Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  He lets some air escape from his nose. Just a bit. How long will he be held here? His father doesn’t want him to die but maybe to get to know death. He lets out more air. His lungs feel pinched.

  Just when he can’t take anymore he feels the small tug of the white board. His chin emerges, his mouth. He drags air back into his lungs. Is the baptism over? Has he been saved? He feels the motor again, reversing him back into the water. He pleads with the technicians, “No, no, no!” It’s possible that their ears are sealed in some way to protect them from his begging.

  He can’t shake his head, can’t arch his back for air.

  He’s submerged again and again—a baptism that just won’t take? He stops pleading. He works to time his breaths. He tries to develop a method. His mind loses track of time. He’s only trying to meet the surface, to be in the air.

  He tries to hold on to the image of Lyda’s face, the exact color of her eyes. He comes up for air and his larynx spasms, closes shut. This time, there is no air. No sound. No breath. He tries to signal his panic to the technicians with his eyes.

  They make notes.

  The motor hums again. He’s going back under without having taken a breath.

  One of the technicians seems to understand that something’s gone wrong. He reaches for an intercom.

  But Partridge is now submerged. He can’t hear what’s being said. He can’t breathe even if he wanted to draw water into his lungs. That’s when the bright glossy light of the room fades to a smear of darkness—ash. He thinks of ash and snow and Lyda—her face coming apart piece by piece and floating up into the sky.

  PRESSIA

  MOSS

  PRESSIA AND BRADWELL are living in a small cottage, where the search party brought them the night they almost died. Small, with stone walls covered in moss both inside and out, it was chosen because it was easy to heat with its potbelly stove. Pressia rebounded quickly from hypothermia, but Bradwell’s lungs have taken on water. One thing survivors know well is labored breathing, coughs, how to determine which are serious. Pneumonia causes short grunts at the end of each exhale.

  For three weeks now, Pressia has dedicated herself to two things—poring over Fignan and all the notes that Walrond left behind, and tending to Bradwell, who mostly sleeps.

  She started writing on paper, which is precious, but soon ran out and began writing on the surface of a narrow table. When she ran out of room there, she started writing on a small chopping block, and then on stones she’s brought in from the orchard. She keeps her print tiny. In cones of light flickering in the air above him, Fignan projects video clips, images of scanned documents—birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices, diplomas, transcripts—and Willux’s handwritten notes about books he’s reading, giving page numbers without titles or authors, and convoluted screeds. Pressia jots it all down.

  Meanwhile Bradwell rouses just enough to take a sip of water or pork broth. El Capitan has arranged for soldiers to bring food, and nurses visit. Fignan offers medical information and data about pneumonia, various risks and treatments and medicines that they don’t have access to. She can’t fault him. He’s trying to be helpful.

  El Capitan begged Pressia not to stay with Bradwell, whose sickness could be contagious. She told him she couldn’t leave him. “I’m a loyal friend.”

  Friend—is that still what they are? Pressia remembers his body, stripped of clothes, wet. Sometimes, she thinks of him seeing her undressed, almost completely naked. She knows it’s silly to be embarrassed. They were dying. So what if he saw her undressed? He saved her life. But now, just thinking about it, she feels suddenly shy—flushed, nervous—as if it’s happening at that very moment. Her mind wanders to the feeling of his skin against hers, trembling because of the cold, and she feels like she’s falling again, headlong, down into some unknowable darkness, a terrifying rush. Falling, falling, falling—in love?

  Right now, it’s selfish and stupid to even think about things like that. She sits on the edge of his cot, waiting for that moment when Bradwell comes to, blinking into the light, knowing who she is. The alternative is that he doesn’t get better, that his lungs fill with too much fluid and he drowns from within. She can’t let herself think of it. She has to work. She has to have something to show him when he emerges. She emerged once from drowning. He will too.

  She stands and leans against one of the lichen-covered walls. From all the video clips that Fignan has stored within him, there’s one she keeps coming back to—the one of her parents when they were both young. Pressia’s taken detailed notes about it. It feels like an indulgence each time she asks him to play it, but now as a reward for slogging through Willux’s notes, she says, “Show me again, Fignan, that footage of my parents.”

