Pure

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

A Preview of Fuse

Newsletters

Copyright Page

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.

PRESSIA

CABINETS

PRESSIA IS LYING IN THE CABINET. This is where she'll sleep once she turns sixteen in two weeks—the tight press of blackened plywood pinching her shoulders, the muffled air, the stalled motes of ash. She'll have to be good to survive this—good and quiet and, at night when OSR patrols the streets, hidden.

She nudges the door open with her elbow, and there sits her grandfather, settled into his chair next to the alley door. The fan lodged in his throat whirs quietly; the small plastic blades spin one way when he draws in a breath and the opposite way when he breathes out. She's so used to the fan that she'll go months without really noticing it, but then there will be a moment, like this one, when she feels disengaged from her life and everything surprises.

"So, do you think you can sleep in there?" he asks. "Do you like it?"

She hates the cabinet, but she doesn't want to hurt his feelings. "I feel like a comb in a box," she says. They live in the back storage room of a burned-out barbershop. It's a small room with a table, two chairs, two old pallets on the floor, one where her grandfather now sleeps and her old one, and a handmade birdcage hung from a hook in the ceiling. They come and go through the storage room's back door, which leads to an alley. During the Before, this cabinet held barbershop supplies—boxes of black combs, bottles of blue Barbasol, shaving-cream canisters, neatly folded hand towels, white smocks that snapped around the neck. She's pretty sure that she'll have dreams of being blue Barbasol trapped in a bottle.

Her grandfather starts coughing; the fan spins wildly. His face flushes to a rubied purple. Pressia climbs out of the cabinet, walks quickly to him, and claps him on the back, pounds his ribs. Because of the cough, people have stopped coming around for his services—he was a mortician during the Before and then became known as the flesh-tailor, applying his skills with the dead to the living. She used to help him keep the wounds clean with alcohol, line up the instruments, sometimes helping hold down a kid who was flailing. Now people think he's infected.

"Are you all right?" Pressia says.

Slowly, he catches his breath. He nods. "Fine." He picks up his brick from the floor and rests it on his one stumped leg, just above its seared clot of wires. The brick is his only protection against OSR. "This sleeping cabinet is the best we've got," her grandfather says. "Just give it time."

Pressia knows she should be more appreciative. He built the hiding place a few months ago. The cabinets stretch along the back wall that they share with the barbershop itself. Most of what's left of the wrecked barbershop is exposed to the sky, a large hunk of its roof blown clean off. Her grandfather stripped the cabinets of drawers and shelves. Along the back wall of the cabinets he's put in a fake panel that acts like a trapdoor, leading to the barbershop itself, a panel that she can pop off if she needs to escape into the barbershop. And then where will she go? Her grandfather has shown her an old irrigation pipe where she can hide out while OSR ransacks the storage room, finding an empty cabinet, and her grandfather tells them that she's been gone for weeks and probably for good, maybe dead by now. He tries to convince himself that they'll believe him, that she'll be able to come back, and OSR will leave them alone after this. But of course, they both know this is unlikely.

She's known a few older kids who ran away—a boy with a missing jaw, then two kids who said they were going to get married far away from here, and a boy named Gorse and his younger sister Fandra, who was a good friend of Pressia's before they left a few years ago. There's talk of an underground that gets kids out of the city, past the Meltlands and the Deadlands where there may be other survivors—whole civilizations. Who knows? But these are only whispers, well-intended lies meant to comfort. Those kids disappeared. No one ever saw them again.

"I guess I'll have time to get used to it, all the time in the world, starting two weeks from today," she says. Once she turns sixteen, she'll be confined to the back room and sleep in the cabinet. Her grandfather has made her promise, again and again, that she won't stray. It'll be too dangerous to go out, he tells her. My heart won't take it.

They both know the whispers of what happens to you if you don't turn yourself in to OSR headquarters on your sixteenth birthday. They will take you while you're asleep in bed. They will take you if you walk alone in the rubble fields. They will take you no matter whom you pay off or how much—not that her grandfather could afford to pay anyone anything.

If you don't turn yourself in, they will take you. That isn't just a whisper. That's the truth. There are whispers that they will take you up to the outlands where you're untaught to read—if you've learned in the first place, like Pressia has. Her grandfather taught her letters and showed her the Message: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters… (No one speaks of the Message anymore. Her grandfather has hidden it away somewhere.) There are whispers that they then teach you how to kill by use of live targets. And there are whispers that either you will learn to kill or, if you're too deformed by the Detonations, you'll be used as a live target, and that will be the end of you.

