She thinks the Aperture has made this obvious. The polished young men and women of the Delegation now cook euphoric poison in their basement, fight in the street, and steal from each other’s unlocked apartments, among other things. Even Mr. Nadir had kept his small refrigerator behind plywood so no one else knew about it.

  “What does this have to do with Grace Ward?” she says.

  “Ah,” Nikhil says. “In the last few days before the uprising, I met a remarkable woman who had facilitated many of these Evasions. Emily Knox was her name—though she was known only as Knox. I don’t know that she will know your girl, but if I had to look for unofficial information of any kind, I would go to her.”

  Sonya nods.

  “What sentence did you give her?”

  “I don’t remember,” Nikhil says, with a sigh. “But I did not often show leniency to the focal points of Undesirable activity.”

  The tomatoes are gone, their wiry stems in a pile on the table. Shouts echo from the street beyond the Aperture, as they do every night at sundown, when it’s easier to peer into the windows of Building 4. The crowds are thinner on this corner than near Buildings 1 and 2, where the Aperture residents frequently throw trash at onlookers from their windows. Tonight, at the corner store across the way, it’s just a loud, laughing conversation. Sonya feels—and suppresses—the urge to crack open the window so she can hear what they’re saying.

  Nikhil clears his throat.

  “You didn’t tell me Alexander was your Triumvirate contact.” He says it like he’s setting down something heavy, and she realizes he’s been waiting the whole conversation to bring it up.

  “You asked me if it was some resistance goon,” she says. “And that’s what he is.”

  Nikhil nods.

  “You don’t need to protect me from my son,” Nikhil says.

  “I don’t think of him as your son.” Sonya sweeps the tomato stems from the table and into her palm.

  “How is he?”

  Nikhil has Alexander’s and Aaron’s eyes, though his are watery, like he’s always on the verge of tears. She has only ever seen him cry on the anniversary of Aaron’s and Nora’s deaths. He was devoted to her, to Nora; he even took her name when they got married, a rare thing.

  She thinks all the time about why Alexander turned on them, on all of them. It certainly wasn’t because his parents didn’t love him enough.

  “The same,” Sonya says. “He’s the same.”

  She gets up and throws the tomato stems in the trash.

  Later they sit in silence, Sonya in the kitchen and Nikhil in the chair beside his bed, a pile of socks in his lap. He mends them for everyone in the building; he says it’s good for an old man to have responsibilities.

  The radio is on the table in front of her. She took the plastic case off the back, so its parts are visible, like she’s doing a dissection for a science class. She has removed the worn wires and is trying to find replacements in a second radio, this one broken beyond repair, that she found in the late Mr. Wu’s apartment on the second floor.

  She has her soldering iron and an array of screwdrivers she traded for a quilt five years ago. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but trial and error has worked for her before.

  Sonya stares hard at the tangled wires inside the radio, a habit from a lifetime of using the Insight at its full capacity. In times past, that kind of stare would have prompted the implant to present information in the ocular display. The Insight would have taught her how to fix the radio.

  But the Insight only watches her now, it doesn’t help her. She pries the plastic casing away from the end of the wire, exposing the twisted metal strands beneath it. She begins the delicate process of reattaching it to the newer radio, strand by strand, with the soldering iron.

  Nikhil starts to whistle. The first few notes have Sonya drawing up straight, her spine rigid. Her hands freeze over the wires.

  The song is “The Narrow Way,” a Delegation song.

  “Nikhil,” she says.

  He looks up.

  “Don’t.”

  He looks at her for a long moment, and then nods, returning to his work in silence.

  It was the song her mother hummed, right before.

  “Wait, wait, I have a good one,” Sonya said to David once, as they sat on the floor in his apartment. Tokens carved out of wood litter the ground between them. Lined up between their knees are five small teacups from a child’s tea set, and a bottle of cloudy moonshine that tastes like glue.

  She reaches out and taps his nose and recites:

  Four Delegationers sit as the world blows up.

