Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “The seed of truth,” Lyda says, “is in good hands. It’s with the people who will know what to do. Good people.”

  Illia doesn’t move. Can she hear Lyda?

  “Illia,” she whispers. “The truth is in good hands. You fulfilled your role.” Is she giving Illia permission to die? It’s been ingrained in Lyda to fight sickness and death, to fear them above all else. One day her father was sick; the next day he was gone—shuttled away to a distant ward. She never got a chance to say good-bye. They got a notice saying he was dead. But the mothers have taught her death is part of life.

  Lyda looks at Mother Hestra. “Has she been gone like this for a long time?”

  “She’s half here and half in the beyond. Between life and death.”

  “Illia,” Lyda says. “I know what you meant when you said ‘I miss Art.’ I know you meant Art Walrond.”

  Her eyes flutter. She turns her head and stares at Lyda.

  “The seed of truth—it’s alive. It exists. You did what he needed you to do.”

  “Art,” she whispers. “I’ve seen him. He’s there; he’s waiting.”

  Lyda’s eyes fill with tears. “You can go to him,” she whispers. “It’s okay now.”

  Illia raises her hand and touches Lyda’s cheek. “If I’d had a daughter . . .” And then she lays her hand on her heart and closes her eyes.

  “Illia,” Lyda whispers. “Illia, are you still with us?” She turns to Mother Hestra. “Do something! I think she’s—”

  “She is going,” Mother Hestra says calmly “You knew that. She is going, and it’s okay.”

  Lyda stares at Illia’s ribs, looking for breath. They’re still. “She’s gone.”

  “She is. Yes.”

  Mother Hestra hooks her arm around Lyda’s and says, “Let’s go back now. We will take care of her body.”

  “Let me sit with her a minute.”

  “Yes,” Mother Hestra says.

  Lyda closes her eyes and says a bedtime prayer, one she used to whisper to her stuffed ladybug toy about the joy of morning light.

  After a while, Lyda walks, nearly blind, back through the hall to cot number nine. She wants to tell them, Someone’s died. Someone just left us. But there’s no need to wake them. It was natural. Death is part of life.

  She lies down and tries to sleep, but she doesn’t have the ability to rein in her thoughts. She imagines Illia and Art Walrond reunited in a place like heaven. Is it possible? Her mind darts to Partridge. Where is he now? Is he safe? Is he thinking of her?

  She remembers the last thing he said to her. You said good-bye, but I’m not. Because we’ll find each other again. I’m sure of it.

  Now he’s returned to some version of the life they once lived. It has rules, social order, and rigor. It has bath towels, starched shirts, and fresh paint. People expect things from him. The Dome has a way of changing you—beyond enhancements and drugs—just by the stifled air you breathe. In the Dome, she accepted what she was told. Her greatest fear was disappointing those around her. And yet the truth was there if she’d looked for it. She accepted—so easily, so readily, so happily—that those on the outside were less than human. She doesn’t despise her old self as much as she fears her. Her trapped life was so comfortable that she’d still be in it if she’d been allowed a choice. If her old self had been told that she would one day find herself out here, living among the wretches, she would have pitied her new self. But she’s lucky she got out.

  When she’s sure everyone’s asleep, even Freedle, she pulls out the music box Partridge gave her—the one that belonged to his mother. She winds it and lifts the lid but lets only a few stray notes float on the air. Illia and Art—can they hear this tune? Where does the soul go after death?

  She slips the music box back under her pillow.

  How can Partridge remember the world outside—hold on to the strange idea of it—once inside the Dome?

  She’ll be erased. She knows it. The Dome won’t allow her to exist.

  She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.

  She clenches her fists and thinks, Will he find me again?

  And she tells herself, No. Don’t want this. Let him go.

  She opens her hands, spreads her fingers wide.

