Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

Weaponless, he’s vulnerable and useless. Mother Hestra has a leather sack of lawn darts strapped to her back. He’d like to have something—anything, really. He’d gotten used to Bradwell’s various butcher-shop knives and hooks. In fact, he feels weirdly relieved that, while still in the Dome, he got some special coding into his muscles—strength, speed, agility. The strange gratitude to his father for dosing him twists his stomach.

  The Deadlands that lie before them were incinerated during the Detonations. They were stripped bare and still are—no trees, no new vegetation, only the remains of a crumbled highway, rust-rotted cars, melted rubber, toppled tollbooths.

  Partridge slows and rubs his face, stiff with cold. He clenches his fists. The one stung by the beetle is still taut with pain. Cold radiates through his bones even down into the lost tip of his pinky, which seems impossible but he would swear to it.

  They have to be careful now. Curved spines arch in the sand, which whips in spirals. Dusts are creatures that, during the Detonations, fused with the earth and rubble itself, and now they’re trawling. Encrusted with dirt, stone, sand, they come in all sizes and shapes. They blink up from the ground, and can circle and attack. But Dusts know the mothers. They fear them.

  Lyda has slowed, allowing space between her and Mother Hestra to grow so that she’s closer to Partridge. On purpose? He picks up his step.

  “Was it this bitter cold when we were little?” he asks.

  “I had a blue parka and mittens that were connected by yarn and wound through the sleeves of my coat so I wouldn’t lose them. We should be attached,” she says, “so one of us doesn’t get lost.” She stops. He keeps walking up to her. She glances at Mother Hestra and then she turns toward him. He kisses her. He can’t help it. She quickly touches his cheek—their skins coated in that waxy ointment feel strange. “Something happened,” she says, “with Illia.”

  “What is it?” Partridge says.

  “She knows things. She says she can’t die until she plays her role. She kept talking about the seed of truth.”

  “Is she hallucinating or something? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Lyda says. Before Mother Hestra has a chance to yell at them, Lyda turns and strides quickly to reclaim her place in line.

  Mother Hestra stops at the edge of a rise. Below is a splintered gas station and billboard half devoured in sand. “Stay here. I’ll call you when it’s safe to follow.”

  Partridge looks at Mother Hestra’s son’s head bobbing beside her as she heads down an incline toward the beaten highway. “I’m still not used to it.”

  “Used to what?”

  “Children fused to the mothers’ bodies. It’s, I don’t know, disturbing.”

  “I think it’s nice to see kids for a change,” Lyda says. Because of limited resources in the Dome, only certain couples are granted procreation rights. But still this exchange feels like a rift between Lyda and him. “There were so many children during the Before,” she adds. “Gone.” The Before—that’s a phrase that the wretches use. She’s already picking up the mothers’ habits and language? The change makes him feel uneasy. She’s the only one who really understands him here. What if she becomes one of them? He hates himself for even thinking this way—us, them—but it’s ingrained.

  “Are you happy here?” he asks.

  She glances back at him again. “Maybe.”

  “It might not be that you’re happy here. But just happy in general. You know, one of those people who starts whistling the moment they wake up.” She can’t really be happy because she’s here, can she?

  “I don’t know how to whistle.”

  “Lyda,” he says, his voice so forceful it surprises him, “I don’t want to go back. But it’s inevitable. Home is no longer a place.” Partridge hears his father’s voice in his head saying, Partridge, it’s over. You’re one of us. Come home. There is no home.

  “If home isn’t a place, what is it?”

  He tries to imagine what this place was like before it was wrecked and the drifts of sand blew in. “A feeling,” Partridge says.

  “Of what?”

  “Like something perfect just out of reach. It was stolen. Home used to be simple.” He can see Mother Hestra and Syden making their way to the next rise. She might wave to them to follow at any second. He says to Lyda, “I know what’s in the vials. I experimented a little.”

  “Experimented?”

  “I saw the stuff grow cells, build them up. I doused a beetle’s leg and it grew and grew. My father wants what’s in those vials, and now I know how potent it is.”

