Burn

by Julianna Baggott

  And just then, someone somewhere lets loose some pink confetti. It’s blown in from an unseen machine and flits around them. It takes him back to the beginning of it all—running through the massive air filtration system, the giant fan blades, cutting through the pink filters, all the fibers spinning around him. It reminds him of the way ash floats on the air—out there—and of Lyda and what she said about being locked within a snow globe.

  Iralene tugs at his jacket. “Don’t let Pressia ruin it! She’ll get to know me, and she’ll like me. You didn’t like me at first either,” she says.

  Iralene starts to pull him toward the dance floor. He stops her and looks into her eyes. He remembers what it was like when he first met her. She was stiff and awkward—almost like a foreigner. And she was a foreigner. She’d lived so long suspended. “I’ve messed everything up.”

  She wraps her arms around him, holds him tightly. “No, you haven’t. You’ve done the right thing. I saw you do it. I know it’s the truth. You’ll explain it all to her. She’ll understand.”

  “I don’t think she’ll ever understand.”

  “I know what you’ll do, Mr. Partridge Willux.”

  “What?”

  “You have the greatest gift in the world to give her, and once you do, she’ll forgive everything.” Iralene smiles at him. “Right?”

  Partridge has her grandfather. Alive. The fan lodged in his throat was taken out, and he was stitched up, suspended. He might even have her father, though he can’t access that chamber—not yet at least. For now, he can give her grandfather back. He can try. But he feels like he’s drowning. He’s failed. Pressia knows it. She probably doesn’t even know the worst of it.

  “In the end, you’ll look back and it will all make sense.”

  Will it ever make sense? Will anyone ever look at this series of events and know that he tried so hard to do the right thing—while it all crumbled down around him? “What else can I do?” he says.

  “You could dance with Mrs. Partridge Willux.”

  Still dazed, he lets Iralene lead him to the dance floor, confetti filling the air, dusting the floor like pink snow.

  PRESSIA

  JUMPERS

  I’m usually the one dressed as a guard,” Beckley says. “Mind if I take off the tie?”

  “What do I care?” Pressia says. She’s furious. It’s like two fists pounding together in her chest. Bradwell was right—about the Pures, about Partridge. She’s ashamed that she bought into the joy, love, and emboldened hope of a wedding—even if for a second. She misses Bradwell more than ever. He says what he means—even if he knows she’s not going to like it. He’s screwed up—all human beings are—but at least he’s real. El Capitan and Helmud too. She wonders if she should have come at all. But she can feel the metal box cutting into her hip. She has to try to save people. She has to give it a shot—even if Partridge is a lost cause.

  They’re walking down the empty street. The storefronts are pasted with pictures of Partridge and Iralene in various poses. She stops at one of Partridge pushing Iralene on a wooden swing. “Look at him.”

  Beckley stuffs the bow tie in his pocket and stops. “I was there,” he says. “He didn’t want to pose for the pictures.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to pose for them, but the fact is that he did. He let someone take that picture.” She stares up at Beckley’s face. He’s older than she is by a good bit, looks a little hardened. “What’s it like?” she says. “To live in this place?”

  “What do I know? It’s been so long I don’t have anything to compare it to anymore.”

  “You don’t remember the Before? I don’t believe you.”

  “Maybe that’s your first lesson. You shouldn’t believe anyone in here.” He starts walking again.

  She walks after him quickly. “Is it always as awful as it is beautiful like that?”

  “It’s not usually so brightly lit, but yeah.”

  “Partridge says he’s bringing my grandfather back. My grandfather’s dead, Beckley. Does Partridge think he’s God?”

  Beckley shrugs.

  It was cruel of him to say that—to promise Pressia her grandfather. Partridge knows what it would mean to have her grandfather back. He was the only real parent she ever knew. He wasn’t her real grandfather, but that only made what he did all the more remarkable. He saved her life.

  “Tell me—whose side are you on?” she asks.

  “There are no sides.”

  “And is that the second lesson?”

  “I guess it could be.”

  “I think that there is a good side,” Pressia says. “And you’re on it or you’re not.”

  He glances at Pressia then up into the stale air. “What’s it like out there now anyway?”

  How can she describe the world outside the Dome? It’s impossible. “I don’t know,” Pressia says. “Real.”

  Beckley stares at a spot on the narrow sidewalk that’s splotched whiter than the rest.

  “What’s this?” Pressia asks.

  He stops, looks up at a building, and points out one of the windows that’s been capped with thick plastic. “Jumper.”

  “Jumper?”

  He nods.

  “You mean someone jumped out of that window?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the sidewalk is white because…”

  “They cleaned up the blood and bleached it.” Beckley stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks on.

  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.”

  “Is that right?” Maybe she has power and Beckley is challenging it, for Lyda’s sake or hers.

  Lyda’s mother turns; her skirt flares around her. She grabs her pocketbook, and says, “I can’t work under these conditions! I’m a professional.”

  She’s here working? She’s a professional mother? Pressia doesn’t understand.

  Lyda’s mother walks to the door. “I want the nursery dismantled. I want it all hauled away and everything replaced. Every last thing. You hear me?” Her voice is cold and distant.

  Beckley doesn’t answer. He unlocks the door and holds it open wide. As she steps through it, she glances back at Pressia. She doesn’t look angry now; it’s as if that emotion has suddenly faded and what’s surfaced in its place is fear.

  Pressia likes it. She thinks of El Capitan—fear is power. No wonder he liked it all those years. It made him feel protected and safe.

