PARTRIDGE
TIED WITH STRING
The long mahogany table is actually a screen. It’s projecting a live map—the Dome sits in the center. Partridge looks down at the image. Small dark flecks have circled the Dome, and more are coming—flecks are pouring out of the woods.
“It’s produced through a compilation of various cameras that tag movement and follow it,” Beckley explains.
“Each fleck is a survivor?” Partridge says. It’s really happening. He realizes now that he never fully believed it.
“Correct.”
Iralene hooks her arm around Partridge’s. He’s so disconnected that her touch surprises him. “There are so many of them!” she says.
Partridge’s heart thuds in his ears. He feels a surge of pride. He can’t believe they’ve organized and joined together like this. He imagines what El Capitan and Bradwell are feeling now. Are they at the head of this? Has it happened around them? But at the same moment, that surge of pride quickly switches to fear. They’re gathering because they’re expecting entrance. This isn’t a feel-good mission. This is the beginning of a revolution.
“We have to communicate with them,” Partridge says. “There’s still a way to slow it all down! We have to do this peacefully. Do we have an update on Pressia and Lyda?”
“They’re on their way,” Beckley says.
The thought of Lyda makes his chest constrict. Why didn’t she ever return his letters? Has she fallen out of love with him?
“You can talk Pressia into calling a truce. I know you can,” Iralene says. “She comes from those people. She’ll know how to communicate with them, right?” Wretches—that’s what Iralene means.
Beckley’s talking to someone on his walkie-talkie. “He’s ready? Here now?”
“What’s going on?” Partridge asks.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Beckley says, “but I took the opportunity to get someone who could be a liaison.”
“A liaison?”
“You’ll need someone on the ground to serve as a go-between. I thought of the perfect person. Someone who might seem…trustworthy to them.” Beckley walks to the door, opens it, and in walks a tall, lanky Special Forces soldier hobbled by a sleek prosthetic, the soldier’s leg ending in the thigh. The soldier stares at Partridge, and Partridge knows him.
“Hastings…” He tries to see his old friend, goofy and easily embarrassed. He misses him.
“Partridge Willux.” Hastings’ voice is more robotic than ever, but there’s still something deeply human inside of him, something they can’t erase.
Iralene is afraid of Hastings. She tightens her grip on Partridge’s arm and shifts so that she’s standing slightly behind him.
“What happened?” Partridge asks about Hastings’ leg. The last time he saw Hastings, Partridge had told him to go find El Capitan. Did that lead to his loss? Is Partridge to blame? It wouldn’t surprise him.
“An incident.” Hastings has been shut down. He can only give short answers—the least revealing kind. He went rogue and they recoded him.
“I’m sorry about that,” Partridge says.
Hastings nods. They’re still old friends. Some loyalty remains.
“Hastings,” Beckley says, “we need you to be our eyes and ears.” Hastings is fully bugged. “We’ll set you up with communication so we can speak directly to who’s in charge down there.”
“El Capitan and Bradwell,” Partridge says.
“We’ll give you a handheld that will transmit our voices from here,” Beckley explains.
Hastings takes a deep breath. His bulky shoulders rise and fall.
“Beckley brought you in because you’d be the one they might trust out there, but really you’re the one I trust, Hastings,” Partridge says. “We go way back.”
“You don’t have to play on your old ties,” Iralene says softly, recognizing something in Hastings. “He’s programmed to obey you.”
“She’s right,” Beckley says. “Foresteed doubled up on his behavioral coding. He’ll never go rogue again.”
“I want him to have a choice!” Partridge says. “Damn it! I want people to make up their own minds!”
Beckley walks up to Hastings. “Can you make up your own mind, Hastings?”
Hastings looks at Partridge and then at Iralene. He shakes his head. “No, sir.”
“We have to get him out there fast,” Beckley says, “if we’ve got any hope of negotiating.”
“Okay, Hastings, go on out. Find Bradwell or El Capitan. Pressia will be here soon,” Partridge says, hoping it’s true. “When you find them, we’ll be ready to talk. We can still turn this around.”
Beckley walks to the hall and picks two guards to escort Hastings out of the Dome.
