Page 96 of Poster Girl

Eugenia’s hand lifts, hovers near her mouth. The kitchen is silent.

Sonya remembers a splinter she got in the sole of her foot, as a child, running barefoot in the yard. For a day she tried to ignore it, but it was too painful, and she had to confess to her mother that she needed it removed. Julia dug it out of her foot with a sterilized needle. It was deep, and stubborn, and she screamed and sobbed for Julia to stop, but she refused.It has to come out,Julia said to her.All of it.

“I went home and I told my father, who was the head of the Committee of Order,” she says. “He’s the one who ordered the raid on your apartment. I don’t know the exact details of the story after that. But I know that after he took Grace, he gave her Sol. She died without pain. He brought her body to a house in the woods outside the city to be buried.”

Roger takes a horrible, rattling breath. Trudie is still crying, but quiet.

Eugenia only stares.

“A valuable friend of the Delegation—and now the Triumvirate—lives out there. She was able to confirm what happened. I can tell you how to find the place, if you would like to see the grave, and speak to the woman who lives there.”

Sonya doesn’t want to tell them the woman is Naomi Proctor; it will only sound ridiculous to them.

Sonya rehearsed everything she has said so far, but she never got to this part. The part where she tells them she’s sorry. The part where she lets herself soften. All of that feels wrong now. There is nothing that feels right, to take its place. Nothing that makes this easy, or simple, or good.

“I agreed to investigate your daughter’s disappearance because I knew I was responsible for it,” Sonya says. “I can’t . . .” Her breath hitches. Sometime in the last few minutes, she started crying, but she didn’t realize it. “I can’t apologize to you. I came to tell you the truth. That’s all.”

She is quiet then. Trudie’s and Roger’s hands are piled on top of each other on the counter, each of them reaching for the other, comforting each other. But Eugenia has stayed still. Her soft eyes are not so soft anymore. She looks at Sonya, and Sonya wants to cower, but she doesn’t. She looks back.

“Do you feel better now?” Eugenia says, in a cold, small voice. “Now that you’ve made your big confession?”

It would be easy, Sonya thinks, to feel superior to this woman—stripped of her youth, in her faded floral dress, in her ugly yellow kitchen that smells like oil spatter and chocolate cake. But the way she received the devastation that Sonya came to offer her makes that impossible. Sonya could never feel superior to this woman.

“Do you think it makes you noble, that you take responsibility for this?” Eugenia goes on. “You made sure to tell me, didn’t you, in your own little way, that you didn’t do this in exchange for your freedom, no, you did it for high-minded reasons. You triedso hardto make it look like you understand what you did to us. What an elegant manipulation you’ve brought to our doorstep, Sonya Kantor.”

She tips up her chin.

“How did you spend the DesCoin you received as a reward for turning us in? On a new dress, a wild night? Or did you hoard it for the perfect future the Delegation had laid out for you?”

Sonya had, in fact, spent the DesCoin she earned for turning Grace Ward in. She had used it to buy a night with Aaron. Her first time, her virginity lost out of wedlock. A hefty DesCoin penalty.

Sonya flinches at the question. She doesn’t answer.

“My daughter is dead,” Eugenia says. “Get out of my house.”

Cold with sweat, Sonya wipes her cheeks, turns, and leaves. She expected to run into a sea of commuters, coming home from work, but the street is empty, quiet. She crosses it, and then keeps walking, trembling, toward the train.

Twenty-One

The air smells salty and sour. She climbs the steps to the top of the embankment that wraps around most of the city’s waterfront, a story high, to protect the city from the rising water level. There are stretches of glass here and there, to give pedestrians a look underwater. She passes one on her way up. Sea foam collects in the upper corners of the window.

The embankment is empty now, likely due to the rain. It taps on her shoulders and the top of her head. It rolls behind her ears and accumulates around her collar. She stands with her hands on the railing, and closes her eyes. All she hears is the splash of the waves beneath her. She wonders what the city sounded like when the streets were full of cars. When the water didn’t press up against its edges, fighting to get in.

She doesn’t look over her shoulder to find out if Easton Turner sent someone to follow her, to make sure she kept her promise. She never intended to keep it, only wanted to get out of the Aperture for long enough to talk to the Wards, to fulfill Knox’s last request. To find the proof Rose needs.

Knox told her at the very beginning,You don’t really understand how much you can find out about a person just based on where they go and when.She does now. Her father’s life had unfurled in front of her when Rose looked up his name, the screen pausing on the last place his Insight emitted a signal: a grave somewhere outside the city, where many of the people killed in the uprising were buried. She could have kept pieces of her family, the ones recorded in the UIA database—couldhave learned her mother’s secrets, as well as her father’s, and Susanna’s. Ripped the entire family open to see what was inside. She had gone so long with her eyes closed, there was something appealing about prying them open, now, to find out just how foolish she’d been.

In the end, she let them wash away.

The rain gentles to a mist, and she sits down on a bench to watch the water move. It’s just starting to get dark. She unzips her coat just enough to reach the interior pocket, where she put the travel permit, but that’s not what she’s after—instead, she takes out the worn envelope behind it. Until this morning, she kept it in the crate beside her bed. She opens it, and tips a yellow pill into her palm.

Ten years ago, she made the decision not to take her life in a single moment, when she tilted her head back along with her parents and sister but never opened her mouth. But as she watched them descend into euphoric giggles, she thought about it again. And as they slumped over the table, all the life drained from them, she thought about itagain.She considered the pill in her hand for a long time before the uprising burst through the door to the cabin. Eventually, she hid it, in case she needed it later.

She considers it now. She doesn’t feel desperate, or afraid. She feels like someone who leveled everything behind her so she had nothing left to go back to. In a few days or a few weeks, Rose Parker will publish the article that blows up Easton Turner’s life, and it will take Sonya’s family with it. It doesn’t matter that she was a child when her father murdered those people. It doesn’t matter whether her mother and sister knew or not. And it doesn’t matter if she takes on a new name. Everyone in the city knows her face. She will always be his daughter.

But if she’s honest with herself, that isn’t why she is considering the Sol now. That honor belongs to Eugenia Ward.Do you feel better now that you’ve made your big confession?

No,she wants to go back and answer.No, I feel sick all the time, I feel ready to be gone.

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