Pressia rocks her as she rocks the doll head. “Hush. It’s okay.” Pressia has memorized the first Message, the one written on small slips of paper that flurried down from some kind of airship. She recites it: “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.”
The girl nods. They’re speaking the same language.
The blind woman says, “What’s happening?”
“Hush,” Margit says. “Just hush.”
“The cross,” Pressia says softly to the others. “The kind with the wreath around the center point. It’s the same one printed at the end of the first Message.” She looks at Bradwell. “The two Messages are almost identical in some way, right?”
“In what way?” Bradwell says.
“I don’t know. They just feel like they’re the same length, the same form. You know?”
El Capitan says, “Twenty-nine.”
“Twenty-nine?” Bradwell asks.
“Words. Each Message has exactly twenty-nine words,” El Capitan says.
“It’s going to be okay,” Pressia whispers to Wilda and rubs her narrow back.
“Okay, okay,” Helmud coos.
Holding the doll head tightly, the girl whispers, “We want our son returned.”
“I know,” Pressia says. “We’re going to take care of you.”
EL CAPITAN
SPIDERS
BRADWELL LIFTS THE GIRL, who’s still gripping Pressia’s doll-head fist, while the blind woman curses and claws at Bradwell. “She’s ours! Let her go!”
“Back off!” Pressia shouts, and she shoves the woman. She and Bradwell carry the girl off quickly.
Margit yells at El Capitan, “Let us all be Pure! You know their son! I know you do! Hand him over! If you don’t hand him over, we will hunt him down ourselves!”
“Don’t threaten me!” El Capitan says.
“It’s not a threat!”
The blind woman says, “Didn’t the Message open your heart?”
“Shut up about my heart!” El Capitan says.
“My heart!” Helmud says.
“Hand over their son!” Margit shouts.
The blind woman screams, “Pure! We can be Pure!”
“Pure! Pure!” Helmud calls back, like it’s some kind of birdcall. Margit grabs Helmud’s shirt and yanks as hard as she can. El Capitan swings the rifle around and aims it at her. “Don’t give me a reason. I’m trigger-happy. Call off your friend too.”
“We’re willing to die for the New Message!”
“Kill us!” the blind woman shouts.
“Really?” El Capitan says. He cocks the rifle. They’re both quiet. The blind woman knows the sounds of a gun. Helmud shrinks on El Capitan’s back, laying one cheek flat against his neck.
Margit takes her friend’s hand. “Jazellia, the angels will watch over her every step! Have faith!”
Up ahead, Bradwell’s voice rings out. “Spiders! They made it!”
El Capitan and the two women run out of the culvert. Spiders are everywhere. The Groupie is gone. The pale, burned clothes smolder. Bradwell, gripping Wilda to his chest, and Pressia run to the car. Helmud’s whittled boat pops out of the girl’s pocket and falls in the snow. No going back for it. They slam the doors as spiders click over the hood.
One of the spiders gets too close to El Capitan. He fires at it, misses.
The blind woman screams. Margit says, “The Dome sent these creatures. The Dome is good!” Her eyes snap to one spider, skittering over a rock, and she watches its small, swift movements. She reaches for it.
“Don’t!” El Capitan calls out.
But it’s too late. The spider crouches and springs at her. It hooks its pronged feet through her sleeve and into the meat of her upper arm. Her eyes go wide as a red bead of light flashes on its bulbous body Blood seeps from her skin into her sleeve. Her face goes pale. She raises her hands in the air. “It chose me!” Her voice is a mix of joy and pain.
Another spider is circling close to the blind woman’s leg. El Capitan shoots at it, misses. “Run!” he shouts. “Or I’ll kill you! Go, go, go!”
“Go,” Helmud says.
The blind woman pulls on Margit’s arms. They turn and run. El Capitan sprints to the car. In the backseat, Pressia holds the girl, who keeps her eyes on the doll’s eyes; maybe she’s in shock.
“Get in!” Bradwell shouts from the driver’s seat. He revs the engine.