Before Hastings leaves, he glances over his shoulder. He gives Partridge a look—it’s all he has, an undeniable humanity in his eyes. The look is both accusatory and full of suffering. It’s sharp and quick and sends a shock through Partridge. It’s as if Hastings knows the future, and it’s worse than Partridge could ever imagine. But before Partridge can say anything—and what would he say?—Hastings has walked out of the room, half lumbering, half limping.
He remembers Hastings talking to a girl at the last dance he ever went to, the one where Partridge danced with Lyda. How did they end up here—each newly broken in ways they never could have predicted?
“There’s one more thing,” Beckley says to Partridge as he steps back into the room. “Cygnus decided it was better if you and Lyda were split up.” He reaches into the pocket of his uniform jacket and pulls out two bundles—stacks of folded paper, each tied with string. “Letters—from you to Lyda and from her to you.”
PRESSIA
SACRED
Pressia and Lyda are running along the streets of the Dome toward the war room. Their spears are tucked into their belts. Pressia took one that was small and sharp, just six inches long and easier to hide. Lyda is wearing her armor. Everyone is so panic-stricken, so dazed and angry and hopeful and lost, that they don’t even notice. A shop window has been shattered, and people are on the street, fighting over flashlights and batteries. Another group has blocked an official Dome truck and is looting gas masks, blankets, bottled water. Pressia remembers the stories her grandfather told her about what happened just after the Detonations—fights in mini-marts and sprawling superstores. The posters announcing Iralene and Partridge’s engagement, plastered in storefront windows, have been defaced, their faces x-ed out, DIE written in thick ink above their heads, along with nooses and skulls.
“He’s the goat,” Lyda says. “Partridge is the goat!”
“What do you mean?”
“The scapegoat. They’re going to blame him for everything!”
Pressia’s scared. These people want blood. She knows that look in their eyes. She remembers it from the survivors who took to the streets during the Death Sprees. People can only suffer for so long before someone must pay.
She and Lyda cross the street to avoid the Pures, who are brawling in their overcoats and pantsuits and sliding around in their thin-soled loafers.
They head into a cloud of smoke. It’s billowing up from a crowd in front of a church up ahead, roiling and roiling with nowhere to go.
“It’s starting to smell like home,” Lyda says. “Not just the smoke but the desperation.”
They cover their mouths and noses with their sleeves and press on.
As they pass the church, Pressia sees that the crowd is burning an effigy—a stuffed suit with a crackling face. “Par-tridge! Par-tridge! Par-tridge!” they shout. Pressia can barely breathe. She’s lost faith in her brother, but burning him in effigy?
She looks at Lyda, who’s stricken. Pressia shoves her away from the crowd. “Just keep your head down,” Pressia says. “Keep going.”
Lyda stumbles a little, but they press on.
When they turn the final corner, Pressia slams into a guard. He grabs her by the arm. “Where the hell are you going?”
A woman is standing nearby. She sees the doll head before the guard does, and she screams.
“They’re here already!” she screams. “Wretch!” the woman screams louder. “Wretch!”
The guard sees the doll head and falls backward, clawing for the rifle on his back. “Stop!” he shouts through the thickening smoke. “Stop now!”
But they keep sprinting as fast as they can. Pures around them are running and shouting. A gunshot goes off. Was it from the guard shouting at them through the smoke? Someone else?
Lyda pulls Pressia into a building, and they run across a broad, airy lobby with mirrored walls and beautiful gold trim. Another guard shouts, “This way!” They run to a sole elevator and step inside.
The guard hits a button. “He’s been waiting for you.”
“Which one of us?” Lyda asks.
The guard shrugs as if he doesn’t even really know who they are, and now Pressia can tell that he’s young—younger than she is. “Do you think I should stay?” he asks quietly. “I’m worried about my sisters. Should I leave? It’s getting bad, isn’t it?”
“Are you related to the Flynn girls?” Lyda says. “Did you go to the boys’ academy?”
“Aria and Suzette,” he says. “My parents are gone. They didn’t make it much past”—he lowers his voice—“the speech. They did it in a good way—really well planned. No blood, and they arranged it so the maid would find them, not us. They were good parents.” The boy shivers.
