Burn (The Pure Trilogy) by Baggott Julianna

Author:Baggott, Julianna [Baggott, Julianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Pressia

Home

Pressia steps in through what was once the doorway, her boots crunching the broken glass. Its roof is gone, like a gaping maw over her head. The floor shines with dark puddles of rain. There’s the old striped pole, lying on its side, the row of blasted mirrors, and tucked in way back, up against the solid wall, the one remaining barbershop chair, the counter, the combs upright in an old glass Barbasol container. The fire made its way here. The walls are even more blackened, the remaining shards of the mirrors fogged gray as if sealed shut. Pressia reminds herself that it hasn’t been that long since she was here. But that doesn’t help. Everything is different.

There could be snipers near, but she doesn’t care. Kill me, she thinks. Wilda and the children are dead. If she’d gotten here faster, if she’d never left them so unprotected… It’s her fault.

She sees the fake panel that her grandfather built along the back wall—her escape hatch—fitted back into place. It leads to the barbershop’s back room, her childhood home. She walks up to the panel, wedges it loose.

And there is the cabinet where she once slept. She rubs her hand on the wood, the fine grit of ash. This was where she drew the lopsided grin of the smiley face. She promised her grandfather she’d come back, and now here she is, finally. Even though he’s dead, she should be true to that promise—to herself if no one else.

The cabinet door is slightly ajar, and she can see the old storage room—the table legs, her grandfather’s chair. She crawls into the cabinet and fits the panel back into place. Once inside the small space, she tightens the cabinet door from within. It’s dark, and she feels small again. She tucks the doll head under her chin. She tries to remember what it was like to be here that first time—the cramped space, the fine motes of dust and ash spinning in the air, and how some part of her hoped she could survive just by being good and quiet and small. She remembers her grandfather sitting in his usual spot by the door, his stump knotted with the veins of wires, the brick on his lap, the fan in his throat whirring one way and then the other with each of his ragged breaths.

She misses him. She misses who she once was in this cabinet. She was his granddaughter. He’s dead, and it turns out she wasn’t even his granddaughter. She was just a lost little girl surrounded by dead people in an airport. He saved her.

She wants to be saved again.

She thinks of the shoes her grandfather gave her for her sixteenth birthday—that pair of clogs—as if he knew she was leaving soon and wanted her to have sturdy shoes at least so that she could make it in the world. And what kind of world was it?

Nothing she could have ever imagined.

As awful and bloody and filled with suffering and death as it is, she fell in love in that world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.