Beckley says, “I can’t believe how you laid into Arvin Weed.” He smiles broadly.
Partridge rubs his knuckles. “I didn’t think about it. I just did it.” He looks at Beckley’s broad shoulders. “You’ve got some coding in you, right? There’s a mummy mold in the medical center with your name on it, I bet.”
“Actually, I was given just some raw stuff. Nothing high-end. No molds.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a way to do coding right with all the built-in protections to make it as safe and specific as possible. And then, for a lot cheaper, you can do it fast. I don’t think it was as good for my overall health, but I’m not an academy boy, right? I’m expendable, in the long run.”
Partridge remembers Wilda—just a nine-year-old girl—who was made Pure inside the Dome, and how she started to break down so quickly because it was all too potent and she was so young. What’s going to happen to Beckley ten years from now? Five? Partridge stands up and looks at the boys’ dormitory. “I don’t think you’re expendable. Not at all.” He glances at Beckley, who gives a curt nod and looks away.
And then he hears Iralene’s voice, set on edge, giving instructions of some sort. He turns and there she is, wearing a canary-yellow dress that floats around her legs silkily. The dress is low-cut and looks like an evening gown. Partridge is underdressed. She’s surrounded by a small clutch of young women with fixed smiles. Her mother, Mimi, is with her, looking cold and angry. A half dozen photographers file in behind them, their cameras pointed at Partridge like they’re armed.
“Hey, Iralene,” Partridge says. “Ready?” He wants to get this going.
Her mouth becomes a perfect O of surprise. She smiles and then, oddly, she takes off her canary-yellow heels, hooking them in her fingers, and runs to him. She opens her arms, and if he doesn’t open his, she’s going to run right into him. And so he has to open them, and as he does, she jumps a little so that he has to catch her and set her back down on the ground.
“You’ve been working so hard we’ve had no time together! None at all!” She tilts her head and gazes at him.
The cameras erupt with clicking and flashes.
“Don’t look at them,” she says. “We’re not supposed to know they’re here.”
Iralene’s friends—though he doesn’t recognize any of them and wonders if they’ve been assigned the job—are cooing and awing like they’re watching kittens. Partridge hates it. “Do they have to make those noises?”
“We’re all alone now! At last! Let’s walk to the wooden swing near the trellis.”
“Fine.”
They hold hands and walk. “How are you doing?” she says. “Tell me everything I’ve missed!”
“Mrs. Hollenback tried to off herself taking pills. There are these premature babies…I can’t talk about them. They’ve been torturing people. Glassings among them. He looked almost dead. I punched Arvin Weed.”
“Stop it!” she says suddenly, flushed with anger. “Just stop it!”
“You asked.”
They’re at the swing. She puts her high heels back on, which is as inexplicable as her having taken them off. She sits on the swing and freezes, looking up at him, smiling lovingly.
He can’t smile back. He feels sick. He looks at the dormitories again. The freshman wing is all lit up. The other floors, though, are dark and quiet. Did the older three grades go on one of those dismal field trips to the zoo? He misses it all suddenly. He wants to be a kid again. He’d like to know nothing. Is that wrong?
“Push me! Push me!” Iralene says, sounding more like little Julby Hollenback than herself.
Her friends call out, “Yes, yes! Push her!”
Mimi looks on with disgust.
He feels so deeply manipulated that for a second, he can’t move. He refuses to do what they’re telling him.
But he’s already here. He’s signed on. No more blood on your hands, he hears Lyda whispering. He reminds himself that he’s not going through this little fairy tale for Iralene’s entourage. He’s doing it to save lives.
He steps behind Iralene, grabs the ropes over her head, pulls the swing back, and lets it go. A few pushes later, she’s really gliding, and now he understands the dress. It was made to ripple perfectly along her legs while swinging on a wooden swing.
“Aren’t you happy?” she calls to him, and by this she probably means, Smile, okay? At least try to smile!
