She stands at the edge of the sidewalk, where curb meets road. Behind her is the Aperture, a rooftop garden in pots, a broken radio, a roof that leaks every time her upstairs neighbor, Laura, takes a shower. In front of her is the HiTrain, a churning sea of people moving in all different directions, a criminal named Emily Knox. She wonders if it’s as good as they say, to take out the Insight, to be all alone.

  A body rushes toward her, and she flinches before realizing it’s Alexander, his collar turned up against the chill, his cheeks dotted with mist.

  “There you are,” he says. “Something happened, come on.”

  He puts a hand on her elbow, and she jerks it free. He doesn’t seem to notice, leading her to an alley with an open dumpster. A mangled wooden chair stands beside it, the legs twisting in all directions, splintering.

  “Are you following me?” she says.

  “I told you we would monitor your Insight,” he says, fumbling in his pocket for something. “The Wards got in touch with me this morning.”

  “The Wards?”

  “Yes, you know, the Wards, the people whose daughter you’re trying to find by consulting with a notorious criminal?” He takes a tangle of wire out of his pocket with a silver device at the end of it. “They reached out to me and they sent me this audio file—”

  At the other end of the tangle of wire is a headband with two foam pads at either end, folded in half. He straightens the headband and claps the foam pads over her ears with a snap. She winces.

  The cord stretches taut between them. She notices for the first time that his eyes are wild, his hair piled on one side of his head, curling into the air.

  He presses a button on the device, and she remembers standing across the HiTrain platform from Aaron after school, her on her way home and him on his way to his father’s office, how he liked to beam songs directly to her Insight. The prompt would come up on the display, Aaron Price would like to share a song, do you accept? And she would nod, and the song would play, the deep connectors of the Insight translating sound into electricity in her brain, as if it was whispering into her ears. They listened together on separate trains, moving in opposite directions.

  The sound in her ears now is faint. She covers the earpieces with her palms, pressing the voice closer.

  “. . . reached the voicemail of Eugenia Ward, please leave your name and a way to contact you and I will get back to you as soon as possible . . .” Eugenia’s voice is low and even, a voice accustomed to soothing. Sonya looks up at Alexander, frowning, as the beep sounds, and a new voice crackles to life.

  “Hello?”

  It is low, too, for a woman’s voice, and unsteady, breaking—

  “This is . . . this is your Alice.”

  Sonya’s hands tighten around the earpieces, around her ears.

  “They told me you were gone, they told me you were dead and I believed them, I believed them, but I saw you in the paper and I—” The voice whispers, urgent now in its quiet. “What kind of a person says that if it isn’t true, says that to a child? What kind of a person—” In the background, a door slams. “I’m scared. I don’t know—I don’t know what to do, I can’t—I have to go. I have to go.”

  Scuffling, a crackle against the mouthpiece.

  The sound cuts off. Sonya releases the earpieces, but doesn’t take them off.

  “Rose Parker ran an article after you were released from the Aperture. About you, about what you’re doing,” Alexander says. “She thought it might help you. Apparently she was right.”

  Sonya shakes her head.

  “That’s Grace? She called herself Alice,” she says.

  “As in Wonderland,” he replies. “The Wards used to call her their Alice. You know—down the rabbit hole.” His mouth twists. “Because she lived in a secret room in their house.”

  She removes the headphones and folds them in half again, but doesn’t hand them back to him. She hears that croaky voice again, the voice of a girl who suddenly sounds like a woman and isn’t used to it—Grace Ward would be about thirteen, all sprouted now, with skinny legs and spiderwebs of stretch marks on her thighs and a halting, unsteady walk.

  “She’s somewhere in the reach of the Chronicle,” Sonya says.

  “The Chronicle distributes to the entire megalopolis,” he says. “Doesn’t exactly narrow things down.”