  “Like that kid who won first prize in the science fair last year.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I don’t know his name. He was the kid who always won, every year.”

  “Arvin Weed?”

  “Yes! That’s his name.”

  “What the hell did Weed win for?”

  “Did you go?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I vaguely remember walking around the booths with Hastings.”

  “I was on a team that made a new kind of sensitive-skin detergent.”

  “Nice!”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t make anything for it, not even a volcano with baking soda.”

  “Well, Arvin Weed was documenting how he’d regrown the leg of a mouse that had lost a limb in a trap.”

  “Are you kidding me?” But then he remembers it, how Hastings said something sarcastic like “Excellent work, Weed. You’ve discovered the three-and-a-half-legged mouse. An incredible species.” Weed had glared at him, and as Hastings had loped off, Weed grabbed Partridge’s arm and told him that he should care about his experiment, that it could save people. “Save people from three-and-a-half-legged mice?” Partridge had said.

  The memory jolts Partridge. “Jesus,” he whispers. “He’s already figured it out! So the Dome already has access to what’s in these vials. When my father had me followed to my mother’s bunker, he was after the other two things—the missing ingredient and the formula. He was already a step ahead. He has one of the three things he needs to reverse his Rapid Cell Degeneration and save his own life.” It’s a race suddenly, and his father’s winning. Partridge’s mother told him that his father knew the brain enhancements would catch up to him, but he thought he could find a solution, and once he had it, he could live forever. “What if my father never dies?”

  “All fathers die.”

  Partridge thinks of the thick black muscular leg of the beetle. “My father’s not like other fathers.” He reaches out and grabs Lyda’s hand. She seems surprised by the suddenness. He says, “We need a plan on how we’re going to get back into the Dome, how we’re going to get the truth out once we’re there.”

  She stares at him, her eyes watery with fear.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “It wasn’t okay for Sedge,” she says.

  For years, Partridge’s father let him believe that his older brother, Sedge, had killed himself. But the truth was that Partridge’s father killed Sedge, his oldest son. How many times had Partridge imagined Sedge fitting the muzzle of a gun into his mouth? It was a lie. But now his brother is truly dead. Partridge, it’s over. You’re one of us. Come home. Partridge despises, most of all, the way his father said it—his voice going soft as if he loved Partridge, as if his father could ever understand something like that. It’ll never be over. He isn’t one of them. There is no home.

  “He could kill you,” Lyda says. “You know that.”

  Partridge nods. “I know.”

  One of the Dusts suddenly rears from the ground so close to Lyda’s foot that the earth crumbles and she loses her footing.

  Partridge’s enhanced vision crystallizes. As the Dust’s jaws widen, he jumps and, midair, kicks the Dust in its rocky head. The Dust’s head cracking against his boot feels good.

  Lyda is on her feet, spear in hand.

  The Dust
now has its eyes locked on Partridge. “Come on,” Partridge urges. “Come on!” His body burns to be put to fighting use. His heart pounds in his chest; his muscles feel coiled, ready to spring loose.

  But Mother Hestra shouts from the ridge on the other side of the highway, drawing the Dust’s attention. As it turns, she whips out a lawn dart, launches it expertly from a great distance, hitting the Dust’s forehead, dead-on. The Dust sags.

  Partridge shouts, “Why’d you do that? I had it!”

  Lyda walks to the Dust, the living element of its body sifting into the dirt, and pulls out the dart, wipes the dark blood on her skirt. “Did you really have it?”

  “Of course I did.”

  She shakes her head, as if scolding him. “I would have taken care of it myself.”

  Partridge lets out a deep breath. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” She dusts off her cape. There’s some look in her eye that he doesn’t recognize.

  Mother Hestra waves them on, and when they’re close enough, Lyda shouts, “How much farther?”

  “A couple of miles. Keep the line straight. No talking.”

