PARTRIDGE
GRIEF
It rises in his throat. I killed him. Sometimes he even opens his mouth as if he’s really going to tell someone. I killed my father. The leader you love—Willux, your savior—I murdered him. But then his throat cinches.
He can’t say this to anyone, of course—except Lyda. After he confessed to her, he felt lighter—but only for a short time. He sees her every few days, and he spent the night of Christmas Eve with her, almost a month ago now. Christmas morning they woke up and exchanged small gifts in her beautiful apartment, the one he had set up for her on Upper Two. It was the first thing he did when power was transferred from his father to him. He got Lyda out of the medical center, and now she has people who take care of her—and the baby growing inside of her. Their baby.
He’s surprised by how loudly a secret can ring in your head. I killed him. It’s not just a secret, though. He knows this. It’s murder. It’s the murder of his father.
Partridge is sitting in an anteroom next to the main hall where he can hear the mourners starting to line up. They’re muffling their grief, but soon enough they’ll let loose. It’ll get loud and stuffy with all of the bodies packing in, and Partridge will have to accept their condolences, all of their twisted love for his father.
Partridge isn’t surprised when Foresteed walks into the room. He’s been the face of the Dome’s leadership for some time, and he attends most of these services. Partridge’s father had used him as a figurehead ever since the start of his deterioration, and surely Foresteed expected to step in as Willux’s replacement upon his death. Naturally, he’s not fond of Partridge.
Foresteed isn’t alone. He’s flanked by Purdy and Hoppes, who work for him. They all say their hellos and sit across from Partridge at the mahogany table. Partridge is wearing one of his black funeral suits. He has seven of them now—one for each day of the week.
“I thought we’d take a minute to talk,” Foresteed says.
“Well, I’d like to know how many more memorial services there are going to be,” Partridge says. It’s like being on tour with his father’s urn—a grief tour. The worst part is sitting through the eulogies. Some of the speakers talk about what his father saved them all from—the wretches, those vile blights on humanity, soulless, no longer human. He’s had to tell himself that he can turn them around—when the time comes. He’s said to Lyda, “When they meet a wretch, like Pressia, everything will change.” But the whole thing makes him sick and anxious.
Foresteed cocks his head and says, “This too much for you? I mean, dealing with your personal grief on top of all this adoration? You sure you can handle it?”
Foresteed is a layered conversationalist—Partridge will give him that. Is he being sarcastic about Partridge’s personal grief? Is he hinting that Partridge isn’t grieving enough? Does he suspect that Partridge killed his father? Or is Foresteed simply calling Partridge weak? “I just want to get to the work at hand,” Partridge says, “the work my father wanted me to do.” Partridge puts his chin to his chest and scratches his forehead, hiding his eyes for a moment because they’ve gone teary. Fact is, he killed his father, yes, and he doesn’t regret it, but he misses his father too. This is the sick part. He loved him. A son’s allowed to love his father no matter what, isn’t he? Partridge hates how the emotions come upon him so fast—guilt, fear of being exposed, sadness.
Purdy checks a planner on his handheld.
For someone who lives in the Dome, Foresteed is very tan. His teeth are so shiny they look polished. His hair is stiff as if it’s been misted with hair spray. He says, “The people are still in need of public mourning.”
“How about some private mourning?” Partridge says. “Culturally speaking, I think we’re pretty good at bottling our emotions.”
“Your father wanted a public mourning period,” Foresteed says. Sometimes Partridge thinks Foresteed might have hated his father. Always the second in line, he had to be jealous of the power.
“But this service is different,” Purdy says.
“How?”
“I mentioned it in my last report,” Foresteed says. He gives Partridge reports all the time—fat stacks of papers filled with bureaucratic policy updates written in dense, senseless language (“Heretofore the forewith will be presumed to forbear and withstand the aforementioned duties…”). He can’t stand reading them.
“Ah, right,” Partridge says. “I must have missed that part. Can someone fill me in?”
Purdy looks at Foresteed. “We’ve got all the dignitaries and socialites coming in this time,” Foresteed says. “It’s closed to the public. We’ll be broadcasting it, however. Live streaming. We want this one to have the feel of magnitude. The moment when the people truly recognize the leaders of tomorrow, moving into this new phase.”
