“So Grace Ward,” Sonya says.

  “Not sure why they bothered naming her that, if she was an illegal second child,” Knox says. “They didn’t earn anything by having her. They must be boring by accident, and not on purpose. How old was she when she was taken?”

  “Three,” Alexander replies.

  “Three.” Knox lets out a low whistle. “Now, that’s impressive. Shouldn’t be possible, really, with how Insights register each other.”

  “But she probably didn’t have an Insight if she was illegal.”

  “Oh, she must have had an Insight,” Knox says. “When Insights lock on each other, they register each other’s presence—but they are also designed to search out human faces, and to detect human voices. Even if you can tend to an infant blindfolded, you can’t keep them silent for three years.”

  Knox’s glass has a layer of water in it now, from the melted ice cube. She tips it back, swallows.

  “It’s time for you to go, Ms. Kantor,” Knox says. “I’d like to have another drink without the phrase ‘The Narrow Way’ rattling around in my head, thanks. I’ll get in touch with you if I find anything on this.”

  She doesn’t say how, and Sonya doesn’t ask. Knox tucks the silver device into her pocket, unplugs the headphones, and tosses them at Sonya. It’s a dismissal.

  Everything inside the HiTrain car is bathed in greenish light. Most of the seats are occupied, but the car is quiet, full of people with heads bowed toward their Elicits; people leaning against the glass barriers with eyes closed; people with books held between thumb and pinkie; people with slumped posture and scarred hairlines. The only two seats available are side by side, so Sonya and Alexander sit with their shoulders brushing together every time the car sways, and she pulls her arms in, squeezing her hands between her knees.

  He taps his fingers, pinkie, then ring finger, middle, index, and thumb, in a ripple.

  She always got to the Price house early on Wednesdays, before Aaron got home from soccer practice. When she did, she went straight upstairs to wait in his room for him—usually posed on his bed, her head angled just so, so he’d tell her she looked like a painting. But she could never stop herself from slowing down as she passed Alexander’s door, where he inevitably sat at his desk, hunched over his homework. One night, though, she saw him with photo negatives. Each strip of them, acquired at vintage stores and donation centers, cost fifty DesCoin—the Delegation didn’t reward nostalgia. Alexander had stacked them on his desk, and one by one he held them up to his task lamp.

  He noticed her standing there, watching. Want to see, he asked her, almost like it wasn’t a question. She stepped into his room, over the soft blue carpet. It smelled like orange—there was a peel in the trash can. She took one of the negatives from him and held it up to the light, closing her right eye so the Insight’s light wouldn’t interfere. She saw a collection of aluminum cans in one, a man and woman with their arms wrapped around each other in another, a dog with its tongue curled around its nose in the third. And beside her, Alexander sat with his fingers tapping, waiting to hear what she said.

  Each one’s a world, she said, because it sounded like it might be profound. She wanted to steady his hands.

  When she thinks of it now, after everything he did, she feels uneasy, like she might be sick. She tries not to bump him with her knee.

  No one on the train speaks to her, but everyone looks at her, their attention drawn by the glow in her right eye, the glow that once assigned value to every choice. Now those small choices—posture, the length of a stare, the activity one chooses to pass the time on the train—are empty of value, and the people are ruled by whim instead.

  She never wanted to be rid of the Insight, before. Before the uprising, it was like a friend, one who kept her from getting too lonely. She spoke to it sometimes, knowing it couldn’t read her thoughts; told it benign secrets, like how much she loved the smell of pipe tobacco and how stupid Aaron made her feel when he talked politics and which people at school she sometimes thought about kissing. She told herself it understood her private indiscretions, the way she cursed to herself when she was alone in her house and made a mistake, the urge to touch herself when she couldn’t fall asleep, the smug feeling of seeing the billboard of her own face on the way to school every morning. It knew her during a time when she was desperate to be known.

  But now all it does is watch in silence. All the Insight does is make people stare at her.

