His father says, “This is about your mother giving you pills, making you swallow something, during the dates of your absence.”
“I don’t remember. I was eight years old. Jesus. What do you want from me?” Even as he says it, he remembers the sunburns they both got though it was overcast and how, when they were sick, his mother told him a bedtime story, a swan wife with black feet. His mother, he sees her in his mind often—her curly hair, her soft hands with their bones as fine as a bird’s bones. The swan wife was a little song, too. It had a tune. It had words that rhymed and hand motions. His mother said, “When I tell you the singing version of the story, hold this necklace in your hand.” He gripped it tight in his fist. The edges of the swan’s flared wings were sharp, but he didn’t let up.
One time he told the story to Sedge. This was in the Dome, a day when Partridge missed his mother sharply. Sedge said it was a girl’s story. It was for kids who believed in fairies. “Grow up, Partridge. She’s dead and gone. Don’t you see that? Are you blind?”
His father now presses him. “We’re going to have to do more tests on you. Batteries of tests. You’ll be poked with so many needles, you’ll feel like a pincushion.” Pincushion—it’s one of those words that no longer mean anything. A cushion for pins? Is this some kind of a threat? It sounds like one. “It would help us out if you could tell us what happened.”
“I can’t. I’d like to, but I don’t remember.”
“Listen to me, son.” Partridge doesn’t like the way his father says the word son, as if it’s a rebuke. “You need to get your head screwed on right. Your mother…” His father’s eyes are weary. His lips are dry. He seems to be talking to someone else. He’s speaking in a voice that he uses on the phone. Hello, Willux here. He crosses his arms on his chest. His face goes slack for a moment as if he remembers something. There’s the shaking of his head again. Even his hand seems to quiver with anger. He says, “Your mother has always been problematic.”
A look passes between them. Partridge doesn’t say a word, but his mind keeps repeating. Has always been. Problematic. Has always been. This isn’t the past tense. This isn’t the way you talk about the dead.
His father recovers. “She wasn’t right in the head.” He rubs his hands on his thighs and then leans in. “I’ve upset you,” his father says. This is strange too. He never talks about emotions.
“I’m fine.”
His father stands up. “Let’s get someone in here to take a picture of us. When was the last time?” It was probably at Sedge’s funeral, Partridge thinks. “Something you can have in your dormitory so you’re not homesick.”
“I’m not homesick,” Partridge says. He hasn’t ever felt like home was home, not here in the Dome, so how can he miss it so badly that he’s sick?
His father calls a tech in anyway, a knobby-nosed woman with bangs, and tells her to get a camera.
Partridge and his father stand in front of the newly hung blueprints, shoulder-to-shoulder, stiff as soldiers. There’s a flash.
PRESSIA
SCAVENGING
EVEN A BLOCK AWAY, Pressia can smell the market—spoiled meat and fish, rotted fruit, char, and smoke. She can make out the hawkers’ shifting shadows, and she knows them by their coughs. This is how death is sometimes measured. There are different kinds of coughs. They rattle crisply. They begin and end with a wheeze. They begin and can’t end. They churn up phlegm. They end in a grunt—this is the worst kind, her grandfather tells her. It means the lungs have taken on fluid—death by infection, drowning from within. Her grandfather rattles by day, but at night he makes the grunting cough in his sleep.
She sticks to the middle of the alley. Passing the lean-tos, she hears a family fighting, a man’s loud bellow, something metal banging against a wall. A woman screeches, and a child starts to cry.
As she reaches the market, she sees that the hawkers are closing up. They’ve dragged metal signs in from the highway for rusted roofs and lean-tos. They shutter stalls with waterlogged pressboard, load their wares in gimp pushcarts, drape their stalls in ragged tarps.
Pressia passes a whisper clutch—a circle of huddled backs, hissing, an occasional hoot, then more whispers. She glimpses their faces mottled with metal, shiny glass, rippled scars. One woman’s arm looks sealed in leather, cuffed at the wrist where it meets her skin.
