Burn (45 page)
Iralene walks a few feet down the hall. Partridge and Lyda notice her now. They look up, holding hands, just as Iralene opens a door, and suddenly she is aglow in a bright wash of light. It’s as if she’s opened the door to a room containing the sun itself. “Pressia,” she says, “you’re family. Family is sacred. What’s a home without family?”
T
he crowd is quiet. They march silently. El Capitan sees their faces—the shining plastic and glass, the bright burns, and the tough and knotted scars. Their jaws are set with grim determination. They lurch and shuffle and limp. Some are fused together but stride just the same. No guns, no rifles, no knives. Up ahead, there stands Special Forces—their bodies look overworked, too weighted with guns and rigid with fusings. Some are bent and their arms and legs look uneven. They stand at twenty-foot intervals, ringing the Dome’s perimeter. Regardless of how they look nearly crippled, they are prepared to open fire.
El Capitan can’t keep up. Every step shoots a series of pains through his body. And yet, he feels a strange surge of strength. The Dome looms larger and larger. The wind is cold and sharp. And for some reason, it’s all beautiful.
The shifting veils of ash.
The gauzy dark sky.
The sun a smear of light.
And then everyone stops. Voices begin to whisper and hiss. What’s going wrong? El Capitan pushes through the crowd, his body screaming in pain. “Bradwell!” he shouts. “Bradwell!” He gets to the front and sees Hastings emerge from behind the row of Special Forces protecting the Dome.
Bradwell steps forward to meet Hastings, who lopes downhill, a slightly uneven jerk in his gait.
“Hastings is bugged,” Bradwell says. “They see what he sees and hear what he hears.”
But now that El Capitan sees Hastings’ face clearly, he knows something’s wrong. “Hastings,” El Capitan says. “What’d they do to you?” El Capitan can tell that, despite the deep emotion in his eyes, Hastings has been through more coding. “They reprogrammed you, didn’t they?”
Hastings nods.
“Worse than before?”
Hastings nods again.
“Partridge!” El Capitan shouts. “What’d you do to him? Jesus Christ! He’s a friend of yours!”
Hastings says, “Partridge and Pressia are going to talk to you soon. Please stand by.”
Bradwell looks at El Capitan. “Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” El Capitan says.
“What comes next.”
“What comes next?” Helmud says.
S
un. Curtains warm with it. Lit up. It’s how he felt when he saw the letters and then Lyda herself—as if he had suddenly filled with light, as if the sun were blazing in his own chest.
She didn’t stop loving him. The letters were proof, but she said it herself. “Even though I thought you’d abandoned me, I still loved you. I always will.”
And now here she is with him, wandering this kitchen in the house that Iralene designed, the one she started to talk to Partridge about as if it were a dream, but it was already in the works—for how long now?
Butter glistens in a glass dish. A toaster shines on the counter. A woman stands at the sink, her thin back, her flower-print shirt.
He knows this is an image of his mother. He wants to reach out and touch her shoulder. But he knows there is no shoulder. No woman. He wants her to turn and look at him. But he has no mother.
Lyda reaches out for a milk glass, beading water. Her hand glides through it.
Iralene walks into the room. “Do you like it here?” she asks.
Can he love both of them? His love for Lyda runs deep. But he’s grown to love Iralene. She’s steadfast and true. They all move around the kitchen where his mother—the pale image of her at the sink—reaches into the sudsy water, swirling a white dish, humming to herself. She’s so real he can’t bear to look at her for too long. He wants her to see him there, to treat him as her own—returned.
But does he like it here? Can he answer that? It’s a mirage. It’s not real. Doesn’t Iralene know the difference? He doesn’t tell her any of this. He says, “I do like it here.” It’s a half-truth.
Why is there so much sun? It pours into the windows, fills the room so brightly that it blots the details. Maybe the details aren’t finished.
“How did you do it all?” Partridge asks.
“Purdy and Hoppes have access to all these files. They thought it might convince you. There’s more,” she says. “So much more.”
Lyda isn’t moving. She stands in the sunlight thrown from the fake window. “Birds,” she says. “In the rehabilitation center, they had birds flutter past the fake windows of light just like this.”
“We didn’t have much time!” Iralene says angrily.