  The car empties as they go. As soon as another seat opens up, Sonya comes to her feet, rearranges her coat around her, and moves away from Alexander. She thinks it will be a clear enough sign. But when her stop comes, he gets off the train with her.

  “I didn’t realize you lived so close to the Aperture,” she says.

  She doesn’t move toward the stairs.

  “I don’t,” he says. “But it’s dark, so I’m going to walk you there.”

  “Go home, Alexander.”

  “You don’t have to be so—”

  “How many times do you want me to debase myself in front of you?” she demands. “How many times will be enough?”

  His hands are tucked in his pockets. His skin glows orange under the lights on the platform, which flicker a little as she waits for his answer. He seems stunned.

  Finally, he clears his throat and speaks:

  “I’ll get you the contact information of one of the families that’s been reunited with their child. I’ll leave it for you at the gate.”

  She’s tempted to ask what changed his mind, what made him think that her face will no longer be a torment inflicted on people who have already suffered enough, as he suggested earlier. But she doesn’t. She leaves instead, turning toward the steps and descending, cold air rushing into the worn spots in her shoes. Her socks are damp, and she makes a plan: leave her shoes by the door, hang her socks on the clothesline in the bathroom, wrap herself in the quilt that covers her bed, sleep until morning. Maybe she’ll be lucky and Nikhil will have left food in her kitchen; maybe tonight is the night he decided it was time to open a can of chicken soup instead of beans or corn or peas.

  The streets are empty and dark on the way to the Aperture, and her Insight lights the way.

  Seven

  Sonya sits at Mr. Nadir’s table with the radio again. Charlotte is playing cards with Nikhil, a slow, sedate game that requires a firm grasp of strategy. Sometimes minutes go by without either of them taking a turn. Sonya lines up the wires she’s ripped from the radio and stripped of their plastic casings. Charlotte is humming, but it’s not a Delegation song—it’s something older, probably classical.

  Everyone in the building has something that everyone else wants, and Charlotte’s is a music player. It plays digital files, stored on little devices like the one Alexander played Grace Ward’s voicemail on earlier. Charlotte has spent years acquiring as many of them as she can, and every month the other residents gather in her little apartment and make requests. Each of the old devices has a name—Johnny, Margot, Belinda, Pete, the list goes on. Charlotte’s favorite is Margot, which holds an impressive collection of orchestral music recorded by the Sea-Port Symphonic. Sonya’s favorite is Katherine, an eclectic collection of genres, most of them harder-edged. No one else ever wants to listen to Katherine, but Charlotte lets her in sometimes to listen to it by herself.

  “I wonder if there’s anyone in the Aperture that could help you,” Nikhil says. “Someone who worked in Insight assignation, perhaps—maybe they sold Insights on the sly.”

  “You think someone who broke Delegation laws would end up in the Aperture?” Sonya says. “This place is full of loyalists. That’s why they’re in here.”

  “Not necessarily,” Nikhil says.

  “I think Kevin worked in assignations,” Charlotte says. “Even if he didn’t do anything illegal, perhaps he knows who did.”

  Sonya nods, and runs her fingertips over the wires laid out in front of her.

  “It troubles you, then,” Nikhil says, giving Sonya a sideways look over the top of his cards.

  “The radio?” she says.

  “Obviously not,” Charlotte remarks. “Quiet, I’m on the verge of something.”

  “You’ve been on the verge of something for three minutes,” Nikhil says.

  Charlotte makes a face at him, and lays down a card. Nikhil is ready with his own, matching her just a few seconds later. Charlotte scowls and returns to staring at her hand.

  “It troubles you,” Nikhil says, “that Grace is alive.”

  “What an awful thing to say,” Charlotte says. “Of course it doesn’t trouble her that the girl is alive.”

  “I’m not saying she wanted Grace to be dead,” he says, “just that she believed it was a fool’s errand, and now it isn’t.”

  “Better not to be the fool,” Charlotte says, laying down her card.

