Burn
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For David Scott.
Sometimes all I want to do is lie down—blur-blind, life-weary—and survive with you.
H
e knows the ending. He can see it almost as clearly as he saw the beginning.
“Start there,” he whispers into the wind. His wings are bulky. The quills ruffle; some drag behind him. He has to tighten his wings against the wind as he walks through the stubble fields toward the stone cliff. He wants to go backward, to tunnel and dig to the little boy he once was.
This is what he’s never told anyone.
He didn’t sleep through his parents’ murders; he willed himself to believe he did.
After the men broke into his house, he was woken up by a scuffle, his mother crying out, probably just before she and his father were shot. Bradwell had been warned about people breaking into the house. He scrambled from bed and hid under it.
He saw a set of boots in the inch between the bed skirt and the floor. They stalled beside his bed, and then one of the killers—his would-be killer—knelt, lifted the bed skirt, and for a moment, they were face-to-face.
Bradwell didn’t move, didn’t breathe. The man’s face was long and angular with a slightly crooked jaw. He had blue eyes.
Finally, without a word, he dropped the skirt.
He said to the other man with him, “The boy must be at a sleepover.”
“You checked the room?”
“I checked the goddamn room.”
He listened to them leave and then still didn’t get up. He pretended to sleep, still there under the bed. He pretended to dream. And then he opened his eyes and this is the part that he has confessed: He walked down into the kitchen as if it were any other morning; that might have been all his brain could handle. When his parents weren’t making breakfast, he called for them, and only then did he start to panic. Finally, he found their bodies still in their bed.
He could have run toward his mother’s cry, but instead he hid. He told Pressia that he’d slept through the murders, and he’s wanted to believe that to be the truth. In reality, that day was the first time he should have died, but far from the last. The fact that he’s alive is accidental.
He climbs the stones and walks to the edge of the cliff. It’s dark but the moon is bright. He spreads his wings wide and leans into the wind. For a moment, he thinks the wind will go slack, and he’ll fall forward and fly.
But he doesn’t have wings that will hold him.
Flying. That’s not the ending.
The ending is in ash and dust.
He was meant to be a martyr, alongside his parents.
He’s borrowed this time with his brothers—El Capitan and Helmud. He was never meant to be in love or to have someone love him—Pressia. When he thinks of her, it’s as if his heart has been kicked clean out of his chest. He could have died with her on a frozen forest floor. He could have died bound to his brothers, their blood mixing together. But neither of those was the end.
Here, on the cliff, he sees the end: He’s lying on the ground amid the ash and dust of his homeland and his chest is ripped open. The truth lifts from his body like a long white unfurling ribbon, flecked with his blood.
How will it happen? When?
He only knows that it’s not far off.
With the wind cutting through his wings, he feels like he’s careening toward it—or is the end rushing to meet him? This time he won’t hide. This time he’ll run toward the cry.
T
he door to Pressia’s room is locked. The caretakers come and go with rings of keys, jingling—how many rooms are there? Where’s Bradwell? Helmud and El Capitan? Where are her things—the vial, the formula?
The caretakers never answer her questions. They tell her to get well. “I’m not sick.” They tell her to rest. “I can’t sleep.” They smile and nod and point out the alarms attached to each of the walls in her room. “Push here if there’s an emergency.” The caretakers wear necklaces with emergency buttons attached to them too. But she doesn’t know what kind of emergency to expect. When she asks, they say, “Just in case…”
“In case of what?”
They won’t say.
Each day is the same. Too many days to count; weeks have passed—almost a month now?
The caretakers are all women and golden, each of them, almost glowing. Is it the firelight? Is it that so many of them are pregnant—don’t pregnant women glow? Is it some inner radiance? Most of them have bellies that bloom out from their hips. Engorged.
But it’s not just the caretakers who are golden. The children out in the field are too. They’re sent out at different intervals throughout the day to play. They have sticks and balls and nets on poles dug into the cold ground. Golden, all of them, as if steeped in something slightly metallic, and no fusings or scars or marks. Just skin. The alarms bob on the chests of their coats.
The caretakers bring Pressia trays of food: warm broths, porridges, tall glasses of cold milk—white, white milk, not a dot of ash stirring within it. The ash eaters are everywhere, skittering across spoons, along the edge of the metal bathtub, on the windowpanes, both inside and out. Beetle-backed and lightly iridescent, they seem to work night and day, resistant to cold.
One caretaker told her that they’ve been bred into existence to use their delicate arms to shovel ash into their tiny mouths,
to clean the slate
—that’s how she put it.
They’re the reason why the sky outside the window is tinged blue instead of gray.
They’re why the sheets, the pillowcases, even the tiny goose feathers that escape the comforter are often bright white. Pressia can’t remember ever seeing something so pristine.
