Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  Bradwell doesn’t like it when Partridge is proven right. “About what?” he says a little sullenly

  “The mark on Fignan, what you thought was a copyright, is pi.” Fignan lights up at the sound of his name. “Walrond was giving us a clue. There were twenty-two of the Best and the Brightest who were selected for an End-of-World scenario, and from that Willux chose seven. I looked up pi, and Fignan says that people usually expressed pi as three point one four but also as twenty-two divided by seven. Remember when El Capitan counted the number of words in the two messages from the Dome?”

  “Twenty-two plus seven is twenty-nine,” he says. “But that could be just a coincidence.”

  “Every coincidence is worth looking at closely. Willux’s mind is still thinking in obsessive ways. Pi is a number that goes on forever. And, most important, it’s necessary for circles. Domes are circles. He was obsessed with domes.”

  “Huh,” Bradwell says, and it sounds like a small concession. “Domes. Let’s say that Walrond created an empty file for the formula, as a clue, and hid the formula somewhere. He says on the video that he had to look into the future.”

  “I’ve thought about that too,” Pressia says. “He would have had to look into the future to find a place to hide the formula that might survive the Detonations. What if Willux wanted to spare certain places—ones he found holy? He was in charge of the Detonations—the strategic annihilation—so he could have left some places untouched.”

  “Walrond did call him a romantic, right?” Bradwell says. “Maybe domes were a soft spot.”

  “Exactly,” Pressia says.

  “But domes existed everywhere, in every culture. Which dome was the most holy?”

  “I guess that’s where things fall apart.” She reaches out and touches the shadow-stain.

  “Willux has this string of numbers, mixed with a few letters. I keep trying to fit them into Fignan, but no matches come up.”

  “What are they?” Pressia asks.

  “Twenty point sixty-two, forty-two point oh three, NQ-four.”

  “They sound like coordinates.”

  “I can’t find a place anywhere on this entire planet that they’d work for.”

  Bradwell tilts his head and looks up at the sky. His neck is strong, his collar loose enough that she can see his collarbones. He’s gotten thinner since he got sick, leaner, his cheekbones more cut.

  “Maybe they’re not for this planet,” Pressia says. “If the formula is hidden somewhere out there in the universe, we’re screwed.”

  “There are coordinates for stars.” Bradwell looks down at Fignan. “Run the series of numbers I just mentioned and see if they match anything beyond us—out there, in the universe: constellations, stars, planets.”

  Fignan buzzes quietly, the inner red egg whirring. Pressia doesn’t know much about the night sky. The stars have been dimmed by ash for so long that it’s rare to see them. Her grandfather drew them for her—Orion, the Big Dipper, the Milky Way. He told her that there were myths about stars but that was about it. Fignan finally lights up and shows a slowly rotating model of the night sky. The words right ascension: 20.62 h; declination: +42.03°; quadrant: NQ4; area: 804 sq. deg. are written next to a constellation that reads, The Northern Cross (Cygnus).

  “Cygnus?” Bradwell shakes his head, mystified. “All roads lead back to that word.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I spent some time on your middle name today,” Bradwell says. “Brigid means ‘fiery arrow.’ And Brigid was a saint and before that a pagan goddess. She’s associated with fire and was known for poetry, healing, and blacksmithing. She invented the whistle, of all things. She was the first to keen—a way of mourning by crying out. Her son died. Half of her face was beautiful, half of it was ugly.”

  Pressia looks at the ground. She can feel the burn marks around her eye, a flush as if the burn is fresh and spreading a searing heat across her face. Doesn’t that describe Pressia—half herself, half destroyed?

  “But most of all, Pressia, her symbol was the swan.”

  The wind stings Pressia’s eyes. She reaches up and touches the swan pendant that sits in the dip of her collarbones. Pressia’s mother was the swan, not Pressia. She looks at the sky, which is windy and dark, gauzy with ash. She feels a great pang of loss, an unexpected welling of sorrow mixed with confusion.

