Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  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?”

  PARTRIDGE

  BELOW

  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.

  Their mother is here, somewhere. But will she be the mother he remembers? Practically everything he’s known to be true—even her death—has been proven wrong. Still, she left all of these clues behind. She’s led them here, which feels right, maternal.

  The man at the end of the hall has stooped shoulders and a clean angular face. “You’re a Pure?” Partridge asks, without thinking.

  “I’m not a Pure. I’m not a wretch either,” he says. “I survived in here. I would say I’m an American but that term no longer exists. I guess you can call me Caruso.” He asks them if they’d like to see their mother.

  “It’s why I’ve come all this way,” Partridge says.

  “Right,” Caruso says. “We wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Done what?” Partridge says.

  “Left the Dome,” Caruso tells him. “Your mother had a plan, either way.”

  “What were you planning if I stayed?”

  “A takeover, from the inside out.”

  “I don’t get it. A takeover from the inside out?” Partridge says. “It’s not doable.”

  “Don’t say too much,” Pressia says. “I’m bugged.”

  “Bugged? Who’s got her bugged?”

  “The Dome,” Pressia says.

  Caruso stops and stares at Pressia. “Well, then, they can take a good, long look. Get an eyeful. What do I care? I didn’t destroy the planet. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve lived here in defiance of them. We survived despite their best efforts.” He turns to Partridge. “A takeover from the inside is doable if you have a leader in there.”

  “A leader on the inside? No one’s capable of that. Who’s this leader?” Partridge says.

  “Well, you were supposed to be. Until you left.”

  Partridge feels a little unsteady. He runs his hand along the wall. “Me?” he says. “I was the leader on the inside? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Come on,” Caruso says. “Let your mother explain it to you.”

  They walk down the hall. The cicadas are now swirling around their heads.

  The man stops at a metal door with a row of hinges running down its center. He looks down at the floor. “Be aware,” he says. “Aribelle isn’t the same. But she survived for you. Remember that.”

  Partridge isn’t sure what this means. He looks at Pressia. “Are you okay?”

  She nods. “Are you?”

  He’s terrified. He feels like he’s standing on the edge of a ravine. It doesn’t feel like he’s going to become a son again or get some part of his old life back. No. It feels like the beginning of something unknowable. “Yeah,” he says, “I’m okay,” hoping he really is.

  Caruso pushes a button, and the metal door folds to one side.

  PRESSIA

  CLOUDS

  IN SOME WAYS, THE ROOM REMINDS Pressia of the
little domestic scenes in Bradwell’s magazines. There’s an armchair with appliqué birds on it, a fuzzy wool rug, a small standing lamp, and drapes. But the drapes don’t frame a window; they’re underground. They hide more wall. It’s the only possibility.

  But it’s not a little domestic scene at all because there’s also a long metal table filled with communications devices—radios, computers, old servers, screens. None of them are on.

  And running alongside the far wall, there is the most unusual thing of all, a long metal capsule with a glass cover. It’s vaguely aquatic. She remembers her grandfather talking about glass-bottomed boats, tourist traps, he called them, that took you out through the swamps in Florida where you could count alligators lining the banks. It’s strange to think of Florida now; that’s where she was supposed to have been coming home from when her grandfather met her in the airport at the time of the Detonations. Disney, the mouse wearing white gloves. It never happened.

  The metal capsule with the glass cover also reminds Pressia of Saint Wi, the statue of the girl in the crypt, the stone casket that was behind the Plexiglas.

  And of course, it reminds her of her own cabinet, of home.

  Is this where her mother lies?

  A few cicadas followed and now circle the ceiling, and for a moment Pressia wonders if Caruso is insane. It wouldn’t be that strange, having lived in confinement all these years. Is this a funeral? Is her mother really dead? Is this just a cruel joke?

  Partridge must be thinking the same thing, because he turns and glares at Caruso who’s lingering in the doorway. “What is this thing?”

  “We have sixty-two of these,” Caruso says. “We planned for air contamination and oxygen depletion. They’re completely outfitted with oxygen. We didn’t need them for that, but they’ve come in handy with viral contamination and general organ collapse.”

  “Sixty-two?”

  “All we could get our hands on at the time. We had three hundred people here at one point. Scientists. Their families.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Your mother and I are the only ones left. Many died. Others branded themselves with scars to fit in with the other survivors and left. They still communicate with us. That’s how we found out about your escape. Rumors. We weren’t sure they were true until we picked up the light source on the gem.”

  “It sent light back?” Pressia asks.

  “A refraction, yes.”

  Pressia isn’t ready to look behind the glass. She stands slightly behind Partridge, letting him go first. He leans forward and draws in his breath. She can’t see his face.

  Pressia leans forward now. There is a woman’s serene face behind the glass, her eyes closed. She is the woman from Partridge’s photograph, their mother. Her hair is curly, dark but tinged gray, and it lies on the pillow in loose curls. She’s still beautiful even though her skin is nearly papery and her eyes look bruised.

  But then there is her ravaged body.

  Her neck leads to collarbones, one of which is a steel rod that turns into a metal gear at the shoulder. Her arm is made of stainless steel. The metal is perforated as if from a colander, perhaps to keep it lighter in weight. In lieu of fingers, the arm narrows to a ball-bearing hinge where the wrist should be and ends in a pincer—two metal prongs. The other arm gives way to a prosthetic just above the elbow. It’s wooden, thin, tan in color. It’s been whittled to look like a real arm. Its dainty fingers are hinged. Leather straps keep it in place by attaching around the knotty bone of her shoulder.

  Her legs are gone as well. She’s wearing a skirt that ends mid-shin. Her prosthetic legs are skeletal—two bone-like spokes meeting at the ankles and then something closer to pedals for feet. Both are dented and nicked from use.

