Pure (26 page)

But then someone appears, down the row of windows. The redhead. Her face is soft and pale. Her eyebrows are so fair that they’re barely there. It gives her a blank expression. She stares at Lyda with her eyes full of worry, that same, strange expectant look she had in the craft room.

Lyda feels guilty now for having told her to shut up. The girl was only humming, only trying to pass the time. What was so wrong with that? She decides to make amends and raises her hand to the window, waves.

The redhead lifts her hand too, but then presses the fingers of that hand to the glass. Starting with her pinky, she lifts and presses each finger, one at a time, in a row, to a rhythm. She’s crazy, Lyda thinks, but since there’s nothing else to look at she keeps watching. Pinky, ring, pause. Middle, index. Pause. Then quickly, thumb, pinky, ring. Middle, index, pause. Thumb, pinky, pause. Then quickly again, ring, middle, index, thumb, pinky. Then in threes, ring, middle, index, pause, thumb, pinky, ring, pause, middle, index, thumb, pause, pinky. This is when Lyda realizes that it’s a song. But it isn’t that she’s playing the notes on a piano, only the rhythm of the song.

And Lyda knows what song it is. That horrible, awful, stick-in-your-head-and-drive-you-insane “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Disgusted, she rolls away from the window and, with her back to the wall, slides to the floor.

What if this is her life forever? What if relocation orders never come? She looks up at the fake window. Has it turned to dusk? Will she one day know the most minute shifts of fake sun, from morning to night?

She crawls to her mattress and pulls the sitting mat out from under her covers. She rips the plastic strips apart. She’ll redo them. She’ll make something pretty. She’ll do and make. This will ease her restlessness. She sorts the strips by colors and tries to think of a design that would make her happy. She’d love to stitch a message into the sitting mat.
Save me
, that’s what she would write.
I’m not crazy. Get me out of here!

But who would ever see it? She’d have to hold it up to the window and hope that one of the other girls could read the message. And that’s when she thinks of the redhead. What if she isn’t crazy? What if the song holds a message?

She runs all of the words to the song over in her mind.
Up above the world so high. Like a diamond in the sky?
She starts weaving the plastic strips—blue, purple, red, green, creating a checkered pattern. The song is in her head now and meaningless. Just stuck there. It loops, wordlessly, and then as her fingers move back and forth, finding a rhythm, the words to the song return. But they aren’t “Twinkle, Twinkle.” They’re the alphabet. She’d never noticed before that the two songs share a tune.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G… Letters, language.

She stands up, letting the remaining plastic strips for the sitting mat fall to the floor. She runs to the window, and there is the redhead’s pale face, waiting for her.

Lyda presses her fingers to the window. She runs through the alphabet to the rhythm of the tune until her finger lands on
H
, and then she runs through it again, stopping on
I
.

The redhead smiles and this time, she waves.

It’s dusk. Lyda is losing light. She makes a question mark on her window. What does the girl want to tell her so badly? What is it?

The girl starts to spell. It’s a slow process, and Lyda nods each time she gets a letter. She whispers the letter under her breath, to help her remember where she is in a word. At the end of each word, the redhead draws a line on the window.

She writes, M-a-n-y/o-f/u-s. /W-e/w-i-l-l/

A guard patrols the hall. They both leave their windows. Lyda lies down in bed under her covers, pretends to be asleep. We will what? Lyda thinks. What?

She listens to the guard’s shoes retreat down the hall, returns to the window. The redhead isn’t there, but after a few moments, she reappears.

She writes: O-v-e-r-
Overcome
? Lyda wonders. Will she overcome this imprisonment? Is this a message of hope for all those who are stuck here, feeling lost forever?

No. The redhead’s message goes on. She spells out, t-h-r-o-w. We will
overthrow
? Who will they overthrow?

Lyda taps her letters as quickly as she can, g-u-a-r-d-s. She makes another question mark with her finger on the window.

The redhead looks at her with her blank face, and shakes her head vehemently. No, no, no.

Lyda writes a question mark on the glass. Who? She needs to know.

It’s nearly dark in the room. Lyda can only barely make out the redhead’s finger on the window. The redhead taps out four letters. D-o-m-e.