What happens to the kids in the Dome when they turn sixteen? Pressia figures that it's like during the Before—cake and brightly wrapped gifts and fake, candy-stuffed animals strung up and beaten with sticks.

"Can I run to the market? We're almost out of roots." Pressia is good at boiling certain kinds of roots; it's mostly what they eat. And she wants to be out in the air.

Her grandfather looks at her anxiously.

"My name isn't even on the posted list yet," she tells him. The official list of those who need to turn themselves in to OSR is posted throughout the city—names and birthdates in two tidy columns, information gathered by the OSR. The group emerged shortly after the Detonations, when it was Operation Search and Rescue—setting up medical units that failed, making lists of the survivors and the dead, and then forming a small militia to maintain order. But those leaders were overthrown. OSR became Operation Sacred Revolution; the new leaders rule by fear and are intent on taking down the Dome one day.

Now the OSR mandates that all newborns are registered or parents are punished. OSR also does random home raids. People move so frequently that they've never had the ability to track homes. There's no such thing as addresses anymore anyway—what's left is toppled, gone, street names wiped away. Without her name on that list, it still doesn't feel quite real to Pressia. She hopes that her name will never appear. Maybe they've forgotten she exists, lost a stack of files and hers was in it.

"Plus," she says. "We need to stock up." She needs to secure as much food as she can for them before her grandfather takes over the market trips. She's better at bartering, always has been. She worries what will happen once he's in charge.

"Okay, fine," he says. "Kepperness still owes us for my stitch work on his son's neck."

"Kepperness," she repeats. Kepperness paid up a while ago. Her grandfather sometimes remembers only the things he wants to. She walks to the ledge under the splintered window where there's a row of small creatures she's made from pieces of metal, old coins, buttons, hinges, gears she collects—little windup toys—chicks that hop, caterpillars that scoot, a turtle with a small snapping beak. Her favorite is the butterfly. She's made half a dozen of them alone. Their skeletal systems are built from the teeth of old black barber combs and wings made from bits of the white smocks. The butterflies flap when they get wound up, but she's never been able to get them to fly.

She picks up one of the butterflies, winds it. Its wings shudder, kicking up a few bits of ash that swirl. Swirling ash—it's not all bad. In fact, it can be beautiful, the lit swirl. She doesn't want to see beauty in it, but she does. She finds little moments of beauty everywhere—even in ugliness. The heaviness of the clouds draping across the sky, sometimes edged dark blue. There's still dew that rises from the ground and beads up on pieces of blackened glass.

Her grandfather is looking out the alley door, so she slips the butterfly in the sack. She's been using these to barter with since people have stopped coming to him for stitching.

"You know, we're lucky to have this place—and now an escape route," her grandfather says. "We were lucky from the start. Lucky that I got to the airport early to pick you and your mother up at Baggage Claim. What if I hadn't heard there was traffic? What if I hadn't headed out early? And your mother, she was so beautiful," he says, "so young."

"I know, I know," Pressia says, trying not to sound impatient, but it's a well-worn speech. He's talking about the day of the Detonations, just over nine years ago when she was six years old. Her father was out of town on business. An accountant with light hair, he was pigeon-toed, her grandfather liked to tell her, but a good quarterback. Football—it was a tidy sport played on a grassy field, with buckled helmets and officials who blew whistles and threw colored handkerchiefs. "But what does it mean, anyway, that my father was a pigeon-toed quarterback if I don't remember him? What is a beautiful mother worth if you can't see her face in your head?"

"Don't say that," he says. "Of course you remember them!"

She can't tell the difference between the stories her grandfather's told her and memory. Baggage Claim, for example. Her grandfather has explained it again and again—bags on wheels, a large moving belt, security circling like trained herding dogs. But is it a memory? Her mother took the full brunt of a plate-glass window and died instantaneously, her grandfather has told her. Has Pressia ever really recalled it or only imagined it? Her mother was Japanese, which explains Pressia's black shiny hair, almond-shaped eyes, and her even-toned skin, except for the skin that's the shiny pink crescent-shaped burn, curved around her left eye. She has a light dusting of freckles because of her father's side of the family. Scotch-Irish, her grandfather calls himself, but none of these things means much of anything to her. Japanese, Scotch, Irish? The city where her father had been on business—the rest of the world, as far as anyone could tell—was decimated, gone. Japanese, Scotch, Irish—these things no longer exist. "BWI," her grandfather says, emphatically, "that was the name of the airport. And we made it out of there, following the others who were still alive. We staggered on, looking for a safe place. We stopped in this city, barely standing, but still here because it's not far from the Dome. We live a little west of Baltimore, north of DC." Again, these things mean nothing. BWI, DC, they're just letters.

