Page 53 of Poster Girl

He turns at the entrance to the courtyard, eyes wide.

“Ms. Kantor,” he says. “How are you?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

Graham nods, and gestures for her to follow him to a small table in Building 1’s courtyard. She gets moss on her fingers when she pulls out one of the chairs, which is little more than a metal frame, the wood rotted away. A few empty bottles crusted with dirt rest in a pile nearby; there’s crumpled paper and decaying fabric scraps here and there in the untamed greenery.

Graham seems not to notice it. He looks up at her, expectant.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she says, “but I’ve been given a... project. I’m trying to find a missing girl. She was an unauthorized second child who wasn’t found until she was three years old—which means she must have had a black market Insight.”

Graham’s face falls. He looks away.

“I heard you might know something about how that all worked,” Sonya says.

“Been talking to Marie, have you?” Graham’s mouth twitches into a frown. “I thought perhaps, eventually... eventually we might all be permitted to let go of our past weaknesses... I see now that was foolish.”

“I don’t relish dredging up the past, Mr. Carter,” Sonya says. “But I had no one else to ask.”

He sighs, and taps his fingers on the edge of the table. There is a flower carved into the top—a rose—covered in a film of algae.

“My mother—Charlotte’s and mine—wasn’t well,” he says. “She wasn’t ill, mind you, not really—she thought she was ill, all the time. Charlotte didn’t understand, she just wanted Mom to snap out of it, stop worrying—but I had always been a little more like her, a little more... sensitive.”

She has no trouble believing that. Graham is reactive, twitching and jerking with every movement, every sound. Birdcalls and slammed doors and the snaps of someone shaking out their wet clothes. The morgue must have been a good place for him, a place of deep quiet and soothing monotony.

“The thing is, under the Delegation, when you visited a doctor withinsufficient justification—there was a penalty.” He shrugs. “Sometimes Mom needed DesCoin. So when the bodies came in fresh, the Insights still viable—I would sell them. There was a network for it. Coded, so it was more likely to escape the Delegation’s algorithms.”

“What kind of code?”

“They named things after card games,” he says. “Insights were hearts, Blitz was gin rummy—it got darker and grimmer, but I stayed on the surface of it. But with the code, if you wanted to meet, you could just say, ‘Want to play hearts on Friday?’ and no one was the wiser, see?”

Sonya nods.

“So,” she says, “how did that work? The Insight part, I mean, not the market—you said you only did this when the bodies came in fresh.”

“An Insight’s hardware recognizes death right away, but its software takes time to adjust. If you take it out quick, you can put it in someone else so the Insight doesn’t register the gap—so buyers would be on high alert the second an Insight became available. They’d get a doctor to do the insertion, which is a big needle right under the eye, here—” He touches his lower eyelid, pulling it down so she can see the red capillaries. “And then the system registers their unauthorized child under whatever name the Insight was associated with before. Only that name belongs to someone who’s dead, so they’re not in the system anymore. It’s a loophole, see?”

“So if the Wards looked at their daughter, Grace,” Sonya says, “the data would show them interacting with a dead person... but because the person was dead...”

“It would dump the data automatically,” Graham supplies. “Smart little trick.”

She thinks again of confiding in her Insight when she was alone. The more she learns about how automated the system was, the more foolish she feels. Alone in her house, alone in her head, telling a computer her deepest secrets—and ofcoursethat was all it was, but it felt like something grander, at the time.

“Do you happen to remember selling to the Ward family?”

Graham sighs. “Ten years is a long time for an old man to remember, my dear.”

“I know,” she says. “Thank you, though.” She stands. “I have to go, I’m afraid. Have a good day, Mr. Carter.”

She leaves him sitting there, slumped over the little table. She can feel him staring at her until she’s out of sight.

The night they fled the uprising, Sonya’s mother told her not to bring anything with her. Her math book was open on her desk, the task light shining on it. Her sync screen, marked with fingerprints, was lit up on the desk, waiting for her to scan it with her Insight and transmit to the school’s system. Her school clothes hung over the closet door. She left them all behind, only putting on her shoes before running down the stairs to the front door.

Her mother waited there with her coat, holding it out the way she had when Sonya was a child and wanted to play in the snow. Sonya plunged one arm into a sleeve. The front door was already open, and Susanna was crossing the lawn to get in the car, which hummed in the driveway, their father’s face lit from beneath by the dashboard. Julia’s hand inched along Sonya’s shoulders as she moved around her younger daughter, and then she did up the zipper. It didn’t occur to Sonya to tell her that she could do it herself. In that moment she was a child. She felt like a child.

Her mother’s breaths came in short bursts. She looked up at Sonya. They had the same eyes, everyone always said, so Sonya saw her own fear reflected back to her in perfect symmetry.

She thinks of it, standing before Emily Knox in her bedroom. It’s a bare space with only a bed in it—as if, when Knox isn’t being confronted with the technological, her mind goes blank, and she can only think of what’s necessary for survival. She stands right at the edge of Knox’s white bed with its white sheets and the white walls enclosing them, Knox zipping the jacket she is loaning Sonya for the occasion, leather, black, a little too big. A thick strip of tech disguised as a bracelet is wrapped around Sonya’s wrist. Knox’s eyes lift to Sonya’s. They’re fierce, not afraid.

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