Burn (23 page)
“How do you know?”
“He told me himself. He didn’t think I’d make it out alive. He thinks,” Glassings says, trying to steady his breath, “you’ll be easier to take down than your father.”
Glassings is right. Willux was a powerhouse, insulated on all sides. Partridge feels completely vulnerable. He clenches his fists and then rubs his temples. God. What the hell is he going to do?
“I failed you,” Glassings says.
“No, you didn’t.” Glassings has been a father figure for Partridge for a long time. He remembers him in a bow tie, a chaperone at the dance, and when they met under the stage in the academy’s auditorium. Partridge never had the father he wanted. “What would you do if you were me?” Partridge says. “Tell me.”
Glassings shakes his head. “My advice isn’t any good.”
“Just tell me something—anything.”
“Don’t let him know you know. Take him down when he least expects it. Play dumb.”
Partridge nods. “Considering the grades I got in World History, that shouldn’t be too hard.”
Glassings tries to smile, but his face is too constricted by swelling.
“Get some rest.” Partridge walks to the door.
“You can do this,” Glassings says.
Partridge leans his forehead against the edge of the open door for a second, trying to calm his nerves. He hears Foresteed’s booming laugh. Did the doctor say something funny? Is Foresteed laughing at his own joke? Glassings believes in Partridge. He has to remember this, hold on to it. He doesn’t have much else.
Partridge is about to walk out the door, but first he has a question. “The pill—it was designed to be time released, the poison untraceable,” Partridge says. “Someone stole it for you?”
“Yes,” Glassings says. “Someone on our side.”
“Who?”
“Arvin Weed.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
Glassings closes his eyes and shakes his head.
Was Weed helping because he’s really on the side of Cygnus or was he a mole for Foresteed? After all, someone had to have been feeding Foresteed information, and how convenient that Weed was the one to steal the pill for them. In either case, Partridge punched Weed in the face. He remembers his stupid smirk before Partridge stormed off. Was Weed leading Partridge to Glassings—to save him?—while trying to give the impression of remaining loyal to Foresteed? “Weed?” Partridge says. “Are you sure?”
“Weed,” Glassings says.
T
he smoke has thinned, but the air is, as always, sooty. Pressia hears a sharp zing and a pop near her boots—Special Forces? Sniper rifles?
She runs and crouches behind an oil drum.
A groan echoes down a nearby alleyway.
She moves to the far side of the oil drum, sees a figure limping along the alley, dragging a hand along the stone wall. It lets out another groan. She presses her back to the oil drum, aware that an oil drum is how all this started. She saw a stranger being attacked by a Groupie and distracted them by throwing her clog at an oil drum. That stranger ended up being Partridge, her half brother, which wasn’t a coincidence. They were being set up, herded toward each other, used. She can’t regret that meeting—even after all they’ve been through, even after the losses. It all feels inevitable, looking back.
As the figure comes closer to the end of the darkened alley, it pauses—afraid of the light? It moves like a wretch—an uneven gait caused by carrying some foreign weight lodged in the body, which is sometimes another body. Is it a survivor?
She looks behind her, searching the rubble around a fallen building for signs of Special Forces, who must have shot at her.
Maybe the sniper has heard the groans and now lies in wait for the Groupie or Beast to emerge. Which will attack her—the figure in the alley or Special Forces, hidden somewhere out there? A little of both?
Whatever is in the alley lifts its head as if catching her scent. It jerks toward her and leans forward into the light. She hides again behind the oil drum, wishing she had her knife.
Then she hears a strange noise—chirrups, sad and mournful. She looks again carefully, and the figure has walked into the light—fully. It’s not a Beast or a Groupie or a survivor at all.