Partridge sits back and sighs. He’ll recognize these people from political functions, parties, those who live in the apartment building where he grew up, the parents of his friends from the academy. He shakes his head. “I don’t want to sit next to Iralene this time. Don’t get me wrong. I like Iralene. I respect her. But they’ve got to get used to the idea that we’re not going to get married. Every time they see me with her, it’s going to be harder to explain that I’m with Lyda.” On Christmas Eve, Partridge and Lyda kissed a little. He put his hand on the soft skin of her stomach where the baby is just starting to grow. “I’m going to be a father. Lyda and I are going to get married. We have to introduce this idea and undo my father’s lies.”
Hoppes shakes his head and his fatty jowls wag. He’s taken over managing Partridge’s image. “We’re working on a story that will set this all right. We’ve got a plan. But it’s just too soon. My staff is working diligently. Trust me.”
“How about the truth?” Partridge feels a surge of heat run through him. Lies were how his father operated. He told the people fairy tales so they could sleep at night—tales of a world divided into Pures and wretches. “How about the goddamn truth for once?”
Foresteed sets his fists on the table and stands up, leaning over Partridge. “The truth is that you knocked someone up and you’re engaged to someone else. Your concubine’s set up in a nice place to keep her quiet—like father, like son.”
“I’m not anything like my father.” Partridge stares at Foresteed, waiting for him to back down but Foresteed doesn’t. He glares at Partridge as if he’s begging him to take a swing.
Purdy breaks the silence. Scratching the back of his head, he says, “I just don’t get why you wouldn’t be interested in a girl like Iralene. She was made for you.”
“Literally,” Partridge says.
“Well, she’s a real catch,” Purdy says. “Sometimes you’ve got to rely on someone else to hold up a mirror. Am I right, fellas?”
Hoppes says, “Yes, of course.”
Foresteed nods.
Partridge feels tight pressure in his chest. “I’m in love with Lyda. I’m not going to be peer pressured into falling out of love, okay? So why don’t you keep your goddamn opinions to yourself?”
Purdy raises his hands in the air. “We’re going to work this out. It’s going to be okay!”
He hates this most of all—defensively chipper smiles that cover up all the lies. He can’t take it anymore. His chest feels like it could explode. He leans forward. “I know the truth. And I am going to lead with the truth. My father was the biggest mass murderer in history,” Partridge says. This is the truth he’s held in for a long time. It feels good to warn them. He feels powerful for once. “The people know this, but they pretend they don’t. They’ve all been handed a lie, and they’re living by it. It’s got to be eating at them. They have to be ready to acknowledge it. It’s the only way to move forward.”
“Jesus,” Hoppes says. He’s taken a handkerchief from his pocket and presses it to his upper lip and forehead.
“To what possible end?” Foresteed asks, his eyes wide with astonishment. “I mean, do you want the wretches and the Pures to walk hand in hand into a beautiful tomorrow?”
“Would it hurt to prepare for the time when we leave the Dome and start making a life for ourselves out there? I mean, how about a little compassion for the survivors?” Partridge and Lyda have been writing out plans, simple things they can start to do to improve lives on the outside—clean water, food, education, and medicine. “We can really impact their lives for the better.”
“Isn’t that noble,” Foresteed says.
Partridge can’t bear his condescension.
Purdy says, “Let’s slow down a minute.”
Partridge is sick of putting things off, avoiding conflict. Now is the time. He shifts his tone, tries to sound as calm as possible. “Look, I’ve been thinking about this. What would be so wrong with a council, made up of people from the inside and people from the outside?” He, Lyda, and Pressia could all be on that council—plus Bradwell and El Capitan. They could make real progress.
“God.” Foresteed walks to the door, checks to see if it’s locked, and then sits back down at the table.
“What’s wrong with a council? What’s wrong with some progress?” Partridge says. There has to be progress. This is why he handed himself over to the Dome in the first place. This is why he killed his father—to push for something hopeful.
“No, no, no,” Hoppes says quietly. “These are your people, Partridge, the people of the Dome. They like normalcy, consistency. You can’t barge into their lives and start ripping things up.”
Partridge feels like flipping over the table. He crosses his arms on his chest to try to contain his pounding heart. “Why not? Maybe it’s the only way we’re going to be able to rebuild.”
Foresteed laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Partridge hates Foresteed with a sudden rush. His face flushes with anger. It’d be better if Foresteed punched him or at least argued—but to laugh at him?
Hoppes says, “As a researcher, I’d like to explain to you that the ‘lie,’ as you call it—”
Purdy interrupts, “A term I deeply disagree with.”
“That ‘lie,’” Hoppes continues, using air quotes, “has created the framework that allows the people to accept themselves, to be able to look themselves in the eye, to love each other, and to go on. If you take that away, well—”
“Well what?” Partridge says.
