Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

Author:Veronica Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

She’s on her way to the entrance when she sees Graham Carter ducking into the tunnel that leads to Building 1’s courtyard. Before she can stop herself, she’s chasing him down.

“Mr. Carter!”

He turns at the entrance to the courtyard, eyes wide.

“Ms. Kantor,” he says. “How are you?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

Graham nods, and gestures for her to follow him to a small table in Building 1’s courtyard. She gets moss on her fingers when she pulls out one of the chairs, which is little more than a metal frame, the wood rotted away. A few empty bottles crusted with dirt rest in a pile nearby; there’s crumpled paper and decaying fabric scraps here and there in the untamed greenery.

Graham seems not to notice it. He looks up at her, expectant.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she says, “but I’ve been given a . . . project. I’m trying to find a missing girl. She was an unauthorized second child who wasn’t found until she was three years old—which means she must have had a black market Insight.”

Graham’s face falls. He looks away.

“I heard you might know something about how that all worked,” Sonya says.

“Been talking to Marie, have you?” Graham’s mouth twitches into a frown. “I thought perhaps, eventually . . . eventually we might all be permitted to let go of our past weaknesses . . . I see now that was foolish.”

“I don’t relish dredging up the past, Mr. Carter,” Sonya says. “But I had no one else to ask.”

He sighs, and taps his fingers on the edge of the table. There is a flower carved into the top—a rose—covered in a film of algae.

“My mother—Charlotte’s and mine—wasn’t well,” he says. “She wasn’t ill, mind you, not really—she thought she was ill, all the time. Charlotte didn’t understand, she just wanted Mom to snap out of it, stop worrying—but I had always been a little more like her, a little more . . . sensitive.”

She has no trouble believing that. Graham is reactive, twitching and jerking with every movement, every sound. Birdcalls and slammed doors and the snaps of someone shaking out their wet clothes. The morgue must have been a good place for him, a place of deep quiet and soothing monotony.

“The thing is, under the Delegation, when you visited a doctor with insufficient justification—there was a penalty.” He shrugs. “Sometimes Mom needed DesCoin. So when the bodies came in fresh, the Insights still viable—I would sell them. There was a network for it. Coded, so it was more likely to escape the Delegation’s algorithms.”

“What kind of code?”

“They named things after card games,” he says. “Insights were hearts, Blitz was gin rummy—it got darker and grimmer, but I stayed on the surface of it. But with the code, if you wanted to meet, you could just say, ‘Want to play hearts on Friday?’ and no one was the wiser, see?”

Sonya nods.

“So,” she says, “how did that work? The Insight part, I mean, not the market—you said you only did this when the bodies came in fresh.

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