As if someone has hit a light switch, their car goes dark before the automatic lights flicker on, as they head straight to the heart of the coding center. The brakes hiss, and the boys are slightly bucked, then settle, then stand.
They are quiet in the halls. Some say halfhearted see-yas.
Partridge grabs Hastings before he heads off. “Hey,” he says. “You can’t do that.”
“I’m sorry,” Hastings says. “I shouldn’t have told him. He’s all mouth.”
“No,” Partridge says. “It’s not about me. It’s about you. You’re going to have to stand up to them one day.”
“Maybe,” Hastings says.
“You will and you can do it. I know it.” Partridge feels bad about leaving Hastings behind. He’ll be a little lost without him. He doesn’t want him to fall into the herd by accident, where he’ll be the one they kick around for laughs. “I might miss dinner tonight, to study,” Partridge says. “Go with Arvin Weed. Sit at his table, okay?”
“You’re arranging my social circles now?”
“Just do it. Okay? Remember I said this.”
“You’re being weird,” Hastings says.
“No I’m not.”
Two escorts walk up and lead them in opposite directions.
“See you later, weirdo,” Hastings says.
“Bye,” Partridge says.
He’s led to a small white room—no windows. The mummy mold sits on the examination table. It’s a perfectly smooth cast, hinged at the back so that Partridge can climb inside. Above and beside it, there is equipment—robotic arms, pincers, vacuum tubing—all shiny chrome, newly polished. A desk with a computer and a chair-on-wheels sit in one corner. On the desk, there’s a vase with a fake flower bowing from the lip. A reminder of home or nature? Partridge wonders. The Dome doesn’t usually go for those kinds of soft touches.
And suddenly Partridge has second thoughts. He doesn’t have to go through with this. No one has to know. He could have dinner with Hastings and ask Lyda to help him return the knife. He remembers the feel of her narrow waist and her ribs as his hands moved up her silky dress while they kissed. He’d love to smell her honeyed hair again.
Someone has probably noticed that the knife is missing—a teacher or janitor. Lyda could be in one of the headmaster’s offices right now, being interrogated. If he’s caught, his father will be furious. He might be pulled out of the academy. He might be sent to the rehabilitation center to talk to someone like Lyda’s mother, Mrs. Mertz. And Lyda? She’ll be in trouble too, if he’s caught. He’d have to tell them how he gained access to the display.
He could confide in Glassings. But what would Glassings do? He’d lead him to the library stacks where they’d have a quiet conversation, perhaps using the small squares of scrap paper and tiny pencils. Glassings would sweat the way he does sometimes, small beads on his forehead that he pushes back into his receding hairline. He’d advise him to keep quiet, no doubt. He’d be nice about it.
The cast is there, waiting for Partridge, a perfect mold of his body. It surprises him how big he is. Just a few years ago he’d been the shortest in his class, and pudgy too. But the cast is so long and lean that it seems like it would belong to someone else, someone older, more like Sedge. If Sedge were still alive, would Partridge be taller than him now? He’ll never know.
He wants to go back, but it’s already too late.
He only has a few minutes before the tech arrives. Cool air is streaming through the vents. He pulls the rolling chair away from the computer desk and situates it under the duct. He stands on the chair, hoping for steadiness. He unscrews the duct cover lodged overhead, and pushes it into the ceiling. He quickly reaches up, curling his hands over the metal frame, and then, kicking the chair back to the desk on his way, he pulls himself into the dark duct. On his hands and knees, he replaces the cover over the hole. It won’t fool anyone long, but it may buy him a few minutes.
It’s darker in the ducts than he expected, and louder. The system is on, vibrating manically. He crawls as fast as he can. He has to make it to the first set of filters by the time the system stops. At that point, he’ll have only three minutes and forty-two seconds of downtime to make it through the first filter, the tunnels and the rows of fans, and at the end of that, the second barrier of filters. He’ll have to cut his way out into the world. That is, if he’s made it in time and the blades haven’t chopped him to death by then.
