Pure (42 page)

“Special Forces?” Partridge says.

“But how can they know we’re here?” Bradwell asks.

“The chip is gone,” Pressia says. “It doesn’t make sense.”

A pulse of electricity prickles his skin and crackles like static electricity. The buzz is in the air. Partridge tries to follow the pulse, which moves wave-like.

“They’re part animal, part machine,” El Capitan says. “They can sniff you out.”

“But not miles away,” Pressia says. “They were tipped off.”

Partridge looks at Pressia. “Your eyes,” he says. “The retinal scan should have picked up your eyes as well as mine. I mean, she probably got both of us scanned, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Interference,” Partridge says. “That’s why.”

There’s a quick series of pulses now, crisscrossing the woods.

“What are you talking about?” Bradwell asks.

“Where have you been?” Partridge asks Pressia. “I mean, that car. That didn’t survive the Detonations. It’s from the Dome. So other stuff from the Dome is here, too. Right? What have they done to you?”

“At
OSR
headquarters, they dressed me, fed me, tried to make me shoot people, and eventually, when I was taken to the farmhouse, they poisoned me.”

“Poisoned you?”

“I don’t know what happened really. I passed out, they put me under with ether of some kind, and I woke up later in the car. I had a headache, and I felt out of it. Everything was blurry and my ears felt muffled.”

“You’re bugged,” Partridge says.

“What do you mean?” Bradwell says.

“Her eyes, her ears. Jesus,” he says. “They’ve seen everything she’s seen, heard everything she’s said.” He looks at Pressia and wonders, for a moment, if his father is watching him now. He imagines that he’s looking past her eyes and into the Dome.

Pressia whispers, “I got the chip taken out for nothing?”

“No,” Bradwell says. “This is temporary, right? We can get her free of all this, can’t we?”

“I don’t know,” Partridge says.

“The electrical pulses are getting stronger,” El Capitan says, “which means they’re closing in fast.”

“Okay, let’s stay calm,” Bradwell says. “She’s bugged. That’s all.”

“It’s worse, actually,” Partridge says. He doesn’t want to say the next part, but he has to. “Your headache. Do you have a cut, a bruise?”

“I think I hit my head while I was fighting Ingership.”

Partridge thinks of Hastings, how he was panicked about the ticker. Partridge told him it isn’t real, that it is a myth. It’s not.

“What is it?” Bradwell says. “What’s wrong? Talk to us.”

The pulses are coming even faster now. The crackling, buzzing electricity seems to be ricocheting around them through the trees.

“She’s got a bomb in her head,” Partridge says.

“What the hell are you saying?” Bradwell asks.

Pressia looks at the ground, as if she’s remembering what happened at the farmhouse, putting pieces together.

Partridge says, “They’ve got a switch that they can flip, and if they do, her head will explode.”

Everyone looks at Pressia. For a moment, Partridge wonders if she’s going to start crying. He wouldn’t blame her. Instead, she gazes solemnly back at them, her eyes steady, as if she accepts it. Partridge realizes that he still fights the idea that humans are capable of such evil.

Pressia looks away, uphill. Her vision catches on something. “It’s stopped. It’s hovering.”

And there is the cicada, batting a small circle over one particular spot.

El Capitan runs to it and starts digging through the dirt with his bare hands. He wipes a crescent pane of thick glass. “It’s here.”

Partridge runs over and lies down on his stomach to look inside. It’s dark, but there’s a distant glow somewhere deep inside the earth. “This is it!” he says. “Get a rock. We can try to break in.”

The pulses are almost constant. The electrical buzz whines, set at a higher pitch. There’s no time to get a rock.

The bodies emerge, one by one, from the trees, until there are five of them. They’re grotesque—monstrous thighs and swollen chests; their arms, thick with muscle, are fused with arsenals—and their faces are distorted, their craniums bulging distortions of elongated and protruding bones. Could these soldiers once have been academy boys, jostling across the turf greens, sitting through Welch’s lectures in front of the art projector, listening to Glassings make his dangerous asides? How many of them has the Dome done this to? Is this what they were going to do to Sedge? Was this future part of the reason he killed himself?

One of them knocks El Capitan to the ground with an elbow cross to his face. El Capitan falls hard. Helmud takes the brunt of the fall. The soldier rips El Capitan’s rifle loose from his grip.

