Burn (6 page)
Lyda’s hair is growing back. She tucks just a small bit behind each ear. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she says, testing him a little. “Do you respond to all complaints this fast?”
“These orbs are special!” he says holding it up. “Don’t get many calls for them. I actually worked on the prototype for these.” Boyd is his name. It’s printed on a tag pinned to his shirt. “My first job out of the academy.”
The orb is a small electronic device that allows Lyda to change the decor of the room—even the images that appear as views from the bank of windows—so that the apartment can suddenly feel like it exists in some version of Cairo, Paris, the Canary Islands, or the Swiss Alps, and on and on—all during the Before. “You know how this thing really works?” Lyda asks.
“Sure. Yeah. The corrections should be pretty simple.” He takes the orb to the small glass-top table in the dining room, pulling out a small set of tools. “Mind if I work on it here?”
“It’s fine by me,” she says. “Do you want something to drink?”
Boyd looks up at her quickly and then away. “No—no thank you. Nice of you to offer, but no thank you.” He sits quickly, blushing, and bows his head to the orb.
He’s so flustered that Lyda wonders if he thinks she’s flirting with him, trying to seduce him. Maybe others think of her not as pitiful so much as dangerous. She prefers that.
She gets herself a glass of water and sits across from him at the table. “Tell me how it works.”
“It’s really complicated. Maybe you should watch the broadcast of the memorial service. We were all watching it at work, but then I got this urgent call, so…”
“Urgent? I don’t know about that.”
“It’s the only reason I’m missing the broadcast, which is mandatory. It’s running live in every home right now. I think you’re supposed to—”
“I don’t have to do what I’m supposed to do anymore. That’s the upside of being a social outcast.”
He jerks his head, nodding quickly. “Still, we should probably have it on. They know, you know, what’s on and what’s not. I’d just feel more comfortable with it on. I mean…you know.”
Lyda gets up and walks to the television but doesn’t turn it on. She knows what she’ll see—Partridge living a lie. He’ll be with Iralene, maybe even holding her hand. On Christmas Eve, he promised her that it would end soon, that someone was in charge of handling this so that Lyda and Partridge can emerge, together. Only a few more days, he promised a few days ago, the last time he saw her—a week tops. With the room set on Cairo and a view of moonlit pyramids out the bedroom window, he confessed that he killed his father. He wouldn’t tell her details—only that he hadn’t wanted to, but he did it. She understands that kind of thing now, having lived among the mothers and coming to understand survival on the most basic level. But still, his confession made her feel a fissure deep inside of herself. It was right, yes. She doesn’t doubt that Partridge felt like he had to do it—for survival or to right the wrongs of the past or to make change inside of the Dome possible. But it was also wrong. Even if it was noble, there’s no way around this immutable fact. And it changes a person. Partridge is different now. She felt it before he confessed to the murder, but as soon as he did, she knew it was the reason for the change—a change that’s almost imperceptible. “And Lyda,” he said to her, “something good has to come of it all. It has to.” She knew that he meant he wanted to make this wrong thing the source of something right.
And yes, everything was thrown at him when he came back into the Dome—Iralene was part of a package. It wasn’t his fault. Lyda believes him but sometimes wonders how hard he fought for her. Iralene is undeniably beautiful in a way that Lyda always wanted to be but fell short of.
“Are you going to turn it on?” Boyd asks again. But she ignores him.
She leans in close to the screen and sees her own reflection. Her face has grown just a little plump, and her lips are fuller—as if her body knows what’s coming.
There’s the humming of the air filtration system and yet it feels airless in the Dome—she feels like she can barely breathe. And she’s still nauseous sometimes. The bookshelves are stocked with books about pregnancy and childbirth. She’s not Lyda. She’s the vessel carrying a Willux.
“I can turn it on without sound, Boyd. Is that a compromise you can live with?” Partridge told her what’s said at these services for his father, and she can’t take the outpouring of adoration.
“I really think we should—”
She glares at him. She still carries the fierceness that the mothers taught her—something she’d always had but never tapped into.
“Fine,” he says. “Okay.”