  They walk in silence for what seems like hours until finally they come to a row of fallen prisons—two of them are still standing. Their steel structures and parts of the foundation are still there, but the rest is crumbled. Across from the prisons lie the remains of a factory of some sort. One smokestack still stands, but the other two are felled like trees, smashed on impact.

  Mother Hestra stops at a long, jagged scar in the earth and a sheet of metal staked to the ground on two homemade hinges. She searches the distant skeletons of the steel. A mother must be up there, somewhere, as a lookout, because Mother Hestra raises her arm and seemingly waits for a sign. Partridge scans the structure but doesn’t see a soul.

  Eventually, Mother Hestra must be satisfied by a kind of all clear. She lowers her hand and says, “We’re here.” She pulls the metal sheet up from the ground against the tide of the wind.

  The opening leads to a dark tunnel.

  “What’s down there?” Lyda asks.

  “Subway train,” Mother Hestra says. “We knew it was out here by tracing the route of the subway line that ran in and out of the suburbs. During the Detonations, the train tunnels jacked underground.” Partridge imagines the cars shouldering up hunks of earth, creating this buckle. “We knew what the long tear in the ground was when we saw it and then dug down to it.”

  “Weren’t people trapped in there?” Lyda asks, peering into the slanted hole.

  “Long dead by the time we found them. We gave them proper burials. Our Good Mother wanted to honor them as they gave us something we needed. There’s bounty out in the Deadlands. Often you have to dig for it.”

  Lyda crawls in on her hands and knees. Partridge isn’t as eager. If people didn’t die on impact, they were buried alive. He glances at Mother Hestra. “Ladies first?”

  She shakes her head. “You go.”

  Partridge gets down on his hands and knees too, the ground cold and hard. Mother Hestra, now inside the tunnel behind him, slams the door. The tunnel goes dark.

  Then, suddenly, a bright glow illuminates the end of the tunnel. Lyda’s face appears, bathed in golden light. “It’s perfect,” she says, and, for a moment, Partridge imagines that his entire childhood is waiting for him at the end of the tunnel—dyed Easter eggs, baby teeth, his father just a hardworking architect, a middle-aged bureaucrat, his mother feeding damp clothes into the open mouth of the dryer. A home, the thing that was stolen. Perfect, as if perfect ever existed.

  EL CAPITAN

  PYRE

  EL CAPITAN TRUDGES DOWNHILL. Brambles like small claws nick his pants, but he keeps his pace. The wind cuts in, but he feels charged. Hastings. Maybe it’s not a battle or a greeting, but something as simple as the soldier’s name. It didn’t come to him at first, because El Capitan doesn’t think of Special Forces as being human enough to have names, but of course they were once just normal kids—actually, better than normal. They turned out to be the most privileged kids in the world.

  Or was El Capitan supposed to recognize some meaning? Haste—he knows the meaning: to go quickly. Tidings are greetings. They’re always glad tidings, never hostile tidings, which would be more appropriate here. Haste and tidings equals Hastings, right? El Capitan wasn’t ever good with words. He likes guns, engines, and electricity.

  “Hastings,” he says aloud. Helmud doesn’t repeat it; El Capitan had figured he was asleep, but in the cold, Helmud tucks his chin behind El Capitan’s shoulders and pulls his long skinny arms in tight and dozes. At a distance, El Capitan might even look like a man, all alone. He imagines Pressia seeing him this way. She looks at Helmud sometimes when they’re talking, but not like everyone else does—glancing at some deformity. She looks at him more like he’s part of the conversation. Still, El Capitan would like Pressia to see just him for once. Just him alone.

  He wonders if the soldier will show up again, if he’ll offer real information. Damn, El Capitan thinks, what if I’ve got an informant? Someone on the inside? He thinks of telling Bradwell and Pressia, but he likes the idea of knowing something they don’t—the little rush of power.

  He’s closing in on the survivors building the pyre and can see that they’ve collected sticks, dragged in split logs, arranged narrow saplings in such a way that they could get a big fire going, though the wood looks green and damp. There are a few men with handcarts. They glance at him out of the corners of their eyes but keep moving.

