Page 88 of Poster Girl

She taps on the glass. He startles awake, then nudges the door open with his foot.

“Your security pass has been revoked,” he says. “What the heck did you do?”

“Good evening,” she says. This is the last choice she has. After this, everything will play out the only way it can. “I came to ask you for a favor.”

Williams crosses his arms and waits.

“You know Alexander Price, the tall, gangly one who’s been passing through here?” she says. “There’s something I left unfinished out there. I need him to finish it for me, only I have no way of getting to him. I was hoping...” She clears her throat. “I was hoping you would deliver this for me.”

She holds up the note she wrote, folded in half with a sharp crease. Williams sighs.

“You know I can’t do that,” he says.

“I know you’re not supposed to,” she says. “I also know I have nothing to offer you. I’m hoping you’ll do it anyway.”

She holds her breath. The paper quivers a little in her hands. He looks at her, considering. She knows what many guards would ask for, if faced with a young woman of the Aperture in a desperate position. She doesn’t know him well enough to know if he’s one of them.

“Please,” she says. “This is my last chance. Please.”

His eyes are blue-gray, so pale they’re unearthly rather than appealing.

“All right, all right,” he says, and he holds out his hand for the note. “You happen to know where he lives?”

The next morning she stays in her apartment. She doesn’t want to answer questions about her blank right eye, or the bruises on her fingertips, or Grace Ward. She knows that she’s clinging to something with all her strength, though she doesn’t know what it is, and she knows she will falter eventually, and she’ll free-fall. But not yet.

She drifts in and out of sleep until the afternoon. Then she drags herself out of bed and showers. She doesn’t look down at her body, battered by the journey and the struggle with the gunman and the time she spent kneeling on the hard ground before Grace Ward’s grave.

When she steps out of the spray, she hears the distant grinding of the Aperture gate opening. She runs to her windows and pulls the tapestry aside to see who’s coming in—or going out. Waiting for the gate to open is a white personal-use vehicle with three blue, interlinked stars on the hood. Peace officers.

Whether they’re here at Easton Turner’s behest or here to take Sonya to some kind of trial, she knows they’re here for her. She dresses in a hurry, her pants sticking to her legs because they aren’t quite dry. She flattens her hair in front of the mirror and then pauses to stare at her right eye, no longer lit by its white halo.

She feels a pang deep in her gut. She doesn’t look like herself.

Sonya pinches her cheeks to bring color to them and puts on her shoes. She runs down the stairs, passing Charlotte, who gapes at her, and calls out, “Sonya!”

When she reaches Green Street, she slows to catch her breath. Everyone is moving toward the gate, as they do every time someone comes into the Aperture. They don’t pay attention to Sonya, weaving a path through them, until she reaches the gate. A peace officer stands with the guard—not Williams, this time—his hand balanced on his baton. His Veiled helmet turns toward Sonya.

“There. Ms. Kantor, we’ve been trying to reach you via your Insight.”

“Well,” Sonya says, and she sounds louder than she wants to, with everyone falling silent around her. “My Insight’s not on anymore. So.”

“I can see that,” the peace officer says. “We’ve been asked to escort you to Representative Turner’s office.”

She puts on a good performance of confidence as she walks across the gap that separates the white vehicle from the residents of the Aperture that have gathered to see what all the fuss is about. The peace officer opens the back door for her, and she eases herself in, bringing her feet in last, as her mother taught her to. Ladylike in her bleach-stained pants and pilling sweater.

The Aperture gate opens again, and the vehicle reverses out through the widening pupil without waiting for it to fully dilate. She looks out the window at Renee in her housedress, and the vehicle speeds down the street.

The city looks strange from behind glass, like a dream. The car is moving too quickly for her to notice the cracks in the pavement or the trash stuck to the drains or the graffiti painting the walls with competing messages. From here it looks just as polished and serene as it did under the Delegation. But she no longer feels that the veneer adds anything of value.

The car pulls up to the Triumvirate building, which stands across the street from the diamond-patterned structure where Alexander worked up until a few days ago. This one is polished glass and smooth white stone, the seams between materials hidden so it looks like one solid mass. A grand staircase spills into the street. The Triumvirate’s flag—teal, with three narrow white stripes across it—hangs over the entrance, snapping in a gust of wind.

The peace officer escorts her up the steps at a brisk pace that she struggles to match. He tries to grab her elbow, but she jerks it away from him, and he doesn’t try to take it again.

The lobby is all glass, like the exterior. Matte floor tiles the same color as the flag; reflective walls that show Sonya herself from every angle. A woman in a sharp gray uniform stops them near the entrance. “Identification?”

The peace officer hands the woman Sonya’s Aperture badge. The woman stares at it for a long moment, glances at Sonya, and hands the badge back to him.

“Carry on,” she says.

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