Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  “Up!” the guard shouts at the redhead. “Come on.”

  The girl glances at Lyda and the guard. She picks up the white head scarf in her lap, covers her head with it, tying it in the back. She follows them.

  They’re led to a room with three long tables and benches. Lyda sees other girls now, their whole bodies, not just faces, which surprises her. It’s as if she’s forgotten they have bodies. She recognizes a few from the windows in the past few days. Their heads are covered with scarves too, like hers. They wear identical white jumpsuits. Why white? Lyda wonders. It so easily shows stains. And then she thinks of this as an antiquated notion; fear of stains belongs to her old life. It doesn’t exist here. It can’t. Not alongside the fear of lifelong confinement.

  The girls are weaving mats just like the guard said. They have plastic strips in different colors, and they work them in and out, in checkered patterns, like children at camp.

  The guard tells Lyda and the redhead to take a seat. Lyda files in next to a girl on the end, and the redhead sits across from her. The redhead starts collecting strips—only reds and whites—and weaves quickly, her head bowed to her work.

  The girl next to Lyda looks up at her with deep brown eyes, as if she recognizes her, then lowers her head and gets back to weaving. Lyda doesn’t know this girl. Down the row, all the girls seem to turn quickly and glance at Lyda. Each one who looks nudges the next. It’s a chain reaction.

  Lyda is famous, but these girls know more about why she’s famous than she does.

  The guards have moved to one corner. They lean against the walls and talk.

  Lyda glances at the guards and picks up a handful of plastic strips. Her fingers fiddle nervously. Everything is quiet for a while until the girl beside Lyda whispers, “You’re still here.”

  Does she mean in the community craft room or the asylum? Lyda doesn’t respond. Why would she? Of course she’s still here, either way.

  “Everyone thought they’d have taken you out by now.”

  “Out?”

  “Force you to give information.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  The girl looks at her, disbelieving.

  “Do they know where he went? What happened?” Lyda asks.

  “You should know.”

  “I don’t.”

  The girl laughs.

  Lyda decides to ignore the laughter. The redhead has started humming as she works, a little nursery song that Lyda’s mother used to sing to her, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” It’s the awful kind of song that, once it gets in your head, can stick with you, especially back in solitary confinement. It could make you insane. The redhead’s afflicted with the song, Lyda thinks. She hopes it isn’t catching. The redhead stops humming for a minute and looks at Lyda as if she wants to tell her something, but doesn’t dare. She starts humming again.

  Lyda hates the redhead a little now. She turns back to the one with brown eyes who laughed at her. “What’s so funny?” she asks.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  Lyda shakes her head.

  “They say he went all the way out.”

  “All the way where?”

  “Out of the Dome.”

  She keeps weaving. Out? Why would he go out? Why would anyone go out? The survivors on the outside are evil, deranged. They’re vicious, deformed, no longer truly human. She’s heard a hundred dark and awful tales of the girls who survived, the ones who kept some part of their humanity only to be raped or eaten alive. What would they do to Partridge? Gut him, boil him, feed on him.

  She can barely breathe. She looks at the faces all hovering over their sitting mats. One girl looks at her. She’s pale and smiley. Lyda wonders if she’s taking medications that make her smile. Why else would anyone smile in here?

  The redhead taps her sitting mat on the table, humming away, and stares at Lyda, as if she wants her attention or maybe even her approval. It’s a simple white sitting mat with a red stripe down the middle. She looks at Lyda searchingly, as if to say See? See what I made?

  The girl next to Lyda with the deep brown eyes whispers, “He’s probably already dead. Who could survive out there? He was still just an academy boy. My boyfriend said he wasn’t even through coding.”

  Partridge. She feels like he’s stepped off the planet. But dead? She still believes that she’d know if he were dead. She would feel dead inside. She doesn’t. She thinks of the way he held her waist when they danced, that kiss, and her stomach flips again as it always does when she thinks of him. It wouldn’t happen if he were dead. She’d feel dread, grief. But she still feels hopeful. “He could do it,” Lyda whispers. “He could survive.”

