“I’m not here to reminisce,” she says. “I’m here to find information about this missing girl. Okay?”

  John looks at the name at the top of the paper. His posture sags a little.

  “It’s on the top floor,” he says. “You’ll need a pass. Hold on.”

  He gets her a square of bright paper laminated in plastic. delegation records is written on it in permanent marker.

  “Thank you,” she says. She tucks the Grace Ward paper back into her pocket, and walks toward the escalators.

  As she travels up to the top floor, someone going the opposite direction points at Sonya and elbows her friend, excited. They both wave, and for a second Sonya wonders if she knows them, before she hears them shout, “Poster Girl!”

  The Delegation records take up most of the top floor. Rows and rows of taupe bookshelves with a slim file for each person who lived in the Seattle–Portland–South Vancouver megalopolis. She stands among them with the laminated pass in hand, unsure where to go. Above her, the diamond-patterned glass ceiling slants to its apex. Through it, she sees the stone and glass structures that crowd around the library, blocking some of its light.

  By instinct, she focuses on the ceiling to learn more about the building—the architect, the year it was built, the style. But the Insight display is, of course, inert; it presents her with nothing. She wonders if Alexander Price is watching and mocking her for the old habit.

  At the top of the escalator is a sign explaining the records room:

  It may strike us as odd that the Delegation—with its reliance on the Insight to track, reward, and punish its citizens—would keep paper records. Indeed, they kept both digital and analog files on their citizens when they were in power, with the analog files containing only the information that the Delegation deemed most pertinent. The more expansive digital records were purged by an unknown government official during the uprising, but freedom fighters were able to recover the entirety of the paper records from Seattle’s City Hall, which we make freely available to our patrons here. We believe that staying in touch with our history empowers us to avoid its worst mistakes.

  Sonya reads it with her mouth curled into a sneer, lingering on the phrase “freedom fighters.” She thinks of her father covering her mouth with his hand on the way to the car as they made their escape, his palm smelling of lemon soap; of the red lines on her wrist from the zip ties after her arrest; of the three black body bags arranged on the moss outside the cabin—

  She plucks a file off one of the shelves and reads the name at the top. trevor quinn. She puts it back and pulls a file off the next shelf down. rebecca rand. She’s alone in this section, unsupervised. She could get lost here, burying herself in the stories of what was. The objects she took from her family’s home jingle in her pocket as she walks down to the end of the room, where she finds the Ws.

  There is a row of Wards, not all of them related. They’re arranged alphabetically. Alexander, Anna, Anthony, Arthur. All the way to George, Gertrude, Gloria, Grant, Greg. No Grace. An illegal girl doesn’t have a Delegation file.

  But Grace’s parents’ names were on the paper Alexander gave her: Roger and Eugenia Ward. So she picks up Eugenia’s file and sits on the floor between the shelves. The pages are dense with text. preferred locations is the heading on one; frequent purchases is the heading on another, a DesCoin amount assigned to each item. Trash bags, zero DesCoin; tampons, four DesCoin; a six-pack of beer, fifty DesCoin. Sonya’s parents had argued about the tampon amount once, with her mother demanding to know why tampons were not a zero-tier item when they were so necessary, and her father arguing that not everyone used them, and not everything could be zero tier, she could buy sanitary napkins instead at two DesCoin—

  She scans the list of the Wards’ earnings—highlighted yellow and labeled average. Roger seemed to take in very little DesCoin, period, suggesting a failure to participate in society, and Eugenia lost hers through carelessness, little things like crossing the street outside of approved zones, entering the train before others had exited, cursing in front of her child. But there’s nothing notable. Sonya moves to recent purchases, looking for a sign that they were housing an illegal second child, but they had been careful. They must have planned ahead for a second child, put aside diapers, food, toys from their first daughter to provide for the second. It was an elaborate undertaking.

  Sonya chews her fingernail. There are a few oddities noted in the report, namely that Eugenia Ward favored certain luxury shelf-stable goods, such as nuts, specialty candy, and mustard—not common for someone of her status, and out of line with her other purchases. But even that is not helpful to Sonya—she can’t track down the teenage Grace Ward by following mustard purchases.

  She puts Eugenia’s file back where it belongs, and she’s retracing her steps down the center aisle to the entrance when she sees the label for K, and veers off course.

  Her fingers drift over August and Julia, uncertain, before she plucks sonya kantor from the shelf.

  She skips the early pages—basic information, preferred locations, recent purchases. She was young then, with few purchases to speak of. Movie tickets, snacks at the corner store, school supplies. Her DesCoin history brings a smile to her face—she always had a high number, for someone her age, which means she earned plenty of DesCoin with her behavior and bought only items with a high Desirability score—tickets to C-rated movies, healthy snacks, modest clothing. Each entry is highlighted in green—according to the key, green means above average.

