Read Pure for Free Online

make as many creatures as she can so that he can use them to barter with and survive. She presses on.
    When she comes to the end of the market, she stops. There, posted on a low brick wall, is a new OSR listing. It flutters in the cold wind. Some hawkers are rolling carts down the street, a loud clattering echo. She waits for them to go, then walks toward the listing. She presses the paper flat. The print is small. She has to get close. Her eyes flit down the page.
    And then she sees it.
    The name PRESSIA BELZE and her date of birth.
    She runs the tip of her finger over the letters.
    There’s no denying it now. There will be no lost file with her information in it. Here it is. Real.
    She backs away, stumbling over some upturned bricks. She turns down the first street she comes to.
    She’s freezing now. The air is damp. She pulls her inner-layer sweater up to cover her neck, then her stretched-out sweater sleeve down over her doll-head fist, still covered by the sock, tucks it under her other arm, and then crosses both arms on her chest. This is a habit really, something she does when she’s outside in public, when she’s nervous. A comfort, almost.
    Amid the ruins on either side, there are buildings that still have their skeletal structure, and people have made makeshift homes inside them. Then she passes a building that’s fully collapsed. These are the best for digging. She’s found beautiful things in the rubble before—wire, coins, metal clasps, keys—but the rubble is dangerous. The more human-like Dusts and some of the human-like Beasts who have dug out homes in the rubble keep them warm with fires, cook what they’ve hunted down, creating trails of smoke. She imagines Kepperness’s son out in the Deadlands, an eye in the sand at his feet—then a hand shooting up from nowhere, pulling him down. She’s alone. If she’s grabbed and pulled down, they’ll feed on her until there’s nothing left.
    She doesn’t see any smoke and so she steps up on a pile of wobbling stones, carefully picking her way along, looking for glints of metal, small bits of wiring. She knows it’s pretty much picked clean, but she manages to find what might have once been a guitar string, some pieces of melted plastic like parts to an old board game, and a thin metal tube.
    Maybe she can make something special for her grandfather too—a gift worth holding on to. She doesn’t want to think of the word
memento
because it reminds her that she might soon be gone, but there it is in her mind.
Memento.
    When she heads home by way of the market, all the stalls are closed. She’s late. She should hurry now. Her grandfather will start to worry. At the other end of the market, she sees the boy with the wide-set eyes again, Mikel. He’s cooking another beast now over the kettledrum. This one is very small, nearly mouse-size, barely worth the meat.
    There’s a little boy beside him. He reaches up to touch the meat. Mikel says, “Don’t! It’ll burn you!” He shoves the boy to the ground. The little boy is barefoot. His toes are only nubs. He scrapes his knee, screams at the sight of the blood, and starts to run to a darkened doorway. Three women step out—all fused—a tangle of cloth hiding their engorged middle. Parts of each face seem to be shiny and stiff as if fused with plastic. Groupies, that’s what they’re called. One of the women has sloped shoulders, a curved spine. There are many arms, some pale and freckled, others dark. The one in the middle grabs the boy’s arm and says, “Shut up. Hush now. Shut up.”
    The woman with the curved spine who seems the least fused to the others, barely hanging on, shouts at Pressia, “You do this to the boy? You do this?”
    “I didn’t touch him,” Pressia says, and she pulls on her sleeve.
    “Time to come in,” the woman says to the boy. She looks around as if sensing something in the air. “Right now.”
    The boy twists from her grip and runs down the street toward the empty