Pure (21 page)

Bradwell asks Partridge, in a low voice, trying to sound calm, “How did you come across Pressia?”

“I don’t know. She said she was dodging
OSR
trucks. They were everywhere.”

“
OSR
,” Bradwell says. “Jesus. You two were sheep. You were being herded.”

“By OSR? You think they’re taking orders from the Dome? They’re not revolutionary?”

“I should have seen it. Even the Death Spree, that was planned too, probably. The teams’ chants used to herd her.” Bradwell paces, kicking rocks. “Did you think the Dome was just going to let you waltz off? They arranged all of it. Your daddy took care of everything,” Bradwell says.

“That’s not true,” he says quietly. “I was almost killed by those fan blades.”

“But you
weren’t
killed by the fan blades,” Bradwell says.

“How would they know where Pressia is? Her chip is dead,” Partridge says.

“She was wrong.”

“But what do they want with Pressia?”

“I want to see everything you’ve got,” Bradwell says. “I want to know what you know. I want what’s in your whole head. That’s all you’re worth to me, you understand?”

Partridge nods. “Okay. However I can help.”

FROM
LYDA’S
ROOM
, she can see the faces of the other girls when they peer out the small rectangular windows lodged in the upper left corners of their doors. She’s been here the longest. The other faces on this wing come and linger for a day and then they disappear—to where? Lyda doesn’t know. Relocation, that’s what the guards call it. When they bring Lyda food on compartmentalized trays, they say things about her relocation. They wonder why it’s stalled. They say almost jokingly, “Why are you still here?” It’s a mystery to them, but they aren’t allowed to ask many questions. Some of them know about her connection to Partridge. Some have even lowered their voices and asked questions about him. One asked, “What was he gonna use the knife for?”

“What knife?” she said.

The faces of girls floating, seemingly bodiless, in the rectangular windows of the other holding cells are one way to keep track of the days. A new girl will come. Then another will take her place. Sometimes they leave for therapy then return; sometimes they don’t. Their heads are shiny from being shaved, their eyes and noses puffed and raw from crying. They look at her and see something different. Someone who’s not lost but stuck. They gaze at her pleadingly. Some of the girls try to ask questions with hand gestures. But this is nearly impossible. Guards patrol and clap their small clubs on the doors. Before a language of gestures can develop, the girls disappear.

Today, though, one of the guards comes in when it’s not mealtime. She unlocks the door and says, “You’re going to occupational.”

“Occupational?” Lyda asks.

“Therapy. You’ll weave a sitting mat.”

“Okay,” Lyda says. “Do I need a sitting mat in here?”

“Does anyone
need
a sitting mat?” the guard asks, and then she smiles. “It’s a good sign,” she whispers. “Someone’s going soft on you.”

Lyda wonders if her mother pulled some strings. Is this the beginning of a real rehabilitation? Does this mean someone thinks she can be made well again, even though she was never unwell?

The hall is like another world. She takes in the tiled floor, the clean grout, the swish of the guard’s uniform in front of her, the bobbing Taser strapped to her hip, a janitorial closet with a large unplugged floor buffer.

There’s a face behind one of the small rectangular windows, a girl whose eyes are wild with fear, and then another who’s placid. Lyda categorizes them—the first one hasn’t yet gotten her meds, the second has. Lyda fakes taking her pills now. After the guard leaves, she spits them out and crushes them to dust.

The guard checks her clipboard and stops to open another door not far from Lyda’s. Inside, there’s a new girl, a face that Lyda doesn’t recognize, one who hasn’t yet appeared at her rectangular window. The girl has wide hips and a narrow waist. Her head is freshly shaved. The nicks are still raw. Lyda can tell by the girl’s eyebrows that she’s a redhead.

“Up!” the guard shouts at the redhead. “Come on.”

The girl glances at Lyda and the guard. She picks up the white head scarf in her lap, covers her head with it, tying it in the back. She follows them.

