“Do you think it makes you noble, that you take responsibility for this?” Eugenia goes on. “You made sure to tell me, didn’t you, in your own little way, that you didn’t do this in exchange for your freedom, no, you did it for high-minded reasons. You tried so hard to make it look like you understand what you did to us. What an elegant manipulation you’ve brought to our doorstep, Sonya Kantor.”

  She tips up her chin.

  “How did you spend the DesCoin you received as a reward for turning us in? On a new dress, a wild night? Or did you hoard it for the perfect future the Delegation had laid out for you?”

  Sonya had, in fact, spent the DesCoin she earned for turning Grace Ward in. She had used it to buy a night with Aaron. Her first time, her virginity lost out of wedlock. A hefty DesCoin penalty.

  Sonya flinches at the question. She doesn’t answer.

  “My daughter is dead,” Eugenia says. “Get out of my house.”

  Cold with sweat, Sonya wipes her cheeks, turns, and leaves. She expected to run into a sea of commuters, coming home from work, but the street is empty, quiet. She crosses it, and then keeps walking, trembling, toward the train.

  Twenty-One

  The air smells salty and sour. She climbs the steps to the top of the embankment that wraps around most of the city’s waterfront, a story high, to protect the city from the rising water level. There are stretches of glass here and there, to give pedestrians a look underwater. She passes one on her way up. Sea foam collects in the upper corners of the window.

  The embankment is empty now, likely due to the rain. It taps on her shoulders and the top of her head. It rolls behind her ears and accumulates around her collar. She stands with her hands on the railing, and closes her eyes. All she hears is the splash of the waves beneath her. She wonders what the city sounded like when the streets were full of cars. When the water didn’t press up against its edges, fighting to get in.

  She doesn’t look over her shoulder to find out if Easton Turner sent someone to follow her, to make sure she kept her promise. She never intended to keep it, only wanted to get out of the Aperture for long enough to talk to the Wards, to fulfill Knox’s last request. To find the proof Rose needs.

  Knox told her at the very beginning, You don’t really understand how much you can find out about a person just based on where they go and when. She does now. Her father’s life had unfurled in front of her when Rose looked up his name, the screen pausing on the last place his Insight emitted a signal: a grave somewhere outside the city, where many of the people killed in the uprising were buried. She could have kept pieces of her family, the ones recorded in the UIA database—could have learned her mother’s secrets, as well as her father’s, and Susanna’s. Ripped the entire family open to see what was inside. She had gone so long with her eyes closed, there was something appealing about prying them open, now, to find out just how foolish she’d been.

  In the end, she let them wash away.

  The rain gentles to a mist, and she sits down on a bench to watch the water move. It’s just starting to get dark. She unzips her coat just enough to reach the interior pocket, where she put the travel permit, but that’s not what she’s after—instead, she takes out the worn envelope behind it. Until this morning, she kept it in the crate beside her bed. She opens it, and tips a yellow pill into her palm.

  Ten years ago, she made the decision not to take her life in a single moment, when she tilted her head back along with her parents and sister but never opened her mouth. But as she watched them descend into euphoric giggles, she thought about it again. And as they slumped over the table, all the life drained from them, she thought about it again. She considered the pill in her hand for a long time before the uprising burst through the door to the cabin. Eventually, she hid it, in case she needed it later.

  She considers it now. She doesn’t feel desperate, or afraid. She feels like someone who leveled everything behind her so she had nothing left to go back to. In a few days or a few weeks, Rose Parker will publish the article that blows up Easton Turner’s life, and it will take Sonya’s family with it. It doesn’t matter that she was a child when her father murdered those people. It doesn’t matter whether her mother and sister knew or not. And it doesn’t matter if she takes on a new name. Everyone in the city knows her face. She will always be his daughter.

  But if she’s honest with herself, that isn’t why she is considering the Sol now. That honor belongs to Eugenia Ward. Do you feel better now that you’ve made your big confession?

