And I’ll keep an eye on you

  Five, six, seven, eight. Julia passes a pill to Susanna, a pill to August, and a pill to Sonya, and keeps one for herself.

  One step after another . . .

  We’ll make it through.

  The pill is bright yellow against Sonya’s palm.

  Two

  There’s a man in her apartment.

  Sonya’s hand goes to the knife in her pocket. She knows what it is to be caught unaware, to face the consequences of being on your own among people who have nothing to lose.

  But there are no locks in the Aperture, so there’s nothing she can do to keep her little apartment safe when she’s not in it. Not that it matters much—there’s nothing to steal. And he isn’t here to steal anything.

  He sits at her little table, in one of her folding chairs. It’s a proper table, left in this apartment by whoever occupied it before the uprising. There’s a name carved into the front of it, BABS, written in childish uppercase. She’s invented a story about Babs in her mind—a girl, maybe eleven, unruly, scolded for swinging her legs when she sits, for never being able to stop moving. Desperate to be permanent, somehow; etching the letters with her steak knife when her parents weren’t paying attention.

  Sonya knows the man. His name is Alexander Price. Tall, his knees bumping the underside of the low table. His eyes so dark they look black. He has a beard, trim but not neat, creeping across his throat, uneven in places.

  “Get out,” she says to him.

  She’s holding Graham’s useless stove burner against her stomach like a shield.

  “Now, that,” he says, “is not the Delegation hospitality I was raised to expect.”

  “I reserve that for guests, and you’re an intruder,” she says. “Get out.”

  “No.”

  “You think that just because I’m a prisoner here, you can walk into my home whenever you like?” She puts the burner coil down on the square of countertop where she prepares food. His eyes flick to her tight hands, and then to her face. He seems unbothered.

  She searches automatically for the ring of light around his right iris. But there isn’t one.

  Everyone she ever saw before the uprising—and now after it, with a few exceptions—had an Insight. Its absence is like a missing finger, or a missing ear; he looks unbalanced without it. Or unfinished, like someone stopped drawing him too soon.

  “You look the same,” he says. “Except the hair. I’m surprised the old geezers in here let you cut it that short. That haircut wouldn’t earn you any DesCoin.”

  She turns back to the apartment door and opens it wide. Cool air from the hallway wafts in. Her next-door neighbor Irene isn’t home—she spends most of her time downstairs with Mrs. Pritchard and three of the other widows, the most proper ones. But Sonya wants him to know that if she screams, her voice won’t be muffled by the door.

  When she turns back to him, he’s frowning a little. “I’m not going to hurt you. Do you really believe I’d do that?”

  “I believe many things about you now,” she says.

  This is the man who told the uprising where to find her family when they tried to flee the city. Without him, they might have been able to escape. Without him, they might have lived. She wasn’t ready for the pain of this, of seeing him again.

  She waits, because she doesn’t trust what will come out of her mouth if she opens it.

  “Well,” he says, after the silence has coiled tight between them. “I’ll just get to the point, then.”

  He takes something out of his pocket. It’s a device, rectangular, the right shape for a palm. An Elicit. She recognizes it, not from experience, but from lessons on the history of the Insight—it’s an old piece of technology that predates it. Like the Insight, the Elicit was designed to go with a person everywhere, to augment their reality and communicate with a network about their behavior.

  The system seems clumsy to her now—why carry something in your hand when you could carry it in your head, instead? If you spend all your time holding something, caring for it, feeling its warmth—it may as well be a part of your body, as integrated as an eye.

  He holds the Elicit at the bottom right corner, careless. Though she doesn’t know how to use it, she knows it’s valuable; if she took it from him now, she could trade it for anything she wanted in the Aperture, just because of its rarity.

  But there’s nothing to want in the Aperture.

  The Elicit lights up, and its reflection in his eyes almost makes it look like he does have an Insight. Almost makes him look like he used to, neat and tidy, his smile always reluctant. Alexander, the older brother who walked in his younger brother’s wake.

