Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  Pressia hears Bradwell’s heartbeat again. It’s like a soft drum. He’s alive and Ingership is dead now; his eyes have gone blank. She thinks of her grandfather’s work as a mortician, and she feels like she should say a prayer over the dead body, but she doesn’t know any prayers. Her grandfather told her that they used to sing prayer-like songs at the funerals he oversaw. He said that the songs were for the mourners, to help heal them. She doesn’t know any of those prayer-like songs, but she thinks of the song her mother used to sing to her—the lullaby. There’s something about the nursery with no baby in it that makes her think of her mother, the image she saw on the screen, the recording of her voice. And Pressia opens her mouth and starts to sing softly.

  Pressia’s voice doesn’t surprise Partridge. It’s as if he’s been waiting to hear it for many years. Her voice lilts with sadness, and it takes Partridge a moment to place the tune. But then he does. It is a song his mother sang to them at night. A lullaby that wasn’t a lullaby at all. It was a love story. In Pressia’s voice, he hears his mother’s voice. She sings about a screen door that slams, a dress swaying. He remembers the night of the dance, the feel of Lyda’s breath beneath the tight fit of her dress. She must be struck by the song too, because she fits her hand in his, the one wrapped in gauze, missing half a finger. He knows this isn’t the end of the battle, but for a moment he can pretend it’s over. He leans over to her and he says, “Your bird made of wire—did it ever go up in Founders Hall on display?”

  Lyda is about to ask him what will happen to them now. Where will they go? What’s the plan? But all her words are stuck. All that’s in her mind now is the wire bird. It’s a lonesome bird that swings beautifully in a wire cage. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m here now.” There is no returning.

  Ingership’s wife had been named Illia. She thinks of her name, of being Illia again. She isn’t Ingership’s wife because now he’s dead. She thinks of Mary, the girl in the song, a girl on a porch. Don’t go—that’s what she wants to tell the girl. Her husband’s blood is now on her shoes. She touches the boats on the nursery’s wallpaper and remembers her father’s boat, bailing it out with buckets as a little girl. She feels unsteady, as if standing in the rocking boat. She hears her father saying, “The sky is a bruise. Only a storm will heal it.”

  El Capitan looks at the soldiers. He imagines what they have to tell him. There are others living here, and their skins are probably as beaten as Ingership’s wife’s skin. They live somewhere on the land. They can’t have much to eat that isn’t poison. Some are surely dying. He puts his hands on the counter below the window to better shoulder his brother’s weight. From here, he can see just a bit of the dim buckled remains of the old highway. The asylum graveyard was out here somewhere. He was there with his mother once in a thunderstorm. She was going to pick out her plot. He didn’t go in. He stood behind the gate in the driving rain and waited for her, holding Helmud’s hand because he was scared of the lightning. On the way home, she said, “I won’t need a plot anytime soon. I’ll die an old woman. Don’t look so gloomy.” But she would be going to the asylum for her lungs. The date was set, and they weren’t sure when she’d return. “You’re in charge ’til I come back, El Capitan.” And he has been in charge of Helmud ever since. More than that, he is Helmud. When he hates Helmud, he hates himself. And when he loves his brother? Does it work that way, too? The truth is that Helmud’s weight hasn’t only made him stronger. It’s kept him pinned to Earth, as if without Helmud, he’d have floated clean off the planet by now.

  Helmud feels his brother’s ribs between his knees, his brother’s heart pounding in front of his heart. He says, “Down… roaring on. On the wind… climb in.” His brother’s heart will always reach every place he ever goes just before Helmud’s heart. It’s the way he will make it through the world—his brother’s heart, a beat, then his. A heart on top of a heart. A heart leading. A heart following. Twin hearts, bound.