  Three girls are sitting on the ground, making up a song together. The girls are all Posts—born during the After—and just like all Posts, they’re still deformed. The Detonations impacted cells down to the spirals of DNA. No one was spared—not even this generation. One of the girls has a closely shorn head as if she’d been recently deloused, which lays bare her skull’s knotted bones, bowed on one side as if there’s more than just a brain lodged within it. Another girl’s shoulder juts forward under her coat. All three have mottled skin and pinched eyes.

  When the girls see him, they stand and bow their heads. The OSR uniform has been associated with fear for a long time, and there isn’t much he can do about it, so he uses the fear. Fear can be an asset.

  “At ease,” he says. The girl with the jutted shoulder looks up and shudders, frightened by Helmud, who must have just lifted his head. “Just my brother is all.”

  One of the men walks up. He has a bloated belly, maybe a growth that’s widened his ribs. “We don’t mean any harm. We’re for the greater good.”

  “Just curious what might be going on here,” El Capitan says, swinging the rifle around in front of him.

  “We got word,” the man says.

  A tall, older girl with a raised braid of skin on the side of her face says, “She’s real! They can save us. She’s the living proof. I was one that found her. That’s what. Not far from here.”

  “Hold on,” El Capitan says. “It seems like you want to build a fire.”

  “Fire,” Helmud says, and everyone gawks at him.

  “We want them to see that we found her and we got these three to offer,” the young woman with the braided face says. “We’ll line ’em up and wait.”

  “That one in the middle’s mine,” the wide-ribbed man says, pointing to the girl with the shorn head.

  “Who’d you find out here?” El Capitan says. “What girl?”

  “What girl?” Helmud says.

  “The Girl with the New Message,” the young woman says. “Proof they can save us all!”

  “When did you find this girl?”

  “This is the third holy day,” the young woman says.

  “And who can save us, exactly?” El Capitan asks, but he knows the answer. The Dome has sent a message through a child. Is this why the soldier led him here?

  The young woman smiles, the braid on her cheek bunching up. She lifts her hands to the Dome. “The Benevolent,” she says. “Our Watchers.” El Capitan ha
s heard this kind of talk before—the Dome followers, the ones who’ve confused Willux and his people with gods and the Dome with heaven.

  He rubs the muzzle of the rifle, just to remind them that there are more powers than the Dome to contend with. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says calmly. “I’m going to have to ask you to disperse.”

  “But we’re preparing the Girl with the New Message for the pyre,” the young woman says. Her face is lit up like she’s been stricken by something. Her eyes have lost focus.

  “Are you going to burn her?”

  “Burn her?” Helmud whispers. El Capitan hears Helmud’s penknife click open.

  “We’re going to worship and adore her. And hope they take the others.” She sways as she speaks and her skirt brushes her shins, which are pale and ashen.

  El Capitan looks over at the three girls again. They squint and tilt their heads. They don’t even seem scared, which makes El Capitan nervous.

  “The angels,” the wide-ribbed man says, “are never far off.”

  The young woman says, “Can’t you hear the buzz of their holy spirits?”

  “Special Forces? That’s no holy buzzing, I can guarantee that.”

  “Guarantee,” Helmud says.

  “You don’t believe,” the young woman says. “But you will.”

  He points the gun at the man with the wheelbarrow. “How about somebody brings me the girl, now!”

  “Now,” Helmud whispers.

  The young woman looks at the man with the wheelbarrow.

  He nods.

  “She’s in the city, being kept,” the young woman says. “I can show you.” She starts to walk toward the other edge of the woods. El Capitan follows her. She looks over her shoulder, showing the bulbous, braided cheek, and says, “She’s real, I tell you. She’s proof. She’ll tell you herself.”

  But as soon as the young woman with the braided face finishes her sentence, her eyes dart behind El Capitan and then widen. Her voice awed, she whispers, “Look!”

  El Capitan doesn’t want to look. This can’t be good. Helmud arches on his back, pivoting to see what’s behind them. El Capitan takes a deep breath and turns.