“Of course they were good parents,” Pressia says. “I’m sure they loved you very much. They’d be proud of you now, thinking of your sisters.” She knows what she always wanted to hear from her mother and father—I love you. I’m proud of you. She’s hung on to the idea of them watching over her for so long… She can’t imagine if they’d killed themselves.
Lyda reaches out and grabs the boy’s sleeve. “You should go. Now’s the time for people to talk about love. There might not be much time left.”
Pressia thinks of Bradwell. She can’t help it. Love. There it is. She’ll always love him. Will they have more time together?
The elevator rocks to a stop. Pressia will never get used to elevators. The doors open, and Lyda and Pressia step out.
“This way!” another guard calls to them down the hall.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” Pressia says, turning to the boy in the elevator.
His eyes tear up. “No one ever says anything like that here. No one talks about them anymore. It’s like they disappeared.”
“They aren’t gone,” Pressia says.
The guard lowers his head, and the doors glide shut. Pressia knows she’ll probably never see him again. This is how everything feels now—a first time and a last, all in one.
Lyda runs down the hall. Pressia follows after her. As they pass a series of doors, Lyda ducks into a hall and presses her back against the wall.
“What are you doing?” Pressia asks.
Lyda wraps one arm around her ribs. “I just need a moment. Go on.”
“Are you sure?”
She nods.
Pressia continues on. A door opens up ahead. Partridge steps into the hall. Pressia remembers the first time she ever met him—how, with his scarf unwound, she knew that he was the Pure that she’d heard about, the Pure with the short hair and the perfect skin let loose from the Dome. He reaches out—to shake her hand? Is this going to be formal? “I saved your life before I even knew who you were,” she says. She doesn’t accept the handshake.
Partridge puts his hands in his pockets. “That’s right,” he says. “Groupies were about to take me out.”
“They wouldn’t have, though, right? We were being herded together then, and we’re being herded together now,” she says.
“Maybe that’s true.”
“I have a feeling it’s going to be different this time.”
“We’re in a lot deeper,” Partridge says. “As deep as it gets.”
“What have you done here, Partridge? Who have you become?”
“What about you? You turned on me. You gave up on me.”
“No, you gave up on us,” Pressia says.
“You have to call off the attack,” Partridge says coldly. “We’re getting a location on Bradwell and El Capitan and are setting up communication. Hastings is the messenger. It’s all coming together. We’ll be in dialogue—real dialogue—for the first time in the history of the Dome.”
“And in this dialogue, you tell them what to do? Is that a dialogue?”
Partridge looks down the hall, and Pressia knows by the changed look on his face that Lyda has appeared. And then he says her name. “Lyda. Lyda Mertz.” He starts to walk toward her, and then he starts running. Lyda stands completely still. Pressia doesn’t know if she’ll accept him or not. Does she really still love him, or does she just have to know whether he loved her at all—really and truly loved her?
At the last second, he slows. She says something that Pressia can’t hear, and he says something back. He reaches up and touches her cheek with the back of his fingers. She hugs him then, whispering something to him.
Pressia hears a noise behind her and turns. There’s a woman. She stares at Partridge and Lyda, and she takes a sharp breath in and a ragged breath out.
“Iralene,” Pressia says, recognizing her as the bride at the wedding.
Iralene nods. “I have something that will change your mind.” Iralene looks down the hall, and Pressia follows her gaze to Partridge, who is now holding Lyda’s face in both hands, talking to her in a rush of words. “It was a wedding gift.”
“Iralene,” Pressia says again. “Are you okay?”
Iralene grips the doorframe. “It’s heaven,” she says, and she smiles at Pressia as tears slip down her cheeks. “I had them make heaven. Here. Right here. Because it’s the safest place in the world. Here,” she says, “let me show you heaven.”
As she steps into the hall, her ankle buckles, and she teeters for a moment in her heels. She whispers so softly Pressia can barely hear her. “Come with me. I want to show you why you should tell them to stop. This will change everything. It will make everything right. You’ll see.”
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?”
EL CAPITAN
EYES
The 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.
PARTRIDGE
ROOMS
Sun. 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…”
“Weed told me you’d throw everything at me to get me to call it off.”
“Why won’t you?”
“Why do you think I can?”
