And when the Delegation fell, it went silent.

  The new government linked all the prisoners of the Aperture into a closed system, so the Triumvirate could still see through their eyes at any moment, if it wanted to. And the Triumvirate could send prisoners messages, like the one she just received. But there was no music, no videos, no television. No voice calls, or looking something up mid-conversation to verify it, or assurances of safety when you were lost or in trouble.

  She blinks, and the message is gone. She finishes the dishes, leaving them to dry on a dish towel on the counter, and dries her hands. She checks herself in the mirror, heaves the trunk away from the doorjamb, and leaves her apartment.

  Medical checks happen annually, unless you have a condition or submit a special request. Dr. Hull for the men, Dr. Shannon for the women. There were no offices for them in the Aperture for some time, but when Alan Dohr of Building 3 died of alcohol poisoning, they turned his apartment into one.

  On her way out, she sees Mrs. Pritchard sitting on a bench in the courtyard with Mrs. Carter, both of them knitting. Yarn is in short supply, so most of the time, when Mrs. Pritchard and the others knit, they have to unravel something else they’ve made.

  “Hello, Mary, Charlotte,” she says, as she passes through the courtyard.

  “Where are you headed?” Mrs. Pritchard asks. She likes to know things.

  “My annual,” she says.

  Mrs. Pritchard shakes her head. “Terrible, terrible, what they do to you young ladies.”

  Sonya doesn’t answer. She walks through the tunnel to Gray Street and turns right. In the center of the Aperture, a group of six is playing with an old soccer ball. They set up buckets for goals on either end of Green Street. Gabe and the others are standing near the outer wall, smoking cigarettes, talking to one of the guards above. Probably making a deal, she thinks, though she’s not sure what Gabe has to offer an Aperture guard other than subpar moonshine.

  When she passes through the tunnel to Building 3, she sees Renee, Douglas, and Jack, a graying writer who lives on the second floor, gathered around something. When she draws closer, she sees that it’s a newspaper, spread out on a low table in the corner of the courtyard.

  “Sonya!” Renee says. “Come look at this. Yesterday’s news.”

  Sonya draws closer, leaning over Renee’s shoulder to see the front-page headline. the analog army claims responsibility for murder. There are two pictures beneath it, side by side: in one, a young man with a swoop of brown hair grins. The caption: Sean Armstrong, 32, found dead in his apartment on Tuesday night. The other picture is a close-up of a note scribbled on a slip of paper, with a safety pin through the top of it. The caption: A note signed with the Analog Army insignia, found pinned to the victim’s chest. The picture is too blurry to read most of the writing. Sonya catches a few stray phrases: designed implant technology . . . reestablish cloud-saving structure . . .

  “It’s a list of his supposed ‘crimes,’” Jack says, following her gaze.

  “The Analog Army,” Sonya says. “This is the terrorist group that bombed that tech manufacturer last year?”

  For a time, they had consistent access to newspapers because of that journalist, Rose Parker, who was working on the Children of the Delegation piece. She brought only one copy, most of the time, but people passed each one around the Aperture like it was fine china or gold leaf. Nikhil read them aloud in the evenings to Building 4—to those who cared to listen, anyway. Plenty of people, like Mrs. Pritchard, didn’t want to know what was going on outside the Aperture. Sonya didn’t blame them. After all, it had nothing to do with them anymore. With any of them.

  “The very same,” Jack says. “Wish I could get a copy of their manifesto.”

  “They’re a bunch of psychos who hate technology,” Douglas says. “What more is there to know?”

  Jack gives Douglas a blank look, like he doesn’t even know where to begin.

  “Just because you completely lack curiosity doesn’t mean the rest of us do,” Renee says, flipping to the next page of the paper. “I wonder who designs the logo for a terrorist organization. You think they hired someone for that?”

  “That logo?” Sonya says, looking at the two As layered over each other. “No, that’s definitely the work of an amateur.”

  “An Amateur Analog Army Artist,” Renee says, laughing.

  “Where’d you get this, anyway?” Sonya says.

  “Rose Parker came with that big pack of journalists yesterday,” Jack says. “She handed it over. Apparently those ‘fireworks’ we heard a couple nights ago were actually gunshots.”

  “Gunshots,” Renee says. “How did the Analog Army get their hands on a gun?”

  “No idea.”

  “Can you bring this to Building 4 later?” Sonya says. “I’m sure Nikhil will want to do a public reading.”

  “Sure thing,” Jack says. “I’ll bring it by his place.”

  “Thanks,” Sonya says. “Gotta go. Doc’s waiting.”

  Renee’s face contorts. None of them like the doctor.

  The apartment looks just like every other apartment in the Aperture: one big room with kitchen and bathroom attached to it like a boil. Instead of a bed dominating the small space, there’s medical equipment: an exam table, a cabinet full of supplies, a few machines in a row. This is the only room in the Aperture that is allowed a lock, or people would have stolen all the supplies ages ago.