  Bradwell remembers the song. Arthur Walrond, the drunk physicist, his parents’ trusty leak, used to play it in his convertible. Bradwell remembers driving around with Walrond and the dog that Bradwell named Art after him, the wind whipping around their heads. Walrond is long gone, and so are Bradwell’s parents. But Willux knew his parents. What would Ingership have said, if he were still alive? Bradwell wishes he knew. But he doesn’t think about this for long because Pressia’s voice slides him into this moment. Pressia’s cheek is pressed to his chest, so he feels the song on his skin. The delicate vibration, the movement of her jaw, the thin cords of her neck, the voice box—that fragile instrument thrumming in her throat. A memory has formed and will stay on his skin like this: her soft quick draw of breath, each note held, the song lifting from Pressia’s lips, her eyes closed to the future. It’s an indulgence to think about the future, and he wouldn’t if it weren’t for Pressia. What if they can fight the Dome and win? Could he have a life with her? Not a convertible or a dog or a nursery with wallpaper boats. But something beyond this.

  Partridge has to leave. It’s too much to bear. His mother’s dead. Her voice is a song in Pressia’s throat.

  Lyda’s hand caresses his arm.

  He shakes his head and pulls away. “No.” He has to be alone.

  He walks out of the room, across the hall. There’s a door. He opens it and finds the communications room, all lit up, a huge blue-lit screen, a console of gauges, wires, keyboard, speakers.

  He hears his father’s voice, giving instructions. People respond to him, “Yes, sir. Yes.” And then someone says, “Someone’s there, sir.”

  His father says, “Ingership. Goddamn it! Finally.”

  Partridge says, “He’s dead.”

  His father’s face appears on the screen in front of the blue backdrop, his watery shifting eyes, the slight palsy of his head, his hands spread on the console before him. One of which is raw, a dark pink, scaly, as if recently scalded. He looks pale and breathless. His chest is slightly concave. Murderer.

  “Partridge,” his father says softly. “Partridge, it’s over. You’re one of us. Come home.”

  Partridge shakes his head.

  “We have your good friend, Silas Hastings, and your buddy Arvin Weed has been extremely valuable. We’d have never known what he was at work on if we hadn’t asked him a few questions about you. They’d both like to see you.”

  “No!” Partridge shouts.

  His father whispers urgently, “That was a mistake in the woods with Sedge and your mother. An accident. It was reckless. But we’re atoning for that now. All of that is ended.” And now Partridge sees that the skin on his father’s neck is also seared, as if it’s only a thin pink membrane. Is his skin degenerating? Is this another one of the signs that his mother would have recognized?

  Reckless? Partridge thinks to himself. Atoning? All of that is ended?

  “And I brought you and your half sister together. Did you see that? A gift.”

  Partridge can barely breathe. His father did arrange it. He knew what Partridge would do. He treated him like a puppet.

  “You’ve gotten what we need here. It will help so many. You’ve done well.”

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “What?” his father asks. “What is it?”

  “This is only the beginning.”

  “Partridge,” his father says. “Listen to me.”

  But Partridge walks out of the room and starts running down the stairs. He opens the front door and, for no reason he can name, he runs down the porch steps and then up onto the roof of the black car. He stands there and looks out as far as he can see. It feels like a beginning.

  He turns around and looks at the house, the large yellow bulk of it, the sky pressing in behind it all, and then the simple ripple of the blood-streaked hand towel. The wind, it still surprises him sometimes.

  When the song is over, they’re silent a moment. How long? Pressia can’t tell. Time no longer has increments. It floods and fades. She walks to the window,
and Bradwell stands behind her, wraps his arm around her waist, looks out over her shoulder. Neither of them can be far from the other now. Though neither of them has put words to this feeling between them, they’re bound, more tightly because they’ve come so close to losing each other.

  And life resumes because it has to. El Capitan and the soldiers lift Ingership by his arms and carry him from the room, his shoes dragging behind him, leaving streaks of blood.

  Lyda has walked out of the room and now rushes back in. “Where’s Partridge? Does anyone know where he went?”

  No one does, and so she walks out again.

  Ingership’s wife picks up the curtain, folds it in her arms. She looks at Pressia and says, “You came for me.”

  Pressia says, “And you saved my life.”

  “I knew when I first saw you,” Ingership’s wife says. “Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on.”

  “That’s true,” Pressia says—for her, it was true of Bradwell and Partridge. She’ll never be the same.