Lyda stares at her. She doesn’t understand. She puts her finger on the glass again and draws another question mark.

The redhead taps out T-e-l-l/h-i-m.

THE
PRISONS
,
ASYLUMS
,
AND
SANATORIUMS
have all collapsed, one colossus after the next, like piles of wrought-iron bones scorched bare, and the houses in the gated communities are charred or obliterated completely. The plastic jungle gyms and pirate ships and mini castles turned out to be durable. Large indistinct blobs of color, they dot the blackened, nearly flattened terrain of dust and ash like warped sculptures, things Partridge has seen images of in his Art History class.

Art installations, that’s what Mr. Welch called them. And, in some strange way, they please Partridge now. He imagines Welch, who resembles in some ways a shrunken version of Glassings in World History. Welch would sometimes stand in front of the projector to explain something with the blur of colors on his reedy frame, his sunken chest, his shiny bald pate. He was one of the judges who picked Lyda’s bird. Partridge will probably never see Welch or Glassings or Lyda again. He’ll never see the bird. And Pressia?

Bradwell is out in front of Partridge, his hand resting on the hilt of a knife in his jacket. And Partridge has a hook and a butcher’s knife from Bradwell, as well as the old knife from the Domesticity Display, but still he feels vulnerable out here, slightly imbalanced. The coding is gaining its foothold in his body. Sometimes he feels it surge as it tries to take hold of his muscles, drill into his bones, fire through his synapses. It’s a feeling that he can’t describe—a thickening of blood coursing through his body, something foreign within him. He was immune to the behavioral coding because of the blue pills his mother fed him at the beach, but still the rest of the coding exists in the chemicals of his brain. Can he trust his own brain? Right now he feels foggy on details. “What’s this trustworthy woman like again?” Partridge asks.

“Hard to say,” Bradwell tells him.

“Haven’t you two met before?”

“Nope,” Bradwell says. “I know the rumors, though.”

“Rumors?”

“Yep. She’s our only shot,” Bradwell says. “That is, if we’re not killed by her protectors first.”

“Her protectors could kill us?”

“They wouldn’t be protectors if they didn’t protect her.”

“Shit,” Partridge says. “You’ve got me out here based on rumors?”

Bradwell spins around. “Let’s get this straight.
You’ve
got
me
out here, looking for Pressia, who you got out, too.”

“Sorry,” Partridge says.

Bradwell starts walking again. Partridge follows. “It’s not really rumors anyway. Myth is more accurate. Do you have a better idea?”

He knows that Partridge doesn’t have any better ideas. Partridge is a stranger here. He’s got nothing.

Sometimes Partridge imagines that this isn’t real, that, instead, it’s just some elaborate reenactment of destruction, not the actual destruction itself. He remembers once being in a museum on a class trip. There were miniature displays with live actors in various wings, talking about what things were like before the Return of Civility. Each display was dedicated to a theme: before the impressive prison system was built, before difficult children were properly medicated, when feminism didn’t encourage femininity, when the media was hostile to government instead of working toward a greater good, before people with dangerous ideas were properly identified, back when government had to ask permission to protect its good citizens from the evils of the world and from the evils among us, before the gates had gone up around neighborhoods with buzzer systems and friendly men at gatehouses who knew everyone by name.

In the heat of the day, there were battle reenactments on the museum’s wide lawn that showed the uprisings waged in certain cities against the Return of Civility and its legislation. With the military behind the government, the uprisings—usually political demonstrations that became violent—were easily tamped down. The government’s domestic militia, the Righteous Red Wave, came to save the day. The recorded sounds were deafening, Uzis and attack sirens pouring from speakers. The kids in his class bought bullhorns, very realistic hand grenades, and Righteous Red Wave iron-on emblems in the gift shop. He wanted a sticker that read
THE
RETURN
OF CIVILITY—
THE
BEST
KIND
OF
FREEDOM
written over a rippling American flag, with the words
REMAIN
VIGILANT
written beneath it. But his mother hadn’t given him money for the gift shop, no wonder.

