Pure (41 page)

“You were an academy boy. You became Special Forces. This is what they turned you into?” She thinks of the small, elite corps. This can’t be what was done to them. It would be impossibly cruel. She lifts her hand. She touches one of the guns. She can see the place in his arm where the metal meets the folds of his skin.

He doesn’t say a word, doesn’t move. His eyes simply shift to her face.

“What about your family? Do they know you’re here?”

“I was,” he says again. “And now I’m not.”

PRESSIA
FEELS
LOST
. The dust swirls around the car. The barren landscape stretches on before them. East. What was once a national preserve. That’s all they have. And that might not even be a real clue. It might mean nothing. She says, “Smoke signals would help.”

Bradwell looks at her sharply. “You’re right,” he says as if he’s been thinking along the same lines. “The Dome would see smoke signals, though, but we need something like it.”

“Recite it all again,” Pressia says to Partridge. “The birthday card. Take it from the top. El Capitan hasn’t heard it yet.”

“It’s useless,” Partridge says. “There’s nothing out here. There’s nothing farther east but a hill and beyond that more dead barren nothingness. What are we doing out here, except risking our lives?”

“Recite it again,” Bradwell says.

Partridge sighs. “
Always walk in the light. Follow your soul. May it have wings. You are my guiding star, like the one that rose in the east and guided the Wise Men. Happy 9th Birthday, Partridge! Love, Mom.
Ta da!”

“
Always walk in the light
,” El Capitan says.

“The light,” Helmud says.

“I’ve got nothing,” El Capitan says.

“Nothing,” Helmud says.

Pressia unclasps the necklace, pain slicing through the back of her neck. She stares at it in her palm, its blue jewel of an eye. She puts it up to one of her own eyes and squints through it, tinging the desolate land blue. She says, “How did 3-D glasses work? You know, the ones in the movie theaters that the people wore while eating from little paper buckets?”

“There were different kinds,” Bradwell says. “Some used two different-colored lenses, one red and one blue, which made sense of a film that really had two images running at the same time. Other glasses were polarized, horizontal and vertical images being worked out by the lenses.”

“Could someone send a light message that only people looking through a certain lens could see?” Pressia asks, musing aloud.

“In the Dome, there was this kid named Arvin Weed who sent messages to the girls’ dorm shining a laser pen on the grass lawn of the commons,” Partridge says, tapping the window with his knuckle, gazing off as if he’s trying to picture the grass lawn now. “Some said he was trying to invent a type of laser that only his girlfriend could see.”

“So if you want to be found and you can’t use smoke signals,” Pressia says, “you might use a kind of light that can only be seen through a certain lens.”

Bradwell says, “What do you know about photons, Partridge? Infrared or UV? Do they teach a lot of science in the Dome?”

“I wasn’t the best student,” he says. “We have ways of detecting these kinds of light pretty simply. But Weed’s right. There are other levels of light. He could send a beam right at his girlfriend—from his window to hers—and she could see it through a lens that only sees different frequencies of light out of our visual range. You know, two sixty-two, three forty-nine, three seventy-five.” Pressia and Bradwell exchange a glance. No, neither of them knows this kind of thing. Pressia sees a twinge in Bradwell’s face. She thinks of how much he loves to know things. They’ve both been robbed of an education that Partridge has taken for granted. Partridge doesn’t notice. He goes on, “And they could need a lens to be detected. The beams would also have to be directed right at the person looking through that lens, right? Because lasers don’t scatter light.”

“It’s like how dogs can hear whistles that are out of our hearing range,” Bradwell says.

“I guess so,” Partridge says. “I never had a dog.”

“Light can exist on a spectrum that can be seen only through one kind of filter? Is that right?” Pressia says.

“Exactly,” Partridge says.

Pressia feels a shiver run through her body. She holds the swan’s blue eye to hers again. The landscape swims in front of her again, awash in blue light. “What if this isn’t just the blue eye of a swan. What if it’s our lens, our filter.”

“
Always walk in the light
,” Bradwell says.

