Page 74 of Poster Girl

Alexander gives her an appraising look.

“What?” she says.

“I didn’t expect you to have any survival skills,” he says. “I certainly don’t.”

She smiles a little.

“My father taught me,” she says. “We used to camp when we were kids, just Susanna and me and Dad. Pretty sure I could catch us a rabbit if I had to.”

She piles the branches she gathered next to the NeverFail, to feed the fire later. Alexander unrolls his sleeping bag. There are shadows on his throat from being strangled, shadows in the shape of fingers. Hesits with the bread and peanut butter and starts making them both sandwiches. She stares at him through the flames as he does it.

“You know that song I had to sing for Knox?” she says.

He nods, without looking at her. “‘The Narrow Way,’ right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “My mom was singing that right before... right before.”

He pauses with a slice of bread balanced on his palm, and looks up at her. “Oh.”

“Then my dad handed out Sol to each of us,” she says. “And he poured us each a full glass of water. And that’s what gets to me now—that he filled the whole glass when all any of us was going to need was a sip.” She laughs a little. “I mean, Sol starts working pretty much right away, and I’m sure he knew that. It’s funny, right? How logic fails us, all the time.”

Alexander’s brow furrows. She looks away, into the trees. The sky is so dark now that she can’t see the outline of the branches against it. The moon is a hazy crescent above them.

“Sol doesn’t kill right away,” she goes on. “It induces euphoria. So after they swallowed it, they all startedlaughing.I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there. Every second that passed, I almost took it, Ialmost...” A shudder works its way down her spine. “But then they kind of just... slumped.”

Remembering it is like looking at something through a glass of water. It has all the wrong shapes.

“I kept sitting there,” she says. “Until the uprising came.”

She looks at him again, and she’s surprised to find his eyes sparkling with tears.

“You asked me if I ever thought about what kind of man it made him, that he gave us poison,” she says. “The answer is no. I never do. I’m pretty sure I know what I’d see, if I looked that closely at it. And it’s easier to just remember them all... fuzzily.”

“What stopped you from taking it?” he says, softly.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “But I think... I didn’t know what I would be dying for.”

The flames wrap around the NeverFail log, blue and orange and yellow. Their eyes meet above them. His look black at night. They focus on her like there’s nothing else to see.

“You know,” he says to her, “you never rattle just because the wind blows. It’s a little unnerving, Sonya.”

The firelight throws his features into sharp relief, the long line of a nose, the ridge of a brow. He sits cross-legged, a hand balanced on one knee, long fingers dangling. She looks at him, carefully. She wants to put her hands in his hair. She wants to peel back the layers around him. She wants to taste the dip in his collarbone.

She wants him.

She knows it now, and it’s as if she’s always known it and only just discovered it, at the same time. Her hands tremble with it. She gets up, moving around the fire to stand in front of him. He looks up at her, firelit and patient. He doesn’t ask her what she’s doing. She doesn’t ask herself what she’s doing, either.

“I feel,” she says, “like this is a betrayal. Of all of them... but mostly of him.”

“Of Aaron, you mean.”

She nods.

“Only,” she says, “it’s too late.”

He shifts forward, onto his knees. The fire is warm at her back. He slips his hands under her coat and rests them on her hips, his touch gentle, careful. He tips his head back and looks up at her.

“So betray him, then,” he says.

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