Page 86 of Poster Girl

That’s how she enters the Aperture, not ten minutes later. They pull her out of the car with no attempt at gentleness, and a bright floodlight goes on outside the gate in response to their movement. The twisting circle of the Aperture entrance opens to admit them, and the peace officers march her in. The group of prisoners drinking in the middle of Gray Street falls silent at the sight.

“You will be summoned for a disciplinary hearing,” the peace officerclosest to her says. “Check at the guard station tomorrow for the date and time.”

“A disciplinary hearing resulting inwhat?” Sonya snaps. “I already have a life sentence.”

“I assure you, things can always get worse.”

The peace officer cuts the zip tie, and they file out of the Aperture, leaving Sonya standing there alone. She looks at the men standing silent a few hundred yards away. In the dark, they are just a cluster of white rings, Insights shining in the dusk. One of them, she recognizes from Building 1.

“Eddie!” she says. “Is Graham Carter at home? Do you know?”

He’s forty, maybe, but the swig he takes from a bottle of moonshine belongs to a younger man. He taps the lip of the bottle against his cheek as he looks at her, without hunger, without interest.

“Why?” A quick smile. “Looking for a good time?”

Everyone around him laughs. Sonya turns away and starts walking toward Building 1. He calls after her: “Pretty sure he is, yeah!”

The tunnel surrounds her. Someone lit a candle and set it on the ground under one of the names, Margaret Schulte. It’s been burning for a while, the wick surrounded by a pool of red wax. In the courtyard beyond, she sees dark shapes rustling the overgrown grass—rats, out for their nightly scavenge.

She climbs to the third floor, where the first apartment on the left is having a party. The door is open, cigarette smoke and laughter spilling into the hallway. When she passes, she sees a group of people sitting around a table made of packing crates, playing cards. She goes to 3B and knocks.

Graham Carter answers the door in his bathrobe. It’s maroon, with a matching rope trim that has separated from the cuffs and now hangs around his hands.

“Ms. Kantor!” he says, and he wraps the bathrobe more tightly across his chest, belting it firmly. “What are you—”

His apartment is even more cluttered than the last time she was here, the corner stacked with old blankets and towels, the empty glass bottle collection expanded. A bottle of moonshine sits open on thekitchen counter, cloudy and yellowish, likely an ingredient in Graham’s evening tea, left steaming on a nearby side table.

“You said my father was your friend,” she says to him. “That he came by your office just to have lunch.”

“What is this about, dear? I’m quite tired, and—”

She moves deeper into the apartment. Graham’s bed is in the center of the room, with a crease in the middle of the mattress where it can be folded up into a couch. She runs her fingers over the deck of cards on his side table.

“The thing about that is, he never mentioned you,” she says. “He told us all kinds of stories about all his friends growing up, and somehow you just never came up.”

Graham looks puzzled.

“Surely you’re not suggesting that I waslyingabout that,” he says.

“No,” she replies. “I’m not. There are two potential explanations for him not talking about you. One is that he didn’t know you. The other is that he was ashamed of something.”

“I don’t—”

“Stop,” Sonya says, coldly. “Stop lying to me. I already know what my father did. He killed people. He killedchildren.”

“Don’t say such a thing,” Graham says. His face, his soft-skinned throat—so like a bullfrog’s—are splotched red. “Your father was a good man.”

“No, he wasn’t.” She steps closer. “Stop being a coward.”

Graham’s chin wobbles. She thinks maybe he’ll collapse like an underbaked cake.

“He came to play euchre,” Graham says dully. He sits on the edge of his bed, sending a few small feathers soaring from his down comforter. “You remember what I told you, about the codes? Hearts meant Insights, gin rummy meant Blitz...”

“Euchre meant Sol,” Sonya says.

Graham nods.

“How many times?” Her voice breaks over the question.

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