Page 76 of Poster Girl

She thinks,Idiot,but with warmth she didn’t expect. She puts her hand in his.

The road leads them through the ruins of old civilizations: parking lots with vegetation bursting through the pavement—so huge Sonya tries to imagine all the automobiles that would fill it, and she can’t. Charging stations for electric vehicles that look like spindles with many threads, the cables now eroded. Stores for external ocular devices, the precursors to the Insight, with names like ClearVision and Secretary (outpatient procedure! go home with the only helper you’ll ever need TODAY!one sign reads, in bright pink letters). Spacious complexes for virtual reality gaming, the dated helmets lined up in the windows, covered in dust.

The businesses were abandoned with no one bothering to pack them up. The Delegation promised rewards for those who left the old in favor of the new. People vacated their homes and relocated to city apartments with wide windows; they traded cameras, phones, game consoles, personal computers for Insights, and the government paid them for it.

After one of these stretches of the civilization-that-was, Alexander stops to consult the map. Ahead of them, the road bends to the right. A sign somewhere behind them readtanner.

“Time to leave the road,” he says. “Where we’re headed is close to that mountain.”

He points at a hump of land in the distance. Sonya unzips the front pocket of his bag to take out his Elicit. He turned it off yesterday to conserve its battery—now they’ll need it for its compass.

She lets him turn the Elicit on, since she still doesn’t know how to use it, and steers them into the trees.

They don’t talk as much in the woods. They’re getting close to Grace Ward, and she feels it—in the clench of her jaw, the tightness of hershoulders. She ducks under low branches, waxy needles brushing her cheeks. She takes his hand as they climb over fallen branches or wet slopes. She doesn’t need to ask him to slow down now—she’s content to be breathless, panting into the wet air, if it gets them to their destination faster.

The scrambling of squirrels and birds accompanies their footsteps, the creak of trees in the wind, the chattering of water. The mountain is up ahead, itself a compass drawing them inexorably north. They stop near a pond for water, a bathroom break, a snack—she eats two slices of plain bread, instead of more peanut butter—and they sit on a log by the shore as they chew, looking out over the water.

“I just realized,” he says, his voice sharp and sudden in the quiet. “You changed your mind when you saw her name.”

“What?”

“You were adamant about not doing this whole mission. Up until the second you agreed to it, I thought you were going to tell me to go fuck myself and that would be the last time I ever saw you,” he says. “But then I gave you the piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it.”

Sonya doesn’t dare look at him. She watches the wind ripple the water.

“It wasn’t the offer that changed your mind, it washer.” He furrows his eyebrows. “Why? Did you know her?”

“Not really,” she says.

“But I’m not wrong. You’re not doing this for your freedom, you’re doing it forher,specifically.”

She hesitates with a word between her teeth. But the moment has a certain inevitability in it.

“Yes,” she says.

Sonya—sixteen years old, her hair curled just so—sits on the HiTrain, near the window, and tries not to groan.Minor disruption of the peace, minus threeDesCoin,she thinks. She stays quiet and waits for the train to start again. It stalls here, at almost the same place, every day.

She’s just two stops away from home, on her way back from school.Her backpack—green and gray, patriotic colors—is tucked between her feet. Her knees are together, and her hands are folded in her lap. She ignores the man dozing beside her and looks out the window.

A little girl swings in the side yard of the brick building next to the raised tracks. In another one of these stalled periods, she watched the father of the family construct the swing set, his face red and his forehead shiny with sweat. Now the girl pumps her legs back and forth, seeking height. The swing set bounces every time she reaches her apex. She has worn the grass away beneath her, probably from dragging her feet to stop herself when the swinging gets out of control.

It’s dusk, later than Sonya usually goes home. She stayed after school to practice with her vocal ensemble group. She’s a first alto, never a soloist, but a reliable keeper of the pitch. The concert is just a week away, and they’re struggling with maintaining the rhythm between the sections. When Sonya tried to complain about some of the girls’ inability to read music the other night, Susanna rolled her eyes and reminded her that she doesn’t know how to read music either.I don’t need to,Sonya replied, petulant.I can hear the rhythm just fine.Minus ten DesCoin for bragging.

The lights are on in the first-floor apartment, right by the swing set. Sonya can only see silhouettes in them, since all the curtains are drawn. Movement in a room toward the front of the house catches her eye, the busy shuffling and stepping of someone in the kitchen—the mother, probably. She sees the blue rectangular glow of a homescreen—the father, maybe, resting after work. She invents a family just like her own, but with one daughter instead of two, of course—these people, with their little apartment, their worn grass, their ragged curtains, would never be permitted to have two children.

Then something shifts near the back of the apartment. Sonya frowns, and leans closer to the window, until her nose is almost touching it. The curtains in the back room open just a few inches. The room is dark, but Sonya sees a small white circle between folds of fabric.

An Insight, shining in the dark.

Her heart races. Sonya’s eyes stay locked on the Insight, and she thinks she can see, by its light, the curve of a small cheek, the point ofa chin. Then the train starts moving, a calm voice apologizing for the delay. But Sonya can’t stop staring out the window. She knows what she just saw: an illegal second child.

She sets up the equation in her mind, the same way she always does. There’s a risk of a penalty here. She doesn’t know the family in that apartment—maybe their daughter is the one hiding in the dark, and the girl on the swings is someone else in the building. She’ll lose DesCoin for telling tales if the information isn’t accurate. But no, she’s seen the girl on the swings before, and she knows it was the girl’s father who built the swing set.

No, she knows what she saw.

“I went home,” Sonya says, her voice flat, “and I told my father. I told him what I saw, and I told him where the building was. I was proud afterward. I was up all night waiting for my DesCoin count to increase. I bragged to Susanna when it did. I even told Aaron. All that green. Look how useful I can be.”

She picks up a small rock near her feet, draws her elbow back, and throws it into the water. It drops in with athunk.

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