Burn (8 page)

He looks at the paper taped to the wall beside the picture. It’s a letter. It reads,

To my beautiful wife,

I remember you in this moment. Was I there? Do I only have a memory of looking at this photograph? Our lives are layered like this. I miss you still. I miss you always. You’re mine. Don’t forget that. Mine.

Ellery

Partridge moves to the next sheet of paper.

To my beautiful wife…

And the next:
To my beautiful wife
…

And then he finds one that begins,

Dear Sedge,

What happened? Why did you turn away from me? Why…

Did Sedge ever turn away from his father?

Partridge,

Look at how young you once were. You used to shout and sing when I came in the door, and now you’re grown. An Academy Boy…

His father’s brain was affected by the enhancements. It was deteriorating, and he was willing to sacrifice his own son to be able to live on. Partridge whispers through his dry lips, “My father was insane.”

Partridge reaches up and grabs the letter. He balls it in his fist. His father was writing letters to them all this time? He was making a walk-in photo album, a display. And he kept it to himself all these years.

Partridge pulls loose a photograph of himself at five on a bike, of Sedge in his ice hockey gear, of his mother and father dressed for a formal occasion.

His love and hate for his father churns within him. Who was Ellery Willux? Did he love them after all? Is this place proof that he couldn’t show it?

Partridge lunges at the wall and tears down as many photographs and letters as he can. They fall to the floor. He drags his hands down the walls, ripping one swatch and then the next. His chest contracts. He feels like his heart is clenched, and his breath is suddenly shallow. He holds his fist to his chest. “Damn it,” he says.

And he staggers to the only chair in the chamber, the one behind his father’s desk. He sits down heavily and slowly looks around the room. This is everything he ever wanted from his father. Some show of his love. Some gesture of affection. And all along he was building
this
?

He hears a knock on the door.

“I told you to wait in the hall!” he shouts, then tries to catch his breath. Is he having a heart attack? Jesus, is his father trying to kill him with this shit?

“It’s me. Lyda.”

Lyda. He pushes himself up from the chair and moves to the door. He turns the knob and, as before, the door opens automatically.

There she is. He takes her in for a moment—her face, her lashes, her parted lips.

“You told the truth,” she says, astonished.

For a second, he’s not sure what she’s talking about—saying all those things at the service feels like it happened a long time ago. “I was hoping you were out there, watching.” He pulls her in close. He smells the lavender scent of her perfume. “I told them to bring you here. I had to see you,” he says. “Come in here with me.”

“What is this place?”

He puts his hand on the small of her back and guides her into the chamber. She looks around at the floor littered with photos and letters, and at the walls splotched with tape. “Partridge,” she says, “was this your father’s room?”

“His secret chamber.” He’s relieved that she’s here. She’s like an antidote to his father’s lonesome madness. She brings sanity to this room. He can focus on her and let the rest of it all blur behind her.

“Why did he do this to you?”

“To me?” Partridge asks. “What do you mean,
to me
?”

She looks up at him, surprised. He can tell that she’s holding back. She doesn’t want to say something that will hurt him. She’s not good at hiding it.

And then it hits him, and he looks around the room again—this time seeing it the way she sees it. Is this all for show? His father must have worked on this for years—long before he’d planned to use Partridge’s body to move on. Is this room some kind of prank? Are all of these photos and stupid letters an attempt to wrench Partridge’s heart? Or maybe it was originally designed to mess with Sedge. He was the rightful heir.

Is this all fake? A ploy to garner sympathy? A final power grab at love?

“Do you think he’s messing with me still?”

She walks to Willux’s desk with its shiny surface. She circles behind it and pulls out his chair.

“Don’t,” Partridge says.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…”

“What?”

“This room. It feels like it’s filled with contagion. Don’t you feel him in here? His presence? It’s like he’s not dead. Not in here, at least. He fills up the room, the air.” Partridge wonders if the contagion he feels is his own toxic guilt. He looks at the faces of his family staring up at him accusingly. He was once a baby; now he’s a murderer.

“This room is yours now,” she says.

“What if I don’t want it?”