She sees a group of kids, not too much younger than she is. Two of them—twins, both with mangled, rusty legs exposed a bit below their skirts—are swinging a rope for a third with one whittled arm who hops between them. They chant:
Burn a Pure and breathe the ash.
Take his guts and make a sash.
Twist his hair and make a rope.
And use his bones to make Pure soap.
Washy, washy, washy. One two three.
Washy, washy, washy. Pure is me.
Pure is the name for those in the Dome. Children are fixated on Pures. They’re mentioned in all of their childish rhymes, usually dead. Pressia knows this rhyme by heart. She skipped to it when she was little. She’s wished for that soap, stupidly. She wonders if these kids do, too. To be Pure—what would it look and feel like? To erase the scars, to have a hand again, not a doll?
There’s a little boy with eyes too far apart, eyes lodged almost on the sides of his head, horse-like, who’s tending a fire in a metal barrel with two spits of charred meat balanced on it. The beasts on the spit are small, rodent-size. These children were babies during the Detonations, hardy ones. Kids born before the Detonations are called Pre and those born after are Posts. Posts should be Pure, but that’s not how it works. The mutations caused by the Detonations settled deep into the survivors’ genes. Babies aren’t born Pure. They are mutated, born with traces of their parents’ deformities. Animals too. Instead of starting anew, the breeds only seem to get more convoluted, a mix of human, animal, earth, objects.
But there’s an important distinction that the people her age make—those who remember life before the Detonations and those who don’t. Sometimes after an introduction, kids her age will play I Remember, exchanging memories like currency. How intimate the memory is proves how willing you are to be open to this person—a currency of trust. Those who were too young to remember are both pitied and envied, a hateful mix. Pressia catches herself pretending to remember more than she does, borrowing other people’s memories and mixing them with her own. She worries about it, though, afraid that she might build on other people’s memories so much that her own are untrustworthy. She has to hold tightly to the few she has.
She looks from one face to the next, the fire casting strange shadows, glinting off shards of metal and glass in their faces, lighting up bright scars, burns, and knots of keloids. A girl looks up at her, one she recognizes but can’t fix a name to, and says, “You want pieces of a Pure? All toasted to a crisp?”
“No,” Pressia says, louder than she meant to.
The kids laugh, except for the boy minding the fire. He twists his spit, his fingers small and delicate like he’s working something that winds up, a kind of instrument or an engine. His name is Mikel. He’s not like the other children. There’s something steely about him. She can tell he’s seen a lot of death, his parents long gone. “You sure, Pressia?” he says, very seriously. “Just a little before you get took for good?” Mikel has a mean streak, though it’s not usually directed at her because she’s older. So the comment surprises her.
“Nice of you to offer,” she says, “but I’ll pass.”
Mikel looks at her with a sad expression. Maybe he’d wanted her to yell that she wasn’t ever going to be taken. In any case, she feels sorry for him. His cruelty has always made him seem vulnerable, which is the opposite of the impression he’d like to give.
Up ahead, she sees Kepperness, the man her grandfather mentioned. She hasn’t run into him for a while. He’s the age she imagines her father would be. He’s slinging empty crates into the back of a handcart with his sleeves rolled up, exposing glass-encrus
ted arms, thin and sinewy with muscle. He looks at her and then away. He has a few dark tubers left in a basket. She dips her head forward to cover the scars on the side of her face. “How’s your son doing? Is his neck all healed?” she asks, hoping he’ll feel that he still owes her something.
He stands and stretches his back with a grimace. One of his eyes glows with a golden-orange film, a cataract from the burn of radiation, which isn’t unusual. “You’re the flesh-tailor’s kid, right? Granddaughter? You’re not supposed to be around anymore. Too old, right?”
“No,” she says defensively. “I’m just fifteen.” She pretends to huddle against the wind, though she’s actually trying to look smaller and younger.
