Burn (22 page)
The pyre to dispose of the dead has gone out, and even if it stops raining, it will be a long time before they can get the wood dry enough to start it up again.
They find a group of survivors digging a mass grave, bodies piled nearby. At least now the ground is no longer frozen and gives a little.
Deeper into the city, they start to hear the cries of new orphans and parents calling for their children. The fresh burns and welts and blisters cover the old scars—a layer of fresh pain on old pain. Pressia is more protective of what’s in her backpack than ever. The vial and the formula can make them whole again, can’t it?
“Wilda!” Pressia keeps shouting, her voice joining the chorus of voices calling for the lost. “Wilda!”
Hastings stays close to them so that it’s clear he’s not a threat—maybe even a prisoner. Pressia asks survivors if they’ve seen the children. “They might have looked like they were shaking. They might have been carried in on people’s backs.”
The survivors give only blank stares and shrugs.
But then Pressia sees a man she recognizes from the outpost. He has a spray of metal on his arms and a gear lodged in his jaw.
“Excuse me,” she says.
He looks up.
“We’re looking for children who were being taken care of in the main building at the outpost. They were sickly. They shook and would have probably been with nurses. You were at the outpost. You know who I mean.”
“Gone,” the man says, the gear in his jaw clicking.
“What do you mean—gone?” Pressia steps closer. “Are they dead?” She feels a swell of dread.
“They carried children out on their backs and kept going. Who knows where? Who cares where? There’s nowhere to go. They were everywhere. They wanted to kill us all. I beat one to death with a rock.” The man looks down at his hands, crusted with metal, his fingers curled like he’s holding the rock at this moment. His eyes flash wide. “And it was a kid. It was just this kid. A dead boy. A bloody, dead boy.” He looks up at Pressia. “Like my own son. That was the thing. He looked like my own son—if my son had been born right and lived.”
Did Partridge do this?
“I’m sorry,” Pressia says. “I’m so sorry.”
The man looks at her clearly, as if he’s just woken up. “They were going to take them to the city—those shaking children on their backs, those pale shaking children. The city. For help. But I saw the smoke coming up from the city too, so who knows where they went? Who knows?” He shuffles on.
Hastings, with his enhanced hearing, is good at locating people moaning from the remains of fallen lean-tos and searching for people trapped inside. They stop and dig, finding bodies—some living, some dead from smoke inhalation. El Capitan works with survivors, tending wounds, making splints. As Pressia digs, pulling up the stones and rocks, she still calls for Wilda. It’s become a song, a prayer. Her voice is rough and worn.
Wilda. She shouts it so many times that it doesn’t sound like a name anymore—just two sounds locked together and echoed again and again.
They keep going, passing people who are barely hanging on. She sees a Groupie sitting on rubble—three women she vaguely recognizes. One is so badly burned she won’t make it. What will happen to the others she’s fused to? They won’t survive the death. One holds a wet rag to the victim’s lips. The third stares off.
Pressia, Bradwell, El Capitan, and Hastings help carry the dead to the mass grave. They lean into the cold wind, sweating from the work, hands starting to go numb. Sometimes one of them will walk to the edges just to recover. They breathe heavily. Sometimes they cry. But then they come back. Ready to keep going.
The Dome worshippers are broken. It’s not that they no longer believe in the Dome. It’s that the grief has swept through them. They’re vacant.
One man with a crooked leg and a face tainted with coppery flecks tells them that the dead include Special Forces. “Them bodies over there—we stripped the weapons from their ligaments. Got some of ’em to work even. But we keep the bodies covered. Can’t bear the sight.”
There are three lumps wrapped in a single dark sheet, splotched with dried blood. Pressia understands why they wouldn’t want to look at the enemy’s dead eyes staring at them.
“Young ones they’re sending down now,” the man goes on to say, “like they run out of the ones old enough to be soldiers and sent in their little brothers.”
Pressia imagines arms bulked with weapons too big for their thin frames to hold.
“Careful,” the man says. “Some still out there. Not many, but they got good eyes too.”
Pressia keeps calling for Wilda as they move through the Black Market stalls that have all been burned to nothing, the tarps, carts, and lean-tos. All the wares are charred past recognition, heaped in piles. Survivors pick through them.
