Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “The Seven,” he says.

  “The swan was their symbol.” Fignan starts up again. “Remember, I told you that they got tattoos, when they were all still together and young and idealistic, a row of six pulsing tattoos that ran over their own hearts, which was the seventh pulse.” Three of the pulsing heartbeats had stopped, but not her father’s. Pressia knows she should be content that he survived. She shouldn’t long to see him, but she can’t stop herself from longing. Sometimes all she wants is to get out, to search for him. Even now, the thought of it makes her heart pound with extra beats, like the pulsing tattoos themselves.

  Bradwell, El Capitan, and Partridge latched on to the idea of heart-beats still pulsing. It meant that other survivors, maybe other civilizations, exist beyond the Deadlands. But how far? For Pressia, it’s personal.

  She walks back to the box, leans down, and stares at it. “Swan,” she says and it starts up again, repeating the word seven, seven times, then beeping. “It’s asking us for a password—or seven of them.”

  “Do you know their names?” Bradwell asks.

  She shakes her head. “Not all of them.”

  “Swan,” Bradwell says.

  The Black Box says seven again and when it’s done and the beeping starts, Bradwell says, “Ellery Willux.” A green light blinks from a row of lights near the camera eye. “Aribelle Cording.” Another green light sparks.

  “Hideki Imanaka,” Pressia says, and it accepts this name too. She’s said her father’s name aloud so few times that this small green light feels like an affirmation. He truly exists. He is her father. She feels hopeful in a way she hasn’t in a long time.

  “And the others?” Bradwell asks.

  She shakes her head. “Caruso would have helped. He would have known.” Caruso lived in the bunker with her mother. When Bradwell and El Capitan went back to the bunker after the farmhouse burned, they thought they’d talk him into coming with them. But he’d killed himself. Bradwell never said how he did it, and Pressia didn’t ask. “I wish he’d known how much he could have helped us. If he’d known, maybe he wouldn’t have . . .”

  “Was Caruso one of them?” Bradwell asks.

  “No.”

  “Try to remember,” Bradwell says.

  “I can’t remember!” She squeezes her forehead. “I don’t even know that she said all the names.” Her mind is blank except for the image of her mother’s death—her skull, the mist of blood.

  “If we can get these passwords, who knows what we’ll have access to.”

  “No!” She’s angry now. “We have to focus on what we can do here, now, today, for these people. They’re suffering. They need help. If we let ourselves get pulled into the past, we’re turning our backs on the survivors.”

  “The past?” Bradwell is furious. “The past isn’t just the past. It’s the truth! The Dome has to be held accountable for what they did to the world. The truth has to be known.”

  “Why? Why do we have to keep fighting the Dome?” Pressia has given up on the truth. “What could the truth possibly matter when there’s all this suffering and loss?”

  “Pressia,” Bradwell says, his voice going soft, “my parents died trying to get at the truth!”

  “My mother’s dead too. And I have to let her go.” She walks up to Bradwell. “Let your parents go.”

  He walks down the rows and stops in front of the drawer at the end. “You should see the dead boy.”

  “No, Bradwell . . .”

  He grips a chest-high handle. “I want you to see him.”

  She takes a deep breath. He pulls the handle, and the slab slides out. She walks to his side.

  The boy is about fifteen years old, bare chested, his lower half wrapped in a sheet. His skin has turned the color of a dark bruise, his lips purpled as if he’d eaten blackberries. His hands are curled up around his neck, twisted claws, and one foot pokes out of the bottom of the sheet. He has short, dark hair. What’s most striking is that embedded in his bare chest is a silver bar that stretches from one side of his ribs to the other. He was a little kid when the Detonations hit, a kid on a tricycle. The handlebars are mottled with rust. They curve around him like an extra pair of ribs. His skin attached to the metal is thin, almost like webbing.

  Pressia closes her eyes. She wraps her arms around her own ribs. “What happened to him?”