  Dr. Shannon is an older woman, stern, her hair worn as short as Sonya’s but white as snow. Her hands sometimes shake when she uses her stethoscope. She can never find Sonya’s veins when she draws blood, which she observes each time with an accusatory air, as if Sonya is making her veins small on purpose. She checks her watch when Sonya walks in.

  “I got the message at an inconvenient time,” Sonya says. “I came when I could.”

  “Well, fine, I suppose you don’t normally need much time anyway,” Dr. Shannon says. “Sit on the table and let me take your blood pressure.”

  Sonya goes through the ritual of it: stripping off her cardigan, rolling up her sleeves, sitting on the cold metal table that Dr. Shannon sanitizes after each visit, putting her arm out for the blood pressure cuff that squeezes her, stepping on the scale that pronounces her weight “healthy enough,” eyeing the paper folder Dr. Shannon flips through to remind herself of Sonya’s medical history.

  “You seem fine,” Dr. Shannon says. “Time for your shot.”

  Sonya turns her arm out.

  The injection lasts for a year, though Sonya hasn’t needed it to prevent pregnancy since David died. It’s mandatory for every person in the Aperture with the capacity to bear children.

  She knew David from her life before, but only as a name and a face at the back of a classroom, nothing more. One night early in her Aperture sentence, she danced with him at a party—he was the only one there who knew the foxtrot. Later, her lips burning with moonshine, she went back to his apartment and took off all her clothes to let him look at her. He was just a body, then. And she just wanted someone to touch her.

  He wasn’t Aaron, and that wasn’t difficult in the way that she had expected. Aaron had been an inevitability, and she had wanted him in the same way she wanted childhood to end and the rest of her life to begin. Under the Delegation, though, being with David would have cost her DesCoin—and that was all she wanted, right after she was locked in the Aperture: to shed as much DesCoin as possible, now that the Delegation was gone. She drank and smoked and swore and stripped herself bare and let herself want, and she expected it to mean something, to change something.

  And then David died of his own volition. She hosted his funeral in a black dress in the center of the Aperture, where she said little, just laid a dandelion seed head on the pavement to watch its seeds split off into the wind.

  “Is there a way to just eliminate the possibility of pregnancy forever?” Sonya says, as Dr. Shannon prepares the syringe. “Without surgery, I mean?”

  “Technically, yes,” the doctor replies. She dabs the inside of Sonya’s arm with a square of gauze soaked with antiseptic. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re still young. Something could change—”

  Sonya laughs. “In here? No, it can’t.”

  “The Triumvirate already released some of you,” the doctor says. “Someday, they may release all of you. And you might want to have a child when that happens.”

  The needle is sharp and then over. The table doesn’t warm beneath her legs. The air stinks of mildew and dirt. Maybe whoever lived here before—not Alan Dohr, but the person who lived here before this part of the city was seized by the Triumvirate and converted into the Aperture—kept gardening equipment in it. Shovels leaning into the corner. Bags of earth piled near the door. A place for making things new instead of tending to the dying.

  Probably not.

  Dr. Shannon presses a cotton ball to the injection site and tapes it in place with her free hand.

  “Mood rating for the last week?” she asks, as she always does.

  “Out of one hundred?”

  Every time, out of one hundred. One hundred, a delirium of happiness. Zero, a soul-crushing sorrow.

  “Fifty,” she says, without waiting for the doctor to answer.

  “You’ve never given me any other rating.”

  “That’s because I always feel fine.”

  Dr. Shannon strips off her gloves, and throws them in the trash.

  “Most people don’t always feel fine, Sonya,” she says. “Particularly when they’ve experienced some of the things you have.”

  “How is this relevant to my health?”

  Dr. Shannon takes a flashlight out of her pocket. Sonya knows this ritual, too. She sits up straighter as Dr. Shannon shines the light into her right eye to look at the Insight.

  “Many people in the Aperture are on medication to help them stabilize their moods,” Dr. Shannon says. “Your lot in life is difficult, and you should have the tools to manage it.”

  Sonya unrolls her sleeves.

  “You know what might help us all manage it?” Sonya says. “Fresh produce. More than one set of sheets. Some way to pass the time that isn’t kicking a half-deflated soccer ball around on some asphalt.”

  Dr. Shannon sighs.

  “Unfortunately, I am not authorized to offer any of those things. Medication, however . . .”

  “Do I seem like I have unstable moods to you?” Sonya says.

  “No,” Dr. Shannon replies. “You are very much under control, Ms. Kantor, and you always have been.”

  Sonya puts her cardigan back on.

  “Then what’s the problem?” she says, and she stands to leave.

  Three

  He’s back.

  Standing in her kitchen with a glass of water in hand, which means he went through her cupboard to find it. His big hand outstretched to touch the thyme growing behind the sink, in the patch of light that comes in from the emergency stairwell. He’s wearing a chain around his neck. At the end of it, a ring with a purple stone that she recognizes as his mother’s.

  When he sees her looking at it, he tucks it under his T-shirt collar.

  “I think I made myself perfectly clear,” she says. “You’re not welcome here. Which means you’re also not welcome to rifle through my things.”

  She leaves the door open behind her.