“Let me tell you what my father figured out. The wretches are the superior race. They’ve been tested and tested and tested by all the horrors they’ve been through and are now toughened. And the Pures? They’re weak—coddled and protected. They have no real immune systems anymore. You know what will happen if the Dome no longer exists and the Pures have to live out there, breathing ash and fighting Dusts and Beasts and Groupies?”
“Yes,” Pressia says. “I know exactly what will happen. Have you forgotten? That’s my childhood.”
“And do you want that to play out again?”
Pressia shakes her head. “I wanted Pures to help the survivors. I wanted to even the playing field with the cure. I wanted to erase all the scars and fusings and have everyone be whole again. But I don’t want that anymore. Bradwell was right. We should never erase the past even when we wear it on our skin.”
“I know where the button is, Partridge.” Iralene points to a small metal square embedded in the wall. “This is it, isn’t it? Save us, Partridge.”
There’s a knock on the open door. A man’s voice says, “Bradwell is standing by. Are we ready?”
“We’re ready,” Partridge says.
A screen lights up one wall. And there is Bradwell’s face. His eyes are squinting. The wind is whipping his shirt, his hair. He turns and looks to one side—showing the double scars running down one side of his face, his dark wings.
Iralene gasps. She’s not used to ash, scars, and fusings.
The cameras that are lodged in Hastings’ eyes take in El Capitan and Helmud, who look pale and weak. El Capitan has two black eyes and a crooked jaw.
“What happened to them?” Pressia says.
“Are those two fused together?” Iralene says the word fused as if it’s new to her. She’s horrified, and Pressia remembers what Bradwell said about what he thought the Pures would think of him—that disgust, that horror.
“I’ll explain it later,” Partridge says.
Pressia wonders if there will be a later…
“Tell Bradwell to call it off,” Partridge says to Pressia. Would Partridge hit the button? Would he kill all of the survivors once and for all?
Pressia slips her hand in her pocket and grips the top of the spear that Lyda whittled from the crib slats.
“Bradwell!” Pressia says. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” he shouts into the wind. “Are you okay?”
“Are you?” she says.
He nods. He glances at El Capitan and Helmud. “We’re okay. I wish I could see you!”
“Tell him, Pressia,” Partridge says.
“Is that Partridge’s voice?” Bradwell asks.
“It’s me,” Partridge says.
“What do you have to tell me?” Bradwell asks.
Pressia knows that she’s supposed to tell Bradwell to call off the attack, but instead she says, “Partridge can kill all of you. He can push a button of his father’s design and send a gas out across the wind that will put you all to sleep forever.”
Bradwell takes a deep breath. “We’re unarmed,” he says. “El Capitan said that was the only way to do this. Unarmed. All of us together.”
“If you bring down the Dome, Pures will die. They can’t live outside the Dome. Most won’t make it,” Partridge says. “So you seem pretty well armed to me.”
El Capitan starts to speak. Hastings’ eyes quickly focus on him, and his face fills the screen. “You’d choose to kill survivors to save Pures?”
“Don’t you see the death toll on either side?” Partridge asks.
“Do the deaths of wretches count for less?” Bradwell says.
“None of you can understand. I’m going to be a father. I’ve got a baby on the way—you don’t know what it’s like to worry about raising a child out there.”
“Partridge,” Bradwell says, “we were children out here. We know what that’s like, and you never will.”
“My own child!” Partridge says. “My own child has to be able to breathe and grow and thrive. He can’t do that out there.”
“Your child?” Iralene says, as if it’s just now dawning on her how much this child means to him. Does she think she’ll be the mother of the child? Or is she talking about Lyda?
Pressia says, “The baby isn’t just yours. In fact, right now, the baby isn’t yours at all.”
“They’ll kill me—you know that. I’ll be the first to die. They’ll kill Iralene too. Pures and wretches—it doesn’t matter who. They’ll kill us. You know what we represent.” He presses his hands against the wall. “He’s in me. He’s inside of me. My father. He’s not just in the air all around us. He’s inside of my body. His blood is my blood.”
Pressia watches his hand, the one with the pinky that’s now fully grown back, the one dangerously close to the command button. She can’t rush Partridge with the spear. He’s been coded for strength and speed. He’d overtake her easily.
