Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “You don’t even really know,” she says. She turns and looks at him. “You can’t really understand it all.”

  “Who’s down there? How many?”

  She looks at the window casement, rubs it with one hand. “I can’t even begin to explain. There are so many things I’m not supposed to understand.”

  He walks over to her and takes her hand. He needs to know that she’s real. Her hand is trembling. “Why do you do it?”

  She looks at him as if he should know the answer to this question. “We exist only when needed. The cold slows any damage to our cells. My mother and I can both stay young.”

  “For my father?”

  She rips her hand away from him. “For our own self-esteem! This is for us! Not your father, not you. It’s so we can feel good about who we are—inside and out.” Her voice is high and ragged in her throat.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She walks to the wardrobe, opens it, and pulls out a suit on a hanger and then two shiny black shoes by their heels. “You’ll need to fit in.” She walks back to him and shoves the suit and shoes at his chest. She turns her back, and he starts to undress quickly. “I overloaded the system with requests—India, China, Morocco, Paris, the Nile. It will repair itself quickly. You need to hurry.”

  He puts on the pants and zips them, pulls on the shirt and jacket without buttoning them. He loops the tie around his shirt collar. “Socks?” he says.

  She walks back to the wardrobe, searches the single drawer at its base. “There aren’t any.” She looks like she’s going to cry. “An oversight! I can’t believe it!”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He buttons his shirt now and shoves on the shoes. He goes to the bed, picks up the key, feels the iron collar for the lock, fits the key in, and turns.

  The collar pops open. He throws it on the bed, the key still in it, and rubs his chafed neck.

  “You can walk the ledge outside of the window to the fire escape,” she says as she walks over to him. She lifts the ends of the necktie and starts looping it into a knot. “Then you can run.”

  “Come with me,” Partridge says. “You don’t have to stay here.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “Of course you can. You don’t even have a collar.”

  “I don’t have one because they know I’d never leave.” She tightens the knot around his neck.

  “Iralene, they’ll know you arranged for the system to go down. They’ll know you helped me out of here.”

  “I was being honest when I hit all those buttons. I really want to go to India, China, Morocco . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “I don’t trust my father. I don’t know what he’ll do to you.”

  “Go, Partridge. Just go.”

  “I won’t forget this, Iralene.” Partridge goes to the window, climbs out onto the ledge, and, still gripping the frame, says, “Thank you.”

  “It was our secret,” she says. “We shared it. It was ours.”

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “Go.”

  He walks down the ledge, foot over foot. The Caribbean breezes are gone. The air is static again. He climbs onto the fire escape in his shiny, thin-soled shoes and looks down to the cement below.

  He looks up and sees a building of windows. None of them are lit.

  PRESSIA

  STARS

  PRESSIA WALKS QUICKLY UPHILL toward the dormitory lights. The night is blustery. She pulls her collar up, crosses her arms, tucking the doll-head fist out of sight, the way she used to in the market. She can feel the burn on one side of her face like it’s fresh. Brigid—half beautiful, half ugly. It’s as if Willux ordained it, and he did ordain it, in a way, by burning and mutating them all. He was forged by fire—what did that mean? He was made new. The survivors weren’t.

  She walks along the side of the building and glances quickly into lit windows, not wanting to pry but needing to find Wilda. In one, a soldier’s studying some papers. In another, there’s a kitchen with people working in a steam so thick that some of the windows are opaque.

  Finally she comes to a dimly lit window with only one small bed and a chair. The door to the hall is open. A guard paces back and forth. A nurse dozes in a chair. And there is Wilda. She’s in bed. Her skin still looks creamy and clear. She’s asleep, but even so, Pressia sees the trembling bedsheet.

  Pressia pushes away from the window and slides down the wall onto the cold ground. Pressia knows what DNA is. It’s why she has her mother’s freckles and her father’s dark, almond-shaped eyes and shiny hair. The survivors are changed, marked, down to their very DNA. It’s why babies who’ve been born post-Detonations aren’t born Pure. The double helix of snakes and DNA—how are the two related?

  She looks up at the sky. The stars are lost in the cover of ash. The constellation Cygnus is up there somewhere. She wishes she could see it. She imagines what it was like to see stars every night, to take them for granted. She knows that sailors never took them for granted. They used them to navigate. Stars, with their fixed constellations in the sky. Her grandfather told her that they used to wish on them, and that the brightest ones were often not stars at all but planets. “Twenty point sixty-two, forty-two point oh three, NQ-four,” she whispers into the air.

  And then she stands up, abruptly. Navigation. The stars were used to help people find their way. The coordinates 20.62, 42.03, NQ4 don’t exist just in the sky. They could direct someone on earth too. The constellation of Cygnus—is there a dome on earth that is connected to those coordinates? These are things she barely grasps, but Bradwell might understand them.

  She starts walking quickly downhill, back toward the stone cottage. Her feet naturally start to run. She runs so fast that her coat kicks open. It flaps on either side of her like wings. Brigid, the swan, searching for Cygnus, the swan. For a moment, she hopes to take flight.

  She sees the orchard and light streaming from the windows of the cottage.

  As she gets close, she hears voices coming from the other side of the door. She wonders at first if they’re from one of Fignan’s videos, but they’re too loud and crisp. She hears El Capitan and then Helmud’s echo.

  She opens the door and steps inside. Bradwell is standing by the bed, holding Fignan under one arm. El Capitan and Helmud are beside him. Their backs turned to her, they’re talking urgently.

