"What's funny?"

"Just that they're real. In the Dome, we know they exist. OSR. That they started as Operation Search and Rescue, a civilian militia, and then became a kind of fascist regime. Operation... what is it now?"

"Sacred Revolution," Pressia says, flatly. She can't help but feel like she's being made fun of.

"Right!" he says. "That's it!"

"Do you think that's quaint?" she says. "They'll kill you. They'll torture you and shove a gun down your throat and murder you. Do you understand that?"

He seems to accept this, and then he says, "I guess you hate me. I wouldn't blame you. Historically speaking..."

Pressia shakes her head. "Please don't give a group apology. I don't need your guilty conscience. You got in. I didn't. The end." She puts her hand in her pocket and feels the hard rim of the bell. She considers adding something a little gentler, to relieve his guilt, something like We were kids when it happened. What could we do? What could anyone do? But she decides not to. His guilt gives her some leverage, too. And the fact is that there's some truth to his guilt. How did he get into the Dome? What kind of privilege allowed it? She understands enough of Bradwell's conspiracy theories to know that ugly decisions were made. Why shouldn't she blame the Pure a little?

"You've got to wear the hood and the scarf over your face," she tells him.

"I'll try to blend in." He quickly winds the scarf around his neck, covering his face, and lifts the hood. "Good now?" he says.

It's not really enough. There's something in his gray eyes that makes him different, something that he probably can't do anything about. Wouldn't anyone know at a glance that he's a Pure? Pressia feels certain that she would. He's hopeful in a way that no one here is hopeful, but there's also some deep sadness in him. In some ways, he doesn't seem Pure at all. "It's not just your face," she tells him.

"What is it?" he says.

She shakes her head, letting her hair fall to cover the scars on one side of her face. "Nothing," she says. And then without thinking, she simply asks, "Why are you here?"

"Home," he says. "I'm trying to find my way home."

For some reason, this makes Pressia furious. She pulls her sweater up under her chin. "Home," she says. "Here outside the Dome on Lombard Street?"

"Right."

But he left this place. He deserted his home. He doesn't deserve to get it back. She decides to veer away from talk of home. "We have to take the shortcut through the Rubble Fields. We have no choice," she tells the Pure. She's trying not to look at him now. She tightens the sock and tugs on her sweater sleeve. "We could run into Beasts and Dusts who might try to kill us, but at least it'll take us off the streets where we might run into those who'll try to capture you. Plus it's faster."

"Capture me?"

"People already know you're here. There are whispers all over the place. And if any of those Groupies weren't too polluted to see your face, well, they'll spread the whispers even more. We'll have to move fast and quietly so we don't give them a lot of warning and we'll have to-"

"What's your name?" the Pure asks.

"My name?"

He sticks his hand straight out in front of himself, aiming it at her like a gun, with his thumb up in the air.

"What are you doing that for?"

"What?" He shoves the hand at her again. "I'm introducing myself. People call me Partridge."

"I'm Pressia," she tells him and then she gives his hand a smack. "Stop pointing your hand at me like that."

He looks confused and shoves his hand in one of the pockets of his hooded jacket.

"If there's anything of value in that bag, you better hide it under your coat at all times." Pressia starts walking quickly toward the Rubble Fields, and he follows closely behind. She gives instructions. "Stay away from the rising smoke. Walk gently. Some people say that the Dusts can feel vibrations. If you get grabbed, don't scream. Don't say a word. I'll keep looking back."

There's an art to walking through the Rubble Fields, being light-footed, quick to shift your weight from one side of your body to the other, but not overcompensating in any one direction. She's mastered these skills from her years of scavenging and knows how to keep her knees loose, her feet flexible, so that she can maintain her balance.

She heads out across the rocks and she can hear him following behind her. She's keeping a lookout for eyes in the stones. She can't get too worked up about the eyes, because she also has to constantly route a path around smoke-fires and glance backward at Partridge. And she listens for the OSR truck engines. She doesn't want to get to the other side just to wind up caught in headlights.

She realizes that this is her value to him. This is what she's worth. She's his guide and she doesn't want to tell him too much because she wants him to rely on her, to need her, and maybe to become indebted. She wants him to feel like he owes her something.

She's doing all of this-shifting, looking for Dusts, veering away from smoke, and glancing back at the Pure, his hood flapping around his darkened face in the wind-and she's thinking about Bradwell too. What will he think of her bringing a Pure to his door? Would that impress him? She doubts it. He doesn't seem like he'd be easy to impress. But still, she knows he's devoted his life to unraveling the past. She hopes he has the right old maps, and that he knows how to apply them to what's left of this city. What good do street names do for a city that's lost everything, including most streets?

That's what she's thinking about when she hears the scream from behind her. She turns around and sees that the Pure is already down; one leg has been dragged into the rubble out of sight. "Pressia!" he shouts.

The guttural noises of Beasts rise up all around them.