El Capitan sees the boat in the snow. He could make it, he’s pretty sure. “I should get your goddamn boat, Helmud. You made that beautiful goddamn boat!”
“Get in!” Helmud says, throwing his weight toward the door.
A spider runs over the toe of El Capitan’s boot. He jumps. Fires. A plume of snow and dirt rises from the bullet hole. He grips the handle of the passenger door just as a young man runs toward him screaming.
A metallic spider is embedded in his thigh; his pant leg runs dark with blood. Too late for you, El Capitan thinks. Maybe it’s too late for all of them. His army isn’t ready. It probably never will be. The Dome has sent little spiders to kill them.
El Capitan’s going to leave the guy there. What can he do? But Pressia jumps out of the car and runs to the man.
“Leave him,” El Capitan urges her. “Spiders are everywhere!” He tells Bradwell to stay with the girl. He runs to Pressia.
“We can’t help,” El Capitan tells her. “We have to go.”
“We can help!” Her fingers run lightly over the spider’s back, which glows with a red digital clock: 00:00:06. . . 00:00:05. “It’s counting down!”
“Down!” Helmud cries out like a command. “Down, down!”
El Capitan grabs Pressia by the ribs and lifts her and runs. Helmud grips his neck. The spider emits a long, slow beep. El Capitan dives.
The spider, locked onto the man’s leg, explodes.
His ears are ringing. His vision is black. His shoulder feels like it’s plowed into a wall. His breath is caught in his throat. Helmud moans.
Pressia puts her hands on his chest. “El Capitan? Can you hear me?” Her voice is tinny and distant.
“Yeah,” El Capitan says gruffly, as her face—her perfect face—comes into view. She’s reaching over his shoulder and tending to Helmud.
She tries to pull them up. El Capitan stands so fast his vision fades again for a second. Pressia steadies him, but he pushes her away. “I’m fine.” She runs to the car, looking back to make sure he’s following. He is, though his steps are leaden.
“Don’t look!” he hears Bradwell shout, maybe to the little girl. “Don’t look!”
Helmud repeats it, burying his face behind El Capitan’s back. “Don’t look. Don’t.” But El Capitan does look back at the exploded man—his body already charred, his clothes on fire, smoke trailing in the air.
El Capitan reaches the car and puts his hands on the hood to keep his balance. He presses his forehead to the window for a second. Cool glass.
“Hurry up, Cap!” Bradwell shouts.
“Hurry,” Helmud says.
Something darts up the heel of El Capitan’s boot. He sees a small bulky movement under his pant leg—a spider’s on him. He whips off his rifle and rams his calf with its butt, but the spider’s legs pierce his skin and drive into his muscle. He feels sick, but he straightens up, blood trickling down into his boot. Don’t look, he tells himself. Don’t look. The others are in the car, calling his name. They can’t see the lower half of his body, so he tugs up his pant leg, and there, above the cuff of his boot, in the densest part of his calf muscle, is a robotic spider. Its black humped back shows a timer, counting down. 07:13:49. . . 07:13:48. . . 07:13:47. The rest of his life and Helmud’s too, meted out in hours, minutes, seconds.
“Goddamn,” El Capitan says.
“God,” Helmud says, pleadingly. “God, God, God!”
PRESSIA
GAZEBO
IT’S LIKE THE CIT
Y HAS GROWN a layer of movable skin, a clicking black scrim that’s covering everything in sight—the hunched buildings, the broken walls, the plywood roofs on handmade lean-tos. Pressia closes her eyes, but the clicking sounds like the eyes of a thousand dolls.
Bradwell jerks the gears, tugs the wheel as spiders pop and crunch under the tires. Luckily, this doesn’t cause them to detonate; they’re probably programmed to explode only when attached to flesh, which they’ve done expertly. Survivors stagger and call out to one another. Some run and climb. Others smash spiders with bricks. But some just give in and have half a dozen or more spiders locked onto their bodies like thick black ticks.
