Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  He whips around, scared, and then his eyes fall on her, and he’s obviously relieved that she’s not a Groupie or a Beast or even an OSR soldier—though she doubts he knows the names of any of these things. What’s there to be afraid of where he comes from anyway? Does he even understand fear? Is he afraid of birthday cakes and dogs wearing sunglasses and new cars topped with big red bows?

  His face is smooth and clear, his eyes a pale gray. And she can’t quite believe that she is looking at a Pure—a living, breathing Pure.

  Burn a Pure and breathe the ash.

  Take his guts and make a sash.

  Twist his hair and make a rope.

  And use his bones to make Pure soap.

  That’s what comes to mind. Kids sing the song all the time, but no one ever thinks they’ll see a real Pure, no matter how many stupid whispers there are. Never. She feels like there’s something light and airy and winged inside her chest, locked in her ribs, like Freedle in his cage, like the homemade butterfly in her sack.

  “I’m trying to get to Lombard Street,” he says, a little breathlessly. Pressia wonders if the quality of his voice is different. Clearer, sweeter? Is that the voice of someone who hasn’t been breathing ash for years? “Ten Fifty-four Lombard, to be exact. Large row houses with grillwork gates.”

  “It’s not good to stand out there in plain sight,” Pressia tells him. “It’s dangerous.”

  “I’ve noticed.” He takes a step toward her and then stops. One side of his face has been lightly dusted with ash. “I don’t know if I should trust you,” he says. It’s a fair statement. He’s almost been beaten by Groupies; he’s bound to be a little nervous now.

  She sticks out her foot, the one missing its shoe. “I threw my shoe to distract the Groupies who were about to kill you. I’ve already saved you once.”

  He looks down the street to where he was getting shoved around. He walks over to Pressia in the alley. “Thanks,” he says. He smiles. His teeth are straight and very white, like he’s lived on fresh milk his whole life. His face, this close up, is even more startling because of its perfection. She can’t tell how old he is. He seems older than she is, but then he seems young in a way too. She doesn’t want to be caught staring and so she looks down at the ground. He says, “They were going to tear me apart. I hope I’m worth your lost shoe.”

  “I hope my shoe isn’t lost,” she says, turning away from him a little so that he can’t see the side of her face that’s burned.

  He tugs on the strap of his bag. “I’ll help you find your shoe if you help me find Lombard Street.”

  “It’s not easy finding streets here. We don’t go by streets.”

  “Where did you throw your shoe? Which direction?” he asks, heading back toward the street.

  “Don’t,” she says, although she needs the shoe, the gift from her grandfather, maybe the last gift he’ll ever give her. She hears a truck engine to the east and then another in the opposite direction. And there’s still another not far off, or is it an echo? He should stay out of sight. Anyone could see him. It’s not safe. “Leave it.”

  But he’s already in the middle of the street again. “Which way?” he says and opens his arms wide, pointing in opposite directions, like he wants to be a living target.

  “The oil drum,” she says, just trying to hurry him up.

  He spins around, sees the oil drum, and runs to it. He turns a half circle around the drum and then bends over. When he pops back up, he’s got her shoe. He holds it over his head like a prize.

  “Stop,” she whispers, wishing he’d get back in the shadows.

  He runs to her and gets down on his knee. “Here,” he says. “Give me your foot.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I can do it.” Her cheeks are flushed. She’s embarrassed and mad at him too. Who does he think he is, anyway? He’s a Pure who’s been kept safe, who’s had it easy his whole life. She can put on her own shoe. She’s not a child. She bends down, rips her shoe out of his hand, and puts it on herself.

  “How does this sound? I helped you find your shoe so you help me find Lombard Street or what used to be Lombard Street.”

  She’s scared now. It’s settling in that he is a Pure and that this is too dangerous, being with him. The news of his presence will keep spreading, and there’s no way to stop it. When people find out that there’s a Pure here for certain, he will definitely become a target—his arms stretched wide or not. Some people will want to use him as an angry sacrifice. He represents all of the people from the Dome, the rich and the lucky who left them behind to suffer and die. Others will want to capture him and leverage ransom somehow. And the OSR will want him for his secrets or to use him as bait.