They’re led to a room with three long tables and benches. Lyda sees other girls now, their whole bodies, not just faces, which surprises her. It’s as if she’s forgotten they have bodies. She recognizes a few from the windows in the past few days. Their heads are covered with scarves too, like hers. They wear identical white jumpsuits. Why white? Lyda wonders. It so easily shows stains. And then she thinks of this as an antiquated notion; fear of stains belongs to her old life. It doesn’t exist here. It can’t. Not alongside the fear of lifelong confinement.

The girls are weaving mats just like the guard said. They have plastic strips in different colors, and they work them in and out, in checkered patterns, like children at camp.

The guard tells Lyda and the redhead to take a seat. Lyda files in next to a girl on the end, and the redhead sits across from her. The redhead starts collecting strips—only reds and whites—and weaves quickly, her head bowed to her work.

The girl next to Lyda looks up at her with deep brown eyes, as if she recognizes her, then lowers her head and gets back to weaving. Lyda doesn’t know this girl. Down the row, all the girls seem to turn quickly and glance at Lyda. Each one who looks nudges the next. It’s a chain reaction.

Lyda is famous, but these girls know more about why she’s famous than she does.

The guards have moved to one corner. They lean against the walls and talk.

Lyda glances at the guards and picks up a handful of plastic strips. Her fingers fiddle nervously. Everything is quiet for a while until the girl beside Lyda whispers, “You’re still here.”

Does she mean in the community craft room or the asylum? Lyda doesn’t respond. Why would she? Of course she’s still here, either way.

“Everyone thought they’d have taken you out by now.”

“Out?”

“Force you to give information.”

“I don’t have any.”

The girl looks at her, disbelieving.

“Do they know where he went? What happened?” Lyda asks.

“You should know.”

“I don’t.”

The girl laughs.

Lyda decides to ignore the laughter. The redhead has started humming as she works, a little nursery song that Lyda’s mother used to sing to her, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” It’s the awful kind of song that, once it gets in your head, can stick with you, especially back in solitary confinement. It could make you insane. The redhead’s afflicted with the song, Lyda thinks. She hopes it isn’t catching. The redhead stops humming for a minute and looks at Lyda as if she wants to tell her something, but doesn’t dare. She starts humming again.

Lyda hates the redhead a little now. She turns back to the one with brown eyes who laughed at her. “What’s so funny?” she asks.

“You don’t know, do you?”

Lyda shakes her head.

“They say he went all the way out.”

“All the way where?”

“Out of the Dome.”

She keeps weaving. Out? Why would he go out? Why would anyone go out? The survivors on the outside are evil, deranged. They’re vicious, deformed, no longer truly human. She’s heard a hundred dark and awful tales of the girls who survived, the ones who kept some part of their humanity only to be raped or eaten alive. What would they do to Partridge? Gut him, boil him, feed on him.

She can barely breathe. She looks at the faces all hovering over their sitting mats. One girl looks at her. She’s pale and smiley. Lyda wonders if she’s taking medications that make her smile. Why else would anyone smile in here?

The redhead taps her sitting mat on the table, humming away, and stares at Lyda, as if she wants her attention or maybe even her approval. It’s a simple white sitting mat with a red stripe down the middle. She looks at Lyda searchingly, as if to say
See? See what I made?

The girl next to Lyda with the deep brown eyes whispers, “He’s probably already dead. Who could survive out there? He was still just an academy boy. My boyfriend said he wasn’t even through coding.”

Partridge. She feels like he’s stepped off the planet. But dead? She still believes that she’d know if he were dead. She would feel dead inside. She doesn’t. She thinks of the way he held her waist when they danced, that kiss, and her stomach flips again as it always does when she thinks of him. It wouldn’t happen if he were dead. She’d feel dread, grief. But she still feels hopeful. “He could do it,” Lyda whispers. “He could survive.”

The girl laughs again.

“Shut up!” Lyda whispers harshly at her, and she turns on the redhead and says it to her too: “Shut up!”

The redhead freezes.

The other girls look up.

The guards eye the table. “Work, ladies!” one of them says. “It’s good for you! Keep at it.”

Lyda looks at the colored strips. They blur and jump in her vision. She starts to cry, but backhands the tears. She doesn’t want anyone to see. Keep at it, she thinks to herself. Keep at it.

