“What changed your mind?” he says.

  “Well,” she says, “do they still make those butter cookies? You know, the ones that come in that red packaging with the little dog on it? They were shaped like bones.”

  “Arf’s. Packaging’s blue now,” he says.

  “Yeah, those. God, I miss those,” she says.

  She closes the door between them.

  She has to weave through a crowd to get to the gate the next day. News is contagious in the Aperture, and this is bigger, somehow, than the release of the youngest prisoners—because Sonya will be coming back at the end of the day. She steps around the sleepy-eyed men of Building 2, then Jack with his little notebook; Renee in a negligee and robe, smoking a cigarette; Graham with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

  The guard who sits in the security office positioned right next to the gate is familiar, though she doesn’t know his name. He’s worked here for a long time, but she never goes near any of the guards. She didn’t need to be warned about them. Plenty of women in the Aperture warned her anyway.

  The guard—Williams is the name on his name tag—compares her face to the picture on her security pass. It’s from a decade ago, from when she was seventeen. In it, her hair hangs limp over her shoulders, and there are dark circles under her eyes like bruises. But it still looks like her. He hands it to her, and she puts it in her jacket pocket.

  “You have to check in within twelve hours of leaving,” he says, “or we’ll suspend your privileges until you can cooperate better.”

  “Fine,” she says, and she goes to stand in front of the Aperture’s aperture.

  She’s shaking. For over a decade, Green Street and Gray Street, Buildings 1 through 4, the market, the courtyards—they’ve been her entire world. A planet shrunk down to a snow globe. No choices, no strangers, no wide-open spaces. But now she remembers the largeness of the world, and it feels as oppressive as the air inside a closet.

  Loops of barbed wire stand rigid atop the gate, which is wide enough for a truck to pass through. The guard pushes a lever, and the metal plates in front of her screech as they pull away from each other. She stands, for a moment, in the center of that dilating pupil. Just a few feet beyond the gate, held at bay by peace officers, is a crowd of people holding signs.

  And behind her, a crowd of prisoners straining to get a look at the outside world.

  She steps through the gate and into a wall of sound: clicking camera shutters and shouts, and everywhere, everywhere, her name:

  Ms. Kantor, how does it feel to be outside for the first time in—

  Sonya, what do you think about the Children of the Delegation Act that—

  Poster Girl! Over here!

  There are signs attached to broom handles and rulers and branches. Some are friendly:

  Welcome Back, Child of the Delegation

  Some are not:

  Don’t Show Mercy? Don’t See Mercy!

  For the most part, the signs all display the same image: her face, on the same poster the Delegation once plastered across the city, but with a single word struck out and supplanted.

  What’s Right Wrong

  Is Right Wrong

  Her own eyes, rendered light gray by the black-and-white, stare back at her from between the words. She doesn’t know which direction to go, doesn’t know which direction she’s facing. She wants to shout; she remembers the knife-sharp sound of her own voice when she dug her thumb into that man’s eye in her apartment, but this is not the dark void of Building 2, this is out and it’s everywhere and she can only press forward.

  A hand closes around her elbow, and she jerks it back. But the woman’s face has that look about it, the gentle urgency of someone who is helping. Sonya recognizes her as Rose Parker. When Rose’s arm slips across her shoulders, she allows it. She ducks her head into the embrace and watches their shoes moving in tandem.

  Her shoes are so worn she can feel each pebble through the soles. Rose’s are pink sneakers, the color of unripe watermelon. They walk away from the crowd so fast they’re almost running. Sonya is breathless by the time the noise fades. She breaks away from Rose and leans back against a brick wall.

  They are in an alley across from an overflowing dumpster. The alley itself seems to be overflowing, full of chairs with busted seats, shredded plastic bags, sagging couches with the stuffing spilling out, balled-up newspapers, rotting cardboard boxes. The smell is pungent. Across from her, graffiti tangles together on the brick in every color.

  fuck the delegation catches her attention, but there are other phrases she doesn’t understand.