  “No one knows.” Bradwell pulls up the bottom of the sheet as Pressia opens her eyes. The boy has only one leg. The other is newly gone. The rupture is so jagged with exposed bone that Pressia gasps. “The leg exploded,” Bradwell says, “and he bled to death.” He walks to a counter near the sink, picks up a small cardboard box, and brings it to Pressia. The only thing she can imagine is a human heart, still beating.

  He lifts the lid. The box is filled with scraps of metal and plastic. One piece has a metal joint connecting two smaller pieces of broken metal—each about an inch long. Bradwell says, “This stuff was found near his body. Some shards were still embedded in what was left of the flesh on his leg.”

  “What was it?”

  “We don’t know.” He closes the lid on the box and looks at the dead boy. “The Dome did this. They aren’t going away. Special Forces are only becoming more aggressive, hungrier. I’m not turning my back on anybody, Pressia. We have to find a way to push back.”

  LYDA

  METAL TUBS

  THE ROOM IS AIRY WITH NOTHING in it but two large metal industrial-looking tubs and two chairs, lit by the dusky sunlight illuminating the battered windows. They’ve been bathing at night, but they were on lockdown during the last dark hours. Special Forces were buzzing nearby, so the baths were delayed.

  Illia was let into the room first because she can’t be naked in front of anyone. She doesn’t even like to bare her face, which is now draped in gray cloth as she reclines in one of the tubs. As Lyda is led in, Illia says, “You’re here.”

  “And so are you,” Lyda says, and she means not just here physically but emotionally too. The baths were first a recommendation for Illia. The ash of the Meltlands has collected in her lung pockets, the mothers fear, and bacteria has taken root. Illia needs rest and special care.

  But then five nights ago, in these tubs, something miraculous happened. Illia, who’d been so vacant and silent, came to, like a fever broke. She started telling Lyda stories, odd, nameless, placeless stories about the woman and the man, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood.

  Lyda told Mother Hestra about Illia’s breakthrough, and Mother Hestra called it a healing. Lyda loves this. They never used the word healing in the rehabilitation center. Unlike her own mother, the mothers here are fierce but also fiercely loving. Ironically, for the first time in her life, she feels protected in a way that she never did within the protective bubble of the Dome.

  Each day since the healing, they’ve bathed in the hope that it would continue. And it has. During the day, Illia is a dimmed light, coughing in a private room, but the bath changes her.

  “Yours is not water tonight,” Illia says. Her voice is meek and soft, a little hoarse from disuse. “It’s something else.”

  One of the mothers told Lyda that she needed to go all the way under. “The serum must cover every inch of your skin, every hair on your head.” The air smells syrupy and medicinal. Lyda takes off her cape and hangs it on the back of a chair. She dips her fingers in the warm, cloudy bath. They turn slick and dry quickly, leaving a strange film.

  “They say it’ll mask the human scent,” Illia says. “Safer for traveling tomorrow.”

  “How does it feel?”

  “Mine is water. I can’t go and I don’t want to.”

  “Neither do I!” Lyda wants to see Partridge, desperately, but she likes it here. They’ve started her on combat training and hunting. Her muscles have grown strong. Her aim is good. She’s learned to lie in wait silently It’s dangerous, but strangely peaceful. Even now, undressing, she isn’t bashful like she was in the girls’ academy locker room. She fe
els like she’s in her skin, and that’s good. She folds her clothes on the chair and climbs over the edge of the tub, lowering herself into the strange mixture.

  “I’d prefer to die here,” Illia says.

  “You’re sick, not dying.” Lyda doesn’t want to talk about death. In the Dome, it was rarely mentioned. The word itself wasn’t appropriate. Lyda’s father was escorted to the medical center, the quarantined wing, at the first sign of sickness, and she never saw him again. Disease and death are shameful, and she wonders now if her father, like Willux, had taken some enhancements that had started to wear him down. Your father has passed on, her mother told her. Passed on.

  “Tell me a story! I look forward to them all day.” This is a half-truth. The stories also scare Lyda. There’s something doomed about the telling—it’s not a story that’s going to end well.

  “Not tonight.”