  “Your mom must have wanted to pass that down to you for some reason,” Bradwell says quietly. “It’s a good legacy. To have that part of her.”

  “I don’t want it. What good did it do my mother to be the swan wife? To be caught between two powerful men? To have to hide me away like a shameful secret? I’m not the swan. I don’t want anything to do with her legacy.”

  “Sorry,” Bradwell says. “I thought it might make you happy.”

  She points to the light—the one she imagines belongs to Wilda’s room. “If we’re going to save Wilda, the only thing that’s important to ask is why Willux was so obsessed with the swan. What did it mean to him? That’s what we have to focus on now. We have to be simple and practical.” She puts her hand on the shadow-stain. “You said fire, right? Brigid is associated with fire, a fiery arrow. Willux said that he was forged by fire. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “At some point, I think we’re going to have to accept that there are mysteries we can’t solve.” She thinks of Willux’s stupid love poems and those damn entwined snakes that he drew again and again. Maybe that’s just the weird kind of thing a disturbed young man would doodle, madly, for no real reason.

  “Maybe we can get enough answers. Just enough. That’s what Walrond said—the box will unlock the next move. That’s all we need.”

  “So we’re not asking the right questions,” Pressia says.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, okay, my middle name means something, so what about Partridge’s and Sedge’s names?”

  “Do you know their full names?”

  She shakes her head. “Ingership called Partridge by his full name once. I know his first name is really Ripkard but I don’t remember the whole thing.”

  “And Sedge?”

  She shrugs.

  Bradwell asks Fignan to pull up the full bio on Ellery Willux.

  A cone of light brightens above their heads; it shows a document. “Two sons,” she says. “Ripkard Crick Willux and Sedge Watson Willux.”

  “Watson and Crick,” Bradwell says excitedly.

  “What about them?”

  “They discovered the structure of DNA.”

  “But how does that fit with anything?” Pressia sighs.

  “The snakes,” Bradwell says.

  “What about them?”

  “You said there were always two snakes entwined, right?”

  She nods.

  “DNA—the double helix. That’s how DNA is structured.”

  For some reason this only makes her angry. “That’s fantastic,” she says sarcastically. “It doesn’t help, though. I swear, this feels personal. Willux is messing with us. Isn’t it enough that he killed my mother?” It’s the first time she’s ever said it out loud. She feels the sting of tears, pressure building in her chest. She presses her hand against the wall, covers her eyes, and tries not to cry

  “Pressia,” Bradwell says, “it’s okay to be angry and miss her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I think you should talk about it.”

  “No.” She uncovers her eyes and looks at the shadow-stain again. A ghostly girl, most likely. Here, then gone.

  “Pressia,” Bradwell says, “I’m serious about this. It’ll eat you up. Trust me. I know.”

  “You don’t talk about them.”

  “My parents?”

  She nods.

  “I was so angry for so long, and I still can get angry. But it’s different now. I’ve had time.”

  She removes her hand from the wall and bends to match t
he shadowstain’s shape. “What do you think she was reaching for?”

  “Maybe something she’d lost and then found again.”

  She tries to imagine the girl who was vaporized on this spot so quickly her shadow was all that was left of her.

  She looks up at the dormitories again. “I want to see Wilda.”

  “What about the possible contagion?”

  “I know I can’t be near her. But I just want to see that she’s okay. You should go back with Fignan and get more information about swans and Cygnus and Brigid. Everything we can get.”

  “You sure you want to be alone?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  She gets up and starts to walk off toward the dormitory but then stops. There’s something she can’t let go of. “When we were . . .” How would she put it? When we were lying on the cold ground, practically naked, dying in each other’s arms?

  She doesn’t have to say it. Bradwell knows what she’s talking about. “Yeah, in the woods.”

  In the woods. It’s a relief that they now have a phrase for it. In the woods. Not naked, not dying, not lying with each other, skin touching skin. “Right,” she says, “in the woods. I said Itchy knee, and you said Sun, she go. You knew what I was saying. How did you know that? Where does it come from?”

