Burn (Pure #3)(56)

“Twisted,” Helmud says. He knows what El Capitan’s talking about. He bore the brunt of it.

Pressia says, “We have to try to get inside. Let’s stick to the plan.”

“That was never my plan,” Bradwell says.

“Well, it was mine,” Pressia says.

Bradwell walks to her. “Do you smell that in the air? Do you know what that smell is?”

She looks at El Capitan and Helmud, then Hastings. “Smoke.”

“No,” Bradwell says. “What’s riding in that smoke?”

“Don’t,” El Capitan says.

“Hair and flesh. That’s what’s burning, Pressia. How many times are you going to forgive? How many times are you going to fall into the trap of thinking we can reason with them? They’re murderers. Partridge is either too weak to stop them or he’s one of them. Either way…”

“You are your father’s son too, Bradwell,” Pressia tells him. “And your mother’s. They weren’t trying to kill Willux. They believed in the truth. It was their religion, right? You said that. They believed it would set people free. Don’t you believe?”

Bradwell closes his eyes and lets his wings catch in the wind and open a little on his back. “No,” he says. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

Pressia tucks the doll head under her chin, covers her mouth with her hand. She says, “I can go it alone.”

“Let’s stick together for now,” El Capitan says. “At least until we know what we’re up against, until we get our bearings again.”

“What we’re up against,” Helmud says fearfully.

Pressia doesn’t look convinced.

El Capitan tries another angle. “There are people who need us here, Pressia. You want to help them, right? You want to find Wilda and the other kids. Don’t you?”

She looks at the face of the doll head. She tilts it so its eyes close. Is she afraid they’re dead? Is she afraid that it’s too late to get the cure to the Dome, find the children, save them?

“I can’t let you go into the Dome,” Bradwell says. “I can’t let you go.”

El Capitan looks at Pressia. He can tell that she’s surprised. She looks at Bradwell, then El Capitan and Hastings, then quickly away from all of them. Is Bradwell confessing something here—about love? El Capitan feels sick.

“Before we left,” Pressia says, “word had traveled that Cap had set up medical tents in the city. Once the outpost was burned, that would have been the most logical place to take the children.”

The medical tents are gone. That’s the truth, but El Capitan doesn’t say it. Maybe Pressia knows that or maybe she’s living on hope. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s start there.” But he knows he’s probably only bought a little time before she leaves them all to make her own way.





PRESSIA





CALLING, CALLING




Pressia’s already decided to leave them. When the time is right, she’ll slip off. It’s easier this way. No arguments. No fighting. She has to find Partridge. She has to know the truth.

When Bradwell asked her if she knew what that smell in the wind was, she wanted to spin around and slap him. She remembers the smell of burnt flesh and hair from the days the OSR was in power as well as from her early childhood—from the Detonations. She’d blotted the memories out for so long, but now she remembers the fires, worse than these because they were fueled by radiation—or was it that the blasts made everything susceptible to becoming tinder? The fire cyclones tore through everything, drove people to water—people half-dead already. Her grandfather held her to his chest and, one legged, he crawled through the wreckage. He helped her climb across a river clogged with the dead.

They passed over that river as they flew in. It was edged with ice, a white rim. Pressia remembered what it was like to almost drown in it—the cold darkness all around her, that feeling of being saved, lifted by unseen hands. Did Bradwell see the river outside of his own window—the place where they almost froze to death? Does he remember the feel of their skin touching? She does. She’ll never forget it. The flash of it still makes her skin hot.

And then Bradwell said that he couldn’t let her go? He only means that he won’t let her go. He’s telling her what she can and cannot do. He looked her way once, then later again. But she pretended not to notice. If he can’t forgive her, she has to harden her heart, doesn’t she? She has to steel herself. Meanwhile, she’s making her plan.

Of course, she can’t shake the question that pounds through her head—Did Partridge do this? It echoes with each step. She has to believe in Partridge. What else does she have to hope for? Pressia sees a stand of twisted, burnt trees in the distance. Has she ever seen them before? She knows she has. But now, they have been whittled to spokes of char. She feels older now. The dead trees, like monuments to the destruction, stand out to her as individual. Each has suffered on its own. Each has been stunned into being something it never was intended to be. Each is now part of the greater loss.

They walk through the trees toward the city, using what’s left for cover. The trees look like cacti. Stark. Isolated. The silt climbs up their trunks on the side of the prevailing wind. Spider-root systems turned vertical catch what the wind drags in—mostly junk and rot that’s wandered across these wastelands wanting rest, some place to stop, an end to it all. She stares through the low limbs, looking for any shift of a figure or flash of color. “Hastings,” she says every few minutes or so, “anything?”