“I didn’t like the birds,” Lyda says. “They reminded me I had nowhere to go.”
Lyda told him that Arvin had let it slip that the letters weren’t passed between them, that she thought he’d abandoned her. Partridge explained to her that he wasn’t allowed to see her; Foresteed had taken control of his life. After she confessed to him that she’d always love him, he told her that he wanted to be with her. She said, “I understand.” But what does that mean—
I understand
? What had he wanted? For her to say that she’d been wrong to let him go the last time and that from now on, they’d always be together?
“Partridge!” It’s Pressia, calling for him down a hall. He follows her voice, passing a bedroom with bunk beds.
He stops, doubles back, and looks inside. There, sleeping in the bottom bunk, is his brother.
My God, it’s Sedge
—before the enhancements and all the coding. He’s not a Special Forces soldier. He’s just a kid—maybe fifteen or sixteen. He’s sleeping even though the sun is streaming in the window. Partridge wants to wake him up. He wants to hear his brother’s voice. But he knows that this was a rushed job. This is probably all his brother does—he sleeps, as he once did, a boy in a bunk bed. Partridge leans his head against the doorjamb. He says, “Sedge, Sedge. My brother.”
And then Pressia calls for him again.
He pushes himself from the door and walks, unsteadily, into a bedroom. A pink ruffled skirt, a canopy. A stuffed giraffe. A long inlaid mirror on the door of a wardrobe. Pressia stares at herself in the mirror. She pulls her hair back. The crescent scar around her eye isn’t there in the mirror image of her face.
And then she stands back and raises her doll-head fist. But in the reflection, it’s gone. She raises both hands and flexes them—open, closed, open, closed.
She stares at Partridge through the mirror. “Why would anyone make a place like this?”
He doesn’t have an answer.
* * *
A chorus of voices. Pressia recognizes them. She can tell that Partridge does too. He freezes, and she pushes past him. She feels like her heart has swelled and might explode. She follows a hallway into a parlor. And there, as if waiting for her, are three men. Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud. Three
separate
men. They’re talking, joking. Helmud smooths his hair and rubs his knees. He’s nervous. El Capitan gives Bradwell a slap on the back. They all laugh.
She can’t make out their words. They’re still just voices—the kind heard down a long hallway through the walls and doors. They don’t seem to know she’s standing in front of them either.
“Bradwell,” she says.
His face is clean. No scars. His knuckles aren’t nicked. He’s wearing a suit jacket—a fitted one. There are no massive wings. No birds in his back at all.
“How did they do this?”
Partridge is now next to her. He crouches and looks up into their faces. “Jesus,” he says. “Look at them.”
Pressia can’t look at them. “They’re all wrong,” she says to Partridge. “They aren’t themselves—not like that, not without any past.”
She can see a small eye on a round apple-sized object on the floor. An orb, like Lyda told her about. Each room must have an orb, creating each of the images. None of this is real.
She runs from the room and back down the hall, but it’s changed a little. There’s a door where before she’s sure there was no door. It’s open—just a crack. She lifts her doll head, relieved it’s still with her, and pushes the door wide.
There’s her grandfather, pillows plumped behind his back. A crossword book sits on his knee. She can see that he only has one leg still, and a fake leg—shiny and pink—with a small black sock and shoe stands in the corner. The fan that had been lodged in his throat is gone. In its place, there’s a jagged cross-shaped scar.
He isn’t like Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud in the parlor. He seems to know that she’s here. But then he says, “Can I help you?” as if she’s a stranger.
“It’s me,” she says.
“Hello,” her grandfather says, but his tone is embarrassed as if he’s never seen Pressia before.
“Pressia,” she says. “It’s me. Pressia.”
He closes his eyes for a second, tightly, as if the name itself causes him some pain. When he opens his eyes, he’s smiling. “That was my wife’s name,” he finally says. “She died some years ago.”
Pressia walks up to her grandfather then. She lifts her hand, reaches out to touch his but hesitates. She wants to feel the warmth. What if this is just a trick—a cruel trick?
She fits her hand over his—and feels the dryness of his skin, the give of his arthritic knuckles. “You’re real,” she says. “But you don’t know me.”
He smiles at her.
Her eyes burn with tears. “Partridge! Lyda!” she shouts.