  “Not much to rifle through,” he says. “But if I needed a bunch of old fraying wires, you’re the first person I’d come to.”

  She looks at her row of wooden crates, like a garden path leading to her bed. She has a collection of things, just like Graham Carter. A crate for tools—even old, rusty ones have their uses—and one for wires; one for nails and screws of all sizes and shapes; one for bits of things, plugs and jacks, small speakers with no boxes, antennae, switches, and splice caps. And on a low table near the bed, her soldering iron, one of the greatest finds of the last decade.

  “They must be pretty desperate if they’re relying on you for tech support,” he says. “Before the Delegation fell, you couldn’t even hang a picture frame.”

  “Before the Delegation fell, you hadn’t betrayed your entire family,” she says. “Things change.”

  His jaw works like he’s chewing on something. He sets the glass down on the kitchen counter and takes a folded piece of paper out of his pocket.

  “I’m here to give you another chance at earning your freedom,” he says.

  It’s only the memory of Nikhil’s worn face that keeps her from telling him to go fuck himself.

  “There’s a girl,” he says. “She was an illegal second child under the Delegation. Illegal second children were, when discovered, removed from their birth families and placed with upstanding members of the community who couldn’t have a child of their own.”

  His voice sours at that. It’s for the good of us all, Sonya thinks automatically, one of the Delegation’s key phrases. Replying to him with that phrase would have earned her at least thirty DesCoin. Enough for lunch at Al’s—closed now, of course.

  He continues: “The Delegation was in power for thirty years, so unfortunately not everyone can experience any restoration. But we’ve been locating the children who are still minors now, and so far, we have returned all but one to their birth parents. This girl is the last one. She was three years old when she was taken from her parents, but we can’t figure out where she was placed. The others, we just matched the parents’ account with the adoption records. We put pictures of Grace in all the newspapers, asking for information, but no one has come forward with any. It’s very strange.”

  He unfolds the paper as he speaks. He handles it with careful fingers, as if it’s tissue and might rip at the slightest pressure.

  “Our offer is simple,” he says. “Find her—or find out what happened to her—and earn your ticket out of here.”

  Sonya gestures widely to encompass the apartment. “You may have noticed I’m a prisoner here. Not exactly in a good position to find anyone.”

  “You will be given a pass to move in and out of the Aperture while you conduct your investigation,” he says. “We will monitor you, of course, via your Insight.”

  “How convenient that you never let us remove them,” she says. “Even though you made them illegal for everyone else.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “You’re the government, and you couldn’t find her,” she says. “What makes you think I can?”

  “I’m an administrator, not an investigator,” he says. “I wasn’t authorized to dedicate that much time to this. You, however . . . have all the time in the world.”

  She hears a door opening down the hallway—Mr. Teed leaving for his afternoon walk. He tips his hat to her and ambles toward the stairwell.

  Nikhil said this was a gift. Nicole saw it that way. She was so relieved when she was approved for release that she burst into tears. She debated her new alias for days. Do I look more like a Victoria or a Rebecca? She talked about how she’d always wanted to live in Portland, anyway; how she didn’t mind working at the new Phillips factory at all, better to do menial labor than wear away at time in the Aperture.

  But Sonya’s future feels blank. A wall of white light.

  “Tell me,” she says. “Why should I want what you have?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You come in here in secondhand clothes”—she’s only guessing by the uneven stitching on his shirt, mended by unskilled fingers—“with a thankless job as a Triumvirate lackey, and no wedding ring on your finger, and you tell me I should want to be free of this place. Well—for what? What will I get out there? Heckled in the street by people who recognize me from a decade-old poster? A job at a factory? What?”

  He presses the paper flat to the countertop between them.

  “You are . . .” He laughs a little. “You are a fucking piece of work, you know that? You want to stay here and eat cold beans out of a can and watch some old people die one by one? Be my guest.”

  He picks up his glass and drinks the last of his water. Sonya looks down at the paper on the countertop.

  Written at the top of it is a name:

  Grace Ward

  Beneath it is a photograph of the Wards, black-and-white and grainy. They stand shoulder to shoulder in front of a white wall. Mr. Ward is tall and thin, and Mrs. Ward is small and stout. Both look like people who smile easily, the lines in their faces still shaped by mirth, though neither is smiling here. There’s no photograph of Grace.

  Alexander slams his glass down, and walks around the countertop, toward Sonya and the door.

  “All right,” Sonya says.

  She stares at the name at the top of the page.

  “All right what?” he says, scowling at her.

  “I’ll do it.” Grace’s address, her date of birth, a description of her appearance, are all written on the paper. Sonya folds it in half and tucks it into her back pocket, then steps to the side to clear a path for Alexander to leave.

  “Are you . . . What?”

  “I’m not sure how to make it much clearer for you. I accept your offer.”

  “Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “I’ll . . . leave your pass at the guard station. You can pick it up tomorrow morning.”

  His fingers skim the wall on his way to the door, tracing faint lines in the whitewash. There’s powder on his fingertips when he pulls them away. He turns back to her once he’s in the hallway.