  Fignan turns on, creating a flickering cone of light. There’s Pressia’s mother, laughing in the sun and brushing her curly hair from her eyes, then a young man who must be Pressia’s father. He has dark, almondshaped eyes, like hers, and a quick, unpredictable smile. They’re in a field, wearing their cadet uniforms, open-collared, untucked. They wave to the camera.

  Pressia wants to walk into that sunlight, to grab the hands of her mother and father, to tell them, It’s me. I’m your daughter. I’m here. Right here. The image of her parents—so beautiful, so real—is punishing and wonderful. It allows her to miss them specifically, in incredible detail.

  In the background, she sees Willux—she’d recognize him anywhere—with his notebook. He’s talking to the guy whose face Pressia remembers from the clipping, tucked under the bell back at the morgue—the cadet whose death was ruled an accident. Ivan Novikov. Their heads are bent in quick conversation. Her mother walks up to them, showing them that the camera is on. She’s telling them to wave. She reaches for a hand, and she takes the dead cadet’s hand—Ivan Novikov’s, not Willux’s, not Pressia’s father’s. Ivan pulls her close and kisses her. Willux tucks the notebook under his arm. He waves then puts his hand in his pocket and walks away.

  Pressia turns from the flickering light, which makes the moss-covered walls shimmer. Does that kiss mean her mother was dating Ivan? Did everyone love her mother? Who was Aribelle Cording anyway? Pressia can’t imagine how someone could give and take love so easily. Did her mother have a weak constitution? She followed her heart, not her head. Pressia should be thankful for it; it’s the reason she was born. But still, she wishes her mother had been . . . what? Stronger? Less susceptible to love? Love is a luxury. It’s something that people are allowed to indulge in when they’re not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive. Pressia can’t help but think of her mother as love-rich, lovespoiled, and what good did it do her?

  Bradwell moans. One of his feet kicks the covers. She says his name, hoping this is the moment he’ll come to, but then his body is still again. If he did open his eyes just now and recognize her, what would she say to him?

  Pressia knows that it’s fear that keeps her love in check. But what if falling in love is a sign not of weakness but of courage? What if it isn’t falling or crashing but taking a leap?

  The footage stutters to its end. The room dims. She runs her hands over all of the stones, covered in her hand-scrawled notes. The nurse has told her to talk to Bradwell. “It’s good for him. He really might be able to hear you, even in his dreams.”

  And Pressia has kept him updated. She’s told him that even though they don’t know for certain that Partridge is back in the Dome, they suppose he is because the robotic spiders have been deactivated. The day after they made it to the outpost, word came from the city that the robotic spiders all crackled with life for a moment, their legs seized, and then their screens went blank. She’s told Bradwell that El Capitan is in a medic station set up in the city, where he’s been removing the robotic spiders, which are all still lodged in people’s bodies.

  She hasn’t told him the bad news—more children have disappeared. Some have been returned. A few days ago, one was found asleep in the woods. Two more were wanderi
ng the market. Another was in his bed as if he’d never been gone except, like Wilda and the others, his body was perfected. These children have had every scar or burn healed, all amputations regrown, and their umbilical wounds covered in new skin. El Capitan has them all brought here and guarded in the dormitory so they don’t fall into the hands of the growing cult of Dome worshippers. Wilda lives here too. Pressia misses her, but she can’t visit; Bradwell might be contagious, and Wilda’s immune system might be slipping as her cells degenerate.

  Like Wilda, each of the children is programmed to say very little. “Propaganda,” El Capitan calls it. “Little spokesmodels for the Dome.” And their messages end, as Wilda’s does, with the gestured sign of the Celtic cross.

  They call them Purified, as they aren’t really Pure, but remade. And all of them have developed tremors in their hands and heads.