Lyda appears at the door.
“He’s real,” Pressia says. “We have to get him out of here. He has to be with us.”
Lyda’s shaken by the sight of the old man.
“Partridge!” Pressia shouts. “Where are you?”
Pressia reaches out and touches everything now—the wall, the pictures, doorknobs, a vase. Sometimes things are real, and sometimes her hand passes through them like air. “Partridge!” she shouts. “Partridge!”
There’s no answer. She runs to the kitchen, which she passed through quickly the first time.
A woman is standing at the sink doing dishes, and Partridge is sitting at the kitchen table.
“You brought my grandfather back.”
“Except his memory,” he says.
“But he’s alive,” she says. “You did that. Thank you.”
He glances at the woman at the sink and says, “Don’t you know who she is?”
Pressia walks up to the counter. She tilts forward and sees her mother’s face, the profile of her delicate nose and chin. Her eyes are gentle. Her lightly freckled arms are bare. The soap bubbles shine on the surface of the water. She then lifts a bubble on her palm and blows on it until it lifts and glides and then pops.
Pressia reaches out to touch her.
“Don’t,” Partridge says. “Don’t touch her.”
Iralene walks into the room, smiling. “This is worth keeping, isn’t it? A home full of family. All those you’ve lost, perfected. You can’t bring down the Dome now. Not when this place exists! You can call it home, Pressia.”
“Do you think I’m going to want to save this place? It’s not real.”
“No, no,” Iralene says, wringing her hands. “We can program them better. We can make them interactive. You can have conversations with them eventually. You don’t understand.”
“
You
don’t understand. They aren’t real people.”
“That’s why you can’t take down the Dome, Pressia,” Partridge breaks in. “It’s filled with real people. They’ll die out there. And you know who’ll be killed first? Us. You and me and Iralene and Lyda. Lyda and our baby. And more…”
“More?”
“Babies,” he says. “Tiny babies in incubators. What will happen to them?”
“Babies in incubators?” She imagines the mothers finding rows of babies in warm plastic boxes. Mother Hestra and the other mothers would pick them up by the armfuls, strap them to their bodies—a familiar comfort of closeness—and take care of them. “If there are babies who need mothers, Partridge, I think you should know who’d take care of them.”
“You would trust the mothers? The ones who chopped off my pinky?”
“Things have to change,” Pressia says. “I know that. They have to!”
“Well, it gets worse. There are people in cold storage. You can’t imagine…” Partridge stands up, staggers, and walks out of the door of the house and back into the hall.
Pressia follows him, shouting, “Partridge, what are you doing? Partridge!”
He is bent over, trying to catch his breath, but as she reaches him, he straightens and walks into a conference room, stopping at the table in the center of the room.
She moves to the table. There’s a map of the area around the Dome, but it’s a living map. Black marks are moving uphill in every direction, getting closer and closer to the Dome. Is one of those marks Bradwell? Are El Capitan and Helmud among them? Who has the bacterium?
“The survivors are on the move,” Partridge says.
“They’re closing in,” Beckley says.
“Jesus,” Partridge says.
“Is this…?” Pressia isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. Is this
the revolution?
“It’s what you think it is.” He puts his hand on a dark shining pad next to a door. The door opens. “My father’s chamber. Come in. I’ve got something else for you to see.”
Pressia steps into the darkened room. The lights turn on. The floor is covered with photographs of Partridge and his family—holidays, school pictures, vacations—and handwritten letters. Pressia sees one that’s clearly signed “Your Father.” Is this how Willux chose to decorate his office?
Pressia sees a picture of her mother. She kneels quickly and picks it up. Her mother is sitting by a fireplace with a newborn in her arms—Partridge or his brother Sedge? She only knows that it isn’t her as a baby.
Iralene walks in and starts picking up the papers and photographs as if she’s embarrassed by the mess. Partridge walks to a large desk in the middle of the room.
“There’s a communication system here,” Partridge says. “It connects us to the other places in the world that survived.” He touches the desk, and a screen lights up on its surface, like the mahogany table in the conference room, but this one is of a map of the world. “If the Dome goes down, so does your shot at finding your father.” He points to Japan. “His heart was beating,” Partridge says. “He’s alive somewhere…”
