Burn (Pure #3)(21)

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s another secret. We grew up with all of these secrets and lies. How can we keep living this life, Partridge? I don’t know if I can…” She takes a deep breath, quickly touching her stomach. The baby. The future.

“Without you, I’ll be alone in this,” he says. “Don’t turn your back on me.”

“I’m not.” She glances around as if adding, I have nowhere else to go. But then she reaches into her coat pocket. “We’re not completely alone.” She pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He walks to her and she hands it to him. “They’re here—the sleeper cells: Cygnus, the swan.”

It’s an origami swan. “They made contact with you?”

“Read it.”

Partridge unfolds a wing and reads Glassings needs your help. Save him. “Who gave this to you?”

“The tech who came to fix the orb.”

“Save Glassings from what? Where the hell is he?” he says.

“This is all I’ve got.” She sighs and then rubs her eyes. “Are you going to open the drawer?”

“What?”

“I think you should do it.”

“I watched my father all my life, you know—how people looked at him and how he was spoken to. I didn’t mean to, but I took it all in, and I think, on some level, I must have thought my father’s life would one day be mine. I mean, he was my father.” He stops abruptly. He draws in a sharp breath. He’s worried that he’s going to cry. “It’s not just that I killed him, Lyda. It’s not just that I’m a murderer.” He rubs his thumb against his fingertips, thinking of his father talking about blood on his fingerprint. “It’s that I’m afraid I’ll become him.”

“Open the drawer,” Lyda says.

Partridge isn’t going to argue with her—not now. He puts a finger on the blue lit square on the top desk drawer. It glides open, revealing a stack of folders.

He picks up the top folder and drops it on the desk. Just like his father said, its label reads ENEMIES. He opens it up. It’s filled with people’s pictures, each with a page of data—suspicious activity, family, friends, affiliations.

Partridge flips through the stack, and Lyda walks over, close enough to see the faces. He stops when he comes to Bradwell. Lyda gasps, and he knows it’s because she recognizes the background too—the woods where his mother and brother were killed. The picture is of Bradwell shouting, the cords of his neck taut; he’s caught mid-action, and Partridge realizes that this picture was taken from a video stream of one of the Special Forces soldiers who attacked them. This picture was taken minutes before his father killed Sedge and their mother.

“Go on,” Lyda urges. “Who else is there?”

He turns to the next photo, and there’s a picture of El Capitan and Helmud from that same place on that same day. He closes the folder and shoves it back in the drawer. “These aren’t my enemies,” Partridge says. It’s a relief. His father was wrong.

There’s another folder. He reaches in and pulls it out.

NEW EDEN.

He opens it and skims plans—handwritten in his father’s loose scrawl—to enslave the wretches as a subhuman class to serve the Pures once the earth is habitable again. “New Slavery for a New Eden,” Partridge says, his stomach twisting. He shuts it.

The next folder is called REVERSAL. His father usually goes for more symbolic references, so this practical word makes him nervous. He flips it open so he and Lyda both can read together.

First there’s an official report from a team of scientists and doctors. The list of names at the top of the report is lengthy, but the name Arvin Weed pops out at him. He points to it. “Look.”

“I saw it too,” Lyda says.

From the samples collected and the incubation of those samples in a simulated environment, our specimens did poorly overall. Of the twenty, twelve died within the first ten days. Four contracted cancerous tumors that took root almost immediately and seemed to thrive in their healthy tissues. Two of these four were cured of the cancers but died from more growths within the year. The four survivors—one male and three female—have fared poorly overall. Two are sterile. The male has contracted an eye disease, rendering him blind. He and one female have asthma and compromised lungs. We do not expect them to be able to rejoin the general population within the Dome. The male is in a critical-care unit, and the female suffers mental problems and is currently in solitary confinement in the rehabilitation center. The other two are being studied and evaluated. They have been released back into the public with their memories of this study erased.

In conclusion, we believe that those who survived in the Dome have, by lack of exposure to the outdoors and to disease in general, become more vulnerable over time. If we move into New Eden, we will lose a large number of people within the first year. Those who survive will be far outnumbered by the survivors outside of the Dome. However, the longer we wait to enter New Eden, the more vulnerable our population will be to the elements that will kill us.

Meanwhile, the original survivors of the Detonations have been weeded out, leaving only those with extreme abilities to adapt and survive. The remaining have superior immune systems. Operation Wretch Purification contains the most detailed information about the survivors of any of our observational studies.