IT’S
NOT
THE
WAY
PRESSIA
THOUGHT
it would be. It’s more like an old hospital than a military base. The air smells antiseptic, too clean. Almost bleached. There are five cots in this room, and the kids lying on them don’t shift. They don’t move. But they aren’t asleep either. They’re wearing green uniforms, starched, waiting. One has a stiff hand covered in red aluminum. Another’s head is mangled with stone. Yet another is hidden under a blanket. Pressia knows that she’s none too pretty either—her scarred face, her fused doll-head fist. She still has the duct tape on her mouth, her hands tied behind her back, and she’s in street clothes, so they know she’s new. If she could, she thinks she might ask them what they’re waiting for, but then would she really want to know?

She tries to be still like them. She tries to imagine what happened after Bradwell and Partridge figured out she was gone. She wants to believe that they’d join forces and come after her, try to free her. But she knows this isn’t possible. Neither of them really even knows her. Partridge ran into her by accident; he has a mission of his own. She looks back and wonders if Bradwell liked her at all or if he only ever saw a type. It doesn’t matter anyway. The last thing he really had to say was that he had survived because he didn’t get involved with other people’s lives. Would she have tried to save him if the roles were reversed? She doesn’t have to think about it for long—she would. The world, as awful as it is, seems like it’s better off with Bradwell in it. He’s charged from within, lit up, ready to fight, and even if he’s not going to fight for her, he has energy that they all need here on the outside.

She thinks of his double scars and the angry flutter of birds on his back. She misses him. It’s a sudden, sharp ache in her chest. She can’t deny it; she wants him to miss her too, and to fight to find her. She hates the feeling in her chest, wishes it would go away, but it doesn’t subside. She’ll have to haul this ache around with her, an awful realization. The truth is that he isn’t coming for her, and Bradwell and Partridge hate each other too much to stick together anyway. Without her, they likely said their good-byes quickly and went their separate ways. She’s on her own now.

The hard cot is tightly made, which makes Pressia think there’s a nurse lurking somewhere. Pressia has imagined hospitals like the one she was born in—one where she could get an operation to free her hand and her grandfather could get the fan removed from his throat. She imagines herself and her grandfather in side-by-side hospital beds on plumped pillows.

Lying on her side, she can pick at the wool blanket with her hand behind her back, but can’t do much else. Sometimes she thinks of God and tries to pray to Saint Wi, but it won’t take root. The prayer just rolls away from her.

The lights flicker.

There’s a round of gunfire outside.

The guard walks by the door and stares inside. She holds a rifle in her arms, cradles it really like she’s pacing the halls to get a baby back to sleep, like there’s a maternity ward somewhere. She wears the regulation green
OSR
uniform, complete with an armband with a claw.

Pressia will have to explain herself at some point. She knows
OSR
doesn’t like the ones who don’t hand themselves over, whom they have to hunt down and capture. But her resistance has to prove something at least, that she’s tough in some way. Pressia thinks she can explain that she would have turned herself in, but she has to take care of her grandfather. That’s a sign of loyalty. They want loyalty. She has to say whatever she can to stay alive.

But she’s seen
OSR
drag people from their homes, wrestle them into the backs of trucks in front of children, in front of whole families. She’s seen them shoot people dead in the streets. She wonders how Fandra died but stops herself. She has to forget this.

The guard walks in through the door. The faces all turn to her, stricken, dazed. Is this what they’re waiting for? The guard isn’t cradling the rifle anymore. She’s pointing it at Pressia.

“Pressia Belze?” she says.

Pressia would sit up and say yes but she can’t. Tape over her mouth, she nods, lying there on her side, curled like a shrimp.

The guard walks over and yanks her upper arm, pulling her to her feet. She follows the guard out of the room, but glances back at the other kids. None of them will look her in the eye, except one. Pressia can see now that he’s a real cripple—one of his pant legs is empty. There’s nothing there, and she knows he won’t make it, not as a soldier and maybe not even as a live target. Even if these are the remains of some hospital, it’s not one anymore, and maybe they use the bleach to cover up the smell of death. Pressia tries to smile at the cripple, to offer some small kindness, but her mouth is taped shut so the cripple won’t ever know.