“Partridge,” she whispers. His name sounds strange in her mouth, too personal. But she says it again. “Partridge, are you okay?”
He pulls the hood back up over his head, sits on the rocks, trying to catch his breath. He wraps his arms around his bag. “Sorry,” he says.
“Sorry for what?” she asks.
“I screamed. You told me not to.” He rubs at the soot on one hand with his thumb, then stares at it. “The dirt,” he says, his voice strangely peaceful.
“What about it?” she asks.
“It’s dirty.”
PRESSIA
WIND
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RUBBLE FIELDS, Pressia takes out the folded map that Bradwell slipped into her pocket at the meeting, and studies it for a minute. They’re only five blocks from Bradwell’s place. They stick to side streets, alleys. Everything is quiet. She hears no trucks. Even the chanting from the Death Spree is gone. At one point, there’s a baby crying, but then it quiets down.
Partridge is taking everything in, but Pressia can’t imagine what’s so interesting. It’s all burned hulls, smashed glass, melted plastic, charred metal, and the sharp edges of things poking up from ash.
He lifts his hand in the air like he’s trying to catch snow. “What is this stuff in the air?” he asks.
“What stuff?”
“The gray stuff.”
“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t even notice it anymore. She’s gotten used to it swirling in the air day in and day out, settling like thin lace over everything that sits still long enough. “Ash,” she says. “There are a lot of names for it—black snow, the earth’s silk lining—like a purse turned inside out. Some call it the dark death. When it billows and then settles, some call it a blessing of ash.”
“A blessing?” Partridge says. “We use that word a lot in the Dome.”
“I imagine you’d have lots of reasons to.” It’s not a nice thing to say, but she’s already said it.
“Some,” he says.
“Well, it’s soot and dust and bits left from the blast,” Pressia says. “It’s not good to breathe.”
“You’re right about that,” he says, pulling his scarf up over his nose and mouth. “You breathe it in and it stains your lungs. I’ve read about it.”
“Are there books about us or something?” This makes Pressia angry—the idea that this world is a subject of study, a story, instead of filled with real people, trying to survive.
He nods. “Some digitized documentation.”
“But how can you know what things are like here when you’re all in a Dome? Are we your little scientific subjects?”
“It’s not me,” he says, defensively. “I’m not doing it. It’s the people in charge. They have advanced cameras that shoot footage for security purposes. The ash makes the shots kind of unclear. Some of that footage is chosen to be frozen into stills. And there are reports about how bad things are here and how lucky we are,” he says.
“Luck is relative,” Pressia tells him. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently. That’s what the Message said. So that’s what they meant, after all.
“But they don’t really capture it. Like the dusty air.” He waves a hand around. “And how it gets on your skin. The air, itself, it’s cold. And wind. No one can really explain wind. How it can come up really fast and it stings your face a little. And it moves the dust in the air around. They can’t get all of that.”
“You don’t have wind?”
“It’s a Dome. A controlled environment.”
Pressia looks around and thinks about wind for a moment. And she realizes that there’s a difference between soot and dust—something burned or having been ripped apart or demolished—and they move differently in the wind. It never really struck her before, but she finds herself saying, “Soot flutters up on almost any shift in the wind, but dust is heavier. It will weigh itself down more quickly.”
“That kind of thing,” Partridge says. “That’s what they can’t get at.”
Pressia pauses a moment and then asks, “Do you want to play I Remember?”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t play it in the Dome?”
“Is it a game?”
“It’s just what it says. When you meet someone and you’re getting to know them, you ask them what they remember about the Before. Sometimes it’s all you can get out of a person, especially old people. But they play the game the best. My grandfather remembers a lot of things.” Pressia isn’t good at the game. Although her memories are brightly colored, crisp, sometimes tactile—like she can almost feel the Before—she can never quite express those sensations. She thinks about playing the game with her mother and father one day. They’ll fill in the gaps between the small tank with fish, the tassel on her mother’s pocketbook, the heating duct, the parade, the wire brush, the smell of grass soap on her skin, her father’s coat, her ear to his heart, and her mother brushing her hair, her mother singing the song on the computer, the lullaby about the girl on the porch and the boy who begs her to come with him—did the girl ever have the courage to go? She wants to play the game with Partridge. What would a Pure remember? Aren’t their memories clearer, less muddied by this version of the world they live in?