  Ingership’s wife nods and then looks at Bradwell. “You remind me of a boy I knew once, but that was worlds ago.” Her eyes look past him, unfocused and distant. She touches the soft cloth of the curtains, and walks out, down the hall.

  This leaves Bradwell and Pressia alone in the operating room.

  Pressia turns to face him. He kisses her on the lips, tenderly, and there’s the heat of his skin, the pressure of his soft warm lips on hers.

  He whispers, “It’s your turn to promise not to die.”

  Pressia says, “I’ll try not to.” The kiss already seems like a dream. Did it happen? Was it real?

  And then she remembers the silent bell. She reaches into her pocket and pulls it out. She cups it in her palm and hands it to him. “It’s a gift,” she says. “You think there’s going to be time and then there isn’t. It’s not much, but I want to give it.”

  He lifts it, shakes it. It makes no sound. He holds it over one ear. “I hear the ocean,” he says.

  “I’d like to see the ocean one day,” she says.

  “Listen.” He holds the bell to her ear. She closes her eyes. There’s dim sunlight coming in through the windows; she can feel the press of it through her lids. She hears a muffled airy rushing sound—the ocean? “Is that what it sounds like?”

  “No, not really,” Bradwell says. “The real sound of the ocean can’t be held in a bell.”

  Pressia opens her eyes and looks out at the gray sky through the windows. The wind shivers with soot, and then she hears Partridge’s voice shouting their names.

  There’s the fresh scent of smoke. Something’s caught fire.

  EPILOGUE

  They stand in a fallow field watching the farmhouse burn. Thin wires light up like cracks running across the facade of the house, brightly lit. Each wire sparks another. Pressia assumes that the house itself had a ticker, and somewhere in the Dome, its switch has been flipped.

  The fire is efficient and quick. It goes up fast in great gusts of unfurling smoke and upward-spiraling cinders. The windows shatter. The curtains are lit up like flares; even the hand towel streaked with blood that was hanging outside the window is soon gone. The searing heat reminds Pressia of descriptions of the Detonations. Sun on sun on sun.

  Lyda holds Partridge’s hand tightly, like she’s afraid he might run off again. Or is he the one holding on, hoping to stay where he is?

  Bradwell and Pressia lean together, facing the fire, like a couple who’ve been dancing and the music has stopped, but they can’t let go.

  El Capitan has backed the car away from the porch. He and Helmud watch from behind the windshield. The soldiers stand on the far side of the car, letting it block them from the heat. Ingership’s body is in the house. El Capitan shouted orders at the soldiers to leave it. “Easy funeral!” he said with a smile, though Ingership was never going to get a funeral.

  The only one who looks away is Ingership’s wife, Illia, who turns her back and keeps her eyes on the distant hill. Pressia looks at the side of her face, scarred and bruised. The stocking is a frayed collar around her neck.

  They should go, but no one can move. The fire holds them there.

  Pressia’s memory of this day will blur. She can feel the details colliding in her mind already—a slow loss of facts, reality.

  Finally, the house burns itself out. It’s smoldering. The front half still stands. The door is wide open. Pressia takes a few steps toward the porch.

  “Don’t,” Bradwell says.

  But Pressia starts running. She’s not sure why except she has an overwhelming fear of leaving something behind, of loss. Isn’t there something that can be saved? She charges up the steps and into the charred foyer. She turns to the dining room. The chandelier has broken from the ceiling and through the table. A hole overhead gapes, and below it the chandelier sits like a fallen queen on a blackened throne.

  Bradwell’s voice comes from the door. “Pressia, we can’t be in here.”

  Pressia reaches for the chandelier. She touches one of the ash-covered crystals. It’s teardrop-shaped and still hot. She twists it from the chandelier until it pops loose. It reminds her of pulling fruit from a tree. Did she ever do that as a child? She slips the crystal into her pocket.

  “Pressia,” Bradwell says gently. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She walks to the kitchen, which has already collapsed. In the rubble, there are sparks. She turns and Bradwell is there. He grabs her by the shoulders. “We have to go.”

