Page 93 of Poster Girl

“Well,” Sonya says, “shall we?”

She leads the way into the building’s lobby. There’s a different guard here from the one that let her in last time. The woman recognizes her, even without the Insight burning in her iris.

“Here to pay our respects,” Sonya says.

“To her door?” the guard says.

“Yes,” Sonya replies, tipping her chin up as if daring the woman to call her a fool. The guard gestures to the elevator bank.

They step into the elevator, and as the doors close, Rose looks at her. “You have a real way about you, you know that?”

“I’ve already been here once since she died.”

“I thought they couldn’t get her door open,” Rose says. “I heard the peace officers applied for a permit to break the wall down.”

The elevator rushes up to Knox’s floor, making Sonya’s ears pop. She’s uneasy—the door might not open for her now that she has her Insight disabled—but she has to try. She walks down the hallway and stands in front of Knox’s door, just as she did before. The mechanical eyeball swivels, once, before locking on her. The white ring around it flashes. The door opens.

“Guest: Kantor, Sonya,” the voice announces. “Clearance level four.”

“I didn’t know you knew each other so well,” Rose says.

“We didn’t. But we had a deal.”

The apartment looks just as it did when she was last here, maybe with more dust on everything. But it’s different, seeing it through Rose Parker’s eyes. She touches things, her fingers dancing over the table by the door, the kitchen counter with its coffee rings, the edge of Knox’s desk. She disappears into the bedroom, and Sonya hears the squeak of her sitting on the edge of the bed, the jostling of plastic bottles in the shower. Rose comes back, and the look in her eyes is like the whir of a computer fan, everything moving.

Sonya takes the instructions for using the UIA database out of her pocket and unfolds them. She sits in Knox’s desk chair and presses the paper flat in front of her, then starts to type. Last time she sat here, she was terrified of what she would find—terrified that it would be nothing. But this time, she knows what’s waiting for her on the other side of the program.

“I’m not good with computers, so I was hoping you would help me,” she says. She types in the nameTurner, Easton.

The screen shifts, redrawing the straight lines of roads to reveal that Easton Turner is in an apartment building near the water.

“What is this?” Rose asks, frowning up at the screen. “How are you tracking him?”

“With his Insight,” Sonya says.

“He doesn’t have an Insight.” Rose arches an eyebrow at Sonya. “Does he?”

“We all do,” Sonya says, and it feels strange to be on the other end of this conversation. “They can’t actually be removed. It’s . . . a long story, and I’ll tell it, but we don’t have time right now. I know thisdatabase has kept track of location data for the entire time we’ve had Insights. I need to extract all Easton Turner’s location data from the fall of the Delegation back to about five years before that. Can you figure out how to do that?”

Rose stares up at the screen.

“I mean, I can try,” she says. “Let me sit.”

Sonya gets up, and walks into Emily Knox’s bedroom, where the white blankets are still rumpled. There’s a long dark hair on one of the pillows, a dried-up contact lens on the bedside table. She sees a piece of paper sticking out of the drawer.Violation of privacy, minus two hundred fiftyDesCoin,she thinks, but tugs the paper free anyway.

It’s a half sheet, and thick, almost like an index card. There’s a grid of black lines and text, recognizable immediately as a government-issued document, overwhelming Sonya with information at first. But the title, stamped in small uppercase, readspermit 249a, for travel to sector 4c.She thinks of the wallpaper on Knox’s computer, the desert sunrise—or sunset, she couldn’t tell which.A girl can dream,Knox said.

“I think I figured it out!” Rose says from the other room. “What should I do now?”

Sonya tucks the permit into the interior pocket of her coat, and returns to the living room.

“Send it to yourself,” Sonya says. “And then do the same thing for August Kantor. Same range of time.”

Rose’s fingers hesitate on the keys. She turns back to Sonya.

“All right,” she says. “I’ve been pretty patient so far, but you really need to tell me what this is about.”

Sonya looks out the window. The city is cloudy, as usual, the water in the bay gray and calm.

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