Pressia hears whimpering. She walks to a pile of rocks—what used to be a homemade house—and starts digging.
“Someone’s alive here!” she shouts, and the others gather. They don’t step on the pile of rubble—too much weight. But they take the rocks from her as she lifts them up. “I hear a voice!” she says.
El Capitan and Helmud’s faces are smeared with ash. Bradwell’s face is flushed by the cold. Hastings hasn’t cried—maybe he’s programmed not to—but his face looks lost and broken.
She’s dug closer to the moan. Is she going to pull a final stone away and see Wilda? She wraps her hand around a rock, jimmies it until it gives and she can pull it loose.
And there’s a woman’s face, pale with blue lips—she gasps and then her eyes go glassy. She’s dead, but then there’s whimpering. Could this woman be one of the children’s nurses?
Pressia says, “Wilda! Wilda!” even though she knows it can’t be Wilda—can it?
El Capitan says, “Pressia,” like a warning. Maybe he knows that her heart is set on finding the girl.
And then she pulls away enough stones to see a small gray dog—it looks up at her wide-eyed, shaking. The woman protected the dog, pulling it in tight to her body. Pressia reaches down and grips the dog under its bony ribs.
She lifts the dog, rubs its ears, and as soon as she’s climbed down the rubble, the dog twists from her arms and jumps to the ground, darting off.
Her arms are empty. Her heart feels like it might heave from her chest. She sits down on the dirt.
Bradwell walks over to her. “Are you ready now?”
“What?”
“Have you seen enough?”
She feels dizzy and sick. “If I go in and find Partridge and try to figure out what’s going on in there, and I can get to the labs and start them working on the cure while you all keep looking… You just keep…looking…for Wilda and…” She feels breathless, like her throat is starting to constrict. She puts her hand on her chest.
Bradwell holds his head with both hands. “Pressia, after all we’ve seen, after all these dead bodies and destruction, you want to go in
and try to figure out what’s going on
? I think we know what’s going on! Partridge needs to be stopped. He’s worse than his father—whether he’s too weak to keep this from happening or ordered it himself.”
She shakes her head. “We have to try to talk to him. We have to try to help the children.”
“Goddamn it, Pressia!” Bradwell says. “Wilda and the other children are dead!”
The air seems to snap all around her. She blinks and it feels like an electrical pulse in her head.
Bradwell whispers, “Wilda’s dead.”
“You don’t know that,” Pressia says, but her voice is small. She looks at El Capitan. “Cap, tell him.”
El Capitan looks at the ground, and she knows he thinks they’re dead too.
She stands up and grabs El Capitan, gripping his coatsleeves. “How long have you… How long have you kept it from me? Cap, tell me. How long?”
“I never thought the chances were very good,” he says. “But when there were only more and more dead—”
“Shut up,” she says quietly.
“Pressia,” El Capitan says, “we should hear Bradwell out. He’s—”
“Shut up,” Helmud tells him.
Wilda and the children can’t be dead. They’re lost—that’s all. Pressia starts to cry and walks away from them toward an overturned market stall. Wilda is a survivor, like Pressia. If she’s dead, then some part of Pressia will die with her. “No,” she says, turning back toward the group. “You don’t know that they’re dead. You can’t give up on people.”
Bradwell shakes his head.
“Let’s just keep moving,” she says.
And they do, but soon enough there are only more dead to tend to. Bradwell, El Capitan, and Hastings haul a dead Groupie—two broad men—out of the rubble. They’re engrossed in the effort—even Helmud.
Pressia knows the only way she can truly help her people is to get the vial and the formula into the Dome. She takes one last look—El Capitan with Helmud clinging to his neck, the sooty shine of Bradwell’s wings, and Hastings hefting the bulk of the Groupie’s weight—and turns down an alley and starts walking quickly. She won’t run. It’s too much like running away. She turns down one street and then another.
The voices of men and women calling for children ring through the streets, overlapping. And children too. Lost children. Their calls not matching. The voices seem to only have grown louder, more insistent.
Wilda, Wilda, Wilda!
She can’t open her mouth and call her name. She’ll break down. Instead, the girl’s name rings in her head.
