“I don’t know what he wants from me,” El Capitan says to Helmud.
The soldier leaps from the tree and starts to run. But then he pauses.
“He wants us to follow,” El Capitan says.
“Follow,” Helmud says.
El Capitan nods and follows the soldier through the woods for almost a mile, keeping a brisk pace. Finally he comes to a clearing that overlooks the city, or what used to be the city. From this height, it’s easy to see how it’s been reduced to the Rubble Fields, black markets, hulls of old buildings, a grid of alleys, and nameless streets.
El Capitan looks around for the soldier. He’s gone. El Capitan is breathless. Helmud’s heart is beating fast too, but maybe only because El Capitan’s heart has pumped the blood so hard. “Damn it,” El Capitan mutters. “Why’d he bring me here?”
“Bring me here,” Helmud says.
El Capitan can see the Dome too, the white curve of it on the distant hill, its cross glinting through the ashen sky. “Did he think I didn’t know where he came from?” He rubs his eyes with his knuckles.
“Where he came from,” Helmud says, and he points out across the barren, near-desert land that surrounds the Dome to a clump of people dragging timber and arranging it on the iced ground.
“Some crazies trying to build something out in front of the Dome?”
“In front of the Dome?” Helmud repeats.
Why in front of the Dome? Is this what the soldier wanted him to see? If so, why? El Capitan watches the way the people move. They’re organized, shuttling things along like ants in ordered rows. “I don’t like it,” he says. “Almost looks like they’re going to try to build a fire.”
“Fire,” Helmud says.
El Capitan looks up at the Dome. “Why the hell would they do that?”
PRESSIA
SEVEN
THE MORGUE IS COLD AND BARE with one long steel table. Since the last time she was here, a couple of weeks ago, Bradwell has spread out even more papers and books. Portions of his parents’ unfinished manuscript are arranged in piles. On the wall, Bradwell has taped the Message, an original her grandfather kept for years. She gave it to Bradwell after he went back to the barbershop to pick up what was left. He’s the archivist, after all.
We know you are here, our brothers and sisters.
We will, one day, emerge from the Dome
to join you in peace.
For now, we watch from afar, benevolently.
When the Message first fell from the hull of an airship to the ground in the days after the Detonations, it must have felt like a promise. Now it feels like a threat.
Bradwell slides a heavy bar across the door—a handmade lock bolted to the wall.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” she says.
He walks to his pallet and straightens the covers. “No complaints.”
Pressia moves to the table where she sees the bell she gave him in the farmhouse. She found it in the burned-out barbershop just before she left home. It has no clapper. It sits on a news clipping that must have survived the Detonations, probably in Bradwell’s parents’ footlocker. It’s not as ashen and charred as some of the other documents. He’s taken good care of it. Bradwell has always taken care of the things from the past. After his parents were murdered before the Detonations—shot in their beds—Bradwell found their footlocker, which was sealed off in a hidden, reinforced room. It was filled with his parents’ unfinished work, trying to take down Willux, as well as things Bradwell has preserved—old magazines, newspapers, packaging. The footlocker is shoved under a rusty stainless-steel sink. The bell hides part of the headline. The rest reads, drowning ruled accident. There’s a photograph of a young man in uniform, stone-faced, staring into the camera. Bradwell is using the bell as a paperweight. Is that all it means to him?
Pressia checks on Freedle. She opens her hand and sets him on the table. His eyes blink open and he looks around.
The Black Box motors past her feet. “It is kind of like a pet dog,” Pressia says. “You’re right.”
“I had a dog once,” Bradwell says.
“You never told me that.”
“I told Partridge when we were looking for you out in the Meltlands. A friend of the family, Art Walrond, talked my parents into giving me a dog. He told them that an only child needs a dog. I named the dog Art Walrond.”
“Weird name for a dog.”
“I was a weird kid.”
“But when Art Walrond, friend of the family, and Art Walrond, family dog, were both in the room at the same time, and you said, ‘Sit down, Art Walrond,’ which one would sit?”
“Is that a philosophical question?”
“Maybe.” And it feels almost okay again between them. Maybe they can be friends, the kind who banter back and forth.
He reaches down and pats the Black Box like it’s a dog. “It’s not quite the way I remember it.” She’d like to imagine him as a kid with a dog, weird and all. She’d like to know about herself as a child too. She spent most of her childhood trying to remember things that never happened, the life her grandfather invented for her. But he wasn’t even her grandfather; he was a stranger who rescued her and made her his own. Was this lie hard for him? Maybe he’d had a wife and children who died and she was supposed to stand in for these losses. He’s gone now, so she’ll never know.
If the Detonations hadn’t ever happened, she’d have liked to have met Bradwell—a reality in which there are no doll-head fists or scars or embedded birds, before all the losses. They might have had a first kiss under mistletoe—something her grandfather once told her about.
On the other side of the table, the room extends with three rows of what look like small square doors, three deep on one wall—nine total. She walks up to them, curiously. She touches one of the handles.
“That’s where they kept the bodies,” Bradwell says. “And the metal table was used for autopsies.”
