Pure (12 page)

Partridge feels a sting on his arm. He swats it, and there is an armored beetle of some sort with thick pincers. He flicks it, but the beetle seems rooted. So he digs his fingers in and pinches it off his skin.

The man returns with his bottle, now filled with water.

“Where are you coming from?”

“The city,” Partridge says. “I should be getting back.”

“What part of the city?” the man asks. His sunken eye blinks slower than the other. Partridge shifts his vision between the two.

“The outskirts,” Partridge says, and he starts to walk back the way he came. “Thank you for the water.”

“I’ve suffered a recent loss,” the man says. “My wife, diseased. She’s dead, fresh dead. I need a warm body here. It’s the work of more than one.”

Partridge looks at the penned sheep. One of the sheep has a spade-like hoof, rusty and dented. He digs in the corner. “I can’t.”

“You’re not natural. Are you?”

Partridge doesn’t move. “I’ve got to head back.”

“Where’s your marks? What’s you fused to? I see nothin’ on you.”

The man picks up his stick and points it at Partridge. Partridge sees the scars on his face clearly now, a frenzy of nicks.

“Hold steady,” the man says slowly, crouching.

Partridge turns and runs back the way he came. His speed kicks in, the motion of his arms and legs fast and steady as pistons. He heads out of the woods the way they came, and then his foot catches on a soft log. He falls to the ground. Here, again, is the puddled rainwater where the sheep had been drinking. He looks back at the log and sees that it isn’t a log at all. It’s a bundle of reeds—some green, some a rusty brown. He thinks of the threshers out beyond the academy. He listens for the shepherd, hears nothing. He walks to the reeds, sees the shine of wire that binds them. He stares until he sees a pale glimmer, something wet and still. He reaches down, his hand shaking. He smells something sickly sweet. He parts the reeds—they’re damp, almost rubbery—and exposes a human face, whitish gray on one cheek while the other is dark red, the flesh seemingly broiled, the mouth purplish from a lack of air and blood. It’s the shepherd’s wife—
diseased, fresh dead
. This is how he’s buried her.

What part of her is wet and still? Her eye—a dark, luminous green.

THE
WHITE
PADDED
ROOM
IS
CHILLED
. It reminds Lyda that there once was a container within the large box of the refrigerator before the Detonations. There are only small fridges now that people mostly eat soytex pills. But the little box in the big fridge was where her mother kept the round heads of lettuce. Were they too dainty to withstand the common area of the refrigerator? She thinks of the flared, rippled edges of the outer leaves like a skirt hem twirling.

Her mother has been to visit her twice, unofficially. During those visits, her mother was relatively quiet, but Lyda could read her anger. Her mother chatted about the neighbors and her kitchen garden, and once, very quietly, she said, “Do you have any idea how much your actions will cost us? No one can look me in the eye.” But she hugged her too, at the end of each visit, rough and quick.

Today her mother will arrive as an administrator for an evaluation. She’ll walk in like all the others wearing a lab coat and carrying her small handheld computer—a shield in front of her chest, hiding her tightly wrapped bosom. Beneath the press of her brassiere and the fatty meat of her breasts, there’s a heart. Lyda knows it’s there, beating furiously.

The room is small, square, outfitted with a bed, a toilet, and a miniature sink. A fake window shimmers on one wall. She remembers her mother fighting for this improvement in quality care a few years ago. She led the discussion in front of the board. Someone had done research that sunlight helps those with mental illness. But of course, real lit windows were out of the question. This was a compromise. The window shows shifts of light timed with a caged wall clock. Lyda doesn’t trust the clock or the window image. She thinks that time is manipulated when she sleeps. It goes too quickly. Perhaps it’s the sleeping medication. The longer she stays in confinement, the more serious they are categorizing her mental illness, and her chance of release shrinks. She takes pills in the morning to wake her too, and others to calm her nerves, even though she tells them that her nerves are fine. Are they? Under the circumstances, she figures they’re not too bad. Not yet at least.

Regardless of whether she gets out or not, there is the stain. Who would allow her to marry into their family now? No one. Even if they did, she wouldn’t be permitted to have children. Ill fit for genetic repopulation—the end.