  And she has her own reasons, doesn’t she? If there’s a way out, that means there’s a way in. That’s what the old woman said, and maybe it’s true. She knows that he could be of use. Wouldn’t he offer her some leverage with the OSR? Could she get out of having to report to headquarters? Could she negotiate medical help for her grandfather too, while she’s at it?

  She tugs on her sweater sleeve. The Dome will send out people to look for him, won’t they? What if they want him back? “Do you have a chip?” she asks.

  He rubs the back of his neck. “Nope,” he says. “I never got one as a kid. I’m fresh as the day I was born. You can look if you want.” The chip implants always leave a small raised bump as a scar.

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you have one?”

  “It’s defunct now. Just a dead chip,” she says. She always keeps her hair long enough to cover the small scar. “They don’t work here anyway. But it’s what all good parents did back then.”

  “Are you saying my parents weren’t good parents?” he says, half joking.

  “I don’t know anything about your parents.”

  “Well, I don’t have a chip. That’s what you wanted to know. Are you going to help me or what?” He’s a little angry now. She’s not sure why, but she’s glad to see that she can rile him. It tilts a little power in her direction.

  She nods. “But we’ll have to use old maps. I know someone who has them. I was on my way to his place. I can take you there. Maybe he can help.”

  “That’s fine,” he says. “Which way?” He turns and starts for the street.

  She grabs his jacket. “Wait,” she tells him. “I’m not going out with you like that.”

  “Like what?” he says.

  She stares at him, disbelieving. “Uncovered.”

  He puts his hands in his pockets. “So it’s obvious.”

  “Of course it’s obvious.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment. They stand there. “What was that thing that attacked me?”

  “A Groupie. A big one. Everyone out here is deformed in some way, fused so that we aren’t exactly what we were before.”

  “And you?”

  She looks away from him and answers a different question. “People’s skin is often littered. Glass is sharp, depending on how it’s embedded. Plastic can stiffen up, making it hard to move. Metal rusts.”

  “Like the Tin Man,” the Pure says.

  “Who?”

  “He’s a character in a book and this old movie,” he says.

  “We don’t have that stuff here. Not much survived.”

  “Right,” he says. “And what’s that singing?”

  She’d blocked it out, but he’s right. Chanting voices from the Death Spree carry on the wind. She shrugs and says, “Maybe people singing at a wedding.” She’s not sure why she would say something like this. Did people sing at weddings—like her parents’ church wedding and white-tent reception? Do they still sing in the Dome?

  “You’ll have to watch out for OSR trucks too.”

  He smiles.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just that they’re real. In the Dome, we know they exist. OSR. That they started as Operation Search and Rescue, a civilian militia, and then became a kind of fascist regime. Operat
ion… what is it now?”

  “Sacred Revolution,” Pressia says, flatly. She can’t help but feel like she’s being made fun of.

  “Right!” he says. “That’s it!”

  “Do you think that’s quaint?” she says. “They’ll kill you. They’ll torture you and shove a gun down your throat and murder you. Do you understand that?”

  He seems to accept this, and then he says, “I guess you hate me. I wouldn’t blame you. Historically speaking…”

  Pressia shakes her head. “Please don’t give a group apology. I don’t need your guilty conscience. You got in. I didn’t. The end.” She puts her hand in her pocket and feels the hard rim of the bell. She considers adding something a little gentler, to relieve his guilt, something like We were kids when it happened. What could we do? What could anyone do? But she decides not to. His guilt gives her some leverage, too. And the fact is that there’s some truth to his guilt. How did he get into the Dome? What kind of privilege allowed it? She understands enough of Bradwell’s conspiracy theories to know that ugly decisions were made. Why shouldn’t she blame the Pure a little?

  “You’ve got to wear the hood and the scarf over your face,” she tells him.