  She was betrothed to his little brother, Aaron, as a teenager. Aaron and Sonya were the perfect Delegation match, with the perfect Delegation future. But Aaron was killed in the uprising, in the street, along with hundreds of others.

  Alexander shows her the screen. On it is an article she’s seen before. Under the Delegation, there was just one news source that fed to everyone’s Insight upon request; you could read it just by staring out the window on the train. But with the Delegation’s fall, newspapers seem to be back in fashion—there are half a dozen of them competing, each with a different interpretation of the same data. This one is the Chronicle, she can tell by the elaborate C at the top, and this particular edition already turned up in the Aperture, months ago. children of the delegation, the article reads, in bold black letters across the top. Rose Parker, the byline says.

  “I’ve seen it,” Sonya says. “And?”

  “You’ve seen it?” He raises his eyebrows. “I guess Rose smuggled some in here? Wouldn’t want her great work to go unrecognized.”

  He puts the Elicit down on the table, still lit up.

  “So you know, then, that we have this article to thank for the Children of the Delegation Act. Everyone who was a child when they were put in the Aperture, held accountable for their family’s crimes, is now eligible for release. People like you.” He tilts his head. “Well, not exactly like you. You were a little older, weren’t you?”

  “It’s interesting that you’re pretending not to know,” she says.

  She and Aaron had been the same age, after all.

  Alexander’s mouth twists.

  “You have perhaps noticed that many of the younger people in the Aperture have been released lately. Given new identities and a chance to live a worthwhile life instead of . . .” He waves a hand. “This.”

  She sees her run-down studio apartment as if for the first time. The bed with its patched-up sheets, its fraying blanket. The scratched frying pan drying next to the sink on a ragged, stained towel. The things she has used to decorate the space: plants lined up on the sill above the kitchen sink, growing out of tin cans; the patterns she painted in black on the tapestry that covers her living room windows, shielding her from observers; the cluster of lamps with dim bulbs she put on a crate near the bed. Alexander, though, remembers where she lived before.

  Fuck you, she thinks, one of many phrases she has never said aloud—in the past, because they would cost her DesCoin, and now, because they would be a sign that she is going backward, to the girl who lived in a pit of grief and knew the taste of moonshine. But she thinks it anyway, Fuck you, I hate you, I hope you choke and die—

  Alexander waits, as if for a reaction. Finding none, he continues:

  “You have presented a unique problem. Not young enough to be an easy candidate for release, but not old enough for us to forget about you.”

  “Is that what you’ve done with us, in here? Forgotten about us?”

  “For the most part, yes. And you can’t imagine what a relief it’s been.”

  “Well, if you think I’ve spared a single thought for you,” she says, “you’re mistaken.”

  “I’m heartbroken.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a piece of paper folded into fourths. “As I was saying. We came up with an idea for a trade—”

  “We?”

  “We will give you an opportunity to right one of the wrongs of the Delegation. If you succeed, you can have your freedom. If you fail, you will continue to rot in here.”

  The word rot makes her flinch. That was how David talked about it, near the end—like he was a piece of meat left on a countertop to spoil. She could never find the words to disagree with him. She wasn’t sure she even did.

  “I’m not some ant you can fry with a magnifying glass,” she says. “I’m not going to squirm for your entertainment.”

  He pauses, the paper still half-folded. “You don’t even want to hear what we want you to do?”

  She’s squeezing the edge of the counter so tightly she’s lost feeling in her fingers.

  “No,” she says. “Get out.”

  Alexander puts his Elicit back into his pocket. He stands. Even though there is as much space between them as she can get, he feels too close.

  “Have it your way, for now,” he says. “But I’ll be back in a few days. Hopefully by then you’ll have come to your senses.”

  The three representatives of the Triumvirate visit the Aperture once a year, accompanied by a small battalion of journalists and peace officers. The stated purpose of their visit is to meet with Aperture leaders—each building elects two—but Sonya knows better. The Triumvirate are here to prove they haven’t forgotten. To make a show of mercy—but also to remind the public that the favored sons and daughters of the Delegation are still safely locked away.