  That’s when they hear the soft clicking, almost like the skitter of a rat’s nails. They see a small light shining up through the wreckage. There is a buzz and a raspy whir. Pressia thinks of the noise of the fan that was lodged in her grandfather’s throat. For a dizzy moment, she wants him to be alive and coming back to her.

  Muscling up from the deepest part of the wreckage, where the floor has caved into the cellar below, is a small black metal box with robotic arms and multiple wheels. It burrows up, its gears hitching. The lights lining the top of the box flicker, then dim.

  “What is it?” Pressia says.

  “Maybe a Black Box,” Bradwell says. “The kind of thing that’s built to survive plane crashes, a recording of the flight and all the mistakes that were made so that those mistakes can’t happen again.” The beams overhead creak. Bradwell takes a step toward it.

  The Black Box claws backward, away from him.

  The wind is blowing now.

  “Where is it trying to go?” Pressia asks.

  “It’s probably got a homing device.”

  A homing device. She knows that the Black Box is trying to get back to the Dome, but it reminds Pressia that she has no home, not anymore.

  The beams pop and sigh. Pressia looks up at the ceiling. “It’s going to give,” she says.

  Bradwell lunges for the Black Box, grabs it, and pulls it to his chest.

  They run out of the back of the house, diving for cover in the tall grass, landing side by side. They’re both breathless.

  The house creaks; its boards whine and splinter. Then the beams buckle, and in a heavy exhale of dust the rest of the house, at last, caves in.

  “Are you okay?” Bradwell asks.

  Pressia wonders if he’ll kiss her again. Is this the way she’ll live from now on, wondering when he might lean toward her? “Are you?”

  He nods. “We don’t have a choice,” he says. “We have to be okay, right?”

  They’re survivors. This is what they know. He stands up, reaches out his hand. She grabs it and he helps pull her to her feet.

  They see the others in front of the house in the field. It’s cold enough for their breaths to form ghosts in the air, barely visible through the rising smoke of the house.

  Bradwell holds the Black Box against his ribs. He touches Pressia’s face gently with the back of his rough knuckles then cups her face.

  “You were only supposed to stick with us for your own sak
e, your own selfish reasons,” Pressia says. “You said you had one.”

  “And I do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re my selfish reason,” he says.

  “Tell me we’ll find something like home one day,” she says.

  “We will,” he says. “I promise.”

  She realizes that she can love Bradwell in this moment so fully because she knows that this moment won’t last. She allows herself to believe his promise and lets him hold her up. His hammering heart is as restless as the birds on his back, and she imagines how the soot will cover the earth again with a new dusting, black snow, a blessing of ash.

  And then there’s more shifting under the fallen house where it has collapsed into its own cellar hole. Another Black Box shoulders up, grinding its gears, and starts picking its way across the wreckage on spindly jointed arms. And then the cindered wood starts to shiver, and, one by one, Black Boxes pull themselves up from the char.

  The End of Book One

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel drilled its way into my dreams. When I tried to look away, there were people who urged me not to, namely my daughter who kept telling me that I had to finish the book, that it was the best thing I’d ever written. When I confided in my friends Dan and Amy Hartman what I was at work on, they, too, kept pushing me back into this world. I’m thankful that they did.

  I want to thank my father who tracked down tons of research for me—nanotechnology, history, medicine, slaughterhouses, light, communications, gems, geography, agriculture, Black Boxes…—who made architectural drawings of the Dome, drew up the top secret document Operation Phoenix, and sent me articles to read, things to consider, and I am forever indebted for the argumentative, thoughtful, and loving way he raised me.

  Thank you to Dr. Scott Hannahs, PhD, director of DC Field Instrumentation and Operations at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the University of Florida, for briefly discussing with my father the feasibility of the construction of crystalline detectors. Thank you, Simon Lumsdon, for giving me a brilliant lecture on the basics of nanotechnology. I appreciate the information on burying guns posted by Charles Woods in Backwoods Home Magazine, available at this link: http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wood115.html.