But she glances at Iralene. She’s a Pure—she’s the weaker race; that’s what Willux came to believe. And so Pressia reaches for Iralene’s pale wrist. She grabs it and spins her around, twisting her arm and jamming it up between her shoulder blades. The letters and photographs that she’d collected in her arms fall to the floor, a spray of faces, birthdays, bicycles, Christmas trees, and handwritten notes—pages and pages of them. Her skin feels thin and chilled. Pressia shoves Iralene’s face against the wall, pinning her other arm with Pressia’s hip and holding the spear tip to her throat.
“Walk away from it,” Pressia says, “or I’ll kill her.”
Partridge glares at Pressia. He clenches his fists and stands completely still. “Hastings,” Partridge says. “Get Bradwell.”
Partridge’s voice is tinny and cold. Get Bradwell. The words are a sick echo in Pressia’s head, a ringing that won’t stop.
Hastings has no choice.
He pushes Bradwell to the ground, puts his good foot on Bradwell’s chest. Bradwell’s wings splay beneath him. Hastings aims one of the guns lodged in his arms at Bradwell’s heart.
There’s the red bead of light.
Bradwell stares into Hastings’ eyes, but he’s only talking to Pressia. He says, “I’m sorry.”
Pressia can’t breathe. She knows what he’s sorry for—not what’s happened, no. He’s saying he’s sorry for what’s about to happen.
“No!” she screams, still holding Iralene tight. “No!”
And then Bradwell starts to fight back. He bucks. He kicks Hastings and tries to wrestle himself up from the dirt. His wings beat against the dirt, filling the air with more dust and ash.
The screen darkens. Bradwell’s face is lost in the dark cloud.
“Stop resisting!” Hastings orders. “Stop now!”
Pressia shouts at Partridge. “Do something!”
But Partridge doesn’t understand, does he? Bradwell is fighting to the death. He’s fighting, knowing he’ll die.
The screen goes black.
Hastings has shut his eyes.
And then there’s a gunshot.
Just one.
A few survivors scream.
And then silence.
And then there’s a cry—loud and long.
It’s followed by another cry—just as loud and just as long.
An echo of the first.
Pressia drops the spear. She loses her grip on Iralene, who remains completely still, her body leaning against the wall.
“He’s dead,” Pressia whispers.
* * *
Hastings is stiff, his guns poised on the crowd. He is a soldier. He stands his ground.
El Capitan kneels next to Bradwell. He’s terrified of all of the blood, so sudden and quick, spreading across Bradwell’s chest. Helmud holds on to El Capitan’s neck. He grips his shirt in his skinny fists.
“Bradwell,” El Capitan says breathlessly. He’s supposed to check his heart. But the blood has soaked his shirt. There can’t be much left of his heart.
El Capitan’s hands are shaking so badly he can barely get hold of Bradwell’s shirt. But when he does, he rips it wide open.
The wind gusts.
Small sheets of bloody paper lift.
El Capitan sits back as the wind collects the papers and sends them out over the dry dirt.
Hastings’ boot steps on one, its edges soaked red.
El Capitan picks one up.
We are here, my brothers and sisters,
to end the division, to be recognized as human,
to live in peace. Each of us has the power
to be benevolent.
There is no cross on the bottom of the message. Only random splatterings of Bradwell’s blood.
The survivors pick up the sheets. They gather around Bradwell.
His body lies on a blanket of his black-feathered wings. The bloody white sheets of paper keep fluttering up from his chest like an unending ribbon pulled by the wind.
His arms are spread wide, his hands open—and from one of them, Freedle appears. Nearly lost in the spinning, swirling sheets of paper, Freedle spreads his mechanical wings and takes flight, heading toward the Dome.
* * *
Pressia can’t breathe. She can’t cry. Bradwell is dead. He knew that he was going to die. If we don’t see each other again…She should have stayed with him. She shouldn’t have left. He knew, and he didn’t tell her—not the whole truth. He said if… if, if, if… She thought it was just the beginning.
She can still remember his kiss. Will she always remember it? Is it burned onto her lips? This is why he made her promise to be together here, now, and beyond—in case there’s a heaven…in case of what might lie ahead.
She puts her fist to her heart. She and Bradwell are still locked together. There is no better church than a forest. In the end, a wedding is between two people—what they promise in a whisper.
