“It’s happening to my father,” Partridge says, as if this is hitting him for the first time. “I thought he was just angry at me, shaking his head, almost unconsciously showing his disgust. But that’s why he wants this medicine so badly.”
Aribelle freezes for a moment; her entire body is rigid. “Despite all of the reports, part of me has always believed he was dead.”
“Why?” Partridge says.
“I had my reasons.”
“What reasons?”
She uses her pincer to fold down the collar of her shirt, revealing the skin just above her heart. There are six small squares, their outlines barely visible under her skin. Three of the squares pulse. Three don’t. “We each embedded the others’ heartbeats under our skin so we would know who was living and who was dead. A kind of pulsing tattoo.” She points to the first two dead squares. “These two are dead. This one, here, Ivan, died very young, not long after we had the pulses embedded. This one not long before the Detonations, and your father’s heartbeat,” she says to Partridge. “It stopped pulsing shortly after the Detonations.”
“He has scars on his chest,” Partridge says. “I saw them once. A row of scars arranged just like that.”
Aribelle takes a deep breath and lets it out. “He said that he was done with all of us. He was cutting us loose. And that’s what he meant. He cut us out,” she says, “with a knife. It makes sense. He wouldn’t know if we were alive, but he was willing to sacrifice that knowledge to make us think that he’d died.”
“And the survivors?” Pressia says.
She points to each of the pulsing squares one at a time. “Bartrand Kelly. Avna Ghosh. And Hideki Imanaka.”
“My father?” Pressia asks.
She nods.
Pressia’s eyes fill with tears. “You think he’s alive.”
“The fact that his heart is beating helps to keep me alive.”
“Why the tattoos?” Partridge asks. “What linked all of you together?”
“Idealism.” She moves to the table, turns on the computers. Screens light up. Radios crackle. “We were all recruited for the Best and the Brightest. Among that group there were twenty-two selected for an End-of-World scenario. This was in our late teens. We were kids still. From there, your father kind of chose an inner group. He was brilliant and lost. His mind, even before he took the enhancements, worked at a frenzied pace. I could only see in retrospect how mad he’d been from the beginning.” She looks again at the swan pendant. “Your father, Pressia, he gave me that necklace. I knew the inscription inside it. The swan was important to us early on, the seven of us, a symbol. But then Operation Phoenix killed the swan and turned the symbol into a bird that could rise from the ashes. Ellery Willux’s idea. Hideki, he wanted me to be the swan that became a phoenix and survived all of what we knew was to come. He called me his phoenix.” She closes her eyes, spilling tears. “It started out so well meaning. We were going to save the world, not end it.”
“But why did you even go to Japan to begin with?” Pressia asks.
“Imanaka, your father, was doing great work. The Japanese have a very intimate history with radiation, the bomb. They were ahead of everyone else in defense, resistance. His research dovetailed with my area, trauma repair through biomedical nanotechnology. And Ellery, Partridge’s father, wanted me to go over to see if Imanaka was making any progress on reversal. He was afraid that he would degenerate one day. He wanted that information above everything else. My guess is that he still does. More urgently now than ever.”
She glances at Pressia, very aware she’s bugged. “There are other survivors out there. If Ghosh and Kelly and Imanaka are still alive, then there are more. Ellery wouldn’t want news of this to circulate in the Dome. But I know it has to be true. I haven’t been able to establish contact with anyone beyond a hundred-mile radius—radio wave, satellite… Nothing works. The Dome keeps all of those methods blocked. But I live on hope.”
Pressia thinks of Saint Wi and Bradwell there in the crypt, kneeling before the small statue behind the cracked Plexiglas. Hope.
“You got resistance down, in some way, right? I mean, you did something to make me resistant to coding,” Partridge says.
“Yes, but we didn’t get it down fast enough. There was nothing we were going to be able to do to stop the Detonations—only defense and repair. We knew that it wouldn’t really save many lives. People would still die in the destruction—a massive body count. But we could spare the survivors fusings and poisoning. We wanted to leach radiation-resistance materials into the public drinking water. But it was too risky. Doses that work on adults could kill a child. That’s why I had to choose with you, Partridge. I couldn’t make you completely resistant. You were only eight, and hardy enough for only one limited run of it.”
“You chose my behavioral coding.”
“I wanted that to be your own. The right to say no, to stand up for what’s right. I wanted your character to be kept intact.”
“And me?” Pressia asks.
She takes a long jagged breath. “You were a year and a half younger and small for your age. It was too risky to dose you. You were being kept in Japan, looked after by your father and his sister. I couldn’t simply come home with a baby. I would have been sent to a rehabilitation center. That’s where I would have died. I discovered what my husband was planning—full-scale destruction—and when I knew he was closing in on it, I sent for you. I had to tell my husband. I had no choice. He was furious. And there was more to it. I can’t explain it all now—things about the past. Dark things that I knew to be true, things that he didn’t want me to know. I couldn’t live in the Dome. I had a plan for stealing the boys from him. I could tell that he was moving quickly—his brain so fevered—and I knew that he was making rash decisions and had massive amounts of power, no oversight. I needed to get Pressia here with me, safe in the bunker. There were delays, problems with passports. Your aunt was bringing you by plane. The Detonations were supposed to still be weeks away.