  No, she wants to go back and answer. No, I feel sick all the time, I feel ready to be gone.

  “Hello.” Alexander’s callused hands close over the back of the bench, beside her. He looks at her—at her wet hair, her soaked wool coat, the yellow pill in her hand. Then he looks out at the water. The only sign of emotion he wears is in his hands, trembling as he lifts them from the bench. He walks around it, and sits beside her.

  “Rose Parker came to ask me for your Insight footage,” he says. “She was worried about you. I remembered you saying you wanted to go to the waterfront. Had to rack my brain to remember where they used to sell those sticky buns.”

  “It’s the sound,” she says. “I like the sound, here.”

  “Right.” He looks at the pill again, chewing the inside of his lip. “You kept it all this time?”

  She kept it in her fist, hidden from the peace officers, until they made it back to the city. Then she bent to tie her shoes, and tucked it into the cup of her bra, hoping they wouldn’t find it. But they didn’t seem to care what she wore into the Aperture, what she brought with her. It’s how Mary Pritchard kept her pearls, how Nikhil kept the photograph of Nora, Aaron, and Alexander that lived in his wallet.

  All Sonya brought in was her Sol.

  “I didn’t know what the uprising would do to me, after they arrested me,” she says. “It seemed like a good idea to have a way out. And then it just kept seeming like a good idea to have a way out.”

  “That,” he says, “is a terrifying thing for a girl of seventeen to have to consider.”

  She nods.

  “So what’s this about?” he says, nodding to her hand. “Shame?”

  “I talked to the Wards,” she says, looking across the water at the faint bumps of hills on the horizon, gray and fuzzy from the distance and the cloud layer. “Grace Ward’s mother asked me what I spent my DesCoin on, after getting her daughter killed. You know what it was?” She laughs, and somehow the laugh turns into a sob. “I slept with Aaron. He’d been trying to convince me it was worth it, but I wasn’t willing to do it unless I had an unexpected windfall.” She pushes her free hand through her hair, knots her fingers in the fine strands. “God, it’s so vile. I can’t . . .” She chokes. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand what I did to them. I can’t stand to know why.”

  She closes both hands into fists, and digs them into her legs.

  “I’ll always know what I did, and what came of it,” she says. “I will never be rid of it.”

  Alexander lays a hand on her fist, gentle, to get her to relax it. Then he sits forward, resting his elbows on his spread knees, and stares at the ground between his feet.

  “You were trying to earn absolution for what you did,” he says. He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Well, so was I.”

  He’s always moving, Alexander Price, fidgeting with something in his pocket, playing with his food at the dinner table, tossing a coin as he waits for the HiTrain, chewing his fingernails in the middle of conversations. Every memory she has of him, he’s moving. He turns toward her now, lifting his eyes to hers, and he finally goes still.

  “I didn’t betray my family,” he says. “I know you think I did, but I didn’t need to—my father surrendered himself right away. And I hadn’t done much for the resistance movement, you know? I had joined up a few months before, but hadn’t made much progress, and during the uprising, I was just terrified it wouldn’t be enough—terrified they would arrest me, too, maybe kill me. I should have hated them, after Mom and Aaron died in the rioting, but I was just afraid of them. So when they asked me where they might find your father . . .” His throat clicks as he swallows. “I told them. I didn’t think about what would happen to you, or your sister, I just . . .”

  Sonya keeps her eyes steady on his. He shakes his head.

  “Ten years later, I found out from a friend that the Triumvirate were evaluating your case—you were right on the line for release,” he says. “They thought it was too much of a risk to release you, you were too well known, too much of a symbol for the Delegation. So I barged into the hearing and I suggested they give you something to do, instead. Some way to earn your way out. I said I had some unresolved matters that might be suitable, and they agreed. I thought—if I can get her out of there, if I can get her freedom, it’ll undo what I did to her.”

  He shakes his head.

  “It doesn’t,” he says. “I know that. I know there’s nothing—”

  Sonya reaches out. She sets her hand on his arm, drawing his eyes to hers again.

