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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