  “The point is, she’s alive,” Sonya says, and she reaches for the silver device still clasped in his hand, ignoring the prickle of strangeness as she touches him—this man she wishes were dead, this man she told so in no uncertain terms—“I need to take this with me.”

  “Take it where?” he says. “You’re not going to see Emily Knox—”

  “Why not? Maybe there’s some way to find out where this message came from—”

  “Like I said, she’s a criminal—”

  “And what am I, exactly?”

  She tries, again, to take the device from Alexander. He holds on to it.

  “Ten years hanging around with some Delegation lowlifes and you think you’re tough now?” he says. “Emily Knox has spent time in an actual prison. The list of crimes she’s suspected of could fill an encyclopedia.”

  “Oh, so you have a better idea?”

  “You could talk to the Wards.”

  “The Wards are a nice, wholesome family with a welcome mat and a swing set,” she says. “They’re not going to know any more than they needed to know to keep their daughter hidden.”

  He frowns at her.

  “Like you know them all of a sudden?” he says. “You haven’t even walked past their apartment. How do you know?”

  “I know,” she says. “And I’m going to talk to Emily Knox. Now.”

  “Fine, then I’m going with you,” he says, and she gives up, and walks toward the HiTrain.

  Six

  As they wait for the HiTrain to arrive, Alexander takes a pair of sunglasses from the inside pocket of his coat and offers them to her. They’re too large for her face, but they’re dark enough to disguise her Insight.

  The HiTrain coasts into the platform. It’s a newer one than the one she rode to her old neighborhood the day before. The clouds covering the sun are hazy, like smoke swirling across a lit cigarette. In the moment before the glass doors open, she sees her reflection in the train’s chrome-plated side.

  Her hair needs a trim. Its color is darker now than it was in the posters, dirty blond, a fringe around her face. Her mouth is drawn into a tight line. She can barely see the light of the Insight through the lenses of the sunglasses.

  She only comes up to Alexander’s shoulder. He was an oddity in his family, in more ways than one; Nikhil, Nora, and Aaron were all small, careful, graceful. And then, Alexander—ungainly Alexander, loping like a wolf. Hunched over his desk with a pen between his teeth, his nose inches from the page.

  The train car is relatively empty, except for an old lady in orthopedic sneakers with a shopping bag between her feet, and a father humming to the infant child balanced on his hip. They sit across the car from the other passengers, and then across the aisle from each other. Alexander’s knees spread wide when he sits, taking up more space than he needs to. Sonya draws up straight and folds her hands in her lap.

  Alexander rolls his eyes a little.

  “You do know that there’s no DesCoin anymore, right? You’re not still waiting for the Delegation to come back and tally up all your good manners?”

  She used to check her total ten times a day, hungry to see it increase. She lived her life eager to be noticed, sitting on the edge of every seat, every script of courtesy memorized down to the inflection. If Susanna was going to be brilliant, then Sonya would be immaculate, a perfect Delegation girl.

  She leans forward.

  “Do you know there’s no DesCoin anymore?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It seems to me,” she says, “that if your every choice is in defiance of a system, you are as much a servant of that system as someone who obeys it.”

  Alexander stares at her. She watches the man and his son at the other end of the train, the little boy grabbing the man’s shirt collar with a tiny hand, the man guiding it away, pointing at something out the window. Look, a bus!

  “You told me you reunited some of the other children—the displaced children, like Grace Ward—with their birth parents, after the Delegation fell,” she says. “How did you find them?”

  “The Delegation did keep records of adoptions, in general,” he says. “Not all the adoptions were displaced children—some were abandoned, or voluntarily surrendered. But I cross-referenced physical descriptions and birth dates from the birth parents with the adoption records. There were a few older ones, like Grace, who there was no record of anywhere—and of those, Grace is the only one who would still be a minor. We’re leaving all the ones who are adults now alone. Seemed kinder.”

  The brakes squeal. The old lady picks up the bag at her feet, heaves it into her arms, and limps out of the train car. The man is sitting now, bouncing his child on his knee.

