The businesses were abandoned with no one bothering to pack them up. The Delegation promised rewards for those who left the old in favor of the new. People vacated their homes and relocated to city apartments with wide windows; they traded cameras, phones, game consoles, personal computers for Insights, and the government paid them for it.

  After one of these stretches of the civilization-that-was, Alexander stops to consult the map. Ahead of them, the road bends to the right. A sign somewhere behind them read tanner.

  “Time to leave the road,” he says. “Where we’re headed is close to that mountain.”

  He points at a hump of land in the distance. Sonya unzips the front pocket of his bag to take out his Elicit. He turned it off yesterday to conserve its battery—now they’ll need it for its compass.

  She lets him turn the Elicit on, since she still doesn’t know how to use it, and steers them into the trees.

  They don’t talk as much in the woods. They’re getting close to Grace Ward, and she feels it—in the clench of her jaw, the tightness of her shoulders. She ducks under low branches, waxy needles brushing her cheeks. She takes his hand as they climb over fallen branches or wet slopes. She doesn’t need to ask him to slow down now—she’s content to be breathless, panting into the wet air, if it gets them to their destination faster.

  The scrambling of squirrels and birds accompanies their footsteps, the creak of trees in the wind, the chattering of water. The mountain is up ahead, itself a compass drawing them inexorably north. They stop near a pond for water, a bathroom break, a snack—she eats two slices of plain bread, instead of more peanut butter—and they sit on a log by the shore as they chew, looking out over the water.

  “I just realized,” he says, his voice sharp and sudden in the quiet. “You changed your mind when you saw her name.”

  “What?”

  “You were adamant about not doing this whole mission. Up until the second you agreed to it, I thought you were going to tell me to go fuck myself and that would be the last time I ever saw you,” he says. “But then I gave you the piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it.”

  Sonya doesn’t dare look at him. She watches the wind ripple the water.

  “It wasn’t the offer that changed your mind, it was her.” He furrows his eyebrows. “Why? Did you know her?”

  “Not really,” she says.

  “But I’m not wrong. You’re not doing this for your freedom, you’re doing it for her, specifically.”

  She hesitates with a word between her teeth. But the moment has a certain inevitability in it.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Sonya—sixteen years old, her hair curled just so—sits on the HiTrain, near the window, and tries not to groan. Minor disruption of the peace, minus three DesCoin, she thinks. She stays quiet and waits for the train to start again. It stalls here, at almost the same place, every day.

  She’s just two stops away from home, on her way back from school. Her backpack—green and gray, patriotic colors—is tucked between her feet. Her knees are together, and her hands are folded in her lap. She ignores the man dozing beside her and looks out the window.

  A little girl swings in the side yard of the brick building next to the raised tracks. In another one of these stalled periods, she watched the father of the family construct the swing set, his face red and his forehead shiny with sweat. Now the girl pumps her legs back and forth, seeking height. The swing set bounces every time she reaches her apex. She has worn the grass away beneath her, probably from dragging her feet to stop herself when the swinging gets out of control.

  It’s dusk, later than Sonya usually goes home. She stayed after school to practice with her vocal ensemble group. She’s a first alto, never a soloist, but a reliable keeper of the pitch. The concert is just a week away, and they’re struggling with maintaining the rhythm between the sections. When Sonya tried to complain about some of the girls’ inability to read music the other night, Susanna rolled her eyes and reminded her that she doesn’t know how to read music either. I don’t need to, Sonya replied, petulant. I can hear the rhythm just fine. Minus ten DesCoin for bragging.

  The lights are on in the first-floor apartment, right by the swing set. Sonya can only see silhouettes in them, since all the curtains are drawn. Movement in a room toward the front of the house catches her eye, the busy shuffling and stepping of someone in the kitchen—the mother, probably. She sees the blue rectangular glow of a homescreen—the father, maybe, resting after work. She invents a family just like her own, but with one daughter instead of two, of course—these people, with their little apartment, their worn grass, their ragged curtains, would never be permitted to have two children.

  Then something shifts near the back of the apartment. Sonya frowns, and leans closer to the window, until her nose is almost touching it. The curtains in the back room open just a few inches. The room is dark, but Sonya sees a small white circle between folds of fabric.

  An Insight, shining in the dark.

  Her heart races. Sonya’s eyes stay locked on the Insight, and she thinks she can see, by its light, the curve of a small cheek, the point of a chin. Then the train starts moving, a calm voice apologizing for the delay. But Sonya can’t stop staring out the window. She knows what she just saw: an illegal second child.

  She sets up the equation in her mind, the same way she always does. There’s a risk of a penalty here. She doesn’t know the family in that apartment—maybe their daughter is the one hiding in the dark, and the girl on the swings is someone else in the building. She’ll lose DesCoin for telling tales if the information isn’t accurate. But no, she’s seen the girl on the swings before, and she knows it was the girl’s father who built the swing set.

  No, she knows what she saw.