  “Japan was my father’s area of interest. It’s how he stumbled on the stories of the fusings from the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first place. I know some Japanese, and you do too, or you did as a child. I told you that it was still inside of you.”

  “I was speaking in Japanese? I wasn’t talking about an itchy knee and the sun going away?”

  She remembers being a little girl right after the Detonations—all these new memories that have risen up: the singed sheep, the body snapping with electricity, the dead bobbing in the water. She had her old language. She was holding on to what she knew

  “You were counting,” Bradwell says. “You were saying one, two, three, four, five. I counted with you.”

  PARTRIDGE

  PIANO

  AFTER IRALENE LEAVES, he can’t sleep. His mind wanders to Lyda. Just the idea that his father seems to want him to be pleased by Iralene feels like betrayal. He wonders where Lyda is now. Is she safe? Are the mothers taking care of her? He hears piano music—the sonata again. Iralene told him to follow the music. That was her way of helping him. He feels a surge of hope. Maybe Iralene will prove useful, but he feels the gnawing of dread too. He doesn’t want to be indebted to her now.

  Moonlight shines through the window. He gets out of bed, hobbles to the door—his joints aching—and jiggles the knob. It’s locked.

  Did she realize that he was locked in? He searches the bedside table drawers, the bathroom, even the window hinges for anything that would help him jimmy the lock. He flips up the bed skirt. On the edge of the mattress, there’s a rounded plastic corner that has a few inches on either side that run long and flat. He kneels down and pries it loose.

  He walks to the door, wedges the plastic into the lock. He twists the knob. The door swings open. No alarm. He wonders if he’s supposed to leave the room, if this is part of someone’s plan.

  Afraid of a shock, he edges toward the threshold slowly, waiting for a tingling sensation. He doesn’t feel anything.

  He passes through the doorway. Iralene said that he was allowed to walk through the house. Is it part of the secret within the secret within the secret where he now lives?

  Fitting the piece of plastic into the lock to keep it from latching, he closes the door behind him.

  The hallway is wide. The floor is terra-cotta. Partridge tiptoes to the stairwell and stares down into darkness. The music is coming from the lower level. As he descends, barefoot, the stairs lose the feel of terracotta. They’re rougher, more like cement.

  At the foot of the stairs, he walks into a beautiful room of overstuffed sofas and armchairs, paintings of colorful squares, dots of color. On the white wool carpet, there’s a little white dog—the size that would fit in a handbag. It pants and stares at nothing. It doesn’t seem to know Partridge is there. People were allowed to bring their pets with them into the Dome, but most of those animals have died off by now. Miniaturesize dogs are the only kind allowed to breed.

  The living room opens to a kitchen, where Mimi is at the stove pulling out a tray of muffins. “Take that from the top again, Iralene, will you? There was a misstep—a flat that should be a sharp.”

  The piano music stops. Partridge turns and sees Iralene sitting at a piano, a dark mahogany upright, on the other side of the room. She straightens her shoulders, and the song starts at the beginning again. Iralene said she didn’t play the piano. Was she just being modest?

  “Good morning,” Partridge says to Mimi, who hasn’t yet noticed him standing there. “Or is it still night?”

  Mimi doesn’t respond. She’s icing the muffins. He’s pretty sure that she doesn’t like him.

  He walks over to Iralene, and that’s when he steps on the woolly white rug. He’s barefoot, but the rug feels no different from the cement flooring.

  This isn’t real.

  He reaches out and touches the sofa. But his hand simply cuts through air. In his bedroom the images must be overlaid on top of real things. But here, there’s nothing.

  “Iralene,” he says and touches her shoulder, but there is no shoulder. No Iralene. She wanted him to follow the music—to see this for himself.

  He presses one finger to a piano key, and it resists then lets out a note that mixes with Iralene’s song. The piano is real. He hammers the keys with his fist.

  He shouts, “Is anyone here?”

  Mimi pulls out another tray of muffins and says, “Take that from the top again, Iralene, will you? There was a misstep—a flat that should be a sharp.”

