Burn (Pure #3)(59)

“Let’s just keep moving,” she says.

And they do, but soon enough there are only more dead to tend to. Bradwell, El Capitan, and Hastings haul a dead Groupie—two broad men—out of the rubble. They’re engrossed in the effort—even Helmud.

Pressia knows the only way she can truly help her people is to get the vial and the formula into the Dome. She takes one last look—El Capitan with Helmud clinging to his neck, the sooty shine of Bradwell’s wings, and Hastings hefting the bulk of the Groupie’s weight—and turns down an alley and starts walking quickly. She won’t run. It’s too much like running away. She turns down one street and then another.

The voices of men and women calling for children ring through the streets, overlapping. And children too. Lost children. Their calls not matching. The voices seem to only have grown louder, more insistent. Wilda, Wilda, Wilda! She can’t open her mouth and call her name. She’ll break down. Instead, the girl’s name rings in her head.

She sees a boy about twelve years old or so. It’s hard to say. Survivors are often stunted. He’s walking quickly too, though one of his legs seems fused to a knot, as if his knee joint is part metal and it has rusted up on him, locked shut. One side of his face looks freshly scalded. He doesn’t look up. When he passes, she says, “Excuse me. Can you do me a favor?”

“World doesn’t work on favors,” he says. “What you got?”

She has precious things—the vial, the formula—but they’d mean nothing to him. She reaches into her pocket, rummages. She pulls out a tin of meat. “I need a messenger.”

He eyes the tin hungrily. “What’s the message? Who’s it for?”





PARTRIDGE





PILL




Partridge storms down the hall of his apartment building, shot through with adrenaline. He’d like to punch Foresteed the same way he laid into Arvin Weed, but that wouldn’t do much good. He has to be rational with Foresteed—steady, steely, calm.

And who the hell is Arvin Weed anyway? Weed helped make the assassination possible, and yet he’s still carrying out the dead man’s wishes? But then Partridge thinks of his time in his father’s secret chamber: Is he just carrying out his dead father’s wishes too?

Beckley jogs to keep up with him. They aren’t speaking. Partridge shouts down the hall to the guard at his door. “Foresteed here?”

“Not yet,” the guard says as he fumbles to open the door for him.

Partridge and Beckley walk into the living room, where a doctor is giving a nurse instructions.

“Is Glassings here?” Partridge asks.

“Hello, Partridge,” the doctor says.

“Where is he?” Partridge says, blowing by them and walking down the hall to the bedrooms.

He hears Beckley ordering the doctor to stay put.

Partridge isn’t sure why, but he expects Glassings to have been put up in Partridge’s own bed. Then he hears a ragged cough coming from his father’s old bedroom, the door to which he’s kept closed since he arrived here after his father’s death.

He walks up to the door, puts his hand on the knob, but he doesn’t turn it. He’s frozen there, worrying for a moment if his father’s on the other side. His father still seems so alive it wouldn’t surprise Partridge to find him sitting in bed, pillows plumped behind his back, reading reports.

“Stop it,” Partridge says aloud. “He’s dead. He’s dead already.”

He turns the knob and opens the door. The room is lit by a single bedside-table lamp. Glassings jerks as if he’s expecting strangers, torture. Partridge says, “It’s just me.”

Glassings’ face is battered, his arms blackened with bruises. Both legs have now been set with casts, propped up on pillows to keep them elevated above his heart. The room smells of ointments and alcohol swabs. His breaths are shallow and sharp. He tilts his head so he can see through the puffed slits of his eyelids.

Partridge walks over to the bed and sits on the edge. It’s bizarre to see Glassings’ broken and battered body in his father’s bed, his head on his father’s pillows. “You’re going to stay with me here until you’re completely recovered.”

Glassings opens his lips and whispers, “I won’t recover.”

“Of course you will.” But Glassings doesn’t just look beaten. He looks small and sick. Partridge is worried now that Glassings is right.

“We weren’t secret,” Glassings says. “He knew who we were all along.”

“My father knew about Cygnus? About you?”

Glassings shakes his head. He coughs again, wincing with the pain in his ribs.

“Take it easy,” Partridge says. “We can talk later. You have to get feeling better.”

“No,” Glassings says, his face stricken with pain. “Now. You have to know this now.” His voice is hoarse, nearly gone.

“Okay,” Partridge says. “Who knew?”

Glassings draws in a wheezy breath. “Foresteed.”

“Foresteed knew about Cygnus?”

“He let us work. He protected us without us knowing it.”

Partridge thinks of that pill in his pocket just before he killed his father, remembers touching it with the tips of his fingers. “The pill.”