Page 19 of Poster Girl

“Thank you,” she says. She tucks the Grace Ward paper back into her pocket, and walks toward the escalators.

As she travels up to the top floor, someone going the opposite direction points at Sonya and elbows her friend, excited. They both wave, and for a second Sonya wonders if she knows them, before she hears them shout, “Poster Girl!”

The Delegation records take up most of the top floor. Rows and rows of taupe bookshelves with a slim file for each person who lived in the Seattle–Portland–South Vancouver megalopolis. She stands among them with the laminated pass in hand, unsure where to go. Above her, the diamond-patterned glass ceiling slants to its apex. Through it, she sees the stone and glass structures that crowd around the library, blocking some of its light.

By instinct, she focuses on the ceiling to learn more about the building—the architect, the year it was built, the style. But the Insight display is, of course, inert; it presents her with nothing. She wonders if Alexander Price is watching and mocking her for the old habit.

At the top of the escalator is a sign explaining the records room:

It may strike us as odd that the Delegation—with its reliance on the Insight to track, reward, and punish its citizens—would keep paper records. Indeed, they kept both digital and analog files on their citizens when they were in power, with the analog files containing only the information that the Delegation deemed most pertinent. The more expansive digital records were purged by an unknown government official during the uprising, but freedom fighters were able to recover the entirety of the paper records from Seattle’s City Hall, which we make freely available to our patrons here. We believe that staying in touch with our history empowers us to avoid its worst mistakes.

Sonya reads it with her mouth curled into a sneer, lingering on the phrase “freedom fighters.” She thinks of her father covering her mouth with his hand on the way to the car as they made their escape, his palm smelling of lemon soap; of the red lines on her wrist from the zip ties after her arrest; of the three black body bags arranged on the moss outside the cabin—

She plucks a file off one of the shelves and reads the name at the top.trevorquinn. She puts it back and pulls a file off the next shelf down.rebeccarand. She’s alone in this section, unsupervised. She could get lost here, burying herself in the stories of what was. The objects she took from her family’s home jingle in her pocket as she walks down to the end of the room, where she finds theWs.

There is a row of Wards, not all of them related. They’re arranged alphabetically. Alexander, Anna, Anthony, Arthur. All the way to George, Gertrude, Gloria, Grant, Greg. No Grace. An illegal girl doesn’t have a Delegation file.

But Grace’s parents’ names were on the paper Alexander gave her: Roger and Eugenia Ward. So she picks up Eugenia’s file and sits on the floor between the shelves. The pages are dense with text.preferred locationsis the heading on one;frequent purchasesis the heading on another, a DesCoin amount assigned to each item. Trash bags, zero DesCoin; tampons, four DesCoin; a six-pack of beer, fifty DesCoin. Sonya’s parents had argued about the tampon amount once, with her mother demanding to know why tampons were not a zero-tier item when they were so necessary, and her father arguing that noteveryone used them, and not everything could be zero tier, she could buy sanitary napkins instead at two DesCoin—

She scans the list of the Wards’ earnings—highlighted yellow and labeledaverage. Roger seemed to take in very little DesCoin, period, suggesting a failure to participate in society, and Eugenia lost hers through carelessness, little things like crossing the street outside of approved zones, entering the train before others had exited, cursing in front of her child. But there’s nothing notable. Sonya moves to recent purchases, looking for a sign that they were housing an illegal second child, but they had been careful. They must have planned ahead for a second child, put aside diapers, food, toys from their first daughter to provide for the second. It was an elaborate undertaking.

Sonya chews her fingernail. There are a few oddities noted in the report, namely that Eugenia Ward favored certain luxury shelf-stable goods, such as nuts, specialty candy, and mustard—not common for someone of her status, and out of line with her other purchases. But even that is not helpful to Sonya—she can’t track down the teenage Grace Ward by following mustard purchases.

She puts Eugenia’s file back where it belongs, and she’s retracing her steps down the center aisle to the entrance when she sees the label forK,and veers off course.

Her fingers drift over August and Julia, uncertain, before she pluckssonyakantorfrom the shelf.

She skips the early pages—basic information, preferred locations, recent purchases. She was young then, with few purchases to speak of. Movie tickets, snacks at the corner store, school supplies. Her DesCoin history brings a smile to her face—she always had a high number, for someone her age, which means she earned plenty of DesCoin with her behavior and bought only items with a high Desirability score—tickets to C-rated movies, healthy snacks, modest clothing. Each entry is highlighted in green—according to the key, green meansabove average.

Near the back is a page titledcontribution assessment:

Sonya Kantor is a legal second child (Permit #20692) of August and Julia Kantor. She does not show signs of mental illness beyond the norm, though she has a propensity for moodiness greater than the average for her age. She exhibits moderate intelligence, below the level of the rest of her family. That said, her average school performance can be attributed to a lack of interest as well as a lack of ability—she is bored by difficult texts and appears to achieve acceptable grades only to earn DesCoin. Her extracurricular interests are relatively shallow, and though she is competent at piano and voice, she does not possess a particular talent in either. She is compliant with Delegation protocols, with a strong desire to please and a good memory for rules and regulations. She trusts easily and does not possess a great deal of curiosity. Though she occasionally demonstrates furtive interest in the same gender, she appears to be demonstratively heterosexual and will be a suitable partner for a promising Delegation employee. However, she is not a viable option for Delegation employment herself.

Sonya stops reading. She closes her folder and puts it back on the shelf, between her mother’s and her sister’s—there was only one Kantor family in the megalopolis, so there are no other names to sort through. As she walks out of the library, the laminated pass left behind on the carpet, she presses her palms to her cheeks to cool them.

She rides the escalators down, running her fingers over the objects in her pockets—the bottle cap, the fragments of the dish she made, the guitar pick. Then she puts up her hood, shielding her right eye from view, and walks back to the HiTrain.

Four

Alexander Price stands at her window, where the tapestry blocks her view of the street beyond the Aperture. He’s holding the tapestry back so he can look down at the corner store where she has seen people with binoculars, peering into the windows of Building 4 like birders. His hair, now that it’s long, is wavy and thick, oil dark. When he turns toward her, a curl falls over his forehead and he doesn’t seem as threatening. He more closely resembles the boy she used to sneak looks at across the kitchen island when she was supposed to be listening to Aaron.

She still leaves the door open behind her.

There was a crowd at the entrance when she returned, waiting for her. She had no choice but to elbow people aside. One of them shouted in her face, his breath stale and hot. One of them spat on her coat; she wiped it away once she was inside with a handkerchief she had tucked into her sleeve. A few others tried to get pictures of her with their Elicits, or her signature on little slips of paper. She was steady as she walked away from the guard station, and then slumped against the outer wall of Building 4 to catch her breath.

She thinks, now, of the wall in her parents’ house that saysdelegation scum.

“Why are you here?” she says to Alexander, in a tone that would have lost her two DesCoin, if it still existed.

“Seems like you had quite a day,” he says. He turns his head to the side. There’s a scar on his temple, a shade darker than the rest of hislight brown skin, jagged, like the surgeon who removed his Insight slipped a little with the scalpel.

“I’ve been going over your footage,” he says.

“Then you saw that there’s no way for me to find that girl,” she says. “I have nothing to go on. Not even a mention in her parents’ files.”

“I saw that you have no particular interest in finding her.” He lets go of the tapestry and steps away from the window. “Judging by the first thing you did when you left the Aperture.”

“Are you telling me you never went back to your old house?” she says. “I doubt Grace Ward’s parents will notice the extra hour I spent there.”

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