Mikel climbs on top of his oil drum and scurries up a metal roof. The Groupies in the doorway dip inside, covering the door with a slab of wood. They don’t even call to the lost child, who’s still running down the street alone.
Pressia knows the Beast will take the child first. He’s smaller than Pressia, a perfect target. But of course, it could attack both of them. It’s surely big enough.
Pressia holds tight to her sack and starts sprinting, her arms pumping and legs moving swiftly. She’s a fast runner, always has been light on her feet. Maybe her father, the quarterback, was fast. Her shoes are worn through on the balls of her feet, so she can feel the ground through her thin socks.
With the market closed up, this street looks foreign. The Beast is bounding down toward her. She and the little boy are the only ones out now. The little boy must sense that something’s changed, danger in the air. He turns and his eyes grow wide with fear. He stumbles and, terrified, he can’t get up. Closer now, she can see that his face is scalded near one of his eyes, which shines whitish blue, like a marble.
Pressia runs to him. “Come on!” she says, grabbing under his arms and lifting him up. With only one hand that’s good for gripping, she needs the boy’s help. “Hold tight!” she says.
She’s looking wildly in every direction for something to climb. Behind them, the Beast is closing in. There’s only rubble on either side of her, but up ahead she sees a building that’s only partially collapsed. It has a barred gate on its metal door—a door to a shop that once had a plate-glass front, like the barbershop. She remembers her grandfather telling her it had been a pawnshop and explaining how people looted them first because they had guns and gold, though gold eventually became worthless.
Its door is slightly open.
The kid is screaming now, loud and shrill, and he’s heavier than she expected. His arms are clamped tightly around her neck, choking off her breath. The Beast is so close that she can hear its panting.
She runs to the door of metal bars, throws it open, swings around and slams it shut, the child still holding on. The door locks automatically.
They’re in a small bare room, just a few pallets on the floor. She covers the kid’s screaming mouth with her hand. “Quiet,” she says, “just be quiet!” and she backs up to the far wall. She sits down with the boy in her lap in the darkened corner of the room.
The Beast is at the door in an instant, barking and clawing through the bars. This Beast has no speech, no hands, despite its human face and eyes. The door rattles loudly. Frustrated, it crouches and growls. And then it turns its head, sniffs the air. And, distracted now, it runs off.
The boy bites her hand as hard as he can.
“Ouch!” Pressia says, rubbing her palm on her pants. “What was that for?”
The boy looks at her wide-eyed as if it surprised him too.
“I was kind of expecting a thank-you,” she says.
There’s a loud bang from the other side of the room.
Pressia gasps and turns. The boy looks too.
A trapdoor has been slapped open and a guy’s head and shoulders have popped up from a room below. He has mussed hair and dark, serious eyes. He’s a little older than Pressia. He says, “Are you here for the meeting or what?”
The boy screams again, as if this is the only thing he knows how to do. No wonder the woman told him to shut up, Pressia thinks. He’s a screamer. And then he runs to the barred door.
“Don’t go out there!” Pressia says.
But the boy is too quick. He unlocks the door, shoots through it, and takes off.
“Who was that?” the guy asks.
“I don’t even know,” Pressia says, standing up. She can see now that the guy is standing on a rickety, folding ladder leading to a basement. There’s a roomful of people down below.
“I know you,” he says. “You’re the flesh-tailor’s granddaughter.”
She notices two scars running up one side of his face, maybe her grandfather’s stitching. She can tell that the stitching isn’t very old, only a year or two. “I don’t remember meeting you.”
“We didn’t meet,” he says. “Plus I was pretty banged up.” He points to his face. “You might not recognize me. But I remember seeing you there.” He looks at her in a way that makes her blush. There’s something familiar maybe, just in the dark shine of his eyes. She likes his face, a survivor’s face, a sharp jaw, his scars long and jagged. His eyes—there’s something about them that makes him seem both angry and sweet at the same time.
“Are you here for the meeting? Seriously, we’re starting. There’s food.”
It’s her last time out before she turns sixteen. Her name is on the list. Her heart is still pounding in her chest. She saved the boy. She feels courageous. And she’s starving. She likes the idea of food. Maybe there will be enough so she can steal some for her grandfather, unnoticed.
There’s a howl not too far off. The Beast is still near.
“Yes,” Pressia says. “I’m here for the meeting.”
He almost smiles, but stops short. He’s not the kind to smile too easily. He turns and shouts to those below, “One more! Make room!” And Pressia notices a fluttering motion beneath the back of his blue shirt, rippling like water.
She remembers him now, the boy with birds in his back.
PARTRIDGE
METAL BOX
ALL THE BOYS FROM GLASSINGS’ World History class are quiet, which is strange because field trips usually bring out the worst in them. Only their footsteps clatter and echo up and down the alphabetized rows of metal boxes. Even Glassings, who always has something to say, has gone mute. His face is taut and flushed as if he were choking on something, grief or hope? Partridge isn’t sure. Glassings shuffles off, disappearing down one of the aisles.
