Hello, Poster Girl.

  C:FortKnoxdirectory>cd

  C:FortKnoxPosterGirl

  C:FortKnoxPosterGirl>“justincase.avi”

  Something hums. An image of Knox fills the screen—no, a video.

  She sits in the same chair Sonya is sitting in, in the sweatpants and loose shirt she wore the last time Sonya saw her. She brings a knee up to her chest, and starts to speak. Her voice comes from everywhere—ahead of Sonya, behind her, on either side, the apartment full of her voice.

  “Well, if you’re watching this, things went sour in a big way,” Knox says. “Which was always a possibility. I’ve spent my entire life poking different bears with different sticks, and one of them was bound to get homicidal at one point or another. Still, I hope this program never triggers. Maybe one day I’ll show it to you, and we can have a nice laugh together. Do you think you and I are capable of laughing together, Sonya? I’m not entirely convinced you know how to laugh anymore.”

  She reaches out of frame and picks up a mug of espresso. She holds it against her chest as she goes on.

  “There are a few things you should probably know, if I’ve given up the ghost,” she says. “The first is that there’s something I didn’t tell you about stealing the Army’s data—I didn’t just steal it. I deleted it. My leech was . . . more like a screwworm. It attached to their systems, copied their data, and then devoured the original. Once the Army discovers that, they’re going to be . . .” She smiles, but it’s unsteady. “Incandescent with rage.”

  Behind her, the sun is setting over the water. She must have recorded this right after Sonya left.

  “I did this because I don’t think anyone should have this data,” she says. “Because I believe in creating stable systems. The Delegation used location data to root out their detractors. After the uprising, the very things that made a person favored by the Delegation made them a criminal to the Triumvirate, and vice versa. Just because you’re not committing a crime now, by going where you go, by seeing who you see, doesn’t mean that another government, another set of people with another set of priorities, won’t come along and call you a criminal one day. The players change, the rules change, that’s an inevitability . . . The most we can do is build a board that restricts what’s possible. We can create limits to power. Understand?”

  Sonya leans forward, because Knox is leaning forward, all traces of humor gone from her face, her eyes glinting. She is a zealot, too, Sonya realizes, just like Myth and the people of the Analog Army. But there’s less danger in this kind of zeal.

  “My intention is to use the UIA database to help you find Grace Ward, and then delete it,” she says. “If I’m dead, I won’t be able to do that—but you can. I can’t guarantee that you will. I simply have to believe it. I have to believe in you.” She laughs. “It’s difficult to believe in you, Sonya Kantor. Do you know how many teenagers were in the uprising? People who were raised to obey the Delegation, but saw it for what it was anyway, and were willing to die to dismantle it. People who did die to dismantle it. You weren’t one of them. You don’t get a free pass, Poster Girl, just for being young. But God, I don’t know, I think I have to believe that you’re not trapped in amber. I fucking hope so.”

  She sits back, and clears her throat.

  “In the bottom drawer, on your right, are two sets of instructions. Printed out.” She smirks. “The first will tell you how to use the UIA database to locate Ms. Ward. The second will tell you how to wipe my computer system. I wouldn’t recommend doing the second until you have actually laid eyes on Ms. Ward, just in case.”

  Sonya rolls closer to the drawer unit under the desk and tugs the bottom one open. Two pieces of paper rest on top, one labeled uia database and one labeled endgame. Sonya folds Endgame and slides it into the inner pocket of her coat. She presses UIA Database flat, hands trembling. She starts to type.

  Knox’s notes are a jumble, her handwriting cramped and difficult to read unless it’s describing code. Sonya types in nonsense sequences, her fingers unused to finding the forward slash, the carat, the brackets. She presses “enter,” and a new window opens on one of the other screens. It displays a huge, detailed map of the megalopolis, a web of fine lines that, for a moment, Sonya doesn’t even recognize.