She isn’t sure why, but now she feels fear. It seizes her chest. She knows what it is to feel the shock of grief, what it’s like to mourn. But what she feels is terror. He is gone. The realization that the world still exists and he doesn’t—this is what she’s been most afraid of. And here it is.
She looks at the ground littered with the photographs of Partridge’s happy childhood.
Partridge walks toward her. “I killed him,” he says.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t look at me.”
Partridge is a ghost.
Iralene says, “You didn’t kill anyone. You didn’t. You didn’t kill him. Hastings did it!”
“Shut up,” Pressia says. “Shut up!”
Iralene slides down the wall and sits on the floor. She stares blankly.
“Pressia,” Partridge says, “I did the right things. I swear. I didn’t know that Hastings was going to kill him.”
“Hastings was programmed to kill anyone who resisted. Bradwell knew it. It’s why he fought back.”
“I gave the order,” Partridge says, his voice so hoarse it’s barely audible. “I could have called Hastings off. I could have done something.”
“You got us here,” Pressia says. “You drove us all to this moment. You’ve done worse than not calling off Hastings.”
“I wasn’t going to push the button,” Partridge mutters. “I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have.”
“No,” Iralene says. “You wouldn’t have. I know you wouldn’t have.” Then, with hope in her voice, she adds, “Maybe that stopped them. Maybe they’ll turn back now.”
“Freedle,” Pressia says. “Didn’t you see him? He’s carrying the bacterium. It’s coming. It works fast.”
There’s pounding on the door. They hear Beckley’s loud, urgent voice. “The people are rising up in the streets! They want blood!”
“They’re coming for us,” Iralene says.
“They’ll find us here,” Partridge says. “I know they will.”
The screen is still playing out the scene. Hastings’ eyes are wide open. He scans the crowd of people. El Capitan is shouting, “We keep going. This is what he wanted. We move forward. Together!” His face is streaked with black ash. He’s wiped his bloody hands on his shirt.
And then Hastings turns. He walks toward the Dome and stands in line between two other soldiers.
“The Dome is coming down, and when it does, I’m getting out and going home,” Pressia says. She walks to the door, opens it, and stands in the conference room. Beckley is standing next to Pressia’s grandfather, who sits in one of the leather chairs, Lyda at his side.
“You’ll come with us,” Pressia says to her grandfather. “We’ll keep you safe.”
He’s scared, but he nods. Once upon a time, he was the stranger who took her in. This time, she’ll be the one to take care of him.
* * *
Partridge stares at Lyda, still shocked that she’s here, so close, and yet she’s still distant. Things have changed between them. What has this been like for her? He remembers Pressia telling Lyda that they were going to take the baby from her. Did she believe that? Was it the truth? He doesn’t know what’s true anymore. Maybe he never has. Pressia will tell her what happened in that room. She’ll tell Lyda that he could have saved Bradwell and that he failed. His friend is dead. Partridge hesitated. Why? Out of anger, spite, or did he really think he was doing the right thing, trying to save his people? Deep down, is that the way he thinks of the Pures—as his people? He may never know his own truth. Maybe this is how it began for his father—one act that he couldn’t ever take back and he had to decide what kind of person he was. Partridge wants to be good. He’s always wanted to be good, hasn’t he? Right now, he has to decide how they’re all going to try to survive. “You could have run. You probably should have. Why’d you stay?” Partridge asks Beckley.
“We’re friends. Friends stay.”
Partridge didn’t realize that he’d been waiting for this, but now that he hears it, he’s happy. He grabs Beckley and hugs him. “Thank you,” he says.
“We have to move now. If you don’t go,” Beckley says, “they’ll find you here. You can’t lock yourselves away. They’ll only wait you out if you stay in your father’s chamber.”
Partridge looks at Pressia. He knows that he doesn’t deserve to come with them. He shakes his head. “They’ll just tear us apart out there,” he says. “One way or another…”
“We have to move now,” Beckley urges.
“Come with us,” Pressia says. “We can find a way to get you out of the Dome; then we can find a hiding place for you on the outside.”
