Page 64 of Poster Girl

Eugenia sighs. She wipes beneath one eye, and then the other.

“You listened to the voicemail we received a few weeks ago?”

Sonya nods.

“Then you’ll understand what I mean soon enough,” Eugenia says. “The name of the dead woman was Alice Gleissner.”

Sonya hears the croak of the voice on the recording.This is your Alice.Alexander told her it was a reference to Alice in Wonderland.

“A ghoulish joke, perhaps, between my husband and me,” Eugenia says. “We called her our Alice because we didn’t want to trigger an alert from our Insights by calling her by a different name. We were assured that wouldn’t happen, that the loophole would take care of that—do you know about the loophole? Yes, of course you do, you’ve done your investigating—but we never felt sure of it. So we gave her the nickname, and we told her it was because of the girl in the story, Alice in Wonderland.”

“Oh,” Sonya says. “Um—do you have a piece of paper for me to write the name down?”

Eugenia looks her over for a moment as if unsure of her. She opens a drawer at the end of the island and takes out a notepad and pen. Sonya scribbles a message for Knox on it—here’s the name Grace’s Insight was registered under—and asks Eugenia to spellAliceGleissneras she copies it down.

“You’re different than I thought you would be,” Eugenia says toher, as she tears the sheet away from the notepad and folds it. “More serious.”

“Yes. Well.” Sonya tucks the paper into her pocket and pulls away from the island. Suddenly she needs to be gone, like she’s been underwater for too long and is becoming desperate for air. She leaves the half-finished glass of orange juice on the counter and moves toward the door. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Ward.”

She’s made it to the door when Mrs. Ward stops her.

“Sonya.”

She looks back.

“Thank you so much,” she says, “for working so hard to find our daughter.”

Sonya draws a sudden, sharp breath.

“Don’t,” Sonya says, as she opens the door. “Don’t thank me, please.”

She leaves the house, forgetting to close the door behind her, and spills into the street, dodging a cyclist who screams an obscenity at her, stumbling toward the train station, taking deep gulps of air like she’s never tasted it before.

She rides the train back to Knox’s apartment, leaves the note at her front desk, and returns to the Aperture.

That night, she dreams of sitting at the table in the cabin as someone hums “The Narrow Way” right behind her, right into her ear. She stares down at the yellow pill in her hand, and when she lifts her head, she sees that the Wards, not her own family, are sitting all around her: Trudie, Eugenia, and Roger. They tip their heads back in unison, to swallow.

When she wakes, startled, she realizes she was the one humming.

Thirteen

She can’t get the song out of her head. She keeps moving to its rhythm, chewing on its words.Won’t you set aside the lies that you’ve held dear.She thinks of Sam in the sandbox, poking holes with a stick. The fog of Placatia inching toward her. The unobserved hours people bought from Knox.Don’t you know that what’s better is right here?When she got older, she thought of Aaron when she heard that. It would be good, she thought, to marry him, to have a nice little house and weekly dinner parties and two children—with a permit for the second, as the law required. No use resisting it, and no reason to. It was good, because it earned her DesCoin; DesCoin put everything in order, measured and ranked by desirability.

It felt easy.

She goes up to the roof, to the little greenhouse where the seedlings are growing. She knows enough about plants now to know they are best left unfussed with, so she just sits on the stool and watches them and hums the birthday song, to banish “The Narrow Way.” Her hands are shaking and she sits on them.

She hears footsteps on the roof, and sighs. She hasn’t spoken to Nikhil in two days, not since he told her that the world was changing her. She nudges the door open with her toe, expecting to find him there. But Alexander is there instead.

“Mrs. Pritchard told me you might be up here,” he says. “She hasn’t changed at all, has she?”

“No,” Sonya says. “Did she scold you for something?”

“She commented on the length of my hair.” Alexander steps into the greenhouse and makes it feel smaller than it already did. “She never liked me. One time I picked all her irises and gave them to my mom like I’d bought them.”

There’s trouble in his eyes. He’s always shifty, but there is something desperate in the way he sticks a hand in his hair, tugs it. She doesn’t want to ask about it yet.

“You were never good with small talk, either,” she says.

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