Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  Pressia cradles them gently. “If things go badly, and you don’t come back out,” Pressia says to Partridge, “we’ll go in after you.”

  “Thanks,” Partridge says.

  “We’ll stay down here with the girl until it’s all clear,” Bradwell says.

  “Be careful up there,” El Capitan says.

  “Careful,” Helmud says.

  Partridge turns and looks at Lyda. He fits his hand around hers and squeezes it. “Lyda and I will stick together.” And in that moment, that small collection of words, Lyda feels like her fate is sealed. Could she tell him, right here, in front of everyone, that she’s not coming with him? He’s sacrificing everything. Shouldn’t she sacrifice too? She can imagine the mothers, urging her to stay, but she also knows her role—the one that’s been drilled into her head her entire life. She should be a helpmate. She should follow.

  “We’ll be fine,” Lyda says, letting go of his hand and putting on her cape. She steps into the tunnel after Partridge, and as he begins to open the flat metal door, there is at first just a quick flutter of light, and she remembers her cell in the rehabilitation center, the fake panel of sunlight on the wall as if it were streaming in through a window and how sometimes it would flicker like a bird had fluttered by, casting a quick shadow and then it was gone. A fake bird, a mere projection, flitting in fake sun on the other side of a nonexistent window—inside a prison.

  The Dome is a cage, a snow globe. She’s going back in.

  PARTRIDGE

  SPEAR

  PARTRIDGE GRABS THE HANDLE and pushes it outward. The brightness dazes him, and when he pulls himself out of the tunnel, he hears the clicks of guns. As his eyes adjust to the light, he sees they’re all trained on him. He lifts his hands in the air. “Easy now,” he says. “We’re coming peacefully.”

  The wind picks up snow and swirls it around him. Partridge scans the crowd for Silas Hastings and the other academy boys from his year—the herd, as he used to call them: Vic Wellingsly, Algrin Firth, the Elmsford twins. They’ll be hard to recognize—pumped with enhancements, made into mechanical creatures. There are remnants of their former selves locked inside them somewhere—former selves who hated Partridge. The last time he was with them, Vic offered to beat his ass, and Partridge talked him down with one word. “Really?” But everyone knew what Partridge meant: It probably wouldn’t be too smart to beat up Willux’s son. Partridge was disgusted with himself for saying it, but Wellingsly backed down, though he was probably seething—and now he may be heavily armed.

  Lyda appears beside him, knitting her hands on her head. The guns shift. Red target lights dot her chest and head. It makes him sick. He remembers the beams trained on them in the woods where his mother and brother were murdered. That old rage rumbles back. “Can you all back off?” Partridge shouts. “We’re handing ourselves over! What more do you want?”

  “We want the others,” one of the officers says. He steps forward, close enough that his gun muzzle presses into Partridge’s ribs.

  “What others? It’s just us.” Where’s Hastings? Partridge keeps scanning the thick jaws and massive craniums and knotted temples. Nothing.

  “Take the girl!” the officer shouts, and two other soldiers grab her arms, pulling her about thirty feet away.

  “She’s coming in with me! It’s a condition of my surrender!”

  “You don’t set the conditions,” the officer says. “We do.” He bends over the hatch and shouts, “Everyone out!”

  He should have known Special Forces wouldn’t be content with just him. “What are your orders?” Partridge says. “What are you going to do with them?” Partridge doesn’t like the way one of the soldiers grips Lyda’s waist.

  The officer doesn’t answer. One of the soldiers takes a small step forward from the line, tilting his head at Partridge. He’s tall and thin, insect-like almost. Silas Hastings? Could it be him?

  Partridge jerks his head the way Hastings used to, flipping the hair out of his eyes. The soldier repeats the action even though his head is shaved. Hastings. Clearly. Is he offering to help?

  As the others climb out of the tunnel, each is shoved along by a soldier and lined up. They put their hands in the air—El Capitan and Helmud, Pressia’s doll-head fist. Bradwell has left Fignan and the maps behind.

