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She nods. She gets up, and stands at the railing.

Deciding to live is as easy as tipping her hand so the pill falls into the water and sinks to the bottom.

She’s sitting in a social worker’s office when she comes to a decision. The office is buried in the back of the administration building that Susanna once described as the most depressing place on Earth. The carpet beneath her feet is speckled gray and blue, worn in all the places where feet commonly tread. A beat-up metal desk stands between her and Agatha Sherman, lifetime bureaucrat, who has an ink stain at the corner of her mouth from chewing on a pen. There are no windows.

She is staring at a piece of paper certifying Sonya’s release from the Aperture—not issued by Easton Turner, this time, but by the other two members of the Triumvirate, Petra Novak and Amy Archer.

Agatha’s desk is covered with little figurines shaped like frogs and toads. Some are clear glass, and some are painted. One wears a ceramiccrown. One has eyes that shift back and forth every second, like a clock. One is the size of Sonya’s fist. She can’t help but stare at them.

“Okay, Ms. Kantor,” Agatha Sherman says. She rubs the corner of her mouth. The ink only smears into her cheek. “Per the terms of the Children of the Delegation Act, your Insight will be deactivated...” She pauses, looking up at Sonya. “I suppose you don’t require that—but you are entitled to transitional housing and a new identity, if you want it. Most of our Aperture releases have embraced the opportunity to begin anew—”

“No,” Sonya says. “No, thank you.”

Agatha frowns. She sets the paper down, and folds her hands on her desk. Her elbow nudges one of the frogs—a tropical one, its underside painted blue and black—askew.

“Can I make a personal recommendation?” she says. “You are too well known to do very well with your current name. I encourage you to reconsider. There is no reason to work against yourself here.”

“Thank you,” Sonya says. “But I don’t think I’m going to be in the city for long, and...” She shrugs. “For better or worse, this is my name.”

Agatha looks faintly annoyed. She is not used to people not taking her personal recommendations, maybe.

“Fine,” she says. “I take it you won’t be requiring temporary housing?”

“No,” Sonya says.

Agatha purses her lips, then stamps the paper with a giant ink seal of the Triumvirate. She passes it to Sonya, who takes it, folds it, and comes to her feet. She reaches across Agatha’s desk and restores the tropical frog to his original position, then leaves the office.

She spends the next few weeks tangled together with Alexander Price. Her mornings, padding into the kitchen in one of his sweaters, barefoot, to heat up the water for coffee. Her afternoons, reading the books he keeps stacked here and there all over his little apartment. Her nights, waking with a start, only to put her hand on his chest and makesure he’s still breathing. She doesn’t meet his friends; she doesn’t make eye contact with his neighbors. She’s waiting, and they both know it.

On the day Rose Parker’s special issue of theChronicleshows up at their door, with a note from Rose herself attached to it, Sonya sits down at the kitchen table and reads the paper front to back. The first page readseastonturner accomplice to delegation murders, by Rose Parker. Then,turner location data reveals connections to extremist group. Thenaugustkantor, delegation killer.

That night, she crumples it in the bottom of a trash can and goes out to the balcony with Alexander to burn it. She watches it curl in the flames and turn to ash. Then she stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, and it’s a kind of goodbye.

When he drops her off at the airport, so she can catch a rare flight out of the sector, he gives her the dish she made for her father, glued back together, her old house key, and Susanna’s guitar pick.

Epilogue

Sonya drags a handkerchief across her forehead and tucks it in her pocket before getting on the bike. She kicks the solar motor on, then speeds down the dirt road to the highway. The sun is setting behind the mountains, jagged in the distance, but everything is flat where she is now, and she can see for miles in every direction.

The road is smooth and unbroken, for the most part. Where there’s no moisture, Ellie says, there’s no need for road maintenance. Dust curls around her bare ankles. It will stain her socks by the time she gets back to the dormitory where she lives with all the other Desert Eden laborers. Dust creeps in every crack there, too—wipe it away in the morning, and it’s back by evening. She pulls her kerchief up to cover her mouth as she reaches the highway.

Joshua trees stand on either side of the road like people waiting in line. When she first arrived, she couldn’t stop staring at them. She’s used to the heavy branches of evergreens, bowing beneath the weight of the rain. She’s used to the moss that grows on every tree trunk. She doesn’t know how to account for the stiff, bare trunks of these trees, the spiky leaves and the bulging white flowers. The first time she touched one, it drew blood. She loved it immediately.

Find out who you are when no one is watching,Naomi Proctor advised, and Sonya has. She likes things that are difficult to love: the misty air of the Desert Eden dome, which makes everyone else’s hair go limp; the dust that collects in the creases of her face; the chemical smell of the sunscreen she has to cover herself with every day to keepfrom frying in the sun; the freckles that spot her legs and arms anyway, no matter how hard she tries to keep the sun at bay.

She likes finishing her days aching, with dirt under her fingernails, falling asleep on top of the book about plants that her supervisor, Ellie, gave her when she arrived. The sector assigned Sonya here, when she told them she knew how to fix old appliances and grow things, her only useful skills. The place has received her neutrally, neither impressed with her nor particularly critical of her. Ellie likes that Sonya is a quick learner and not easily pushed around. The others like that she knows how to roll cigarettes and play cards.

The sun is behind one of the mountains now, and all around it the sky is orange, so brilliant Sonya has to stop. She kicks off the solar motor and stands with the bike between her legs, in the middle of the road that no one calls I-40 anymore, though the signs are still up, here and there, bent and coated in dirt. The mountains are purple, the clouds that drift above them pink. Sonya reaches into the bag at her side and takes out a camera, an old one she borrowed from one of the other gardeners, Lily. Lily will teach her to develop the film the old-fashioned way. People are like that, here. They want to walk backward through time, just like the Analog Army. For the most part, Sonya doesn’t mind.

She adjusts the settings, hesitating with her finger over the wheel that adjusts the aperture. She promised Sasha she would send him photographs with her next letter. He’s agreed to forward some of them to Nikhil. Travel restrictions are supposed to loosen soon, he tells her, as the Triumvirate stabilizes. She has never promised to go back, but one day, maybe, she will.

Still, she doesn’t lift the camera to her eye. Instead, she just stands there with it in her hands, and looks around.

She’s a speck of dust here, unobserved and unremarked upon. Everywhere, in every direction, is emptiness.

Everywhere, in every direction, is freedom.