  PRESSIA

  STONES

  PRESSIA IS BENT TO HER NOTES written on wood and stones. The problem is clear. Willux was crazy. He was crazy when he detonated the planet and he was a crazy young man. On one page, he scrawled Good Ole Buck in one corner, Collins in another—buddies of his?—and the rest of the page is filled with entwined snakes. One page is just the numbers 20.62, 42.03, NQ4, and the words I was forged by fire. Made new by flames. What does it mean? He seemed fond of poetry and appeared to be working on one that shows up a few times with various alterations.

  She rises every day to the top of the sky,

  Brushing over the holy mound with the tip of a wing.

  I’d tell you this but my voice is shy

  Because your beauty is, too, a sacred thing.

  He drew an arrow from I’d tell you this but my voice is shy to an alternative line, The truth is written up there on high, and then a list of words to rhyme with wing—sing, swing, bring, adjourning—and then sky—sigh, lie, pry, fly. A romantic—that’s what Walrond called him. Were these poems written to Pressia’s mother? The thought sickens her.

  She’d really like to stumble upon formulas, discussions of cells, degeneration, renewal, nanobiology . . . Instead, she’s just found pages of what look to be constellations and birds and curlicues, ever-tightening spirals—pages of them.

  She stares up at the lit motes swirling in the image of a page projecting up from Fignan. She feels so alone. She looks at Bradwell’s shoulder, rising and falling with each breath, his jaw, his cheek. Since he called her name, he sits up to eat and can walk a little, one hand on the wall—touching the ghostly girls’ faces, which he doesn’t seem to notice. He looks at Pressia as if he’s trying to see her across a canyon. Sometimes he whispers her name or says, “Thank you.” And Pressia feels like the ground is shifting under her feet. Falling, falling—that’s what it’s like when her name is on his lips. Still he sleeps most of the time, and then she returns to one question: How did Walrond get inside Willux’s mind? The room seems to spin with the faces of all the ghostly girls looking on, urgent and goading. What if nothing ever makes sense?

  She knows the answer. The ghostly girls will hound her. They won’t ever let her walk away. They’ll haunt and roam this shore forever, haunt and roam this shore forever.

  She says to Fignan, “Turn the page,” and a new page from Willux’s notebooks appears. Again, birds.

  But this time, in the margin, there’s a word: Brigid. Her middle name. Emi Brigid Imanaka. Willux didn’t name her. He didn’t even know she existed until years after her birth, so why does he have a note with her middle name in it—over a decade before she was even born? She feels a flush fueled by anger.

  It feels personal, as if he’s goading her. What does he want from her?

  She stands up and says to Bradwell, who’s still sleeping soundly, “Okay, let’s go over this again.” She points to the upper-right corner of the table. “All this refers to the Seven—how it started, what it meant to Willux. Each of the members of the Seven has their own area.” After Willux, notes on her father and mother are the fullest. Maybe she should be ashamed of spending so much time with them. She couldn’t help it. She loves the way her father smiles. She sees her face in his—a bit here and there. She’s amazed by him. Even the simplest gesture—picking up something someone dropped and handing it to them. She had to start somewhere—why not her father, the lost part of herself?

  “This large stone is where I write all references to swan; this portion of the chopping block is devoted to numbers—Willux had certain numbers that he loved. This stone is where I jot references to domes of any sort.” Young Ellery Willux was obsessed with domes.

/>   She moves back to the table, leans down on it, one palm flat and the doll-head fist pressed into the box reserved for Ivan Novikov. She might not be able to get into the head of Ellery Willux, but what about Ivan Novikov, Willux’s first victim? She remembers the video of him holding her mother’s hand.

  She walks the edges of the room, looking into the eyes of all the ghostly girls. There’s one who always makes her pause—there’s something about this girl’s face, a flash of light in her eyes, that reminds Pressia of her friend Fandra, her good friend from childhood. Fandra and her brother Gorse ran away before they could get taken by OSR. Fandra had golden hair that brushed her shoulders, blue eyes, and a shriveled left arm. She snorted sometimes when she laughed, which made Pressia laugh. Pressia ran into Gorse not long ago—at one of Bradwell’s old underground meetings on Shadow History that she’d gone to—and was stunned to find him alive. She started to ask about Fandra, and he said, “No.” Fandra was gone.