  Partridge quickly takes in the landscape—do the others have any shot of escape? Out past the fallen smokestacks there’s a wispy spiral—a Dust? A spiny back crests and falls like a wave of dirt. Where are the reinforcements the mothers had promised? Have the Dusts had enough time to learn to fear Special Forces the way they do the mothers? He doesn’t want to get shot, but he doesn’t want to get eaten by Dusts either. “I have a right to know what your orders are,” Partridge says.

  The officer walks up. Despite massive thighs and broad shoulders, he’s strangely light on his feet. He says to Partridge, “Do you have any rights?”

  Partridge glares into his beady eyes. “I know he wants me brought in alive. I’m no use to my father dead.”

  With the sharp knob of his elbow, the officer strikes a blow to Partridge’s ribs, knocking the air out of him. Partridge folds, almost falls to one knee, but refuses. He wrenches his body upright. He sucks air, chokes it down into his lungs.

  “Execute them,” the officer says. “Return this prisoner to the Dome.”

  “What? No!” Partridge lunges at the officer. “I’m Willux’s goddamn son! I outrank you!”

  The officer punches him with a gun riding into the muscle and bone of his hand and arm. Partridge hears his jaw pop and tastes blood. He spins and falls.

  He hears Pressia’s voice. “This girl is Pure. You sent her here. You can’t kill her.”

  Partridge wipes blood from his mouth and sees Pressia pushing Wilda out of the line toward the soldiers. Bradwell and El Capitan wear steely expressions, unreadable. It’s as if this is how they always thought they’d die. Helmud’s already closed his eyes, bracing for death.

  “She’s done her duty,” the officer yells. “Step back in the line!”

  Wilda takes a step back toward Pressia.

  “I’ve got an army now,” El Capitan says. “They will avenge our deaths.”

  “Listen to him!” Partridge shouts. “Please stop! Let’s talk this out!” And then he locks eyes with Lyda. She’s lowered her arms and is gripping her ribs. He expects terror but he sees something else—clenched jaw, stiffened arms. She isn’t scared. She’s angry.

  The officer looks at Partridge coolly. “On three,” he shouts to the soldiers.

  Lyda calls, “Mother Hestra!”

  Bradwell tries to stall. “Listen, we’re of use to you. We’ve got some information—”

  The officer ignores all the noise. “One!”

  “Jesus!” Partridge shouts and he charges one of the soldiers, tackling him. The soldier quickly flips Partridge and pins him, slamming his head into the ground. With sharp gunmetal pressed down on his windpipe, Partridge bucks and twists, trying to get up.

  “Two!”

  “Not the girl!” Pressia shouts. “Just not her!”

  And then there’s a shot. One of the trigger-happy soldiers firing before the officer even gets to three? Who was hit? The soldier holding Partridge down slumps on top of him, bullet to the temple, deadweight. Partridge starts to push the dead soldier off, but there’s cross fire. Everyone scatters. Bradwell, Pressia, and Wilda run for cover on the other side of the earth buckled from the subway. El Capitan? Lyda? He can’t see them. The bullets are zinging the air. Partridge huddles under the dead soldier, hoping he absorbs bullets. Two more soldiers are hit and fall to the ground.

  The soldiers drop to their bellies and fire back in the direction of the smokestacks. At first Partridge thought it was the mothers, the reinforcements arriving with their knives, lawn darts, and spears, but instead, the soldiers are being taken out with real guns—automatics.

  Partridge sees Lyda. She’s loose and on the run. One of the soldiers s
pots her, sprints after her, and grabs her cape, which rips and tears loose from her neck, revealing the homemade spear. She must have gone back for it when he was already crawling out of the tunnel. She pulls it out, chokes up on the handle, and pierces the soldier in the throat. The gun in one of his arms lets out a stutter of bullets, spraying across the snow.

  Partridge is stunned. Lyda looks around—raw and wind-whipped—then turns and keeps running toward the fallen prisons. Why? He’s not sure, but he’s not going to let her be out there alone. It’s too dangerous.

  He looks over his shoulder, ready to make a run for it. Faint silhouettes of small, pale bodies dart between the rubble of the smokestacks, firing with sniper-like precision. The horizon is spinning with Dusts now, rising up from the earth. Death is coming and they want to feed.