"Why did you scream?" she shouts at the Pure, realizing she's screaming now too, but unable to stop herself. "I told you not to scream!" She looks out across the Rubble Fields. Heads have already popped up from the smoke holes. The Beasts know that they've gotten one. They will all want in on the feast. Out here, there are other outcasts too. Creatures so fused or burned or scarred that no one can identify them anymore. They've lost something elementally human. And cut off from others, they've become vicious.

Pressia picks up rocks and hurls them at one Beast's head and then another. They duck and reappear. "It's stronger than you," she yells. "You can't try to hold on. You have to be willing to go down and fight it. Get a rock in each hand and kick it! I'll cover you!" She hopes he can fight, but she doubts they teach that kind of thing in the Dome. What would they need to protect themselves against? If he doesn't know how to fight, she can't go down after him. There'd be no one to fend off the Beasts. They'd gather in a large hungry crowd waiting at the hole to kill them both as soon as they made it back up, if they could make it back up.

Partridge looks at her, wide-eyed with fear.

"Do it!" she says.

He shakes his head. "I'm not going down to fight it on its own terms," he says.

"You don't have a choice!"

But then Partridge claws at the stones, pulling himself forward, inch by inch. He grabs a loose stone, which gives, and the creature-likely a Dust-jerks him as if he's slipped down a rung of a ladder. But his other hand keeps its grip, and although the Dust has a hold on one of his legs, the Pure is kicking it hard with his free boot. His hands flexed, he pulls his leg to his chest with brute strength and drags the Dust up from the hole. She's never seen anything like it, didn't know it was possible.

Squat and barrel-chested, this Dust is a hunched creature with hardened armor made of stone. Its face is dug out-pitted eyes, a small dark hole for a mouth. It's the size of a small bear. Used to darkness and tight spaces, it looks slightly confused up here, a little dazed. But then it locks onto Partridge and crawls toward him. Pressia hurls rock after rock at the Beasts so they know that she and Partridge aren't just victims here to pick away at like vultures. They'll have to fight. She hits two Beasts square-on-one with a cat-like head who yowls and disappears for good. The other is furred but thickly muscular. It takes the blow, arches, and goes back under the rubble.

Partridge is fiddling with his backpack, rummaging around with his strangely fast movements. Why do his hands move so quickly? How is it possible? And yet he's so clumsy. If he'd slow down, he'd be able to find what he's looking for more easily. His hands flutter in the bag, and this only gives the Dust time to crouch back on its haunches and pounce. The stone weight of the creature lands on Partridge's chest and sends him crashing on the rocks behind him. The Dust has knocked the air out of him, and he's stunned, breathless. But Pressia can see what he pulled from the bag: a knife with a wooden handle.

Pressia keeps throwing rocks at Beasts circling closer. "Look for something human on him," she cries out. "You can only kill it if you can find the part of it that's alive and pulsing."

The Dust has him pinned to the rocks and lifts its blunt stone head, ready to slam it into the Pure's skull, but the Pure shoves him off with surprising force, and the Dust lands hard-stone against stone-on its back, revealing a slip of pale raw pink skin on his chest. Beetle-like, the Dust is stuck on its back, its small stumped stone-encrusted arms and legs flailing.

The Pure moves in fast. He fits the knife into the pink center, stabbing the Dust's belly, in between the stone plates, driving the knife in deep. The Dust gives a hollow moan as if its voice echoes in its own stony shell. Dark, ashen blood spills out of the wound. The Pure saws the knife back and forth, as if he's cutting into a loaf of bread, then pulls it out and scrapes it on the rocks.

The foul stench of the Dust's blood is carried by the wind. The Beasts, fearful, retreat quickly into their smoky holes.

Pressia is breathless. Partridge stares at the Dust. The knife is shaking in his hand, his eyes vacant. He's covered in dust and soot. There's a trickle of blood coming from his nose. He wipes it with the back of his hand and stares at the red smear left there.

"Partridge," she whispers. His name sounds strange in her mouth, too personal. But she says it again. "Partridge, are you okay?"

He pulls the hood back up over his head, sits on the rocks, trying to catch his breath. He wraps his arms around his bag. "Sorry," he says.

"Sorry for what?" she asks.

"I screamed. You told me not to." He rubs at the soot on one hand with his thumb, then stares at it. "The dirt," he says, his voice strangely peaceful.

"What about it?" she asks.

"It's dirty."

PRESSIA.

WIND.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RUBBLE FIELDS, Pressia takes out the folded map that Bradwell slipped into her pocket at the meeting, and studies it for a minute. They're only five blocks from Bradwell's place. They stick to side streets, alleys. Everything is quiet. She hears no trucks. Even the chanting from the Death Spree is gone. At one point, there's a baby crying, but then it quiets down.

Partridge is taking everything in, but Pressia can't imagine what's so interesting. It's all burned hulls, smashed glass, melted plastic, charred metal, and the sharp edges of things poking up from ash.