  “I’ll try to blend in.” He quickly winds the scarf around his neck, covering his face, and lifts the hood. “Good now?” he says.

  It’s not really enough. There’s something in his gray eyes that makes him different, something that he probably can’t do anything about. Wouldn’t anyone know at a glance that he’s a Pure? Pressia feels certain that she would. He’s hopeful in a way that no one here is hopeful, but there’s also some deep sadness in him. In some ways, he doesn’t seem Pure at all. “It’s not just your face,” she tells him.

  “What is it?” he says.

  She shakes her head, letting her hair fall to cover the scars on one side of her face. “Nothing,” she says. And then without thinking, she simply asks, “Why are you here?”

  “Home,” he says. “I’m trying to find my way home.”

  For some reason, this makes Pressia furious. She pulls her sweater up under her chin. “Home,” she says. “Here outside the Dome on Lombard Street?”

  “Right.”

  But he left this place. He deserted his home. He doesn’t deserve to get it back. She decides to veer away from talk of home. “We have to take the shortcut through the Rubble Fields. We have no choice,” she tells the Pure. She’s trying not to look at him now. She tightens the sock and tugs on her sweater sleeve. “We could run into Beasts and Dusts who might try to kill us, but at least it’ll take us off the streets where we might run into those who’ll try to capture you. Plus it’s faster.”

  “Capture me?”

  “People already know you’re here. There are whispers all over the place. And if any of those Groupies weren’t too polluted to see your face, well, they’ll spread the whispers even more. We’ll have to move fast and quietly so we don’t give them a lot of warning and we’ll have to—”

  “What’s your name?” the Pure asks.

  “My name?”

  He sticks his hand straight out in front of himself, aiming it at her like a gun, with his thumb up in the air.

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “What?” He shoves the hand at her again. “I’m introducing myself. People call me Partridge.”

  “I’m Pressia,” she tells him and then she gives his hand a smack. “Stop pointing your hand at me like that.”

  He looks confused and shoves his hand in one of the pockets of his hooded jacket.

  “If there’s anything of value in that bag, you better hide it under your coat at all times.” Pressia starts walking quickly toward the Rubble Fields, and he follows closely behind. She gives instructions. “Stay away from the rising smoke. Walk gently. Some people say that the Dusts can feel vibrations. If you get grabbed, don’t scream. Don’t say a word. I’ll keep looking back.”

  There’s an art to walking through the Rubble Fields, being light-footed, quick to shift your weight from one side of your body to the other, but not overcompensating in any one direction. She’s mastered these skills from her years of scavenging and knows how to keep her knees loose, her feet flexible, so that she can maintain her balance.

  She heads out across the rocks and she can hear him following behind her. She’s keeping a lookout for eyes in the stones. She can’t get too worked up about the eyes, because she also has to constantly route a path around smoke-fires and glance backward at Partridge. And she listens for the OSR truck engines. She doesn’t want to get to the other side just to wind up caught in headlights.

  She realizes that this is her value to him. This is what she’s worth. She’s his guide and she doesn’t want to tell him too much because she wants him to rely on her, to need her, and maybe to become indebted. She wants him to feel like he owes her something.

  She’s doing all of this—shifting, looking for Dusts, veering away from smoke, and glancing back at the Pure, his hood flapping around his darkened face in the wind—and she’s thinking about Bradwell too. What will he think of her bringing a Pure to his door? Would that impress him? She doubts it. He doesn’t seem like he’d be easy to impress. But still, she knows he’s devoted his life to unraveling the past. She hopes he has the right old maps, and that he knows how to apply them to what’s left of this city. What good do street names do for a city that’s lost everything, including most streets?

  That’s what she’s thinking about when she hears the scream from behind her. She turns around and sees that the Pure is already down; one leg has been dragged into the rubble out of sight. “Pressia!” he shouts.

  The guttural noises of Beasts rise up all around them.

