Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  Founders Hall is the main exhibit space, now home to a Domesticity Display. Partridge pulls out his light-up pen and lets it glide over the nested metal spoons for measuring, a small white timer, and plates with elaborately designed edging. Lyda is in charge of the Domesticity Display. That’s why he chose her, a calculated move on his part to get the keys, which sounds worse than it is. Partridge reminds himself that no one’s perfect. Not even Lyda. Why did she say yes? Probably because he’s Willux’s son. And that fact has clouded all of his relationships. Growing up in the Dome, he can never be sure if people like him for himself or for his last name.

  His light reflects a row of sharp glints—the case of knives. He walks over quickly. He runs his fingers over the lock, lifts Lyda’s key ring, the keys clinking in the dark. Because of the coding, he hears the keys too crisply in his mind like high-pitched bells. He tries one key after the next until one glides in. He twists it. There’s a small pop. He lifts the glass lid.

  Then he hears Lyda’s voice. “What are you doing in here?”

  He looks back and sees the soft outline of her dress, a silhouette. “Nothing,” he says.

  She touches the light switch and turns on the electrical wall sconces, set to dim. Her eyes catch the light. “Do I want to know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She looks over her shoulder at the door. “I’ll look away and count to twenty,” she says. Her eyes lock onto his, as if she’s confessing something. He wants to confess too, suddenly. She looks beautiful at this moment—the tight fit of her dress around her narrow waist, the shine of her eyes, the petite red bow of her lips. He trusts her with a rush that he can’t explain.

  He nods and then she turns her back and starts counting.

  The display case is lined with soft velvety material. The knife has a wooden handle. He runs his finger along the blade—duller than he’d have liked. But it will do.

  He tucks the knife into his belt, hidden by his blazer. He locks the case and walks to the door. “Let’s go,” he says to Lyda.

  She looks at him for a second in the dim light, and he wonders if she’s going to ask him questions. She doesn’t. She reaches up and hits the light switch. The room goes dark. He gives her the keys, his hand brushing hers. They walk out together, and she locks the door behind them.

  “Let’s do what normal people do,” Partridge says as they walk down the hall together, “so no one suspects.”

  She nods. “Okay.”

  He slips his hand in hers. This is what normal people do, hold hands.

  When Partridge steps back into the decorated dining hall, he feels like a different person. He’s only passing through. He’s leaving. This won’t last. His life is going to change.

  He and Lyda walk to the middle of the dance floor, under the fake gold stars attached to the ceiling, where the other couples sway. She reaches up and knits her fingers behind his neck. He wraps his hands around her waist. The silk of her dress is soft. He’s taller than she is and lowers his head to be closer. Her hair smells like honey, and her skin is warm, maybe flushed. When one song ends, he starts to back away, but stops when they’re face-to-face. She rises up on her tiptoes and kisses him. Her lips are soft. He can smell her flowery perfume. He kisses her back, runs his hands up her ribs a little.

  And then, as if she’s just realized that they’re in a crowded room, she pulls away and glances around.

  Glassings is eating off a cake plate, loading up. Miss Pearl is idling by the entrance.

  “It’s late,” Lyda says.

  “One more song?” Partridge asks.

  She nods.

  This time he holds her hand, pulls it to his shoulder, and tilts his head so it’s touching hers. He closes his eyes because he doesn’t want to remember what he sees, only what he feels.

  PRESSIA

  GIFTS

  ON THE MORNING OF HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Pressia wakes up having slept fitfully in the cabinet. She can hear Bradwell’s voice asking her if she’d turned sixteen yet. And now she has. She can still remember the feel of the raised print of her name on the official list as she touched it with her fingertip.

  She could stay in the darkened cabinet all day. She could close her eyes and pretend that she’s a speck of ash that’s floated far up into the sky and she’s only looking down on this girl in a cabinet. She tries to imagine it, but then she’s distracted by her grandfather’s ragged cough, and she returns to her body, her backbone against the wood, her clamped shoulders, the doll-head fist tucked under her chin.

