Page 89 of Poster Girl

They walk down a few short, dizzying glass hallways. Sonya sometimes mistakes her own reflection for an oncoming stranger, her own empty eyes unfamiliar to her. She loses track of which direction she’s going. They step into an elevator and glide up two floors, and the hallway beyond splits off in three directions. They follow the center path to Easton Turner’s door.

She clasps her hands behind her back to disguise their trembling. Sending a peace officer to pick her up in the Aperture is a declaration: Easton Turner has power, and he’s willing to use it against her. A peace officer sent to escort her can just as easily become a peace officer sent to interrogate her, to disappear her.

A voice within the office calls out, “Come in!”

The office is a sprawl of space with nothing to fill it, a stretch of seamless windows, a wide desk, a neat row of filing cabinets, a bookshelf that hangs from the ceiling like a swing, and a chair for visitors. A man she recognizes as John Clark stands talking to Easton Turner; when she walks in, he takes an Elicit from Easton and, as he passes her, looks her up and down like she’s less than he was expecting. The peace officer doesn’t follow her in.

Easton’s crisp white shirt is rolled up to his elbows, his top button unbuttoned. He smiles at her.

“Hello, Sonya,” he says, like they’re old friends. “Please, have a seat.”

Her body winds up tight, but if he’s going to pretend, so is she. She sits in the chair across from him—with crossed ankles, tucked back, her hands folded in her lap.

“Representative Turner,” she says. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me.”

She understands Easton’s part in all this, how he used diplomatic means to suppress her investigation into Grace Ward. What confuses her is Knox’s death, and the man who attacked Sonya in the woods—both crimes attributable to the Analog Army, not to Easton Turner. Asfar as she knows, the Army has nothing to do with the Triumvirate—if anything, they’re a threat to the Triumvirate’s stability.

“I trust you brought your own deck of cards?” Easton says. “Since we’re playing euchre.”

“Euchre is played with four people,” she says. “Would you like to ask your fellow representatives to join us?”

She considers the tin of pens on his desk, closer to her than it is to him. There’s a letter opener in it, with a slim metal handle.

“I’m sure they’re quite busy.” Easton Turner is still smiling at her. She’s never seen him without a smile on his face. Always shaking hands, making speeches about tech regulation, about restrained progress, about opening up trade with the other sectors.Wouldn’t it be nice,she remembers him saying, a few years ago, in a newspaper article that found its way into the Aperture,if we could all eat bananas once a month, instead of once a year?

Sonya, at that time, had not eaten a banana since she was a teenager, but she could still feel the dryness in her mouth as she swallowed it.

“Won’t you stay awhile?” he says, and her hands go to her zipper automatically to take off her jacket. She freezes there, an odd echoing feeling in her chest like someone struck a bell behind her rib cage.

“I thought it was time that you and I had a chat,” he goes on. “I heard about your little adventure in the woods. Oddly enough, your Insight seems to be malfunctioning—I’m sure I have Ms. Proctor to thank for that—so I wasn’t able to watch it all firsthand, but I let the peace officers know where you would go upon your return.”

“Naomi was very helpful,” Sonya says.

“She’s a very interesting woman,” he says. “What did you two talk about?”

He looks harmless. The crinkling around his eyes. His white, straight teeth. But it’s harmlessness that comes with effort. He leans forward, and at this distance, she can see that his eyes are a warm brown, like light shining through maple syrup. It’s not a typical shade, and it reminds her of something.

“Well, she pointed me toward Grace Ward’s grave, for one thing,”Sonya says, as airily as she can manage, with a sour taste at the back of her mouth. “And she told me a little bit more about my father.”

“Oh?” Easton says. “Such as?”

“He had a fondness for euchre, evidently.” She plucks the letter opener from the cup of pens and lays it on its side across her palm. The dulled blade is etched with Easton’s name, in delicate script. “And he used to play with you, didn’t he?”

His smile doesn’t fade.

“Your father and I met several times, enough for me to get an impression of him,” he says. “It’s a shame you were deprived of getting to know him as an adult. It might have been illuminating.”

His voice is like the computerized one that announced her name in Knox’s apartment, its pitch and pace predetermined regardless of subject matter. But it tightens when he says “illuminating,” and she wonders about it.

“Sounds like you have some experience with that,” she says.

“Most people have, Ms. Kantor.”

Sonya nods, but she is thinking about his eyes. Warm brown. Just like the eye she caught a glimpse of behind Myth’s Veil.

Myth, who also asked if she would stay awhile.

“You know, I figured out it was the Analog Army behind Emily Knox’s death,” she says. “And I know it was an Army member who attacked me in the woods. I just couldn’t figure out how they were connected to you. I guess I just did.”

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