  “I went home,” Sonya says, her voice flat, “and I told my father. I told him what I saw, and I told him where the building was. I was proud afterward. I was up all night waiting for my DesCoin count to increase. I bragged to Susanna when it did. I even told Aaron. All that green. Look how useful I can be.”

  She picks up a small rock near her feet, draws her elbow back, and throws it into the water. It drops in with a thunk.

  “A few days later, the Wards were arrested, and the Delegation took Grace from them.”

  Alexander was quiet for the whole story, just sitting there next to her.

  “You didn’t know,” he says, his voice creaking.

  She replies, “I knew enough.”

  She’s never been to church—there were no DesCoin rewards or penalties for religious practice, the Delegation said, and there’s no church in the Aperture—but she imagines this is what it feels like. Seated, wishing you were someone else. Wishing you could walk backward through time.

  He puts an arm around her, and she pushes him away and gets to her feet.

  “I knew enough,” she repeats, firm this time. “Come on. I owe her the truth.”

  They see the smoke from the house’s chimney before they see the house itself. It stretches toward the sky in a single gray column, the mountain veiled in mist behind it.

  The tire tracks come next. They’re deep grooves, curving around a path that Sonya didn’t recognize as a path until she saw them. Plants have sprung up in the depressions, suggesting that whoever drove here hasn’t done so in a long time.

  Then—the dark shape of a building through the trees. Their pace slows as they approach it. It’s a cabin, though that word is too small for its size. Its front door is painted blue. There’s a garden in front that reminds her, with a twinge of pain, of the seedlings growing in the greenhouse on Building 4’s roof. It’s caged in chicken wire, presumably to keep wild animals from eating the leaves.

  Alexander stops her when they’re still far enough away from the house not to be overheard.

  “What if they attack us, whoever they are?” he says.

  She looks up at him.

  “Have you really come all this way without thinking about how the people holding Grace Ward might be dangerous?” she says.

  “Well,” he says. “Yes, actually.”

  She smiles, and takes off the backpack. Zipped into the side pocket is the knife she took from Alexander’s kitchen. The knife she killed the man with. It’s clean now, washed in a stream. About the length of her palm, with a plastic handle. She turns it so the blade is up against her arm, hidden by her sleeve, and touches Alexander’s arm.

  “I look harmless, so I’ll go in alone,” she says. “I’ll signal you when it’s safe.”

  She moves toward the house, ignoring his hissed objections. He won’t risk her safety by coming after her now. She’s in the open, in view of the blue door. She limps a little, playing up the soreness in her legs to appear even less threatening. She’s a few feet from the bottom of the steps when the blue door opens and a woman steps out. She’s holding something familiar.

  A gun, she thinks, held up to the woman’s eye, her hands wrapped around the body of it. Bigger than the one the man from the Army brought to kill Sonya and Alexander, with a long wooden handle. For a moment it’s all Sonya can see, and then the woman herself—tall and gray-haired, wearing a sweater the color of oatmeal and a pair of blue jeans. There’s a pencil tucked behind her ear.

  “Who the hell are you?” the woman says to her. Her voice is like ice water.

  “I just need some help,” Sonya says. “I don’t mean any harm.”

  “That why you’re holding a knife?”

  The woman nods to Sonya’s right hand. Sonya reaches out to the side and lets the knife slip from her grasp. It tumbles into the leaves at her feet. She turns her hands so her palms are facing the woman.

  “Just didn’t want to be caught in a bad situation,” Sonya says.

  “Guess that plan backfired, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Don’t think you really answered my ‘who are you’ question,” the woman says. “Though I guess the Insight kind of narrows down the options.”

  Sonya knows what guns do—that they shorten the distance between people. She can’t turn and run now. The Insight’s bright halo feels strange here, nestled in all these trees. Only moonlight shines like this, out here.

  The woman lowers the gun a few inches. Her eyes are dark and creased at the corners. Her mouth is drawn and puckered. There’s something familiar about her.

  “You come from the Aperture,” the woman says.

  “I’m on the run,” Sonya says. “With a friend. We want to get away from the city. If I tell him to come here, will you hurt him with that . . . thing?”

  “Not unless he gives me a reason.”

  Sonya looks over her shoulder. She can’t see Alexander from here, but she knows where she left him. She calls out, “Sasha!” and hears his footsteps on the fallen leaves. He carries her backpack with him, and his eyes flick between Sonya and the woman and the gun in the woman’s hand, as long as her arm.

  “I see,” the woman says, raising an eyebrow. “Star-crossed lovers on the run?”

  “Something like that,” Sonya says, because if this woman is keeping Grace Ward captive somewhere in her house, it’s better for her to have romantic notions than to suspect the truth. “We had to leave in a hurry, and we didn’t pack enough supplies. We saw the smoke from the house from a ways off.”

  “So the question is,” the woman says, “am I feeling generous?”

  Sonya tips her head up and waits. The woman rolls her eyes and beckons for them to follow her inside.