The dead. Pressia imagines her mother’s face—there and then gone. She draws her hand away from the drawers and looks at the far wall, its broken cinder block cracked through with dirt pushing in on the other side. “It’s a morgue. Of course they stored dead bodies here,” she says, more to herself than to him.
“And they still do every once in a while.”
She tries to lighten things. “I guess that would be like having a roommate.”
“Kind of,” Bradwell says. “I’ve had only one so far.”
“Who?”
“A kid who died out in the woods,” Bradwell says. “Do you want to meet him?”
It’s like an intruder has suddenly appeared. “He’s here now?”
“Soldiers on patrol found him. Cap brought the body here. He wants to know what killed the boy. And they’re trying to find the family to come identify the body.”
“What if he doesn’t have family?”
“I guess it’ll be a fresh recruit’s job to bury him.” He pulls one of the handles. She expects to see the boy’s body. “A morgue also happens to be the perfect place to lock up Black Boxes.” As the long slab slides out, she sees it’s filled with the other five Black Boxes. They’re still, their lights off. Each has a piece of paper covered with notes taped to the slab. Each note has a heading; he’s named the boxes—Alfie, Barb, Champ, Dickens, Elderberry, alphabetical order. Fignan’s on the floor, buzzing close to Bradwell’s heels. Freedle flutters from the table and flaps around Fignan. A camera lens on a small arm extends from the top of the box and seems to take footage of Freedle in flight.
“Did you have to name them?”
“Easier to talk with them if they have names. I grew up alone. I can strike up a conversation with anything,” he says. With that, Pressia glimpses his childhood. At ten, he lived alone in the basement of a butcher shop and fended for himself. It was lonesome. How could it not have been? “It doesn’t really matter what I’ve named them, though. These five are all identical inside, designed to withstand extreme heat, pressure, radiation. They ha
ve this series of plugs.” He picks up one of the boxes and shows Pressia the small holes that the plugs revealed. “I wedged the plugs off with the help of one of Cap’s rigged-up blowtorches and then . . .” He picks up three pieces of wire and, simultaneously, fits them into the holes, a delicate operation. “There you go.” The Black Box’s lid is pulled back with a buzzing sound, and there inside is something red, oval, and made of heavy metal.
“What is it?”
“It’s where all the information is stored. It’s the brain. It responds to simple commands,” he says. “Open egg.”
The red egg hums. Small sliding metal doors retract, revealing chips, wires, a vast network of synaptic-like connections.
“This is its brain. A thing of beauty.” He picks up the red egg, turns it in his hand. “It holds an entire library of data.”
“Libraries,” Pressia says, awed. “They were buildings that housed books, room after room of books, and they had people who tended to the books.”
“Librarians.”
“I’ve heard of them.” The concept is hard to fathom. “And you could take the books home if you promised to bring them back.”
“Exactly,” Bradwell says. “I had a library card as a kid. My name typed up next to my picture.” He looks wistful for a second. Pressia’s jealous of the memory. She built a childhood from the things her grandfather told her, and now she has to dismantle that world, to unremember. She wishes she could recall something as simple as a library card with her name and picture. She thinks of her real name. Emi—two sounds that hum for that brief second on her lips. Brigid—like a bridge spanning a wide cold lake. Imanaka—the sound of sticks being struck together. Who was Emi Brigid Imanaka supposed to become?
Maybe that version of herself—Emi—could have fallen helplessly in love with Bradwell. She can’t, not when it seems to guarantee losing him.
Bradwell turns his attention back to the boxes. “I had to open the box to activate the egg, but now it can sit inside the Black Box and answer any question you can dream up.” He puts the egg back into the Black Box. “Close.” The egg seals itself up and the box locks into place around it.
“What did you ask it?”
“First, I asked it what it was.”
“And?”
He leans over the box. “What are you?”
A series of clicks rattle up from its center, and a mechanical, camera-like eyeball appears from its top. A beam of light shoots up above the eyeball, and an image of the egg itself appears and turns in the air. A young man’s voice recites a brief history of recording devices, including Black Boxes, which were usually painted red or orange for easy recognition at a crash site. “This box is part of a series of identical Black Boxes, a government-sanctioned and federally funded project to record cultural history and data in the case of a holocaust—nuclear or otherwise.” It gives the specific measurements of its aluminum housing, high-temperature insulation, stainless-steel shell, and radiation-resistant nanotechnology tubing.
“Wow,” Pressia says.
“They contain images of art and movies, science, history, pop culture,” Bradwell says. “Everything.”
The idea of everything makes her feel almost light-headed. “The Before,” Pressia says, awed.
“They contain a version of the Before. A digitized, cleaned-up version. Information isn’t necessarily the truth.”
“My grandfather explained how the universe worked by rotating rocks in circles on the floor—the sun, planets, stars. He pretended to know things, because when he didn’t, he could tell it made me nervous.”
“What is the universe?” Bradwell asks the Black Box.
Another widening beam of light shows planets and moons orbiting the sun, constellations dotting the air. Pressia reaches for a moon, expecting to nudge it, but her fingers glide through it. Freedle flutters up through the image too, then lands on his pronged feet and gazes at it, confused. “This was what my grandfather was trying to explain. The universe.”