Another moves into view, partially hidden by billowing white cloth. But then Partridge sees that the white is clothing, a jumpsuit. A small figure, a shaved head, a face covered with a white scarf. A woman. The soldier—if that’s what he can be called—is holding her around the waist. He pulls down the scarf.

Lyda—her delicate cheekbones now dusted with ash, her startlingly blue eyes, her lips, and dainty nose. “Why are you here?” Partridge asks, amazed, but he knows the answer, at least in part. She’s a hostage. She’s here to force him to make a decision. But what decision?

“Partridge,” she whispers, and he sees that she’s holding a blue box in her hands. He wonders for a moment if she’s come all this way to give him something that she forgot earlier—a boutonniere for the dance? He knows that the thought is illogical, but he can’t shake it.

She lifts the box. “It’s for someone named Pressia Belze,” she says, and she glances at everyone standing before her.

Pressia steps forward and walks to Lyda. Pressia clearly doesn’t want to take the box.

Lyda is hesitant too. She says, “Are you the swan?”

“What did you say?” Partridge asks.

“Who here is the swan?” Lyda asks.

“Did someone tell you something about a swan?” Partridge says.

“They’re waiting for the swan,” Lyda says, and then she pushes the box into Pressia’s hands. “That’s all I know.” She wants to get rid of the gift. She’s scared of it.

Pressia looks at Lyda and then at the soldiers around her. The red target lights of their guns are trained on Pressia’s chest. Her hands are shaking. She opens the box, fiddles with some tissue paper. She looks at what’s inside, and Partridge can tell that, at first, it makes no sense to her. But then she looks up and lets the box fall to the ground. Her face has gone pale. She staggers backward and drops to her knees.

Lyda reaches for her or perhaps the box, but the soldier jerks her back.

“Get up!” the soldier shouts. Pressia looks up. The soldier has a red bead of light trained on her forehead. And then the soldier speaks more quietly. “Get up. Come on. It’s time.”

And it’s in that softer voice—maybe the rhythm of the words—that Partridge hears his brother’s voice, talking to him in the way he used to when Partridge was just a sleepy kid waking up, kicking sheets.

Get up. Come on. It’s time.

Sedge.

AT
FIRST
PRESSIA
TELLS
HERSELF
that her grandfather is not dead. They’ve taken out the fan, repaired his throat, and stitched him up. Pressia is still on her knees. She can’t get up. She looks at the girl’s face. A Pure. Someone Partridge knows. Someone he calls Lyda. “He’s not dead,” Pressia says.

“I’m supposed to tell you that it’s all they have left,” Lyda says gently.

The small set of fan blades looks polished, as if someone took their time. Pressia’s grandfather is dead. That’s what this means. And what does the light through the crescent window dug into the dirt mean—that her mother is alive? Is this the way the world works—endless taking and giving? It’s cruel.

Still on her knees, Pressia grabs a fistful of dirt.

There’s a bomb in her head. The Dome sees what she sees, hears what she hears. They’ve heard everything she and Bradwell said to each other last night—the confession of his lie, his desire to see his father with an engine in his chest, her scar. She feels stripped of all privacy. She looks at Bradwell; his beautiful face looks anguished. She closes her eyes. She refuses to let them see anything. She presses the doll head and her dirty hand to her ears. She’ll starve them—the enemy, the people who killed her grandfather, who could kill her by exploding her head with a remote-control switch. But this makes it worse. She’s punishing herself in order to punish someone else.
Kill me
, she wants to whisper.
Just do it
—as if she could call their bluff. The problem is that they aren’t bluffing.

She looks at Bradwell again. He gazes at her as if he desperately wants to help her. He says her name, but she shakes her head. What can he do? They killed Odwald Belze, and then it was someone’s job to polish the fan that had been in his throat and wrap it in pale blue tissue paper and find the perfect box. The people who did this are in her head. These are simple unalterable facts.

Pressia stands, her fist still clenching dirt. She’s crying, silently. The tears work their way down her face.

Partridge looks dazed. His expression is a strange mix of fear and maybe anxious anticipation. He looks at the girl, Lyda, and the soldier beside her.

The beasts Pressia saw with El Capitan just days ago are soldiers. They were once human, once boys. She spots the cicada. It has perched on a furred leaf and tucked in its wings. Its light has faded.

The first soldier to arrive walks toward Partridge. Pressia is trying to listen, trying to pay attention. Her ears are ringing.