  Analog Army

  Unmedication for All

  Bust the Borders

  “You all right?” Rose says, and there’s flint in her voice.

  When she came into the Aperture to conduct her interviews for the Children of the Delegation article, her hair was in dozens of tight braids, but now it is a tumult of tight curls held back by a floral scarf.

  “Yes,” Sonya says, and she adds, “Thank you,” because she is supposed to. Her Insight glows in its perpetual halo; someone—probably Alexander Price—is watching.

  “I don’t know if you remember me,” Rose begins. “I never got to speak with you, before.”

  “I remember.”

  Rose wanted to interview her along with the others. She was in the market, a recording device in hand, calling out to every young person she could find in the Aperture. She was a magnet with the same polarity, a repulsive force surrounding her. She had spoken to Sonya by name. Ms. Kantor, if you have a moment to talk about—

  Sonya hadn’t had a moment.

  “Well,” Rose says. “Mr. Price said I could maybe buy your cooperation with these.”

  She reaches into a bag hanging at her side and takes out a slim blue box that says arf’s with a cartoon dalmatian perched on top of the F. Butter cookies.

  Sonya frowns. She doesn’t take them, even though she wants them. She can already feel them crumbling over her tongue.

  “My cooperation,” she says.

  Rose takes out a black device with a fuzzy microphone about the size of a walnut at the end of it. “I was hoping to write a piece about you, one of the Delegation’s famous faces, and—”

  “No,” Sonya says.

  “I could tell everyone about your mission, let them know that you’re trying to do good—”

  Sonya laughs.

  “Playing puppet for your new government on an impossible errand is not ‘trying to do good,’” Sonya says. “If you’ll excuse me, please.”

  She moves toward the end of the alley. She doesn’t know where she is, her thoughts too scattered to remember the geography of the city. But she has to get away.

  “Wait.” Rose offers her a business card. Her name, phone number, and address are written on it. “Just in case you change your mind.”

  Sonya’s mind often feels, to her, like clay hardened by the sun, left out too long to take a new shape. But she takes the card anyway.

  The city is loud. Everywhere is the shriek of the HiTrain over rails, the honking of buses telling pedestrians to scatter, bike bells tinkling behind her, beside her, in front of her, and voices—shouting, chattering, laughing, ranting voices. It takes her a half hour to understand that she is listening for something else: the shush of car tires, personal vehicles allocated only to those with the highest Desirability scores. They are nowhere in sight.

  She climbs the steps to a HiTrain platform, not to ride it, but to look at one of the maps. The HiTrain was built during a push for public transportation, long before she was born. It’s not as fast as the Flicker, a vacuum tube train that connects each segment of the megalopolis, but it’s better for short distances. She pulls her hood low over her right eye. The Insight’s glow stands out here.

  Looking at the map, she begins to remember where she is. The Aperture is in the middle of the Seattle branch of the megalopolis, where the jagged line of skyscrapers tapers off to more moderate buildings. Nearby, all along the seawall that contains the waterfront, are the neighborhoods people used to clamor to live in. It was a privilege to move away from the noise of the city center, a mark of loyalty and service.

  She is just a few neighborhoods away from Washington Park, where her family lived. The piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it is in her pocket, folded into fourths. She stands on the platform and watches the next HiTrain come in, its wheels whistling on the rails. A crowd waits near the edge of the platform. Their clothes are a full spectrum of color, from neon bright to drab beige. One girl, a teenager, wears a tight bodysuit splattered with paint. Her hair is stained pink. Sonya can’t stop staring at her as she snaps gum between her teeth and bounces on her toes, eager for the train doors to open. An outfit like that used to cost a person at least five hundred DesCoin for the day—a penalty for being disruptive. Most people didn’t bother.

  When the doors open, everyone piles on. They have no Insights to scan at the door, and Sonya begins to wonder if she can ride the HiTrain. It used to cost DesCoin. It doesn’t seem to cost anything anymore.