“That so?” He stops and stares. She focuses on his good eye, the only one he can see from. “I risked my life for these tubers. Dug ’em up right near OSR’s woodland. Got a few left.”
“Well, what I’ve got is a one-of-a-kind item. Something only someone with built-up wealth could afford. You know, not for just anyone.”
“What is it?”
“A butterfly,” she says.
“Butterfly?” he snorts. “There ain’t many butterflies left.” It’s true. They’re very rare. In the last year or so, Pressia has seen a few more, small signs of renewal.
“It’s a toy.”
“A toy?” Kids don’t really have toys anymore. They play with pig bladders and knotted rag dolls. “Let me have a look.”
She shakes her head. “No use looking at it if you can’t pay for it.”
“Let me just see it.”
She sighs and pretends to be reluctant. She pulls out the butterfly and holds it up.
“Closer,” the man says. She can tell now that both of his eyes were seared by the Detonations, one far worse than the other.
Pressia says, “You used to have real toys as a kid, I bet.”
He nods and says, “What’s it do?”
She winds it up and sets it in his pushcart. The butterfly flaps its wings. “I wonder what it was like to grow up when you did. Christmas and birthdays,” she says.
“I believed in magic as a kid. Can you imagine a thing like that?” he says, tilting his head and staring at the toy. “How much?”
“Normally, I charge a lot. It’s a remembrance of things past. But for you? Well, just the rest of your roots, those left over,” she says. “It’s all we need.”
He hands her the basket and she rolls the roots into her sack, then picks up the butterfly and hands it to him.
Kepperness says, “I’ll give it to my son. He won’t last long.” Pressia has already turned to go. She hears the ticking of the windup mechanism, and then the wings fluttering. “This will brighten him up some.”
No, she thinks. Keep walking. Don’t ask. But she remembers his son. He was a sweet kid. Tough too. He didn’t cry when her grandfather stitched his neck, even though there was nothing for the pain. “Has something else happened to him?”
“Attacked by a Dust. He was out past the fields, near the desert, hunting. He saw its eye blink up from the earth, and then it pulled him down into the sand. His mother was with him, saved him. But he got a bite somehow. It infected his blood.” Dusts are those who fused with the earth; in the city, they fused with the blasted buildings. Most of them died shortly after the Detonations—no means of sustenance, or no mouths, or mouths with no digestion. But some survived because they became more rock than human, and others proved they could be of use, working in conjunction with Beasts, those who fused with animals. When Pressia scavenges in rubble, she watches for Dusts that can reach up, clasp a leg, and pull her down. She’s never been out of the city where the boy was grabbed. She has heard that land is filled with Dusts. She’s heard that lots of the survivalists who thought they saw the End coming, before the Detonations, and moved out into the woods were swallowed into the trees.
She’s heard that a bite is an awful way to die. The child sometimes foams at the mouth and seizes. Pressia reaches into the sack for the tubers. “I didn’t know,” she says. “Look, keep the tubers and the butterfly.”
“No,” Kepperness says, putting the butterfly in an inner pocket of his coat. “I seen your grandfather not long ago. He’s not doing well either, is he? We all got someone. Deal’s a deal.”
She’s not sure what to say. He’s right. Everyone has someone who’s died or dying. Pressia nods. “Okay,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
He’s back to loading his cart again and shakes his head. “We’re all sorry.” He unfolds a heavy piece of cloth and pulls it down over his wares. While he isn’t looking, she upends her sack and a couple of tubers roll back into the basket.
She turns quickly and starts walking. She knows she couldn’t have eaten all of them, not with Kepperness’s son dying, and having charged him more than she usually gets for her work.
But still, now she has to scavenge. Kepperness was right. Her grandfather isn’t well. He won’t last. What if she gets taken or has to run soon? She has to make as many creatures as she can so that he can use them to barter with and survive. She presses on.