It’s a soldier, but not a Pure—no. It’s small and, yes, young, reminding her of her conversation with the man who said these soldiers were like the little brothers of the others who’d come before. He isn’t sleek or agile. His musculature has been pumped up, but the muscles are bulky and hardened—almost calcified—making him stiff, and the strangest part is that the soldier has burns on his face. She remembers that once, not long ago, she saw a snowman in the city—it was warped and covered in the detritus of the street. It looked like a wretch. This is a Special Forces soldier, but he’s also a wretch. How is it possible? And moreover, why would they make a soldier who wasn’t Pure? Why make a soldier burdened by the deformities of the enemy?
He makes noises that are soft and almost sweet. He lifts his hands in the air, and she’s expecting to see his metallic guns, the ones fused into his arms.
But now she sees that one of his arms is a bloody stump. The other has been gutted, and the gun is gone. Has someone stripped him of his guns while he was still alive?
He chirps at her. “Help me. Help me.”
He reaches out, his arm barely there, and staggers toward her. She grips her backpack, guarding it above all else.
But just before he falls, a shot is fired by someone unseen. It strikes him squarely in the chest, and he falls hard to the ground, inches from her.
He lies there, blood pooling from his body, mixing with the dark rain puddles. His body twitches twice.
She moves closer to him while still under cover. She looks into his eyes. She wants to give him peace. “It won’t hurt for long.” He reaches, one last great effort, and grips the meat of her upper arm—pinching her skin.
He makes the strange chirping noise a few more times, and then his hold loosens. His hand falls. He’s dead.
She knows that most likely survivors stripped his weapons and that somehow he got free of them and ran off, but they’ve hunted him down and have just shot him, probably with his own rifle. They’ll approach as soon as they’re sure he’s dead.
And so she sprints to the alley to a jagged pile of bricks and hides again.
Sure enough, within moments, survivors are picking over him—they take some knifelike weapons lodged in the boots, something razor sharp from his shoulders. They work quickly and quietly. They’re experts at this now.
She rubs the sore spot where he pinched her arm, finds a small rip in her jacket and a bit of blood.
She looks up again. The survivors are gone, leaving the body behind.
Pressia can’t help but look at what’s left. The body is slumped to its side. She can see the boy’s face scarred by burns, an upper arm that’s lightly furred as if he were part Beast, and the hump on his shoulder isn’t a hump at all. It was some kind of animal that existed beneath the skin. Why beneath the skin?
This isn’t a Pure. This is a wretch. But not like any wretch she’s ever known. He’s been enhanced, and yet it’s as if, with the enhancements, he was also bred to be a wretch. Why would anyone do this? Why? Pressia remembers the awful creatures in Ireland—the fog’s heartbeat, the night baring teeth, the idea of that stitched-up skin, the blind roving eyes. How many like this one are already dead? How many are still out there?
She gets up and runs. The rain starts pounding. She hunches her shoulders, pumps her arms and legs, and pounds against the ground. Her breath burns her lungs.
She’s trying to find the shortest route to the Dome. Soon she recognizes the streets around her, this air, this smell.
These are the streets that she ran as a little girl, and finally she finds herself standing in front of the blasted husk of what was once a barbershop. Her grandfather told her about migratory birds. They know home. They always come back to it. Here she is.
Home.
T
here aren’t many uses for matches in the Dome. Fires, large and small, are frowned upon. Lyda remembers many conversations between her mother and her mother’s friends on the subject. They missed having pumpkin-scented candles in the fall. “How else will we know it’s autumn?” her mother said once. And the men missed their grills. Fireworks on the Fourth of July were replaced by an electric light show.
But Lyda wants matches. So she tells one of the guards that she wants to make a special dinner for Partridge. “I want to do it with candles and everything—to make it romantic! Can you get me candles and matches? And keep it a secret. I want to surprise him.”
The guard gives them to her, secretly, bundled in brown wrapping paper.
She winks at him.
She doesn’t care about the candles. She hides the matches in a pocket, takes them into the bathroom. She also brings a metal bowl and one of the books Chandry brought her,
How to Decorate the Perfect Nursery
. The nursery already has a crib and mattress, a rocking chair, a changing table, and a small chest of drawers, but she’s supposed to be picking out her color schemes, her motif—starfish, elephants, balloons? The book is supposed to help.