  Sonya selects a wire that looks right, and clamps it to the connector on the old radio, on each end, two sets of needle-nose pliers sticking out of the back. Chewing on her lip, she flips the power switch.

  The radio crackles to life.

  “Is it?” Sonya replies.

  The guard at the entrance—Williams—is ready for her the next morning, a business card pinched between his first two fingers.

  “Someone left this for you,” he says. “Gangly fellow.”

  The front of the card reads alexander price, department of restoration. Beneath it is an address and phone number. She stares at “Department of Restoration” for a moment, and then flips the card over. Ray and Cara Eliot. The address is in Olympia, which means she’ll have to take the Flicker instead of the HiTrain. She’s never ridden the Flicker alone.

  A note at the bottom of the card reads—in cramped writing—I let her know you would be coming. She remembers him washing the dishes after weekly dinners, leaned up against the counter with his sleeves bunched around his elbows, whistling under his breath, like even the song in his head was something he wanted to keep for himself. She remembers how she watched him when no one was looking, and it eats at her now, the thought of that past longing.

  “He told me he would,” she says to the guard. “Can you tell me where the nearest Flicker station is?”

  “Downtown,” Williams says. “Near the Beaver Building.”

  Her face heats as she asks, “Do I need credits for it?”

  “Not unless you want a fancy seat,” he says. “You can thank the Triumvirate for making public transportation free for all.”

  Sonya tucks the business card into her pocket. “Thank you.”

  She thanks him every time he opens the gate for her, and he scowls every time.

  There are only a few people waiting for her outside the gates today, none of them holding signs. One is a woman with rosy cheeks, who asks her for a picture together. Sonya is too startled to refuse. She watches the woman’s hands shake as she holds up a small camera secured to her wrist with a strap. The woman smells like baby powder. Sonya doesn’t remember to smile.

  One of the others tries to talk to her, calls her Poster Girl, asks her if she’s lonely, and she just keeps walking. He follows her, at first, but she doesn’t turn to look at him, and eventually, his footsteps fade, and there’s just the crunch of gravel and paper under her feet.

  It’s bright today, the sun gleaming on the pavement and shining on the chrome side of the HiTrain as it pulls up to the platform. She finds a seat alone at the back of the car and leans her head against the glass to watch the city pass by. The buildings shift from low and crumbling brick to towers of metal and glass. When she was a child, she thought of them as giants from old legends, titans and nephilim, Svyatogor atop his massive steed. But the wonder of youth has faded. Now she knows how many people are stuffed inside every building. The more there are, the less any one of them matters. Who cares about a single blade of grass when you’re standing in a field?

  She gets off the train at Rainier Square. The Beaver Building, as Williams called it, stands across the street from the station, a seamless concrete pedestal that arches up to a rectangular shaft, nicknamed so because the bottom looks like it was chewed by a beaver. A sign points her toward Freeway Station, just two blocks east, and she remembers where she’s going.

  Her father took her on the Flicker when she was ten years old. He signed her out of school for it, telling her it was worth the DesCoin to spend some time with her alone. They walked to the station together, hand in hand, and rode the Flicker south, to Tacoma, where her grandmother lived. He sat next to her on the way, and instead of working, as he normally would have, he ignored the occasional flutter of his Insight—notifications from work—to point out different parts of the city on a map for her. The smell of pipe tobacco and soap enveloped her every time he shifted in his seat. He showed her how to make a comb into a harmonica by laying a piece of paper on top of it and making it flutter as he sang.

  It’s an hour before the train will arrive, but instead of waiting inside, surrounded by people reading newspapers, she goes outside to the platform. The train tracks are straight, surrounded on all sides by concrete. The Flicker tracks were built under an old road, her father told her on their way to the station, and she can see it now, the wide stretch of land carved into the city as if by the point of a knife, the same way Babs drew her name on the side of the table in her apartment, working her name into the wood.