  “Sasha,” she says. “I’ve known this since the Delegation fell.”

  His eyes look so dark, in this light. A cold, dark brown turned black by a cloudy day.

  “There were only so many people who knew where that cabin was,” she says. “And most of them were dead before the uprising found us. Why do you think I hated you so much when you turned up in my apartment?” She tilts her head a little. “Well, I guess there were a few reasons to choose from.”

  “You knew,” he says.

  She nods. “I tried to keep hating you. But you were young and scared. I know what it’s like to be young and scared.” She shrugs a little. “You didn’t earn it. At some point—I don’t even remember when—I just . . . swallowed it.”

  She looks out at the water again. It crashes against the embankment wall in an imperfect rhythm.

  “I guess,” she says, “I can’t make the Wards swallow it for me.”

  “No,” he says, softly. “You can’t. Not even by dying for it.”

  She nods. She gets up, and stands at the railing.

  Deciding to live is as easy as tipping her hand so the pill falls into the water and sinks to the bottom.

  She’s sitting in a social worker’s office when she comes to a decision. The office is buried in the back of the administration building that Susanna once described as the most depressing place on Earth. The carpet beneath her feet is speckled gray and blue, worn in all the places where feet commonly tread. A beat-up metal desk stands between her and Agatha Sherman, lifetime bureaucrat, who has an ink stain at the corner of her mouth from chewing on a pen. There are no windows.

  She is staring at a piece of paper certifying Sonya’s release from the Aperture—not issued by Easton Turner, this time, but by the other two members of the Triumvirate, Petra Novak and Amy Archer.

  Agatha’s desk is covered with little figurines shaped like frogs and toads. Some are clear glass, and some are painted. One wears a ceramic crown. One has eyes that shift back and forth every second, like a clock. One is the size of Sonya’s fist. She can’t help but stare at them.

  “Okay, Ms. Kantor,” Agatha Sherman says. She rubs the corner of her mouth. The ink only smears into her cheek. “Per the terms of the Children of the Delegation Act, your Insight will be deactivated . . .” She pauses, looking up at Sonya. “I suppose you don’t require that—but you are entitled to transitional housing and a new identity, if you want it. Most of our Aperture releases have embraced the opportunity to begin anew—”

  “No,” Sonya says. “No, thank you.”

  Agatha frowns. She sets the paper down, and folds her hands on her desk. Her elbow nudges one of the frogs—a tropical one, its underside painted blue and black—askew.

  “Can I make a personal recommendation?” she says. “You are too well known to do very well with your current name. I encourage you to reconsider. There is no reason to work against yourself here.”

  “Thank you,” Sonya says. “But I don’t think I’m going to be in the city for long, and . . .” She shrugs. “For better or worse, this is my name.”

  Agatha looks faintly annoyed. She is not used to people not taking her personal recommendations, maybe.

  “Fine,” she says. “I take it you won’t be requiring temporary housing?”

  “No,” Sonya says.

  Agatha purses her lips, then stamps the paper with a giant ink seal of the Triumvirate. She passes it to Sonya, who takes it, folds it, and comes to her feet. She reaches across Agatha’s desk and restores the tropical frog to his original position, then leaves the office.

  She spends the next few weeks tangled together with Alexander Price. Her mornings, padding into the kitchen in one of his sweaters, barefoot, to heat up the water for coffee. Her afternoons, reading the books he keeps stacked here and there all over his little apartment. Her nights, waking with a start, only to put her hand on his chest and make sure he’s still breathing. She doesn’t meet his friends; she doesn’t make eye contact with his neighbors. She’s waiting, and they both know it.

  On the day Rose Parker’s special issue of the Chronicle shows up at their door, with a note from Rose herself attached to it, Sonya sits down at the kitchen table and reads the paper front to back. The first page reads easton turner accomplice to delegation murders, by Rose Parker. Then, turner location data reveals connections to extremist group. Then august kantor, delegation killer.

