Page 8 of Poster Girl

“All fixed. Thanks for the story about my father.”

“Happy to oblige,” he says.

On the day she lost everyone:

They sit at the table in the cabin at their usual places: August at one end, Julia at the other, Susanna at their father’s right, Sonya at his left. August pours each of them a glass of water. Julia hums as she tips the pills from the bottle: one, two, three, four.

Sonya recites the lyrics in her head.

Won’t you keep an eye on me

And I’ll keep an eye on you

Five, six, seven, eight. Julia passes a pill to Susanna, a pill to August, and a pill to Sonya, and keeps one for herself.

One step after another...

We’ll make it through.

The pill is bright yellow against Sonya’s palm.

Two

There’s a man in her apartment.

Sonya’s hand goes to the knife in her pocket. She knows what it is to be caught unaware, to face the consequences of being on your own among people who have nothing to lose.

But there are no locks in the Aperture, so there’s nothing she can do to keep her little apartment safe when she’s not in it. Not that it matters much—there’s nothing to steal. And he isn’t here to steal anything.

He sits at her little table, in one of her folding chairs. It’s a proper table, left in this apartment by whoever occupied it before the uprising. There’s a name carved into the front of it, BABS, written in childish uppercase. She’s invented a story about Babs in her mind—a girl, maybe eleven, unruly, scolded for swinging her legs when she sits, for never being able to stop moving. Desperate to be permanent, somehow; etching the letters with her steak knife when her parents weren’t paying attention.

Sonya knows the man. His name is Alexander Price. Tall, his knees bumping the underside of the low table. His eyes so dark they look black. He has a beard, trim but not neat, creeping across his throat, uneven in places.

“Get out,” she says to him.

She’s holding Graham’s useless stove burner against her stomach like a shield.

“Now, that,” he says, “is not the Delegation hospitality I was raised to expect.”

“I reserve that for guests, and you’re an intruder,” she says. “Get out.”

“No.”

“You think that just because I’m a prisoner here, you can walk into my home whenever you like?” She puts the burner coil down on the square of countertop where she prepares food. His eyes flick to her tight hands, and then to her face. He seems unbothered.

She searches automatically for the ring of light around his right iris. But there isn’t one.

Everyone she ever saw before the uprising—and now after it, with a few exceptions—had an Insight. Its absence is like a missing finger, or a missing ear; he looks unbalanced without it. Or unfinished, like someone stopped drawing him too soon.

“You look the same,” he says. “Except the hair. I’m surprised the old geezers in here let you cut it that short. That haircut wouldn’t earn you any DesCoin.”

She turns back to the apartment door and opens it wide. Cool air from the hallway wafts in. Her next-door neighbor Irene isn’t home—she spends most of her time downstairs with Mrs. Pritchard and three of the other widows, the most proper ones. But Sonya wants him to know that if she screams, her voice won’t be muffled by the door.

When she turns back to him, he’s frowning a little. “I’m not going to hurt you. Do you really believe I’d do that?”

“I believe many things about you now,” she says.

This is the man who told the uprising where to find her family when they tried to flee the city. Without him, they might have been able to escape. Without him, they might have lived. She wasn’t ready for the pain of this, of seeing him again.

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