Pure (13 page)

Now there are hills of collapsed stone. Beasts have dug burrows and small caves in them. Pressia can see tendrils of smoke rising up from gaps here and there. The Beasts have lit fires to keep warm.

She doesn’t have much time to worry about what to do next, because an
OSR
truck roars up the street and parks abruptly in front of the building closest to her. She edges around the corner and presses her back against the brick.

The passenger door pops open. A man in a green
OSR
uniform jumps out. His foot is gone. One of his pant legs is cuffed. And instead of a knee, there’s the neck bone of a dog, its furred cranium, its bulged eyes, jaw, teeth. Is the man’s leg part of the dog’s vertebrae? It’s impossible to say where the man’s leg once was. The dog is missing a back leg and its tail, but he skitters in place of the man’s foot. They’ve learned how to walk with a quick, uneven limp. He goes around back and opens the door. Two more
OSR
soldiers jump to the street in their black boots. They’re armed with rifles.

“This is the last stop,” the driver shouts out. Pressia can’t see his face behind the glass, but it seems as if there are two men in there, one head close to the other—or maybe behind it. Is the driver a Groupie? She hears another voice echo the driver, “Last stop.” Has it come from the other head?

Her heart hammers. Her breath’s gone shallow.

The three men storm into the building. “OSR!” one shouts. And then she hears their boots pounding through the house.

The soldier driving the truck cranks the radio, and she wonders if it’s the same truck that was in her alley earlier that night.

Down the street, a bunch of voices rise up. There’s a figure, someone wearing a hooded coat, a face hidden by a scarf. It’s too dark to make out much else. The figure shouts, “Stop! Leave me alone!” It’s a boy’s voice, muffled by the scarf. He’s over sixteen by the looks of him.
OSR
will take him if they see him.

Then she sees the Groupies emerge from a side street. What used to be maybe seven or eight people is now one massive body, an assortment of arms and legs and a few glints of chrome, their leering faces—burned, wired, sometimes melded, two faces in one. They’re drunk—she can tell that much by the way they’re stumbling around, the slurriness of their curses.

The soldier behind the wheel glances in his rearview mirror, but then, disinterested, takes out a pocketknife and starts cleaning his nails.

“Give us what you got!” one of the Groupies says.

“Hand it over!” another says.

“I can’t,” the voice in the hood says. “It’s nothing anyway. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“Then give it!” one of the Groupies says.

And a hand shoots out and shoves the hooded figure. He falls to the ground and his bag flips from his hand, landing a few feet away. That’s what they’re after. If it’s not important, he should give it to them. Groupies can get vicious, especially when they’re polluted.

The hooded figure reaches for the bag so quickly and surely, his hand seems like an arrow that shoots from his body and then back again. The Groupies are confused by this sudden action. Some try to rear backward, but the others won’t let them.

Then the hooded figure stands up so unnaturally fast that he stumbles backward as if his body is out of sync. While he’s off balance, one of the Groupies kicks him in the stomach, and then they all move in—one massive body.

They could kill him, and Pressia hates the hooded figure for not just giving them his bag. She presses her eyes shut. She tells herself not to get involved. Let him die, she tells herself. What’s it to you?

But she opens her eyes and looks out at the street. She sees an oil drum on the other side. The soldier behind the wheel is whistling to the song on the radio, still picking his nails with the knife. And so she takes off her heavy shoe—the clog with its wooden sole—and throws it at the drum as hard as she can. Her aim is good, and she hits it dead-on. The drum gives out a low loud gong.

The Groupies look up, their dull faces clouded with fear and confusion. Is it a Beast from the Rubble Fields? A team from an
OSR
Death Spree, lying in wait? They’ve been ambushed before; she can tell by the way they whip their heads around. And of course, they ambush people themselves.

The distraction gives the hooded figure enough time to scramble to his feet again, more slowly and deliberately this time, and run up the hill away from them. He runs fast, with extreme speed, even with a limp in his stride.

For some reason she can’t understand, he runs straight for the back of the truck, crawls under it, and freezes.