  It isn’t a new tray of muffins. It’s the same tray. They’re stuck in a short loop. Did his father create this fake world? Is it for Partridge’s benefit? Does his father think that he’d believe this? Be comforted by it? While Partridge was locked away in the academy, was this a world that his father retreated into? What makes Partridge angriest is how shoddy the work is. Maybe it exists just so his father can walk through the room and pretend for a moment that he’s part of a family—since, obviously, Partridge wasn’t enough—and then move on.

  “Home sweet home,” Partridge says to no one. He walks to one of the walls, puts his hand on it, and follows it to the edges of the image. The walls are buttery yellow and occasionally decorated with a wall sconce or painting, except that those things don’t exist at all. What lies beyond this? Maybe a way out. Finally he comes to a corner that isn’t a corner. He runs his hands along the wall and continues on until he’s on the other side of the image.

  He finds himself in a dimly lit hall, lined with doors close together on either side; a strange bass hum emanates from each door.

  The doors are marked with placards. They read, SPECIMEN ONE AND TWO, SPECIMEN THREE AND FOUR . . . all the way to SPECIMEN NINE AND TEN. And then, on the rest of the doors, there are names etched on small, silver placards. Partridge reads name after name—all women, from what he can tell.

  IRALENE WILLUX. The placard is new, maybe because the last name is new. Iralene is now his stepsister, another Willux. Why is her name here? What does she have in common with specimens?

  Below her name is another placard: MIMI WILLUX. It too is new, freshly polished, shiny, no spots of rust or tarnish.

  This is what Iralene wanted him to find. The secret within the secret within the secret—what layer of secrets is he in now? He doesn’t want to know what’s inside these small rooms.

  He knocks lightly.

  There’s no answer.

  He knocks again. “Iralene? It’s me, Partridge.”

  Again, no answer.

  He turns the knob and opens the door.

  There’s a gust of cold from the room; in fact, the air is the coldest he’s ever felt it in the Dome
. He touches the wall with the flat of his palm, looking for a switch. His hand hits a button. The room lights up.

  And there are two six-foot-tall capsules in a bare room. The capsules are fogged, their glass grayed with crystalline patterns of ice. Partridge walks up to one. He rubs the glass with his hand. A face frozen, completely still.

  Mimi Willux.

  Suspended. That’s the word she used.

  He staggers backward, running into the door. Ageless. This is how She saves time by preservation. Why is Mimi suspended? Is this how she stays young looking? Some cryogenic state, some self-induced hypothermia?

  Iralene. He walks up to the other capsule. He lifts his hand, gathers his courage, and then wipes away the iciness. The capsule is empty. He presses his hand to the glass and realizes there is no humming motor keeping it cool.

  Where is she? Why would they do this to her? She’s just a teenager. Or is she? Partridge remembers the way she looked at him when he guessed her to be only sixteen. Are Iralene and Mimi both much older than they seem?

  He runs out of the small room, shutting the door behind him. There’s no exit down this hall. He runs back the way he came, his legs still weak. As he finds the brightly lit edge of the living room and starts to enter it, the room crackles. There’s a pop of light. A bright flash. And then the room darkens. It’s a basement. Nothing more. He sprints halfway across the empty room. No doors. No windows. But now he sees a piano shoved under the stairs. A real piano with real keys and pedals and everything. A dream version of the one that had been stripped bare at the warden’s house, where he last saw Lyda.

  Lyda. He’s glad she isn’t here. What would they do to her?

  He takes the stairs two at a time. The terra-cotta is gone. His door is open. Hadn’t he closed it behind him?

  He walks into the room, which is bare except for a few stark furnishings—a plain bed, a bedside table, an old lamp, a wardrobe.

  Iralene is there by the window, which is open, but there’s nothing beyond it—no ocean, no moonlight.

  On the bed, there’s a metal key—the key to his collar.

  “I saw it, Iralene,” he says. “I saw what they’re doing.”