Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “He’s taking her to the medical outpost, past the river.” The river. Pressia’s never been out that far. “He said you know the way.”

  “I do,” Bradwell says. “More or less.”

  “Do you think they’ll make it?” She was lying when she said to El Capitan, We’ll see each other again. This isn’t the end. She was lying to him and to herself. And he knew it. She remembers his look of sad resignation. Shouldering his brother all these years, he’s always accepted the truth of his life—now his death. “He’s gone,” she says, and it feels like a part of her is gone. She had no idea how empty and vulnerable and disoriented she would feel at the idea of losing him. She raises her hand to her throat and looks out across the dusty terrain. Smoke has clouded everything.

  “El Capitan?” Bradwell says. “Never count him out.”

  LYDA

  BRASS

  THE HOUSE IS PROPPED ON one side by a chimney and on the other by a staircase. The outer walls are gone for the most part, making the house feel exposed. A piano stripped of keys and strings and pedals sits on its side, a slain carcass. She hears someone behind her, turns. It’s Partridge. Just him. They’re alone.

  “Did they follow us?” she asks. Her heart beats quickly in her chest, but, for some reason, she feels calm.

  “I don’t think so.” He touches a cracked windowsill. “This may be the warden’s house. Some of them lived near the prisons in big, beautiful houses.”

  She tries to imagine this house as beautiful. It’s now ravaged.

  They take the stairs, which have survived a fire. Whorls of black soot stain the walls. The handrail has detached and lies on the stairs, useless. Silky ash makes the stairs slippery

  “Where are we going?” Partridge asks.

  “Up.”

  On the third floor, there’s only air overhead. A roof of sky, she thinks. She’ll miss the sky—dusky as it is. She’ll miss wind, air, and cold. The walls have nearly crumbled away, and the room is bare except for a tall four-poster brass bed frame. It’s a miracle—this bed frame. The mattress, sheets, blanket, dust ruffle are long gone, swept up with the roof or looted. But this brass frame, covered in soot, remains.

  Lyda wipes the brass ball on one of the posts. She sees her own reflection, and behind her Partridge, warped and rounded. “It feels like a gift,” she says.

  “Maybe it’s our Christmas gift,” he says.

  She steps over the rails into the middle, where the mattress once was, and says, “Maybe so.” She sits down and, in slow motion, pretends to throw herself back onto the soft blankets.

  “How will we get back into the Dome now?” Partridge says.

  Lyda doesn’t want to talk about it. “We have to wait out the battle. We can’t do anything until the soldiers and Dusts are gone at least.” She smiles. “We need to plump the pillows.”

  Partridge steps over the rails, picks up a pretend pillow, gives it a few punches, and hands it to her.

  “Share it with me,” she says, pretending to put it down on the bed.

  He lies down next to her. Side by side, they stare up at the clouds.

  Partridge rolls toward her. “Lyda,” he says.

  She kisses him. She doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say. They’re in this windy world in a house without a roof in a bed that’s no longer a bed. They’re free of the Dome’s chaperones and the mothers. They’re alone. No one knows where they are. No one at all. They don’t even have to exist. What they’re doing is make-believe.

  Partridge’s mouth is on hers and then on her neck. His hot breath sends shivers across her skin.

  She pulls off his coat. There are the small, delicate buttons of their shirts, and then the shirts are gone. His skin touches hers—so hot it surprises her. With wind this cold, how could such warmth exist?

  They cocoon themselves in his coat. Her body rubs against his. She’s surprised by how good it all feels—his lips on her ear, her neck, and her shoulders. She feels flushed, but not just her cheeks—her whole body. In fact, his body and hers—what’s the difference? There’s this abundance of skin, all of it tingling as if it’s just come alive for the first time.

  The waxy sheen from the baths turns slick. Is this how it should be between a husband and wife? She thinks back to her health lessons in the girls’ academy—a happy heart is a healthy heart. They said nothing of love and sex, though she knows bits of these, the small amounts of science that the girls are allowed to know, what some mothers will whisper to daughters and girls will whisper among themselves, which gets spread so thin who knows what’s true and what’s a lie?

