Page 18 of Poster Girl

She descends the steps to street level. Everywhere else, the disarray of the city seemed to be the result of bad behavior; here, it’s due to neglect. The stores—once a row of charming boutiques and coffeehouses—are boarded up. The grass in the parkways is wild and tall; the tree branches tangle in the power lines and hang heavy overthe street. She steps over a fallen streetlight, bits of glass crunching under her feet.

She remembers children in strollers, wearing hats to protect their faces from the sun; she remembers couples walking shoulder to shoulder, their knuckles brushing as their arms swung; she remembers dogs sniffing at front gates and the corners of fences. But this is no longer a place for those ordinary things. She turns at the next intersection and walks down the street where her family lived.

There’s debris here, too, but a different kind. She steps over a broken fishing pole, a knitting bag with shiny needles poking out of it, a children’s bicycle with no tires. She recognizes the tattered frame of a brocade sofa from the Perez house, turned upside down on their front lawn, now obviously a home for small mammals. She stops in the middle of the street to look at the front doors torn off their hinges on each side, the broken windows, the charred remains of second stories.

Her family fled early in the uprising. Her father came to them late at night and told them to pack a change of clothes and a toothbrush. They drove down the street with the headlights off, only the car dashboard and their Insights glowing—

Sonya keeps walking.

The Kantor house is made of red brick. Two stories high, with fir trees at the edges of the property. The right side of the house is half-collapsed, the second floor tumbling into the first. Sonya’s room and the guest room fold in on themselves.

Two white pillars frame the front door, which rests against the side of the house, where the lilac bushes used to be. Broken furniture is strewn over the lawn, like entrails spilling from an animal carcass. She stands on her tiptoes near the front door to feel along the frame for the spare key. It’s there, covered in dirt, paint from the frame sticking to it. She slides it into her pocket.

The rugs are gone, the walls cracking and flaking, the furniture absent or broken. She doesn’t trust the steps that lead upstairs. She wanders into the formal dining room, to the left, where the tabletop has shattered, leaving beads of glass all over the wood floor. The metal frame stands unaffected.

All the drawers in the built-in cabinet along the far wall are open. But something in one of them catches the light—one of the napkin rings her mother saved from her first dinner party, a simple yellow loop made of plastic. It looks like something for a baby to teethe on. Her mother always talked about how determined she was to make things “nice” even when they were young and poor—plastic napkin rings, polyester napkins instead of paper, matching melamine plates.There’s no excuse for a lack of effort,she liked to say, one of the phrases Sonya repeated to herself when she saw unkempt or disruptive people.

She keeps moving until she reaches the threshold of her father’s office. She wasn’t allowed to go in, even as a teenager. But it’s only wreckage now. There are books everywhere, left to rot on the hardwood. His desk has been ripped apart, files everywhere, shelves broken, keepsakes smashed. The clay dish she made him in primary school, a cradle of leaves painted deep green to match his walls, is in pieces on the floor. She crouches to pick them up, one by one.

Near the edge of the desk is the poster, encased in glass.what’s right is right. He kept it hanging right in front of him so she could watch him work—that’s what he said, anyway. She stays for a long time in a crouch, the pieces of the dish in her hands, her adolescent face glaring back at her in grayscale. Someone sprayed a red X on the glass, but she can still see through it.

Her father was the one who asked her to sit for the poster. Susanna didn’t like it. She grumbled about it for days. But Sonya had squealed with excitement at the thought of her face being all over the city.

She stands and leaves the office. The rooms are arranged in a square, connected by hallways, so she walks right through the kitchen, with its broken tiles and collapsed cabinets, to the laundry room, half-buried in rubble, the washing machine unperturbed.

She collects things as she goes: a spoon from the wreck of the kitchen, one of Susanna’s guitar picks wedged between the floorboards, a bottle cap her father saved from his first date with her mother. She notes the big homescreen—a wide glass panel designed to sync with all their Insights—in the living room, bashed in repeatedly with a blunt object,and the spray paint on the wall in the foyer that readsdelegation scum. That, she looks at for a long time.

All the little keepsakes in her pockets clatter together as she walks back down the street, away from her family’s home.

The piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it gives the Wards’ address, but Sonya doesn’t go there. Instead she rides the HiTrain toward the Seattle downtown, where pillars of buildings crowd together along the waterfront. There, perched unevenly on a downward slope, is a blocky, asymmetrical glass structure once used as a public library, in the time when print books were more abundant, and now used as one again. The Delegation used it as a community gathering space, the books locked away behind glass, like museum relics.

Sonya has been there before, though she only ever read books projected into her eye via the Insight display. The library is where the Delegation records are kept. That much she knows from Rose Parker’s article.

She follows a line of people into the blue glow of the lobby. She feels the way she did when she was a child, like a small fish in a large fishbowl, the angular glass panes above her refracting light. To her right are seats that descend into the ground, a lecture hall; ahead are bright yellow escalators. She goes to a nearby desk, where a middle-aged man wears a name tag.john.

“Hello,” she says to him. “Would you please tell me where to find the Delegation records?”

John’s eyes fix on her Insight. He hesitates with his stylus over an Elicit screen; he seems so startled by the sight of her that he has forgotten his task. But Sonya knows there are different kinds of surprise, with and without delight. This is the latter.

“For what purpose?” he says.

“Pardon me?”

“For what purpose,” he repeats, slowly this time. “Do you need the Delegation records.”

“Is that a standard question?” she says. “Or are you only askingme?”

He has a scar near his hairline. It is not the first one she’s seen,though it’s more obvious than many, because his hair is thinning, gray sprinkled among the brown. She assumes it’s from the surgery to remove the Insight. It’s an inch long, paler than the rest of his skin.

She takes the Grace Ward paper out of her pocket, unfolds it, and presses it flat to the desk in front of him.

“I’m not here to reminisce,” she says. “I’m here to find information about this missing girl. Okay?”

John looks at the name at the top of the paper. His posture sags a little.

“It’s on the top floor,” he says. “You’ll need a pass. Hold on.”

He gets her a square of bright paper laminated in plastic.delegation recordsis written on it in permanent marker.

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