Wilda is between Pressia and El Capitan and Helmud in the backseat. Fignan seems to be putting on a light show for the girl, as if to distract her from the window. Pressia warns her that sometimes Fignan bites and pulls hair. And, sure enough, moments later, she sees Fignan scratch the girl’s arm, but it’s not too rough and barely leaves a mark. The girl doesn’t seem to mind. She goes back to the light show.
“The Dome wants Partridge back. Our son returned. . . What the hell are we going to do?” El Capitan says.
“Partridge can’t hand himself over,” Pressia says. “It would be a death sentence.”
“He’s Willux’s son,” Bradwell says. “That has its privileges.”
“What’s the alternative?” El Capitan says. “Is he going to let everyone die, one by one?”
“We need to get to him,” Pressia says.
“Before the Dome worshippers get their hands on him,” El Capitan says. “They say they want to hand him over, but they’re insane. They might hand him over by burning him up and sending his ashes off in the first stiff wind!”
“The mothers hear everything. They’re the eyes and ears,” Bradwell says, hitting a straightaway. The spiders under the wheels sound like crushed bones. “They’ll know we’re headed there before we even show up.”
“Okay then,” El Capitan says. He still looks pale from the blast.
“Thanks for grabbing me back there,” Pressia says.
“It was nothing. Don’t even think about it.”
“Think about it,” Helmud whispers.
Wilda stares up at Pressia. “We want our son,” she says. Pressia guesses that she’s tired.
Pressia pats her shoulder. “Rest your head.”
The girl leans on Pressia, lifts her arms. Pressia lets her hold the doll head to her chest, and then Wilda closes her eyes. Pressia thinks about the lullaby her mother used to sing to her, and her mother’s face appears in her mind. The bloody mist. She thinks of El Capitan saving her from the explosion. Couldn’t she have done that for her mother? There must have been something she could have done. Pressia leans close to Wilda’s ear and sings the song that pops to mind, the one sung by the man in the crowded, snowy lobby of OSR headquarters.
The ghostly girls, the ghastly girls, the ghostly girls.
Who can save them from this world? From this world?
The river’s wide, the current curls, the current calls, the current curls.
They wade in water to be healed, their wounds to be sealed, to be healed.
Death by drowning, their skin all peeled, their skin all pearled, their skin all peeled.
Her grandfather told her that she went to an all-girls school for kindergarten in a plaid pleated skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She knows who Peter Pan was—a boy who stayed young forever. Was this her childhood? Had her grandfather stolen this childhood from someone else? This song is about boarding-school girls who survived the blasts and walked to the river singing their school anthem. Some of the girls were blind because they’d been lying in the grass, staring up at the sky when the Detonations lit it up—at least that’s the way people tell it. They huddled by the river. Some waded in. Water was good because it soothed the burns, even though the water was warmed by the Detonations. Their skins turned papery, peeling away from their arms, curling like lace collars at their necks. In the end, people knew them by their uniforms—what was left of them.
Marching blind their voices singing, voices keening, voices singing.
We hear them ’til our ears are ringing, ears are screaming, ears are ringing.
The way the story goes, people wanted to save them but the girls didn’t want to be saved. They wanted to die together and they did, singing.
They need a saint and savior, saint and sailor, saint and savior.
They’ll haunt and roam this shore forever, haunt and roam this shore forever.
In some versions, they fused with trees that still stand by the riverside. In others, they became Dusts and rove the banks, and if you come close, they’ll devour you. In some versions, they fused with animals and became foxes or waterbirds. But in every version, no one can ever get them back.
The ghostly girls, the ghastly girls, the ghostly girls.
Who can save them from this world? From this world?
The river’s wide, the current curls, the current calls, the current curls.