  Sonya says, “I’d be curious to know how Grace’s parents managed to hide a second child for as long as they did.”

  “That’s the thing. Most of them only made it a few days after the child was born before they were discovered. For some it was months. But Grace . . .” He shrugs. “She’s old enough to remember them, at least a little.”

  Sonya frowns. It wasn’t like the Delegation not to keep records. Data meant optimization—a better algorithm for purchases, better reminders from your Insight to correct your bad habits, better information in your display as you moved through the world.

  Alexander goes on: “We think there’s no record of those adoptions on purpose. Taking an infant child is bad enough, but taking an older child who’s already bonded with her parents is especially cruel. The Delegation likely didn’t want a record of that cruelty to exist. It wouldn’t be the first thing they failed to log.”

  “Have you considered that the adoption records were in the digital files that were purged in the uprising?” she says.

  He scowls at her.

  “We have a saying, when it comes to the Delegation,” he says. “‘Never ascribe to carelessness that which can be adequately explained by shame.’”

  The train stops again, and this time, Alexander gets to his feet. Out the window, Sonya sees sunlight on water, a boat coasting over the waves. The robotic voice of the HiTrain announces that they are at the Pike Place Market stop. Sonya gets up and follows Alexander to the platform.

  “I’d like to speak to some of the birth parents,” she says. “They might have information that would help me.”

  “Speak to the Wards,” Alexander says. “I thought that would be the first place you’d go, actually.”

  The Wards live in the first-floor apartment of a small complex not far from the Aperture. Twelve units. Sonya knows.

  “I will,” she says, “but more information is better.”

  He wheels around to face her.

  “You hear these people were reunited with their kids and you think, Well, they’re fine now, no harm done?” He rakes a hand through his hair so hard he tears a few strands loose. “Getting your kid back after losing their entire childhood is better than nothing, but it’s also worse than nothing. Every day is a reminder of what you didn’t see, of time you didn’t get. So no, I’m not going to re-traumatize these parents by letting the face of the goddamn Delegation interrogate them.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  She takes off the sunglasses he loaned her, folds them, and presses them to his chest. Then she puts her hood up and walks down the steps to the street. She hears him following, that uneven gait, his from birth.

  Pike Place Market is the smallest building in the area, full as it now is with skyscrapers, all vying for the same view of Elliott Bay. It bears a glowing red sign, public market center, with a clock beside it—a faithful copy of the original, Sonya’s Insight once told her, when she came with the other Delegation volunteers to scrape gum from the wall behind Market Theater. She was disgusted by it at the time, and not just because of the gum—because of the defiance that led people to revive the old tradition despite the Delegation outlawing it. Now, though, it reminds her of how stubbornly some people in the Aperture cling to Delegation rules that no longer have meaning—the widows separating their compost from the rest of their trash even though it all goes to the same dumpster, the rules about serving the oldest first at the dinner table, even though they’re all gray and wrinkled except Sonya. People love their small rebellions. She knows what that feels like, though she’s since lost her taste for them.

  The oblong building boasts a grid of square windows, and beyond them, lights and bustle and bodies, bundles of fresh flowers, whole crabs piled together on beds of ice, displays of jam and mustard in tiny jars that remind Sonya of the Wards, the odd charges in their purchase history.

  The building that houses Emily Knox is one in a cluster of glass pillars, a few blocks from the cracked cobblestones that surround the market. The street name is Triumvirate, a substitution for its former name, Delegation, as though even the word is now a crime, all symbols of the past doomed to be locked up in the Aperture.

  Alexander raises a long arm to point out the right building, the glass tinted smoky orange instead of blue or green, like the ones around it. It’s flat and squared off at the edges on one side, and curved on the other, a steep arc like a diving bird. It doesn’t hold a place in Sonya’s memory. She stares at it for just a moment too long, waiting for the Insight display to provide her with its history.