  It’s her birthday. There’s no way around it.

  She climbs out of the cabinet.

  Her grandfather’s sitting at the table. “Good morning!”

  Before him are two packages. One is simply a square of paper laid on top of a small mound, topped with a flower. The flower is an ash-choked yellow bell. The other package is something rolled up and wrapped with a cloth, tied with string, knotted in a bow.

  Pressia walks past the gifts to Freedle’s cage and fits her fingers through the bars. The cicada flutters its metal wings, which tick against the bars. “You shouldn’t have gotten me gifts.”

  “Of course I should have,” her grandfather says.

  She doesn’t want a birthday or presents. “I don’t need anything,” she says.

  “Pressia,” he whispers, “we should celebrate what we can.”

  “Not this one,” she says. “Not this birthday.”

  “This gift is from me,” her grandfather says, pointing to the flower-topped gift. “And I found this other one beside the door this morning.”

  “Beside the door?” Anyone who wanted to know her birthday could. It’s written on the lists posted around the city. But Pressia doesn’t have many friends. When survivors approach sixteen, alliances break down. Everyone knows they have to fend for themselves. In the weeks leading up to Gorse and Fandra’s disappearance, Fandra was cold to Pressia, breaking ties before she had to say good-bye. Pressia hadn’t understood it at the time, but now she does.

  Her grandfather rolls the gift toward Pressia to reveal scribbling on the cloth.

  She walks to the table and sits in the opposite chair. She reads the scribbling: For you, Pressia. And it’s signed Bradwell.

  “Bradwell?” her grandfather asks. “I know him. I stitched him once. How does he know who you are?”

  “He doesn’t,” she says. Why would he get me a gift? she wonders. He thinks I’m only a type—the type who wants it all back the way it once was, the Before, who even loves the idea of the Dome. And what’s so wrong with that? Isn’t that what any normal person would want? She feels a strange angry heat spread under her ribs. She pictures Bradwell’s face, the two scars, the burn, the way his eyes tear up and then he squints so he looks tough again.

  She ignores his gift and instead pulls her grandfather’s toward her so it’s right in front of her.

  “I want to tell you,” he says, “that I wish it were something beautiful. You deserve something beautiful.”

  “It’s okay,” she tells him.

  “Go ahead and open it.”

  She leans over the table, pinches the paper, and lifts it with a small flourish. She loves gifts even though she’s embarrassed to admit it.

  There sits a pair of shoes, thick leather stretched over smoothed wood.

  “Clogs,” her grandfather says. “They were invented by the Dutch, like windmills.”

  “I thought there were mills for grain,” she says. “And paper. Mills for wind?”

  “They were shaped like lighthouses,” he says. He’s explained lighthouses. He grew up near ships. “But instead of lights at the top, they had fans, to turn wind into power. Once upon a time we were going to use a lot of them for energy.”

  Who would mill wind? she wonders. And who would name a shoe a clog? As if someone were going to shove the shoe down a pipe.

  “Try them on,” her grandfather says.

  She sets the clogs on the floor and slips her
feet into the wooden grooves. The leather is still stiff, and when she stands, she notices that the wood soles make her taller. She doesn’t want to be taller. She wants to be small and young. Her grandfather is replacing her old shoes with new ones that seem like they’d never wear out. Does he think they’re coming for her soon? Does he think she’ll run away in these shoes? Where to? The Rubble Fields? The Meltlands? The Deadlands? What lies beyond that? There are rumors of fallen train cars, tracks, caved tunnels, large airy factories, amusement parks—there wasn’t only Disney—zoos, museums, and stadiums. There were bridges, once; one of them used to span a river that’s supposed to exist west of here. Is all of it gone?

  “When you were two years old, you had a pony at your birthday party,” her grandfather says.

