Burn (Pure #3)(61)

He makes noises that are soft and almost sweet. He lifts his hands in the air, and she’s expecting to see his metallic guns, the ones fused into his arms.

But now she sees that one of his arms is a bloody stump. The other has been gutted, and the gun is gone. Has someone stripped him of his guns while he was still alive?

He chirps at her. “Help me. Help me.”

He reaches out, his arm barely there, and staggers toward her. She grips her backpack, guarding it above all else.

But just before he falls, a shot is fired by someone unseen. It strikes him squarely in the chest, and he falls hard to the ground, inches from her.

He lies there, blood pooling from his body, mixing with the dark rain puddles. His body twitches twice.

She moves closer to him while still under cover. She looks into his eyes. She wants to give him peace. “It won’t hurt for long.” He reaches, one last great effort, and grips the meat of her upper arm—pinching her skin.

He makes the strange chirping noise a few more times, and then his hold loosens. His hand falls. He’s dead.

She knows that most likely survivors stripped his weapons and that somehow he got free of them and ran off, but they’ve hunted him down and have just shot him, probably with his own rifle. They’ll approach as soon as they’re sure he’s dead.

And so she sprints to the alley to a jagged pile of bricks and hides again.

Sure enough, within moments, survivors are picking over him—they take some knifelike weapons lodged in the boots, something razor sharp from his shoulders. They work quickly and quietly. They’re experts at this now.

She rubs the sore spot where he pinched her arm, finds a small rip in her jacket and a bit of blood.

She looks up again. The survivors are gone, leaving the body behind.

Pressia can’t help but look at what’s left. The body is slumped to its side. She can see the boy’s face scarred by burns, an upper arm that’s lightly furred as if he were part Beast, and the hump on his shoulder isn’t a hump at all. It was some kind of animal that existed beneath the skin. Why beneath the skin?

This isn’t a Pure. This is a wretch. But not like any wretch she’s ever known. He’s been enhanced, and yet it’s as if, with the enhancements, he was also bred to be a wretch. Why would anyone do this? Why? Pressia remembers the awful creatures in Ireland—the fog’s heartbeat, the night baring teeth, the idea of that stitched-up skin, the blind roving eyes. How many like this one are already dead? How many are still out there?

She gets up and runs. The rain starts pounding. She hunches her shoulders, pumps her arms and legs, and pounds against the ground. Her breath burns her lungs.

She’s trying to find the shortest route to the Dome. Soon she recognizes the streets around her, this air, this smell.

These are the streets that she ran as a little girl, and finally she finds herself standing in front of the blasted husk of what was once a barbershop. Her grandfather told her about migratory birds. They know home. They always come back to it. Here she is.

Home.





LYDA





NURSERY




There aren’t many uses for matches in the Dome. Fires, large and small, are frowned upon. Lyda remembers many conversations between her mother and her mother’s friends on the subject. They missed having pumpkin-scented candles in the fall. “How else will we know it’s autumn?” her mother said once. And the men missed their grills. Fireworks on the Fourth of July were replaced by an electric light show.

But Lyda wants matches. So she tells one of the guards that she wants to make a special dinner for Partridge. “I want to do it with candles and everything—to make it romantic! Can you get me candles and matches? And keep it a secret. I want to surprise him.”

The guard gives them to her, secretly, bundled in brown wrapping paper.

She winks at him.

She doesn’t care about the candles. She hides the matches in a pocket, takes them into the bathroom. She also brings a metal bowl and one of the books Chandry brought her, How to Decorate the Perfect Nursery. The nursery already has a crib and mattress, a rocking chair, a changing table, and a small chest of drawers, but she’s supposed to be picking out her color schemes, her motif—starfish, elephants, balloons? The book is supposed to help.

She shuts the door.

The soot here in the simulated world isn’t real. Lyda can’t feel it. She needs to feel it.

She closes the toilet lid, stands on it, disengages the smoke detector—just a little knot of wires—and turns on the fan. She sits on the tiled floor, starts ripping out the book’s pages. She pulls the matches from her pocket and burns the pages, one after the other, in the bowl.

The flames remind her of the mothers. They often cooked over open flames. They gathered around fire pits and talked in small groups, their children fused to their hips and shoulders, heads bobbing.

Her own mother? She imagines her face—stern, shut off. Her mother loved her—she’s sure of it. But it was a locked-up love, a buried-down love, a love to be ashamed of because…because that kind of love makes you vulnerable? Makes you weak? Why hasn’t her mother come to visit? Is she too ashamed of her daughter now?

Lyda misses the mothers and their fierce love.

She misses the cold, the wind, the fire.

She touches some of the ash, rubs it together until her fingertips are smudged black.