  And even though this girl doesn’t have golden hair, Pressia feels like Fandra exists in the image somewhere. “Fandra,” she whispers now. “What am I doing?”

  She knows what Fandra would do. She’d keep going.

  Pressia needs a new stone, one reserved for the word Brigid. She says to Bradwell, “I’ll be right back.” She shuts the door tightly behind her as she leaves.

  She can’t shake Willux’s words—I was forged by fire. Made new by flames—and the image of the entwined snakes, always two wrapped around each other, loosely spiraling up. “Ivan Novikov,” she says to herself, dipping under the branches. What did the clipping say about his death? Willux tried to save him during training. Young Cadet Walrond said that it was a sad day An officer said that it was Ivan’s first swim of the season, that he’d been sick but had just gotten well.

  Pressia bends down and finds a large oval stone. She cradles it to her chest. She remembers Willux’s expression when her mother held Ivan’s hand. Did Willux have a crush on her? Was he jealous?

  She remembers nearly drowning in the cold, dark river, the hands—she was so sure they were hands—pushing her up, and she imagines Ivan Novikov, but Willux’s hands are pushing him down. Looking down from above, who can tell whether the struggle is to save someone or drown them? And if Walrond thought the world of Willux, he’d assume the best. Ivan was sickly, so that might have made it easier to believe he was drowning, to believe the rescue was doomed. Willux had no visible motive. Ivan was his friend.

  She walks quickly back to the cottage, closing the door behind herself once inside. Bradwell is restless. The birds flutter on his back. She sets the stone on the table.

  “Fignan, show me Walrond’s message, the one meant for the Seven.”

  Fignan powers on, and there is Art Walrond again, broad and blond. “Fast-forward,” Pressia says. The image speeds up. “Stop.”

  Art crosses his arms and says, “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.”

  He killed the one person who could have saved him. Ivan Novikov. Was he the one who had the formula?

  “I want to see the medical records again,” she says to Fignan. “Ivan Novikov.” Fignan lights up Ivan’s folder. She reads the doctor’s handwritten scrawl.

  . . . Tremors of the extremities. Slight palsy of the head. Hearing diminished. Eyesight decreased from 20/20 to 20/100. . .

  Pressia recognizes the symptoms. Rapid Cell Degeneration. Willux started brain enhancements young, a little at a time, her mother had said. Maybe that was one of the points of the international branch of the Best and Brightest—a global effort to ensure that the best minds were even better. If Novikov and Willux had both started up brain enhancements, neither of them would have had adverse effects for a long time. Wilda shakes because her body was too young to accept the intense doses all at once. Willux shakes now because of the accumulation of enhancements over decades. Maybe Novikov had some underlying medical condition causing the enhancements to hit him harder, or maybe he did more than Willux, more than anyone else . . .

  Willux killed the one person who could save him.

  She starts over. Novikov had Rapid Cell Degeneration, from what the medical reports indicate, and then he didn’t. He was better. Maybe Novikov knew that the enhancements would have a downside. Maybe he induced the Rapid Cell Degeneration himself because he had a way to reverse it and he wanted to test it.

  “Novikov’s notes,” she says to Fignan. “I want anything that Walrond collected from him that’s personal, written in his own handwriting.”

  The cone of light above Fignan yields one result—a file: Novikov Notations. She says, “Open file.”

  The file is empty.

  Why would Walrond make a file of Novikov’s notes if he didn’t have any?

  Unless Walrond was sending a message that he had notes, but now they’re gone.

  “Walrond’s message again,” Pressia says to Fignan.

  The Black Box shows Walrond’s face. He gives his introduction, and as the message plays on, his eyes go teary. “It’s all here for you and it’ll lead you to the formula,” Walrond says. “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.”