  She takes the business card out of her pocket and looks at it again, Alexander Price, Department of Restoration. It’s a strange job for someone so intent on leaving the old world behind, a job that wraps itself around the past. She wonders if he chose it or if it was given to him as a kind of punishment, the way the Aperture was given to her. He betrayed the Delegation, but maybe, in the eyes of the uprising, he didn’t betray it thoroughly enough.

  She descends to the train when the gate springs open, automatically, at its arrival. She’s one of the first to board, so she chooses a forward-facing seat near the front of the car and folds her hands in her lap, spine straight, ankles together. People move into the car and settle in. It’s a late-morning train, so it isn’t packed with commuters—there are two solo parents pushing their respective strollers, three university students with backpacks in their laps, two old men with a magnetic chess set.

  The vacuum tube doesn’t allow for windows, so along each side of the train are screens for advertisements, lit up in brilliant colors. A woman tosses her hair over her shoulder, holding up a shampoo bottle the size of a finger. Just one drop does the trick! A child holds a bright blue camera up to his eye and points it at his dog. The Memory Keeper: all the feeling of analog with the convenience of digital. A man stares at a heap of dishes in his sink and heaves a sigh. Tired of doing dishes? In the next frame, his sink is empty, and he’s holding up a pill the size of a fingernail. Nourishment can be dish free with NutriNeat Meal Replacer.

  A voice announces that the train will be leaving soon, and encourages Sonya to buckle herself in, as a precaution. She does, tightening the belt over her lap. She remembers the sudden acceleration from her childhood, throwing her back against the seat and making her ears pop. The acceleration is more gradual now, but she still feels the pressure against the sides of her head, the force that fights her every movement.

  She looks over at the university students, taking books out of their backpacks and laughing. They aren’t paying attention to her, and neither are the chatty parents a few rows behind her, a woman with a shaved head and a man with a lip ring. She loosens her seat belt, and, watching the advertisements shift to some kind of luminous vodka, slumps down and stretches her legs out, her ankles cracking.

  No one looks at her.

  An hour later, Sonya is in Olympia, on Union Mills Road, a set of old, rusted train tracks behind her and a dilapidated apartment building across the road from her. The number on the building, 2501, matches the one Alexander wrote on the business card. Ray and Cara Eliot. And Cara is expecting her.

  She crosses the street. The Eliots live in unit 1A. Their name is written on a sticker on their mailbox, so she knows she’s at the right place. In the side yard is a clothesline with sheets hanging from it, and a boy sitting in an old sandbox. He is too old for playing in sand—his limbs too long and too skinny, maybe eleven years old. One of the containing walls has collapsed, so sand spills into the sparse grass of the yard, wet and dark where it mingles with the dirt. The boy holds a stick and stabs repeatedly at the sand with it, poking holes over and over. She knocks on the door.

  A woman answers. She wears loose jeans and a green men’s work shirt with a collar. Cara Eliot.

  “Hello, Ms. Eliot,” Sonya says, her Delegation manners filling the space for her. “My name is—”

  Cara Eliot gives a mirthless hiccup of a laugh.

  “Oh, I know,” she says. “I used to stare at your face every morning on the way to work. Come in.”

  She walks away from the door, leaving it open. Sonya opens the screen door and follows her into a cramped living room with a pea-green sofa in it, sagging in the middle where the springs have worn out over time. A homescreen the size of a textbook stands on a beat-up coffee table across from the couch. The carpet is beige and stained here and there, red and brown and blue. Cara has moved into the kitchen, adjacent to the living room, which teems over with plastic bowls and cups, pots with cooked food burned into the bottom of them, cereal boxes and cracker boxes and boxes of dried noodles.

  “Ignore the mess. Have a seat,” Cara says, gesturing to the little table that stands between living room and kitchen, the rooms all bleeding together. She busies herself at the stove, where a pot of water is heating. “Gosh, I don’t know what to offer someone like you. Tea?”

  “Yes, please,” Sonya says.

  “It’s nothing fancy,” Cara warns her, and the words seem to encompass not just the tea, but the entire apartment, worn and stained and collapsing.