He lifts his hand in the air like he's trying to catch snow. "What is this stuff in the air?" he asks.

"What stuff?"

"The gray stuff."

"Oh," she says. She doesn't even notice it anymore. She's gotten used to it swirling in the air day in and day out, settling like thin lace over everything that sits still long enough. "Ash," she says. "There are a lot of names for it-black snow, the earth's silk lining-like a purse turned inside out. Some call it the dark death. When it billows and then settles, some call it a blessing of ash."

"A blessing?" Partridge says. "We use that word a lot in the Dome."

"I imagine you'd have lots of reasons to." It's not a nice thing to say, but she's already said it.

"Some," he says.

"Well, it's soot and dust and bits left from the blast," Pressia says. "It's not good to breathe."

"You're right about that," he says, pulling his scarf up over his nose and mouth. "You breathe it in and it stains your lungs. I've read about it."

"Are there books about us or something?" This makes Pressia angry-the idea that this world is a subject of study, a story, instead of filled with real people, trying to survive.

He nods. "Some digitized documentation."

"But how can you know what things are like here when you're all in a Dome? Are we your little scientific subjects?"

"It's not me," he says, defensively. "I'm not doing it. It's the people in charge. They have advanced cameras that shoot footage for security purposes. The ash makes the shots kind of unclear. Some of that footage is chosen to be frozen into stills. And there are reports about how bad things are here and how lucky we are," he says.

"Luck is relative," Pressia tells him. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently. That's what the Message said. So that's what they meant, after all.

"But they don't really capture it. Like the dusty air." He waves a hand around. "And how it gets on your skin. The air, itself, it's cold. And wind. No one can really explain wind. How it can come up really fast and it stings your face a little. And it moves the dust in the air around. They can't get all of that."

"You don't have wind?"

"It's a Dome. A controlled environment."

Pressia looks around and thinks about wind for a moment. And she realizes that there's a difference between soot and dust-something burned or having been ripped apart or demolished-and they move differently in the wind. It never really struck her before, but she finds herself saying, "Soot flutters up on almost any shift in the wind, but dust is heavier. It will weigh itself down more quickly."

"That kind of thing," Partridge says. "That's what they can't get at."

Pressia pauses a moment and then asks, "Do you want to play I Remember?"

"What's that?"

"You don't play it in the Dome?"

"Is it a game?"

"It's just what it says. When you meet someone and you're getting to know them, you ask them what they remember about the Before. Sometimes it's all you can get out of a person, especially old people. But they play the game the best. My grandfather remembers a lot of things." Pressia isn't good at the game. Although her memories are brightly colored, crisp, sometimes tactile-like she can almost feel the Before-she can never quite express those sensations. She thinks about playing the game with her mother and father one day. They'll fill in the gaps between the small tank with fish, the tassel on her mother's pocketbook, the heating duct, the parade, the wire brush, the smell of grass soap on her skin, her father's coat, her ear to his heart, and her mother brushing her hair, her mother singing the song on the computer, the lullaby about the girl on the porch and the boy who begs her to come with him-did the girl ever have the courage to go? She wants to play the game with Partridge. What would a Pure remember? Aren't their memories clearer, less muddied by this version of the world they live in?

He laughs. "We'd never be allowed to play a game like that. The past is the past. It would be impolite to bring it up. Only little kids do that kind of thing." And then he quickly adds, "No offense. It's just the way we are."

Pressia takes offense anyway. "The past is all we've got here," she says, picking up her pace a little. She thinks about Bradwell's speech. They want to erase us, the past, but we can't let them. This is how forgetting works. Erase the past, never speak of it.

He strides quickly to catch up and grabs her elbow, the one that leads to the doll head. She jerks it in close to her body. "Don't just grab people," she says. "What's wrong with you?"

"I want to play the game," he says. "It's why I'm here-to find out about the past." He looks at her straight-on, his eyes taking in her face, skittering to the edge where the burn begins.

She dips her head forward so her hair blocks her face from view. "Well, here, that's what's impolite."

"What?" he asks.

"Staring at people. None of us wants to be looked at."

"I didn't mean to..." He looks away. "I'm sorry."

Pressia doesn't respond. It helps that he feels like he's done her wrong and owes her something, and good too that he needs her as a social guide here-the dos and don'ts of this culture. She is trying to ratchet up his dependence on her.

They walk a little farther in silence. She's punishing him, but then decides she should be forgiving too, and so she asks a question that's been on her mind. "Okay," Pressia says, deciding to fake it, "we once bought a new car with a giant red ribbon on top of it. And I remember Mickey Mouse and his white gloves."

"Huh," he says. "Right."

"Do you remember dogs wearing sunglasses? They were funny, right?"

"I don't really remember dogs wearing sunglasses," he says. "Nope."

"Oh," she says. "Your turn."

"Well, my mother used to tell me a story about the swan wife, and there was a bad king in the story who stole her wings and, well, I guess I thought my father was the bad king."

"Was he a bad king?"