The air in the Dome is always dry and sterile, a static presence. But in the Personal Loss Archives, the air feels faintly charged, almost electrically. Partridge can’t put his finger on it. Of course, he tells himself, it’s not possible that the items of the dead stored here are different from any other molecular arrangement of items, but still it seems almost as if they are.
Or maybe it isn’t the personal items of the dead or the air. Maybe it’s the academy boys who are charged, each looking for a specific name. All of them lost someone in the Detonations, like Partridge did. If, out of that person’s entire life, some artifact of their existence survived, it was put in a metal box, labeled, alphabetized, trapped here forever—to be honored? And then there are those boys who know someone who’s died since the Detonations in the Dome itself. Partridge has someone like that too. When you lose someone in the Dome, though, not much is made of the loss. These losses are to be taken in stride. In the face of such great global losses, how can anyone take a personal loss too personally? And serious illnesses are rare, or maybe more accurately well hidden.
Glassings has put in the request for this field trip many times over the years. Finally he got the okay, and here they are. A recorded voice-over narration kicks in overhead on unseen speakers, a woman saying, “Each person who dies is afforded one small metal box of personal items. Bodies are cremated because space is at a premium. We must reduce each footprint. This is what’s allowed until the land is habitable again and we regain our rightful place as full participants and re-creators of the natural landscape.”
“Can we open the boxes?” Arvin Weed calls out. “I’ve found an aunt.”
“Auntie Weed!” one of the other boys shouts, mockingly.
“Yes,” Glassings says, distracted by his own search, no doubt. “It’s not every day you get access like this. Be respectful. Don’t touch anything.” This means that if Glassings finds the metal box he’s looking for, he’s opening it. Partridge assumed they wouldn’t be allowed to open anything, that he’d only see rows of metal boxes. His heart beats harder in his chest. He walks faster, before Glassings changes his mind, before one of the docents comes in and tells them not to. He’s almost running. He feel
s dizzy. It seems like all the boys are almost running now, skidding around corners, teetering due to the coding’s effect on their equilibriums.
He makes it down the long rows to the end of the alphabet—Willux. He finds his older brother’s name—SEDGE WATSON WILLUX—and his dates, so final and finite, in tidy print. He runs his fingers over the raised type. The ink isn’t faded like some of the others. Sedge has only been gone for a year. In some ways it seems like forever and then, in almost the same moment, it’s as if he’s still here, and there’s been some kind of clerical error. He remembers the last time he saw him. They were at his induction dinner. Sedge and the five other newly graduated academy boys were the first of the new elite corps. Sedge was wearing his uniform. The coding was in full effect. He was taller, broader, his jaw thicker. He told Partridge that he was too skinny. “Double up on the protein bars,” he said, and there was a moment when he looked at Partridge and said, “You remember the stories you used to tell? Fairy tales?” Partridge nodded. “I think about them sometimes still.” Sedge laughed. And then, just before he left, Sedge hugged Partridge and whispered in his ear, “Maybe this won’t happen to you.” At the time, Partridge thought it was a mean thing to say, like he wasn’t man enough to make it through the training. But after Sedge was found dead, Partridge wondered if it was a sincere wish, a hope.
Partridge doesn’t know what happened to the other five boys inducted that day. He’s heard rumors that they are in intensive training and their families only get letters from them. Partridge assumes that their families don’t complain; they have to be relieved that their kids are still alive.
Partridge fits his fingers in the handle, but for some reason he can’t bear to open the box. Sedge is gone. In the small print below his name, a line reads CAUSE: GUNSHOT WOUND, SELF-INFLICTED. Unlike life before they lived in the Dome, suicide doesn’t have as dark a stigma. Resources should go to the healthy and those with a strong will to live. The dying aren’t given many resources; that would be impractical. One day, hopefully not too far off, they will all return to the world outside, the New Eden, as some call it, and they’ll need to be hardy. Sedge’s suicide was tragic because he was young and strong, but the act alone of taking his own life was a sign of defectiveness, and there was something admirable in the act—or so that was the rhetoric thrown at Partridge—that Sedge saw this defect in himself and spared himself for the good of the whole. Partridge hates this kind of talk. My brother is dead, he wants to tell them. He was the murderer and the victim. We’ll never get him back.
Partridge doesn’t want to see what his brother has been reduced to. The contents of a metal box. He can’t bear it.
His mother’s box is next—ARIBELLE CORDING WILLUX—and he’s surprised that she’s allowed to exist here at all. Unlike Sedge, Partridge will take any memory of her he can find, fitted into a box or not. He pulls the small metal handle, unhooks the box, and carries it to the narrow table in the middle of the row. He lifts the lid. He hasn’t asked his father many questions about his mother. He can tell that it makes his father uncomfortable. Inside the box, Partridge finds a birthday card with balloons on the cover without an envelope written by his mother to Partridge on his ninth birthday—but his ninth birthday hadn’t happened yet—a small metal box, and an old photograph of him and his mother at the beach. What shocks him is how real these things are. She must have moved them into the Dome before the Detonations. Each of them was allowed to bring in a few small items that were special to them. Of course, their father said it was just in case of emergency—an emergency that he said would likely never happen. These were things from the box his mother must have brought in with her.