  Pressia hopes that they will be able to find the formula in combination with her mother’s vials and the third mysterious ingredient. Maybe they can save the children before they’re too far gone. She would never confess to Bradwell that she stares at her doll-head fist sometimes, squints until her eyes blur with tears, and tries to imagine the hand beneath it. The doll head gone? Maybe it’s another reason why she works so hard.

  And now she says, “Willux is a stranger to me, Bradwell.” How do you organize the ravings of a crazy person? How is she to find some pattern that would make sense to one of the Seven or Bradwell’s parents?

  Walrond left clues for them after all. Bradwell knows Willux better than she does. “I need you,” she says. “Wake up and help me.” But she’s not sure if he would help even if he were awake. He desperately wants the truth, but not the formula.

  From a restless sleep, he coughs. His cheeks turn a deep ruddy color. The birds on his back contract, as if their air is dependent on his breaths.

  “Easy now,” she says. “It’s okay.” Fignan buzzes to his bedside. His coughing subsides.

  The fire is fading a little. She puts on her new boots and coat—OSRissued, gifts from El Capitan. She slides the iron bolt that El Capitan installed, and opens the door. A cottage is tucked deep in an orchard. The trees’ black branches bow so low that the limbs have started to root back into the ground. The air is cuttingly cold. She supposes Partridge is sleeping in some completely static temperature—and what would that be? Seventy-two degrees or seventy-three? She wonders if he ever thinks of her out here. There’s a chance they’ll never see each other again, and, for a moment, it’s as if it’s all over. Nothing will change. This will be her life. Here forever. And that will be his.

  And if Bradwell dies, Pressia will live out her days here in this orchard cottage surrounded by trees that seem wired to the earth, alone.

  Because the moon is full—though, as always, partially lost in a skein of ash—she can see the low, crumbling cement wall in the distance and, beyond that, to one side, the glowing fires of the tent dwellers and, to the other, an old dormitory, half of which is collapsed. That’s where Wilda stays.

  There’s a light on in the dormitory and Pressia wonders if it’s Wilda’s light. What if nothing comes of Walrond’s Black Box? The girl will die.

  She picks up an armful of wood from the neatly stacked pile and imagines what this place was like during the Before. When the ghostly girls were alive and well, did they pull fruit from the trees? She squints through the orchard—these stalks of wilting bouquets, rows and rows of blackened tethered limbs—and she sees movement. A shape darts so quickly that the fog swirls. Then nothing.

  She looks at the small cottage. She hears Bradwell coughing again and then his voice—rough and raw. “Pressia!”

  She drops the firewood, runs to the cottage, and finds him thrashing. She kneels next to the bed. His eyes are open but he’s still lost. “I’m here,” she says. “I’m still here.”

  He coughs raggedly. She gets a cup of water. She lifts his head and puts the cup to his lips. “Take a sip,” she says. “You need to drink something.”

  His eyes close, and he drinks a little then pulls away. She eases him onto his side.

  She stands and paces. Finally, she rests her forehead against the stone wall, flattens her hand to the moss, and rubs it away. “Bradwell,” she says, “why don’t you come back? This can’t be the end.” She waits for Bradwell to respond even though she knows he won’t.

  Pressia lifts her hand from the wall and sees colors—a bit of blue, a smear of red. She looks closely at the lichen. Are these reds and blues just another kind of mold?

  She reaches up and rubs off more lichen, and beneath it, she sees more color—paint. She rubs and rubs, until she sees the side of a face—an eye, a cheek, an ear.

  Who lived here after the Detonations? An artist? Did the artist keep painting in this little cottage and after running out of canvases, take to painting the walls?

  Pressia grabs a washcloth and lightly dabs the moss away, careful not to damage the colors underneath. Faces emerge—one girl after the other—as if they were locked away. Ghostly girls. Who can save them from this world? The river’s wide, the current curls, the current calls, the current curls.

  Was the artist trying to hold on to all those who were lost? Pressia remembers the feeling of being pushed up to the surface—those small hands at her back. True or not, she felt it. They wade in water to be healed, their wounds to be sealed, to be healed. Death by drowning, their skin all peeled, their skin all pearled, their skin all peeled.