Pressia looks at the hills before them, and sweeps back and forth. She passes a small glinting white light, stops, and returns to it. The light sits like a beacon, like a star on top of a Christmas tree during the Before.

“What is it?” Bradwell asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “A small white light.” Pressia readjusts her view and sees another white light, flickering on top of another distant tree on the hillside. “Could it be her?” If this is the work of her mother, then it’s the first real thing Pressia has ever known of her—on her own, without stories and photographs, and the murky past. Her mother is a flickering white light pulsing in trees.

“Aribelle Cording Willux,” Bradwell says again, like the last time, a little awed and mystified.

“Can I look?” Partridge asks.

Pressia hands him the gem.

Partridge pulls himself to the middle of the backseat, up to the edge. He lowers his head and squints through the gem. “It’s just a cloudy blue haze.”

“Keep looking,” she says. She isn’t crazy. She saw the light. It was there, flashing.

And then he sees it too. Pressia knows he does. “Wait,” he says. “It’s straight ahead.”

“If this is it, then once we’re closer, we won’t have the vantage point for it to lead us,” Bradwell says. “We’ll have to find some focus to keep us on the right trail.”

“We’ve gotten this far,” Partridge says.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” El Capitan says.

Helmud has a slack jaw but his hands still move nervously behind his brother’s back. There’s something in his eyes that makes Pressia wonder if he’s smarter than he looks. “Lucky,” Helmud says.

EL
CAPITAN
PARKS
THE
CAR
in vines at the foot of the hills. He covers it as well as he can with clumps of plants he pulls from the earth, roots and all. He tells them which plants not to touch. “The one with the spikes on the tips of the three-pronged leaves, they’re acidic. Coated in a thin film of it. They’ll blister you.” He points out a clutch of white flowering mushrooms. “Those are infectious. If you step on them and break them open, they’ll send out spores.” One group, he tells them, was part animal. “Vertebrate,” he says. “They have berries that lure animals that they can choke and eat.”

Pressia walks directly behind Partridge, who walks behind El Capitan, avoiding the most poisonous plants.

Bradwell insists on walking behind everyone, “to keep watch,” but Pressia wonders if he’s worried about her. She remembers the feel of his hand on her neck before he cut out the chip and the gentle touch of his finger on her wrist scar. And his eyes, the gold flecks. Where had they come from? It was as if they’d suddenly appeared. Beauty, you can find it here if you look hard enough. Every once in a while, in a quick shot, she’ll remember how he looked at her, taking in her entire face. The thought of it makes her nervous, the same feeling as having a secret you hope no one ever finds out about.

They’re in the brush, tromping uphill over thorny brambles and spiked vines, trying to stay true to the direction of the white light. Pressia feels unsteady, as if she has the legs of a newborn colt. The ground is unpredictably loose with gravel. She can hear the light noise of their blades tinking against one another as they walk. El Capitan huffs, and Helmud sometimes makes small noises on his back—little clicks and murmurs. Each of them loses their footing from time to time. The wind is stiff and cold. It helps to keep her alert. At their backs, the Deadlands writhe.

She’s aware of her body more keenly now. Her vision is still a little milky, her hearing dimmed. Her head and neck wounds throb.

If she finds her mother, won’t that mark her death? If they somehow get her mother to a safe place and don’t hand her over to the Dome, they’ll become targets, all of them. And if they fail and Special Forces gets hold of their mother first, Pressia will no longer be of use and she’ll be killed.

She feels a well of dread in her stomach. She should be happy that there’s a chance her mother is alive in a bunker in the hills. But if that’s the case, why didn’t she come for Pressia? The bunker isn’t halfway around the world. It’s right here. Why not leave the bunker and search for her daughter and bring her back? What if the answer is simple:
It was never worth the risk
? What if the answer is:
I didn’t love you enough
?

Partridge stops so abruptly that she almost runs into his back. “Wait,” he says.

They all stop and fall silent.

“I hear something.”

It’s a faint hum. The humming grows louder.

A hazy golden cloud descends upon them through the trees, and then suddenly there are wings beating around their heads. El Capitan bats the air. Pressia strikes what seems to be a swarm of large bees with heavily armored shells, like beetles. The hum fills her head, her chest. It vibrates through the surrounding trees. The insects are like a hive spinning around her head. Partridge smacks a few. They fall to the brambles.