  Knox’s instructions tell her how to open the side panel and search for a name.

  type in whatever name you got from the wards, surname first, they say. Sonya thinks of her note, waiting with the security guard downstairs the other night. The one that just missed Knox. She types in Gleissner, Alice.

  Nothing appears.

  Sonya folds into herself a little. The map is moving, shifting, the lines redrawing. The grid of roads disappears in favor of wobbly lines layered over each other, odd shapes, shading and numbers. Topography. The signal isn’t coming from the city; it’s coming from the land beyond it.

  In the center of the map is a blinking blue dot. A white square appears beside it, along with some text:

  UIA #291-8467-587-382, “Gleissner, Alice Elisabeth”

  47° 27′ 01.3″ N

  121° 28′ 26.5″ W

  Status: Online

  Fourteen

  The HiTrain creeps from stop to stop. Somewhere, a baby shrieks, and she feels an irrational desire to scream back.

  Status: Online. The words pulse inside Sonya like another heart. Grace Ward is being held in the wilderness beyond the megalopolis; no wonder she was never found.

  She fidgets. She doesn’t have a plan beyond going. She’ll go to the Aperture; she’ll pack what she has for the journey. She’ll find a map—somewhere. The library. The corner store. Possibilities unfold before her like she’s fanning the pages of a book, passing too quickly for her to acknowledge them all.

  Status: Online.

  She’s standing by the door when the train pulls into her station. She flies down the stairs to the street, and jogs in hard-soled, worn shoes to the Aperture entrance. Standing in front of the metal eye of the gate is Alexander Price, and he has that look about him like he’s about to give her a revelation and it’s not one she wants to hear. She stops a few feet away from him.

  He doesn’t actually look that much like Aaron, she thinks, and maybe she only thinks that because it’s been so long since she’s seen Aaron’s face. His features are harsher, longer. Time has sharpened him—sharpened her and Alexander both.

  He moves closer, and so does she. The street is empty except for the guard at the Aperture gate and the man working the counter at the corner store. They’re in a pocket of silence.

  “The Triumvirate,” he says, “has officially revoked their offer.”

  The words settle inside her. Not heavy, exactly, but strange. “Oh.”

  “They’ve commanded you to return to the Aperture now,” he says, “where you’re to stay for as long as it exists.”

  “Did they give you a reason?”

  “They said it’s time to move on. They’ll be eliminating my department entirely, and reassigning everyone,” he says. “I think it’s pretty clear now that whoever wants to stop us from finding Grace Ward is working for them.”

  She nods. She looks at the gate, the interlocking segments closed now. She hears what he said again, and it sounds new this time.

  “Working for them.” She looks up at him. “Not us? Didn’t they reassign you?”

  “No, I’ve been fired, actually.”

  “Fired.”

  “Well, I argued with them,” he says, “and I may have become insubordinate. And I may have purged all your Insight data from the system so they can’t use it against you later.” He tilts his head. “Don’t worry, I kept a copy.”

  She thinks this should scare her, or upset her. The hope of freedom is gone. Knox is dead. Whoever wants her to stop, to leave Grace Ward alone, is desperate and powerful.

  But she feels steady. She knows what she’s doing. She knows where she’s going.

  “Do you have a map?” she says. “Of our entire district, woods and all?”

  One of his thick eyebrows pops up. “Yes.”

  “Good,” she says.

  “Are you—you know where she is?”

  She likes the light in his eyes when it dawns on him. She nods.

  “Knox held up her end of the deal,” she says. “I’d understand if you don’t want to come, if you just want to be done with all this and go back to your life, but—”

  “I’m coming,” he says. “I’m not done, Sonya.”

  She likes, too, the way his voice softens over her name. She smiles a little, and together they walk away from the Aperture gate, and toward the HiTrain.

  Alexander’s apartment, located just one stop away from hers, is a cramped place full of objects. He collects things: chess pieces litter his bookshelf, little glass figurines decorate the table by the door, a cluster of bud vases with dried flowers sticking out of them populates the middle of his dining room table. Picture frames cover his walls, but the photographs are all buildings: grids of windows, the hexagon-within-diamond-patterned face of the King County Administration Building, where he worked, the stacked stripes of the Space Needle’s squat belly. His bookshelves are full of cameras, old and dusty, new and polished, some in-between.

