Page 92 of Poster Girl

“Hey there, Poster Girl,” he says, without looking up. “What’s cooking out there?”

“Same old,” she says. “Good book?”

“Whoever donated it left notes in the margins,” he says. “I like reading those more than the book, to be honest.”

She laughs, and opens the door to the stairwell. She climbs up to Renee and Douglas’s apartment and knocks on the door.

“Sleeping, Kevin!” Douglas shouts from within the apartment.

“Not Kevin!” Sonya says.

She hears some shuffling, some muttered conversation. A minute or two later, Renee is slipping out of the apartment in an old bathrobe, sandals on her feet. Her hair is knotted on one side where she was sleeping on it.

“Your eye,” Renee says.

“Yeah.”

Renee frowns at her.

“You’re leaving,” she says, and Sonya nods.

Renee disappears into the dark apartment and emerges a moment later with a box of matches and a cigarette. She tucks them into the pocket of her robe and leads the way to the stairwell. Together they climb the stairs to the roof, and each floor they pass is silent and still, the residents resting before a day of illusory productivity.

The night tastes wet, and the faint scent of petrichor is in the air, as if it just rained. They lean against the half wall that borders the roof, both looking out at the Aperture gate. Renee passes the cigarette to Sonya, and strikes a match for her; Sonya takes the first breath of smoke. Rarity confers value, she thinks, and she knows she won’t smoke another cigarette after she leaves here, because half a dozen brands will be available to her and the allure will be gone.

“You should take my dress, the yellow one,” Sonya says. “Go get it in the morning, before Building 4 gets wind that I’m gone. I also have a refrigerator, it’s behind the plywood.”

“Good looking out, Poster Girl,” Renee says, as she takes the cigarette from Sonya with her first two fingers, delicate as tweezers. “They give you a new name?”

“Not yet,” Sonya replies. “Not sure I’ll bother. Everyone knows my face anyway.”

“Wish they’d send you over a sector, so you could actually start again.”

Sonya doesn’t think about the other sectors much. They were closed off under the Delegation, an impossibility. Even now, travel permits are rare.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“Leaving, I guess.” Now Renee will be the youngest person in the Aperture.

“Don’t be stupid,” Renee says, taking another drag from the cigarette. “I’m happy for you.”

Sonya raises an eyebrow.

“A person can be more than one thing at once,” Renee says. “I can be so jealous I want to burn my eyes out and happy for you at the same time.”

Sonya takes Renee’s hand and squeezes. Renee passes the cigarette back to her. They smoke it down to the filter, and don’t say goodbye.

Rose Parker waits for her outside Knox’s building, Artemis Tower. She looks more sedate than usual, in black trousers and a white sweater, the only hint of color the scarf she wears in her hair, with its green leaf pattern that matches the vines that cling to the building’s entrance. When she sees Sonya approach, she waves and smiles, as if they’re friends.

“Wow, no Insight,” she says, when Sonya draws near enough to hear her. “What’s it like?”

“What was it like for you?” Sonya puts her hands in her pockets. The feeling of wrongness that has dominated the right side of her body since Naomi deactivated the Insight is already beginning to fade.

“When I did it, everyone was doing it,” she says. “So we all pretended to be exhilarated by it.”

There was a similar charade of happiness in the Aperture, for a time. Everyone pretending to be relieved they hadn’t been executed, making plans for a little utopia among the four buildings.Wouldn’t want to be out there anyway,people said, like this was a choice they had made instead of a prison they were locked in.

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