The soldier says, “Retrieve your mother. Do not disturb her quarters. Give her to us. We will give you this girl. If you do not, we kill the girl and take your mother.”

“Fine,” Partridge says quickly. “We’ll do it.”

“I can’t fit through that window,” Bradwell says.

“Neither can I,” El Capitan says. “Not with this.” He gestures to Helmud.

One of the soldiers walks to the window, which is slanted slightly upward to fit with the slope. He drops his knee into the glass, puncturing a hole. He punches the rest of it loose, bare-fisted, but he doesn’t bleed.

The soldier says, “Only the Willux boy and Pressia.”

“She might not be there,” Pressia says. “She might be dead.”

The soldier says nothing for a moment, as if he’s awaiting confirmation of orders.

“Then bring the body,” the soldier says.

The window is a dark crescent, dimly lit from within. Partridge goes in feetfirst. He has to tuck one arm down into the window and then drop. Pressia sits on the edge of the window, the ground littered with glass. She slips her legs in and, for a moment, lets them dangle. Then she feels Partridge’s hands on her legs. She looks back one last time. There’s El Capitan and Helmud, eyes darting wildly; the Pure girl with the shorn head, surrounded by the beastly soldiers who tower over her. And then there’s Bradwell, dirt and blood on his face. He looks at her as if he’s trying to memorize her face, as if he may never see it again.

She says, “I’ll be back,” but this isn’t a promise that she knows she can keep. How can anyone promise that they’ll return? She thinks of the smiley face she drew in the ash of the cabinet door. It’s childish. Stupid. A lie.

She slides off the edge and falls through the window. Even with Partridge’s help, she lands hard on the ground.

They’re in a small room. The floor and walls are dirt. There’s only one way to go—down a narrow hallway lined with moss. She looks up through the crescent window but only sees a bit of sky, coagulated by gray clouds and crosshatched by a few tree limbs.

A man’s voice calls out down the hall, “This way!” A tall, narrow-shouldered figure appears at the end of the hallway. Backlit, his features are too dark to make out. She thinks for a moment of the word
father
. But it doesn’t even register. She can’t believe it. She can’t believe anything.

She turns to Partridge and whispers urgently, “I need to know about the girl.”

“Lyda.”

“Are you going to hand over our mother to save her?”

“I was buying time. Lyda knows something. She knows the swan. Who’s waiting for the swan? What does that mean?”

“Are you going to hand over our mother, if she’s alive?” Pressia asks again.

“I don’t think that will be my decision, in the end.”

Pressia grabs his shirt. “Would you? Would you do it? To save Lyda? I did it. I sacrificed my grandfather. He’s dead.” Couldn’t she have saved him? If she’d followed orders…

Partridge looks at Pressia intently. “What about Bradwell?”

The question catches her off guard. “Why would you even ask something like that?”

“What would you do to save him?”

“No one’s asking me to hand over my mother to save him,” Pressia says. Is he accusing her of having feelings for him? “So it doesn’t matter.”

“What if you were forced to choose?”

Pressia isn’t sure what to say. “I’d rather hand over myself.”

“But what if that wasn’t an option?”

“Partridge,” she whispers. “They can hear this, see it. All of it.”

“I don’t care anymore,” he says. His eyes are teary, his voice shallow. “Sedge. My brother. He isn’t dead. He’s one of them.”

“Who?” Pressia says.

“Special Forces,” Partridge says. “He’s one of the soldiers up there. They’ve turned him into—I don’t know if he’s really still in there. I don’t know what they’ve done to his soul. We can’t…”

Up ahead, there’s the man’s voice again. “This way.” It’s deep and unwavering. “We’re here.”

Partridge reaches out for her hand, but instead he grabs the doll-head fist. Pressia expects him to recoil, but he doesn’t. He wraps his hand around the doll head, as he would her hand, and looks back at her. “Ready?”

THE
DIRT
FLOOR
OF
THE
TUNNEL
gives way to muddy tile, its grout black. The air is humid, smells mildewy. There are a few lights at the end of the hall. The cicadas flutter like moths, their metal wings clicking. Partridge holds his sister’s doll-head fist in his hand. It is part of her. It isn’t with her, but of her. He can feel the humanness of it—the warmth, the play beneath the skin of a real hand, alive. He feels a surge of protectiveness. Things could go badly from here on out. He knows he shouldn’t feel so protective; Pressia’s tougher than he is. She’s been through so much more than he could ever imagine.