  He takes off the rest of his clothes, and she undresses too. All of it gone. Is this even happening? They’re completely alone, unseen, unwatched, and she feels something like hunger, but it’s not hunger exactly. She loves his lips on hers. She runs her hands through his hair. She wraps herself around him, arms and legs.

  Partridge pulls back. He looks surprised, scared even. He says, “Are you sure?”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Is she sure she’s coming with him into the Dome? She didn’t know she had a choice. But of course she has a choice. This isn’t the girls’ academy. This is the real earth and sky, and she’s alive in it. Maybe she can stay here. She doesn’t want to ruin this moment by telling him the truth—if she doesn’t have to go back into the Dome, she won’t. She says, “I’m sure.” She’ll explain it to him later. Why waste this precious time?

  And then he’s inside of her. She feels a sharp, brief pain, then pressure. An expansion of herself. She lets out a gasp.

  “Should I stop?” he asks.

  Is this what he meant? Was she sure that they should do this, something she’s only heard rumors about—stories of grunting animals and husbands and blood and babies?

  She should tell him to stop, but she doesn’t want him to. His skin and his lips and their bodies—where does his body end and where does hers begin? They’re fused—this is what comes to her now. The two of them are Pures, but fused. She loves him in this moment. Everything feels so warm and wet and fascinating and new that she doesn’t want it to end. “Don’t stop,” she whispers.

  What if this is the last time they see each other before they’re separated forever? Now that she knows she’s not going with him, she’s desperately sad as well as freed. She wants to be his wife—if in no other moment than this one, all they might ever have.

  He says, “I love you. I’ll always love you.”

  And she says, “I love you too.” She loves the way it sounds.

  She’s sure there’s blood. She’s sure that this is wrong, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to do anything differently. He shivers and lets out a soft sound. He holds her then, close.

  She looks up at the sky over Partridge’s shoulder—the scudding clouds, the windswept ash—and she imagines she’s above them, atop a roofless house, two bodies locked together in the center of an empty four-poster bed.

  She misses him already. She can already feel herself longing for him. He’s going to go. She’s going to stay. What will happen to the two of them without each other?

  “Good-bye.” She whispers it so softly that she isn’t sure whether he’s heard it or not.

  EL CAPITAN

  SING, SING, SING

  THEY’RE WINDING THROUGH TREES, heading uphill. El Capitan can hear the river, can almost smell it. He walks behind Wilda, keeps his eyes moving, but they blur with sweat. The pain keeps trying to draw on his old pain, but he tells it to shut up. Some were vaporized so fast that their bodies left only a shadowy stain behind. Some turned to char. After the Detonations, he found a woman in her yard, bent over her melted rabbit cages—a thick coal statue. He reached out and touched her shoulder, hoping she’d turn; instead, a chunk of her shoulder fell to the ground in a puff of ash. His fingers were stained gray. He was lucky he wasn’t char. He was lucky he didn’t drink the black rain even though he was dying of thirst. He found an old water tank, and he an
d Helmud drank from it instead. So he didn’t die, days later, from the inside out. He and Helmud were both sick and weak, but they ate canned tangerines—something his mother used to put in a dessert with apples and coconut flakes.

  The pain winds its way up through his body. Now his chest hurts. His heart pounds. He steadies himself by putting his hand on the rough bark of a sapling. The pain reminds him of the other kinds of suffering—loss. His mother. The plastic bag of coconut flakes—gritty in your teeth and sweet on your tongue.

  He grunts.

  Helmud grunts.

  El Capitan touches the girl’s shoulder. “This way.” They push past saplings. The river opens up. It’s deep here, but up a little farther it’s shallow enough to pass. They follow the bank, then El Capitan stops. “I’ll have to carry you,” he tells Wilda.

  She looks up at him and raises her arms.

  He lifts her and the pain is brutal. Oddly, though, with her gripping his chest and Helmud on his back, he finds a new equilibrium. The water is frigid. It seeps quickly into his boots and up his pants. As soon as the iciness hits the wounds from the robotic spider, he wonders if the water will fry the little thing. Maybe it’s that simple.