He laughs. “We’d never be allowed to play a game like that. The past is the past. It would be impolite to bring it up. Only little kids do that kind of thing.” And then he quickly adds, “No offense. It’s just the way we are.”
Pressia takes offense anyway. “The past is all we’ve got here,” she says, picking up her pace a little. She thinks about Bradwell’s speech. They want to erase us, the past, but we can’t let them. This is how forgetting works. Erase the past, never speak of it.
He strides quickly to catch up and grabs her elbow, the one that leads to the doll head. She jerks it in close to her body. “Don’t just grab people,” she says. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want to play the game,” he says. “It’s why I’m here—to find out about the past.” He looks at her straight-on, his eyes taking in her face, skittering to the edge where the burn begins.
She dips her head forward so her hair blocks her face from view. “Well, here, that’s what’s impolite.”
“What?” he asks.
“Staring at people. None of us wants to be looked at.”
“I didn’t mean to…” He looks away. “I’m sorry.”
Pressia doesn’t respond. It helps that he feels like he’s done her wrong and owes her something, and good too that he needs her as a social guide here—the dos and don’ts of this culture. She is trying to ratchet up his dependence on her.
They walk a little farther in silence. She’s punishing him, but then decides she should be forgiving too, and so she asks a question that’s been on her mind. “Okay,” Pressia says, deciding to fake it, “we once bought a new car with a giant red ribbon on top of it. And I remember Mickey Mouse and his white gloves.”
“Huh,” he says. “Right.”
“Do you remember dogs wearing sunglasses? They were funny, right?”
“I don’t really remember dogs wearing sunglasses,” he says. “Nope.”
“Oh,” she says. “Your turn.”
“Well, my mother used to tell me a story about the swan wife, and there was a bad king in the story who stole her wings and, well, I guess I thought my father was the bad king.”
“Was he a bad king?”
“It was a fairy tale, that’s all. They didn’t get along. It was kid logic. It didn’t make sense. But I loved the story. I loved her, I guess. She could have told me anything, and I’d have loved her. Kids love their parents, even the parents who don’t deserve it. They can’t help it.”
This memory of his is so honest and real that Pressia’s embarrassed that she didn’t play the game sincerely. She tries again. “My parents hired a pony to come to my birthday party once when I was little.”
“To give the kids rides?”
“I guess.”
“That’s nice. A pony. You liked ponies?”
“I don’t know.”
She wonders if the game has helped. Does he trust her more now that she’s handed a memory over and he’s given one to her? She decides to test it. “Back there with the Dust you killed, when you pulled it up from the hole and flipped it—that didn’t seem normal,” she says. “It didn’t seem possible.” She waits for him to pick up his end of the conversation. He tucks his chin to his chest and doesn’t answer. “Back there with the Groupies, when you ran, it seemed faster than a human running…”
He shakes his head. “The academy,” he says. “I got some special training. That’s all.”
“Training?”
“Well, coding, really. It didn’t all take, though. I’m not a ripe specimen, turns out.” He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, and she doesn’t want to push. She lets the conversation lag. They walk on in silence.
Finally they come to a small collapsed storefront.
“This is it,” she says.
“This is what?” Partridge asks.
She leads him around a pile of rubble to a wide metal back door. “Bradwell’s place,” she whispers. “I should warn you that he’s fused.”
“In what way?”
“Birds,” she says.
“Birds?”
“In his back.”
He looks at her, startled, and she likes that she’s disturbed him.