  “Old habits die hard, huh?” Alexander says.

  Fuck you, she thinks.

  They walk past a man holding a stack of pamphlets; he thrusts one in Sonya’s face as she passes him. It reads The Dangers of Digital: Why Elicits Are a Slippery Slope That Leads Back to the Insight. Stamped at the bottom are the words citizens against digital takeover. Sonya looks back at the man. His thick beard obscures his face, but his eyes lock on hers, taking in the glow of the Insight. He opens his mouth, as if to speak, and she hurries along.

  “CAD nutjobs. They’re a feeder organization for the Army, you know,” Alexander says, plucking the pamphlet from her hand. “‘Slippery slope.’ That’s like saying that alcohol leads directly to Blitz.” He pauses. “Blitz is a recreational drug. A stimulant.”

  “I know.” Her voice sounds so hard it’s almost tinny. “Plenty of people have died of overdoses in the Aperture.”

  Sonya never took Blitz. There was no reason to want an excess of energy in the Aperture. Nothing to occupy your busy hands, your busy brain. Better to dull everything, to mute it, like a T-shirt worn soft by countless washings. But David took it sometimes and stayed awake all night teeming over with ideas. Escape, revenge, home improvement projects, everything.

  David also took it to die.

  Alexander frowns. “I didn’t know.”

  “Why would you?”

  David would have been released with the other Children of the Delegation, had he lived. Nikhil had pointed that out to Sonya when the first few younger ones were released, and it kept her up at night for a week, the thought of the little blue pills in David’s palm, so like the little yellow one in hers, a long time ago.

  Vines crawl up the side of Knox’s building, a curved, organic shape layered over the building’s strict geometry. Beneath the tangle of leaves is the entrance, two doors framed with grand ironwork. She walks into the building, where security guards stand at either end of the lobby, guarding each elevator bank. A screen greets her, the robotic voice saying, liquid smooth, Welcome to Artemis Tower, please sign in.

  Alexander nudges her aside, taking her place at the screen. He types her name, and Emily Knox’s, and hesitates over the line that asks for a reason for his visit: Social Call, Celebration, Business, Other. “Other” is his final selection.

  Sonya wonders how, in a world without DesCoin, a person comes to live in a place like this. There’s another form of currency, now simply called “credits,” but she doesn’t know how a person like Knox earns it. Nikhil said she flourished under the Delegation, but without Insights to hack, how does she flourish now? Someone who is useful to two opposing regimes, Sonya thinks, can’t be decent.

  Now requesting access from your guest, Emily KNOX, the screen reports.

  “She’s not here,” one of the guards says, from the far end of the lobby. Behind him is a fountain, just a heavy tray on the ground with a bubble of spray in the center.

  “Do you know where she is?” Alexander says.

  “Ordinarily I wouldn’t say,” the man replies. “But given her . . .” He gestures to Sonya. “I’m sure she’d love to know what you want, Poster Girl. She’s at the bar across the street, the Midnight Room.”

  Sonya shivers at the way he looks at her, eager, like she’s something he wants to unwrap. She’s already passing through the doorway by the time Alexander thanks the man.

  “Nice of him,” Alexander says.

  “Was it?” Sonya replies.

  The Midnight Room occupies the ground floor of the building across the street—with the glass tinted dark blue—and its facade is as dark as its name. Sonya hesitates before opening the door. She thinks of the people who spat at her as she left the Aperture that morning. delegation scum painted on the wall of her living room.

  She could go talk to the Wards, instead.

  The interior of the Midnight Room is pure black at first, in contrast to the daylight. Shapes materialize from the dim, dark leaves covering the walls, hanging from the ceiling. Low lamps shine here and there. All along the bar, there are orbs full of artificial insects—small drones, buzzing mechanically against the glass. The plants must be artificial too, convincing fakes. Someone plays light, gentle piano in the corner.