She turns on the television and there’s Partridge, shaking hands, accepting condolences. A broadcaster is giving a narration of who’s standing in line, how they’ve served the Dome or their relationship with Willux. She hits mute. “Can you reprogram the orb?” she asks Boyd.
“What do you mean? Why would you want to do that?” He looks around the room, and she knows he’s searching for surveillance cameras. Partridge assured her that all recording devices were forbidden here. Still, Lyda—and surely Boyd—has doubts.
“I want you to add a world. Can you do that?”
“If the algorithms have been invented, yes. There are lots of shortcuts. It’s actually been made so that a layperson can choose between different options pretty easily. Willux wanted these to be made affordable and user-friendly for everyone. They’re still a little too expensive to just hand out like candy, but they’re getting closer. Where do you want it to take you?”
She imagines wind pushing ash, the cool shadows that she felt right at the edge of the stunted forest, and snow. God, yes—gray snow sifting from the sky. “I want out there.”
Boyd stops. His hands freeze. “Out there?” he says in a sharp breath.
She narrows her eyes, looking at him. “Yes.”
“But why?” He looks down at the orb and then glances at the television as if the faces there can see him in this room, can hear this conversation. Lyda looks too. A little boy is saluting Partridge. His beautiful hand, his perfect face—so clean and sleek, it seems almost unreal. “What’s it like out there?” Boyd asks in a hushed voice.
“Hard to explain,” Lyda says. “I didn’t really remember the Before so I was shocked by the air, how quickly it spins things. The real sun—it’s cast-over but amazing. And the moon too—like a bright bulb in the sky. The people, the Beasts and Dusts, the deformities, the grotesque… You can’t imagine what beauty there is in their lives. Everything’s dirty and real. There’s nothing fake or sterile. It’s…life. You know what I mean?”
Boyd has started crying. Two tears streak his cheeks. He doesn’t wipe them away. He says, “I remember it. I’m a little older than you so…yes. I know what you’re talking about. I used to climb trees. I even fell out of one once and snapped a bone in my hand.” He clenches his fist. “Sometimes, when I lie down at night, I remember what it was like to fall through the air and land hard on the muddy ground. I couldn’t breathe. All the wind had been knocked out of my lungs. But I just stared up at the blue sky. There were clouds—big, fat, white clouds that seemed to be moving really fast across the sky.” He shakes his head. “Goddamn it.”
Lyda walks over to the table and puts her hand on his. “I want the detonated world. I want the truth of it,” she says. “Will you make it for me? Wind, ash, dirt, dark clouds, everything burned and charred and broken.”
“I don’t know,” he says, glancing at Foresteed on the TV screen. He’s just finished his address and is stepping off the platform. “I don’t think I’m supposed to…”
“I think you’re supposed to do what I tell you to do,” Lyda says. She’s not sure if this will work. Is this repairman above her social standing because she’s ruined, or is he below her because the baby is a Willux? The hierarchies of the Dome are strict, but this is uncharted territory for her. She flattens her voice, trying to make it sound more detached, less shaky. “Do you know who I am? Do you know who’s in charge?”
Partridge is going to speak now. He’s going to give his remarks, which will end as they always do:
I hope we can all move into the future with confidence and hope.
Lyda helped him with those lines. She might have to point this out to Boyd. She walks to the television and turns up the volume.
But Partridge isn’t saying what he usually says. He’s telling the people that his father’s a mass murderer; he’s calling them sheep. No—not sheep. Audience members. He’s telling them they’re complicit. He wants them to acknowledge the truth.
How else can we move forward into the future?
Lyda’s heart starts thrumming in her chest.
We owe the survivors…ourselves. We can do better.
He’s still talking—about New Eden, being forgiven… The screen goes blank.
Lyda can barely breathe. Partridge did it. He told the truth. She’s thrilled and stunned. This is a vindication. She wants to tell the mothers and all of the wretches outside of the Dome. She wants to shout to Bradwell, Pressia, and El Capitan and Helmud,
He did it!
But, too, she’s scared. This means change—huge sweeping change. The future. She spreads one hand on her stomach. She’s started into her second month of pregnancy. She feels puffy, the first hint that her body’s going to start to swell. The future, the world their child will live in—it just shifted into a new shape.
