Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

Mother Hestra says, “Three feet between you two, please. Three feet!” Partridge lifts his hands, as if to say, No contact. Promise! Lyda and Partridge step away from each other.

  Mother Hestra has told her that if Lyda and Partridge were left alone, he’d “make unwanted advances,” and he might even “do her harm.” But Lyda would love to tell Mother Hestra that she’s got it wrong. Lyda’s always liked Partridge more than he liked her. She’d love to be alone with him, to kiss his lips, to run her hands over his skin, and have him run his hands on her. She knows what married couples do when they’re alone—or she’s heard rumors, at least. They keep most of that away from the girls in school. A happy heart is a healthy heart—that’s what passes for health education; that covers the issues of the body

  “Let’s work on the maps,” Partridge says. “We have to get them done before . . .”

  Before what?

  “Mother Hestra,” Partridge calls, “can Lyda help me with the maps?”

  Mother Hestra has a small morsel of food that she pops into Syden’s open mouth. She mulls it over and finally nods.

  He pulls the maps from his backpack and spreads them on a section of the floor that’s been swept clean of debris. “Maybe you should start your own map.” He walks to the advertisement about sprucing up your home. He picks at some shards of Plexiglas until he can get an edge of the poster and pulls it free. He hands it to her. The back of it is bare.

  She looks at Partridge. We need a plan on how we’re going to get back into the Dome.

  That’s what he said. We. The two of them together. It’s what she’s been waiting to hear, in some way, isn’t it? She was raised to become a wife, a we, and who better to be with than Partridge? But now she looks at him, and she thinks there is no such thing as we. Each of us is an individual. Odd that she’d realize that here, among the mothers, among those fused together. But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.

  She feels numb, suddenly, as if cold has burrowed into her ribs. She grips the poster and looks around the subway car, and it’s as if the train car is a rib cage too and each of them is a chamber of the pounding heart. She feels like she could die here. Trapped and pounding. That’s why some of the windows have the spiderweb shatters—people banged their fists on them in the hope of getting out.

  There was no way out.

  PRESSIA

  SNOWMAN

  BRADWELL DRIVES, HUNCHED forward so as not to apply pressure to the birds rustling beneath his shirt. Pressia likes to look at his hands on the wheel, red and nicked up. He fiddles with the knobs that turn on the heat, but no heat comes. He hits the button for the windshield wipers to brush away the ash and light snow. Only one of them works. It wags across the windshield like a broken tail. Fignan, who sits on the seat between them, lifts one of his spindly arms, moving it in unison with the wiper, as if the wiper is waving and the Black Box is waving back. She checks on Freedle, snug in her pocket.

  She rubs her hand over her doll-head fist then looks at Bradwell, the jagged twin scars running up his cheek. “How did you get those scars?”

  He reaches up and touches them. “Groupies,” he says. “They caught me off guard, almost killed me. But your grandfather did a good job, didn’t he?”

  “I always wished he could fix me,” she says.

  “Fix you?” Bradwell says, then glances at the doll head. “Oh.”

  “What about the birds?” she asks. “Didn’t you ever want someone to come in and be able to remove them, magically?”

  “No.”

  “Never? Not once? You’ve never wanted them out? Just to be free of them?”

  He shakes his head. “The people who died instantly all over this earth and the ones who died slowly of burns and disease and poisoning, they’re free of everything, right? The birds meant that I survived. Fine with me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Maybe it’s different for you because you can’t see them.” She thinks about this for a moment. “Have you ever seen the birds?”

  “I don’t get undressed in front of a lot of full-length mirrors.”

  “Do you even know what kinds of birds they are?”

  He shakes his head. “Waterbirds,” he says. “Terns, I think. I’m not sure.”

  For some reason this makes her feel better, consoled. Bradwell doesn’t know the most basic things about himself either. They’re strangers to each other, but to themselves too. “I like that,” she says. “You like what?”

  “That you don’t know something. You should try it more often.”

  “Are you calling me a know-it-all?”

  “As a know-it-all, you should know you’re a know-it-all.”

  “Which is proof that I’m not.”

