Page 9 of Poster Girl

She waits, because she doesn’t trust what will come out of her mouth if she opens it.

“Well,” he says, after the silence has coiled tight between them. “I’ll just get to the point, then.”

He takes something out of his pocket. It’s a device, rectangular, the right shape for a palm. An Elicit. She recognizes it, not from experience, but from lessons on the history of the Insight—it’s an old pieceof technology that predates it. Like the Insight, the Elicit was designed to go with a person everywhere, to augment their reality and communicate with a network about their behavior.

The system seems clumsy to her now—why carry something in your hand when you could carry it in your head, instead? If you spend all your time holding something, caring for it, feeling its warmth—it may as well be a part of your body, as integrated as an eye.

He holds the Elicit at the bottom right corner, careless. Though she doesn’t know how to use it, she knows it’s valuable; if she took it from him now, she could trade it for anything she wanted in the Aperture, just because of its rarity.

But there’s nothing to want in the Aperture.

The Elicit lights up, and its reflection in his eyes almost makes it look like he does have an Insight. Almost makes him look like he used to, neat and tidy, his smile always reluctant. Alexander, the older brother who walked in his younger brother’s wake.

She was betrothed to his little brother, Aaron, as a teenager. Aaron and Sonya were the perfect Delegation match, with the perfect Delegation future. But Aaron was killed in the uprising, in the street, along with hundreds of others.

Alexander shows her the screen. On it is an article she’s seen before. Under the Delegation, there was just one news source that fed to everyone’s Insight upon request; you could read it just by staring out the window on the train. But with the Delegation’s fall, newspapers seem to be back in fashion—there are half a dozen of them competing, each with a different interpretation of the same data. This one is theChronicle,she can tell by the elaborateCat the top, and this particular edition already turned up in the Aperture, months ago.children of the delegation, the article reads, in bold black letters across the top.Rose Parker,the byline says.

“I’ve seen it,” Sonya says. “And?”

“You’ve seen it?” He raises his eyebrows. “I guess Rose smuggled some in here? Wouldn’t want her great work to go unrecognized.”

He puts the Elicit down on the table, still lit up.

“So you know, then, that we have this article to thank for the Children of the Delegation Act. Everyone who was a child when they were put in the Aperture, held accountable for their family’s crimes, is now eligible for release. People like you.” He tilts his head. “Well, notexactlylike you. You were a little older, weren’t you?”

“It’s interesting that you’re pretending not to know,” she says.

She and Aaron had been the same age, after all.

Alexander’s mouth twists.

“You have perhaps noticed that many of the younger people in the Aperture have been released lately. Given new identities and a chance to live a worthwhile life instead of...” He waves a hand. “This.”

She sees her run-down studio apartment as if for the first time. The bed with its patched-up sheets, its fraying blanket. The scratched frying pan drying next to the sink on a ragged, stained towel. The things she has used to decorate the space: plants lined up on the sill above the kitchen sink, growing out of tin cans; the patterns she painted in black on the tapestry that covers her living room windows, shielding her from observers; the cluster of lamps with dim bulbs she put on a crate near the bed. Alexander, though, remembers where she lived before.

Fuck you,she thinks, one of many phrases she has never said aloud—in the past, because they would cost her DesCoin, and now, because they would be a sign that she is going backward, to the girl who lived in a pit of grief and knew the taste of moonshine. But she thinks it anyway,Fuck you, I hate you, I hope you choke and die—

Alexander waits, as if for a reaction. Finding none, he continues:

“You have presented a unique problem. Not young enough to be an easy candidate for release, but not old enough for us to forget about you.”

“Is that what you’ve done with us, in here? Forgotten about us?”

“For the most part, yes. And you can’t imagine what a relief it’s been.”

“Well, if you think I’ve spared a single thought foryou,” she says, “you’re mistaken.”

“I’m heartbroken.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a pieceof paper folded into fourths. “As I was saying. We came up with an idea for a trade—”

“We?”

“We will give you an opportunity to right one of the wrongs of the Delegation. If you succeed, you can have your freedom. If you fail, you will continue to rot in here.”

The wordrotmakes her flinch. That was how David talked about it, near the end—like he was a piece of meat left on a countertop to spoil. She could never find the words to disagree with him. She wasn’t sure she even did.

“I’m not some ant you can fry with a magnifying glass,” she says. “I’m not going to squirm for your entertainment.”

He pauses, the paper still half-folded. “You don’t even want to hear what we want you to do?”

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