She walks back to the table and looks at Boyd. “Did you…?” She can’t finish the sentence. She just wants to make sure that she has a witness. She hasn’t gone crazy.
Boyd says, “Yes.”
“Everything’s going to change,” she tells Boyd, though in the pit of her stomach, she isn’t sure if it will change for the better or for the worse. “Can you believe it?”
Boyd stands up. He looks uncomfortable with his height, his lanky arms. He covers his mouth with his hands and shakes his head.
“What is it, Boyd?”
He doesn’t move.
“What is it?” He’s a stranger, but still she reaches up and grabs his wrists and pulls his hands from his mouth. “Tell me.”
He closes his eyes slowly and then opens them. “It was too soon,” he whispers. “We weren’t ready.”
“We?”
He reaches into his pocket with his right hand and then shakes her hand, as if they’re just meeting. She feels the pressure of something he’s pushed into the center of her palm. She takes it, hiding it in her folded hand, and then sits down in one of the dining room chairs. She hunches over slowly, and through the glass of the tabletop, she sees a small piece of paper—an origami swan.
She looks up at Boyd. He’s one of them. He’s part of the revolutionary movement on the inside, the sleeper cells that were aligned with Partridge’s mother—those who wanted to take down the Dome. It’s as if some silent prayer has been answered. She feels connected to something larger than just her and Partridge, alone.
She closes her hand over the small paper swan. She thinks,
Too soon? We weren’t ready?
Has Partridge just made a terrible mistake? She feels shaken.
“But it’s good,” she says. “He’s going to tell them about us too. This is what he was supposed to do. He had to tell the truth.”
Boyd looks down at her hand in her pocket.
She’s scared of the swan now. She turns it over in her hands, and sees the edge of a word under one wing. She unfolds it. And there’s a message.
Glassings needs your help. Save him.
Isn’t Glassings the one who’s supposed to be helping Partridge? Partridge has been hoping to get in touch with Glassings. He needs Glassings, but now he’s going to have to save Glassings first? The network that, just moments earlier, seemed like it could help them now feels fragile.
Lyda says, “He promised me that he was going to…” tell everyone about her and the baby. He promised that they would be able to be together—publicly. But she knows that everything’s changed now. He told the truth—it was
too soon
. But was there ever going to be a good time to say what he had to say? She’s angry now and scared. What’s happened to the future?
Boyd doesn’t ask her to finish her sentence. He knows there’s nothing he’d be able to do to help.
Lyda puts the swan in her pocket. She looks at Boyd. “I’ll take care of this when I see Partridge again, but you have to do something for me in return.”
“Of course.”
“Program the orb the way I asked you to,” she says to Boyd. “Will you do that for me?”
“Yes, Ms. Mertz,” he says, “of course. I’ll do what you tell me to do. That’s my job.”
P
artridge feels the change immediately as he steps onto the street. Everything is different. The air is charged in a way he’s never felt before. The noise of muffled voices rises behind the windows of all of the apartment buildings. Most windows in the Dome are sealed shut—the buildings are temperature controlled. Why open a window ever? Frankly, it only invites people to jump, and suicide rates in the Dome are high enough.
Still, he can hear yelling and shouting—muted, yes, but it’s everywhere at once. And Partridge knows why. He’s taken away their lie—the one that allowed them to function in the world around them.
If you rob them of their lie, they’ll self-destruct
, Foresteed had warned. Was that true? Or are they angry at him? Surely, there are the sleeper cells, the Cygnus, who’ve seen the footage and are rejoicing. Some of this noise could be joyful, right?
As he rounds the corner, Beckley and the two other guards are in step, surrounding him. “Where are you going?” Beckley asks.
“I’m going to Lyda’s,” Partridge says. “I need to see her.”
“I think that might be a bad idea.”
Partridge pulls his tie through his collar. He balls it up and shoves it in the pocket of his suit jacket. “If I want your opinions, I’ll ask for them.”
They pass by Smokey’s Restaurant. Some people must have gathered there to eat brunch and watch the broadcast together. Someone spots Partridge through the window and shouts, “There he is! He’s right there!”
Partridge doesn’t like the hostile tone. He and the guards keep a fast pace, but people pour out of Smokey’s double doors and start to follow him.