Burn (Pure #3)(39)

The cockpit is quiet.

“Here’s my compromise.” Bradwell breaks the silence. “Only over my dead body are the Pures coming out of this as heroes.” He looks each of them in the eyes and then turns and walks out.

Pressia stares at the windshield that held his reflection. It’s now a black screen shuddering with occasional clouds. He let his guard down. He talked about finding his dead parents. She wishes she’d said something different, but what?

She turns to El Capitan’s reflection. He catches her eye and smiles sadly. “Sorry,” he says. “For everything. I shouldn’t have pushed him to—”

“Don’t,” she says. “It’s okay.”

Helmud reaches out and quickly touches her hair then shyly looks away.

She sees her own reflection and thinks of the rhyming game of tag the children were playing in the field.

Look in a looking glass. Look for a match. Find yourself! Find yourself! Don’t be the last!

She lifts the doll head. Who would she be without it? More herself or less? She can’t imagine what it must be like for Bradwell—his body isn’t his own. She thinks of her own DNA, the instructions of how to build her and her alone. Hair, skin, blood.

And then she remembers the hairbrush in her room, how it never had a strand of hair in it the next morning. Did they take her DNA? Will there be replicas of her—out there—one day? The idea terrifies her in ways she doesn’t understand. Find yourself. Find yourself. She doesn’t really even know who she is. Neither does Bradwell. Does anyone?

El Capitan says, “We’re over land.”

“Land,” Helmud says, as if commanding his brother to bring the airship down. “Land!”

Pressia pulls the backpack off and holds it to her chest. She looks out the windshield at the rugged horizon. From here, it looks peaceful and calm. But she knows it’s teeming with Beasts and Dusts. The land itself is alive—hatefully alive. Maybe vengefulness is part of all of them.





PARTRIDGE





LUCKY US




His mother’s voice. “Partridge! Your friend is here!”

He opens his eyes.

His mother’s voice? No—it can’t be. She’s dead. And yet she used to call to him like this when his friends showed up at the house. He remembers his childhood home—his bed sheets with small trucks on them, the clock in the shape of a baseball, a set of connectable blocks teetering on the floor.

And his mother, appearing in the doorway—the swing of her hair, her smile.

It’s not his mother’s voice, and it’s not Lyda’s either. This is his bedroom in the apartment he grew up in while inside the Dome. He sleeps on the bottom bunk. Sedge used to sleep on the top bunk. He didn’t like it when Partridge would cry at night. Sedge would tell him to shut up. Their mother was gone, presumed dead. He should have been allowed to cry anytime he wanted to.

His father’s bedroom is empty. He doesn’t go in there—ever.

Partridge killed him.

This thought jerks him fully awake.

The door opens and it’s Iralene. “Arvin Weed’s here,” she says. “Should I make you two something to drink? Refreshments?” She’s twising her engagement ring.

“What time is it?” He sits up.

“You slept and slept and slept,” she says. “It’s tomorrow already!”

After he got home and Iralene hugged him, he told her that he wasn’t feeling well and thought it’d be good to talk to Arvin Weed, who’s now his doctor. Really, he just wanted to grill Weed again about Glassings and the people who are still suspended, and also to show him the sheet of scientific equations Partridge found in his father’s war-room chamber. After Iralene told him she’d set up a meeting with Weed, Partridge walked to this bedroom, lay down, and after days of not sleeping, fell into restless nightmares. He used to dream of finding his mother’s dead body everywhere—under bleachers, in the academy science lab—but in this dream, he was going about his day in some mundane way when he came across a pile of bodies. One or two twitched, bleeding but still alive, and they got up and staggered toward him. They spoke with the voice of the man who jumped in front of the train—Eckinger Freund, the authorities confirmed. And these dying people called him a liar, but Partridge couldn’t tell whether they hated him because of the truth he told about his father or this new lie—marrying Iralene.

“Are you coming to talk to Arvin?” Iralene says. “Should I chat with him to give you some time?”

He rubs his eyes and lies back in the bed, his hand spread on his heart. He’s still fully dressed. He feels sick. “No, that’s okay. I’m coming.” She starts to leave the room, but he says, “Wait.”

She turns back to him, smiling. “I love the way you look when you first wake up.”

“Iralene, we’re alone,” he says. “We promised not to…” He asked her not to be romantic with him except for show, in public.

“Can’t a girl practice?”

He sits up. “Did the death toll go up any since the press release went out?”

She takes a deep breath. The suicides scare her. Her face goes stony. “Beckley reported that there were no cases overnight.”