Her mother flinches, almost imperceptibly.
“You like it?” the willowy doctor says. “That was a really important improvement for us.”
“We are going to ask you some brief questions once more,” the other doctor begins. She’s squat and chops her words. “We’ve been told to look into the nature of your relationship with Ripkard Willux.”
“Your boyfriend, Partridge,” the willowy doctor adds as if Lyda wouldn’t recognize his name.
“Just a few questions,” her mother says. “We’ll keep it short.” Is her mother telling her to keep her answers short, too?
“I don’t know where Partridge is,” Lyda says. “I’ve told everyone that, again and again.” There have been several interrogations, each a little more hostile than the one before it.
“Ellery Willux himself is, of course, very invested, as you can imagine,” the willowy doctor says. Just saying his name thrills her, Lyda can tell. “It’s his son we’re talking about.”
“You might aid in finding the boy,” her mother adds, cheerfully, as if to say that this might redeem them as a family.
The fake image of the window flickers again as if with wings—or is it that the program has a glitch? Is it stuttering? You might aid in finding the boy. Is he lost? Is he gone? Like an aviary bird? Like the bird she made of wire that might now be on display in Founders Hall in lieu of antique egg timers, aprons, and knives. Or has her wire bird been disqualified because she’s no longer a student attending the academy?
“You’ve stated that you showed him the Domesticity Display after hours in the exact manner that you would have when leading a tour midday,” the squat doctor says.
“But is this completely accurate? A boy and a girl in a dark room, having skipped out on a dance, music playing,” the willowy doctor adds. “We were all young once.” She winks.
Lyda doesn’t answer. She’s learned to answer questions with questions. “What do you mean?”
“Did he kiss you?” the willowy doctor asks.
Lyda feels heat rise in her cheeks. He didn’t kiss her. She kissed him.
“Did you two embrace?”
She remembers his hand on the dip of her waist, lightly touching her ribs, the swish of fabric across her stomach. They danced to two songs. They have plenty of witnesses. Mr. Glassings and Miss Pearl were chaperones. Partridge bowed his head as they danced, and she felt his breath on her neck. There was a knife in his belt, hidden from view by his jacket. Yes. The kiss? Did people notice? They held hands on the walk to her dormitory. Many people saw them. Was someone looking out a window? Were there other couples walking down the path?
“Whether you liked him or not,” the squat doctor says, “do you think he might have had deep feelings for you?”
Lyda’s eyes tear up. No, she thinks. No, he didn’t have feelings for me. I was just a convenient date. He’d been surly from the start. He was only kind to her because she’d let him get away with stealing from the display cases—a knife. A knife he used for what purpose? No one will tell her. And he danced with her because he wanted them to appear normal, to fit in and not draw any attention to themselves. Do they worry that he might be dead? Do they think he’s wandered off and killed himself like his brother? She looks at her mother now, pleadingly. What should I do?
“Did he love you?” the willowy doctor repeats.
Lyda’s mother nods. It’s not even a nod really. It’s more of a slight jerk, as if she were trying not to cough. Lyda wipes her eyes. Her mother is telling her to say yes, to tell them that Partridge loved her. Would this make her more valuable? If she has any value at all, it would only be because he’s alive. If they think that he loves her, then perhaps they will use her—as a dispatch? A go-between? A lure?
She grips her knees, the fabric bunching between her fingers, and then she smooths the fabric flat. “Yes,” she says, lowering her eyes. “He loved me.” And for a moment, she pretends it’s true, and she says it again, louder. “He said so. He told me he loved me that night.”
The window flickers again. Or is it her vision?
PRESSIA
SHOE
TO GET TO BRADWELL’S HOUSE, Pressia crosses the street and heads down the alley that runs parallel to the market. Off in the distance, she hears the chants of the Death Sprees. Sometimes she pretends the chants are part of a wedding party. Why not? They rise and fall and sound like a celebration—why not of love? Her grandfather told her about her parents’ wedding—white tents, tablecloths, a tiered cake.