  David used to say that visitors to the Aperture made him feel like an animal in the zoo. Before he died, they spent visitation days drinking themselves into a stupor. Sometimes they put on old propaganda songs and sang them at the top of their lungs, in the hope that the Triumvirate would hear them through the walls. But most of the time they just fell asleep in David’s bed in the middle of the afternoon.

  This year, a panicked Mrs. Pritchard finds Sonya right before the representatives arrive and asks her to change the dead lightbulbs in the maintenance hallway. The representatives will be touring the ground floor, and as Mrs. Pritchard says, “We don’t want them to think we don’t take care of ourselves.” Mrs. Pritchard is eternally embarrassed, always aware of deviating from a norm that only she is keeping track of. It’s easier to do as she says than to argue with her.

  Sonya carries a stepladder and a bag of lightbulbs to the maintenance hallway. One by one, she unscrews the dark bulbs from their sockets and replaces them, then carries the ladder another few feet to do it again. She has made it to the end of the hallway when the door at the other end opens and the representatives of the Triumvirate walk in.

  She doesn’t know their faces, but there’s no one else they could be, dressed like that. One wears a knee-length red dress, her hair sleek and almost as short as Sonya’s. Another is in a blue pantsuit, her fingers adorned with green stones. They are Petra Novak and Amy Archer—she doesn’t know which one is which.

  The third, a tall man in a dove-gray suit, is the first to recognize her. His name is Easton Turner. He was elected sometime in the last few years. David heard about it on a radio.

  “My, my,” he says. “Isn’t this unexpected.”

  Sonya finishes screwing in the lightbulb, and descends the ladder. Nikhil and Mrs. Pritchard are close behind the Triumvirate representatives, and a few feet behind them are journalists with microphones extended and Elicits raised, likely recording video. Sonya straightens. She wishes she was wearing something neater than a pair of loose trousers and an old T-shirt with an unraveling hem. She wishes she didn’t look quite so much like the adolescent girl in everyone’s memories.

  Easton says, “Don’t you recognize her, Petra? She’s the girl from the propaganda posters.”

  “Wow,” the woman in the red dress says. Her fingernails are long and filed almost to points at the ends—precise and sharp. “So she is. What is your name, anyway?”

  “Kantor,” Sonya says. “Sonya.”

  “I forgot you were in here, Sonya,” Easton says. He’s handsome in a way that suggests he looked too boyish and soft when he was young and has only just found his face. His hair is salt-and-pepper, thick, short, trim at the neck.

  “Why are you in here?” the woman in the blue pantsuit—Amy Archer—asks Sonya. She sounds like a security guard who’s caught someone trespassing. “Didn’t the Children of the Delegation Act secure your release?”

  “No,” Sonya says. “I just missed the age cutoff.”

  “But we did approve something related to you, didn’t we?” Easton says. He taps the side of his nose, and points at her. “Yes, yes. A special exception, if you perform an act of service.”

  “I heard something about that,” Sonya says.

  Petra smiles.

  “Oh, did you?” She laughs. “And?”

  “And,” Sonya says, and she shoulders her bag of lightbulbs. “I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

  “What to make of it,” Petra says.

  “I’m under the impression it isn’t compulsory,” Sonya says. “There’s a choice involved.”

  “Of course,” Amy Archer says. “We simply assumed that you would jump at the chance.”

  “Unless, of course, you are . . .” Petra’s eyes drop to the bag of lightbulbs at Sonya’s side. “Satisfied with your current station.”

  Sonya clenches her jaw so hard her teeth squeak.

  “Well,” Easton says. “I hope you make the right choice.”

  Petra grins at Easton. “‘What’s right is right,’ after all.”

  Everyone—Easton, Petra, Amy, all the journalists and security guards behind them, even Mrs. Pritchard—laughs.

  Sonya reaches for a response and comes up empty-handed. She moves to the side with her stepladder as the group passes her, Nikhil squeezing her shoulder as he walks by. Journalists thrust Elicits in her direction. She recognizes one as Rose Parker, the one who wrote the Children of the Delegation article.