  Pressia knows what it’s like to be trapped underwater, and now it feels like she’s bringing each of them to the surface, one by one. There’s another mouth, open, as if holding the note of a song. Marching blind their voices singing, voices keening, voices singing. We hear them ’til our ears are ringing, ears are screaming, ears are ringing. A blue eye, half closed, pained. There is a cheek, rounded and full. They need a saint and savior, saint and sailor, saint and savior. They’ll haunt and roam this shore forever, haunt and roam this shore forever. Another eye, lifted sadly by a worried brow. Lips, this time pursed as if about to say a word.

  Bradwell breathes jaggedly, but it’s as if the girls are breathing. They breathe in, Will; they exhale, ux. He is their murderer. He killed them. The walls are filled with their faces. The room is filled with their breathing.

  Will.

  Ux.

  Will.

  Ux.

  Pressia turns and finds Fignan at her feet. Walrond said to remember that he knew Willux’s mind. To know the secret, she has to know the man. To know the man, the mass murderer—the killer of these girls as well as most of the world—she has to enter his mind.

  Will.

  Ux.

  She has to think his thoughts, walk his steps, breathe his breaths.

  Will, the girls whisper in unison, ux.

  LYDA

  NINE

  HER COT IS NUMBER NINE on the right. This is a new place, a new room—temporary, as the mothers tend to be nomadic. But her number isn’t temporary. The next place the mothers move, she will still be number nine, even if it’s a row of pallets on the floor, even if it’s a row of bodies in a dirt dwelling. Maybe even if it’s a row of graves.

  Why number nine? After the mothers found her, they gave her this cot, which belonged to one of the mothers who died in the recent battle. It seems cruel for Lyda to take her place. It’s hard to lie here, heart pounding into the bedsprings, knowing it should be someone else’s heart. But there’s no way around it. The mothers believe in order.

  It’s night. The room is dark. Some of the children are still restlessly fighting sleep. She hears them asking for water, the mothers humming, the whispers of nightly prayers. It’s an incantation that helps her sleep.

  But tonight she’s not sleeping. She’s been told that she’s finally allowed to see Illia. She’s wanted to see her every day since she returned, but she was told that Illia had gotten worse and was under quarantine.

  Lyda’s requests have finally been granted, though, beca
use Illia’s body is barely holding on. “The soul case is wearing thin,” Mother Hestra told Lyda. “Her time is coming.”

  Lyda rests her head on her pillow, shared with Freedle. He was given to her when she arrived. She’s to keep him safe for Pressia. His wings creak when he flutters them, but he’s still swift. She strokes his head.

  When she was little, she had a stuffed ladybug that she shared her pillow with. Lyda was in charge of putting herself to bed. Her mother followed the method that told parents not to come when their kids called out at night. And now she is surrounded by an abundance of mothers. It feels good, safe. She’s earned a place here through hard work. Her muscles burn with fatigue. She’s learning to aim darts—the important action of the wrist. She’s practiced gutting Dusts and Beasts and hauled dirt from a new burrow being excavated. She’s dug up roots and, hunched over a bucket, skinned them for meals.

  All the while she tries not to think of Partridge. The mothers have taught her that men are a weakness. They will only betray your love. Of course, Partridge isn’t a Death. He’s not one of those men the mothers hate with such conviction. But she’s still afraid that the more she misses him—his face, his skin, the way he looked at her—and the more hope she has that she’ll see him again, the more she has to lose.

  The door opens; light sweeps into the room. Mother Hestra whispers her name.

  Lyda pats Freedle quickly and runs to the door.

  Mother Hestra says, “It’s time,” and leads her down the hall into a small room. Lyda needs to tell Illia about the Black Box, the seed of truth.

  Illia is gaunt and pale. Her face is bare, covered with burns and scars from the Detonations and from Ingership’s abuse. Maybe she’s come to peace with it or is too tired to hide it. Lyda sits in the chair beside her bed. Illia stares at the ceiling. Lyda takes her hand and whispers her name. Illia doesn’t respond.