  Four pills in hand and four water cups

  Count down from four and it’s bottoms up

  One Delegationer sits as the world blows up.

  The way they joke, sometimes, is like digging a hole. Who can go deeper, who can go darker. If you can laugh while you’re drowning, David says, who’s to say you’re not going for a swim?

  This time, her eyes burn with tears. She tries to laugh, and her chest heaves instead. David reaches for her, pulls her against him. A wooden token digs into her hip. She buries her face in his T-shirt, and breathes in the smell of his soap until she steadies again.

  Five

  The next day, Renee waits for her at the gate before she leaves. Her hair is piled on top of her head and knotted with a strip of old towel. She still wears the creases of a pillowcase on her cheek.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Good morning,” Sonya says. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. I was just wondering . . .” She looks at the gate. “Can you buy things out there?”

  “No,” Sonya says. “They’re not giving me a stipend or anything. I’m not even sure what they use for currency now.”

  Renee sighs.

  “Well, if you find a newspaper lying around,” she says. “Grab it, would you?”

  Most of what she knows about Renee, she learned in a haze of cigarette smoke at a party. She worked for the Delegation; she has a little sister outside the Aperture. She always wanted a big wedding in the garden at her parents’ house, and two kids, if she could get a permit for the second. Girls. She wanted girls. She’s always trying to get the Aperture leaders to demand the end of mandatory birth control, and Nikhil says the request always gets tacked on to the bottom of the list. Hard to get people to rally behind birth control, he says, when they still aren’t eating enough.

  “Sure,” Sonya says. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  Renee stands back as the gate opens.

  There are fewer protesters at the entrance today. They part for Sonya like water around a stone, but their eyes, following her down the street, are hungry. Once she’s far enough away from the crowd, she puts up her hood to shade the Insight.

  She hears scuffling behind her, but when she turns to look, there’s no one.

  Pinched between her thumb and forefinger is the card Rose Parker gave her the day before. The address printed at the bottom is a long walk from the Aperture, but Sonya decides not to take the HiTrain. She feels the pebbles poking through the worn soles of her shoes, the grit of the sidewalk. She walks in the street, her hands in her pockets and the misty air wetting her face.

  She takes a detour through the park, following the edge of the concrete-lined reservoir, the art museum with the rippling stone face, the angular metalwork on its windows. The grass is unkempt, spilling over onto the sidewalk, and little white flowers are in bloom everywhere—weeds, but still she thinks of pulling them up by their roots so she can plant them in the courtyard. Mrs. Pritchard might not approve.

  She hears the scuffling again, and looks over her shoulder. There’s a man walking behind her, his hands in the pockets of his blue jacket, his face turned up to the sky, as if he’s relishing the mist. She walks faster, choosing a path that will take her back to busier streets. Her hand flexes, empty. She didn’t even try to bring her knife out of the Aperture.

  Rose Parker’s office is in a small, plain building with a security guard near the elevators and a woman in a prim suit at the reception desk. She holds a book in one hand and an apple in the other, so she turns the pages of the book with sticky fingers. The book is not one Sonya recognizes. Its glossy cover reads The Artistry of Thieves, and there’s a ship on the cover, drawn cresting green and purple waves.

  Sonya takes off her hood just as the woman looks up. The apple falls out of her hand as she takes in Sonya’s face. Before Sonya has to explain herself, someone taps on the glass separating them from the office beyond—Rose Parker, in a blue, geometrically patterned dress. She beckons to Sonya to come in, and neither the receptionist nor the security guard objects as Sonya passes through the doors to the office.

  It’s an open space, bright from the windows along each wall, and the lights in the center of the room, which hover together like bubbles at the top of a glass of milk. The sight seems dated to Sonya—that kind of fixture, with free-floating, glowing spheres, was common when she was a child, but in her teenage years it fell out of fashion. Between that and the paper books and the Elicits, she wonders if it’s possible for time to run backward.