Beckley and Lyda help Pressia’s grandfather. They move to the door. Pressia follows. “Come on, Partridge. Bring Iralene. Getting out is her only chance. Let’s stick together.” He can tell that it pains her to say this. He knows what he must seem like to her. He hates himself. He hates both worlds—inside the Dome and out.
Iralene and Partridge walk into the hall, following the others to the elevator, Lyda and Beckley supporting Pressia’s hobbled grandfather.
Then Iralene stops. She looks at the door to the house she designed. It’s still open—just a crack. Light is pouring from it.
She grabs Partridge’s arm, holds it tight. “Remember,” she says, “you still owe me a favor.”
“Iralene,” Partridge says softly.
“You made me a promise,” she says. “Will you stand by it?”
“Please…” he says.
“Are you a man of your word?” she says. He knows what she wants, and he doesn’t want her to say it aloud, but she does. “I built a home for us.”
Pressia holds the elevator door open. “Hurry,” she calls to them, as the others turn and look back.
He shakes his head. “I can’t.” Iralene lets go of his arm and heads toward the door filled with golden light. He grips Lyda’s letters.
“Don’t, Partridge,” Pressia says.
Lyda says, “There’s nothing real in there. It’s emptiness.”
“I can get you out of here,” Beckley says pleadingly. “Iralene, tell him to come with us!”
“One minute,” Partridge says to Iralene. She gives a nod. He walks down the hall to Lyda. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the stack of his letters, and hands them to her. “Here. These are yours.”
Lyda takes the stack and holds the letters to her chest. “I can’t stay and you can’t go?” she says to Partridge.
“You never know what will happen. One day…”
“If you come looking for me, you know I’ll be out there…”
“Both of you,” he says. Mother and child. “This is a ship. I think if it goes down, I should go with it.”
He walks back to Iralene, takes her by the hand, gives one final wave. He and Iralene step into the glowing room, into its blinding light—and he closes the door behind them.
* * *
A group of survivors stands watch over Bradwell’s body as El Capitan and Helmud lead the others. The circle grows tighter and tighter until only ten yards stand between El Capitan and the Special Forces soldiers, Hastings among them. El Capitan gives a shout, and the survivors around him stop. His command travels around the circle, and soon all of the survivors are locked in place. Hastings looks at El Capitan. Has Hastings lost contact with those inside? What’s going on in there?
No one moves. No one speaks. They stand there in the wind, Bradwell’s sheets still spinning in the ashen air.
And then it happens.
A creaking noise, low and deep, like something heard on a massive ship.
There’s a pop, and then a crack shivers up the side of the Dome like a crack through the ice of a frozen lake. It shoots across the surface, sending out fissures.
And then a piece of the Dome shifts, tilts, and then falls into the Dome itself.
* * *
Our Good Mother walks uphill, protected on all sides by mothers. The cross of the window casing in her chest keeps her posture stiff. She holds her head high. When she sees the splinters run across the white surface of the Dome, she whispers to the baby mouth lodged in her arm, “Let’s go find Daddy, dear one!” And she tightens her grip on her spear. “Let’s go find your papa.”
* * *
The lights flicker then fade. Arvin waits. He holds his breath, closes his eyes—and when he does, he sees his parents’ faces. He’s followed orders so that he could stay alive. He’s made himself valuable, indispensable. But now, he’s finally free. The generator hums to life. The lights brighten overhead, and he hears the buzzing noise of the laboratory being sealed. He won’t leave until he has a cure.
* * *
When the lights flit out, the hum of machinery dies inside of each chamber—up and down the halls. It’s deathly silent. Peekins has been working in this one chamber, trying to save a family—four stiff infants, the pale blue tinge fading from their skin. He fumbles in his pocket for a flashlight. He pulls it out and shines it on the babies before him—the Willuxes. One set of eyes flutter. The eyes open. It’s the little girl. Partridge’s mother. Maybe she’ll be the only one to survive.
* * *
The orbs light each room. Iralene has chosen the music—the same song they danced to at the picnic, which seems so long ago. It seeps in from unseen speakers. They hold each other in the living room—they’re swaying more than dancing. There are voices in the hall now, thudding footsteps.
Partridge whispers, “The sunlight isn’t warm. It’s not real.”
“What is reality anyway?” Iralene says.