  “Why did you scream?” she shouts at the Pure, realizing she’s screaming now too, but unable to stop herself. “I told you not to scream!” She looks out across the Rubble Fields. Heads have already popped up from the smoke holes. The Beasts know that they’ve gotten one. They will all want in on the feast. Out here, there are other outcasts too. Creatures so fused or burned or scarred that no one can identify them anymore. They’ve lost something elementally human. And cut off from others, they’ve become vicious.

  Pressia picks up rocks and hurls them at one Beast’s head and then another. They duck and reappear. “It’s stronger than you,” she yells. “You can’t try to hold on. You have to be willing to go down and fight it. Get a rock in each hand and kick it! I’ll cover you!” She hopes he can fight, but she doubts they teach that kind of thing in the Dome. What would they need to protect themselves against? If he doesn’t know how to fight, she can’t go down after him. There’d be no one to fend off the Beasts. They’d gather in a large hungry crowd waiting at the hole to kill them both as soon as they made it back up, if they could make it back up.

  Partridge looks at her, wide-eyed with fear.

  “Do it!” she says.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not going down to fight it on its own terms,” he says.

  “You don’t have a choice!”

  But then Partridge claws at the stones, pulling himself forward, inch by inch. He grabs a loose stone, which gives, and the creature—likely a Dust—jerks him as if he’s slipped down a rung of a ladder. But his other hand keeps its grip, and although the Dust has a hold on one of his legs, the Pure is kicking it hard with his free boot. His hands flexed, he pulls his leg to his chest with brute strength and drags the Dust up from the hole. She’s never seen anything like it, didn’t know it was possible.

  Squat and barrel-chested, this Dust is a hunched creature with hardened armor made of stone. Its face is dug out—pitted eyes, a small dark hole for a mouth. It’s the size of a small bear. Used to darkness and tight spaces, it looks slightly confused up here, a little dazed. But then it locks onto Partridge and crawls toward him. Pressia hurls rock after rock at the Beasts so they know that she and Partridge aren’t just victims here to pick away at like vultures. They’ll have to fight. She hits two Be
asts square-on—one with a cat-like head who yowls and disappears for good. The other is furred but thickly muscular. It takes the blow, arches, and goes back under the rubble.

  Partridge is fiddling with his backpack, rummaging around with his strangely fast movements. Why do his hands move so quickly? How is it possible? And yet he’s so clumsy. If he’d slow down, he’d be able to find what he’s looking for more easily. His hands flutter in the bag, and this only gives the Dust time to crouch back on its haunches and pounce. The stone weight of the creature lands on Partridge’s chest and sends him crashing on the rocks behind him. The Dust has knocked the air out of him, and he’s stunned, breathless. But Pressia can see what he pulled from the bag: a knife with a wooden handle.

  Pressia keeps throwing rocks at Beasts circling closer. “Look for something human on him,” she cries out. “You can only kill it if you can find the part of it that’s alive and pulsing.”

  The Dust has him pinned to the rocks and lifts its blunt stone head, ready to slam it into the Pure’s skull, but the Pure shoves him off with surprising force, and the Dust lands hard—stone against stone—on its back, revealing a slip of pale raw pink skin on his chest. Beetle-like, the Dust is stuck on its back, its small stumped stone-encrusted arms and legs flailing.

  The Pure moves in fast. He fits the knife into the pink center, stabbing the Dust’s belly, in between the stone plates, driving the knife in deep. The Dust gives a hollow moan as if its voice echoes in its own stony shell. Dark, ashen blood spills out of the wound. The Pure saws the knife back and forth, as if he’s cutting into a loaf of bread, then pulls it out and scrapes it on the rocks.

  The foul stench of the Dust’s blood is carried by the wind. The Beasts, fearful, retreat quickly into their smoky holes.

  Pressia is breathless. Partridge stares at the Dust. The knife is shaking in his hand, his eyes vacant. He’s covered in dust and soot. There’s a trickle of blood coming from his nose. He wipes it with the back of his hand and stares at the red smear left there.