  She wonders if Alexander is watching her now.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” Rose says to her. “I thought you would probably light my business card on fire right after we spoke.”

  “I didn’t have matches,” Sonya says, surprising a laugh out of Rose.

  “Wow. A joke, from the poster girl.” She touches her chest. “Come on, my desk is over here.”

  All the desks are at long tables with low shelves serving as dividers. Most are filled with stacks of paper—old articles, competing newspapers, pamphlets with staples at the corners. At the far end of the room are several wall screens, not unlike the one Sonya saw smashed in her family’s home. They play what appears to be a news feed.

  Under the Delegation there was one news feed: Channel 3. Sonya knew the anchors like they were old friends, Elisabeth with the morning report, Abby with the evening, Michael with the weather forecast. On the screens in Rose Parker’s office, there are four different feeds running simultaneously, the faces unfamiliar, the headlines unintelligible: The Analog Army Claims Responsibility for Murder of Tech Magnate. Triumvirate Representative Petra Novak Promises Continued Aid to Victims of Phillips Bombing. Flu Vaccine Delayed Due to Syringe Shortages. They’re headlines for another world.

  “So you’ve changed your mind about doing an interview, then?” Rose smiles like she already knows the answer. She drags a metal chair over from one of the other desks and puts it beside her own.

  When they sit, their knees almost brush together. Sonya crosses her legs at the ankle and folds her hands in her lap. Rose stares at her like she’s done something strange.

  “No,” Sonya says. Scattered across Rose’s desk are scraps of paper with scribbled notes on them. Seemed skittish; follow up with neighbor is on the one closest to her, with a box around the word neighbor. This seems like bullshit is written on another one, with an arrow pointing at something written in shorthand.

  “I needed help with something,” Sonya continues.

  “So, just to remind you where you and I stand,” Rose says. “You refused to participate in my Children of the Delegation interviews. You refused another interview after I saved you from that crowd. And now you want my help.” She tilts her head, a diamond-shaped earring catching the light. “Why should I give it to you?”

  Sonya frowns. “Do you know why I’ve been granted permission to leave the Aperture?” she says.

  “I might,” Rose says. “But I’d love to hear how you choose to explain it.”

  Sonya senses she’s about to walk into a trap, but there’s no way to avoid it. “I’m supposed to find a girl. She’s a teenager now, I guess. The Delegation rehomed her because her parents violated reproductive legislation—”

  “What a fascinating word, rehomed,” Rose says, leaning forward so Sonya can see the tangle of capillaries at the corner of one of her eyes. “Because what it means is that a child was ripped from her parents because they weren’t quite indoctrinated enough to the Delegation to find favor. A cruel euphemism, don’t you think?”

  Sonya straightens in her chair. Even after all this time, she still waits for the alert that her DesCoin levels have dropped, their conversation deemed Undesirable. But though the glow of the Insight continues unabated, the display remains dark.

  “Have I offended you?” Rose asks, again with that head tilt.

  “I went to look at the Delegation records.” Sonya’s throat is tight. “There’s no record of her existence in the old files.”

  “Ah, so you’ve been there already,” Rose says. “Did you look at your own?”

  Sonya thinks of the wiry carpet beneath her, the cold shelf behind her, the weight of the file in her lap. The paragraph that declared her to be docile but mediocre. She thinks of her father’s file, her mother’s, her sister’s, all lined up in alphabetical order—

  All lined up in black bags on the moss—

  “So you did,” Rose says, her voice softening a little. “We’ve all done it, you know—”

  “I think it’s odd there’s no record of Grace Ward at all, not even a mention in her parents’ files,” Sonya says. “I know you probably don’t know anything about Grace, but I thought of someone who might. Emily Knox.”

  Rose sighs.

  “Yeah, I know her,” Rose says. “Pretty sure every journalist in the city does; she’s not shy.”

  “Can you tell me where to find her?”

  “Can I? Yes.” Rose smiles. “But I’d like a trade of my own.”