She existed. He thinks of his father’s line of questioning. Had his mother interfered with his coding? Had she fed him pills? Did his mother know more than his father had given her credit for?
He opens the card and reads her handwritten message. Always walk in the light. Follow your soul. May it have wings. You are my guiding star, like the one that rose in the east and guided the Wise Men. Happy 9th Birthday, Partridge! Love, Mom.
Did she know she wasn’t going to be with him on his ninth birthday? Was she planning ahead? He tries to hear the words in his mother’s voice. Is this the way she talked about birthdays? Was he her guiding star? He touches her scrawl, written so hard that he can feel the grooves her pen made.
He picks up the small metal box and sees a small windup tab on the back, next to the lid’s hinges. He opens the lid. A few plinking notes rise up—a music box. He shuts the lid quickly, hoping everyone was too engrossed in their own finds to notice.
Hidden under the music box, Partridge finds the thin chain of a necklace and pendant—a swan made of gold with a bright blue stone for an eye. He picks up the chain, and the swan pendant spins. He hears his father’s voice again, “Your mother has always been problematic.” Has always been.
Partridge knows he has to get out to the other side. If she exists—if there’s the smallest hope—he has to try to find her.
He looks up and down his row—empty. He picks up each small item and slips them, quickly, one by one, into his blazer pockets, then fits the box back into its slot, the sound of metal against metal and then a clunk.
PRESSIA
MEETING
THE MEETING ROOM IS SMALL and cramped. It holds only a dozen people, all standing, and when Pressia descends the ladder, they shift and sigh, annoyed that she’s here taking up room. She figures they’re mad that there’s another person they’ll have to share food with. The room smells like vinegar. She’s never had sauerkraut but her grandfather has described it, and she wonders if that’s what they’ll be eating. Her grandfather has taught her that it’s a German food.
The guy who appeared from the trapdoor moves to the back wall. Pressia has to inch around the group to be able to have a clear view of him. He’s broad and muscular. His blue shirt has a few tears. The elbows are worn through. Where the buttons are missing, he’s punched holes in the fabric and tied them with string.
She remembers the first time she saw him. She was heading home down the alley from a day of scavenging and heard voices through the window. She stopped and looked in. She saw this boy—two years younger than he is now but still strong, wiry—lying on his side on the table while her grandfather worked on his face. The scene was blurred by the splintered window, but still she was sure that she saw the small quick wings of birds—rumpled gray feathers, a quick glimpse of a pair of small orange claws tucked up under a downy belly—lodged there in his back. The boy sat up, put on his shirt. Pressia walked to the door and stood just out of sight. The boy said that he could bring her grandfather a weapon as payment. Her grandfather told him to keep the weapon. “You need to protect yourself. Plus,” he said, “one day you’ll be stronger, and I’ll only be older, weaker. I’d rather you owe me a favor.”
“I don’t like owing favors,” the boy told him.
“Too bad,” her grandfather said. “That’s what I need.”
The boy then left in a hurry, and when he turned the corner he ran into Pressia standing there. She pitched backward and he grabbed her arm to steady her. He was gripping her arm with the doll-head fist. He noticed it and said, “Sorry.” For bumping into her or because of her deformity? She pulled her arm away from him. “I’m fine,” she told him. But she was embarrassed because he probably knew she’d been spying on him.
Here he is now, the boy who doesn’t like to be indebted but owes her grandfather. The boy with birds in his back.
He starts the meeting. “There’s a new person with us.” He points to Pressia. Everyone turns and looks at her. Like everyone else, they have scars, burns, large red knotted tissue, almost rope-like. One of the faces is connected to a jawline that holds a drape of twisted skin, so textured it almost seems like bark on a tree. She only recognizes one face—Gorse, who disappeared a few years ago with his little sister Fandra. Pressia looks around for Fandra, who had fine golden hair and a shriveled le
ft arm. They used to joke that they were perfect for each other—Fandra had a good right hand and Pressia had the left. But she doesn’t see her. Gorse catches her eye and looks away. The sight of him makes Pressia giddy. The network of the underground—maybe it not only exists but actually works. She knows now that at least one has survived, and all the people in the room look older than she is. Is this the underground? Is the boy with the birds in his back the head of it?
And what do they see when they look at her? She tucks her head to her chest, turning the crescent-shaped scar away from view, and she pulls her sweater sleeve down over the doll head. She nods at the group, hoping they’ll look away soon.
“What’s your name?” the boy with the birds in his back asks.
“Pressia,” she says and then immediately regrets it. She wishes she’d used a fake name. She doesn’t know who these people are. This is a mistake. She knows it now, clearly. She wants to go, but feels trapped.
“Pressia,” he says under his breath, as if he’s practicing it. “Okay,” he says to the group, “let’s get started.”
Another boy in the crowd raises his hand. His face is partially disintegrated from infections where the metal on his cheek, something that once was chrome but is now rust-mottled, meets the puckered skin. There’s a ridge of angry festered skin. If he doesn’t get antibiotic ointment, he could die of it. She’s seen people die of simple infections like this. The medicine is sometimes sold at certain stalls in the market but not always, and it’s expensive. “When are you going to let us look in the footlocker?” he asks.