  She stands still while he busies himself grabbing two empty backpacks from his hall closet, full of hangers with no coats on them; going into the kitchen to collect a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter; burying his head in his chest of drawers in pursuit of sweaters. While he packs, Sonya wanders into the kitchen, which has the grimy feeling of a place that will never be clean, no matter how many times a person scrubs it. The countertops are white Formica, with circles burnt into it here and there from hot pans. There are photographs on the refrigerator, too: groups of people laughing, or smiling at the camera with their arms around each other; a woman at the water’s edge, in sunglasses; a baby holding a dog’s tail in his fat little hand. She never thinks about Alexander Price having friends, or a girlfriend. She spends her time at odds with him instead.

  She came into the kitchen for a reason. Sonya opens one of his drawers and finds measuring cups and spoons, a spatula, a garlic press. She opens another one and finds a paring knife in a plastic sheath. She slips it into her pocket.

  Knox is dead. It doesn’t hurt to have a knife.

  Alexander walks in and offers her a backpack. It’s full, but not stuffed. She settles it over her shoulders, and he hands her a hat, a pair of gloves, and a pair of sunglasses that slant up at the corners.

  “Cat eyes, huh?” she says.

  “Old girlfriend left them here,” he says. “As well as a couple bras I don’t have a use for, aside from maybe—slingshots?”

  “Interesting idea,” she says, as she puts the sunglasses on her nose. “Do you need to let anyone know you’ll be gone?”

  “No,” he says, looking confused. “Like who?”

  “I don’t know.” Sonya taps the woman in the photograph, the one next to the water. “Her?”

  “Just a friend. Ryan is her name,” he says. “That’s her baby grabbing the dog, actually.”

  Sonya nods.

  “I wasn’t always alone,” he says. “Mostly I haven’t been. But—no one serious.”

  Alexander is still for a moment before holding up the map, folded up now so it’s only as big as his hand. He unfolds it, and lays it flat on the kitchen table, knocking over one of the bud vases. It shows their sector, the megalopolis that stretches from the water to the very edge of the forest preserve, the wilderness beyond it, the river on the other side of it that separates them from the next sector over, ruled by some other group of politicians, some other system.

  She takes the slip of paper with Grace Ward’s coordinates written on it out of her pocket, and she finds the latitude while he finds the longitude. Their knuckles knock together when they find the point where latitude and longitude meet. It’s a place in the forest, near a lake, in the shadow of a peak. Alexander draws a red dot there with a pen, and folds the map so that part is facing out.

  “Looks like we can take the Flicker eastbound, to the end of the line,” he says. “And then we’re in for a long walk. If we go right now, they might not be looking for us yet.”

  Sonya doesn’t know who “they” are exactly. But they’re in the Triumvirate, which means if they access her Insight feed, they can piece together where she is, wherever she is. So she and Alexander need to get there first.

  An hour later she sits on the Flicker in the seat next to Alexander. He stretches his legs long, under the seats in front of them. His backpack is between his knees. Together they stare at the advertisements on the bright screen in front of them. The pixels coalesce into a woman’s face. Live life without limits, she says, her smile wide and white. The pixels spray apart, and then realign into the words Focusil: for those who strive.

  Alexander makes a face.

  “Do they always do that?” she says. “Advertise a product without saying what it is?”

  “It’s a medicine,” he says. “But it’s for the healthy, not the sick. Which is in fashion lately.”

  She remembers the graffiti she saw when she first left the Aperture: Unmedication for All. She wonders if the two are related.

  “Are you on any?” she says.

  “I’m on one for the sick,” he says, tapping the side of his head. “Uptiq.”

  “Wouldn’t describe you as ‘sick,’” she says.

  He glances at her.

  “Do I seem well?” he says.