But she can’t think about that now. She tries to gauge the positions of the Death Spree teams, and decides that they must be in the Meltlands where the gated suburbs once stood. She knows people who grew up there. She’s heard about them in games of I Remember—identical homes, ticking sprinklers, plastic playground equipment in everyone’s backyards. That’s why they’re called the Meltlands—each yard dotted with a large, colorful melted knot of plastic that was once a sliding board, swing set, and lidded sandbox in the shape of a turtle.
She tries to figure out by the chant which team it is. Some are more vicious than others. But she’s never really learned to tell them all apart. Her grandfather refers to the different chants as birdcalls, each one supposedly distinctive. She doesn’t know if chants are starting up or coming to an end in the enemy’s final field. Luckily the chants are off in the southern part of the Meltlands, which isn’t the direction she’s headed. Now that she listens more closely, they could be even farther. Maybe they’re out by the prisons, asylums, and sanatoriums, their scalded infrastructures of steel, rubbled stone, and the trimming of barbed wire. The kids have a singsong about the prisons.
The deathy houses all fell down.
The deathy houses all fell down.
The sick souls wander ’round and ’round.
Watch out! They drag you underground.
She’s never seen the fallen structures herself. She’s never been that far.
No one is out on the streets. It’s cold and dark and damp. She pulls her thick sweater up around her neck, tucks the sock-covered doll-fist under her arm, and walks quickly to another alley. She kept the hollow bell. It’s shoved down deep in her sweater pocket.
On top of the Death Spree chants, she’s listening for Groupies. There’s something about the restlessness of never being able to get away from one another that makes them take to the streets at night. Some Groupies use their collective strength to hunt people down and rob them—not that she and her grandfather ever have much to take. She listens for OSR trucks too. They’re the reason she’s chosen to walk in the narrowest alleys instead of the streets.
She crosses to another alley and then, because she feels charged with adrenaline, she starts running. She can’t help it. The streets are so quiet with only the distant chanting that she wants to drown it out with the sound of her heart in her ears. She heads down one alley but hears an OSR engine. She doubles back and heads in the opposite direction from the chanting. She crosses from one alley to another and another—twice she catches a glimpse of an OSR truck and has to change directions.
When she arrives at the Rubble Fields, she’s turned around. She stands in the shadow of a hobbled brick building that’s part of a wrecked row. She has to decide whether to go around the Rubble Fields, which will take an extra hour at least, or to cut through. The Rubble Fields used to be the center of the city, densely packed with tall buildings, trucks and cars, an underground metro system, and aboveground crowds crossing at traffic lights.
Now there are hills of collapsed stone. Beasts have dug burrows and small caves in them. Pressia can see tendrils of smoke rising up from gaps here and there. The Beasts have lit fires to keep warm.
She doesn’t have much time to worry about what to do next, because an OSR truck roars up the street and parks abruptly in front of the building closest to her. She edges around the corner and presses her back against the brick.
The passenger door pops open. A man in a green OSR uniform
jumps out. His foot is gone. One of his pant legs is cuffed. And instead of a knee, there’s the neck bone of a dog, its furred cranium, its bulged eyes, jaw, teeth. Is the man’s leg part of the dog’s vertebrae? It’s impossible to say where the man’s leg once was. The dog is missing a back leg and its tail, but he skitters in place of the man’s foot. They’ve learned how to walk with a quick, uneven limp. He goes around back and opens the door. Two more OSR soldiers jump to the street in their black boots. They’re armed with rifles.
“This is the last stop,” the driver shouts out. Pressia can’t see his face behind the glass, but it seems as if there are two men in there, one head close to the other—or maybe behind it. Is the driver a Groupie? She hears another voice echo the driver, “Last stop.” Has it come from the other head?
Her heart hammers. Her breath’s gone shallow.
The three men storm into the building. “OSR!” one shouts. And then she hears their boots pounding through the house.