She sees a boy about twelve years old or so. It’s hard to say. Survivors are often stunted. He’s walking quickly too, though one of his legs seems fused to a knot, as if his knee joint is part metal and it has rusted up on him, locked shut. One side of his face looks freshly scalded. He doesn’t look up. When he passes, she says, “Excuse me. Can you do me a favor?”
“World doesn’t work on favors,” he says. “What you got?”
She has precious things—the vial, the formula—but they’d mean nothing to him. She reaches into her pocket, rummages. She pulls out a tin of meat. “I need a messenger.”
He eyes the tin hungrily. “What’s the message? Who’s it for?”
P
artridge storms down the hall of his apartment building, shot through with adrenaline. He’d like to punch Foresteed the same way he laid into Arvin Weed, but that wouldn’t do much good. He has to be rational with Foresteed—steady, steely, calm.
And who the hell is Arvin Weed anyway? Weed helped make the assassination possible, and yet he’s still carrying out the dead man’s wishes? But then Partridge thinks of his time in his father’s secret chamber: Is he just carrying out his dead father’s wishes too?
Beckley jogs to keep up with him. They aren’t speaking. Partridge shouts down the hall to the guard at his door. “Foresteed here?”
“Not yet,” the guard says as he fumbles to open the door for him.
Partridge and Beckley walk into the living room, where a doctor is giving a nurse instructions.
“Is Glassings here?” Partridge asks.
“Hello, Partridge,” the doctor says.
“Where is he?” Partridge says, blowing by them and walking down the hall to the bedrooms.
He hears Beckley ordering the doctor to stay put.
Partridge isn’t sure why, but he expects Glassings to have been put up in Partridge’s own bed. Then he hears a ragged cough coming from his father’s old bedroom, the door to which he’s kept closed since he arrived here after his father’s death.
He walks up to the door, puts his hand on the knob, but he doesn’t turn it. He’s frozen there, worrying for a moment if his father’s on the other side. His father still seems so alive it wouldn’t surprise Partridge to find him sitting in bed, pillows plumped behind his back, reading reports.
“Stop it,” Partridge says aloud. “He’s dead. He’s dead already.”
He turns the knob and opens the door. The room is lit by a single bedside-table lamp. Glassings jerks as if he’s expecting strangers, torture. Partridge says, “It’s just me.”
Glassings’ face is battered, his arms blackened with bruises. Both legs have now been set with casts, propped up on pillows to keep them elevated above his heart. The room smells of ointments and alcohol swabs. His breaths are shallow and sharp. He tilts his head so he can see through the puffed slits of his eyelids.
Partridge walks over to the bed and sits on the edge. It’s bizarre to see Glassings’ broken and battered body in his father’s bed, his head on his father’s pillows. “You’re going to stay with me here until you’re completely recovered.”
Glassings opens his lips and whispers, “I won’t recover.”
“Of course you will.” But Glassings doesn’t just look beaten. He looks small and sick. Partridge is worried now that Glassings is right.
“We weren’t secret,” Glassings says. “He knew who we were all along.”
“My father knew about Cygnus? About you?”
Glassings shakes his head. He coughs again, wincing with the pain in his ribs.
“Take it easy,” Partridge says. “We can talk later. You have to get feeling better.”
“No,” Glassings says, his face stricken with pain. “Now. You have to know this now.” His voice is hoarse, nearly gone.
“Okay,” Partridge says. “Who knew?”
Glassings draws in a wheezy breath. “Foresteed.”
“Foresteed knew about Cygnus?”
“He let us work. He protected us without us knowing it.”
Partridge thinks of that pill in his pocket just before he killed his father, remembers touching it with the tips of his fingers. “The pill.”
“We thought we stole it.”
“But it was easier to steal than you thought,” Partridge says, “because Foresteed wanted you to steal it, wanted you to get it to me. He wanted me to kill my father.” Partridge gets up and looks at his father’s bedroom. He feels breathless and sick. “Foresteed wanted me to kill my father. He wanted my father to die, and I did it for him.” He hears Beckley’s voice in the living room and then Foresteed’s voice too. He’s here for their meeting. A streak of heat burns across Partridge’s chest. “He had a shot at being put in charge. And then, at the last minute, my father switched the power to me.”
“He wants to take you out too,” Glassings says, reaching and grabbing Partridge’s arm, gripping it tightly for a moment before his hand sags.