  Near the back is a page titled contribution assessment:

  Sonya Kantor is a legal second child (Permit #20692) of August and Julia Kantor. She does not show signs of mental illness beyond the norm, though she has a propensity for moodiness greater than the average for her age. She exhibits moderate intelligence, below the level of the rest of her family. That said, her average school performance can be attributed to a lack of interest as well as a lack of ability—she is bored by difficult texts and appears to achieve acceptable grades only to earn DesCoin. Her extracurricular interests are relatively shallow, and though she is competent at piano and voice, she does not possess a particular talent in either. She is compliant with Delegation protocols, with a strong desire to please and a good memory for rules and regulations. She trusts easily and does not possess a great deal of curiosity. Though she occasionally demonstrates furtive interest in the same gender, she appears to be demonstratively heterosexual and will be a suitable partner for a promising Delegation employee. However, she is not a viable option for Delegation employment herself.

  Sonya stops reading. She closes her folder and puts it back on the shelf, between her mother’s and her sister’s—there was only one Kantor family in the megalopolis, so there are no other names to sort through. As she walks out of the library, the laminated pass left behind on the carpet, she presses her palms to her cheeks to cool them.

  She rides the escalators down, running her fingers over the objects in her pockets—the bottle cap, the fragments of the dish she made, the guitar pick. Then she puts up her hood, shielding her right eye from view, and walks back to the HiTrain.

  Four

  Alexander Price stands at her window, where the tapestry blocks her view of the street beyond the Aperture. He’s holding the tapestry back so he can look down at the corner store where she has seen people with binoculars, peering into the windows of Building 4 like birders. His hair, now that it’s long, is wavy and thick, oil dark. When he turns toward her, a curl falls over his forehead and he doesn’t seem as threatening. He more closely resembles the boy she used to sneak looks at across the kitchen island when she was supposed to be listening to Aaron.

  She still leaves the door open behind her.

  There was a crowd at the entrance when she returned, waiting for her. She had no choice but to elbow people aside. One of them shouted in her face, his breath stale and hot. One of them spat on her coat; she wiped it away once she was inside with a handkerchief she had tucked into her sleeve. A few others tried to get pictures of her with their Elicits, or her signature on little slips of paper. She was steady as she walked away from the guard station, and then slumped against the outer wall of Building 4 to catch her breath.

  She thinks, now, of the wall in her parents’ house that says delegation scum.

  “Why are you here?” she says to Alexander, in a tone that would have lost her two DesCoin, if it still existed.

  “Seems like you had quite a day,” he says. He turns his head to the side. There’s a scar on his temple, a shade darker than the rest of his light brown skin, jagged, like the surgeon who removed his Insight slipped a little with the scalpel.

  “I’ve been going over your footage,” he says.

  “Then you saw that there’s no way for me to find that girl,” she says. “I have nothing to go on. Not even a mention in her parents’ files.”

  “I saw that you have no particular interest in finding her.” He lets go of the tapestry and steps away from the window. “Judging by the first thing you did when you left the Aperture.”

  “Are you telling me you never went back to your old house?” she says. “I doubt Grace Ward’s parents will notice the extra hour I spent there.”

  “This isn’t about the time; it’s about your priorities. There’s a family out there that hasn’t seen their daughter in a decade. If you think it’s okay to—”

  “What I think is that your Triumvirate doesn’t expect me to find her,” Sonya says. “So I’d better take all the time I can get outside the Aperture.”

  “Fucking typical. You never even considered trying to help these people, did you?”

  “Of course I did. But I also considered that the person who gave me a decade-old cold case to solve in exchange for my freedom wasn’t really interested in me getting my freedom, he just wanted a publicity stunt that makes the Triumvirate look merciful.”

  Alexander steps closer to her, and stares at her for a long moment before he speaks again.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  Eat shit, she thinks. You fucking asshole, you—

  “No,” she says. “Get out of my apartment.”

  “This is not your apartment, this is a cell that belongs to the citizens of this sector, funded by their tax dollars, and they generously permit you to live in it instead of in the maximum security prison.” He moves closer to her, and this time, she doesn’t back away. She thinks of the knife in the kitchen drawer, with its taped-up handle.

  “Empty your pockets,” he says again.

  She used to think she had nothing to lose. That’s the philosophy of the crowd she and David used to hang out with, too. And they’re right—they have life sentences in the Aperture, after all; no more severe consequences await them for whatever they do to each other. They could be moved to the prison along with the Triumvirate’s murderers and thieves, perhaps, but that’s never happened, and so they think, Go ahead and watch, as they defy the rules of their imprisonment. Go ahead and stop me. And no one does, no one has.

  Sonya has something to lose now. So she gathers up the bits of things that are in her pockets. The pieces of the dish she made her father, Susanna’s guitar pick, Julia’s napkin ring, the spare key to the house, August’s bottle cap. She drops them all on the kitchen counter beside her with a clatter.

  Seeing those things through his eyes, now, they look like garbage. She could have found them in an alley.

  He sneers a little, sweeps them into his hand, and drops them in his coat pocket.

  “You shouldn’t pine for your old life,” he says. “Everything you enjoyed about it came at someone else’s expense.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything to anyone.”

  He snorts.

  “I have nothing left of my family,” she says. “That’s all I have left of them.”

  “It’s a pile of junk, Sonya.” He scowls at her. “You want to know whether I ever went back to my family’s house? Sure I did. But I didn’t take anything they bought with other people’s suffering.”