  The thought spurs him quickly to the other side of the river. He puts Wilda down and looks at his calf. While the girl is distracted, he inches up the wet pant leg, dark with blood. His eyes sting so much he has to blink and squint. It’s not fried. The timer reads, 1:12:04. . . 1:12:03. . . 1:12:02.

  It’s close to dusk. The sunlight is low in the trees.

  “Helmud,” he says, “I’m going to try to make it, but if I don’t, we have to get the girl—”

  “Don’t,” Helmud says, and it’s one of those moments when Helmud doesn’t feel like an echo. He seems to know that El Capitan is about to go soft, and he wants him to stop. These moments are rare but, God, El Capitan lives for them. It’s like having his real brother back again—that kid who buried guns with him, the smart one who sang.

  “Okay,” El Capitan says. The fact is, if El Capitan dies, Helmud will too. He wants to tell Helmud what’s going on, just to say it aloud, just to have someone help shoulder the emotional weight of it. But Helmud understands what’s at stake.

  The truth is that if it weren’t for Helmud, El Capitan probably wouldn’t have made it. He’d have already given up without someone to protect, even in his own twisted, love-hate way.

  He continues walking. He’s got to at least try to deliver the girl to the outpost safely before the spider explodes. He wishes he could get there in time to try to dismantle it, but chances are they’d only set it off and die in the effort.

  Wilda looks at him.

  “It’s just a little farther. We’ll follow the edge of the woods around the meadow to the right. After that, we’ll see the roof of the outpost.”

  Wilda is ahead of him on the narrow path. He keeps trudging forward, each step more excruciating than the one before it. He’s slowing down. Maybe he should just tell her to keep going. Maybe this is as far as he’ll get.

  His knee buckles. He staggers, reaches out, and grabs a tree. He drops and lands with his bad leg kicked out to one side. Helmud hugs his neck.

  Wilda rushes back to him.

  “You’re going to have to make a run for it yourself,” El Capitan says. “Don’t come back.” He worries about OSR soldiers guarding the outpost. If they hear her running, they’ll open fire. “Can you sing?”

  She shrugs.

  “Sing the message as you run. Sing all the way. Sing!”

  She turns and starts running through the woods, jumping over brush. Her dress flashes through the trees, then disappears. She’s not singing. “Sing!” El Capitan shouts, using all his breath. “Sing or they’ll shoot you!”

  “Shoot you!” Helmud says. They might shoot her anyway.

  By God, she’s still not singing. Sing, sing, sing! he begs her in his mind.

  And just when he figures that maybe she really can’t, a voice rises up, clear, sweet, melodic. “We want our son returned!” Wilda sings, and it reminds him of Helmud’s voice when he was a kid, during the Before. Angelic. It made their mother cry sometimes. “This girl is proof that we can save you all!” Wilda holds the last note and it rings through the trees.

  El Capitan closes his eyes, lets the song swell in his head. We want our son returned. . . And El Capitan wants to be returned. Coconut and tangerines. His mother mixing them in a bowl. Return, return. He feels a tug on his pant leg. I’m hurt, he would tell his mother if she were here. I’m hurt.

  His eyes flit open. Helmud’s face bobs into focus for a moment, then is gone. He feels his brother rummaging behind El Capitan’s back, then he hears the click of Helmud’s penknife. He shows El Capitan the shiny blade.

  “No, Helmud. Jesus. No,” El Capitan says through grunts of pain. “You think you’re going to dig the spider’s legs out of me? Like whittling a piece of wood?”

  “Like whittling a piece of wood,” Helmud says calmly

  “It’s too dangerous. What if you trip the explosive? What if . . .”

  “What if?” Helmud says.

  He’s right. They’ve got nothing to lose. “Oh, God. Helmud.”

  “God Helmud!”

  For once, their lives are in Helmud’s hands. There is no other alternative.

  “The girl isn’t around, right? I don’t want her to be anywhere near us.”

  “The girl isn’t around.”

  El Capitan bows his head. “Okay.”

  Helmud twists around. His arms are long enough to apply pressure to El Capitan’s ankle, a firm hold. There’s a breeze and then a pain so sharp he punches the dirt. “Shit!” El Capitan screams.

  Helmud takes just a bit of the word this time—“Shhh. Shhh. Shhh”—and keeps digging.