  “A pony?” she says, clomping around in the heavy shoes, feeling hooved herself. She’s wearing woolly slacks and socks and a sweater. The wool to make her clothes comes from sheep herded outside the city where there are small swatches of prickly grass cropping up from the earth, and stands of trees that edge up to OSR land where some survivors hunt new breeds, winged things and furred beasts that claw bulbs and roots, and feed on one another. Some of the sheep are barely sheep. But even deformed, horns twisted and spiked, unfit to eat, their wool is good. Some survivors have made a living off of it. “Why a pony? Where would they put a pony?”

  “It walked circles in the backyard, giving rides.” This is the first she’s heard of a pony. Her grandfather has told her stories of birthdays. Ice cream cake, piñatas, water balloons. Where did this come from?

  “My parents hired a pony to walk in circles?” They’re strangers to her. The smallest glimpse awakens some kind of insatiable hunger.

  He nods. He looks tired suddenly, very old. “Sometimes I’m glad they never had to see this.”

  Pressia doesn’t say anything, but his words burn deeply. She wants her parents here. She tries to keep certain moments of her life in her head so that she can tell them all of this one day, just in case. Even though she knows they’re dead, she can’t stop herself. Even now she thinks that she’ll tell them about this day, clogs and talk of windmills. And if she ever sees them again, even though she knows she won’t, she’ll ask them questions. They’ll tell her stories. She’ll ask them about the pony. She wants them to be watching over her somehow, seeing all of this, the way certain religions believe in heaven and the soul living on. Every once in a while, she can almost feel them watching—her mother or her father? She’s not sure. And she can’t confess it to anyone, but it is a comfort.

  “And this other gift? From Bradwell?” Her grandfather is part teasing and part suspicious, a tone she’s never heard before.

  “It’s probably something stupid or mean. He can be mean.”

  “Well, are you going to open it?”

  Part of her doesn’t want to, but that would just make the gift loom larger. To get it over with, she quickly pulls the string on the bow and it comes loose and falls to the table. She brings the string to Freedle’s cage and slips it between the bars. Freedle likes small things to play with sometimes, or he did at least when he was younger. “Have at it,” Pressia says.

  Freedle’s eyes snap to the string. He flaps his wings.

  Pressia walks back to the table, sits down, and unrolls the cloth.

  It’s a clipping—the one that she found in Bradwell’s footlocker and loved, the one of people wearing glasses with colored lenses in movie theaters, eating from small colorful cardboard bins, the one that made her hands shake for reasons she couldn’t explain, the one that she was looking at when he told her that he knew her type. Pressia’s heart kicks up in her chest. She’s a little breathless. Is this just some kind of cruel gift? Is he making fun of her?

  Pressia needs to calm down. It’s only paper, she tells herself.

  But it isn’t only paper. It existed way back when she had a mother and a father and she rode a pony in her backyard in circles. She touches the cheek of someone laughing in the theater. Bradwell was right after all. She is a type. Was this his point in giving her the gift? Well, fine then. This is what she wants and will never have. The Before back again. Why not envy the people in the Dome? Why not wish she were anywhere but here? She wouldn’t mind wearing 3-D glasses in a movie theater and eating from boxes with her beautiful mother and accountant father. She wouldn’t mind having a dog in a party hat and a car with a bow and a measuring-tape belt. Is that so wrong?

  “The movies,” her grandfather says. “Look at that, 3-D glasses. I remember seeing movies like that when I was young.”

  “It’s so real,” Pressia says. “Wouldn’t it be nice if—”

  Her grandfather cuts her off. “This is the world we live in.”

  “I know,” she says and looks at Freedle in his cage, rusty Freedle. She gets up and walks away from the picture. She stares at her row of little creatures on the window ledge. For the first time, they strike her as childish. She’s sixteen now. What does she want with toys? She looks at them sitting there. She then looks at the magazine picture—3-D glasses, velvet seats. Compared with that shiny world, her little butterflies look dull. Sad excuses for toys. She picks up one of the newest butterflies and holds it in her hand. She winds it and lets its wings sputter, noisy clicking. She puts the butterfly back on the ledge and raises her one good hand, lightly pressing it against the window’s splintered glass.