Pressia thought of the ghostly girls often when she was Wilda’s age, haunting the shore in tattered uniforms and lace collars of peeled skin, a detail so grotesquely specific she was sure it had to be true. She tries to think of a happier story to tell Wilda, but the girl’s breath has gone deep. Her eyelids flutter with dreams. Pressia wonders what her dreams might look like. Hasn’t she been to the Dome and back? What did she see there? A fleeting smile plays across her lips; then it’s gone. Wilda’s grip on the doll head has loosened. Pressia puts her hand on the girl’s hand and feels a faint vibration. It’s not just the car rattling on the road, but trembling—from within Wilda herself.
And Pressia thinks of Willux, his tremor, the result of years of brain enhancements, ones that will hopefully result in his death sometime soon. But she remembers, in a sickening flash, asking her mother in the bunker why she didn’t dose Pressia with some resistance to enhancements, why they didn’t leach the meds she’d developed into the drinking water. Her mother said the doses that would work for an adult could kill a child. She could give Partridge resistance to only one form of enhancements, and she chose behavioral coding. She wanted him to have his own will. And why didn’t she give any to Pressia? Well, she was just that much younger. It was too dangerous.
What have they done to Wilda to make her Pure? Is the cure a new disease, just like Willux’s Rapid Cell Degeneration? Is it crashing her system? Is this trembling the very first sign?
An hour later, Bradwell parks on a hill between two fallen houses on the edge of the Meltlands. They have a view of the footprints of slab foundations, cracked cement holes that were once swimming pools—circular, oval, kidney-shaped—burned metal skulls of cars, and indistinct blobs of melted playground equipment. The semicircular streets fan into the dust bowl of the Deadlands.
Bradwell gets out and paces in front of the car. El Capitan and Helmud get out too and sit on the hood. Pressia stays with Wilda, who’s sleeping, her hands curled near her chest, shivering, ever so slightly. But then she stirs, sits bolt upright, and says, “Proof that we can save you all?” She looks out the window.
“We’re waiting for help,” Pressia tells her. The girl grabs the door handle and jiggles it. “Do you want to see where we are?”
She nods.
Pressia unlocks the door and opens it. They step out and look at the Meltlands below, soot and snow dragged across them in dark billowing sheets. “Any sign of the mothers?” Pressia asks.
“Not yet,” Bradwell says.
“Can’t be sure if they’ll show up as caretakers or warriors,” El Capitan says. “Unpredictable lot.”
Wilda starts to walk toward one of the toppled homes.
“Call to us if you see them,” Pressia says, following the girl.
They both nod, Helmud too, staring out across the landscape.
Pressia stays close to Wilda, following her to the back of a house where there’s the impression of a cement pool.
The deep end is cluttered with patio furniture and what might have once been a gazebo—crooked, splintered, and covered in ash and snow. It leans to one side like an off-kilter hoop skirt. Wilda sits on the edge of the shallow end, pushes herself off, and lands. “Wait,” Pressia says. She climbs in after her. Wilda walks over to the gazebo and sits down inside, cross-legged, on its floor. Pressia joins her. “It’s like playing house,” Pressia says. “Do you like to do that?”
The girl nods.
“I wonder,” Pressia says, taking Freedle from her pocket and letting him flit around, “if kids play house in the Dome.” If you weren’t always searching for a real home, if you lived in a safe and happy place, would you still need to play house? For a fleeting second, she imagines cooking in a cheery kitchen, and there’s Bradwell working with her. She has her doll head fused to her fist. His birds are still there nestled in his back. No. It can’t work. In fact, the idea of the two of them in a cheery kitchen scares her. It seems to invite only doom and loss.
Wilda looks at Pressia, startled. “If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages.”
“So you’re saying they were bad? It was scary in there?”
She looks across the pool and slowly shakes her head.
“Was it nice?”
Wilda shakes her head again.
“It wasn’t scary and it wasn’t nice. What was it?”
Wilda lies down, closes her eyes, and then opens them, blinking like there’s a bright light shining down on her. She presses fingers to thumb, opens and closes them—gesturing someone talking over her head. She does it with the other hand. Another person talking. The hands look down at her then to each other. More talking.
“You weren’t a hostage as much as you were a specimen? Something to be experimented on?”