Of course, he knows now that the museum was propaganda. Still, he could pretend for a moment that this is what the Meltlands could be, a museum, researched for authenticity. “You remember what it was like before the Detonations?” he asks Bradwell.

“I lived out here for a little while with my aunt and uncle.”

Partridge, whose mother had refused to leave the city, had only visited his friends’ houses there. He remembers the sound of the gates—the low hum of electricity, grating gears, loud clunks of metal. Even though the houses in the gated communities were crammed next to one another, each with only a small swathe of grass, coated in a velvety, chemical sheen, they seemed desolate. “Do you still have pictures of it in your head?” he asks Bradwell.

“Not ones I want.”

“Was this where you were at the end?”

Bradwell says, “I’d wandered away from the neighborhood. I was that kind of kid, always drifting away from where I was supposed to be.”

“Most kids were kept indoors, out of the public eye,” Partridge says. “I know I was.” Children said things. They couldn’t be trusted, and they repeated their parents like parrots. Partridge’s mother told him, “If someone asks you for my opinion on something, tell them you don’t know.” She didn’t leave him alone for long at a friend’s house. There was always the fear of a virus, too, something contractible. The environment was compromised. The water systems were suspect, often tainted, the food stores contaminated. There were recalls. If not for the Detonations, Partridge had been taught in the academy, they still would have needed the Dome. It proved prescient. The Detonations—could his father really have been in on it from the beginning? He rarely spoke of the Detonations in the Dome, but when he did, he accepted it as a natural disaster almost. More than once he’d heard him say, “An act of God. And God was merciful on us,” and “Thank you, Father, for we are blessed.”

Partridge remembers one time when he and his mother arrived at a friend’s house and the mother was gone. He wonders if the remains of that house exist somewhere nearby in this vast barren landscape. “Mrs. Fareling,” he says, remembering her name.

“What?” Bradwell says.

“Mrs. Fareling was my friend’s mother. We sometimes carpooled to things together. My mother liked her. She had a son my age, Tyndal. We showed up for a playdate at her house in a gated neighborhood, and she was gone. Another woman opened the door. ‘State worker,’ she said. She was there as interim care while Mr. Fareling looked for a replacement for his wife in the home.”

“What did your mother do?” Bradwell asks.

“She asked what happened and the woman said that Mrs. Fareling stopped attending FF meetings, then church functions.”

“Feminine Feminists,” Bradwell says.

“Did your mother belong?”

“Of course not. She wasn’t going to embrace conservative ideals. She thought it was bullshit, like saying,
Aren’t we great the way we are! Pretty, feminine, nonthreatening
.”

“My mom despised the movement too. She fought with my dad about it.” Partridge’s friends’ mothers were members of the FF. They always wore lipstick, which was pretty even though it sometimes gummed on their teeth.

“What happened to Mrs. Fareling?” Bradwell asks.

“I don’t know.” The woman said that rehab wasn’t always permanent. She offered counseling:
Sometimes we can help when someone is affected by a sudden loss.
His mother refused. Partridge can almost remember the feel of her hand gripping his upper arm as she marched him to the car, as if he’d been the one to do something wrong. “On the way home, she told me that they built the prisons and rehabilitation centers and sanatoriums tall for a reason. So everyone knew that the only difference is that you live under their roof or in their shadow.”

It’s dusk and the shadows are growing darker. Beasts could be anywhere. They skirt a few melted jungle gyms and over a ribbon of flattened chain-link fence.

“Your parents,” Partridge says to Bradwell, “how did they figure anything out if they said no to the Best and the Brightest in those Red Lobsters? They were on the outside.”

“Luck,” Bradwell says, “but I’m not sure if it’s good luck or bad luck, now, looking back. My dad won a grant to study rituals in a remote Japanese fishing village and a family gave him a video recording of a woman who had survived Hiroshima, but had become deformed. Her arm was seared to a pocket watch. She was hidden because there had been others like her, people who’d fused in strange ways to animals, to land, to each other, and they were taken away by the government and never seen again.”

“In the Dome, they like us to study ancient cultures. Cave wall drawings, shards of pottery, occasionally mummies. That kind of thing. Easier that way.”