  She whispers, “I had to look into the future. Why?” She looks at the stacks all around her.

  “This box wasn’t safe enough for me,” Walrond’s image says. “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.”

  “Stop,” Pressia says.

  Fignan holds the image frozen in midair. She remembers Bradwell questioning Walrond. Time was of the essence back when they hoped to stop Willux. Not now. It makes no sense. And Walrond couldn’t trust the box to hold the formula. The file was a placeholder. It tells Pressia that the formula exists, but that maybe Walrond hid it. “Where?” She sits down on the edge of Bradwell’s bed. She’s suddenly angry at Bradwell, even though that’s not fair or logical. She needs his help. She takes a deep breath. “Continue,” she says to Fignan.

  Walrond disappears off screen but then returns and says, “I can feel them closing in on me. We’re running out of time. If you’re hearing this, it means all our attempts here have failed.” He laughs and cries at the same time for a second and then he says, “Willux—he’s a romantic when all’s said and done, right? He wants his glorious story to live on. I hope one of you hears this, and I hope you give his story an ending. Promise me that.”

  “Stop,” Pressia says. The image stops. The small cottage goes quiet. The wind is sharp outside. A small sprig of ivy taps the window. She should tell Fignan to power down, but she likes the extra light. It’s getting dark outside. Her mind is whirring.

  Bradwell’s birds rustle under his shirt. She lifts his shirt to see if they’re okay, revealing Bradwell’s broad, muscular back. His skin holds on to a deep flush. The birds seem better. Their eyes glint. She strokes their feathers. They’re beautiful—regal almost. She wonders, What is it like to be joined to something alive, to have those three small beating hearts with you, always?

  Pressia lowers the shirt, hoping they’ll sleep. She’s tired too.

  Bradwell turns. She wants to be close to him and warm. She’s been sleeping on a pallet on the floor, but it’s cold. Ice is crystallizing on the windowpanes. She doesn’t want to sleep on
the cold floor alone. Pressia wants to feel safe. She doesn’t want to think of what might be lurking in the orchard or of Willux drowning Ivan Novikov. She doesn’t want to wonder why her middle name is in the margins of Willux’s notebook.

  She lies down next to Bradwell, slips under the blanket, lifts his heavy arm, and lays it over her shoulder.

  She feels his warm breath on her ear.

  Loyal friends. That’s what they are—friends—and that’s why this is okay. If it were more, she would stop herself. She likes the feeling of his warm breath on her neck.

  And then she hears his voice. “Are you taking advantage of me?”

  She sits up and scrambles out of the bed. “Bradwell.”

  His eyes are clear. “I’m in a weakened condition, you know.” He smiles. “You shouldn’t take advantage of someone at a time like that.”

  “I was cold!” Pressia says, wrapping herself in her arms. “That’s all.”

  “Is that right?” His eyes are shining.

  “You’re awake. You’re really awake,” she says.

  He nods. “More or less.”

  “I’m glad you’re back.” And she is. She feels giddy with happiness. “You’re really back!”

  “I never left.”

  “You saved me out there,” she says.

  “And you saved me in here.”

  PARTRIDGE

  WARM

  PARTRIDGE WAKES UP warm and dry. He opens his eyes and sees a billowing white canopy. There’s a breeze. Sunlight thrown from a window falls on the blanket. He lifts his hand—which feels impossibly heavy and bruised to the bone—and rests it on the sunny square.

  It’s warm. Is that possible? Where is he?

  He smells food being cooked—something fatty and fried. Maybe bacon. He hasn’t smelled frying bacon since he was a child, but some things stick with you forever, he thinks, and bacon is one of them.

  The canopy is attached to a large oak bed and he’s in the middle of it. He lifts his head, which starts pounding, and struggles to his elbows, as if his body is waterlogged. A door across the room leads to a pale blue tiled bathroom.