She walks toward Partridge, kneels down, and picks up another picture of him as a baby. In this one, Partridge is wearing a cap. His face is a bright pink. And it’s his father who’s holding him. “You were a pretty baby,” she says. She stands up and hands it to him. He stares at it for a minute. And in an unexpected rush of longing, he wants to go back. He wants to be that baby again. He wants to do it all over.

But he can’t let his father get to him. He was led here, and he’ll use this room for his own end. He’ll use his father’s secrets against him, try to undo what his father’s done.

He hands the picture back to Lyda, walks to his father’s desk, and says, “What else does he have hidden in here?” He won’t sit in his father’s chair again. He pushes it back from the desk and then presses his hands flat against the glossy surface. Suddenly the desk lights up.

Before him is a map of the world, dotted with blue lights, each of them pulsing except for one—located on the map where the Dome stands. It glows.

“What the hell?” Partridge whispers.

Lyda walks up and stands beside him. “It’s the world and that’s us.”

“Yeah,” he says. “So the question is what do all the blinking lights represent?”

“
What
do they represent, or
who
?” Lyda says quietly.

Partridge’s skin feels suddenly chilled. “These could be other places that were spared. Could it mean that there are other survivors out there?”

“Touch one,” she says.

Partridge thinks of Pressia’s father, Hideki Imanaka. He was one of the Seven. One of the tattoos still pulsing on his mother’s chest before she died was proof that he was still alive. Maybe this is one way to find him. One of the flashing lights is on the island of Japan. Partridge reaches out and touches it.

Static rises up from unseen speakers, and then a voice. “Partridge.” It’s his father’s voice, and for a second, he thinks that his father’s still alive, that the murder wasn’t a success. He looks at the door to the chamber, but it’s closed. Lyda reaches out and grabs his hand. Is his father back from the dead? Is he unkillable? “My son,” his father says.

“No.” Partridge feels dizzy. He grips the edges of the desk and sits in his father’s chair.

His father’s voice goes on: “Your fingerprint—that tiny swirl that’s been there since birth. You found this room, this map, my world. You unlocked my voice with a single touch. And this means only one thing: You’re alive and I’m dead.”

“Lyda,” Partridge whispers. “I can’t listen to this.”

She grabs his arm. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “We have to.”

“With that touch, a message has now gone out to all the others that I’m gone and you’re in charge. Did you really think I was content with just one little Dome to take care of?”

Partridge wants to press the heels of his palms over his ears, but he can’t move. He can barely breathe. He killed his father, and his father’s still here.

“Open the top desk drawer. There, you’ll find a list of my enemies—now they’re yours. You’ll find out the truth that I’ve hidden from everyone—even you. You’ll find the simple, honest irony of everything I’ve tried to accomplish. Hopefully you’ll understand the fragility of what you’ve inherited. You might hate me. I understand. I hated my parents too. This is the way of the world. I saw the end, Partridge, and I was trying to save you from it. Believe what you want, but this is what fathers do.” His father pauses then. Did Willux see his own end in sight? What end? “One more thing,” his father says. Is he going to sign off by telling Partridge he loves him? What does Partridge really want from the dead man?

His father lowers his voice and says, “A question. Is there blood on that fingerprint now?”

There’s another brief burst of static and his father’s voice is gone.

It’s silent. He stares across the map with its blue lights. His breath feels high and tight in his throat. He flips over his hands and looks at his fingertips—the tiny intricate swirls that are his and his alone. His father knew that if Partridge was listening to this recording then he probably killed his father.

Lyda whispers, “He knew you’d do it.”

“Don’t,” Partridge says.

“He’s still in power.” Her voice is cold, or maybe fearful.

He lifts his head and turns to look at her. “No,” Partridge says. “I killed him.”

Lyda’s face looks pale and stiff. “He’s still…” She pulls her hands up to her throat, tightening her fists. He stands up and she backs away. “It’s changed you, Partridge. Part of your father knew you’d do it, knew you were capable of killing him, and it’s changed you deep down.” She backs against a wall, the photographs rattling.

