Page 85 of Poster Girl

She thinks. Closes her eyes. “The waterfront. Suza took me there after school once. She bought me a sticky bun and we ate it on the embankment wall.”

“And the smell didn’t ruin the experience?” he says, laughing. “Always smells like dead fish up there.”

“I mean, the bun was terrible,” she says. “But Suza didn’t hang out with me very often, so I loved it.” She sighs. “I don’t think I should take any detours right now, though. The Triumvirate will be looking for me.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

They watch the advertisements play—for Chill Water, a beverage laced with calming medication; for a book subscription service that carries only titles banned by the Delegation; for FaceMelt, a cream that makes scars disappear. Eventually the music, the crisp metallic voices, melt into the background.

“I keep thinking about you,” she says, suddenly.

“What?”

“Remembering you, I mean,” she says. “Sitting at your desk with those negatives.”

“Oh, right.” He ducks his head a little. “I tried to develop some of them, a couple years after the uprising, when the chemicals were available again. It wasn’t quite the same.”

“No?”

He shakes his head. “Under the Delegation, those negatives were almost contraband. Photographs, people think they just record whatever you see, but all those little adjustments the photographer can make—what you focus on, how bright it is, whether it’s off center or not, those all affect what you see and how you see it. They’re a language, only you don’t need to speak it to understand it. So the negatives—they were people talking in a way the Delegation couldn’t monitor. Looking at them was like hearing secret messages.”

Each one is a world,she said to him, at the time. A nonsense thing to say.

She nods. “So after the Delegation fell—when anyone could say anything they liked . . .”

“I didn’t need them anymore,” he says. “I could think about what I wanted to say, instead of what I needed to say. Wanting things instead of just needing them—that’s a gift.” He shrugs. “I know you—maybe you don’t see it that way.”

Maybe she does, she thinks. But all that’s in front of her is necessity. The advertisement for glowing vodka appears on the wall, eerie blue bottles against a black background. A man across the aisle folds his newspaper in half and sets it on the seat next to him; she resolves to pick it up before getting off the train.

“Listen,” she says. “Don’t come with me to the Wards’.”

“What? Why not?”

“Go back to work, get your things. Make a copy of my Insight footage from the last week. And then—go stay with a friend. That woman from the beach, I don’t know.” She looks at her fingertips, still raw and red from clawing at the hard ground. “Someone tried to kill us on our way out of the city. They won’t like it that you’re back.”

“What about you?”

“We both know I’m going to get arrested pretty quickly, even without the Insight,” she says. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be tucked away in the Aperture by nightfall.”

On the HiTrain, Sonya rehearses what she’s going to say. How she’ll refuse whatever Eugenia Ward offers her, even if it’s a seat; how she’ll allow her tone to soften, but she won’t use any euphemisms. She mouths the wordsGrace is deadat the window, and wonders if this is the exception to Knox’s rule against euphemisms, because “dead” sounds so unfeeling. An ill-tended plant is dead, an old packet of yeast is dead, but a little girl—shouldn’t she be more than that?

A shiver goes through her as the train passes the Wards’ apartment building—the same view she had over a decade ago, when she saw Grace in the window, with Alice Gleissner’s Insight glowing around her iris. The brakes kick in and the train pulls to a stop. Sonya stepsoff, onto the platform. She drinks in the cold, wet air, and descends the steps to the street.

Waiting for her at the bottom of the platform are four peace officers, knights all in white.

Somehow this is not an outcome she anticipated, just a block away from the Wards’ house. She assumed that without her Insight to trace her, the Triumvirate would be slow to find her; how did they know where she would go when she returned to the city?

“Please,” she says to one of them, it doesn’t matter which one—they’re faceless, in their white helmets with the shimmering Veils. “I just need ten minutes. I just need to talk to someone.”

“Prisoner 537 of the Aperture, we have been dispatched to ensure your safe and prompt return,” one of them says. The voice is high-pitched and airy, but the person it is attached to is no less intimidating for it. She hasn’t heard her number since she was first put in the Aperture.

“I know,” Sonya says, frowning. “I know that, I just—I need to tell them what happened to their daughter.”

“If you do not cooperate, we will be forced to restrain you,” the peace officer says.

“I’m notnotcooperating,” she says, frustrated. She is so close, she can see the corner of the Wards’ building, red brick made dull by cloud cover. “I just—”

One of the peace officers grabs her arm, and she jerks away from him by instinct. This turns out to be a mistake. One of the others grabs her instead, and twists her arm behind her back, making her cry out. They pin her up against one of the platform supports, so the side of her face scrapes the gritty metal, and squeeze her wrists into a zip tie.

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