  The girl laughs again.

  “Shut up!” Lyda whispers harshly at her, and she turns on the redhead and says it to her too: “Shut up!”

  The redhead freezes.

  The other girls look up.

  The guards eye the table. “Work, ladies!” one of them says. “It’s good for you! Keep at it.”

  Lyda looks at the colored strips. They blur and jump in her vision. She starts to cry, but backhands the tears. She doesn’t want anyone to see. Keep at it, she thinks to herself. Keep at it.

  PRESSIA

  BLEACH

  IT’S NOT THE WAY PRESSIA THOUGHT it would be. It’s more like an old hospital than a military base. The air smells antiseptic, too clean. Almost bleached. There are five cots in this room, and the kids lying on them don’t shift. They don’t move. But they aren’t asleep either. They’re wearing green uniforms, starched, waiting. One has a stiff hand covered in red aluminum. Another’s head is mangled with stone. Yet another is hidden under a blanket. Pressia knows that she’s none too pretty either—her scarred face, her fused doll-head fist. She still has the duct tape on her mouth, her hands tied behind her back, and she’s in street clothes, so they know she’s new. If she could, she thinks she might ask them what they’re waiting for, but then would she really want to know?

  She tries to be still like them. She tries to imagine what happened after Bradwell and Partridge figured out she was gone. She wants to believe that they’d join forces and come after her, try to free her. But she knows this isn’t possible. Neither of them really even knows her. Partridge ran into her by accident; he has a mission of his own. She looks back and wonders if Bradwell liked her at all or if he only ever saw a type. It doesn’t matter anyway. The last thing he really had to say was that he had survived because he didn’t get involved with other people’s lives. Would she have tried to save him if the roles were reversed? She doesn’t have to think about it for long—she would. The world, as awful as it is, seems like it’s better off with Bradwell in it. He’s charged from within, lit up, ready to fight, and even if he’s not going to fight for her, he has energy that they all need here on the outside.

  She thinks of his double scars and the angry flutter of birds on his back. She misses him. It’s a sudden, sharp ache in her chest. She can’t deny it; she wants him to miss her too, and to fight to find her. She hates the feeling in her chest, wishes it would go away, but it doesn’t subside. She’ll have to haul this ache around with her, an awful realization. The truth is that he isn’t coming for her, and Bradwell and Partridge hate each other too much to stick together anyway. Without her, they likely said their good-byes quickly and went their separate ways. She’s on her own now.

  The hard cot is tightly made, which makes Pressia think there’s a nurse lurking somewhere. Pressia has imagined hospitals like the one she was born in—one where she could get an operation to free her hand and her grandfather could get the fan removed from his throat. She imagines herself and her grandfather in side-by-side hospital beds on plumped pillows.

  Lying on her side, she can pick at the wool blanket with her hand behind her back, but can’t do much else. Sometimes she thinks of God and tries to pray to Saint Wi, but it won’t take root. The prayer just rolls away from her.

  The lights flicker.

  There�
��s a round of gunfire outside.

  The guard walks by the door and stares inside. She holds a rifle in her arms, cradles it really like she’s pacing the halls to get a baby back to sleep, like there’s a maternity ward somewhere. She wears the regulation green OSR uniform, complete with an armband with a claw.

  Pressia will have to explain herself at some point. She knows OSR doesn’t like the ones who don’t hand themselves over, whom they have to hunt down and capture. But her resistance has to prove something at least, that she’s tough in some way. Pressia thinks she can explain that she would have turned herself in, but she has to take care of her grandfather. That’s a sign of loyalty. They want loyalty. She has to say whatever she can to stay alive.

  But she’s seen OSR drag people from their homes, wrestle them into the backs of trucks in front of children, in front of whole families. She’s seen them shoot people dead in the streets. She wonders how Fandra died but stops herself. She has to forget this.

  The guard walks in through the door. The faces all turn to her, stricken, dazed. Is this what they’re waiting for? The guard isn’t cradling the rifle anymore. She’s pointing it at Pressia.

