Page 41 of Poster Girl

“And you think they won’t be attuned tome?” Sonya says, laughing a little. “I’m carrying around a still-functioning model of their most hated technology in my skull.”

“True,” Knox says. “But you are also investigating the disappearance of a child and have a plausible explanation for why you might want to speak to them.”

“So I should just, what? Go in there and ask them to give me the UIA database?”

“Yes,” Knox says. “They’ll laugh you right out of their little clubhouse. But all I need you to do is get through the door.” She shrugs. “And place a copying device on their server.”

“You just told me they’re dangerous.”

“And you’ve spent the past decade in a prison,” Knox says. “You seem determined to have it both ways. You can’t be both the pretty Delegation princess and the hardened prisoner of the Aperture at the same time.”

“Aw,” Sonya says. “So you think I’m pretty?”

Knox sneers at her.

“What am I supposed to do, just walk up to wherever they keep their hideout and knock on the door?” Sonya says.

“I have a plan for you, obviously,” Knox says. “I just need to know whether you’re up for it or not.”

Sonya considers Emily Knox, of a height with her, barefoot on the cold tile floor, her breath sharp with apple. It seems she’s been given a series of impossible tasks now; tasks she’s not suited for. But there’s a feeling of inevitability in each of them, that whatever path she walks now, it’s the only path that leads forward instead of back.

“Just so we’re clear,” Sonya says. “What you want in return for handing me Grace Ward’s location... is a database full of UIAs that you have already told me you can use to track anyone who ever had an Insight, regardless of whether it’s been disabled or not. Meaning that I am going to risk my life to give you the ability to blackmail everyone in the Sea-Port megalopolis.”

Knox grins, a dimple forming in her cheek.

“Seriously, poster girl,” she says. “Smarter than you look.”

Sonya sighs, and remembers Cara Eliot looking out her window at the son she barely knows. That’s the gift she would be giving Eugenia Ward, if she succeeds. It feels like a pale thing, really, but it’s the only thing.

“You have to help me hide from my minder,” Sonya says.

“Easy,” Knox says, and when she smiles, it’s a little too gleeful.

Alexander is standing in the lobby when she exits the elevator, looking unkempt, as usual. He wears a blue moth-eaten sweater with a worn hem. Shoes that have seen better days, cracking at the places where his feet bend when he walks. The pocket flap on his coat is falling off. Nikhil could mend it, she thinks, the way he mends everyone’s socks, one eye squinting as he threads the needle with careful fingers, his tongue poking into his cheek.

When he sees her, he says, “Come on, I need to talk to you.” He glances at one of the security guards. “Um—outside, maybe.”

Sonya follows him to the courtyard in front of the building, where the vines stretch across the copper-tinted glass. An evergreen with sagging branches looms over them. The rain has subsided to a mist.

She looks up at him and waits. Knox’s device distorted their conversation, but if Alexander is here, he still knows that she went to meet with Emily Knox alone.

“I assume she gave the recording back,” he says.

Sonya takes the device with Grace Ward’s voicemail on it out of her pocket and offers it to him. He takes it, sliding it into his own pocket.

“Nothing useful on it?”

“No,” Sonya says, and he nods.

“I keep waiting for you to yell at me for consorting with a known deviant,” she says, after a moment.

“You’ve made it pretty clear that you would prefer that I leave you to your own devices,” he says. “So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

She keeps her face passive.

“What are you doing here, then?” she says.

He looks around—at the ivy on the building, at the evergreen behind her, at the street beside them.

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