Just as the blueprints indicated, he can crawl out of the ductwork and step into the massive air-purification tunnel itself. He stands upright, his head barely skimming the ceiling. Its sheet metal is perfectly rounded—and he thinks of the word kettledrum. But he’s not sure what the word means. What does a kettle have to do with a drum?
Just ahead, there’s the first set of pink filters, tautly drawn, like a dense fixed curtain, blocking his way. Partridge is surprised that the filters are so pink, pink as a tongue, and that everything here is now so brightly lit. He wonders why. For maintenance purposes?
He pulls out the kitchen knife and thinks of Lyda, her voice counting to twenty slowly in the dimly lit room, his finger running over the blade. He starts sawing through the filters. The fibers are tough with thick strands running through them, like muscle in meat. The fibers begin to break loose. The particles spin and rise, reminding him again of something else from his childhood, but he can’t think of what—something like snow?
Partridge has heard the fibers are barbed and can settle into your lungs, starting up an infection. He doesn’t know if this is true or not. He’s come to mistrust everything presented as fact. Still, he doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks. He pulls out his scarf, ties it around his mouth.
He gets enough of the filters perforated and shoulders his way through. His hooded jacket now dusted pink, he sees the series of monstrous fans in front of him, the fan blades sharp and still.
He runs to the first set of blades and without touching them finds a low triangle between the blades, and he dips through. His boots slip on the slick surface, and he falls on one hip with a thud that echoes, the clumsiness of coding. He scrambles to his feet quickly and takes the next fan and the next, finding a rhythm. Has the tech already figured out that his body cast is empty? Has someone sent out a shrill alarm? Has Special Forces been alerted? Partridge knows that once word gets out that Willux’s son—his only living son—is missing, there will be no end to the search.
He moves faster through the series of tunnels and fans as if it were an obstacle course. He remembers a backyard, maybe his own backyard from his childhood or maybe someone else’s. There was a green lawn with blades of grass that you could rip right out of the ground, and trees with bark that wasn’t smooth or polished. There was a dog even. His older brother and someone else, a tall girl, had set up a course with ropes they were supposed to swing on and hoops to dive through and a ball that they had to shoot into a bucket at the end. There were drinks in boxes with tiny straws. The necks of the straws were like little accordions, and they bent to fit in your mouth.
His head feels suddenly heavy, and his body shifts. He grabs one of the blades to steady himself. It’s so sharp that the edge draws blood. His blood dots the floor. He’s only seen himself bleed a few times, at the dentist’s office, for example, when the machines were too forceful and his foamy spit turned pink. His vision narrows to a white seed of light and then comes flooding back.
He glances at his watch. Thirty-two seconds left. It hits him that he might not make it. He could die here, chopped to bits, and now because he’s broken through the filters, his body will be sent out, his blood carried by the strong current of air with the other smaller fibers. They’ll turn red with his blood. The operators will have to shut things down. Some people will have to be moved to temporary housing. Rumors will spread. The real story will be buried. They won’t mention a word about a problem with the air filtration because everyone would assume that the wretches had risen up, organized biological warfare. They might
even think that OSR, that flimsy militaristic regime, had made a hit. There would be mass panic. They’d come up with some other rationale, and, as for Partridge, they’d make up some story, hopefully something noble. Poor Willux, his father would be given condolence cards. There wouldn’t be a real burial. Just like last time, with his brother. No one wants to see a dead body, no beautiful barbarism here. Poor old Willux, his wife and two sons now all dead, three boxes in the Personal Loss Archives.
Partridge staggers forward, sliding along the surface, throwing himself through the blades. There’s another knick on his cheek. He hears distant ticking. The motor. He jumps through the second-to-last fan and sprints. He can see the final set of pink filters at the end of the tunnel. He wants to get out. He wants to feel it all again, wind and sun. He wants to find his old street, his old house—gone, he knows, blown up, but still. There is resistance in his behavioral coding. Why? What does it have to do with his mother? He found her things in the box, and everything changed. He has the envelope filled with her possessions—the swan necklace on a gold chain, the birthday card, the metal music box, and the photo—locked in a plastic pouch. He feels it all there on his back.
