Page 16 of Poster Girl

She has to weave through a crowd to get to the gate the next day. News is contagious in the Aperture, and this is bigger, somehow, than the release of the youngest prisoners—because Sonya will be coming back at the end of the day. She steps around the sleepy-eyed men of Building 2, then Jack with his little notebook; Renee in a negligee and robe, smoking a cigarette; Graham with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

The guard who sits in the security office positioned right next to the gate is familiar, though she doesn’t know his name. He’s worked here for a long time, but she never goes near any of the guards. She didn’t need to be warned about them. Plenty of women in the Aperture warned her anyway.

The guard—Williams is the name on his name tag—compares her face to the picture on her security pass. It’s from a decade ago, from when she was seventeen. In it, her hair hangs limp over her shoulders, and there are dark circles under her eyes like bruises. But it still looks like her. He hands it to her, and she puts it in her jacket pocket.

“You have to check in within twelve hours of leaving,” he says, “or we’ll suspend your privileges until you can cooperate better.”

“Fine,” she says, and she goes to stand in front of the Aperture’s aperture.

She’s shaking. For over a decade, Green Street and Gray Street, Buildings 1 through 4, the market, the courtyards—they’ve been her entire world. A planet shrunk down to a snow globe. No choices, no strangers, no wide-open spaces. But now she remembers the largeness of the world, and it feels as oppressive as the air inside a closet.

Loops of barbed wire stand rigid atop the gate, which is wide enough for a truck to pass through. The guard pushes a lever, and the metal plates in front of her screech as they pull away from each other. She stands, for a moment, in the center of that dilating pupil. Just a few feet beyond the gate, held at bay by peace officers, is a crowd of people holding signs.

And behind her, a crowd of prisoners straining to get a look at the outside world.

She steps through the gate and into a wall of sound: clicking camera shutters and shouts, and everywhere, everywhere, her name:

Ms. Kantor, how does it feel to be outside for the first time in—

Sonya, what do you think about the Children of the Delegation Act that—

Poster Girl! Over here!

There are signs attached to broom handles and rulers and branches. Some are friendly:

Welcome Back, Child of the Delegation

Some are not:

Don’t Show Mercy? Don’t See Mercy!

For the most part, the signs all display the same image: her face, on the same poster the Delegation once plastered across the city, but with a single word struck out and supplanted.

What’sRightWrong

IsRightWrong

Her own eyes, rendered light gray by the black-and-white, stare back at her from between the words. She doesn’t know which direction to go, doesn’t know which direction she’s facing. She wants to shout; she remembers the knife-sharp sound of her own voice when she dug her thumb into that man’s eye in her apartment, but this is not the dark void of Building 2, this isoutand it’severywhereand she can only press forward.

A hand closes around her elbow, and she jerks it back. But the woman’s face has that look about it, the gentle urgency of someone who is helping. Sonya recognizes her as Rose Parker. When Rose’s arm slips across her shoulders, she allows it. She ducks her head into the embrace and watches their shoes moving in tandem.

Her shoes are so worn she can feel each pebble through the soles. Rose’s are pink sneakers, the color of unripe watermelon. They walk away from the crowd so fast they’re almost running. Sonya is breathless by the time the noise fades. She breaks away from Rose and leans back against a brick wall.

They are in an alley across from an overflowing dumpster. The alley itself seems to be overflowing, full of chairs with busted seats, shredded plastic bags, sagging couches with the stuffing spilling out, balled-up newspapers, rotting cardboard boxes. The smell is pungent. Across from her, graffiti tangles together on the brick in every color.

fuck the delegationcatches her attention, but there are other phrases she doesn’t understand.

Analog Army

Unmedication for All

Bust the Borders

“You all right?” Rose says, and there’s flint in her voice.

When she came into the Aperture to conduct her interviews for the Children of the Delegation article, her hair was in dozens of tight braids, but now it is a tumult of tight curls held back by a floral scarf.

“Yes,” Sonya says, and she adds, “Thank you,” because she is supposed to. Her Insight glows in its perpetual halo; someone—probably Alexander Price—is watching.

---