Foresteed smiles. “If you rob them of their lie, they’ll self-destruct. That’s what. How about a little compassion for the people inside the Dome? Huh?”
The room goes quiet. These men aren’t going to see his side. There are others inside the Dome who are supposed to be on Partridge’s side—the Cygnus—those who had a plan to get him into power, a plan his mother had tried to put into action from the outside. Where the hell are they now? Partridge could use some reinforcements. He can’t even really tell if Foresteed is telling the truth. Does the lie keep these people together or is he just trying to keep Partridge quiet? “I want to see Glassings,” Partridge says.
“Glassings?” Hoppes says.
“My old World History teacher.” Glassings is one of the secret leaders of the sleeper cells, part of Cygnus, and the one who got the pill that would kill his father to Partridge. In some ways, Glassings got him into this. He’d like for him to at least show up in his life again.
“Why do you want to see him?” Foresteed asks. Does Glassings’ name alarm him?
“I have some questions about world history,” Partridge lies quickly. “It would help to know how some other leaders have led. Don’t you think?”
“Your father was a great leader. What more could you ask for?” Purdy says, smiling nervously.
He wants to ask Purdy to schedule a meeting with Glassings, but he doesn’t like the suspicious look in Foresteed’s eyes, so he sighs heavily as if he’s bored. “How many more of these services?” he asks again.
Purdy reexamines his planner. He taps dates and counts aloud to seven. “That’s it. Seven more memorial services. Not bad.”
“And then we can roll out the new story—the break between you and Iralene and the news of your new love, Lyda,” Hoppes says. “We’ll broach the baby situation about two months after that.”
Are they just going to keep putting it off? “The new story about Lyda will go out soon, right? Days, not weeks?”
“Of course,” Hoppes says.
Foresteed says, “Just go out there and say your lines, Partridge. Let them show their respects.”
“Okay, but no Iralene,” Partridge says. “She needs a break anyway. Just send her home, okay?” He worries about Iralene. She’s under a lot of pressure, feeling terribly scrutinized, and she knows that her role is going to change. Partridge has assured her that she’ll always have a place in his life—as a friend—and a respected role in society, but he just doesn’t know what that’s going to look like.
“We can’t make any promises about Iralene,” Hoppes says. “You know that there are a lot of moving pieces here.” He means Mimi, his father’s widow and Iralene’s mother, who can be unpredictable.
“We can’t be held hostage by Mimi.” Partridge stands up. “I’m in charge,” he says, though he feels nervous saying it. “No Iralene this time. Okay? I don’t want her sitting next to me on live-streaming feed.” Lyda will be watching, won’t she? He imagines her as he last saw her. She was wearing a long white cotton nightgown. She was tired—she’s not sleeping well—but also restless.
“I feel like a caged tiger,” she told him. “I don’t know how long I can take it. When are you coming back?”
He kissed her and told her, “As soon as I can. My life isn’t really my own right now, but it will be soon. It’s coming. I promise.”
“This meeting is over,” Partridge says. Sometimes it’s the little things that feel so good—like calling the end to a meeting. It shouldn’t matter, but he likes that he can flex this muscle and no one can contradict him.
Foresteed strides to the door, gets there first, and unlocks it. “Allow me,” he says. He opens the door for Partridge. There’s the line of mourners, immaculately dressed. Their heads turn, and they stare at Partridge. He hears a few stifled sobs. They gaze at him expectantly.
Foresteed claps Partridge on the shoulder, his grip too sharp. He leans in close and whispers, “You’re wrong, you know. Your father wasn’t just the biggest mass murderer in history. He was the most successful. There’s a difference.”
Partridge puts his hand on the door, ready to walk out of the room. “I won’t live his lies for him. I’m not his puppet, and I’m sure as hell not yours.”
Foresteed smiles at him. His teeth nearly glow they’re so white. “As if you don’t have lies of your own already, Partridge,” he says so softly only Partridge can hear. “If you’re going to come clean, why don’t you start with yourself?”
EL CAPITAN
ARMOR
El Capitan doesn’t have a knife. “Don’t need one,” he explains to Helmud. “We’re all dosed up.” He first noticed the change of skin color on Helmud’s arms—always dangling around his neck. At first he thought it was jaundice, but then, as soon as the caretaker told him it was a chemical that repelled those vines—their thorns as sharp as canines—he asked to have his dosage upped. “Two hearts here, two sets of lungs, two brains—more or less,” he said. “We need double the meds. Got to keep that in mind.”