She knocks, following the directions on the piece of paper—one knock, then two soft taps and then she pauses and gives another sharp knuckle-punch. She hears some noise inside. And then Bradwell knocks from the other side, the same way she did, small hollow-sounding gongs.
“He lives here?” Partridge asks. “Who could live here?”
She knocks twice. “Wait over there. I don’t want you to set him off.” She points to a wall, darkened by shadow.
“Does he set off easily?”
“Just go.”
Partridge recedes to the shadows.
There’s a scraping sound, Bradwell unlocking the door. It opens, just a crack. “It’s the middle of the night,” he whispers, his voice so rough she wonders if she woke him. “Who are you? What the hell do you want?”
“It’s Pressia.”
The door opens wider. Bradwell is taller and broader than she remembers him. A survivor, it seems, should be wiry and lithe, a body easily hidden, lean from subsisting on little. But he’s had to become muscular to survive. There’s the double scar running jaggedly up his cheek, his burns, but his eyes are what catch Pressia’s attention. She feels a hesitation in her breath. They’re dark eyes and steely, but when they take in Pressia’s face they seem to soften, as if Bradwell is capable of more tenderness than she thought. “Pressia?” he says. “I thought you didn’t want to see me ever again.”
She turns her burned cheek away from him and feels herself blush—embarrassed by what? Why? She hears a flutter behind him—the wings of the birds lodged in his back.
“Why are you here?”
“I wanted to thank you for the gift.”
“Now?”
“No,” she says. “That’s not why I came. I just thought I’d say it now that you’re here. I mean, I’m here with you.” She’s yammering. She wishes she’d stop. “And I brought someone,” she says. “It’s urgent.”
“Who?”
“Someone who needs help.” And then she quickly adds, “I don’t need help. It’s this other person who does.” If she hadn’t run into the Pure, she’d be at his doorstep right now asking Bradwell to save her. And she realizes how relieved she is that she isn’t coming to him by herself, for herself. There’s a quiet moment. Is Bradwell going to turn back? Is he trying to decide what to do?
“What kind of help?”
“It’s important or I wouldn’t be here.”
Partridge steps out of the shadows. “She’s here for my sake.”
Bradwell glances at Partridge, then Pressia.
“Get in here,” he says. “Hurry up.”
“What is this place?” Partridge asks.
“Elliot Marker and Sons Fine Selection of Meats, Established 1933,” Bradwell says. “Found the little bronze placard after the Detonations. This was when some people were still lining up the dead and covering them with sheets and rolling them in rugs to be identified later, as if some government agency were just about to kick in and start up a recovery effort. The first floor—the display cases and counters, cutting area, cold storage, office—that was all gone, but I pulled the rubble from the back door at night hoping it led to the basement. And it did. The meats were spoiled but a butcher shop’s got a lot of weapons.”
Pressia’s eyes are adjusting to the dark. She’s standing in a strange cage, outfitted with straps and chains, and a slide that leads to the basement. Partridge is standing behind her. He reaches up and touches a chain. “And this is?”
“The stunning pen,” Bradwell says. “Animals were brought in through the back door, then stunned, with their hooves secured by straps connected to a rod that ran along rails. Their heavy bodies would be suspended upside down, and they were brought down for processing.” Bradwell jogs down the slide in his heavy boots. “Just be glad you aren’t a heifer in the old days.”
Pressia sits on the pen’s floor, scoots to the edge, and slides down into the basement. Partridge follows her, and then they walk behind Bradwell along the side of the basement that hasn’t caved in, heading toward the hint of light from the cooler at the other end of the room. “They bled animals down here, used hot vats and processing stations. The animals were pulled along the rails by a system of winches and stripped of their hides, dismantled.”
“Do you ever stop giving lessons?” Pressia asks under her breath.
“What?” Bradwell says.
“Nothing.”