  Bradwell jumps over the buckle in the earth, yanks open the hatch to the tunnel, and dives down, probably going back for Fignan and the maps.

  Partridge gets out from under the dead soldier and starts running. His boots pound across the hard, snow-covered earth. It feels so good to surge with this much speed.

  But then he takes a blow to the back of his head. He falls forward, skinning his palms. Looming over him is one lone soldier. With his thickened cranium and hard-jutted jaw, he leans down into Partridge’s face and hisses, “I’d be happy to beat your ass now, Partridge. How about it?”

  Vic Wellingsly. Partridge looks him in the eye and says, “I didn’t know the Dome’s little sock puppets had such good memories.”

  Wellingsly kicks Partridge in the stomach, knocking the wind from him. This won’t be a fair fight. Wellingsly is incredibly enhanced and was a strapping kid to begin with. He punches the ground near Partridge’s face. “How’d you get out?”

  “What?” Partridge mutters.

  “I wanted out. We all wanted out. And now this is what I am.”

  “I didn’t do this to you. I never wanted—”

  But Wellingsly isn’t listening. He’s cocked his fist again. Partridge rolls left. Then Wellingsly gets struck from behind, crashing to the ground. It’s Hastings. He looks at Partridge but doesn’t say a word.

  Partridge says, “Thanks.”

  Hastings nods. He means, Go. Run.

  As Partridge gets up and starts running as fast as he can, he looks back and sees Wellingsly scramble to his knees and tackle Hastings, wrestling him to the ground. They’re brawling—a flurry of fists and rising dust and snow—quick and vicious.

  Partridge keeps running. The Dusts are moving closer to the fighting—the draw of blood. Partridge sees the two fallen prisons ahead and a shape moving quickly over rubble—Lyda.

  He glances back one more time; the Dusts have risen up thick and monstrous, cluttering the air with snow, sand, dirt, teeth, claws.

  He can’t look. He calls for Lyda. She doesn’t turn back.

  Between the two fallen prison buildings, cocooned from the Detonations, are the skeletal remains of a house.

  A lonesome, tilting, roofless house.

  Lyda steps into its dark, gaping doorway.

  PRESSIA

  SMOKESTACK

  BASEMENT BOYS. TOO MANY to count. And they’re armed with real guns. They aren’t here on a rescue mission. They’re tracking big game—Special Forces. Pressia watches them take out soldiers, one by one, while the Dusts circle and claw. She and Wilda have their backs pressed to the middle fallen smokestack, its top axed off and shattered like a glass bulb.

  El Capitan shouts her name.

  “Here! We’re here!” Pressia calls to him.

  He and Helmud appear at the end of the smokestack. He limps and drops to a knee. “Where’s Bradwell?”

  “He went back to get Fignan and the maps. We’re waiting for him.”

  “We should get out while we can. I’ll carry Wilda. He knows where we’re headed. He’ll follow.”

  “We can’t leave him,” she says, looking out across the dusty, loud, snow-covered battlefield. “What’s wrong with your leg anyway?”

  “It’s just an old injury coming back to haunt.”

  “I thought you said it was a muscle cramp.”

  “That was the injury,” he says. He coughs into the bend of his arm. “The air here—if a Dust doesn’t choke you, it will.”

  He’s hiding something. She looks at Helmud, who stares at her, wide-eyed with fear. “Choke,” he says. “Choke.”

  Pressia looks down at El Capitan’s leg. “There’s blood on your pant leg. Muscle cramps don’t gush blood.” She reaches for his leg, and he staggers back.

  “Don’t. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Helmud says.

  “You have to show me,” she says.

  El Capitan shakes his head and stares up at the sky, letting out a deep breath.

  And then Pressia knows what it is. One of the spiders. She whispers, “No.”

  He nods.

  “You’ve had it on you since the city?”

  “Yes. It got me just outside the car.”

  “It got me,” Helmud says. If his brother explodes, he does too.

  Pressia’s throat cinches. “When you were saving me?”