The soldier driving the truck cranks the radio, and she wonders if it’s the same truck that was in her alley earlier that night.
Down the street, a bunch of voices rise up. There’s a figure, someone wearing a hooded coat, a face hidden by a scarf. It’s too dark to make out much else. The figure shouts, “Stop! Leave me alone!” It’s a boy’s voice, muffled by the scarf. He’s over sixteen by the looks of him. OSR will take him if they see him.
Then she sees the Groupies emerge from a side street. What used to be maybe seven or eight people is now one massive body, an assortment of arms and legs and a few glints of chrome, their leering faces—burned, wired, sometimes melded, two faces in one. They’re drunk—she can tell that much by the way they’re stumbling around, the slurriness of their curses.
The soldier behind the wheel glances in his rearview mirror, but then, disinterested, takes out a pocketknife and starts cleaning his nails.
“Give us what you got!” one of the Groupies says.
“Hand it over!” another says.
“I can’t,” the voice in the hood says. “It’s nothing anyway. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“Then give it!” one of the Groupies says.
And a hand shoots out and shoves the hooded figure. He falls to the ground and his bag flips from his hand, landing a few feet away. That’s what they’re after. If it’s not important, he should give it to them. Groupies can get vicious, especially when they’re polluted.
The hooded figure reaches for the bag so quickly and surely, his hand seems like an arrow that shoots from his body and then back again. The Groupies are confused by this sudden action. Some try to rear backward, but the others won’t let them.
Then the hooded figure stands up so unnaturally fast that he stumbles backward as if his body is out of sync. While he’s off balance, one of the Groupies kicks him in the stomach, and then they all move in—one massive body.
They could kill him, and Pressia hates the hooded figure for not just giving them his bag. She presses her eyes shut. She tells herself not to get involved. Let him die, she tells herself. What’s it to you?
But she opens her eyes and looks out at the street. She sees an oil drum on the other side. The soldier behind the wheel is whistling to the song on the radio, still picking his nails with the knife. And so she takes off her heavy shoe—the clog with its wooden sole—and throws it at the drum as hard as she can. Her aim is good, and she hits it dead-on. The drum gives out a low loud gong.
The Groupies look up, their dull faces clouded with fear and confusion. Is it a Beast from the Rubble Fields? A team from an OSR Death Spree, lying in wait? They’ve been ambushed before; she can tell by the way they whip their heads around. And of course, they ambush people themselves.
The distraction gives the hooded figure enough time to scramble to his feet again, more slowly and deliberately this time, and run up the hill away from them. He runs fast, with extreme speed, even with a limp in his stride.
For some reason she can’t understand, he runs straight for the back of the truck, crawls under it, and freezes.
The Groupies look up the street now. They see the truck, maybe for the first time, and with a few grunts they skulk back in the direction they came from.
Pressia wants to yell at the hooded figure. She created a diversion to save him from the Groupies—in front of the OSR even—and he crawls under their truck?
The soldiers in the house come pounding out again.
“Empty!” the one with the dog leg shouts to the driver.
The other two soldiers climb into the back of the truck, as does the one from the passenger seat. The driver puts away his knife, gives a nod. The other head shifts and bobs over his shoulder. He revs the engine, puts the truck in gear, and pulls off.
Pressia looks up and sees a face appear in the truck’s back window—a face, half hidden with shadow, a face encrusted with bits of metal, and a taped-shut mouth. A stranger. Just a kid, like her. She takes a step toward the boy in the truck—she can’t stop herself—out of the shadows.
The truck turns the corner. Silence fills the alley.
It could have been her.
Now with the truck gone, the hooded figure is exposed, lying on the street. He looks up and sees her. His hood has slipped off, and there is a shorn head. He’s tall and lean without a mark or a scar or a burn on his clean, pale face. A long scarf twists in a loose swirl to the ground. He grabs his bag and scarf, quickly stands up and looks around, dazed and lost. And then he staggers, as if head-heavy, and he stumbles backward toward the gutter. He falls—the thick clunk of his skull on cement.
