Burn (Pure #3)(122)

“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.