Everything in her room is kept clean. Her sheets are changed every day. In the adjoining bathroom, there is always a new bar of soap. Someone even pulls out the tangled strands of loose hair wound through her brush; each morning it’s clean.
She traces her finger on the window and then looks beyond it. She can see an ancient stone tower, tilted as if leaning into the wind, strange lumbering beasts—the size of cows but with thick, rubbery, hairless coats, occasional tusks—roaming the misty, downward slope. Beyond the herd, there’s the airship, locked to the earth by a mound of greenery; it has been swallowed by vines.
Will they ever get back again? Home. Did it ever exist? And now, after all that’s happened, after all she’s done, does she deserve a place called home? Bradwell, his massive wings—she did that to him. She wants to go back to the way it was before. But there is no going back.
To clean the slate.
But what do you do when the slate cannot be made clean?
Is anyone working on the airship? Have Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud regained enough strength to travel? Will Bradwell ever forgive her?
“This is a waste of time!” She’s lost her patience a few times and yelled at the caretakers. “We have to get back home! People need us!”
They smile, nod, point out the alarms on the walls.
At night, when her room grows dark, the alarms glow red and she hears the howling. It comes every night—dogs off in the distance. Wolves, foxes, coyotes? What howling dogs live in this land? Sometimes she wishes the dogs would circle in closer, threaten to devour her. Maybe she wants to be torn to bits, to disappear.
And she wakes up feeling the same way. It’s her guilt that she wants to be torn to bits, devoured, to disappear. Bradwell. She thinks of him now, her room filling with morning light. After she injected the serum into the birds in his back, after those wings grew quickly and wildly as his ribs and shoulders also expanded, he said, “What did you do to me?” She knows now that she betrayed him. He didn’t want to be saved by the contents of the vial—the medicine that might one day lead to Purifying the survivors of all their scars and fusings. He wanted to die Pure—by his own definition of the word. But she couldn’t let him go.
Alone, still feeling dreamy, she lies in her bed and remembers what it was like in the stone underpass on the hard ground with Bradwell, his hands rough and warm, cupping her face. It was like being fully alive for the first time in her life—alive in every cell of her body. And now, something inside of her feels dead. She feels vacant. Bradwell hates her. She hates herself. She isn’t sure which one is worse. She would do anything to win back his trust, but she knows the damage can’t be undone.
She understands why he hates the idea of being able to reverse his fusings, erase their scars, philosophically; he doesn’t want to reverse or erase the past, the sins of the Dome. But she doesn’t understand why there isn’t even one small part of him—deep down—that desires to be made whole again.
She touches the scar on her inner wrist—a thin, puckered line where the synthetic skin of the doll’s head is traced through with her own nerve endings. At thirteen, she tried to cut off the doll head. She remembers the feel of the knife on her skin. It stung sharply. It was something she was in control of—not something that was happening
to
her. She would like to be in control. Did she think a stump would be better? Did she think at all? Not really. She wanted only to be free of it.
She still wants that. The vial and the formula get her one step closer to that possibility, but Bartrand Kelly confiscated these things—what they all risked their lives to unearth. If she can get these things back into the Dome where there are scientists still working in labs, it wouldn’t just help her. No. There could be a future where all the survivors are whole again.
She rubs her hidden knuckles locked within the doll’s skull and rakes her fingers up her arm. She wants to be whole. After all these years, who wouldn’t?
A key rattles the lock. The knob turns. It’s a bright morning.
Pressia sits up and scoots to the edge of her bed, waiting.
Fedelma is the only caretaker whose name she knows. She’s in charge of the other caretakers and pins her hair like two horned knots on top of her head. She has more power and maybe for this reason she’s allowed to do more talking. Pressia is relieved to see her.
Fedelma is pregnant too. Her belly is a taut drum she has to negotiate around, and she’s not young. Her hair is graying at the temples. The skin around her eyes crinkles a bit when she smiles. She pushes the heavy door wide open with one hand, holds a tin tray aloft with the other. “Did you sleep?” she asks.
“Barely,” Pressia says, and she drives to the point. “I want to see Bartrand Kelly.” She hasn’t seen him since the first day—a blur of noise, thorns, blood, and wings—when they were all loaded into a cart and taken in. “He has things that belong to me.”
“He’s good to his word,” Fedelma says, setting the tray on the bedside table. “He’ll tell you everything when the time is right.”
Everything.
About her mother and father? About the past? Bartrand Kelly was one of the Seven. He was friends with her parents when they were all young. He knows more about her parents than she ever will. It seems incredible to her now that she ever hoped to find her father here. She misses him even though he’s a stranger to her.