  She waits for the next train to come, standing beside a woman with a shopping bag between her feet. Pinched between her thumb and forefinger is a paperback book. Sonya reads it over her shoulder. It’s poetry:

  Do you recall that feeling

  of steering your eyes away—

  of steering your mind away?

  The woman sees Sonya looking; she picks up her bag and moves away. The HiTrain coasts into the station, and Sonya follows the others on, half expecting an alarm to go off when she passes through the doors. But they only close behind her with a snap, and the train lurches away from the station, swaying like a boat in a wake.

  Sonya stays on her feet, near the door. The other passengers settle into stained, cracked seats. A boy no older than twelve slurps Coca-Cola from the can; Sonya resists the urge to scold him for breaking the rules, to add a few DesCoin to her count. A man jostles an older woman for more space; she scowls at him, but pulls her arm tighter to her body. A woman in ragged clothing walks the aisle on unsteady feet. Sonya stares at the map on the HiTrain wall. There are only two stops separating her from Thirty-Fourth, where she needs to get off.

  Outside, the city is shrouded in fog—not the heavy fog of pollution, but the mist of a typical morning. The streets are busy and there are signs of disrepair everywhere, as if nothing has been mended since the day she stepped into the Aperture. Perhaps nothing has. A stoplight dangles from a pole, precarious, its light flickering. A crack in the road has grown so wide it could swallow a man; a woman steers her child around it. The Delegation was good at keeping things tidy, but the Triumvirate, it seems, is not.

  The train brakes, and a robotic voice calls out Sonya’s stop. She steps onto the sagging platform alone. She’s been here so many times—she took the HiTrain to school every morning, and to Aaron’s every other day, and to her friend Tana’s on Saturday afternoons to see C-rated movies at the theater near her house. It made her feel grown up, riding the train alone; she pretended she was on her way to work, or to pick up her kids from school.

  Now she feels ancient. A specter haunting a graveyard.

  She descends the steps to street level. Everywhere else, the disarray of the city seemed to be the result of bad behavior; here, it’s due to neglect. The stores—once a row of charming boutiques and coffeehouses—are boarded up. The grass in the parkways is wild and tall; the tree branches tangle in the power lines and hang heavy over the street. She steps over a fallen streetlight, bits of glass crunching under her feet.

  She remembers children in strollers, wearing hats to protect their faces from the sun; she remembers couples walking shoulder to shoulder, their knuckles brushing as their arms swung; she remembers dogs sniffing at front gates and the corners of fences. But this is no longer a place for those ordinary things. She turns at the next intersection and walks down the street where her family lived.

  There’s debris here, too, but a different kind. She steps over a broken fishing pole, a knitting bag with shiny needles poking out of it, a children’s bicycle with no tires. She recognizes the tattered frame of a brocade sofa from the Perez house, turned upside down on their front lawn, now obviously a home for small mammals. She stops in the middle of the street to look at the front doors torn off their hinges on each side, the broken windows, the charred remains of second stories.

  Her family fled early in the uprising. Her father came to them late at night and told them to pack a change of clothes and a toothbrush. They drove down the street with the headlights off, only the car dashboard and their Insights glowing—

  Sonya keeps walking.

  The Kantor house is made of red brick. Two stories high, with fir trees at the edges of the property. The right side of the house is half-collapsed, the second floor tumbling into the first. Sonya’s room and the guest room fold in on themselves.

  Two white pillars frame the front door, which rests against the side of the house, where the lilac bushes used to be. Broken furniture is strewn over the lawn, like entrails spilling from an animal carcass. She stands on her tiptoes near the front door to feel along the frame for the spare key. It’s there, covered in dirt, paint from the frame sticking to it. She slides it into her pocket.

  The rugs are gone, the walls cracking and flaking, the furniture absent or broken. She doesn’t trust the steps that lead upstairs. She wanders into the formal dining room, to the left, where the tabletop has shattered, leaving beads of glass all over the wood floor. The metal frame stands unaffected.