He forces the smile onto his face. It’s painful—worse, maybe, because Beckley’s there. The young women clap their hands lightly.
“Talk about something!” Iralene says. “Something pleasant.”
Partridge can’t think of anything pleasant except Lyda. He misses her. He wishes he were here with her instead. But he pushes himself to make idle conversation. If he says the right things, maybe this will end faster. “I wonder where they took the academy boys. The freshmen are here, but that’s it.”
“Oh, who knows?” Iralene says. “I’m sure it’s educational!”
“Right,” Partridge says, but then he glances at Beckley, who’s turned away. Why? “Beckley, you know where the older boys are?”
Beckley doesn’t answer.
“Beckley! What is it?”
“A bird!” Iralene cries out then. Is she trying to distract him? “A real live bird!” She points up into the branches of the tree.
Partridge glances up. She’s right. It’s a real bird. Sometimes they escape the aviary. They even try to nest in the trees. But without anything to eat, they die quickly.
“It’s so pretty! Catch it for me, Partridge! Catch it!”
“People catch butterflies, Iralene. They don’t catch birds.”
“But you can! For me!”
“No, I can’t actually catch a bird.” He walks away from the swing and over to Beckley. “Tell me what’s going on with the older academy boys.”
Beckley won’t look at him. “I’m not allowed.”
“Do I have to make it an order?”
Beckley nods. “Yep, you do.”
“Then tell me, damn it—that’s an order.”
“I only overheard this, so I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
“What?”
“Foresteed’s attacking. He’s taken all the boys sixteen and up and started massive coding. Some are already out there, having joined Special Forces on the outside. Others are being geared up.”
“Who’s he attacking?”
“Wretches.”
Partridge feels like his head could explode. He presses the heel of his hand against his temple. “Why? For the love of God…”
Beckley shrugs. “There’s an airship that was stolen, and he had to start to neutralize the situation before a serious threat could be…” The airship that Pressia, Bradwell, and El Capitan and Helmud stole—but still, an attack makes no sense!
They crossed the Atlantic. Weed told Partridge that Foresteed didn’t care about Pressia and the airship.
“He can’t attack! He doesn’t have the authority!”
“He leads the military, and since you’ve been preoccupied…”
“I’m not preoccupied! Damn it. You think I want to be at memorial services and photo shoots?” He thinks of Pressia, Bradwell, and El Capitan and Helmud. They can’t come back to an attack from the Dome. He needs them—in one piece, alive.
“Radio ahead. I want a meeting with Foresteed ASAP.”
“Partridge!” Iralene calls out. “I need another push.” The swing is still. Her dress, no longer gusting, looks like a wilted flower.
“They got enough pictures. I’ve got to go, Iralene. Sorry.” He walks off quickly. Beckley is at his side.
Iralene calls out, “No, Partridge! The bird! Come and catch the bird for me! It’s a lovebird!”
Was the lovebird planted there? Did someone actually expect him to catch it for her and give it as a gift?
“It’s going to die out here,” Partridge says. “It needs to be taken back t
o the aviary.”
Iralene cries out, “Oh no!”
He glances back and sees the bird flapping into what would be the sky.
LYDA
SECOND SKIN
Lyda set the orb so that the living room looks like part of a suburban ranch house, pre-Detonations—she would never share her ashen world with anyone but Partridge. She hasn’t seen him since their meeting with Foresteed where she gave Partridge permission to marry Iralene—or did she urge him? And if she’d said no, would it have actually mattered to a man like Foresteed? Looking back, she thinks they were meant to wander the room, and she was meant to find her psychological evaluation. In retrospect, it was a silent threat—lifelong institutionalization.
Now she’s in the care of a woman named Chandry, who is unloading a tote full of yarn balls and knitting needles. “So what would you like to start with? Booties? A baby hat? A blankie?”
“Can I ask who sent you?” Lyda says, trying to sound sweet.