  The house smells like wood smoke and baking bread. There’s no entryway to speak of, just a narrow, wood-paneled hallway that reminds Sonya of a coffin. To the right is a living room piled with cushions and sofas with no backs. The walls are lined with bookshelves, but only a few of them are full of books. On the others are bits of old tech. It’s a combination, Sonya thinks, of Knox’s apartment and the Analog Army building full of hair dryers and record players. Old tossed together with even older like a salad. Wires spill over the shelves like vines. This woman would know how to fix her radio.

  She leads them straight back to the kitchen. The ceiling is high, with unfinished wood beams stretching across it. The cabinets, too, are wood, unvarnished and rough. But the counters are pristine white, like in a laboratory. Windows make up the wall opposite, displaying the forest, the edge of a lake, and in the distance, the rise of the mountain that was Sonya and Alexander’s North Star.

  “Can I wash up somewhere?” Alexander says.

  “Not until you give me your names,” she says.

  Sonya hesitates. She doesn’t know whether to give her real name or a fake one, doesn’t know anything about this woman’s allegiances.

  “I’m not an enemy of those in the Aperture,” the woman says. “Not an enemy of the Triumvirate, either, I suppose.”

  She adjusts something on the gun and sets it down, leaning it up against the wall. Sonya’s jaw unclenches by a fraction.

  “Then my name is Sonya Kantor,” she says. “And this is Alexander Price.”

  The woman—now putting on green oven mitts—lets out a low whistle.

  “Kantor. Now, that’s a familiar name,” she says. “I knew your father, Sonya. Did you leave him behind in the Aperture?”

  “No,” Sonya says. “He’s dead.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” she says. She opens the oven and takes out a loaf of bread with both hands. The smell makes Sonya’s mouth water. The woman sets it on the stovetop and takes off her oven mitts, then leans a hip into the counter. “Well, I guess fair’s fair. My name is Naomi.” She tilts her head. “I invented that thing in your brain.”

  Sixteen

  “You are Naomi Proctor?” Alexander says.

  “You don’t need to sound so surprised,” she says. “A gal could take offense.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just—you’re dead.”

  Naomi glances at Sonya. “I take it you keep him around for his looks, not his brains.”

  Sonya tries to remember the image of Naomi Proctor from the unit on the history of the Insight. The memories are hazy. Only the vague impression of a severe-looking woman with blond hair comes to mind. This Naomi, her gray hair so fair it’s almost white, her nose straight and narrow, fits that memory well enough. The day of her death, too, surfaces in memory—not just the procession of the coffin through the street, but the service playing on their homescreens all day. Sitting in the living room together, listening to a somber speech given by the head of Insight Regulation, whose name has slipped from her mind. Every gesture of respect for the dead earned DesCoin, so the Kantors performed them all, even the ancillary ones. The day after, with her unfocused eyes scanning all the DesCoin they’d reaped, Julia told Sonya to buy herself a treat.

  “They pretended you were dead,” Sonya says, “and exiled you?”

  “Not quite,” Naomi says. “Sit down, I’ll get you something to eat.”

  They sit on the far end of the sturdy table that stands before the windows. Alexander clenches his hands around the edge of it. It’s a reminder: don’t trust a woman who threatens you with a gun. Don’t trust a woman who came back from the dead. Don’t trust a woman whose house is the source of Grace Ward’s UIA signal.

  Naomi assembles food like someone accustomed to hosting, putting on the water for coffee; slicing bread and apples; pouring nuts into tiny bowls; arranging strips of dried meat. A few minutes later, she sits across from them with a mug of coffee gripped in both hands, the spread of food between them. Alexander is already busy with it; Sonya is more hesitant, breathing in the coffee smell and considering her next move.

  “So,” she says.

  “So,” Naomi replies. “They didn’t exile me. After Regulation 82 passed, I wanted to leave, and I agreed they could tell people I was dead if it was advantageous to them.”

  “Regulation 82 made Insights mandatory,” Alexander says, after swallowing a mouthful of apple and bread. “That was your technology, and it was about to be everywhere. Why would you want to leave?”

  “You’ll notice I don’t have an Insight of my own,” Naomi says, tapping the skin under her right eye. “That’s not because I’ve had it disabled. It’s because I never had one put in to begin with. I knew that if I bent to that particular rule, I would be submitting to constant observation, and that was something I didn’t want. Nor was I interested in spending the rest of my life playing a game with every decision I made.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sonya says. “A game?”

  “What do you think DesCoin is?” Naomi says. “Use a crosswalk, earn ten points. Jaywalk, lose ten points. Eat a healthy breakfast, earn five points. Indulge in a donut, lose five points. It’s a game that assigns moral value to even the smallest decisions of your life. Do you know the term ‘operant conditioning’?”

  Sonya shakes her head.

  “It simply describes how human beings learn,” Naomi says. “That particular behaviors are shaped by their consequences. If you’re a child and you grab a knife by its blade, for example, the resultant pain will train you not to touch blades again. If you’re a parent and you’d like your child to learn how to pick up after themselves, you might offer them a reward for doing so. The Insight system made use of this psychological reality—it defined desirable behaviors and shaped people by offering either penalties or rewards. In effect, it treated you all as its children. It molded you into exactly who it wanted you to be.”