  All the drawers in the built-in cabinet along the far wall are open. But something in one of them catches the light—one of the napkin rings her mother saved from her first dinner party, a simple yellow loop made of plastic. It looks like something for a baby to teethe on. Her mother always talked about how determined she was to make things “nice” even when they were young and poor—plastic napkin rings, polyester napkins instead of paper, matching melamine plates. There’s no excuse for a lack of effort, she liked to say, one of the phrases Sonya repeated to herself when she saw unkempt or disruptive people.

  She keeps moving until she reaches the threshold of her father’s office. She wasn’t allowed to go in, even as a teenager. But it’s only wreckage now. There are books everywhere, left to rot on the hardwood. His desk has been ripped apart, files everywhere, shelves broken, keepsakes smashed. The clay dish she made him in primary school, a cradle of leaves painted deep green to match his walls, is in pieces on the floor. She crouches to pick them up, one by one.

  Near the edge of the desk is the poster, encased in glass. what’s right is right. He kept it hanging right in front of him so she could watch him work—that’s what he said, anyway. She stays for a long time in a crouch, the pieces of the dish in her hands, her adolescent face glaring back at her in grayscale. Someone sprayed a red X on the glass, but she can still see through it.

  Her father was the one who asked her to sit for the poster. Susanna didn’t like it. She grumbled about it for days. But Sonya had squealed with excitement at the thought of her face being all over the city.

  She stands and leaves the office. The rooms are arranged in a square, connected by hallways, so she walks right through the kitchen, with its broken tiles and collapsed cabinets, to the laundry room, half-buried in rubble, the washing machine unperturbed.

  She collects things as she goes: a spoon from the wreck of the kitchen, one of Susanna’s guitar picks wedged between the floorboards, a bottle cap her father saved from his first date with her mother. She notes the big homescreen—a wide glass panel designed to sync with all their Insights—in the living room, bashed in repeatedly with a blunt object, and the spray paint on the wall in the foyer that reads delegation scum. That, she looks at for a long time.

  All the little keepsakes in her pockets clatter together as she walks back down the street, away from her family’s home.

  The piece of paper with Grace Ward’s name on it gives the Wards’ address, but Sonya doesn’t go there. Instead she rides the HiTrain toward the Seattle downtown, where pillars of buildings crowd together along the waterfront. There, perched unevenly on a downward slope, is a blocky, asymmetrical glass structure once used as a public library, in the time when print books were more abundant, and now used as one again. The Delegation used it as a community gathering space, the books locked away behind glass, like museum relics.

  Sonya has been there before, though she only ever read books projected into her eye via the Insight display. The library is where the Delegation records are kept. That much she knows from Rose Parker’s article.

  She follows a line of people into the blue glow of the lobby. She feels the way she did when she was a child, like a small fish in a large fishbowl, the angular glass panes above her refracting light. To her right are seats that descend into the ground, a lecture hall; ahead are bright yellow escalators. She goes to a nearby desk, where a middle-aged man wears a name tag. john.

  “Hello,” she says to him. “Would you please tell me where to find the Delegation records?”

  John’s eyes fix on her Insight. He hesitates with his stylus over an Elicit screen; he seems so startled by the sight of her that he has forgotten his task. But Sonya knows there are different kinds of surprise, with and without delight. This is the latter.

  “For what purpose?” he says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “For what purpose,” he repeats, slowly this time. “Do you need the Delegation records.”

  “Is that a standard question?” she says. “Or are you only asking me?”

  He has a scar near his hairline. It is not the first one she’s seen, though it’s more obvious than many, because his hair is thinning, gray sprinkled among the brown. She assumes it’s from the surgery to remove the Insight. It’s an inch long, paler than the rest of his skin.

  She takes the Grace Ward paper out of her pocket, unfolds it, and presses it flat to the desk in front of him.