  Beckley closes the door behind Lyda’s mother and turns to Pressia. “I’ll get the Culp family out of here,” he says. “You can go down that hall. Lyda’s probably in the nursery. The door on the right. It’ll be locked.”

  “Thanks, Beckley,” she says.

  “For what?” he says.

  “You know.” He stuck up for her.

  He nods and walks to the kitchen.

  As Pressia walks down the hall, she smells something familiar—smoke.

  LYDA

  PROOF

  No.

  Partridge will come for her. They’ll start a new life. He loves her. She remembers walking with Partridge to the subway car, the dusty wind kicking up her cape. He kissed her, quickly, before Mother Hestra could catch them. After they lay with each other in the warden’s house, Partridge was the one who wanted her to come with him. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way it felt when they were near each other—that was love, wasn’t it? Can love just disappear?

  She was the one to tell Partridge to marry Iralene—to stop people from killing themselves. Wasn’t it the right thing to do? Was it a setup? Did Partridge want permission to betray her?

  She looks around the nursery—the dismantled crib, the small mattress tilted against a wall next to a stack of ripped-up baby books and the bowl of ash where she burned page after page, the pile of spears she whittled from the slats, the shavings littering the floor, and the bags of yarn and knitting needles brought in by Chandry.

  She looks down at her torn dress, the tightness of it around her waist where her belly will continue to widen… This is the room of a crazy person, and she’s the crazy person within it. Has she just been so sleep deprived that she couldn’t see it clearly for what it is?

  She picks up the scraps of her dress. She’ll throw away the dress, and no one will see what she’s done to it. “I can change back,” she whispers. “I can be my old self again.” She picks up the bag of knitting supplies. “I can do this.” She walks to the stack of ripped-up baby books, wanting to hide them, but accidentally kicks the bowl of ashes, which scatter across the floor. She kneels down and tries to brush the ashes back into the bowl, but she streaks the floor with blackened soot. The more she rubs it, the darker the stain seems to become.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  No, no. “Who is it?” It’s her mother. She knows it. Her mother is coming back to tell her how ashamed she is, how wrong Lyda’s been, what a terrible child she’s raised. She’ll tell Partridge all about the insane nursery.

  “Lyda.”

  It’s not her mother. It’s a voice she recognizes but can’t place.

  Lyda stands up and quietly walks to the door. She touches the wood with her fingertips, lightly, like a water spider on the surface of a pond. She remembers seeing them as a child—pushing and gliding, light as air. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me. It’s Pressia.”

  No, it can’t be. It’s a trick. She shakes her head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Lyda, it’s me. We have to talk.”

  How long has it been since she really slept through the night? Maybe the sleeplessness has made her paranoid, or maybe she should be paranoid. “I don’t trust you!” She stares up at the corners of the room where she’s covered the cameras. “Just leave me alone. Just tell Partridge…” But she can’t finish the sentence. What would she want someone to tell Partridge?

  “I can prove it’s me,” the voice says. “Ask me something only I would know.”

  She thinks back to the times when they were together. “The farmhouse,” she says. “Tell me.”

  “We were all there. Illia too. She killed her husband.” Illia. Lyda remembers her in the tub, her glistening fists shaking in the air.

  “She’s dead,” Lyda says. Maybe people in the Dome know that already. She needs something more specific. “The wallpaper,” Lyda says. “Tell me about the wallpaper in the operating room.”

  “Boats,” Pressia says. “The wallpaper was covered in little boats because it wasn’t always an operating room. It was once a nursery.”

  Lyda looks around her own baby’s nursery. Is that why she asked? The wallpaper was proof that Illia had once thought she would have a baby and then for whatever reasons there was no baby.

  This is what Lyda’s most afraid of now. If Partridge is truly married to someone else, what will happen to Lyda and the baby? She’s suddenly exhaus
ted. She leans against the wall, resting her cheek against the coolness of it, flattening her palms. She looks at the knob. Is Pressia on the other side? Is it a lie? Can she trust anything anyone says to her inside of the Dome?

  She looks at the light ashen print her hand made. She pinches the lock on the knob, turns it, and opens the door a small crack.

  She can’t look. She wants to see Pressia’s face so badly that she starts to cry.

  “Lyda.”

  She looks up.

  Pressia. How is it possible?

  Pressia steps inside the nursery, shuts the door, locks it again, and the two hug each other.

  They hold on tight.

  PRESSIA

  CYGNUS

  Lyda is shaking from deep inside. She’s barely able to stand. Pressia holds her up. “We have to get you out. They’re going to put you away and take the baby once it’s born.”

  Lyda nods. Does she already know this is true? If she didn’t already know, it doesn’t surprise her. “I want to go back to the mothers. This place—it can’t be saved.”

  “Listen, we have the means to take down the Dome,” Pressia whispers.

  “Are you really going to? Can you?”

  “If Partridge has turned on us, we might have to,” Pressia says. “Bradwell and El Capitan are on the outside, waiting for word from me.”

  “Awaiting word to take down the Dome? How would you send the message?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d have help once I was here.”

  “Cygnus,” Lyda says softly. “They’re here. They’re your mother’s followers. They can help us, I think.”

  “Someone from Cygnus met me when I first got inside the Dome.”

  “We can try to get them to help. I know we can,” Lyda says. “What will the message say?”

  “Well, I’m not ready to send it. I have the cure with me,” Pressia says. “I need to get it to someone who knows what to do with it. We can still save people—the survivors. We can make them whole. We can’t take down the Dome until I try to give this to someone we can trust.”