The Groupies look up the street now. They see the truck, maybe for the first time, and with a few grunts they skulk back in the direction they came from.

Pressia wants to yell at the hooded figure. She created a diversion to save him from the Groupies—in front of the
OSR
even—and he crawls under their truck?

The soldiers in the house come pounding out again.

“Empty!” the one with the dog leg shouts to the driver.

The other two soldiers climb into the back of the truck, as does the one from the passenger seat. The driver puts away his knife, gives a nod. The other head shifts and bobs over his shoulder. He revs the engine, puts the truck in gear, and pulls off.

Pressia looks up and sees a face appear in the truck’s back window—a face, half hidden with shadow, a face encrusted with bits of metal, and a taped-shut mouth. A stranger. Just a kid, like her. She takes a step toward the boy in the truck—she can’t stop herself—out of the shadows.

The truck turns the corner. Silence fills the alley.

It could have been her.

Now with the truck gone, the hooded figure is exposed, lying on the street. He looks up and sees her. His hood has slipped off, and there is a shorn head. He’s tall and lean without a mark or a scar or a burn on his clean, pale face. A long scarf twists in a loose swirl to the ground. He grabs his bag and scarf, quickly stands up and looks around, dazed and lost. And then he staggers, as if head-heavy, and he stumbles backward toward the gutter. He falls—the thick clunk of his skull on cement.

A Pure
. Pressia hears the old woman’s voice in her mind.
A Pure here among us.

NOW
,
HERE
,
BREATHLESS
. The stars look like small bright punctures—almost lost in the dark-dust air—but they aren’t punctures. It isn’t the ceiling of the cafeteria decorated for a dance. The sky overhead is endless. It isn’t contained.

Home? Childhood?

No.

Home was a big airy space. Tall ceilings. White on white. A vacuum cleaner always purring in distant rooms. A woman in sweatpants working it back and forth against the furred floors. Not his mother. But his mother was always nearby. She paced. She waved her hands when she spoke. She stared out windows. Cursed. She said, “Don’t tell your father.” She said, “Remember, keep this just between the two of us.” There were secrets within secrets. She said, “Let me tell you the story again.”

The story was always the same. The swan wife. Before she was a wife, she was a swan girl who saved a young man from drowning. He was the young prince. A bad prince. He stole her wings and forced her to marry him. He became a bad king.

Why was he bad?

The king thought he was good, but he was wrong.

There was a good prince too. He lived in another land. The swan wife didn’t yet know he existed.

The bad king gave her two sons.

Was one good and one bad?

No. They were different. One was like the father, ambitious and strong. One was like her.

Like what? How?

I don’t know how. Listen. This is important.

Did the boy—the one like her—have wings?

No. But the bad king put the wings in a bucket down a dark, old dry well, and the boy who was like the swan wife heard ruffling down that well, and one night he climbed down the well and found the wings for his mother. She put them on, and she took the boy she could—the one like her, who didn’t resist her—and flew away.

Partridge remembers his mother telling him the story on the beach. She had a towel around her shoulders. It ruffled at her back like wings.

The beach was where they had their second house. It’s where they were in the photograph he found in her drawer in the Personal Loss Archives. They didn’t go when it was cool except this once. The sun must have been warm because he remembers being sunburned, his lips cracked. They got a flu. Not a virulent one that would send them to an asylum; this was just a stomach flu. His mother took a blue blanket from the linen closet and wrapped him in it. She was sick too. They both slept on the sofas and threw up into little white plastic buckets. She put a wet cloth on his forehead. And she talked about the swan wife and the boy and the new land where they found the good king.

Is my father the bad king?

It’s just a story. But listen. Promise me you’ll always remember it. Don’t tell the story to your father. He doesn’t like stories.

Partridge can’t lift his head. He feels pinned to the ground, and the memory wheels across his mind. And then it stops. His head is abuzz, a cold bright pain at the back of his skull. His heart is as loud in his ears as the automatic threshers at work in the fields beyond the academy. He used to watch the threshers from the lonesome dormer window at the end of the hall in his dorm when Hastings went home for weekends. Lyda—is she there now? Can she hear the threshers? Does she remember kissing him? He remembers. It surprised him. He kissed her back, and then she pulled away, embarrassed.