“But then, that day, your father called me, Partridge. He said that today was the day. It was going down earlier than planned. He wanted me to get into the Dome. He begged me.
“I knew he was telling the truth. There were already strange traffic patterns. People who’d been tipped off were getting in. Pressia’s plane was finally coming in. I told him no. I told him to tell the boys that I loved them, every day. I said, ‘Promise me.’ He hung up the phone. And I drove to the airport as fast as I could, terrified. I got the call from your auntie that the plane had landed. I still thought we might be able to make it back to the bunker before the bombs. I parked the car and was running to Baggage Claim. I could see you through the plate-glass window, standing with your auntie—so small and perfect. My girl! I tripped on the pavement, got to my hands and knees, and I looked up. There was a flash of light. The glass shattered. And I was fused to the pavement—arms and legs. Some people had known where I was headed. They tracked me down. There were four tourniquets, a saw. I was saved. Beyond all expectations, I survived.”
“Did you know I’d survived?” Pressia asks.
“You had a chip. Everyone who came into this country as a foreigner had to be chipped before entering.
“Our equipment after the bombings was sketchy. We could see chips moving on the screens, but not very well. When we located your chip, I used the information from your retinal scan, data your father had sent me from Japan. It was in one of the radiation-resistant computers and survived with minor problems. I had retinal scans for the boys too. I built small winged messengers. Our locusts. I sent them out, coded with your location, and they were chipped too. But they were destroyed before they reached the destination. Finally, though, one made it.”
“I was chipped,” Pressia says. “You knew where I was. You could have had someone come for me and bring me back here.”
“Things were awful here. Confinement, disease, hostility. And how could I take care of you as I was? I couldn’t even
hold you.” She lifts her prosthetic arms then points to a computer screen. It’s a map that Pressia recognizes—the market, the Rubble Fields, Pressia’s barbershop. “At the same time, the chip was a blip on the screen, and the locust was there too, always hovering nearby. Often the two blips were so close that there was no other explanation—you held it in your hand. And your blip began to tell a story. The blip was still at night, always in the same spot at the same time. It woke up and was active. It roamed some and returned to its spot, home. It was the story of a child who was cared for—a child with a routine. A healthy child. A child better off where she was. You were okay, weren’t you? Someone took care of you, someone loved you?”
Pressia nods. “Yes,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Someone took care of me and loved me.”
“And then a few days ago, your blip wandered and didn’t return. You’re sixteen now and I worried about OSR. At the same time, we heard rumors of a Pure, and then that very old locust from the first flock returned. Your locust.” She pulls open a drawer in a cabinet under the computer equipment. The drawer glows warm. It’s an incubator, and lying on a small piece of cloth is Freedle. “It had no message. I thought it might just be some oddity, but with everything happening at the same time, I hoped it was a sign.”
“Freedle,” Pressia says. “Is he okay?”
“Tired from the journey, recovering. He’s elderly. But someone’s taken care of all of his delicate gears.”
Freedle tilts his head and flutters a wing with a series of clicks. “I’ve tried to,” Pressia says, touching his back with one finger. “I can’t believe he made it here. My grandfather…” Her voice chokes on the word. “He’s gone now. But he must have set him loose.”
“You should leave Freedle here,” Partridge says. “He’ll be safer that way.”
Pressia isn’t sure why but this small fact—Freedle being alive—fills her with a strange sense of hope.
“Emi,” Aribelle says, “I think I have to say things that the Dome can’t hear.”
“I’ll go in the hall and wait.” Pressia then turns to Partridge. She touches his sleeve. “Warn her,” Pressia whispers. “Sedge. He’s not the boy she remembers.”
“I know.”
Pressia walks to her mother and gives her a kiss on the cheek.
“We’ll be quick,” her mother says.
PARTRIDGE
CYGNUS
YOU DON’T HAVE IT, DO YOU?” Partridge asks.
“Reversal for Rapid Cell Degeneration?” She shakes her head. “No. We were on to your father. We knew he’d broken from us, that he was dangerous.”
“How did you know?”
“He betrayed me.”
“Didn’t you betray him too?” Partridge says it so quickly that it surprises him.
She glances at him. “Fair enough. But he wasn’t the person he’d told me he was.”
“We can’t always be who we want to be.” He thinks of Sedge. Can he ever be brought back? Can his mother save him?
“Look, there are things you should know. Your father took brain enhancements before they were fully tested, when we were all still young.” She stares at the floor. “Leading up to the Detonations, his brain was fully coded. He said he had to enhance his brain so that he could make this new world happen. Humans worthy of paradise—a New Eden. I didn’t see him much. He told me that he’d stopped sleeping. He only thought. His mind was on fire. The synapses were burning his brain, one minuscule firing at a time. But still he thought…”
“What?” Partridge asks.