And now his skin looks like he’s been at the beach for an entire summer. Not red and blistered, but golden brown. It’s almost got a metallic shine to it. He remembers getting tan on his arms, face, and the back of his neck as a kid—a farmer’s tan, or so it was called. But his tan was always mixed with dirt too. He and Helmud were the kinds of kids who spent a lot of time on dirt bikes, climbing trees, rooting through mud. Maybe he was more like this than Helmud. In fact, as a kid, Helmud had seemed somewhat refined. El Capitan had been the bully, the brute—he’d had no choice. He was the man of the house so young.
His hands wrapped in towels stolen from a cabinet in his room, he uses the vines to climb to the hatch, which, as the airship has rolled to its side, is now on top. But where’s the hatch? It’s not sticking up, which is how he left it when he went out looking for Bradwell. The vines must have shut it when they wound their way around the airship.
The vines seem to sense the chemicals that are emanating from his and Helmud’s skin. They don’t recoil but they certainly aren’t aggressive and do seem to shift away. El Capitan hears the skritch of their thorns against the airship’s exterior. It kills him that they’re scratching it up.
The vines spook him—not just because they almost killed him once, but because they’re not natural. “There’s something not right about this place,” he says to Helmud. He means the herd of creatures grazing on the hillside—are they giant boars? And the children—all of them are under the age of nine, or so it seems, which means they were born after the Detonations. Plus, too many of them look alike. It doesn’t make sense to him, but he knows it’s messed up. “Not right at all. But who am I to talk, right?”
“Who am I?” Helmud says. Is he speaking philosophically? El Capitan’s glad that Helmud can only communicate in repetitive ways. If Helmud could really express himself, El Capitan’s afraid Helmud would push him to take the conversation one level deeper. El Capitan isn’t one for philosophizing.
El Capitan laughs. “Who are you? Let’s keep our shit together, Helmud, okay? Let’s not go off the deep end. You know what I mean.”
“You know what I mean,” Helmud repeats, and El Capitan knows to drop it. Helmud’s in one of those moods where he wants to assert himself. There’s no talking to him.
A knife would help, but he didn’t have time to go hunting for one. He wanted out. He wanted to see his airship, and he’s finally built up enough strength again to roam. He sneaked out, and now is he being watched from afar? Maybe. Who cares? He’s got a ship to get back in order and hopefully up into the air. He has people to get home—Bradwell, Pressia. He thinks of her and remembers the kiss.
Jesus.
He kissed her. Each time he thinks about it, his heart feels like a crooked thing in his chest, all bent, all wrong—a freak heart. His heart will beat for Pressia for the rest of his life. He’ll love her forever. Bradwell might have been able to turn away from her, but El Capitan could never do that. He’ll just have to take this ache. He’ll have to bear it inside of him forever. He’s survived this long under the weight of his own brother. He understands the burden. He feels aged by it, and yet he’s still young. He was a kid when the Detonations went off, just a little older than Bradwell, but he feels middle-aged—probably because he never had much of a childhood. Without a father and with his mother taken away and dying young, he was rushed right into manhood while still a little boy.
He only hopes that Pressia isn’t forever wrecked by what she did to Bradwell—saved him, yes, but killed him in a way too. A deathblow. El Capitan saw her face when she realized what she’d done, and he knew the one she really loved. It was over. Screw it. El Capitan had to simply move on—no matter how sick it made him feel. Homesickness—that he could fix. Matters of the heart? They just build up scar tissue. He’ll be thankful, one day, that she toughened his heart. “Scars are good. Right, Helmud? It’s the body’s way of making armor.”
Helmud is quiet. Maybe his silence means he doesn’t agree.
El Capitan keeps pushing through the vines, and after feeling around blindly for a few minutes, he finds the outline of the hatch.
He knows what to expect—the rot of their rations, his smeared blood, the chaos of the crash landing. The aft-bucky—one of the tanks that helped keep them aloft, dirigible-like—cracked in flight. It started taking on air and is the reason they went down. The other buckies might have broken on impact. But he won’t know these things unless the airship is running and the diagnostics are functional.
He pulls vines, loosening them enough to open the door.
He’s here just to see it, just to be in it again. There’s no other place on earth where he’s felt so powerful, so in control. He looks down into the airship’s interior. The vines choke so much of the light that it’s just a dark hole. It doesn’t smell like rot. Maybe rats worked their way in and ate the rations.
He swings his legs in first and tells Helmud to hold tight. He lowers their doubled weight down. His boots hit, and the airship shifts a little.
He loves this goddamn airship. “Baby,” he says, “I’m home.”