“They’re coming for us.”
“Let them come.”
“Iralene,” he says. He cups her face and touches her cheeks with his thumbs.
There’s banging on the door, a heavy body throwing itself against it again and again.
* * *
By the time they reach the street, they can see the sky through the gaping hole. The ash swirls in.
Pressia says, “It’s happening.”
“Ash,” Lyda says.
Beckley is carrying Pressia’s frail grandfather on his back. “I will remember what it was like, won’t I?” Beckley says.
Pressia’s grandfather lifts his hand in the air and catches light flecks of ash in his palm. He looks at Pressia, a shocked expression on his face, and says, “My girl.”
Pressia starts to cry. “Yes,” she says. “I’m here.” Her mother is dead. Bradwell is gone. And Partridge has chosen his own ending. But she has gotten one person back.
There are others on the streets. Some are screaming and crying. They grip their children to their chests. Some are holding on to their valuables—gold candlestick holders, boxes of memorabilia, their guns. In fact, at this distance, they’re holding on so tightly that they look fused to their earthly possessions.
Some start to run—but to where? There’s nowhere to go.
The electrical grid has been compromised. The lights flicker and die. The monorail has come to a grating stop. Beckley leads them to the set of hidden stairs along the secret elevators, now stalled like everything else.
They get to the ground level of the Dome and walk through the vacant grounds of the academy, past dormitories, the darkened windows of classrooms, even across a football field—its white lines striping the fake turf—and by a basketball court behind a chain-link fence. Once upon a time, she’d been told her father was a point guard. Her real father—she’ll probably never hear his voice…He’s out there.
Finally, they come to the soy fields, which are green and leafy. The rows curve with the shape of the Dome. They walk and walk. Pressia can feel the wind sweeping in from somewhere unseen.
Lyda pulls out her spear. The soot is thicker now, whirling in the wind. She says, “It’s snowing.”
Close to the ground, a triangle of the Dome has fallen onto the soy fields, onto the plants with their green leaves and yellow seedpods. The ground, littered with broken shards, crunches under their boots. They walk toward the hole itself and to the edge of the Dome. Pressia looks out into that ashen world, her homeland. Trudging up the hill are the survivors, coming to claim what’s theirs. She starts to run toward them and searches the faces for Bradwell, knowing he won’t be among them.
But there are El Capitan and Helmud—soot streaked and pained. When El Capitan sees Pressia, he stops and falls to his knees. A white piece of paper is clenched in his fist. He raises it over his head like a small white flag.
There is no victory. There’s always loss.
This is his surrender.
This is her surrender.
Her heart is saying, Enough, enough, enough. I give.
And she expects her heart to stop beating.
She’s lost too much.
And she knows that out there, she will find Bradwell’s body. It will hit her again and again that he’s dead. How many blows can she take?
But her heart beats in her chest and keeps beating.
It beats her back to life.
Her own heart will not surrender.
And so this isn’t the end.
This is only another start.
She stops and looks back over her shoulder. Walking through the black snow toward her are Beckley, carrying her grandfather, alive after all, on his back, and Lyda and the baby inside of her, protected under her handmade armor. She turns back to El Capitan. He staggers to his feet, Helmud weighty on his back, and walks toward Pressia. He hugs her. When they were in the fog surrounded by creatures they thought would kill them, El Capitan said, If you were the person standing there with me, I’d always, always stay. This is the promise she needs to believe in. Stand with me. Stay.
This is her family now.
She and El Capitan and Helmud turn and look at the Pures who are heading into the fields, the green soy leaves shimmering around their ankles. They’re pale and wide-eyed, moving like timid ghosts toward the broken edge of their world.
Somewhere, Partridge and Iralene are sitting at a table in a fake kitchen swollen bright with fake sunlight—while batteries inside of orbs are slowly winding down. If people come after them, she hopes that they’ll at least fight. This is the final bit of faith that she must have in him.
But she’s chosen this truth—grotesquely beautiful and beautifully grotesque—this world.
“What are we going to do now?” El Capitan whispers.
“What now?” Helmud says.
“No more blood,” Pressia says.
Her heart beats and beats and beats—each time like a detonation in her own chest—and every moment from here on out is a new world.
The End