The fake sunlight image of the window flickers as if birds have fluttered by. Is it part of the program? Why would she even think of birds passing by a window? There are so few birds in the Dome. Occasionally one will escape the aviary. But this is rare. Were the birds from her imagination? Some deep recess of memory?

The hardest thing so far, aside from the gnawing panic, is her hair. It was shorn when she arrived. She has calculated that it will take three years, at least, to return to the length it once was. The few girls she’s known to come back from rehabilitation have worn wigs at first. Their faces stiff with fear of relapse and the fake shine of their hair make them seem alien, more reason to fear them. She now wears a white scarf on her head—white to match the thin cotton jumpsuit that balloons around her, snapping up the front—one size fits all. The scarf is knotted at the nape of her neck where she has an itch. She slips her fingers below the knot and scratches.

She thinks of Partridge, his hand fitted in hers as they walked back down the corridor to the dance. He appears so quickly in her mind sometimes that her stomach flips. She’s here because of him. Each question she’s been asked leads back to that night. The truth is that she barely knows him. She can say this again and again, and no one ever believes her. She says it now in the quiet space of her holding cell,
I barely know him.
She doesn’t even believe herself. Is he alive? She feels like her body would know, somehow, deep down, if he was dead.

At three o’clock, there’s a knock and, before she can answer, the door opens. The team walks in—two doctors, both female, and her mother. She looks at her mother, awaiting some acknowledgment. But her mother’s face is as still as the academy’s holding pond. She looks at Lyda, but not really. Her stare rests on the wall beside her, shifts to the floor, the sink, and back to the wall.

“How are you feeling?” asks the taller, more willowy doctor.

“Fine,” Lyda says. “The window’s nice.”

Her mother flinches, almost imperceptibly.

“You like it?” the willowy doctor says. “That was a really important improvement for us.”

“We are going to ask you some brief questions once more,” the other doctor begins. She’s squat and chops her words. “We’ve been told to look into the nature of your relationship with Ripkard Willux.”

“Your boyfriend, Partridge,” the willowy doctor adds as if Lyda wouldn’t recognize his name.

“Just a few questions,” her mother says. “We’ll keep it short.” Is her mother telling her to keep her answers short, too?

“I don’t know where Partridge is,” Lyda says. “I’ve told everyone that, again and again.” There have been several interrogations, each a little more hostile than the one before it.

“Ellery Willux himself is, of course, very invested, as you can imagine,” the willowy doctor says. Just saying his name thrills her, Lyda can tell. “It’s his son we’re talking about.”

“You might aid in finding the boy,” her mother adds, cheerfully, as if to say that this might redeem them as a family.

The fake image of the window flickers again as if with wings—or is it that the program has a glitch? Is it stuttering?
You might aid in finding the boy.
Is he lost? Is he gone? Like an aviary bird? Like the bird she made of wire that might now be on display in Founders Hall in lieu of antique egg timers, aprons, and knives. Or has her wire bird been disqualified because she’s no longer a student attending the academy?

“You’ve stated that you showed him the Domesticity Display after hours in the exact manner that you would have when leading a tour midday,” the squat doctor says.

“But is this completely accurate? A boy and a girl in a dark room, having skipped out on a dance, music playing,” the willowy doctor adds. “We were all young once.” She winks.

Lyda doesn’t answer. She’s learned to answer questions with questions. “What do you mean?”

“Did he kiss you?” the willowy doctor asks.

Lyda feels heat rise in her cheeks. He didn’t kiss her. She kissed him.

“Did you two embrace?”

She remembers his hand on the dip of her waist, lightly touching her ribs, the swish of fabric across her stomach. They danced to two songs. They have plenty of witnesses. Mr. Glassings and Miss Pearl were chaperones. Partridge bowed his head as they danced, and she felt his breath on her neck. There was a knife in his belt, hidden from view by his jacket. Yes. The kiss? Did people notice? They held hands on the walk to her dormitory. Many people saw them. Was someone looking out a window? Were there other couples walking down the path?

“Whether you liked him or not,” the squat doctor says, “do you think he might have had deep feelings for you?”