The airship has an underwater feel to it now. The vines stripe the windows, cutting up the sunlight. He walks past the seats, crawls through the cockpit door, and steps inside. He walks to the console, runs his hands over the toggles and switches and screens. They’re weirdly pristine. In fact, they seem freshly polished. The fractured glass of the window has been replaced. He touches it. No—the glass wasn’t replaced. It was somehow mended. He can feel the ripples of where the shatters once were, and the glass has a pale cloudiness to it, just in that one spot.
Who’s been down here? Some of Kelly’s men? If they fixed the glass, did they fix the aft-bucky too?
He feels hopeful. Is the airship operational? Of course he can’t get it airborne. It’s held in place by the vines, which have enormous collective strength.
“We might just be able to get this baby up in the air again,” he says to Helmud. “God, it felt right being up here at the helm. Didn’t it?”
“Didn’t it?” Helmud says.
“You’ll never get it—not like I do,” he says to his brother. “You don’t understand, Helmud.”
Helmud shifts his weight on El Capitan’s back. “You don’t understand Helmud,” he says.
And he’s right. El Capitan used to think he understood his brother because he thought his brother was a moron, a grotesque puppet that sat on his back, forever. But over the past few months, Helmud has changed, come into his own somehow—or maybe Helmud has always been more complicated than El Capitan’s given him credit for. “Fair enough,” he says to his brother. “Fair enough.”
He looks down where there was once the spray of food, the dark stains of his own dried blood, an errant tin cup. “I could have died here.”
“Could have,” Helmud says.
And then El Capitan remembers Pressia’s face, hovering over him—her beautiful face—and the way she touched his head and stared into his eyes. She was afraid he was dying. She wanted to save him. He wanted that to be proof that she loved him. Maybe that’s why he kissed her and told her that he loved her. He’d confused her tenderness with love. He was too afraid to tell her how he felt before. He’d wasted his time being a coward while Bradwell was moving in, winning her over. But in that moment, he shook off fear and chose to really live.
He wonders now if he should have told her earlier. Maybe he waited too long. But then Helmud starts humming behind his back—an old love song: I’ll stand right here and wait forever ’til I’ve turned to stone—and he knows that it wouldn’t have mattered. She wasn’t going to fall in love with him anyway. He feels his chest well up. He refuses to feel sorry for himself. “Shut up, Helmud!” he says. “Nobody wants to hear that shit!”
“Shut up, shit!” Helmud shouts back.
“Are you calling me a shit?”
“Nobody!”
“Screw you, Helmud. You hear me? If it weren’t for you, Pressia might have been able to fall for me. Don’t you know that? Do you think anyone’s going to ever fall in love with either of us? We’re sick. You understand me? We’re grotesque. And we always will be.”
Helmud pushes his head into El Capitan’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for you…”
“If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.”
“You’d be dead.”
“I know. I know,” he says. “You think I don’t know that we need each other now? I’d have killed you a long time ago if it didn’t mean killing myself.”
“Killing myself!” Helmud says, like he’s lobbing a threat.
“Don’t talk like that. Don’t be so dramatic. Shut up.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” Helmud says. “Shut up.”
El Capitan backs sharply against metal. Helmud lets out a huff of air.
“Shut up,” Helmud wheezes once more.
El Capitan slides down and sits there, feeling a pang of guilt for shoving his brother so hard. He hates the guilt. They’re still relatively new, these pangs. He didn’t really have them before he knew Pressia—or he did but didn’t know what they were—and he wishes they’d go away.
He looks at all of the windows curtained with greenery. What’s the point of going home if he can’t be with Pressia—not here, not ever? “You know what the real wreck is, Helmud? Love. Love is what really wrecks us.” He lets his chin drop to his chest. “What do you think, Helmud? Don’t just repeat me. What do you really think?”
Helmud is silent for a moment, and then finally he says, “Think. Really think.”
El Capitan shuts his eyes. What would Helmud have to say about love and its wreckage? “I don’t know what you’d say, Helmud.” But then it comes to him—as if they are truly wired together in some elemental way. “Maybe you’d say that we’re already wrecked, so what’s a little more wreckage?”
“What’s a little more wreckage?” Helmud says. “We’re already wrecked.”
And then there’s noise—rustling vines, boot scrapes overhead—and voices. Have others come to claim the airship for themselves? Did they follow El Capitan and Helmud here? Are they armed? There’s nowhere to go. “We’re trapped,” El Capitan says to Helmud.
How many are there? Two, maybe three…maybe more.
“Trapped,” Helmud whispers.