She shuts the door.
The soot here in the simulated world isn’t real. Lyda can’t feel it. She needs to feel it.
She closes the toilet lid, stands on it, disengages the smoke detector—just a little knot of wires—and turns on the fan. She sits on the tiled floor, starts ripping out the book’s pages. She pulls the matches from her pocket and burns the pages, one after the other, in the bowl.
The flames remind her of the mothers. They often cooked over open flames. They gathered around fire pits and talked in small groups, their children fused to their hips and shoulders, heads bobbing.
Her own mother? She imagines her face—stern, shut off. Her mother loved her—she’s sure of it. But it was a locked-up love, a buried-down love, a love to be ashamed of because…because that kind of love makes you vulnerable? Makes you weak? Why hasn’t her mother come to visit? Is she too ashamed of her daughter now?
Lyda misses the mothers and their fierce love.
She misses the cold, the wind, the fire.
She touches some of the ash, rubs it together until her fingertips are smudged black.
She knows what she misses most of all. Her spear—the weight of it in her hand as she ran through the woods.
She wants a spear.
It’s impossible. Where would she find something that she could make into a spear? Not here. She’d need a stick, long and straight.
But then, wait.
She stands, walks out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her, and into the nursery.
The crib—with all of its spindles.
A row of spears—if she could get them loose and whittle them with a kitchen knife. How to get them free?
She needs a hammer.
She walks into the living room, turns a circle, sees a lamp with a marble base. She picks it up and weighs it in her hand—heavy enough.
Tonight she will pull her
Baby’s Own
baby book from her bedside table and write in it:
I crave.
I crave.
I crave.
P
artridge runs his hand down the hallway wall as he makes his way to the living room. He hears Glassings’ raspy voice in his head:
Don’t let him know you know. Take him down when he least expects it. Play dumb.
Partridge was never the smart one. Sedge won all the awards in school—athletics and academics both. Partridge was the scrawny little brother with average grades. The comment section of his report card was full of euphemisms for Partridge’s disappointing efforts:
If he applied himself a little more…
How do you tell Willux that his son is inadequate?
Arvin Weed, on the other hand, was a boy genius. He wanted Partridge’s father dead? He’s on their side? Partridge isn’t sure he can trust Arvin Weed. He’s not sure who he can trust anymore.
He walks into the living room. Beckley is standing by the front door. The doctor has left, but the nurse is at the dining room table, organizing all of Glassings’ medical papers into a folder. Beckley says something to the nurse and she responds, “I’ll go check on him now,” and disappears.
Partridge finds Foresteed sitting in Willux’s favorite armchair—the one no one was ever allowed to sit in. He must have pulled it from the corner of the room, closer to the coffee table.
“That was my father’s favorite chair,” Partridge says. “It’s a beaut, isn’t it?”
Foresteed starts to get up.
“No, no,” Partridge says, “don’t get up.”
Foresteed rubs the leather on the arms. “Your father had good taste.”
Partridge sits in a less regal chair a few feet away. “How are things?” he asks.
“You called the meeting. I assumed there were issues you wanted to discuss.”
“I’ve heard about the attacks on the survivors.”
“We had reason to believe that the wretches needed to be subdued.”
“I want that to stop.”
“What?” Foresteed says, as if he’s hard of hearing.
“I want the
subduing
to end,” Partridge says slowly.
Foresteed twists in his chair and props a heel on a knee. “I’m in charge of the defense.”
“And I’m in charge of you.”
“Or so it seems.” Foresteed smiles.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Foresteed pulls a small handheld out of his pocket. He points the screen at Partridge. Partridge’s face is on the screen. He’s at the medical center at Mrs. Hollenback’s bedside. Partridge knows what comes next. Foresteed hits play, and Partridge sees a quick clip of his confession.
“What if I told you…” And there’s the pause—the moment Partridge could have chosen to stay silent, but then he says, “I’m a murderer too.”