Burn (Pure #3)(100)

No. These boxes are sacred.

He walks on a few steps and finds SEDGE WATSON WILLUX and next to it ARIBELLE CORDING WILLUX. He presses his fingertips to his mother’s name. His mind replays the moment of his brother and mother’s death—together—the kiss, the explosion, the blood spraying finely all around them.

He shakes his head. “No. Alive. I want to see her alive.” He closes his eyes and thinks of her on the beach, ankle-deep in the ocean foam lining the shore. Her hair is windblown. She’s looking out at the horizon. He whispers, “Look at me.” And she turns her head, and he can see her face. She brushes her hair back and looks at him with love. Real love. His throat aches.

He opens his eyes. His brother’s cause of death is still the same as it was the last time Partridge was here, the lie that he used to believe: GUNSHOT WOUND, SELF-INFLICTED. He hates his father for killing off his brother—twice. Once with a lie. Once by flipping a switch.

The last time he was here, he couldn’t bear to see his brother’s life reduced to the contents of a box. But now, he’ll take what he can get.

He pulls the small box from its slot, holds his breath, and opens it.

It’s empty.

He fits his hand inside and presses it to the bottom of the box—the way Sedge once taught him to dive to the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool and press his hand flat. A quick sharp memory. Sedge taught him to swim.

He pushes the box back into its slot then quickly pulls the handle on his mother’s metal box.

Nothing, of course. It holds nothing at all. Was he expecting something? Does he still want something from his mother?

Yes, he does. He misses her with a sharp pang.

“Not much to steal this time, is there?”

He turns around and there’s the clerk. She pulls her cardigan in tight around her ribs and crosses her arms. Partridge must look guilty. He doesn’t know what to say.

“I was on duty the last time you were here. In fact,” she says, dipping toward him so that her bob swings forward, cupping her cheeks, “I was the one manning the cameras when you took your mother’s things.”

“You reported it to my father, I guess?”

“Oh, the chain of command is long and byzantine. I didn’t know why you were supposed to steal the things. I just knew that it was good if you did and that we should then let you go.”

“It was a pretty elaborate setup,” Partridge says. “I’ll give my old man that much.”

The clerk nods. “He tried it with Sedge too. A very similar plan. A few years before you showed up here.”

“What do you mean he tried it with Sedge?”

“Oh, Sedge was sent here on a field trip too—not with that teacher of yours. This was someone else. And he went to his mother’s box. And inside of it, there were bits and pieces, knickknacks, like the ones you found. But he didn’t steal them. He couldn’t. He looked around, and we were watching by way of surveillance cameras—me and another clerk in charge of reporting it but not stopping him. No, no. We knew he wanted to steal her things. We made sure he was quite alone. But there was something in him that wouldn’t let him take them.” The clerk smiles at the memory. “Not as much of a thief as you!”

So his father tested Sedge. But did his refusal to steal count as passing or failing?

“Sedge took a lot of time, though,” the clerk says. “He read a little birthday card—that one was for him, of course, with his name in it. He looked at the necklace with the bobble attached to it, and something else.”

“A music box?” Partridge says.

“Yes. It was a music box. And if you ask me, he realized something when he held those items. He felt something deeply. He was shaken by what he found. He knew something that he hadn’t known before.”

“Maybe he knew our mother might not be dead after all.”

“Is that it?”

Partridge nods.

“He went into Special Forces afterward. I heard that he was the first to volunteer to leave the Dome. He wanted to be out there.” The clerk runs her hand down a few of the handles. They each click, metal against metal. “Maybe he went looking for her. Not the way you did, but in his own way.”

He handed his body over to Special Forces. He became a fighting machine, a nearly speechless animal. He somehow maintained some part of himself, and in the end, he never turned on Partridge. He fought for him.

Partridge puts a hand over his eyes, bows his head. He starts crying. He imagines Sedge the moments after knowing what was in his mother’s personal archives box. Did his father also leave the hint that his mother might still be alive beyond the Dome? Had he felt like he wanted to scour the earth for her, the way Partridge had? “I miss him,” Partridge says.

“You think a person only exists in a body? No, no,” the clerk says. “Not any more than a person’s life can fit in a small metal box. He’s here,” the clerk says, and she waves her hand in the air as if it’s suddenly charged with electricity. “All of ’em,” she says. “They’re all around us! Everywhere!”





LYDA





WHEELS




Lyda doesn’t have much time. Pressia, still dressed as a guard, is asleep on the far side of Lyda’s bed but could wake any moment.