  He turns down an alley not far from her old home. Pressia used to like scavenging for parts, bartering in the markets—anything to get out of the back room of the barbershop where she lived with her grandfather—but she doesn’t like open spaces anymore. They make her feel exposed. Everything feels tinged with falsehood. When she walked these streets, she was someone else.

  They turn out of an alley onto a street. The barbershop is up ahead. It’s her first time back since her mother’s death. What’s startling is how little things have changed when, for Pressia, everything has changed. This simple thought disturbs her: Her grandfather is gone, and she’s still here. She feels guilty for being alive.

  They pass the exploded hull of the barbershop. Out front, someone’s built a snowman—blackened, sooty. Each of its three sections is flecked with detritus—small barbs of metal, bits of glass, rocks—from being rolled on the street. Its form is slightly melted. Weary, it tilts to one side.

  “Stop,” she says. “Just for a second.”

  “What is it?” He stops the car and puts it in park.

  She cups her hand to the car window and peers into the barbershop’s blasted front—the old striped pole, melted and warped, and the row of shattered mirrors and demolished chairs, except for the last chair, which is still intact.

  She remembers a fevered dream from her childhood, counting telephone poles—in the dream, this was her job. But instead of one, two, three, she whispered, Itchy knee. Sun, she go. But why did her knee itch? Why did she talk about the sun going? Was she dreaming of the sun blotted by ash after the Detonations? Was that where the sun went? Some of the telephone poles were on fire; some were already blackened and toppled, the electrical wires snapped loose, but she knew not to touch them. Someone else did, and the body rattled to the ground then went limp. In her dream, there was also a body without a head. There was a dog without feet. There was a sheep—pale and hairless, scalded a deep scarlet. It didn’t look like a sheep anymore.

  “The last time I was here, I picked up that bell, the one I gave to you,” she says. “Why are you using it as a paperweight?”

  “It holds down things that are important to me. You want it to be of use, don’t you?”

  She fiddles with the knobs on the dead radio. “Things that are so important you haven’t told me about them?” she says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Arthur Walrond, Willux, the dead cadet?” She looks at him squarely.

  “Just something I found, but I don’t know what it all means. Not yet.” He sighs. “Can we go now? El Capitan’s waiting.”

  She looks back at the snowman—its bulbous body of ice, metal, glass, rocks. One of the snowman’s eyes is melting down its face.

  “It’s one of us,” Bradwell says.

  She can see beauty in the smallest details in this dark world, but this? “It hits a little too close to home,” Pressia says.

  “I don’t know much about art,” Bradwell says, “but I think that’s what it’s supposed to do sometimes.”

  And then Pressia sees something skitter up the snowman’s shoulder. “What was that?”

  “Spider?” Bradwell says.

 
; Another spider—thick and metallic—darts in front of the car. “Another one,” she says.

  “And more,” Bradwell says, pointing at two of them climbing over the broken, snow-covered pavement, crab-like, and another on an exposed drainage pipe.

  He jerks the car into gear and guns it. “Is that what El Capitan meant? Robotic spiders?”

  More are crawling along the window ledge of a splintered storefront.

  “They’re all the same,” Pressia says. “Newly constructed. They have to be from the Dome. There’s no other explanation.” She grips the seat as the car bangs over potholes.

  “You know what they do, don’t you?” Bradwell says grimly.

  Pressia feels sick. She recognizes the black metal, the ball-bearing joints in the spiders’ legs. “The dead boy in the morgue.”

  “One of these things blew off his leg.”

  “El Capitan could have given a little more info on the spiders,” Pressia says.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know what they’re capable of. Yet.” He glances at her. “Glad you came?”

  She’d rather be here than at headquarters. She needs to be out in the world again. She has to prove she’s not fragile—maybe to herself most of all.

  Bradwell pulls the car over a rut and parks. El Capitan stands next to a crumbled brick wall, Helmud’s thin arms gripping his shoulders.

  Pressia and Bradwell climb out of the car. Both eye the ground for spiders.

