Page 27 of Poster Girl

She used to check her total ten times a day, hungry to see it increase. She lived her life eager to be noticed, sitting on the edge of every seat, every script of courtesy memorized down to the inflection. If Susanna was going to be brilliant, then Sonya would be immaculate, a perfect Delegation girl.

She leans forward.

“Doyouknow there’s no DesCoin anymore?”

“Excuse me?”

“It seems to me,” she says, “that if your every choice is in defiance of a system, you are as much a servant of that system as someone who obeys it.”

Alexander stares at her. She watches the man and his son at the other end of the train, the little boy grabbing the man’s shirt collar with a tiny hand, the man guiding it away, pointing at something out the window.Look, a bus!

“You told me you reunited some of the other children—the displaced children, like Grace Ward—with their birth parents, after the Delegation fell,” she says. “How did you find them?”

“The Delegation did keep records of adoptions, in general,” he says. “Not all the adoptions were displaced children—some were abandoned, or voluntarily surrendered. But I cross-referenced physical descriptions and birth dates from the birth parents with the adoption records. There were a few older ones, like Grace, who there was no record of anywhere—and of those, Grace is the only one who would still be a minor. We’re leaving all the ones who are adults now alone. Seemed kinder.”

The brakes squeal. The old lady picks up the bag at her feet, heaves it into her arms, and limps out of the train car. The man is sitting now, bouncing his child on his knee.

Sonya says, “I’d be curious to know how Grace’s parents managed to hide a second child for as long as they did.”

“That’s the thing. Most of them only made it a few days after the child was born before they were discovered. For some it was months. But Grace . . .” He shrugs. “She’s old enough to remember them, at least a little.”

Sonya frowns. It wasn’t like the Delegation not to keep records. Data meant optimization—a better algorithm for purchases, better reminders from your Insight to correct your bad habits, better information in your display as you moved through the world.

Alexander goes on: “We think there’s no record of those adoptions on purpose. Taking an infant child is bad enough, but taking an older child who’s already bonded with her parents is especially cruel. The Delegation likely didn’t want a record of that cruelty to exist. It wouldn’t be the first thing they failed to log.”

“Have you considered that the adoption records were in the digital files that were purged in the uprising?” she says.

He scowls at her.

“We have a saying, when it comes to the Delegation,” he says. “‘Never ascribe to carelessness that which can be adequately explained by shame.’”

The train stops again, and this time, Alexander gets to his feet. Out the window, Sonya sees sunlight on water, a boat coasting over the waves. The robotic voice of the HiTrain announces that they are at the Pike Place Market stop. Sonya gets up and follows Alexander to the platform.

“I’d like to speak to some of the birth parents,” she says. “They might have information that would help me.”

“Speak to the Wards,” Alexander says. “I thought that would be the first place you’d go, actually.”

The Wards live in the first-floor apartment of a small complex not far from the Aperture. Twelve units. Sonya knows.

“I will,” she says, “but more information is better.”

He wheels around to face her.

“You hear these people were reunited with their kids and you think,Well, they’re fine now, no harm done?” He rakes a hand through his hair so hard he tears a few strands loose. “Getting your kid back afterlosing their entire childhood is better than nothing, but it’s also worse than nothing. Every day is a reminder of what you didn’t see, of time you didn’t get. So no, I’m not going to re-traumatize these parents by letting the face of the goddamn Delegation interrogate them.”

“Don’t call me that.”

She takes off the sunglasses he loaned her, folds them, and presses them to his chest. Then she puts her hood up and walks down the steps to the street. She hears him following, that uneven gait, his from birth.

Pike Place Market is the smallest building in the area, full as it now is with skyscrapers, all vying for the same view of Elliott Bay. It bears a glowing red sign,public market center, with a clock beside it—a faithful copy of the original, Sonya’s Insight once told her, when she came with the other Delegation volunteers to scrape gum from the wall behind Market Theater. She was disgusted by it at the time, and not just because of the gum—because of the defiance that led people to revive the old tradition despite the Delegation outlawing it. Now, though, it reminds her of how stubbornly some people in the Aperture cling to Delegation rules that no longer have meaning—the widows separating their compost from the rest of their trash even though it all goes to the same dumpster, the rules about serving the oldest first at the dinner table, even though they’re all gray and wrinkled except Sonya. People love their small rebellions. She knows what that feels like, though she’s since lost her taste for them.

The oblong building boasts a grid of square windows, and beyond them, lights and bustle and bodies, bundles of fresh flowers, whole crabs piled together on beds of ice, displays of jam and mustard in tiny jars that remind Sonya of the Wards, the odd charges in their purchase history.

The building that houses Emily Knox is one in a cluster of glass pillars, a few blocks from the cracked cobblestones that surround the market. The street name is Triumvirate, a substitution for its former name, Delegation, as though even the word is now a crime, all symbols of the past doomed to be locked up in the Aperture.

Alexander raises a long arm to point out the right building, the glass tinted smoky orange instead of blue or green, like the ones around it.It’s flat and squared off at the edges on one side, and curved on the other, a steep arc like a diving bird. It doesn’t hold a place in Sonya’s memory. She stares at it for just a moment too long, waiting for the Insight display to provide her with its history.

“Old habits die hard, huh?” Alexander says.

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