  He looks away, and she knows that’s when it happened. She feels ripped through with guilt. She reaches out and touches El Capitan’s chest, just above his heart. “How long do you have left?”

  “About two hours. Long enough to get us to the medical outpost.”

  Her surge of guilt is quickly overrun by anger. “We could have taken this time to get you to a doctor back at headquarters! We could have left the city immediately and—”

  “No,” he says. “It would have distracted everyone, wasted time—”

  “But”—she’s rethinking all the decisions made in the subway car—“you were the one who convinced me to let Partridge and Bradwell have more time together to figure out the box, to finish the maps . . .”

  “I said that sometimes people are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good. That’s the truth.”

  She’s furious with him. “There’s still time, isn’t there? We have to get you—” There’s a massive explosion. The bottom hunk of the smokestack explodes into dust and shards. She’s blown onto her back, slammed by a dozen fist-size chunks of cement and mortar, her breath shoved from her lungs. All sound is muffled. Special Forces are pulling out the heavy artillery. She runs her fingers over the vials nervously. They’re all intact. She rolls to her stomach and looks around. Smoke and dust fill the air. “Wilda!”

  “Here!” El Capitan is holding her in his arms, protecting her with his body.

  Another blast hits the ground between them.

  “Run!” Pressia shouts. “Take her and run!”

  El Capitan gets on his feet.

  “We’ll see each other again!” she shouts. “This isn’t the end!” It can’t be.

  He smiles at her sadly, then turns and runs, hobbled by his bad leg. As they head off through the smoke, Helmud raises his spindly arm in the air. A wave good-bye.

  Her chest feels like it could tear open at any moment. The spider locked on El Capitan while he was saving her, and now how much time does he have left? Only two hours? She has to focus. She blinks tears from her eyes and looks onto the battle scene.

  Bradwell. She has to find Bradwell.

  And where are Partridge and Lyda? Are they already being led to the Dome?

  She runs down the ruins of the shattered smokestack, her legs heavy. A small cluster huddles about two hundred feet away, their motions frantic. She thinks at first that it’s a Groupie but then realizes it’s a pack of Basement Boys who’ve dragged a compact and broadly muscular Special Forces soldier, now dead, away from the battle. They’re gutting the body for weapons and parts. She feels sick. She hates this world.

  Bradwell. Where the hell is he? Is he ever coming back? What if he’s dead already? Gone?

  Off in the distance, the Basement Boys start to fight over what’s left of the dismantled soldier. At the
center of it, something small and sharp spins through the air and then thuds into the ground.

  A lawn dart.

  And then another.

  The mothers are here, rooted on the far side of the buckle. They kick up a wild spray of lawn darts, spears, arrows. Why the sudden upsurge? But then she figures it out. The mothers are laying down cover for Bradwell, who’s now running toward her through the dust and snow, Fignan under one arm and the rolled maps under the other. Alive. Her chest feels swollen suddenly, tight with . . . relief? Joy?

  “Bradwell! Here!” she screams.

  Bullets whine and crack, hitting the fallen smokestack. His eyebrows are covered in dust, his face streaked with dirt. She’s filled with relief. And then he’s down. Taken by a bullet? He’s still got hold of Fignan and the maps, but a Dust has him by the leg, a claw clutching an ankle. Pressia runs to him as fast as she can. Bradwell kicks the Dust with his free boot as viciously as he can, digging in with his elbows to hold his ground.

  Pressia pulls a stray lawn dart out of the ground and plunges it deep into the ripple of rising and falling ribs—into the heart of the Dust. She hears a guttural cry and hiss as she then rips it from its body.

  She helps Bradwell stagger to his feet. The remaining hunk of the fallen tower bursts open and rains down. The artillery is deafening.

  They run in the direction of distant trees, the woods that lead to the river, and make it to an old outbuilding with a cinder-block foundation. They stop to catch their breath.

  “El Capitan and Helmud,” she says. “A spider. Lodged in his calf. He’s got only a couple of hours left.”

  “Why didn’t he—”

  “He didn’t want to distract us.”

  “Where is he? Where’s Wilda?”