“Oh, it’s my duty! I’m in charge of preparing you for your little bundle’s arrival.” She pats Lyda’s knee. “Plus, it’s soothing to knit. Knit your troubles away!” she chirps. “I have friends who are truly shattered by the recent events, but not me! Not with knitting on my side!”
She either means Partridge’s speech about the truth or the suicides or both. “Recent events?” Lyda says, playing dumb.
“You know,” Chandry says. “You of all people…”
Lyda, of all people. She wonders if Chandry blames her somehow.
Chandry starts to knit while giving a play-by-play of her quick work. Lyda interrupts, “What’s wrong with shattered? Sometimes it’s the right way to feel.”
This flusters Chandry, but she keeps stitching. She wouldn’t want to undermine her own arguments about the soothing powers of knitting. “Not for me!” she says, and she continues on, telling Lyda how to hold the needles. She gives her a little practice piece Chandry started for her at home. She seems oblivious to the fact that Lyda learned how to knit at the academy. All the girls did. But Lyda doesn’t tell Chandry. She pretends to be a terrible student. It’s not that she’s against swaddling her baby in handmade blankets; it’s that she doesn’t want to be soothed—not by anything.
“I’m also giving you a Baby’s Own baby book. You can start writing in it to log the joys of your baby—starting from the womb!”
“The joys.”
“Yes! The joys! Cute stories. You know…maybe you crave strawberry milkshakes! You could write that down in the journal. These are things your child will one day want to know about their fetal experience!”
Lyda craves ash on her skin. She craves hunting in the woods at dusk. She craves the unknown rumble of a Dust—the earth trembling underfoot. She says nothing. If she raises her child in the Dome, would she ever be able to tell her child these things?
The TV screen is blank. She’s watched too much of the news, which is feverishly whipping up excitement over Partridge and Iralene’s engagement while reporting that all else is well. They don’t mention the fights in the streets, the suicides. Instead there are pictures of Partridge and Iralene wandering the academy gardens, holding hands, smiling.
Chandry catches her gaze at the TV. “Oh, honey,” she says. “You don’t want to see what’s on that old chatterbox. You know that.” And she smiles at Lyda with deep cloying sympathy.
Lyda wants to slap her. She doesn’t want her sympathy. She folds her little strip of knitting, takes the needles and the ball of yarn and hands them back to Chandry. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Do you feel sick? Are you craving strawberry milkshakes?” she smiles.
“I’m going to my bedroom.”
“Yes!” Chandry says. “You must get off your feet some and lie down.”
Lyda grabs the orb and walks to her bedroom, shuts the door, and sets it to ash. She lies on the bed and stares up at the ceiling.
She couldn’t tell Partridge not to fake the engagement. The stupid photo shoots might actually save lives. But still, she feels fragile, as if made of fine glass. She could shatter. She remembers feeling this way when she was a student at the academy, but not outside the Dome—not among the mothers, hunting in the woods. Is all of her toughness going to erode? Is she bound to be the person she used to be in the Dome? Does the Dome, once she steps foot in it, define her?
When she hears Chandry talking to the guard and the door to the apartment shutting again, Lyda walks around her room, looking for something. What? At first she wants to make art—not something sweet like her old bird made of wire. No. She wants to make something tough that will endure.
When she opens her closet, she finds wire hangers. She pulls them out and drops them on the floor—which looks sooty and streaked.
She remembers the idiotic sitting mats they had her weaving with colored strips when she was locked up in the medical center, how she wove and rewove hers back in solitary. She sits amid the hangers and unwinds them so that each springs loose. She straightens each one and then begins weaving.