  PRESSIA

  RIVER

  ONCE THEY’RE DEEP ENOUGH into the woods and stop to catch their breath, Bradwell says, “Let’s try it again.”

  “Try what?”

  “Fignan.” The Black Box has been keeping pace, using a mix of wheels and long arms to get him over uneven ground. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I want to try it again with all seven names and Partridge not here. Just us.”

  “Okay,” Pressia says, “but this time don’t—”

  “Don’t what?” She was going to tell him not to pin his hopes on Fignan, but she can’t. His voice is so passionate, his gaze so forceful, how could she tell him not to have hope? How could she tell anyone out here in these wrecked wilds not to have hope?

  “Nothing,” she says. “Let’s try it.”

  They both kneel down on either side of Fignan. “Swan,” Bradwell says.

  After Fignan finishes his litany of sevens, Bradwell quickly rattles off the names. “Aribelle Cording, Ellery Willux, Hideki Imanaka, Ivan Novikov, Bartrand Kelly, Avna Ghosh, and Arthur Walrond.” A green light flashes after each one. The eye of a camera appears on the top of the box. It gazes at Bradwell and then Pressia. “He knows us,” Bradwell says. “He must be matching our faces with the DNA samples he took.”

  Fignan’s inner motor churns, as if he’s having trouble computing. Finally he says, “Matching Otten Bradwell and Silva Bernt. Male. Matching Aribelle Cording and Hideki Imanaka. Female.”

  “That’s us,” Bradwell says. “See?”

  Pressia is stunned.

  “Clearance,” Fignan says. “Playing message for Otten Bradwell and Silva Bernt.”

  And then a flickering bright ribbon of light spirals up from Fignan into a cone and there, hovering, is lit air—motes of ash riding on the wind.

  “It worked!” Pressia says, amazed.

  “I told you it would,” Bradwell says.

  A face appears through static, one that Pressia doesn’t recognize—a man in his thirties with messy blond hair and a blond mustache. He blinks erratically as if he’s been too wired to sleep and has been awake for days on end. He says, “If you’re seeing this, it means you’re someone I trust. Yo
u’re one of the Seven who I still have faith in, or you’re Silva and Otten, who I trust with my life.” He stops, presses his hand flat to his chest. His eyes tear up. “And you’re alive.”

  Bradwell leans close to the man’s face. He’s stunned, like seeing a ghost.

  Pressia reaches up and touches Bradwell’s sleeve. “It’s Walrond?”

  He doesn’t look away from the man, only nods and mutters, “It’s him.”

  “By the time you’re watching this, I’m probably dead. Maybe the whole world is dead. Maybe nothing we’re trying to do right now will work. But I had to try. And the box knows,” Walrond says. “Sorry about the DNA sampling. It was an extra layer of security. I had to do it.” He looks around, bleary-eyed. He steps out of frame for a moment, maybe looking for something or someone, being watchful, but then he’s back. “This box contains all the notes, from the very beginning, since the inception of the Seven—all of Ellery’s ideas that went into it. All of his madness.”

  He crosses his arms on his chest. “People don’t just decide young to be mass murderers. A person has to work up to an act of annihilation, and Ellery has. He still is. But he started small. I was there early on. I should have done something then. I see that now, looking back. The thing is, he killed the one person who could have saved him. That’s the irony.”

  Bradwell’s eyes are filled with tears, but he’s not crying. He loved Walrond. The pain is etched in his face.

  “It’s all here for you and it’ll lead you to the formula,” Walrond says.

  The formula. Walrond had it and can lead them to it—still? After all this time?

  “It’s not all laid out pretty. I couldn’t risk something that simple. And listen, if you get to a point in your search and you can’t go any further, remember that I knew Willux’s mind as well as anyone. I pored over these notes and I had to look into the future. This box wasn’t safe enough for me. I couldn’t simply store everything here. If you know Willux’s mind—and you all do—it became our life’s work, didn’t it? Trying to figure out his next move and all that. Well, if you just think about his mind, his logic, you’ll be able to understand the decisions I’ve made. And when you get to the end, the box isn’t a box at all. It’s a key. Remember that. The box is a key and time is of the essence.”