The final fan clicks backward, just one single inch, and Partridge dives through the last set of blades just as the fans begin to roar at his back, and the wind is drawn in like a deep unending breath from the other side of the last set of filters. The current is drawing him backward now. This is how his memory has felt, a long inhale that pulls him back. He falls to the ground but sets his boot heels and, hand over hand, pulls himself away from the blades. His strength coding is kicking in. He feels a surge of power. When he’s close enough, he reaches out and stabs the filters with his kitchen knife and drags his body forward against the wind. The pink fibers break loose and stream past him into the fans and he thinks of the word confetti.
PRESSIA
KNOCK
PRESSIA IS WORKING LATE AT NIGHT on her small creatures. Her grandfather is asleep by the alley door, sitting upright in his chair, the brick on his thigh. He’s taken over the bartering and, ever since, she’s needed more creatures to sell for smaller returns. Sometimes he’s too sickly to make it to the market at all and they both feel useless, something they both hate. She marks time by hunger now. During these late nights, she’s begun to realize that she could die here slowly, wasting away in an ash-laced cabinet in a cramped room. She looks at her grandfather, his wired stump, his closed eyes, the sheen of his burns, the labored rise and fall of his chest, the soft wheeze of ash in his lungs, the spinning fan in his throat. His face is clenched even while dreaming.
She keeps Bradwell’s gift, the magazine picture, on the table. She sometimes hates the people in their 3-D glasses—an ugly reminder of what she’ll never have—but can’t seem to put the picture away.
Ever since she opened the gift, there have been more memories, quick flashes: a small tank with fish swishing back and forth, the feel of the woolen tassel on her mother’s pocketbook, that soft yarn in her fist, a heating duct under a table that seemed to purr. She remembers sitting on what must have been her father’s shoulders as he walked under flowering trees, being wrapped in his coat as she was asleep and being shuttled from the car to her bed. She remembers brushing her mother’s hair with a wire brush while a song played on a handheld computer—the image of a woman singing a lullaby about a girl on a front porch, and someone is begging her to take his hand to ride with him into the Promised Land. Just her voice, no instruments at all. It must have been her mother’s favorite lullaby. She played the recording every night before Pressia fell asleep. At the time, Pressia got tired of the song, but now she’d sacrifice almost anything to hear it again. Her mother smelled like soap made out of grass—clean and sweet. Her father smelled like something richer, more like coffee. The picture of the people in the theater, for some reason, jolts her memories, and she’ll miss her parents so deeply that sometimes she can’t breathe. Even though she doesn’t remember them in any whole way, she remembers the feel of being enveloped by her mother—the softness of her body, the silkiness of her hair, the sweetness of her scent, the warmth. When her father wrapped her in his coat, she felt cocooned.
This is what she’s thinking about, her fingers quickly attaching wings to the skeletal frame of a butterfly, when there’s a knock at the door. The knock is sharp, the singular rap of a knuckle. There’s no engine noise of an OSR truck. Who can it be?
Her grandfather is sleeping soundly, deep rattling snores. She gets up and tiptoes to her grandfather, which is hard to do in Dutch-invented clogs; did these Dutch never have a reason to tiptoe? She grabs his shoulder and shakes it. “Someone’s here,” she whispers.
He startles awake just as another knock sounds out in the small room.
“Into the cabinet,” he says. They’ve worked it that she hides there if someone comes to the door, and if he taps his cane—shave and a haircut, two bits—she should escape through the fake panel. Pressia assumes that the little rhythm has something to do with barbershops, which may be why her grandfather’s chosen it. That’s their sign.
Pressia walks quickly to the cabinet and climbs in. She leaves the smallest crack in the door so she can see.
Her grandfather hobbles to the door with his cane and peers through a small hole that he’s cut out of the wood. “Who is it?” he asks.
There’s a voice on the other side, a woman’s voice. Pressia can’t make out what she’s saying, but it must appease her grandfather in some way. He opens the door, and the woman walks in quickly, breathlessly. He shuts the door behind her.
