Page 62 of Poster Girl

“I’ve known where the Army’s headquarters are for months,” she says. “It’s hard to hide that kind of power consumption in a city that monitors its resources the way ours does. They just don’t know quite what to look for, and I do.” She smiles a little. “Have you ever seen a magic act?”

“Get to the point,” Sonya says. She squeezes the knife handle.

“The point is: misdirection,” Knox says. “They already knew I was going to make a move. I just needed to convince them that it was a different one than the one I was actually making. So while you were there drawing all their focus... I did exactly what I sent you in there to do, at the same time I sent you to do it. I attached a leech to their server.”

She touches one of the keys on her keyboard, waking up the screenthat hangs above them. An array of windows confronts them, but in the center is a green progress bar, ticking up and down with the flow of data. Knox gestures to it broadly, sweeping her hand across the screen.

“In a little while,” she says, “I’ll have access to the UIAs, just like we planned.”

Sonya grits her teeth so hard they squeak. “I guess it’s a good thing I survived, then.”

“If you hadn’t, I still would have tried to find Grace Ward,” Knox says. “I’m not a monster.”

“Oh?” Sonya tilts her head. “You could have told me what was really going on.”

“I wasn’t sure you could lie adequately.”

“I did,” Sonya says. “I lied for you. Just so you know.”

“I never asked you to,” Knox says, quietly.

“I did it anyway,” Sonya says. She puts her knife back in her pocket and moves toward the door.

“Hey,” Knox says. “You still need to find out the name registered to Grace Ward’s Insight. I assume the Wards didn’t register it to the name Grace.”

“Yeah,” Sonya says. “I know.”

She looks back at Knox, still sitting on the edge of her desk, arms crossed, hair lank around her shoulders. Knox has a point: she never promised decency. From the beginning, she communicated nothing but disdain for Sonya and the people in the Aperture. There’s no reason to feel betrayed. She got exactly what she expected to get.

But there is something humiliating about hope laid bare.

She walks out, shutting the door behind her.

She sits on the curb across the street from the Wards’ apartment building for the better part of an hour, chewing on the inside of her cheek until it aches.

The building is a block of red brick with twelve units and a side yard hemmed in by a chain-link fence. The Wards live in the street-level apartment closest to the train tracks. The one with the wreathof wheat hanging from a nail in the door. The one with the worn red welcome mat.

Sonya rode the HiTrain past this building every day on her way to and from school. The train stalled right next to it half a dozen times while she was riding, waiting for signal clearance. She once watched Mr. Ward disassemble a rusted swing set in the side yard for twenty minutes, getting tangled in the swing chains, stomping on a joint to get the bolt to detach.

Someone puts a grocery bag down next to her on the curb and heaves a sigh. Sonya looks up to see a girl in her late teens, maybe, with curly brown hair and full cheeks. She’s wearing a yellow rain jacket.

“You can just knock on the door, you know,” the girl says, nodding to the apartment across the street. “No one’s gonna bite you.”

Her voice has a familiar rasp.

“I’m Trudie,” the girl says. “Ward. What happened to your face?”

“Oh,” Sonya says. Trudie—Gertrude Ward—is the Wards’ oldest daughter, the one who made Grace illegal. She is thick through the waist and pink-cheeked. Her teeth have the too-straight look of someone whose bite was corrected.

Sonya stands, brushing flecks of rock from the back of her coat. Good Delegation manners carry her when her own brain doesn’t—she sticks out her hand for Trudie to shake. “Sonya Kantor.”

She doesn’t explain what happened to her face.

Trudie shakes it, and picks up her bag. Sonya spots a bunch of grapes inside it, and her mouth waters. She hasn’t had grapes in a long time.

“Coming?” Trudie says, and she starts crossing the street.

Sonya follows her to the red welcome mat and into a bright kitchen. The room feels worn, but in a way that suggests warmth, and use, and fullness at the end of a meal. The floor tiles are cracked, the oven door splattered with grease on the inside. The cabinets are white, painted so thick Sonya can see the brush lines from where she stands in the entryway. A short, stout woman wearing oven mitts takes a loaf of bread out of the oven and sets it on the stove.

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