  When the hallway is empty again, it’s quiet except for her ragged breaths.

  Later that evening, she goes to Nikhil’s apartment for dinner, and Nikhil is in his robe and slippers, holding a cup of tea. Mary Pritchard grows chamomile in her apartment and dries it on her kitchen counters. He must have traded tomatoes for the tea, or green beans.

  She holds up the can of beans she brought, and he gestures to the kitchen, where a pot of rice waits on the stove, already cooked. Nikhil gets out another mug and pours half the chamomile tea into it.

  “I heard you had a visitor this morning,” he says, offering the mug to her.

  She pours the beans into a pot and turns on the burner beneath them, then sits at Mr. Nadir’s old dining room table. After Mr. Nadir died of heart failure, Nikhil went to his apartment to unscrew the legs and carry the tabletop up four flights of stairs to his living room. By that time, the apartment was already picked over and stripped bare. Sonya put the legs back on for him—facing the wrong direction, but Nikhil said he liked them that way, so they left it.

  The underside of the table held a surprise: a picture of Mr. Nadir’s daughter Priya as a teenager, taped right in the middle. During the uprising, Priya betrayed her father in exchange for her own freedom.

  Nikhil and Sonya left the picture where it was.

  “Visitor is a kind word for it. I would say I had an intruder this morning,” she says. “How was your meeting?”

  “Fine. Useless,” Nikhil says. He leans back against the counter. “Tell me what happened with your intruder.”

  Despite the closeness between their families before, she saw Nikhil only occasionally after they were first locked in. But then David died, and one night she came home to a man waiting for her in their empty apartment. She knew him, but only in the distant way she knew many people in the Aperture. He attacked her, and she jammed her thumb in his eye socket. She didn’t feel safe there afterward, so Nikhil persuaded the people of Building 4 to let her in.

  She still sees the man sometimes. He wears an eye patch now.

  Sonya shrugs. “Some resistance goon was just sitting in my apartment when I got back this morning.”

  “Some resistance goon.”

  She hesitates a little before answering. “Yes.”

  “And they offered you a way out.”

  “If I do their little dance, yes.”

  “But you didn’t accept.”

  “No.”

  Nikhil gives her a long, searching look.

  “Why not?” he says.

  “You heard how those Triumvirate people talked to me,” she says. “Even if I could complete whatever task they give me, what kind of life could I have out there? There was a time when my face was everywhere.”

  “And there will come a time when no one will remember it,” Nikhil says. “You just have to endure until then.”

  “I’m tired of enduring things,” Sonya says.

  He replies, “I don’t accept that.”

  Most of the time she forgets that she’s not an old woman. If grief pares a person down, she is whittled just as slim as the rest of Building 4. She belongs with the widows, settled in for a long wait. But now she sees the shadows that have collected in the lines of Nikhil’s face, and she remembers his age, and her own.

  “This is a gift, Sonya,” he says. He sets his hand on her arm, gently. “Just think about it.”

  She receives the notification the next morning. Her Insight’s constant light pulses, once, and then a sentence unrolls before her like a banner. Mandatory Medical Check. For a moment the words are layered over what she sees, the suds in the sink, the sponge in her hand. And then they’re gone.

  It is a sensation at once familiar and strange. Her parents had the Insight implanted in her brain when she was an infant, in accordance with both law and custom. It was a brutal procedure, in a sense—a thick needle stuck in the corner of a newborn’s eye. But cultures have always embraced brutality in service of a greater good, sometimes long after it was still necessary. Immersive baptism. Circumcision. Initiation rites.

  Under the Delegation, the Insight was active, granting a person access to all the information they could possibly need. As a child, she asked it all the questions she might otherwise have asked a parent who didn’t know the answers: Why is the sky blue? How fast does the fastest person run? How do cars work? It supplied the answers visually, or auditorily, depending on her preference. And the Insight was more than that, too. It connected her to people—made it so she could watch an episode of Cluefinder with her friend Tana late at night when she was supposed to be sleeping, or listen to a new composition of her sister’s just seconds after Susanna recorded it. The Insight walked through life with her.