Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  “If there’s a way out,” the woman says again, very slowly and calmly this time, “it means there’s also a way in.”

  “We’ll never get in,” Pressia’s grandfather says impatiently.

  “A Pure,” the woman says, “a Pure here among us!”

  And this is when they all hear a truck rumbling in the alley. They’re still and quiet.

  A dog outside barks viciously, a gunshot, and then no more barking. Pressia knows which dog it was. She recognized its bark—a dog that’s been beaten so much, it only knows how to cower or attack. She always felt sorry for it, and would sometimes feed it small bits of food—not from her hand, though, because it couldn’t be completely trusted.

  She holds her breath. Everything grows quiet except for the low rumbling idle of the truck in the alley. In the morning, someone will be gone.

  Her grandfather taps the floor—shave and a haircut, two bits—with his cane. Pressia isn’t ready to go. She doesn’t want to leave her grandfather. He moves quickly to his chair. He picks up the brick and holds it in one hand.

  The woman holds her wound and moves to the window where she peeks out. “OSR,” she whispers, terrified.

  Pressia’s grandfather gazes at Pressia, their eyes meeting through the small crack of the cabinet door. His breath is quick, his eyes wide. Lost. He looks lost.

  Shot through with fear, Pressia wonders what will happen to him without her. Maybe OSR are coming for someone else, she thinks. Maybe the boy named Arturo or the twin girls who live in the lean-to. Not that she wants it to be the twin girls in the lean-to or Arturo. How can she wish the OSR on someone else?

  She can’t move.

  In the alleyway, she hears a muffled cry, boots scraping the pavement. Not here, she whispers to herself. Please, not here! She’s waiting for the rev of the truck’s engine, the pop of its clutch, but it’s still there, a constant rumbling in the alley.

  Her grandfather taps the rubber stopper on his cane again—harder—shave and a haircut, two bits!

  She has to go. But before she does, she draws a circle, then two eyes and a smiling mouth with her finger in the ash collected on the cabinet door. She wants it to mean, I’ll be back soon. Will he see it and understand? What if she doesn’t come home soon? What if she is not fine and never will be again?

  Pressia takes a deep breath and then she pushes the doll-head fist against the fake panel. It gives a little, then pops loose and clatters to the dusty barbershop floor. Light washes into the cabinet.

  Pressia’s heart hammers in her chest. She looks around the shadowed hull of the barbershop. Most of the roof was blown off and now gives way to the dusky night sky. She feels unprotected coming from the tight embrace of the cabinets to this openness.

  There’s only one chair left in the barbershop, a swivel chair with a foot pump that can make the seat higher or lower. The counter in front of this one chair is still perfectly intact, too. Three combs float in a dust-covered glass tube filled with old cloudy blue water like they’re suspended in time.

  She moves quickly into the shadow of this wall and slides along it, passing the bank of shattered mirrors. She hears another rumbling truck. It’s strange that there is more than one. She squats down and holds her breath. She doesn’t move. She hears a radio playing in the truck, a tinny version of an old-fashioned song with a screaming electric guitar and pumping bass, one she doesn’t know. She has heard that when they take people, they tie their hands behind their backs and tape their mouths. But do they turn on the radio while they’re driving away? For some reason, this seems like the worst of it.

  She crouches as low as she can. She tries not to breathe. Are they coming for her alone, one truck blocking the alley and another on the street running parallel? All the mirrors are broken except a handheld one that sits on that counter. She asked her grandfather about the handheld mirrors once, and he said they used them to show the customers the backs of their heads. She doesn’t know who would ever want to see the back of their head. Who would ever need to?

  From this spot, she can see the Dome again, up on the hill due north. It’s an orb—shiny and bright, dotted with large black weapons, a glittering fortress, topped with a cross that shines even through the ash-choked air. She thinks about the Pure, the one who was supposedly spotted in the Drylands, tall and lean, with short hair. It has to be only a whisper. It can’t be true. Who would leave the Dome to come here and be hunted?

  The truck is inching along. A searchlight floods the room. She doesn’t move.

  The light hits a triangular shard and for a second there, staring up at her, are her own eyes, almond-shaped like her Japanese mother—so beautiful, so young. And her father’s freckles over the bridge of her nose. And then there is the burned crescent that half circles her left eye.

  If she goes, what will happen to Freedle? Freedle is going to give out one day.

  The searchlight slides on and then the truck rumbles past with OSR and a black claw painted on its side. Pressia stays completely still as the growling motor and the radio song fade into the night. The first truck is still in the alley. She hears shouting, but not her grandfather’s voice.

  She peeks out through the large holes where the plate-glass windows used to be. It’s dark and cold. No one is on the street. She slides along the shadow of the wall again to the front door’s blasted hull. There sits a big strange rusted tube painted with pale red and blue spiral stripes. It’s shattered and warped. Her grandfather says it’s something that was attached to all barbershops, a symbol that once meant something. She walks out the door, staying close to the crumbled wall.