  PARTRIDGE

  3 MINUTES AND 42 SECONDS

  FOR A WHILE AFTER GLASSINGS’ FIELD TRIP to the Personal Loss Archives, Partridge hadn’t known how he was going to gain access to the air-filtration system. But then he realized that one of the access points to the system was connected to the coding center where all the academy boys from his level went for weekly coding sessions in their mummy molds.

  And so that’s how he’s decided to work it.

  He lines up at morning bells, carrying his backpack with him; it holds his mother’s things, plus a container of soytex pills, a few bottles of water, and the knife he stole from the Domesticity Display. He’s wearing a hooded jacket and a scarf even though it’s a little warm.

  As usual, the boys are shuttled on the monorail. He steers clear of the herd. He’s never really had many friends in the academy. Hastings is an exception, not the rule. Partridge was too famous when he arrived—because of his father and his older brother. But then Sedge killed himself, and Partridge was famous in a very different way.

  Now he shuffles past the herd and takes a seat between Hastings, who usually sleeps the entire trip, and Arvin Weed because he’s always reading large science files on his handheld—things that the science teacher hasn’t covered and probably won’t, nanotechnology, biomedicine, neuroscience. If you get him talking, he’ll mumble about self-generating cells and synaptic firings and brain plaque. Because Arvin spends most of his time in the school science lab—on to something, making great strides, as Glassings put it, a good egg, going places—he’s almost invisible even when he’s in plain sight. While Arvin is clicking through documents, Hastings has already balled up his jacket for a makeshift pillow.

  Partridge hasn’t gone unnoticed, though. Vic Wellingsly, one of the herd, shouts down the train car, “So Partridge, rumor has it you’re going under today. You going to get a ticker or what?”

  Partridge looks at Hastings, who looks back wide-eyed. He then gives Wellingsly a dirty look.

  “What?” Wellingsly says. “Was I not supposed to say anything? Is this not common knowledge?”

  “Sorry,” Hastings mutters to Partridge, flipping his hair out of his eyes. Hastings wants to fit in with the herd. It’s not surprising that he traded in this information for a little recognition. Still, it pisses Partridge off.

  “So?” Wellingsly says. “Tick, tick, tick?”

  Partridge shakes his head. “Just the regular,” he says. “No big deal.”

  “Imagine Partridge with a ticker,” one of the Elmsford twins says. “They’d flip the switch just to put him ou
t of his misery. A mercy killing!”

  The herd laughs.

  Arvin glances up from his book as if, for a moment, he’s thinking of standing up for Partridge, but then he slouches and keeps reading. Hastings closes his eyes and pretends to sleep.

  The other Elmsford twin says, “Partridge’s head like an exploding melon!”

  “All over Lyda Mertz’s dress,” Vic says. “So sorry, Lyda. Partridge here must’ve gotten excited.”

  “Leave Lyda out of it!” Partridge says, sounding angrier than he wanted to.

  “Or what?” Vic says. “You know I’d be happy to beat your ass.”

  “Really?” Partridge says, and everyone knows what he means—You’re going to beat up Willux’s son? Would that be a wise thing to do? Partridge hates himself for saying it. It just came out so fast. He hates being Willux’s son. It makes him a target as much as it protects him.

  Vic doesn’t say anything. The train car goes quiet. Partridge wonders if they’ll look back at this moment after he’s gone or dead—depending how things go. He’s got to make it past huge sets of fan blades. He could get chopped to death, a chopped melon. What will they think of him then? That he was a coward who died trying to run away? That he was defective, like Sedge?

  He looks out the window. The scenery shifts past—the playing fields, the academy’s stone walls, the tall stacked homes, shopping complexes, the office buildings, and, farther out, the automatic threshers at work in the fields—and then they enter the dark tunnel. He imagines the sick wretches clawing at him, the poisoned land and water, the ruins. He won’t die out there, will he? It’s a risk he has to be willing to take. He can’t stay here, knowing his mother might be alive out there, knowing that if he stays, he’ll be altered, deep down, in ways he’ll never even really remember.