  It’s hard to explain but her limbs seem beautiful to Pressia. Maybe it’s Bradwell’s view that there’s beauty in their scars and fusings because they are signs of their survival, which is a beautiful thing, if you think about it. In this case, someone built these arms and legs for her, the metal seams, the stitching in the leather straps, the covered bolts, the stippled design of the perforations. There’s delicacy, care, love that’s been poured into them.

  Her mother is wearing a white shirt with a row of yellowed pearl buttons that matches the white skirt, and Pressia can’t tell where the prosthetics end, but this is the way her own doll head works. It doesn’t begin or end.

  The buttons on her mother’s cotton shirt rise and fall. Somewhere within her, there’s a pair of lungs, a heart. The others who lived in the bunker were here during the Detonations, but her mother must not have been. For a moment, Pressia wonders if her mother was out trying to save wretches—a saint, just like Partridge thought all these years.

  Caruso pushes a button on the edge of the capsule, and the top pops with some kind of pneumatic release.

  Partridge grips the capsule’s edge to hold himself steady.

  Caruso steps back. “I’ll leave you to talk.”

  Pressia thinks: Aribelle Cording, Mrs. Willux, Mother. What should she call her?

  And then her mother’s eyes open. They’re gray, like Partridge’s, like ashen clouds. Her mother sees Partridge’s face, which is just above hers. She reaches up with her wooden hand and touches his cheek. “Partridge,” she says and she starts to cry.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m here.”

  “Here,” she whispers. “Put your cheek on mine.” And he does. Pressia realizes that her mother must want to feel his skin on hers.

  They are both crying now, softly. And, for a moment, Pressia feels lost, as if she wasn’t invited, as if she’s intruding. Partridge pulls away from his mother. “And Sedge is here. He’s overhead, aboveground.”

  “Sedge is here?” her mother says.

  “And Pressia is here, too.”

  “Pressia?” her mother says, as if she’s never heard the name before, and maybe she hasn’t. It’s not Pressia’s real name anyway. It was made up. She doesn’t know her real name.

  “Your daughter,” Partridge says. He reaches for Pressia, grabs her arm, and tugs her forward.

  “How?” her mother says, and she hooks her pincer on a strap inside the capsule, pulls herself up to a seated position. She looks at Pressia, stares at her, confused. “It can’t be,” she says.

  And Pressia lowers her head. She steps quickly backward, knocking into the table of electronics. One of the narrow radios topples, clattering loudly on the metal tabletop. “I’m sorry,” Pressia says, and she reaches out with her hand and her doll-head fist to set the radio back into place. “I should be going,” she says. “It was a mistake.”

  “No,” her mother says, “wait.” She points to the doll.

  Pressia steps forward.

  Her mother opens her hinged fingers.

  Pressia lifts the doll’s head and places it in her mother’s wooden palm.

  Her mother says, “Christmas.” She touches the doll’s nose, the lips. She looks at Pressia. “Your baby. I’d recognize her anywhere.”

  Pressia closes her eyes. She feels as if she’s breaking open.

  “You’re mine,” her mother says.

  Pressia nods.

  Her mother opens her arms wide.

  Pressia leans over the capsule and lets her mother pull her to her chest. This is her mother—her real mother. She hears the beating of her mother’s faint heart, the rise and fall of her fragile rib cage—alive. She wants to tell her everything that she’s been holding on to—her memories like beads of a necklace. She wants to tell her about her grandfather and the back room of the barbershop. She remembers that she has the barbershop bell in her sweater pocket. She’ll give it to her. It’s not much of a gift. But it’s something she can point to—this was my life, but now my life has changed. “What’s my name?” Pressia asks.

  “You don’t know your name?”

  “No.”

  “Emi,” she says, “Emi Brigid Imanaka.”

  “Emi Brigid Imanaka,” Pressia says. It
’s so foreign that it isn’t a name really at all, but interlocking sounds that fit together perfectly.

  Her mother’s eyes lock onto the broken pendant. “So it was of use, after all this time,” she says.

  “You did plant it for us to find you?” Partridge says.

  “I planted many things,” she said. “I couldn’t rely on any one trail of bread crumbs surviving the blasts, so I made as many as I could. And this one worked!”

  “Do you remember the song?” Pressia asks.

  “What song?”

  “About the screen door slamming and the girl on the porch whose dress sways?”

  “Of course.” And then her mother whispers, “You’re here. You found me. I’ve missed you. I’ve spent my life missing you.”

  PRESSIA

  TATTOOS

  AND THEN THINGS MOVE QUICKLY. “We don’t have much time,” Partridge says. “Not much time at all.”

  “Okay,” Aribelle says to Pressia, “take the floral covering off that chair, and, Partridge, you pick me up and put me in it.”

  Pressia follows orders and pulls the floral print covering. Beneath it there’s a cane chair fitted with wheels. The wheels are disks of pounded circular tin with rubber edging. The seat is padded with small canvas pillows. “I’m bugged,” Pressia says. “Eyes and ears.”

  “The Dome?” Aribelle asks.

  Pressia nods.

  “What do they want?” Aribelle asks. Partridge lifts his mother’s light frail body up from the capsule. He sets her in the chair. Her body clicks.

  “They want what’s here,” Partridge says.

  “In particular, medication. We think that’s the main thing they’re after,” Pressia says.

  Aribelle turns a crank on the side of the chair with her pincer, and a small engine attached to the back of the chair catches, then hums. The chair is motorized. Exposed pistons start pumping. “So they’re breaking down,” she says. “The classic signs are a slight tremor of the hands and head, a palsy. Eyesight and hearing weaken. The skin deteriorates next, becoming thin and dry. Eventually, bones and muscle erode, and organs fail. It’s called Rapid Cell Degeneration and happens after too much coding. We knew it would.”