Burn (Pure #3)(120)

“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?”