Lyda’s eyes tear up. No, she thinks. No, he didn’t have feelings for me. I was just a convenient date. He’d been surly from the start. He was only kind to her because she’d let him get away with stealing from the display cases—a knife. A knife he used for what purpose? No one will tell her. And he danced with her because he wanted them to appear normal, to fit in and not draw any attention to themselves. Do they worry that he might be dead? Do they think he’s wandered off and killed himself like his brother? She looks at her mother now, pleadingly.
What should I do?

“Did he love you?” the willowy doctor repeats.

Lyda’s mother nods. It’s not even a nod really. It’s more of a slight jerk, as if she were trying not to cough. Lyda wipes her eyes. Her mother is telling her to say yes, to tell them that Partridge loved her. Would this make her more valuable? If she has any value at all, it would only be because he’s alive. If they think that he loves her, then perhaps they will use her—as a dispatch? A go-between? A lure?

She grips her knees, the fabric bunching between her fingers, and then she smooths the fabric flat. “Yes,” she says, lowering her eyes. “He loved me.” And for a moment, she pretends it’s true, and she says it again, louder. “He said so. He told me he loved me that night.”

The window flickers again. Or is it her vision?

TO
GET
TO BRADWELL’S
HOUSE
, Pressia crosses the street and heads down the alley that runs parallel to the market. Off in the distance, she hears the chants of the Death Sprees. Sometimes she pretends the chants are part of a wedding party. Why not? They rise and fall and sound like a celebration—why not of love? Her grandfather told her about her parents’ wedding—white tents, tablecloths, a tiered cake.

But she can’t think about that now. She tries to gauge the positions of the Death Spree teams, and decides that they must be in the Meltlands where the gated suburbs once stood. She knows people who grew up there. She’s heard about them in games of I Remember—identical homes, ticking sprinklers, plastic playground equipment in everyone’s backyards. That’s why they’re called the Meltlands—each yard dotted with a large, colorful melted knot of plastic that was once a sliding board, swing set, and lidded sandbox in the shape of a turtle.

She tries to figure out by the chant which team it is. Some are more vicious than others. But she’s never really learned to tell them all apart. Her grandfather refers to the different chants as birdcalls, each one supposedly distinctive. She doesn’t know if chants are starting up or coming to an end in the enemy’s final field. Luckily the chants are off in the southern part of the Meltlands, which isn’t the direction she’s headed. Now that she listens more closely, they could be even farther. Maybe they’re out by the prisons, asylums, and sanatoriums, their scalded infrastructures of steel, rubbled stone, and the trimming of barbed wire. The kids have a singsong about the prisons.

bq.
bq.
The deathy houses all fell down.

The deathy houses all fell down.

The sick souls wander ’round and ’round.

Watch out! They drag you underground.

She’s never seen the fallen structures herself. She’s never been that far.

No one is out on the streets. It’s cold and dark and damp. She pulls her thick sweater up around her neck, tucks the sock-covered doll-fist under her arm, and walks quickly to another alley. She kept the hollow bell. It’s shoved down deep in her sweater pocket.

On top of the Death Spree chants, she’s listening for Groupies. There’s something about the restlessness of never being able to get away from one another that makes them take to the streets at night. Some Groupies use their collective strength to hunt people down and rob them—not that she and her grandfather ever have much to take. She listens for
OSR
trucks too. They’re the reason she’s chosen to walk in the narrowest alleys instead of the streets.

She crosses to another alley and then, because she feels charged with adrenaline, she starts running. She can’t help it. The streets are so quiet with only the distant chanting that she wants to drown it out with the sound of her heart in her ears. She heads down one alley but hears an
OSR
engine. She doubles back and heads in the opposite direction from the chanting. She crosses from one alley to another and another—twice she catches a glimpse of an
OSR
truck and has to change directions.

When she arrives at the Rubble Fields, she’s turned around. She stands in the shadow of a hobbled brick building that’s part of a wrecked row. She has to decide whether to go around the Rubble Fields, which will take an extra hour at least, or to cut through. The Rubble Fields used to be the center of the city, densely packed with tall buildings, trucks and cars, an underground metro system, and aboveground crowds crossing at traffic lights.