  “You told me last time that the woman worked as the keeper of knowledge in the quiet place, and the man came to her and asked her to protect the seed of truth, a seed that would grow in the next world to come. What’s next?”

  “Did I tell you that the woman fell in love with the man?”

  “Yes. You said it was like her heart was spinning.” Lyda understands. She feels this way when she thinks of Partridge, especially when she imagines him kissing her.

  “Did I tell you that the man loved her?”

  “Yes. That’s where we left off. He wanted to marry her.”

  She shakes her head. “He can’t marry her.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s going to die.”

  “Die?”

  “And she can’t die with him. She has to survive because she’s the keeper of knowledge; she has the seed of truth. It holds secrets.”

  “What kind of secrets?”

  “Secrets that could save them all.”

  Is the story true? Is it set during the Before? “And how does he die?”

  “He’s dead. And she dies inside.”

  “What happens to the seed of truth?” Lyda feels anxious. She tells herself that it’s only a story, but she’s not sure she believes that.

  “She marries someone who is chosen to survive so the seed of truth can live. She marries a man who has connections. The End is coming.”

  A chill runs through Lyda. Illia is talking about herself. The man who has connections must be, in fact, Ingership—Illia’s husband, the one she killed. If Lyda brings up Ingership by name, she fears that Illia will retreat again. Isn’t she telling the story this way because she can’t face the truth of it, which is why it’s healing? “Tell me about the End,” Lyda whispers.

  “An explosion of the sun. Everything became iridescent. Everything broke open as if objects and humans all contained light. It was the brightest entry into darkness.”

  “And the keeper survived?”

  Illia pulls down part of the gray cloth and looks at Lyda now with her hooded eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m here.”

  Lyda nods. Of course. But if Illia knows that she’s the keeper, why tell the story this way? “Illia,” Lyda says, “why not just say I fell in love with a man? Why not just tell me everything? Don’t you trust me?”

  “What if I’m not who you think I am? Some little housewife, all knit up in her stocking. Some little beaten housewife who never knew anything, who had no past, who’d never known love, who had no power.” She lifts her arms, shiny and wet, her hands clenched in fists. “You don’t know the difference between these scars and these? Do you? You don’t know anything of scars.” Her arms are pocked and burned—a row of burns up one arm and a spray of shards in the other.

  Lyda shakes her head. “I don’t.”

  “I’m the keeper! So where’s the seed? Huh? I ask you that. Where’s the goddamn seed now?” Illia is furious. Her fists are shaking in the air.

  “I don’t know,” Lyda says. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you mean.” She grips the edge of the tub. “Tell me. Tell me what you mean.”

  “I couldn’t deliver the truth to dead people. I had to keep it.” Her voice sounds distant and haunted.

  “What dead people? Which ones?”

  “There were so many . . .”

  “Illia! I want you to tell me what this means. I want you to tell me the true story. Tell me. For your sake and mine. Get it out. Tell me everything.”

  “And now I can’t die until I have fulfilled my duty, until I have handed it over. I can’t die until then, Lyda.” She looks at Lyda as if maybe she’d like to die. Lyda can’t understand it. “I can’t die,” she says, as if confessing a deep sadness. “Not yet.”

  “You’re not dying, Illia. Tell me what happened to you. Tell me, please. Don’t talk about dying.”

  “Don’t talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They’re one and the same, child. One and the same.”

  The room goes quiet. Lyda shrinks into the tub and closes her eyes and when she does, all she sees are Illia’s wet arms—the spray of debris in one and the strange orderly row of risen welts on the other. It’s the orderly scars that disturb her. The Detonations caused erratic fusings and scars, not tidy rows. She thinks of Ingership. She knows the difference between the two kinds of scars, after all. Some are from the Detonations. The others are from torture—nine years of torture.

  She hears Illia draw in a sharp breath and then mutter to herself. At first Illia says, I miss the truth. I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art. Was she an artist? Lyda loves art. She once made a sculpture of a bird from wire. Illia then starts in about death. I want to die! I want death. But the keeper can’t die. The keeper can’t die until she has fulfilled her role. The keeper must find the seed. It’s not a myth or even a story anymore; it’s more like a mantra or a prayer.