The ceiling is still fitted with its bare rails, which lead into the meat locker—a small room, ten feet by fifteen, with metal walls and ceiling. The rails run along the ceiling in here too. Bradwell says, “I’ve taken down most of the huge hooks that used to dangle from them.” But there are a few left. Two of the hooks are strung up with strange creatures, hybrids of some sort. They’ve been skinned. Bradwell’s also removed any metallic or glass fusings—one is missing an arm, the other has an amputated tail. Now that they’re bare with pimpled flesh, it’s hard to say what they once might have been. In one corner, there is a homemade wire cage holding two rat-like creatures.
“Where did you catch these?” Pressia asks.
“The defunct sewer system. Some of the smaller pipes stayed intact under the rubble. The vermin use them. And at certain points, the pipelines end. Some break completely, and if you lie in wait at the end of one of the narrow pipes, you’ll eventually catch a small beast.”
“There isn’t much room for them to move in these cages,” Pressia says.
“I don’t want them to move. I want them to get fat.”
Their claws scratch against the cement floor.
The walls are lined with shelves interrupted by vertical rows of more hooks. If you tried to hang a hat on one, it’d pierce the top clean through. Partridge is eyeing the hooks.
Bradwell tells him, “Don’t get too excited and start gesturing wildly or you’ll get hooked and good.”
The meat locker doesn’t have much ventilation except for a homemade exhaust fan over a cook stove. “The shop is on the weak power grid that OSR uses to light the city,” he says. A single bulb hangs from the ceiling in the middle of the room.
Wool blankets are draped over two old armchairs that he must have found somewhere out in the streets. One has melted in on itself; the other’s lost one arm and its back. Both have exploding foam that he’s clearly tried to stuff back in, but the stuffing just keeps trying to escape. Pushed together, this must be where he sleeps. He has a small stock of canned meats from the market and some wild berries that grow among thorns in the woods.
Pressia wonders if she’s caug
ht him off guard, showing up like this. He’s tidying up now, putting away a pan, shoving an extra pair of boots under an armchair. Is he embarrassed? Nervous?
She sees the footlocker pressed up against one of the walls. She wants to open it and go rifling through. Sitting on top of it is what seems to be a reference book on butchering, processing, and preserving meats of all kinds.
“So,” Bradwell says, “welcome to my home sweet home.” He still hasn’t gotten a good look at Partridge. He doesn’t know that this is a Pure—flesh and blood. Partridge has his hood on and the scarf. He’s holding tight to his bag, hidden under his coat, like Pressia taught him. Pressia is nervous now. She remembers Bradwell’s talk, how much he hated the people in the Dome. She worries if this was the right decision. How will Bradwell react? It strikes her now that Bradwell might see Partridge as the enemy. What then?
Bradwell pulls the two armchairs apart. “Sit down,” he says to Pressia and Partridge.
And they sit on the lumpy chairs.
Bradwell pulls up the footlocker and takes a seat. She sees the ruffle of birds on his back under his shirt. She feels for him. The birds are his body now—just as the doll head is part of hers. The birds merge with his life span. They live as long as he lives. If one has an injured wing, would he feel it? Once, when she was twelve, she tried to cut her doll head off. She thought she could free herself from it. The pain was sharp, but only at first. When she slid the razor in deep at the back of the doll’s neck where it met her wrist, it wasn’t as painful. But the blood flowed so brightly, and with such force, that it scared her. She pressed a cloth to it, but the cloth went red fast. She had to tell her grandfather. He worked quickly. His skills as a mortician came in handy. The stitches were even, and the scar is small.
Pressia sits back, and even though the sock hides the doll-head fist, she tugs on her sweater sleeve to be doubly sure. The Pure would see it as grotesque and maybe as a sign of weakness.
She glances at Partridge and knows he’s seen the ruffle beneath Bradwell’s shirt too, but Partridge doesn’t say a word. Pressia imagines that he’s in shock. Everything must be foreign. She’s had years to get used to it. He’s only had a couple of days maybe.
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