There is wind on his skin. This is the real air. The wind whips over his head, flutters the fine fuzz of his hair. The air churns darkly as if stirred by unseen fan blades. He thinks of fan blades—shiny and quick in his mind. How did he get here?

THE
PURE
STAGGERS
TO
HIS
FEET
and stands in the road. He glances around for a moment, up and down the row of burned, hollowed-out hulls, over the Rubble Fields with their wisps of smoke threading up into the night air, then at the buildings again. He looks at the sky, as if trying to get his bearings that way. Finally, he pulls the strap on his bag over his shoulder and loops the scarf once around his neck and jaw. He glances at the Rubble Fields and heads toward them.

Pressia tightens the wool sock over the doll-head fist, pulls her sweater sleeve down, and steps out of the alley. “Don’t,” she says. “You’ll never make it.”

He whips around, scared, and then his eyes fall on her, and he’s obviously relieved that she’s not a Groupie or a Beast or even an
OSR
soldier—though she doubts he knows the names of any of these things. What’s there to be afraid of where he comes from anyway? Does he even understand fear? Is he afraid of birthday cakes and dogs wearing sunglasses and new cars topped with big red bows?

His face is smooth and clear, his eyes a pale gray. And she can’t quite believe that she is looking at a Pure—a living, breathing Pure.

bq.
bq.
Burn a Pure and breathe the ash.

Take his guts and make a sash.

Twist his hair and make a rope.

And use his bones to make Pure soap.

That’s what comes to mind. Kids sing the song all the time, but no one ever thinks they’ll see a real Pure, no matter how many stupid whispers there are. Never. She feels like there’s something light and airy and winged inside her chest, locked in her ribs, like Freedle in his cage, like the homemade butterfly in her sack.

“I’m trying to get to Lombard Street,” he says, a little breathlessly. Pressia wonders if the quality of his voice is different. Clearer, sweeter? Is that the voice of someone who hasn’t been breathing ash for years? “Ten Fifty-four Lombard, to be exact. Large row houses with grillwork gates.”

“It’s not good to stand out there in plain sight,” Pressia tells him. “It’s dangerous.”

“I’ve noticed.” He takes a step toward her and then stops. One side of his face has been lightly dusted with ash. “I don’t know if I should trust you,” he says. It’s a fair statement. He’s almost been beaten by Groupies; he’s bound to be a little nervous now.

She sticks out her foot, the one missing its shoe. “I threw my shoe to distract the Groupies who were about to kill you. I’ve already saved you once.”

He looks down the street to where he was getting shoved around. He walks over to Pressia in the alley. “Thanks,” he says. He smiles. His teeth are straight and very white, like he’s lived on fresh milk his whole life. His face, this close up, is even more startling because of its perfection. She can’t tell how old he is. He seems older than she is, but then he seems young in a way too. She doesn’t want to be caught staring and so she looks down at the ground. He says, “They were going to tear me apart. I hope I’m worth your lost shoe.”

“I hope my shoe isn’t lost,” she says, turning away from him a little so that he can’t see the side of her face that’s burned.

He tugs on the strap of his bag. “I’ll help you find your shoe if you help me find Lombard Street.”

“It’s not easy finding streets here. We don’t go by streets.”

“Where did you throw your shoe? Which direction?” he asks, heading back toward the street.

“Don’t,” she says, although she needs the shoe, the gift from her grandfather, maybe the last gift he’ll ever give her. She hears a truck engine to the east and then another in the opposite direction. And there’s still another not far off, or is it an echo? He should stay out of sight. Anyone could see him. It’s not safe. “Leave it.”

But he’s already in the middle of the street again. “Which way?” he says and opens his arms wide, pointing in opposite directions, like he wants to be a living target.

“The oil drum,” she says, just trying to hurry him up.