Her parents are unknowable, that's what kills Pressia, and if they're unknowable, how can she know herself? She sometimes feels like she's cut off from the world, like she's floating—a small lit fleck of swirling ash.

"Mickey Mouse," her grandfather says. "Don't you remember him?" This is what gets him the most, it seems, that she doesn't remember Mickey Mouse, the trip to Disney World that they were just returning from. "He had big ears and wore white gloves?"

She walks to Freedle's cage. It's made of old bike spokes and a thin metal sheet that serves as the cage's floor and a small metal door that slides up and down. Inside, on a perch, sits Freedle, a mechanical-winged cicada. She fits her finger between the thin bars and pets his filigree wings. They've had him for as long as Pressia remembers. Old and rusty, his wings still sometimes flutter. He's Pressia's only pet. She named him Freedle when she was little because when they let him flit around the room, he had a squeaking call that sounded like he was saying, "Freedle! Freedle!" She's kept his parts working all these years, using oil the barbers once used to keep the shears running smoothly. "I remember Freedle," she says. "But no oversize mouse with a thing for white gloves." She vows one day to lie to her grandfather about it, if only to put the whole thing to rest.

What does she remember of the Detonations? The bright light—like sun on sun on sun. And she remembers that she was holding the doll. Wasn't she too old for a doll? The doll's head was attached to its tan cloth body and rubber arms and legs. The Detonations caused a shearing blast of light in the airport that flooded her vision before the world exploded and, in some cases, melted. There was the tangle of lives and the doll's head became her hand. And now, of course, she knows the doll head because it's part of her—its blinky eyes that click when she moves, the sharp black plastic rows of eyelashes, the hole in its plastic lips where the plastic bottle is supposed to fit, its rubber head in place of her fist.

She runs her good hand over the doll's head. She can feel the ripple of her finger bones within it, the small ridges and bumps of her knuckles, the lost hand fused with the rubber of the doll's skull. And in the lost hand itself? She can feel the thick, dulled sensation of her good hand touching her lost hand. That's the way she feels about the Before—it's there, she can feel it, the light sensation of nerves, just barely. The doll's eyes click shut; the hole within the pursed lips is dusted with ash as if the doll itself has been breathing this air. She pulls a woolen sock from her pocket and covers the doll's head. She always covers it when she goes out.

If she lingers, her grandfather will start telling stories of what happened to the survivors after the Detonations—bloody fights in the hulls of giant Super Marts, the burned and twisted survivors battling over camping stoves and fishing knives. "I've got to go before they close up their stalls," she says—before night patrols. She walks to where he's seated and kisses his rough cheek.

"Just to the market. No scavenging," he says, then lowers his head and coughs into his shirtsleeve.

She has every intention of scavenging. It's what she loves most, picking up bits of things to make her creatures. "I won't," she says.

He's still holding the brick, but it strikes her now as sad and desperate, an admission of weakness. He might be able to knock out the first OSR soldier with it, but not the second or the third. They always come in packs. She wants to say aloud what they both know: It won't work. She can hide in this room, sleep in the cabinets. She can pop off the fake panel whenever she hears an OSR truck in the back alley and run. But there's nowhere else to go.

"Don't be gone long," he says.

"I won't." And then, to make him feel better, she adds, "You're right about us. We are lucky." But she doesn't really feel it. The people in the Dome are lucky, playing their buckled-helmet sports, eating cake, all connected and never feeling like lit flecks of swirling ash.

"Remember that, my girl." His throat fan whirs. He'd been clutching a small handheld electric fan when the Detonations hit—it happened during summer—and now the fan is with him forever. Sometimes he labors to breathe. The spinning mechanism gets gummed with ash and spittle. It will kill him one day, the ash mounting in his lungs, the fan chugging to a halt.

She walks to the alley door, opens it. She hears a screech that sounds almost bird-like; then something dark and furred scurries over nearby stones. She sees one of its moist eyes, staring at her. It snarls, unfolds heavy, blunt wings, and scuttles upward, taking to the gray sky.

Sometimes she thinks she hears the droning engine of an airship up there. She catches herself searching the sky for the slips of paper that once filled it—oh, the way her grandfather described it, all those wings! Maybe one day there will be another Message.

Nothing is going to last, Pressia thinks. Everything is about to change forever. She can feel it.

She glances back before stepping into the alley, and she catches her grandfather looking at her the way he does sometimes—as if she's already gone, as if he's practicing sorrow.