A Pure. Pressia hears the old woman’s voice in her mind. A Pure here among us.
PARTRIDGE
SKULL
NOW, HERE, BREATHLESS. The stars look like small bright punctures—almost lost in the dark-dust air—but they aren’t punctures. It isn’t the ceiling of the cafeteria decorated for a dance. The sky overhead is endless. It isn’t contained.
Home? Childhood?
No.
Home was a big airy space. Tall ceilings. White on white. A vacuum cleaner always purring in distant rooms. A woman in sweatpants working it back and forth against the furred floors. Not his mother. But his mother was always nearby. She paced. She waved her hands when she spoke. She stared out windows. Cursed. She said, “Don’t tell your father.” She said, “Remember, keep this just between the two of us.” There were secrets within secrets. She said, “Let me tell you the story again.”
The story was always the same. The swan wife. Before she was a wife, she was a swan girl who saved a young man from drowning. He was the young prince. A bad prince. He stole her wings and forced her to marry him. He became a bad king.
Why was he bad?
The king thought he was good, but he was wrong.
There was a good prince too. He lived in another land. The swan wife didn’t yet know he existed.
The bad king gave her two sons.
Was one good and one bad?
No. They were different. One was like the father, ambitious and strong. One was like her.
Like what? How?
I don’t know how. Listen. This is important.
Did the boy—the one like her—have wings?
No. But the bad king put the wings in a bucket down a dark, old dry well, and the boy who was like the swan wife heard ruffling down that well, and one night he climbed down the well and found the wings for his mother. She put them on, and she took the boy she could—the one like her, who didn’t resist her—and flew away.
Partridge remembers his mother telling him the story on the beach. She had a towel around her shoulders. It ruffled at her back like wings.
The beach was where they had their second house. It’s where they were in the photograph he found in her drawer in the Personal Loss Archives. They didn’t go when it was cool except this once. The sun must have been warm because he remembers being sunburned, his lips cracked. They got a flu. Not a virulent one that
would send them to an asylum; this was just a stomach flu. His mother took a blue blanket from the linen closet and wrapped him in it. She was sick too. They both slept on the sofas and threw up into little white plastic buckets. She put a wet cloth on his forehead. And she talked about the swan wife and the boy and the new land where they found the good king.
Is my father the bad king?
It’s just a story. But listen. Promise me you’ll always remember it. Don’t tell the story to your father. He doesn’t like stories.
Partridge can’t lift his head. He feels pinned to the ground, and the memory wheels across his mind. And then it stops. His head is abuzz, a cold bright pain at the back of his skull. His heart is as loud in his ears as the automatic threshers at work in the fields beyond the academy. He used to watch the threshers from the lonesome dormer window at the end of the hall in his dorm when Hastings went home for weekends. Lyda—is she there now? Can she hear the threshers? Does she remember kissing him? He remembers. It surprised him. He kissed her back, and then she pulled away, embarrassed.
There is wind on his skin. This is the real air. The wind whips over his head, flutters the fine fuzz of his hair. The air churns darkly as if stirred by unseen fan blades. He thinks of fan blades—shiny and quick in his mind. How did he get here?
PRESSIA
GRAY EYES
THE PURE STAGGERS TO HIS FEET and stands in the road. He glances around for a moment, up and down the row of burned, hollowed-out hulls, over the Rubble Fields with their wisps of smoke threading up into the night air, then at the buildings again. He looks at the sky, as if trying to get his bearings that way. Finally, he pulls the strap on his bag over his shoulder and loops the scarf once around his neck and jaw. He glances at the Rubble Fields and heads toward them.
Pressia tightens the wool sock over the doll-head fist, pulls her sweater sleeve down, and steps out of the alley. “Don’t,” she says. “You’ll never make it.”
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