“Pretty hard to capture with rocks on the ground.”
Pressia feels lost. There’s so much she doesn’t know, can’t even imagine. “It’s amazing! The amount of information we can have access to. It can really change people’s lives. We’ll have access to medical information, technology, science. We’ll be able to make a real difference.”
“It’s more than that, Pressia.”
“What do you mean? How can it be more than everything?”
“These boxes know only what they’ve been fed, and all of them were put on the same diet. Except Fignan. He’s different.” Bradwell picks up the Black Box at his feet. “Each of these boxes has a serial code on the bottom. But Fignan has only a copyright symbol.” He flips it over, showing her a circle around a crude three-line C.
Pressia runs her finger over it. “What’s a copyright?”
“It’s a symbol to show ownership. It was widely used in the Before, but was usually followed by a year. This one isn’t.”
Pressia gives the box a quarter turn. “It could also be a U in a circle.” She turns it again, halfway this time. “Or an unfinished square or a table.”
“Black Boxes aren’t just boxes that happen to be black. They’re the name of anything—a device or process—that’s thought of in terms of input and output, when you can’t see how it’s being processed, what’s going on inside. A white box or a glass box, those are things where you can put information in and you can see what happens to it.”
“The Dome is a Black Box,” Pressia says.
“From our perspective, it is,” Bradwell says. “And so is the human brain.”
And so are you, she thinks. And so am I. She wonders if two human beings can ever be white boxes for each other.
He puts Fignan on the table. “Fignan is an impostor. He’s supposed to fit in, but he was made with a different audience in mind. But he won’t just hand that information over to anybody. Some word made him light up and then he talked to me.” He puts his hands in his pockets and lowers his head. “Should I recite what I was saying? About you? I mean, it’s just us trying to figure this out. Nothing more than that, right?”
“Right.” She wants to stall. “But first, it lit up and talked to you. What did it say?”
“It said seven.”
“The number seven?”
“It said seven over and over and then it stopped and beeped as if waiting for a response while seconds were ticking off a clock, and then it stopped. Time’s up, like a game show.”
“A game show?” she asks. She knows that this is a reference to the Before, but she can’t place it.
“You know, TV shows where people answered questions asked by a host who had a microphone and prizes like sets of luggage and Jet Skis, while the audience shouted things at them and clapped wildly There was one where they gave electric shocks when the contestants answered wrong. People loved it.”
“Right, game shows,” she says, as if she remembers them. What’s a Jet Ski? “But why do we care if this one box opens up or not? We have everything we could possibly want from the other five!”
“Fignan holds secrets,” Bradwell says. “He was programmed to guard them carefully.”
Pressia shakes her head. “This is about uncovering the truth, the past, more lessons in Shadow History? Don’t you know enough already?”
“Of course I don’t know enough! How many times do I have to tell you that we have to fully understand the past or we’re doomed to repeat it? And if we can understand Willux, the enemy, then—”
Pressia is furious. “We can improve people’s lives with what’s in these boxes, but you have to go after the mystery, the holdout? Okay, fine. So do it again. Make him do the game-show thing again.”
Bradwell shakes his head and runs his hands through his hair. “That’s just it. I don’t remember what I said exactly. Maybe I should retrace my verbal steps. You sure you’re okay with that?”
“Of course.” Is he needling her?
“We
ll, I was . . . rambling . . . about you. It was the middle of the night, and I was, well, describing you . . . I was talking about what you looked like—your dark eyes, the shape of them, and how they look like liquid sometimes, and I was talking about the shine of your hair, and the burn around one of your eyes. I mentioned your hand, the lost one, but that it’s not really gone, that it exists inside the doll, that the doll is as much a part of you as anything else.”
Pressia’s cheeks flush. Why would he talk about her scars, her deformity? If he were in love, wouldn’t his vision erase her flaws? Wouldn’t he see only the best version of her? She turns away from him and looks at the rows of boxes. Their lights blink dimly, small twinkling repetitions.
He says, “I might have mentioned your lips.”
The room is quiet now.
The flush in her cheeks spreads across her chest. She pinches the swan pendant and twists it nervously. “Okay, so it said seven. Why do we care? Let’s concentrate on the good boxes. Let it keep its secrets.”
Bradwell walks up to her and lightly cups her wrist. He stares at the necklace. His hand is rough but warm. “Wait,” he says. “I also mentioned the necklace, how the pendant sits right in the dip between your two collarbones. The swan pendant.”
The Black Box lights up. It beeps a short punctuated alarm and says, “Seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven.” They both stare at it, startled. The beeping continues as the clock ticks down, and then it goes silent.
“This has to do with my mother,” Pressia says. Her mother told her a lot of things that Pressia didn’t understand. She spoke quickly, almost in a kind of shorthand. Pressia didn’t ask her to clarify because she assumed there would be time later to hear everything she needed to know. But she does remember her mother talking about the importance of the swan as a symbol and the Seven. “The Best and the Brightest,” Pressia says. “It was a large, important program, recruiting the smartest kids they could find. And from that group, they made another, more elite group of twenty-two—and from that, Willux formed an inner seven. This was when they were our age. Early on.”