PARTRIDGE

MUMMIES

PARTRIDGE IS SITTING IN GLASSINGS' World History class, trying to concentrate. The classroom's ventilation is supposed to increase based on the number of bodies present at any given time, and academy boys—all of those rambunctious engines of energy—can make a room stuffy and warm if not kept in check. Luckily, Partridge's desk is situated not far from a small vent in the ceiling, and it's like he's sitting in a column of cool air.

Glassings is lecturing about ancient cultures. He's been going on about this subject for a month solid. The front wall is covered with images of Bryn Celli Ddu, Newgrange, Dowth and Knowth, the Durrington Wall, and Maeshowe—all Neolithic mounds dating back to around 3000 BC. The first Dome prototypes, as Glassings puts it. "Do you think we were the first to think up a Dome?"

I get it, Partridge thinks, ancient people, mounds, tombs, blah, blah, blah. Glassings stands in front of the class in his taut suit jacket with its academy emblem stitched in place and a navy-blue necktie, always tied too tightly. Partridge would rather hear Glassings' take on recent history, but that would never be allowed. They know only what they've all been told—the United States didn't make the first strike but acted in self-defense. The Detonations escalated, leading to near-total destruction. Because of precautions taken by the Dome experimentally as a prototype for sustainable living in the face of detonations, viral attacks, and environmental disaster, this area is likely the only place in the world with survivors—the Dome and the wretches just outside of it now governed by a flimsy military regime. The Dome watches over the wretches and one day, when the earth has rejuvenated itself, they will return to take care of the wretches and start anew. It's kept simple, but Partridge knows that there's much more to it, and he's pretty sure that Glassings himself would have a lot to say on the subject.

Sometimes Glassings gets caught up in a lecture, unbuttons his suit jacket, walks away from his notes, and looks at the class—his eyes locking onto each boy's for just a moment as if he wants them to understand something he's saying in a deeper way, to take some ancient lesson and apply it to today. Partridge wants to. He feels like he could, almost, if only he had a little more information.

Partridge lifts his chin and lets the air cool his face, and he remembers, suddenly, his mother setting out a meal for him and his brother, glasses of milk with bubbles that clung to the edges, oily gravies, the airy, soft innards of bread rolls. Food that filled your mouth, that sent up puffs of steam. Now he takes his pills, perfectly formulated for optimal health. Partridge sometimes swirls the pills in his mouth, remembering that even the pills he and his brother took back then were tangy-sweet and gummed in your teeth and were shaped like animals. And then the memory is gone.

These quick visceral memories are sharp. They come at him these days like sudden blows, the collision of now and past, uncontrollable. It's only gotten worse since his father stepped up his coding sessions—the strange mix of drugs coursing through the bloodstream, the radiation, and, worst of all, being trapped in body casts so that only certain parts of his body and brain are exposed during a given session. Mummy molds. That's what some of Partridge's friends started calling the casts after one of Glassings' recent lectures on ancient cultures that wrapped their dead. For coding sessions, the academy boys are lined up and taken to the medical center, shuttled into private rooms. There, each undresses and fits himself into a mummy mold—confined in the hot suit—and then, after, they get back into their uniforms to be shuttled out again. The technicians warn the academy boys that as the body becomes accustomed to the new skill sets, they can expect some vertigo, sudden losses of balance that will subside as strength and speed take hold. The academy boys are used to it—a few months off from the sports teams because they've become temporarily ungainly. They tip and fall, sprawled on the turf. The brain will be just as uncoordinated, hence the strange sudden memories.

"Beautiful barbarism," Glassings says now about one of the ancient cultures. "Reverence for the dead." It's one of those moments when he isn't reading from his lecture notes. He stares at his hands spread open on his desk. He isn't supposed to make asides—beautiful barbarism, that kind of thing could be misinterpreted. He could lose his job. But he's quick to recover. He tells the class to read aloud from the prompter, in unison. "The sanctioned ways of disposing of the dead and collecting their personal items in the Personal Loss Archives…" Partridge joins in.

A few minutes later, Glassings is talking about the importance of corn to ancient cultures. Corn? Partridge thinks. Really? Corn?

That's when there's a knock at the door. Glassings looks up, startled. All the boys stiffen. The knock sounds again. Glassings says, "Excuse me, class." He straightens his notes and glances at the small black beady eye of one of the cameras perched in the corner of the room. Partridge wonders if the Dome officials got wind of his comment beautiful barbarism. Can it happen that fast? Will that do him in? Will they haul him away, right now, in front of the class?

Glassings steps out into the hall. Partridge hears voices, murmurs.