  “Pressia Belze?” she says.

  Pressia would sit up and say yes but she can’t. Tape over her mouth, she nods, lying there on her side, curled like a shrimp.

  The guard walks over and yanks her upper arm, pulling her to her feet. She follows the guard out of the room, but glances back at the other kids. None of them will look her in the eye, except one. Pressia can see now that he’s a real cripple—one of his pant legs is empty. There’s nothing there, and she knows he won’t make it, not as a soldier and maybe not even as a live target. Even if these are the remains of some hospital, it’s not one anymore, and maybe they use the bleach to cover up the smell of death. Pressia tries to smile at the cripple, to offer some small kindness, but her mouth is taped shut so the cripple won’t ever know.

  The guard is broad and squat. Her skin is scorched, burned to a high pink sheen on her face, neck, and hands. Pressia wonders if it covers her whole body. She’s filled a hole in her cheek with an old coin. She walks beside Pressia and, for no reason Pressia can tell or prompting she can predict, the guard pops Pressia in the ribs with the butt of the rifle. When she doubles over, the guard says, “Pressia Belze,” hatefully, as if it’s a curse.

  There are open doors along the hall, and inside each room there are cots, and kids waiting. It’s quiet, except for murmurs, cot springs, and boot scrapes.

  Pressia can tell now that this place is ancient, the tiled floors, the molding, the old doors, high airy ceilings. They walk past a lobby of some sort that has a threadbare ornate rug and a bank of tall windows. The glass is long gone and the room now swirls with wind that gets caught up in the frail bits of gauzy curtains, gray with ash. It’s the kind of place people would come to wait for someone to be brought to them—a relative wheeled out, someone imbalanced, maybe insane. Asylums, sanatoriums, rehab centers—they had a lot of names. And then there were the prisons.

  Out the windows, Pressia sees planks of wood nailed together like a lean-to, a stone wall topped with barbed wire, and farther still, white pillars that are attached to nothing at all. They’re just stalks.

  The guard stops in front of a door and knocks.

  A man’s voice, gruff and lazy, shouts, “Come in!”

  The guard opens the door and gives Pressia one more shove with the butt of the rifle. “Pressia Belze,” she says, and because this is the only thing Pressia has heard her say, Pressia wonders if it’s the only thing she knows how to say.

  There’s a desk and a man sitting behind it, or it’s actually two men. One is big and meaty. He seems much older than Pressia, but it’s hard to figure age what with scars and burns. The larger man seems old and young at the same time, but he may be only slightly older than Pressia, just wearier. The smaller man seems her age, but also weirdly ageless because of a certain vacancy in his gaze. The larger man is wearing a gray uniform, an officer of some sort, and he’s eating a tiny baked chicken from a tin. The head of the chicken is still on.

  And the man on his back is small. He’s fused there. His skinny arms hang around the big man’s thick neck, broad back to skinny chest. Pressia remembers the driver of the truck and the head that had seemed to float behind his. Maybe these are the same two.

  The big man says to the guard, “Take off the tape. She needs to talk.” The man’s fingers are greasy with chicken fat. His nails are dirty and shiny at the same time.

  The guard pulls off the tape, hard. Pressia licks her lips and tastes blood.

  “You can go,” the big man says to the guard.

  She leaves, shutting the door with more gentleness than Pressia could expect of her. It clicks softly.

  “So,” the big man says. “I’m El Capitan. This is headquarters. I run things.”

  The small man on his back whispers, “I run things.”

  El Capitan ignores him, picks at the dark meat, slips some into his fat mouth. Pressia realizes she’s starving. “Where did they find you?” El Capitan asks as he raises a smaller piece of meat over his shoulder, feeding the man on his back, straight into his mouth almost like a baby bird.

  “I was out,” Pressia tells him.

  He looks at her. “That it?”

  She nods.

  “Why didn’t you turn yourself in?” El Capitan asks. “You like a chase?”

  “My grandfather’s sick.”

  “Do you know how many people have the excuse that someone in the family is sick?”

