested in the Insights. Not in anything else. And I needed ones that weren’t fully developed, so it was—a mutually beneficial arrangement. He brought them to me, and I... cleaned up afterward.”

Alexander makes some kind of pressed-lip sound.

“I just don’t understand,” he says. “Why kill them? All the other illegal second children were placed with adoptive parents. Why not just do that?”

“These children were older. Between three and five years old when he brought them to me.”

“What difference does that make?”

Naomi sighs a little.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” she says. “You want to know ‘why not just adopt them?’ but the Delegation’s question was ‘why not just get rid of them?’ The Delegation got rid of a lot of people. People who were outspoken about the Delegation’s offenses, people who were undeterred by DesCoin penalties. Lawbreakers, upstarts, revolutionaries. People who were disruptive, disloyal. They just disappeared. Pruned from society to make a nicer hedge. After all, population control was also one of their priorities.”

“This is different,” he says. “These weren’t people who violated the rules, they werechildren.”

“What is a child but a future dissenter?” Naomi says. “This isn’t my logic, it’s the Delegation’s. Imagine, if you will, being old enough to remember when the government ripped you away from your parents. Imagine remembering their names, and where they lived. Would you be able to adjust to your new reality? Would you require counseling so as not to erupt into disruptive behavior in public? Would someone have to watch you constantly to make sure you didn’t return to your old home? Would you grow up into someone who was an obedient, loyal servant to your government?”

“No,” Alexander says. “I guess not.”

The glass tinkles as he takes up his sweeping again.

Sonya shifts her weight, just a little, and the floorboards creak under her feet. She walks toward the laboratory, her cover broken. The tablein the center of the room is clean and dry now. Alexander sweeps the last of the glass shards into a tray. The Insights themselves seem to be gone. If Naomi was able to recover them, Sonya doesn’t want to know.

Naomi looks her over. Blank. The same way Sonya looks at her. They’re equals, the two of them—not purveyors of suicide drugs or thieves of children, perhaps, but they’re the ones who make it possible, who make it easy.

“Naomi says she can disable your Insight pretty easily,” Alexander says. “If you want.”

As a child, she thought it was part of her body, grown from infancy just like her hands or her feet. She learned about it when she was in second grade. The teacher described it like a recipe—a dollop of anesthesia and the pinch of a thick needle, the tiny machine compressed inside it only to unfold, umbrella-like, inside Sonya’s brain; and voila, the Insight, her lifelong friend and companion, there to support her every need.

And it was that. It taught her why the sky was blue, how babies were made, what “dammit” meant, how to make cookies. When Susanna tried to trick her with a lie, the Insight made sure she didn’t stay tricked for long. It gave her music that pulsed and pounded in her head, movies that made her laugh until her belly ached. It layered history and artistry over everything she looked at.

But these days it hounds her every footstep. It was a passive observer to the attack she fought off in the Aperture, and to the end that David chose without telling anyone, and to every Aperture overdose, assault, and neglected health condition. It watched as her father stole children from their parents and orchestrated their endings. The Triumvirate could be lying in wait outside the city, planning her arrest. The Insight is now a heartless thing, a creeping feeling at the back of her neck and a constant reminder that no matter where she is or how much trouble she’s in, she’s on her own.

“Yes,” she says. “Turn it off.”

She sits on a laboratory stool against the windows. Alexander leans against the counter nearby, watching as Naomi pieces together some equipment. Sticky tabs to attach wires to Sonya’s temple and cheekand the place behind her ear. Hair-fine wires that tangle together and then bury themselves in a little white box. The little white box has a few buttons, none of them labeled with words, so Sonya has no idea what they do. Naomi attaches the box to a screen in the wall with a blue cable.

Sonya doesn’t watch as she taps away at the screen. She looks at Alexander, and tries to remember him this way, at the exact center of the Insight’s halo. She remembers running a palm down his body, fitting it around his hip. She feels like it happened years ago, instead of last night.

“Ready,” Naomi says. She picks up a different device, this one not unlike the flashlight that a doctor uses to check pupil responsiveness. At the end of it is an open circle, like the halo, as big as Sonya’s eye socket. Naomi stands in front of Sonya with it.

“Are you sure?” she says.

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