Arvin Weed, the genius of the class, who sits in front of Partridge, swivels around and gives him an inquiring look, as if Partridge must know what's going on. Partridge shrugs. People often think Partridge knows more than everyone else. He's Ellery Willux's son. Even someone that high up must let things slip now and then, that's what they figure. But no. Partridge's dad never lets things slip. That's one of the reasons he got to be high up in the first place. And since Partridge has been boarding here at the academy, they rarely even talk on the phone, much less see each other. Partridge is one of the boys who stays year-round, like his brother, Sedge, who went through the academy before him.

Glassings walks back into the classroom. "Partridge," he says, "collect your things."

"What?" Partridge says. "Me?"

"Now," Glassings says.

Partridge's stomach lurches. He shoves his notebook into his backpack and stands up. All around him, the other boys start whispering. Vic Wellingsly, Algrin Firth, the Elmsford twins. One of them makes a joke—Partridge hears his name but can't make out the rest—and they all laugh. These boys all tend to stick together, "the herd"; that's what they're called. They're the ones who'll go all the way through training to the new elite corps, Special Forces. They're destined. It isn't written anywhere, but it's understood.

Glassings tells the class to pipe down.

Arvin Weed gives Partridge a nod, as if to say, Good luck.

Partridge walks to the door. "Can I get the notes later?" he asks Glassings.

"Sure," Glassings says, and then he pats Partridge on the back. "It'll be fine." He's talking about the notes, of course, keeping up with the class, but he looks at Partridge in that way Glassings has, a deeper meaning, and Partridge knows that he's trying to set his mind at ease. Whatever's coming—it'll be fine.

In the hall, Partridge is met by two guards. "Where to?" he says.

They're both tall and muscular, but one of them is a bit broader than the other. This one says, "Your father wants to see you."

Partridge feels cold suddenly. His palms are clammy, so he rubs his hands together. He doesn't want to see his father; he never does. "The old man?" Partridge says, trying to sound lighthearted. "A little father-son time?"

They walk him down the shiny halls, past the oil paintings of two headmasters—one fired, one new—who both look pasty, austere, and somewhat dead, then down to the academy basement, which is on the monorail line. They wait in the airy underground, silently. This is the monorail that takes the boys to the medical center, where Partridge's father works three times a week. There are floors in the medical center reserved for those who are sick. They're kept cordoned off. Sickness is treated very seriously in the Dome. Contagion could wipe them all out, and so the slightest fever can result in short-term quarantine. He's been to one of those floors a few times—a small, boring, sterile room.

The dying? No one visits them. They're taken to a floor of their own.

Partridge wonders what his father wants with him. He's not one of the herd, not destined for anything elite. That was Sedge's role. When Partridge entered the academy he wasn't sure if he was better known for his father or his brother. It didn't matter. He didn't live up to either reputation. He never won a physical challenge and he sat the bench during most games, regardless of the sport. And he wasn't intelligent enough to go into the other training program—brain augmentation. That was reserved for the smart ones like Arvin Weed, Heath Winston, Gar Dreslin. His grades have always been borderline. Like most of the boys going in for coding, he was clearly garden-variety, basic overall enhancement to better the species.

Does his father just want to check in on his garden-variety son? Maybe he was struck by a sudden desire to bond? Will they even have anything to talk about? Partridge tries to remember the last time they ever did anything together for fun. One time, after Sedge's death, his father took him swimming in the academy's indoor pool. He remembers only that his father was an excellent swimmer, he slid through the water like a sea otter, and when he came up for air, toweling off, Partridge saw his father's bare chest for the first time in as long as he could remember. Had he ever seen him only half dressed before? His father's chest had six small scars on it, on the left side, over his heart. It wasn't from an accident. The scars were too symmetrical and tidy.

The monorail comes to a stop, and Partridge has a fleeting desire to run. The guards would hit him with an electrical charge to his back. He knows that. He'd have a red burn spread down his back and arms. His father would be told, of course. It would only make matters worse. Why run anyway? Where would he go? In circles? It's a Dome, after all.

The monorail delivers them to the entrance of the medical center. The guards show their badges. They sign Partridge in, scan his retinas, and walk through the detectors into the center itself. They wind the halls until they come to his father's door. It opens before the guard has time to knock.

A female technician is standing there. Partridge can see beyond her to his father, who is lecturing half a dozen technicians. They're all looking at a bank of screens on the wall, pointing out chains of DNA coding, close-ups of a double helix.

The technician says "Thank you" to the guards and then ushers Partridge to a small leather chair to the side of his father's massive desk, which is on the opposite side of the room from where his father and the techs work.