  But a dark prayer, a terrifying prayer. Lyda keeps her eyes closed—the serum must cover every inch of her body, every hair on her head, the mother explained. She slides down, her backbone bumping the metal. Submerged, everything is quiet. She feels like she’s being held by the serum, the tub. Her held breath starts to burn her lungs. Just another second of peace, she thinks. Just one more.

  PARTRIDGE

  COLD

  PARTRIDGE IS PACKED AND READY. The maps are rolled up in his backpack, the music box is in his coat pocket, and the vials are bound into place with a strip of cloth from his bedsheet, wrapped around his stomach. Still, when the cellar door slams open in the morning, he’s shocked by the dusty light pouring in and the gust of cold air.

  “It’s time!” Mother Hestra shouts.

  He barely slept. The beetle scrambled to the corner and shook spastically until finally it found a rat hole and disappeared. The image stuck in his head—the massive leg. But even without that pulsing behind his lids, he doesn’t like sleeping because he dreams of finding his mother in the academy again and again; her bloody, amputated body under the bleachers by the playing fields, in the hushed library, and, worst of all, in the science lab—as if she’s something his teacher expects him to dissect. He’s sure she’s dead, but then an eye will blink. Better not to sleep much.

  He walks up the small set of wooden stairs. The wind gusts. The sky is shot through with dark, billowing sashes. This was once a nice subdivision—rows of cream-colored houses that now look like bleached bones.

  He sees Lyda standing by the corner of a fallen house. Her cape billowing around her hips, she holds a homemade spear—a sharp blade tethered to the tip of a broomstick. She looks at him at first like she’s scared but then she breaks into a smile that lights her face. Her skin shines from the waxy serum too. Her blue eyes are tearing—because she’s happy to see him, or is it the wind? Her hair is growing in, a soft fuzz on her head. With her hair short like this, he sees more of her beautiful face. He has the urge to run to her, lift her up, kiss her. But Mother Hestra would misinterpret it as aggression and might attack. Partridge and Lyda aren’t allowed to be alone. This was
another one of the conditions—total protection of the girl.

  He smiles and winks. She winks back.

  Lyda walks to Mother Hestra and ruffles Syden’s hair.

  Mother Hestra says, “We’ll travel in a line.”

  “Illia isn’t coming?” Partridge asks.

  “The ash in her lungs has taken on disease. She’ll stay here in the hope of recovery.”

  “Has a doctor seen her?” Partridge asks.

  “What doctor are they going to call?” Lyda says sharply.

  “She is another victim of the Deaths,” Mother Hestra says coldly, eyeing Partridge. “They created this ash, and her lungs are sickened by it. One day, she will likely die of it. Another murder.”

  “I’m not a Death,” Partridge says defensively. “I was a kid when the Detonations hit. You know that.”

  “A Death is a Death,” Mother Hestra says. “Get in line.”

  Lyda is behind Mother Hestra and Partridge is at the end, within three feet of Lyda. His stomach feels light. His heart pounds. “Hi,” he whispers.

  Lyda puts her hand behind the small of her back and waves.

  “I missed you,” he whispers.

  She glances over her shoulder and smiles.

  “No talking!” Mother Hestra shouts. How did she hear him?

  He wants to tell her about the vials, the beetle’s leg, the strange feeling that it’s familiar to him somehow. We need a plan, he wants to tell her. That’s how they first got together, after all—his plan to steal the knife from the Domesticity Display, her keys to the knife case. He can’t stay here, guarded by the mothers for the rest of his life. But there’s no place for him and Lyda to run away to. They’re stuck. Does she feel it too? She has to.

  They’re leaving the Meltlands, heading toward the Deadlands, which are barren, windy, and dangerous. He imagines what he and the other two look like—Mother Hestra dressed in furs limping with the weight of her son, Lyda with her billowing cape, and him glancing around nervously.