“What else could I do? Let him kill me?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head angrily. “It’s just…”

“Just what?” He remembers the feeling he had just after he’d done it. His hands went numb. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t think. His heart was pounding, though, like it was the only thing left. And he feels that now because Lyda’s never been afraid of him like this, and he can read it on her face so clearly. “Lyda,” he whispers.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s another secret. We grew up with all of these secrets and lies. How can we keep living this life, Partridge? I don’t know if I can…” She takes a deep breath, quickly touching her stomach. The baby. The future.

“Without you, I’ll be alone in this,” he says. “Don’t turn your back on me.”

“I’m not.” She glances around as if adding,
I have nowhere else to go
. But then she reaches into her coat pocket. “We’re not completely alone.” She pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He walks to her and she hands it to him. “They’re here—the sleeper cells: Cygnus, the swan.”

It’s an origami swan. “They made contact with you?”

“Read it.”

Partridge unfolds a wing and reads
Glassings needs your help. Save him.
“Who gave this to you?”

“The tech who came to fix the orb.”

“Save Glassings from what? Where the hell is he?” he says.

“This is all I’ve got.” She sighs and then rubs her eyes. “Are you going to open the drawer?”

“What?”

“I think you should do it.”

“I watched my father all my life, you know—how people looked at him and how he was spoken to. I didn’t mean to, but I took it all in, and I think, on some level, I must have thought my father’s life would one day be mine. I mean, he was my father.” He stops abruptly. He draws in a sharp breath. He’s worried that he’s going to cry. “It’s not just that I killed him, Lyda. It’s not just that I’m a murderer.” He rubs his thumb against his fingertips, thinking of his father talking about blood on his fingerprint. “It’s that I’m afraid I’ll become him.”

“Open the drawer,” Lyda says.

Partridge isn’t going to argue with her—not now. He puts a finger on the blue lit square on the top desk drawer. It glides open, revealing a stack of folders.

He picks up the top folder and drops it on the desk. Just like his father said, its label reads
ENEMIES
. He opens it up. It’s filled with people’s pictures, each with a page of data—suspicious activity, family, friends, affiliations.

Partridge flips through the stack, and Lyda walks over, close enough to see the faces. He stops when he comes to Bradwell. Lyda gasps, and he knows it’s because she recognizes the background too—the woods where his mother and brother were killed. The picture is of Bradwell shouting, the cords of his neck taut; he’s caught mid-action, and Partridge realizes that this picture was taken from a video stream of one of the Special Forces soldiers who attacked them. This picture was taken minutes before his father killed Sedge and their mother.

“Go on,” Lyda urges. “Who else is there?”

He turns to the next photo, and there’s a picture of El Capitan and Helmud from that same place on that same day. He closes the folder and shoves it back in the drawer. “These aren’t my enemies,” Partridge says. It’s a relief. His father was wrong.

There’s another folder. He reaches in and pulls it out.

NEW EDEN
.

He opens it and skims plans—handwritten in his father’s loose scrawl—to enslave the wretches as a subhuman class to serve the Pures once the earth is habitable again. “New Slavery for a New Eden,” Partridge says, his stomach twisting. He shuts it.

The next folder is called
REVERSAL
. His father usually goes for more symbolic references, so this practical word makes him nervous. He flips it open so he and Lyda both can read together.

First there’s an official report from a team of scientists and doctors. The list of names at the top of the report is lengthy, but the name Arvin Weed pops out at him. He points to it. “Look.”

“I saw it too,” Lyda says.

From the samples collected and the incubation of those samples in a simulated environment, our specimens did poorly overall. Of the twenty, twelve died within the first ten days. Four contracted cancerous tumors that took root almost immediately and seemed to thrive in their healthy tissues. Two of these four were cured of the cancers but died from more growths within the year. The four survivors—one male and three female—have fared poorly overall. Two are sterile. The male has contracted an eye disease, rendering him blind. He and one female have asthma and compromised lungs. We do not expect them to be able to rejoin the general population within the Dome. The male is in a critical-care unit, and the female suffers mental problems and is currently in solitary confinement in the rehabilitation center. The other two are being studied and evaluated. They have been released back into the public with their memories of this study erased.