  What was the plan? Hide. The huge old irrigation pipe that her grandfather once showed her is three blocks away. He thought she’d be safe there. But is anyplace safe now?

  Bradwell, she thinks. The underground. She has the map to his place that he slipped in her pocket still folded there. He might be home, preparing for his next lesson in Shadow History. What if she shows up and says thank you for the gift, pretending it was meant as a kindness not a cruelty? Would he take her in? He owes her grandfather for stitching him up, but she’d never go there asking for a favor. Never. Still, she decides to try to make it all the way there. Fandra didn’t survive, but her brother did.

  On the floor, next to the door, is a small charred bell. It surprises her. She picks it up but its clapper is missing and so it doesn’t make a sound. She could make something out of it, one day.

  She holds the bell so tightly that its edge digs into the meat of her hand.

  PARTRIDGE

  HOOF

  PARTRIDGE HEARS THE SHEEP before he sees them, rustling from dark brambles in the woods in front of him, errant bleating. One stutters in a way that reminds him of Vic Wellingsly laughing at him on the monorail car. But that was in another world. The sun’s gone down, and all warmth has been leached from the air. Partridge is on the outskirts of the city now, the hunkered char of its remains. He smells smoke from fires, hears distant voices, an occasional shout. A scuttle of wings rattles overhead.

  He’s made it through the stretch of sandy dust fields where he drank all his water and twice thought he saw an eye in the earth, a singular blinking eye that was quickly lost in dust. A hallucination? He can’t be sure.

  He’s skirting the edge of the woods. If the earth can be that alive, the woods are too dangerous. He assumes that’s where some of the wretches must live. He thinks of his mother, the saint, as his father used to call her, and the wretches she supposedly saved. If she’s still alive, are they?

  A large oily black bird dips close to his head. He sees its sharp beak on a crooked hinge, its claws ratcheting open and closed, midair. Astonished, he watches it until it flies out of sight into the woods. He thinks of Lyda’s caged wire bird, and he’s filled with guilt and fear. Where is Lyda now? He can’t help but feel that she’s in danger, that her life has changed. Would they just ask her questions and then let her return to her normal life? She has nothing to tell, re
ally. She knows he took the knife, but after that it will seem like she’s holding something back, that she knows more than she’s saying. Did anyone see them kiss? If so, that will make her look guilty. He remembers the kiss. It comes back to him again and again—sweet and soft. She smelled like flowers and honey.

  Then the sheep emerge from the trees, hobbling along on dainty, mangled hooves. He squats in the brambles to watch them. He assumes they’re feral. They wander to a gutted seam in the earth pooled with rainwater. Their tongues are quick, almost sharp looking, some shining like razors. Their fur is beaded with water, matted in hunks. Their eyes rove out of sync, and their horns—sometimes too many horns to count, sometimes a row of horns, a spiked ridge down the beast’s back—are grotesque. Some horns grow like vines, spiraling one another, then veering off to one side. In one case, the horns have grown backward, like a mane, and have fused into the backbone so the head is locked in place.

  As terrifying as the beasts seem, Partridge is thankful to know that the water is drinkable. He has a ragged cough—from breathing the barbed fibers? From the sandy ash? He’ll wait for the sheep to walk off and refill his bottles.

  But the sheep aren’t feral. A shepherd with a stubbed arm and bowed legs tromps out of the woods, calling gruffly and wielding a sharp stick. His face is marred with burns, and one eye seems to have slid and settled into the bone of his cheek. His boots are heavy, coated in mud. He herds the sheep, brutally whacking and poking them, making guttural noises. The man accidentally drops the stick, bends to pick it up. His face—rippled with burns and welts—turns, and his eyes lock on Partridge. He grimaces. “You,” he says. “You thieving? Meat or wool?”

  Partridge wraps his face with the scarf, pulls up the hood, and shakes his head. “I just need water.” He motions to the puddle.

  “Drink that and your stomach will rot,” the man says. His teeth shine, dark pearls. “Come here. I got water.”

  The sheep—their gray haunches—recede into the woods with the shepherd driving them. Partridge follows. The woods are blackened still, but there’s greenery bursting up in small clutches. Soon enough, they come to a lean-to and a pen of mesh and stakes. The man herds the sheep in. Some buck and he whips them on the snouts. They bleat. The pen is so small that the sheep are wedged in, clotting the space with wool.

  “What’s that smell?” Partridge asks.

  “Dung, piss, rot, sour wool. A little death. I got liquor,” he says, “homemade. It’ll cost you.”

  “Just water,” Partridge says, his breath making the scarf damp. He pulls a bottle from his backpack and hands it to the man.

  The man stares at the bottle for a moment and Partridge worries that there’s something about it that tips the shepherd off, but he then hobbles into the lean-to. Partridge sees inside of it for a moment, the warped door propped by mud. The pink sheen of skinned animals hanging from the walls. With their heads chopped off, he can’t identify them. Not that their heads would have necessarily helped him.

  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.

  LYDA

  REHABILITATION

  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 gnaw
ing 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.”