  The street is empty except for a Groupie—two large men and, slightly behind them, a woman—standing at El Capitan’s side. The air is deeply familiar here—the densely packed housing of lean-tos and tarp-covered huts, the smoky atmosphere, the falling ash a nearconstant dusting. It smells like home, something sharp and sulfuric in the back of Pressia’s throat. It smells like childhood, and she’s allowed to be nostalgic for it; even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.

  “What the hell is Pressia doing here?” El Capitan says.

  “Pressia,” Helmud says with a smile.

  “Hi, Helmud,” Pressia says, then she says to El Capitan, “Thanks for the tip on the spiders. A little more description next time?”

  “What? You were expecting some daddy longlegs?” El Capitan says, and then he knows it was mean. Pressia knows he struggles to be a better person now, but it’s not easy. “Sorry,” he mutters.

  “Longlegs,” Helmud says.

  “They’re deadly, Cap,” Bradwell says. “You know that.”

  “Deadly?”

  “The boy found in the woods,” Bradwell says. “Remember how his leg looked? The hooks in the flesh? He may have been killed by a prototype—you know, a little trial kit.”

  Helmud leans forward, glancing at his brother’s expression, maybe trying to gauge his fear.

  “Well, we’ve got other issues here.” El Capitan strikes a match and tosses it into a metal pail of bundled clothes. “Make sure these burn to ash,” he says to the Groupie. He strides toward the opening of a nerby culvert. “No sudden moves. Eyes out for spiders. Most haven’t made it this far, but they’re coming.”

  Inside the irrigation pipe, Pressia remembers this place. Her grandfather brought her one rainy night, telling her that she was to hide here once she escaped through the back panel in the cabinets. She was supposed to come here the night she headed to Bradwell’s, when she met Partridge—or was led to him. If she had hidden in this pipe, would she still be that other girl who went scavenging through the city? Would her grandfather still be her grandfather? Would he still be alive?

  “You okay?” Bradwell whispers. She must look dazed.

  “Fine,” she says, shaking off the chill.

  “The girl’s a survivor, a Post,” El Capitan continues. “The Dome took her, made her Pure, brought her back. She’s got a message.”

  “Made her Pure?” Pressia whispers. “That’s not possible.”

  “Now it is,” El Capitan says.

  “It is!” Helmud says, eyes glinting.

  Heat prickles across Pressia’s back. It’s possible to make someone Pure?

  They walk up to two young women Pressia’s age and a younger girl, hunched against the wall. El Capitan introduces the one with a twisted lump of skin on one side of her face as Margit. The other is a friend of Margit’s who’s blind. El Capitan doesn’t give her name. “Dome worshippers,” he says with disgust.

  The blind one says defensively, “What would you have us worship instead?”

  Bradwell hates Dome worshippers. He shoots back, “The Dome’s your enemy, not your god.”

  Margit says, “When you hear the New Message, you’ll turn your tongue.”

  Bradwell opens his mouth, but Pressia grabs his arm. “Let it go.” She walks toward the young girl they’ve been talking about—pale and cleareyed with dark red hair.

  “Name is Wilda,” El Capitan says. “Burned the clothes in case of any kind of surveillance.”

  Wilda is wearing an old, ill-fitting dress that gapes at her neck, the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Pressia hasn’t seen a Pure other than Partridge and Lyda. Because this girl is so young, she seems doubly Pure and vulnerable. Pressia wants to protect the girl, maybe because of the way the girl looks at her, so desperate and lonesome.

  “A girl who’s a Pure but not a Pure?” Pressia says.

  “Whatever she is she’s got a New Message from the Dome,” El Capitan says.

  “The truth!” Margit says.

  Wilda has a small wooden boat in her hands. “What’s that?” Pressia asks.

  Helmud shouts, “The truth!”

  “It’s a boat. Helmud whittled it from wood. Gave it to the girl.”

  Pressia looks at the little boat. “I like your boat,” she says to the girl. “Nice work, Helmud. I didn’t know you whittled.” He lowers his head, suddenly shy.

  El Capitan squats down, imbalanced by the weight of Helmud on his back. “Say it for them. Tell ’em.”

  Helmud shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear it.