What is she weaving? She’s not sure. She just weaves and weaves until the metal forms a large rectangle. It doesn’t soothe her, which is good. It makes her feel vital, in control. She can still see Partridge in his father’s chamber, the pictures of his lost family strewn around him. She still loves him—murderer and all. But after seeing her psychological evaluation, her desire to get out has grown. She wants to be out there in the world—whatever it looks like, no matter how wild and untamed. Even if everything gets worked out and Iralene disappears and Lyda can move into that role—Partridge has promised her—she can’t stay here and be Partridge’s happy wife, wearing pearls, knitting booties, writing in baby books. That night when she and Partridge lay together under his coat in the brass bed frame in a house with no roof, only the gray sky overhead, he wanted her to come with him. She refused. This time, though, she’ll talk him into coming with her. This time, they’ll stick together. The baby will keep them together, right? That’s what babies do. They make families.
His father saw the end. Did he see how there will eventually be too little to live on? People will hoard and stand guard and then steal and fight and kill for what’s left. They’re all animals. She doesn’t want to be a caged one.
She keeps pulling the wires, tightening the weave until her fingers are too stiff to go on. She holds up what looks like a woven shield—beautiful, strong, but also bendable. She stands up and walks to a mirror—darkened by the image of ash. She can see her dim reflection. She presses the woven metal to her body. Her belly is going to swell, but the metal is malleable. It could be molded around a belly—however big.
And then she knows what she’s made.
Armor.
A second skin of metal.
It’s art, if anyone asks. But to her, it’s also protection and control. This is who she is—not someone who knits booties to soothe her nerves. She might feel a little shattered, but she’s also strong. She can’t rely solely on Partridge. She has to be able to defend herself. This is her protection.
She hides it in the back of her closet, behind fluffy maternity dresses.
EL CAPITAN
FLUTTER
It’s not just the city. From up high and circling, he can see that everything’s been newly torched. The Deadlands didn’t have much to burn, but El Capitan takes the airship in low enough to see a few blackened Dusts arch from the ground like dead fish rising to the surface of a pond, sucking air. The other Dusts are quiet, as if they’re afraid to lift their heads.
He cuts across the Meltlands, which are vacant. The plastic jungle gyms were already melted to blobs, but some of the houses that had been partially rebuilt have been ravaged again by fires. Tarps flutter in the battering winds. OSR headquarters and the surrounding woods where he and Helmud have hunted for years are still smoking, lost in great billowing gray clouds.
The outpost that was once a boarding school might be the worst off—the survivors’
tents are blackened and have collapsed in on themselves like clenched fists. The buildings’ stone still stands, but the fires have gutted the buildings themselves. He gets close enough to see that there are some people still there, dazed and searching for those they’ve lost. Only a few of them look up when they hear the droning engine. But they don’t take cover. They only stop and raise their faces to the noise. The little cottage where Pressia helped Bradwell regain his strength is still there, but its roof has caved in and the trees around it that had limbs that tethered them to the ground like roots are only charred stalks.
Here and there, even the smallest structures have burned or are still smoking—the huts of shepherds and pickers, lean-tos, the wood roofs of hand-built altars, the posts around graveyards. Smoke shivers to the sky, gusts, and swirls across the terrain in gray billowing sheets.
Shortly after they picked up Hastings, he walked into the cockpit to tell El Capitan to prepare for devastation. He told him the stories of the survivors who’d made it to Crazy John-Johns. El Capitan nodded. “One thing I know is devastation, Hastings. Don’t worry.”
“Worry,” Helmud had said, and he was right. Nothing could have prepared him for this. His homeland has always been burnt and charred but fighting its way back. And now it’s as if all of the life and energy and strength that it took to rebuild have been wiped away.
He sees a sloping field where the Dome worshippers, once upon a time, built a pyre of their own. Gone. All of it. That’s where he’ll bring down the airship.
He takes them lower and lower and finally shouts to the others, “Brace for landing!”
“Brace, brace!” Helmud shouts and grabs hold of El Capitan so hard that El Capitan has to pop his elbows out to have enough mobility to work the instruments.
“Ease up, Helmud.”
The airship glides then bobbles as it starts to descend. The ground is coming at El Capitan too quickly.
“Ease up!” Helmud shouts. “Ease up!”
Burn (The Pure Trilogy) Page 16
