Page 84 of Poster Girl

Sonya nods, and Naomi bends at the waist, then holds the device over Sonya’s eye. She clicks a button on the handle, and there is a pulse of red light.

The halo disappears. Sonya startles, and brings a hand up to her eye to rub it, like she does to get rid of the bleariness of morning. Only the bleary feeling doesn’t go away.

“It will take some time to adjust, but you will,” Naomi says.

Sonya blinks rapidly. She’s heavy on one side, and light on the other. Naomi puts her hands on Sonya’s shoulders to steady her, and says, in a low voice:

“Remember what I said. Go to a place where no one knows you. Find out who you are when no one is watching.”

Sonya sits on the back porch. The house faces northeast. The sun hasn’t managed to burn through the clouds yet today, so she knows it’s setting only by the blueish hue that blankets the tree trunks around her. The forest is quiet and still, a carpet of brown needles and moss undisturbed except by the occasional bird landing to peck at the ground.

Sonya covers her right eye with her palm, hoping it will ease the odd sensation of emptiness that now dominates her vision. It feels like there’s somethingthere,lodged in her eye, making it harder to see.

“It took me a few weeks,” Alexander says. The door squeaks as he closes it behind him. He stands beside her, folding his arms as he looks into the trees. “But eventually it does get better. The weirdest part was missing it. I didn’t expect to miss it.”

“I don’t miss it,” she says. “I lost it ten years ago, when it stopped responding to me.”

He nods. He’s just stepped out of the shower. His hair, so much thicker than hers, is still wet in places—around his ears, in the wavy mass at the top of his head.

“Naomi says she’ll drive us where we want to go. She has a truck in the shed.” He points to the far end of the property, where a wooden structure stands, partly camouflaged by trees. “But we need to decide where that is.”

He turns toward her, and takes her hands. His are warm, and strong. She remembers them grabbing her, eager, almost frantic, like he thought she would never let him touch her again, so he’d better get his fill. Wrapping around her thigh, knitting in her hair. She thinks, with the absurdity of someone laughing at a funeral, that shewilllet him touch her again.

“If we go back to the city, you’ll be arrested and put back in the Aperture,” he says. “Or worse. Maybe we should keep going—try to claim refugee status in the next sector. It might be your best chance at a real life.”

She looks at their hands, linked. The cut from the scalpel in the Analog Army’s building is still healing. Her nails are bitten to the quick. Her cuticles are splitting. She bears the effects of the last few weeks on her body.

“No one’s watching,” she says, softly—not to him, not to anyone.

“Naomi could send a message to the Wards,” he says. “Telling them what happened to their daughter. She didn’t offer, but—I bet I can persuade her.”

A bird lands on the porch railing, brown and fat.

“Sonya, you can’t change what happened, no matter what you do. You can try to move forward instead. Let all this go.”

She nods. The bird pecks at the wood, shuffles back and forth, and then takes off.

“That sounds lovely,” she says, in almost a whisper. She squeezes his hands. “But there’s no such thing as starting over. There’s only running away from something, or facing it. Those are the only options we get.”

He looks down at her, brow knitted with concern, and then he nods. He lifts a hand to her neck, using his thumb to tilt her head up. He kisses her, slowly.

It took a day to walk from the Gilman Flicker stop to Naomi Proctor’s house. It takes a little over an hour to drive. Naomi spends the time clucking in disapproval. She wanted to drive them in the opposite direction.

When they drive past the jut of forest where they left their attacker’s body, Sonya tastes bile. The memories are still there, though they now feel like they happened to someone else. The Sonya from before, the one who didn’t know Grace Ward was already dead.

Naomi drops them off just outside of town. They walk in silence to the train station to wait for the next Flicker to arrive. There’s only one other person on the platform: an old woman who doesn’t give Sonya a second glance. The beacon of the Insight, which drew everyone’s focus, is gone. Maybe, she thinks, they’ll finally stop calling her Poster Girl.

The Flicker slides into place, whisper-quiet, and they board. Sonya leans into Alexander’s shoulder once it’s moving.

“Who do you think left the message?” she says. “The Wards’ message, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” He worries at his lower lip with his teeth. “Could it have been a prank? Some sick person who read the article about you?”

“They wouldn’t know to call her Alice. It had to be someone the Wards knew.”

He nods, but he doesn’t have an answer, and neither does she. The air compresses around Sonya’s ears as they pick up speed.

“Is there anywhere you want to go?” he says. “Before you go back. Just in case.”

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