  That night, she crumples it in the bottom of a trash can and goes out to the balcony with Alexander to burn it. She watches it curl in the flames and turn to ash. Then she stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, and it’s a kind of goodbye.

  When he drops her off at the airport, so she can catch a rare flight out of the sector, he gives her the dish she made for her father, glued back together, her old house key, and Susanna’s guitar pick.

  Epilogue

  Sonya drags a handkerchief across her forehead and tucks it in her pocket before getting on the bike. She kicks the solar motor on, then speeds down the dirt road to the highway. The sun is setting behind the mountains, jagged in the distance, but everything is flat where she is now, and she can see for miles in every direction.

  The road is smooth and unbroken, for the most part. Where there’s no moisture, Ellie says, there’s no need for road maintenance. Dust curls around her bare ankles. It will stain her socks by the time she gets back to the dormitory where she lives with all the other Desert Eden laborers. Dust creeps in every crack there, too—wipe it away in the morning, and it’s back by evening. She pulls her kerchief up to cover her mouth as she reaches the highway.

  Joshua trees stand on either side of the road like people waiting in line. When she first arrived, she couldn’t stop staring at them. She’s used to the heavy branches of evergreens, bowing beneath the weight of the rain. She’s used to the moss that grows on every tree trunk. She doesn’t know how to account for the stiff, bare trunks of these trees, the spiky leaves and the bulging white flowers. The first time she touched one, it drew blood. She loved it immediately.

  Find out who you are when no one is watching, Naomi Proctor advised, and Sonya has. She likes things that are difficult to love: the misty air of the Desert Eden dome, which makes everyone else’s hair go limp; the dust that collects in the creases of her face; the chemical smell of the sunscreen she has to cover herself with every day to keep from frying in the sun; the freckles that spot her legs and arms anyway, no matter how hard she tries to keep the sun at bay.

  She likes finishing her days aching, with dirt under her fingernails, falling asleep on top of the book about plants that her supervisor, Ellie, gave her when she arrived. The sector assigned Sonya here, when she told them she knew how to fix old appliances and grow things, her only useful skills. The place has received her neutrally, neither impressed with her nor particularly critical of her. Ellie likes that Sonya is a quick learner and not easily pushed around. The others like that she knows how to roll cigarettes and play cards.

  The sun is behind one of the mountains now, and all around it the sky is orange, so brilliant Sonya has to stop. She kicks off the solar motor and stands with the bike between her legs, in the middle of the road that no one calls I-40 anymore, though the signs are still up, here and there, bent and coated in dirt. The mountains are purple, the clouds that drift above them pink. Sonya reaches into the bag at her side and takes out a camera, an old one she borrowed from one of the other gardeners, Lily. Lily will teach her to develop the film the old-fashioned way. People are like that, here. They want to walk backward through time, just like the Analog Army. For the most part, Sonya doesn’t mind.

  She adjusts the settings, hesitating with her finger over the wheel that adjusts the aperture. She promised Sasha she would send him photographs with her next letter. He’s agreed to forward some of them to Nikhil. Travel restrictions are supposed to loosen soon, he tells her, as the Triumvirate stabilizes. She has never promised to go back, but one day, maybe, she will.

  Still, she doesn’t lift the camera to her eye. Instead, she just stands there with it in her hands, and looks around.

  She’s a speck of dust here, unobserved and unremarked upon. Everywhere, in every direction, is emptiness.

  Everywhere, in every direction, is freedom.

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote this book during one of the hardest parts of the pandemic: about six months in, no vaccine in sight, quarantine fatigue in full swing. There were a lot of people who quietly kept us all going during that time. Thank you to them, especially.

  Thank you also to John Joseph Adams and Joanna Volpe for helping me to shape and polish this book. A special acknowledgment to Jordan Hill for your spectacular notes when I needed them most. Thank you to Jaime Levine for your hard work and insights.