  The girl tucks the boat in her pocket and looks at all of them. “We want our son returned,” she says, her lips pursed as if her mouth doesn’t open all the way.

  Pressia nods, encouraging Wilda to continue.

  “This girl is proof that we can save you all,” she says and then pulls her lips into a thin tight line, her chin to her chest. Pressia is alarmed by how a face that’s so perfect can look so anguished. Wilda’s cheeks flush and stiffen. Her lips look as hard as knuckles. Still, more words come. “If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages . . .” She squeezes her eyes shut, shakes her head wildly back and forth. She doesn’t want to say another word, but they’re in her throat, working her lips. “One at a time.” She starts to lift her right hand, but she grips her own wrist, stopping herself, and starts to sob.

  “It’s okay,” Pressia says. She looks at El Capitan and Margit. “Tell her she can stop.”

  “Stop!” Helmud says, rubbing his ears.

  “But she can’t,” El Capitan says. “She’s not programmed to stop.”

  Even though Wilda looks at Pressia wide-eyed, pleadingly, the girl still wrestles her arm from her own grip and makes a small cross on the center of her chest then marks it with a circle.

  “The New Message,” El Capitan says wearily.

  “What does it mean, They can save us all?” Pressia never got to be a girl like this—without scars and marks and fusings. This was denied her. They made this girl Pure. Could Pressia have her Purity back? Could she one day see her hand—her real bare hand—again? Could the crescent-shaped burn on her face be erased? What about Bradwell’s birds? What if El Capitan and Helmud could be their own people?

  “Hostages, Pressia!” Bradwell says. “They’re going to kill people.” Pressia’s embarrassed that her first thought was of being made Pure again, but doesn’t like Bradwell correcting her either. He puts his hand on the curved wall of the culvert and shakes his head.

  Margit says, “They’re going to save us. Th
e hostages will be made new!”

  “New,” Helmud whispers to Pressia. “New!”

  “The Dome isn’t going to abduct people to make them shiny and new!” Bradwell says.

  “The spiders,” Pressia says. “That’s how people will be held hostage and killed. That’s why they’re here.”

  “If we give them their son, they can make us all Pure!” the blind woman says.

  “Partridge,” El Capitan says, under his breath.

  The girl stands up, totters a moment, and then starts to walk toward the entrance.

  “Wilda!” Pressia calls.

  Margit runs to Wilda and twists her elbow. “You can’t go nowhere,” she says. “You got to tell them to save us!”

  Pressia shouts at Margit, “Let go of her! You’re scaring her!”

  Margit releases Wilda’s arm. Wilda pulls her arm quickly to her chest, rubbing it, and shouts, “We want our son returned!” But it’s more of a rebuke than a message.

  The blind woman staggers to her feet and sways as if drunk. “We can be made Pure! It’s the way of the First Bible. God gave us his only son. We must return him!”

  “Stop worshipping your oppressors!” Bradwell says. “You know why you’re blind? They did that to you. They did all of this!”

  The blind woman hisses, “What proof have you got? I’ve got the Dome itself! I’ve got this girl! This Pure girl!”

  “This Pure girl,” Helmud says, his voice full of hope. Does Helmud think that the Dome can save him? Separate him from his brother and make him Pure? Pressia would love to believe she could be made Pure, shiny, and new, as Bradwell put it. “This Pure girl!”

  “Shut up, Helmud!” El Capitan shouts, and then all the voices rise up so loud that they bounce around the culvert walls—even Helmud yells back at his brother, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  Wilda squeezes her eyes shut and screams, “This girl is proof that we can save you all! We can save you all! If you ignore our plea, ignore our plea! We will kill our hostages, one at a time.” She then scrapes a cross on her chest and makes a circle around it so roughly that it must hurt.

  The air goes quiet.

  Wilda opens her eyes. Pressia goes to her and kneels. The girl looks at the doll head, touches it gently. Pressia offers it to the girl, and she cradles it and Pressia’s arm, rocking back and forth, soothing herself. “We want our son returned. This girl is proof.” She climbs onto Pressia’s lap.