  Under the Delegation, everything was quantified; everything that a person said or did warranted either a positive or negative quantity of DesCoin. But that trade was conducted with the Delegation, not between users of the Insight system. If you did something good, you were rewarded by the Delegation, not by the person you did it for; your gift had intrinsic value whether the receiver appreciated it or not. The Delegation was a straightforward intermediary, the arbiter of worth.

  In her first days in the Aperture, it was confusing to barter—to get something you wanted only if the other person believed you had given them what you promised. It required, among other things, trust—that if you gave first, you would receive. Rose expects that trust now, and Sonya is not sure she can give it.

  “A trade for what?”

  “An interview. Just five questions, nothing big.”

  Rose opens a drawer and takes out the recording device Sonya saw her with in the Aperture, a black box with a microphone at the end of it, covered in foam. She sets it upright on the desk, between them.

  “Two questions,” Sonya says.

  “Okay, but no one-word answers. I want complete sentences.”

  Sonya clenches her hands. She nods. She wonders how much of herself she will have to give away to find Grace Ward, if it will be worth it in the end. Rose presses a button on the recorder, and it lights up from within, blue shining from the holes in the black casing.

  “Okay, first: tell me how it feels to be back in the world again, after so long away from it.”

  “How it feels? How is that newsworthy?”

  “I’m the one who gets to decide what’s newsworthy,” Rose says. “Answer the question.”

  Sonya feels hot. She touches a cool palm to one of her cheeks. She moves to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear before realizing her hair is too short for that now, and has been for years.

  “It feels confusing,” she says. Rose gestures for her to go on, and she sighs. “It’s like everyone is speaking a different language. I understand the words, but I don’t know what they mean anymore. Triumvirate this and Analog that and—none of the books are the same, the stores, the brands, the packaging, the—You say I’m ‘back in the world’ . . . but it’s not my world, is it?” She swallows hard. “My world is gone.”

  Rose writes on one of the little scraps of paper on her desk. Her writing is too tight, too slanted for Sonya to read it from where she sits, not without leaning closer, which she doesn’t do.

  “Second question,” Rose says. “Something I’ve wondered since I first saw you in the Aperture. You were getting a lot of attention there; you get a lot of attention here. You don’t seem to enjoy it. So why did you even agree to do that propaganda poster to begin with?”

  “First, I want the address,” Sonya says. “Emily Knox’s address.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  Sonya stares at her, hard, Insight aglow, the way she would have in the time before, to find out Rose’s Desirability score, the level to which she was trusted by the government. No number presents itself.

  “No,” Sonya says. “I don’t know why I would.”

  Rose smiles a little. She tears off the bottom of her scrap of paper and writes something on it. But she keeps it pinched between thumb and forefinger, waiting.

  “My father asked me if I wanted to do it,” Sonya says. “My sister, Susanna, she was always better at everything—better at math, better at history. At dancing. At talking to people. Everything. So when he asked me . . .” Sonya sighs. “It was my chance to have something that she didn’t have. I was sixteen. I just wanted . . . something that was mine.”

  She plucks the paper from Rose Parker’s grasp.

  “It backfired,” she adds.

  She stands and walks across the room, toward the glass door where she can see the receptionist with an apple core balanced on the edge of her desk, her book still in hand, the security guard still slumped against the wall near the elevators. Her face, her ears, are warm. She’s dizzy.

  She thinks of the guitar pick Alexander took from her. She found it wedged between the floorboards in the living room, where Susanna liked to practice. Susanna was a competent musician, nothing special. What Sonya had liked more than the songs she played was the sound of her fingers slipping along the frets, a sticky slide.

  For a moment, outside the office building where Rose Parker works, Sonya can’t remember which direction she came from. All the buildings look the same. All the people who pass are loud and sharp, wrinkled brows and nylon-covered elbows, boots splashing through puddles and splattering her trousers. She unfolds the scrap of paper, and doesn’t recognize the address. She isn’t sure if the street names have changed, or if she just doesn’t remember them.