Page 40 of Poster Girl

Knox is different here, Sonya thinks, in her own space, without an audience. She brings her knee up to her chest, and Sonya sees her underwear, black, pinching at the top of her pale thigh.

“You must be desperate,” Knox says. “You know very bad things could happen to you in this apartment and no one would ever hear you scream, right?”

“I know I wedged your front door open.”

Knox laughs.

“All right,” she says. She closes down the open terminals on her screens, one by one, until all that’s left is the desert. Knox picks up the silver audio device from among the knickknacks scattered across her desk—spare keycaps for her keyboards, magnetic dishes full of tiny screws, espresso mugs with coffee dried around the rim—and offers it to Sonya.

“That’s basically useless,” she says. “No location data whatsoever.” She picks at a thread on her sock. “However, as I mentioned, I have another idea.”

Sonya looks around for a place to sit, and doesn’t find one.

“There is a surefire way to find your girl,” Knox says, “and it’s with her UIA.”

“UIA.”

“Unique Identification Address,” Knox says. “Every Insight has one, and it can’t be changed or fooled. It’s not something her parents would have; only the Delegation had access to them, it’s how they kept track of everyone. I never needed them myself, because my clients were always right in front of me—but if I had Grace Ward’s...” She tilts her head. “I could find her exact location.”

In the light of day, Sonya sees gray hairs mixed with Knox’s black ones, and creases at the corners of her eyes. A woman like a sheet of hammered steel, worn by the world but never capitulating to it.

“How do I find it?” Sonya says.

Knox’s eyes glint, and it isn’t reassuring.

“You’ll need access to the UIA database, which was on the Delegation’s server. Only problem is...”

“The server was purged right before the uprising,” Sonya says.

“Was it?” Knox smiles. “The prevailing theory is that some well-meaning Delegation pinhead saw the writing on the wall and did all the Delegation employees one hell of a favor by deleting all evidence of their misdeeds. But in the various back channels to which I am attuned, someone else has claimed responsibility. Someone from a little extremist group known as the Analog Army.”

Sonya thinks of the murder on the front page of the newspaper, the smiling young man and the list of his crimes, safety-pinned to his chest. The doubleAstamped at the bottom.

“They killed that man a few days ago,” she says. “I saw the headline.”

“I keep forgetting you barely get news in your little birdcage,” Knox says. “They’ve killed a lot more than that. Plus a couple explosions for good measure. They want to force us to revert to the pre-digital ageby any means necessary.They started off light, with some Elicit hacks, some empty threats. Sent a death threat to one of the Triumvirate last year. And then they escalated to actual murder. It’s all been downplayed by government officials, but those who know, know.” She smiles. “And I always know.”

“If that’s the case, why would they want to eliminate all the Delegation records?” Sonya says. “If they hate Insights, you would think they would want to reveal as much about the people who benefited from Insights as possible.”

“You are assuming they actually did eliminate the Delegation records,” Knox says. “The thing about zealots is how much hypocrisy they can justify.”

Sonya frowns.

“I don’t really understand why those records are so powerful.”

The question doesn’t cost her as much as she expected it to. Knox probably already thinks she’s stupid. Sonya spent most of her life hoping she wasn’t, and then pretending it didn’t matter if she was. Now it feels irrelevant.

“Then you don’t really understand how much you can find out about a person just based on where they go and when,” Knox says. “That data includes not just where a person went under the Delegation—records of their indiscretions, of their unsavory connections, of theirextracurricular activities—but the ability to trace any person in this entire citynow.”

“So the Analog Army wants to control that data,” she says. “Because they think ‘by any means necessary’ means using technology to destroy technology, hypocrisy be damned.”

“Smarter than you look, aren’t you?” Knox gets up, her oversized shirt draping over her body like a ball gown. She sets her apple down on the desk. “That’s not as much of a compliment as it sounds; don’t get too excited.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sonya replies flatly. “If the Analog Army has the UIA database somewhere, why haven’t you gone to get it yourself?”

Knox runs a fingertip along the edge of the desk, pink light playing over her fingers.

“Given their loathing for digital anything, you won’t be surprised to hear that whatever data they’ve stored is on its own independent server, and I would have to physically walk into their headquarters to gain access to it,” she says. “And they are particularly attuned to me,as someone who profits from all things digital no matter what regime we are living under.”

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