Pressia sees the woman in small glimpses—the rust on the gears embedded in her cheek, a sheen of metal cast over one of her eyes. She’s thin and short with blunt shoulders. She’s holding a bloody rag to her elbow. “Death Spree!” she tells Pressia’s grandfather. “Unannounced! We just had one not but a month ago! I barely got away.”
A Death Spree? It makes no sense. The OSR announces Death Sprees—they let the soldiers form tribes for twenty-four-hour periods so they can kill people, carry their bodies to a circle staked out in an enemy’s field, tallying the dead for points. Those with the most win. OSR sees it as a way of winnowing the weak from the general population. They announce Death Sprees about twice a year, but they’d just had one. It was the time Pressia’s grandfather chose to strip the cabinets and make the fake panel so his handiwork wouldn’t be heard over the stomping, hooting wildness. There have never been two Death Sprees so close together and never unannounced. She assumes the woman’s crazy or perhaps in shock.
“You sure about a Death Spree?” Pressia’s grandfather says. “I haven’t heard any chants.”
“How else did I get this wound? It was out past the Rubble Fields heading west, still going strong. I ran here instead of home.” The woman has come to be stitched up, but it’s been so long since her grandfather has done any stitching, he has to look for his kit, which sits at the end of the cabinet, and dust it off.
The woman says, “By God, what a day. First all them whispers, now a Death Spree!” She sits down at the table and looks at Pressia’s creatures. She sees the picture and touches it lightly with one finger. Pressia wonders if she’ll ask about it. She wishes she’d thought to swipe it from the table before climbing into the cabinet. “You heard them new whispers. Didn’t you?”
“Can’t say that I’ve been out today.” He sits down across from the woman and looks at the gaping flesh.
“You didn’t hear?”
Her grandfather shakes his head and starts swabbing his instruments with alcohol. The room fills with its antiseptic tang.
“A Pure,” she says, lowering her voice. “A boy with no scars, no marks, no fusings. They say he was full-grown, this boy—tall and thin and with hair shorn close to his head.”
“Not possible,” her grandfather says. This is what Pressia’s thinking too. People like to make things up about Pures. It’s not the first time she’s heard this one. And nothi
ng’s ever come of the other whispers.
“He was spotted in the Drylands,” the woman says. “And then he was gone.”
Pressia’s grandfather laughs, which turns into a cough. He turns his head and coughs until he’s gasping.
“You okay to be doing this?” she asks him. “You’ve got the weeping lungs?”
“I’m fine. It’s the throat fan. I collect too much dust and have to get it out.”
“It ain’t polite to laugh anyways,” she says.
Her grandfather starts stitching now. The woman winces.
“But how many times have we heard this one before?” he says.
“It’s different this time,” the woman says. “It’s not drunk Groupies. It was three different spotters. Each saw him and then reported. They say he didn’t see them, and they didn’t approach because they sensed he was holy.”
“It’s the whisper clutches. That’s all.”
They go quiet for a moment as her grandfather stitches the wound. The woman’s face becomes rigid, the gears locking up. Pressia’s grandfather blots the bleeding. He works quickly, daubing the wound with alcohol, then wraps it.
When he says, “All done,” the woman rolls her shirtsleeve down over the bandage. She hands him a small tin of meat and then pulls up a piece of fruit from her sack. It’s bright red but wears a thick skin almost like an orange. “It’s a beauty. Isn’t it?” She hands it to him, as payment.
“Nice doing business with you,” Pressia’s grandfather says.
The woman then pauses. “Believe what I told you or not. But listen, if there’s a Pure who got out, then you know what.”
“No,” he says. “What? You tell me.”
“If there’s a way out, it means there’s also a way in.” Pressia gets a sudden chill. Then the woman lifts her finger to her ear. “Hear that?” she says.
And now Pressia does hear something, the far-off chanting of a Death Spree. What if the woman isn’t crazy? Pressia wants this whisper about the Pure to be true. She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they’re fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.
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