But then she sees one of them—just one, stalled on the ground. It looks like Freedle, except not rusty and mottled. She picks it up in her hand, cupping it so it doesn’t fly away. She knows this sensation immediately. A fat shiny insect crawling on her palm. Its wings fold in close to its body, like a cicada except that it’s made of filigree metal, light and ornate. It has fine wire ribs and gears that churn slowly, a wasp’s stinger—a golden needle like a tail—and small eyes on the sides of the head. “Wait. These are good,” she says. The insect then lets out a familiar click and purr.

“How do you know?” Partridge asks.

“I’ve had one of these as a pet almost all my life.”

“Where did yours come from?” Bradwell asks.

“I don’t know. It was just always there.”

“The birthday card,” Partridge says. “
Follow your soul. May it have wings.
”

“Do you think she sent them?” Pressia asks.

“If she did, then she knows we’re coming,” Bradwell says. “It’s not possible.”

“How else will we know exactly where to go from here on the ground in the hills? They’re here to lead us the rest of the way,” Partridge says. “It’s part of the plan. It’s just been a very long time coming.”

“But anyone could have found that necklace and held it up,” Bradwell says. “These insects could be leading the enemy to her.”

The cicada twitches in Pressia’s palm. She bends closer, opens her hand just enough so that she can see through the slits between her fingers.

Its gears speed up. It cocks its head. And one of its eyes flashes a beam of light into her left eye. She blinks. Her eyes tear. The locust tries again.

“A mechanical insect with a retinal scan,” Partridge says.

“It’s old world,” Bradwell says. “But it doesn’t seem to recognize Pressia’s retinas.”

Pressia hands it to Partridge. “You try it. If she sent it, it will recognize you.”

A bead in the center of the insect’s chest flickers. Its wings flutter.

“It knows who you are,” Bradwell says.

The locust starts beating its wings.

Partridge flattens his palm and raises it up. “Let’s see where it goes.”

If these insects were sent by her mother, was Freedle a gift from her?

The insect, now aglow, flits into the air, dipping through limbs.

THE
LOCUSTS
HAVE
ALL
SCATTERED
EXCEPT
for the one that did the retinal scans. It’s a strange sensation, to be known for your retinas. Partridge assumes that his mother set this up before the Detonations, that she planned ahead and had his retinas recorded. How else? The specificity of her plan unnerves him. If she could do so much to prepare, why couldn’t she have kept the family together? He wants to know what happened in the final days.

But her plan also feels scattered, buckshot. There were so many places they could have lost the trail that he wonders if his mother ever really believed that he would put all these riddles together. In his childhood, weren’t there some presents he couldn’t find without her help with the riddle she’d concocted for him? He supposes that the plan took shape out of desperation. She worked with what she had under constraints he couldn’t imagine.

The insect is up ahead, flying quickly through the trees, much faster than they are. It’s strange to see someone as gruff as El Capitan following a dainty winged bug, as if he’s a butterfly collector.

Bradwell, Pressia, El Capitan and his brother—these are his friends now, his own herd. He thinks of the herd of academy boys as he last saw them, saying their good-byes in the coding center. Vic Wellingsly, Algrin Firth, the Elmsford twins—broad shouldered, low-voiced. They shoved each other around and went their separate ways. Partridge misses Hastings all of a sudden. Did he ever have lunch with Arvin Weed like Partridge told him to? Or did he try to join the herd? Have any of them thought much of Partridge since? He wonders what story they’ve been fed about his disappearance. Maybe they think he had a ticker put in and someone flipped the switch to put him out of his misery, just like they said.

El Capitan stops up ahead. He holds up one finger and points into the woods. Everyone freezes and looks. Partridge squints into the shadows. He sees a very quick shifting of light. A limb bobs. Leaves rustle. But no one is there.

“It’s them,” El Capitan says. “Special Forces. That’s how they communicate with each other. Feel the electricity? It’s like echolocation.”