  She thinks of the mood score Dr. Shannon always asks her for—her constant “fifty,” the number for “fine.” Most people aren’t fine all the time, Sonya. But she is—she has to be. When she wasn’t fine, she was trying as hard as she could to make time pass as quickly as possible, and it scared her. She scared herself.

  Alexander—perpetually unkempt, uneasy in his own body—doesn’t scare her like that. But there’s a lot she doesn’t know about him. Where he’s been. What he’s seen. What he wants.

  “I’m all right, mostly. I’ve got friends, a job—well, up until a couple hours ago, anyway. I go on dates. Take pictures. Go on runs.” He shrugs. “But for a long time, I’d see certain things, hear certain things, and—I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.” He clears his throat. Shrugs again. “It may not seem right to you, that I would be affected by what happened to them. But I am.”

  He stares ahead at the next advertisement, which is for synthetic trees that grow without light. Bring life to your gloomy apartment!

  She doesn’t answer. All her words have dried up. She rests a hand on his arm instead. A moment’s touch, and then she opens the backpack at her feet to see what’s in it, just to cover the awkwardness.

  When she straightens, she feels heat at the back of her neck, and it’s not embarrassment. She looks over her shoulder at the train car behind her. There are clusters of teenagers, an older couple sharing a meal bar, a few men in starched shirts, typing away on Elicits. No one is paying attention to them.

  Still, she touches the knife in her pocket, to make sure it’s still there.

  By the time they get off the Flicker, their car is empty. An announcement informs them that all passengers must exit here, at Gilman. It’s a sleepy place, a sprawl of low buildings, half of which were once occupied by little stores and fast-food restaurants, before the Delegation pushed for centralization in the megalopolis. Now their windows are covered with plywood. A peace officer cruises past on a motorbike, patrolling the empty buildings to make sure no one is squatting.

  Two people get off the train behind them: a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a woman in shoes that snap. All of them move down the same road. Sonya feels them at her back, though they seem to be walking toward Gilman’s only neighborhood, a little cluster of houses near the tree line.

  Alexander takes the map out of his backpack and unfolds it enough to pinpoint their location. He points to the wide road bisecting Gilman—six lanes across, with a gap in the middle for grass and trees that are now overgrown, splitting the pavement where their roots are too thick.

  “We take this,” he says, of the road. “For a while. A day’s worth of walking, at least. Then we’ll have to make camp. Hope it doesn’t rain.”

  They go to a little shop for water, sleeping bags that buckle to the front of their backpacks, and NeverFail, a brand of campfire fuel that lights even when damp. The man at the counter stares at Sonya. She stares back.

  The backpack is heavy on her shoulders. It bumps against the small of her back every time she takes a step. They start toward the tree line. Low hills rise up in the distance, rippling green clothed in mist.

  His strides are longer than hers, and she has to grab his elbow to get him to slow down, breathless already and they’re only at the beginning. He obliges. He carries most of the weight in his bag, stuffed to the brim. She holds the map tight in her left hand, so tight her fingertips turn white from the pressure.

  They walk for a long time in silence, until Gilman disappears from view behind them, until sweat builds up under Sonya’s arms and she unzips her coat. The mist in the air is cool against her cheeks.

  “When did you join the uprising?” she says.

  He gives her a startled look. “I’m not sure we should talk about this.”

  “It’s just sitting here between us all the time. You want to keep pretending it isn’t?”

  He sighs. Adjusts the straps on his shoulders.

  “Late,” he says. “I joined it late. Just a few months before the Delegation was overthrown. I got them access to Nikhil’s work records. Everything that was stored on the Insight servers was also stored separately, in the department heads’ offices. It was easy, really. He wasn’t on guard with me.”

  “Well,” she says, quietly, “you were his son.”

  “Is that how he talks about me?” he says, bitterly. “Like I was his son?”

  She frowns at him. She sees a flicker of movement in the trees, but when she looks at it, there’s nothing. A deer, she thinks, or a squirrel.