When she comes to the end of the market, she stops. There, posted on a low brick wall, is a new OSR listing. It flutters in the cold wind. Some hawkers are rolling carts down the street, a loud clattering echo. She waits for them to go, then walks toward the listing. She presses the paper flat. The print is small. She has to get close. Her eyes flit down the page.
And then she sees it.
The name PRESSIA BELZE and her date of birth.
She runs the tip of her finger over the letters.
There’s no denying it now. There will be no lost file with her information in it. Here it is. Real.
She backs away, stumbling over some upturned bricks. She turns down the first street she comes to.
She’s freezing now. The air is damp. She pulls her inner-layer sweater up to cover her neck, then her stretched-out sweater sleeve down over her doll-head fist, still covered by the sock, tucks it under her other arm, and then crosses both arms on her chest. This is a habit really, something she does when she’s outside in public, when she’s nervous. A comfort, almost.
Amid the ruins on either side, there are buildings that still have their skeletal structure, and people have made makeshift homes inside them. Then she passes a building that’s fully collapsed. These are the best for digging. She’s found beautiful things in the rubble before—wire, coins, metal clasps, keys—but the rubble is dangerous. The more human-like Dusts and some of the human-like Beasts who have dug out homes in the rubble keep them warm with fires, cook what they’ve hunted down, creating trails of smoke. She imagines Kepperness’s son out in the Deadlands, an eye in the sand at his feet—then a hand shooting up from nowhere, pulling him down. She’s alone. If she’s grabbed and pulled down, they’ll feed on her until there’s nothing left.
She doesn’t see any smoke and so she steps up on a pile of wobbling stones, carefully picking her way along, looking for glints of metal, small bits of wiring. She knows it’s pretty much picked clean, but she manages to find what might have once been a guitar string, some pieces of melted plastic like parts to an old board game, and a thin metal tube.
Maybe she can make something special for her grandfather too—a gift worth holding on to. She doesn’t want to think of the word memento because it reminds her that she might soon be gone, but there it is in her mind. Memento.
When she heads home by way of the market, all the stalls are closed. She’s late. She should hurry now. Her grandfather will start to worry. At the other end of the market, she sees the boy with the wide-set eyes again, Mikel. He’s cooking another beast now over the kettledrum. This one is very small, nearly mouse-size, barely worth the meat.
There’s a little boy beside him. He reaches up to touch the meat. Mikel says, “Don’t! It’ll burn you!” He shoves the boy to the ground. The little boy is barefoot. His toes are only nubs. He scrapes his knee, screams at the sight of the blood, and starts to r
un to a darkened doorway. Three women step out—all fused—a tangle of cloth hiding their engorged middle. Parts of each face seem to be shiny and stiff as if fused with plastic. Groupies, that’s what they’re called. One of the women has sloped shoulders, a curved spine. There are many arms, some pale and freckled, others dark. The one in the middle grabs the boy’s arm and says, “Shut up. Hush now. Shut up.”
The woman with the curved spine who seems the least fused to the others, barely hanging on, shouts at Pressia, “You do this to the boy? You do this?”
“I didn’t touch him,” Pressia says, and she pulls on her sleeve.
“Time to come in,” the woman says to the boy. She looks around as if sensing something in the air. “Right now.”
The boy twists from her grip and runs down the street toward the empty market, crying harder now.
The one with the curved spine glances back over her shoulder, raises a bony, knuckled fist, and shakes it at Pressia. “See what you done?”
Then, behind her, she hears Mikel yell, “Beast! Beast!”
Pressia turns around and there’s a wolfish Beast, this one more animal than human. It’s furred, but with glass embedded along its ribs. It runs on all fours with a limp, and then it pauses and rises up on its haunches, nearly the height of a full-grown man. It has clawed feet but no muzzle—instead a pink, nearly hairless human face with a long, narrow jaw and long teeth. Its ribs rise and fall quickly. Across its chest, there is embedded chain link.