“The Dome wasn’t just a job. Domes were a lifelong obsession. You should have heard him lecture on ancient cultures when he was nineteen years old… He saw himself as sitting atop the pinnacle of human civilization. And he knew that the brain enhancements he’d taken would catch up with him. He thought he could find a way to fix it. Once he had that, he thought he could live on forever.”
Partridge shakes his head. “You said you were originally in charge of biomedical nanotechnology for use in trauma. I know what that means.” He thinks about Arvin Weed, rambling on about self-generating cells. “Why didn’t you use those drugs on yourself ? Didn’t you have the ability to help bone cells create more bone? Muscle tissue? Skin? Don’t you have those drugs here?”
“Of course I do. A variety. And there are some that you should know about. They’re very powerful.” She pulls open a drawer, and there, nestled into a row of grooves, are vials.
“Powerful in what way?”
“They’re part of the answer to reversal. Your father needs what’s in these vials, but he also needs another ingredient, which may or may not exist. One of the others in the group was working on it. And, most of all, he needs the formula on how to fit the two pieces together.”
“Does the formula exist?”
“It did, a long time ago, but I don’t know if it still does.”
He thinks of the guns embedded in his brother’s arms, Pressia’s doll head, Bradwell’s birds, El Capitan and his brother. “Can these vials undo fusings?”
She clenches her eyes shut, as if pained, then slowly flexes her pincer. She shakes her head. “No,” she says, angrily. “They don’t disengage tissue. They adhere and build it. Your father was going to release this biosynthesizing nanotechnology purposefully into the cocktail of bombs for the sole purpose of fusing survivors to the world around them, just to create a subhuman class, a new order of slaves, to serve them in New Eden once the earth was rejuvenated. I had to tell others. I had to leave him and try to find ways to save people. I failed.
“That’s the real reason why I took you with me to Japan and where I met up again with Emi’s—Pressia’s father, one of the seven. I had to hand over as many of your father’s secrets as I could.”
“But why didn’t you use any of those drugs on yourself ?”
“For one thing, the drugs aren’t perfected. They don’t always know how to stop themselves. But also, Partridge, even if the drugs were perfect, you know why I wouldn’t fix myself.”
“No,” Partridge says, exasperated. “I don’t!”
“That would be like hiding the truth. My body is the truth. It’s history.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
She looks at his hand. “What happened?”
“I made a small sacrifice,” he said.
“Do you want to take it back?”
He stares at the bandage, the end darkened by dried blood. He shakes his head. “No.”
“Then maybe you understand.” She closes the drawer. “I’ve wasted so much of my life regretting things. So much of this is my fault, Partridge.” She starts to cry.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Partridge says.
“I had to stop looking back. It was eating me alive. Seeing you and your sister, it helps me see the future.”
“There’s something else my father wants,” Partridge says.
“What’s that?” she asks, looking up at him. Her eyes are so much like his own, but different. He’s missed her so much that, for a moment, he can barely breathe. He has to look at the floor to maintain his composure.
“He wants you.”
“Me? Why? He doesn’t have enough servants to wait on him?”
“Caruso out there said that I was going to be the leader from the inside. What did he mean?”
“Exactly that. You were going to be our leader, the one to take down your father and the Dome. We have sleeper cells inside. A vast network.”
“Sleeper cells?” Partridge says.
“People inside the Dome who were with us,” she says.
She drives the chair to the metal-topped desk. She opens a drawer with her pincer and pulls out a sheet of paper. It’s a long list of names. “The Dome can’t know this exists. It would jeopardize people’s lives.”
Partridge’s eyes scan down the list. “The Weeds?” he says. “Arvin’s parents? And Algrin Firth’s father? But Algrin’s supposed to go into Special Forces, eli
te training.” He looks down the list farther. “Glassings,” he says, and then he remembers the conversation he had with Glassings in his bow tie at the dance. “He called me on taking your things from the Personal Loss Archives,” Partridge says. “He said that I could talk to him about anything I needed, that I wasn’t alone.”
“Durand Glassings,” his mother says. “He’s important. Our closest link to you.”
“He’s my World History teacher.”
“He was the one who was going to lay it out,” she says.
Partridge is astonished. “But I’m no leader,” he says. “I couldn’t command sleeper cells and take down the Dome.”
“We were waiting to see a sign that you were ready. And we got one.”
“What was that?”
“Ironically, it was your escape.”
“What do we do now?” Partridge asks. “They want us to hand you over, along with everything here in your labs.”
“And if we refuse?”
“There’s a hostage,” Partridge says. “A girl named Lyda.” His voice is rough as he says her name.
“Lyda,” his mother says. “She means a lot to you?”
He nods. “I wish she didn’t mean so much.”
“No you don’t.”
“She risked her life for me. I’m willing to risk mine for her. But I’m not willing to risk yours.”
“Maybe we can give them what they think they want. I can take in some pills and by the time they find out they’re worthless, maybe you all can get away, to safety,” she says. “Buy some time. Eventually, though, you’ll have to fight, Partridge.”
“I can’t. I’m not Sedge. He was the leader. Not me.”
“Was the leader?” she says. “What’s happened to him?”