Burn (Pure #3) by Julianna Baggott
For David Scott.
Sometimes all I want to do is lie down—blur-blind, life-weary—and survive with you.
PROLOGUE
BRADWELL
He knows the ending. He can see it almost as clearly as he saw the beginning.
“Start there,” he whispers into the wind. His wings are bulky. The quills ruffle; some drag behind him. He has to tighten his wings against the wind as he walks through the stubble fields toward the stone cliff. He wants to go backward, to tunnel and dig to the little boy he once was.
This is what he’s never told anyone.
He didn’t sleep through his parents’ murders; he willed himself to believe he did.
After the men broke into his house, he was woken up by a scuffle, his mother crying out, probably just before she and his father were shot. Bradwell had been warned about people breaking into the house. He scrambled from bed and hid under it.
He saw a set of boots in the inch between the bed skirt and the floor. They stalled beside his bed, and then one of the killers—his would-be killer—knelt, lifted the bed skirt, and for a moment, they were face-to-face.
Bradwell didn’t move, didn’t breathe. The man’s face was long and angular with a slightly crooked jaw. He had blue eyes.
Finally, without a word, he dropped the skirt.
He said to the other man with him, “The boy must be at a sleepover.”
“You checked the room?”
“I checked the goddamn room.”
He listened to them leave and then still didn’t get up. He pretended to sleep, still there under the bed. He pretended to dream. And then he opened his eyes and this is the part that he has confessed: He walked down into the kitchen as if it were any other morning; that might have been all his brain could handle. When his parents weren’t making breakfast, he called for them, and only then did he start to panic. Finally, he found their bodies still in their bed.
He could have run toward his mother’s cry, but instead he hid. He told Pressia that he’d slept through the murders, and he’s wanted to believe that to be the truth. In reality, that day was the first time he should have died, but far from the last. The fact that he’s alive is accidental.
He climbs the stones and walks to the edge of the cliff. It’s dark but the moon is bright. He spreads his wings wide and leans into the wind. For a moment, he thinks the wind will go slack, and he’ll fall forward and fly.
But he doesn’t have wings that will hold him.
Flying. That’s not the ending.
The ending is in ash and dust.
He was meant to be a martyr, alongside his parents.
He’s borrowed this time with his brothers—El Capitan and Helmud. He was never meant to be in love or to have someone love him—Pressia. When he thinks of her, it’s as if his heart has been kicked clean out of his chest. He could have died with her on a frozen forest floor. He could have died bound to his brothers, their blood mixing together. But neither of those was the end.
Here, on the cliff, he sees the end: He’s lying on the ground amid the ash and dust of his homeland and his chest is ripped open. The truth lifts from his body like a long white unfurling ribbon, flecked with his blood.
How will it happen? When?
He only knows that it’s not far off.
With the wind cutting through his wings, he feels like he’s careening toward it—or is the end rushing to meet him? This time he won’t hide. This time he’ll run toward the cry.
PRESSIA
KEY
The door to Pressia’s room is locked. The caretakers come and go with rings of keys, jingling—how many rooms are there? Where’s Bradwell? Helmud and El Capitan? Where are her things—the vial, the formula?
The caretakers never answer her questions. They tell her to get well. “I’m not sick.” They tell her to rest. “I can’t sleep.” They smile and nod and point out the alarms attached to each of the walls in her room. “Push here if there’s an emergency.” The caretakers wear necklaces with emergency buttons attached to them too. But she doesn’t know what kind of emergency to expect. When she asks, they say, “Just in case…”
“In case of what?”
They won’t say.
Each day is the same. Too many days to count; weeks have passed—almost a month now?
The caretakers are all women and golden, each of them, almost glowing. Is it the firelight? Is it that so many of them are pregnant—don’t pregnant women glow? Is it some inner radiance? Most of them have bellies that bloom out from their hips. Engorged.
But it’s not just the caretakers who are golden. The children out in the field are too. They’re sent out at different intervals throughout the day to play. They have sticks and balls and nets on poles dug into the cold ground. Golden, all of them, as if steeped in something slightly metallic, and no fusings or scars or marks. Just skin. The alarms bob on the chests of their coats.
The caretakers bring Pressia trays of food: warm broths, porridges, tall glasses of cold milk—white, white milk, not a dot of ash stirring within it. The ash eaters are everywhere, skittering across spoons, along the edge of the metal bathtub, on the windowpanes, both inside and out. Beetle-backed and lightly iridescent, they seem to work night and day, resistant to cold.