Burn (Pure #3)(94)

Pressia looks up and down the sidewalks on either side of the narrow street. She sees another white bleach stain. Then another. All of them look fresh.

“Why are there jumpers, Beckley?” she asks.

“It’s as awful as it is beautiful, right? And sometimes it’s real here too.” He walks up to an apartment building’s front door, hits the buzzer. The door opens. They step into a lobby with plush velvet furniture and a long gold-framed mirror. Orchids bloom in ornate vases. They can’t be real. Beckley nods to a man sitting behind a desk. He’s watching a miniature TV. Pressia hasn’t seen a television since the Before. It’s grainy but colorful—and then she recognizes the setting. The man’s watching Partridge and Iralene’s wedding reception.

“It’s the big day,” the man says, rubbing his belly. “I thought you were there?”

“Another day, another dollar,” Beckley says.

The man looks at Pressia but doesn’t ask any questions.

Beckley leads her to an elevator. Its doors glide open. Pressia’s nervous to step inside of the box, but she refuses to show it. She stands behind Beckley, who hits a lit-up circular button, and presses her back to a wall. The elevator jerks and rides up. Pressia’s stomach lurches.

Just as the elevator comes to a stop, Beckley reaches out and holds a button. He says, “Lyda isn’t doing so well in here.”

Pressia steps forward. “What do you mean?”

“Would you do well in here?”

Pressia shakes her head. “Today might not be easy, for obvious reasons.”

Beckley covers his mouth with his fist and coughs. Then, with his fist still raised, he says, “Once she has the baby, they’ll put her back in.”

“Back in?”

Beckley releases the button and the doors open. He looks up and down a long hallway. “Sorry,” he says, taking the gun from her holster. “Protocol.” And then he whispers, so softly she barely makes it out. “She’ll go back to the rehabilitation center. For crazy people. She’ll never get out.”

“But the baby…”

“The baby will be fine,” he whispers. “The baby’s a Willux.”





PRESSIA





MOTHER AND DAUGHTER




The apartment is pristine, spacious: white furniture, white drapes, white walls with framed prints of flowers in vases that nearly match the flowers sitting in vases on tables here and there. And seated on the two sofas are two women, one man, and one girl, all perfectly poised around a glowing television tuned to the reception, of course. There’s no escaping it.

Lyda isn’t among them. Pressia is disgusted by the idle perfection of it all. Someone is going to let Lyda be sent back into a rehab center after they take her baby from her? Do people know the secret?

She thought she knew what hell was. She thought she knew it intimately—a Beast grabbing her in a rubble field, OSR’s Death Sprees, the Dusts around Crazy John-Johns, the creatures held by the mist in Ireland, disease, clogged lungs, slow death.

But no. This is a hell she’d never imagined before—a mannered, vicious hell.

“Where’s Lyda?” Pressia asks them.

They stare at Pressia, each set of their eyes gliding to her wrapped-up doll-head fist. She can’t stand the way they’re gawking. She rips the bandage off. She should have done this at the reception—shown them all the truth of who she is. She drops the bandage to the floor. She feels free again—as if the doll head can now breathe.

One of the women grabs the girl and hugs her to her chest.

“Who is this, Beckley?” asks the other woman. She stands up, and her dress ripples like it’s underwater.

Beckley steps forward. “Partridge’s half sister,” he says.

Pressia takes off the hat and throws it on a table so they can see the burns curved around one of her eyes. “Where’s Lyda?”

The man says to the woman clutching the girl, “Take her into the kitchen! For God’s sake!”

“No!” the girl says. “I want to see this!”

But the girl’s mother says, “Hush it, Vienna! Move! Now!”

The man wrenches the girl’s arm, and pulls her into the kitchen, the woman following close behind.

The woman in the floaty dress is standing her ground. She says to Beckley, ignoring Pressia, “I don’t want my daughter talking to this wretch! Do you hear me? This situation is delicate enough!”

“You’re Lyda’s mother?”

The woman won’t look at Pressia. She simply nods curtly. “I won’t have this!” she hisses at Beckley. “I will not have this! Tell her she must leave!”

Beckley shrugs. In fact, he looks kind of amused by the situation. “You can tell her yourself. I’m a guard, not a messenger.”

“Excuse me? You can’t use that tone with me,” Lyda’s mother says. “You wait until I report this. You just wait!”

Beckley smirks. He’s not afraid of Lyda’s mother. It could be that women inside the Dome are never much of a threat as she’s heard it was during the Before, at the height of feminine feminism.

Lyda’s mother looks like she might cry, as if she’s well aware she has no real power. She says, “I want what’s best for my daughter. My only daughter.”