  He’s close. He smells like mint gum. His teeth are white and gritted.

  “I helped the uprising burn it down,” he says.

  “I . . .” She tries not to choke. She looks up at him. “I used to wish you had died instead of him.” She laughs a little. “God, I used to fantasize about it every night . . . inventing a whole world where he was alive instead of you. Where we were together in the Aperture, or where he had been spared somehow, and he was free, married to some other woman, two kids, a little house . . .”

  She remembers the glow of the Insight against the cracked ceiling in her first Aperture apartment, a light that never went out, though power in the Aperture cut off at ten p.m.

  She goes on: “Now, though, I hope you keep living for a long time. I hope you think of him every minute. I hope you inhale the pain of missing him and exhale the guilt of betraying him.”

  He and Aaron had the same dark eyes. Long eyelashes. He blinks at her, and then he steps around her. The bits and pieces of her old life clack together in his pocket as he walks.

  She turns to watch him go. Over his shoulder, she sees Nikhil, pausing mid-step in the hallway, a handful of tomatoes clutched to his stomach.

  The two men are still, staring at each other. Then Alexander shoves open the door to the staircase and disappears.

  They eat the tomatoes raw, whole, no question of cooking them. Cooking them would mean not feeling the tension of the skin giving way, and that’s half the joy of eating a tomato. They’re not the only plants ready for eating—there’s cabbage and green beans, now, and carrots and radishes, for the colder months. They tried to grow bell peppers one year, and the plants withered in the sun.

  Sonya heats up rice and beans, cooked the other night and kept cold in her little refrigerator, one of the only ones in Building 4. Sonya had wondered, as she dragged the refrigerator upstairs from Mr. Nadir’s apartment, whether such an act would have earned her DesCoin—for recycling—or lost them—for pilfering from the dead. As with so many things these days, it was hard to say.

  She left the paper with Grace Ward’s name on it on the table. Nikhil unfolds it and looks it over.

  “Who is she?” he says.

  “So you don’t know her, then,” she says. “I thought maybe you would know her name. Her parents would have passed through your office once they were caught.”

  Before the uprising, Nikhil worked for the Delegation, like Sonya’s father. He determined sentencing for people guilty of serious violations of Delegation protocol—people who had more than one child without a permit, or who tampered with their Insights, or smuggled Undesirable or illegal goods into the underground markets. It was a miracle he escaped the fall of the Delegation with his life. Plenty of the unlawful people who had passed through his office to receive their punishments became dissidents in the uprising.

  It helped, perhaps, that he didn’t run.

  “Too many people passed through my office,” Nikhil says. “Too many for me to recognize all their names. Though I did always feel sorry for the ones in violation of Protocol 18A. Of all the crimes a person could commit, wanting a second child is not so terrible.”

  Sonya raises an eyebrow.

  “But it was a supremely selfish act,” she says. “Protocol 18A was put in place to ensure that we had enough resources for every child. Your desire to replicate your genetic material shouldn’t supersede the common good—”

  “I can’t believe you still have all that memorized,” he replies, with a wry smile.

  “I don’t have it memorized, I just . . .” She thinks about the assessment in her file, the one that said she had a good memory for rules and regulations.

  “Grace didn’t have a file,” Sonya says, tapping the paper. It’s rumpled and worn already, from how many times she’s folded and unfolded it. “I was surprised by that, because I assumed the Delegation would keep a record, even if she was illegal.”

  “The Delegation would.” Nikhil frowns at the paper. “Maybe it was only digital.”

  Sonya sighs.

  “Did you ever read that fairy tale—about Vasilisa the fair?” she says. “My father read it to me, once. Vasilisa’s stepmother hates her, because she’s beautiful, because she’s not hers. So she sends Vasilisa into the woods to get fire from Baba Yaga, a witch who boils people and eats them.” She stares at her hands, clasped loosely on the table, her fingers curled. “She doesn’t expect Vasilisa to come back. She expects her to die. Giving her that task . . . it’s just a way to get rid of her.” She smiles a little.

  “You believe they have sent you to get fire.” Nikhil picks up the wrinkled paper and chews a tomato. “Well, perhaps you’re right. The Triumvirate capitulated to public demand with the Children of the Delegation Act, but they are likely not excited about the idea of freeing a symbol of the Delegation. But if you can’t find anything in the official record . . . you might consider consulting with the unofficial one.”

  Sonya raises an eyebrow.

  Nikhil puts the paper down, and folds his hands on the table. His hands are spotted now, shriveling like figs in the sun. He still has hair, feather-light and white. It reminds her of dandelion seeds, standing high in hope of a breeze.

  “Many of the people I sentenced had committed Evasion, which meant they paid someone to temporarily suspend their Insight’s feed—making them invisible, essentially, just for a few hours at a time,” he says.

  “I didn’t know that was even possible.”

  He nods. “Difficult, yes, and expensive . . . but possible. Most of them used that time to indulge their worst impulses. Everything you can imagine, and more.”

  “Who?”

  Nikhil waves a hand vaguely at the city beyond her wall tapestry. “Anyone, everyone. Delegation insiders and outsiders. There are depraved people everywhere, but some are better at masking it than others.”