  “I’d guess a lot of people have sick families, if they have a family at all.”

  He tilts his head, and she’s not sure how to read his expression. He goes back to his chicken. “The revolution is coming, so my question is this—can you kill?” El Capitan says this without much expression. It’s like he’s reading it off of a recruitment brochure. His heart’s not in it.

  Truth is that there’s something about being hungry that makes Pressia want to kill people. It flashes up in her, this ugly desire. “I could learn how to kill.” She’s relieved that her wrists are still tied behind her back. He can’t see the doll-head fist.

  “One day we’ll take them down.” His voice goes soft. “That’s all I want, really. I’d like to kill one Pure before I die. Just one.” He sighs, rubs his knuckles on the desk. “And your grandfather?” he asks.

  “There’s nothing I can do for him now,” Pressia says. And it hits her that this is the truth and a strange relief. She feels immediately guilty. He has the meat tin and the strange red orange from the woman he stitched and one last row of handmade creatures that he can use for bartering.

  “I understand family responsibilities,” El Capitan says. “Helmud”—he points to the man on his back—“my brother. I’d kill him, but he’s family.”

  “I’d kill him, but he’s family,” Helmud says, folding his arms under his neck like an insect. El Capitan pulls loose a drumstick, holds it up for Helmud to nibble, but not too much, just a little; then he yanks it back. “But still,” he says, “you’re small, like you’ve never eaten a real meal. You wouldn’t make it. I’d say, going with my gut, that you should be of use, but only at your own expense.”

  Pressia’s stomach knots up. She thinks of the cripple with the missing leg. Maybe there isn’t much difference between the two of them.

  He leans forward, both of his elbows sliding across the desk. “It’s my job to make these kinds of calls. You think I like it?”

  She’s not sure if he likes it or not.

  Then he turns and shouts at Helmud, “Knock it off back there!”

  Helmud looks up wide-eyed.

  “He’s always fiddling. Nervous fingers. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. You’re gonna drive me insane one day, Helmud, with all the nervous crap. You hear me?”

  “You hear me?” Helmud says.

  El Capitan pulls a file off the stack. “Strange thing, though. It says in your file th
at you’ve been ordered up. To be an officer. They say we should keep your education intact, and I should roll you into training.”

  “Really?” Pressia says. This immediately feels like a bad sign. Do they know her connection to the Pure? Why else would she be singled out? “Officer training?”

  “Most people would sound a little happier,” El Capitan says, and he rubs his greasy lips then opens a box of cigars on his desk. “In fact, I’d say you’re shit lucky.” He lights a cigar and lets the smoke cloud around his head. “Lucky you!” he says.

  His brother’s face is hidden now behind El Capitan’s head, but Pressia can still hear his voice. “Lucky you,” he whispers. “Lucky you.”

  PARTRIDGE

  SHADOW HISTORY

  THEY’RE BACK IN BRADWELL’S MEAT LOCKER. It smells like smoky meat. While Partridge changed into Bradwell’s clothes, Bradwell refried leftovers of a plump hybrid now sitting on the cook stove. He tells Partridge to eat. “We’ve got to have fuel.” But Partridge has no appetite. He feels like a stranger now that he’s wearing Bradwell’s clothes. The shirt’s too loose, the pants too short. The boots are so wide, his feet slide around. Partridge feels foreign to himself.

  Partridge told Bradwell that he wasn’t chipped, but Bradwell’s sure there’s a bug on him somewhere and has told him that he’ll have to burn all of his clothes and his mother’s belongings, which he’s not sure he’ll be able to do.

  On the floor, Bradwell has set down every paper he thinks will help him find the bigger picture—printed emails from his parents, some original Japanese documentation, handwritten notes, a chunk of his parents’ manuscript, and now, to add to it all, Partridge’s mother’s things. It’s strange to see everything laid out, like pieces taken from lots of different puzzles. How could they ever fit together to create a whole? It’s not possible. But Bradwell seems almost electrified by the possibilities. He’s huffed down his food and now paces around the evidence. Even the wings in his back are unable to be still.