  On the table, there’s a pile of the robotic spiders sent down from the Dome—some whole, some in parts.

  “What’s going on here?” Pressia asks.

  “We got one,” El Capitan says.

  “One what?”

  “Have a look,” Bradwell says and backs away from the cot.

  Pressia approaches slowly

  El Capitan steps out of her way. “Consider it a gift.”

  Pressia sees one of the Special Forces soldiers, lying on the bed, his head wound in gauze. His eyes are open but he looks hazy. He’s long and lean, too big for the cot, his feet stretching far beyond the end of the mattress. Both arms are heavy with machinery and guns. His jaw is so large that he’s like a different species. And maybe he is. He looks at Pressia and smiles.

  She says, “Hi.”

  He struggles to sit up, leaving a fresh splotch of blood on Bradwell’s pillow. It’s too much effort and he falls backward.

  “What happened to him?” Pressia whispers.

  “He’s Hastings, Partridge’s buddy. And he’s all good now,” El Capitan says. “We just had to debug him and take out the ticker. One of the nurses up at the dormitory did it. She was a little nervous, but nothing exploded, so it was worth it, right? I mean, here he is. He wanted out! He’s ours now!”

  “Ours,” Helmud coos as if talking about a newborn.

  Hastings closes his eyes and seems to drift to sleep.

  “What in the hell are we going to do with him?” Pressia whispers.

  “I won’t mind having his muscle and guns on our side,” Bradwell says, “but I hope
he’s got some information in that huge head too.”

  El Capitan shrugs. “I’m just kind of proud. He’s like a trophy or something, isn’t he?” He crosses his arms on his chest.

  “You came in breathless,” Bradwell says. “What’s going on?”

  “I had this thought while I was out there,” Pressia says.

  “About what?” Bradwell asks.

  “The formula—where it might be hidden. A long shot, but . . .” She walks to the table and picks up a spider and holds it in her hand. “Stars are used for navigation. Twenty point sixty-two, forty-two point oh three, NQ-four could be directions meant for someone on earth. Is there a dome—and not just any dome, but an ancient one, an important, holy one—that is connected to the coordinates of Cygnus?”

  Bradwell joins her at the table and sets Fignan down on it. He asks him to show the constellation. Fignan brightens. Stars twinkle in the dusty air.

  “It’s not enough,” El Capitan says.

  “How would you know anything about star coordinates?” Bradwell says.

  “I was raised among some hard-core survivalists, remember? When other kids were getting their pictures taken with oversize puppets on theme-park vacations, me and Helmud were being taught how to bury guns, for shit’s sake. I know how to track and hunt, start a fire, ward off predators. I know how to record what’s edible and what’ll kill you. We were all back to basics. Prepared for the world’s end. And survivalists know something about stars.

  “Cygnus is an important constellation. It’s also called the Northern Cross, and it’s huge.” El Capitan points at Fignan’s display of the swan.

  “Every day the constellation cuts a huge shape across the sky. It covers too much ground. You’d need to know coordinates on a specific day at a specific time.” El Capitan reaches behind his back, grabbing Helmud’s whittling knife and digging dirt out from under his thumbnail. “Or you’d need to really pinpoint it—down to one star, something that cuts a smaller path. It would help narrow the hunt for holy domes.”

  Fignan shows a flurry of shifting domes and constellations; they pass quickly through the cone of light like a sheath of papers being gusted by the wind.

  Hastings moans and kicks a little but doesn’t come to.

  Pressia sinks to a chair pulled to the table, which is covered in the robotic spiders’ various wires, small ball-bearing joints, metal casings, spokes, and the blank digital displays. “Why did you bring all of this here?” Pressia asks El Capitan.

  “You used to make things, right? Thought you might like to try your hand at something new.”

  Pressia thinks of her prosthetics and her handmade creatures—butterflies, turtles, inchworms. “What’d you have in mind?”

  “How about turning those suckers back into weapons, of your own design,” El Capitan says.

  Pressia looks at all the ghostly girls’ faces lining the walls. Willux. Will-ux. Will-ux. “It’s in Willux’s notes,” she says. “I know it. All those doodled birds and spirals and blubbering stupid poems. It’s in the messed-up parts that make no sense.”

  El Capitan laughs. “Willux doodled birds and wrote poems? The greatest mass murderer in history? This I’ve got to see. Fignan!”

  “Seriously, Cap,” Bradwell says. “We don’t have time to make fun of Willux now.”

  “No,” Pressia says, and she stands up slowly. She’s trying to remember the poem—high in the sky, the truth written, a wing, something holy? “Fignan, I want to see the poem. The love poem about his voice going shy and her beautiful face . . .”

  Fignan searches his databases. He flips to the image of a notebook page. And there it is.

  She reads it aloud: “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.”

  “What a sweetie,” El Capitan says.

  “Sweetie,” Helmud says.

  “She rises every day, like the constellations, to the top of the sky,” Bradwell says.

  “The holy mound,” Pressia says. “That’s our spot!”

  “And what’s that written beneath it?” Bradwell asks.

  “Another version of the line I’d tell you this but my voice is shy that reads, The truth is written up there on high,” Pressia says. “Fignan, show us Cygnus again.”

  The notebook fades and the constellation reappears. Pressia looks at the tips of the swan’s wings. “This one protrudes. It has more of a tip than the other wing,” she says, pointing to one of the wings marked with a K. “What’s this one called, Fignan?”

  Fignan launches into a description of a star known as Kappa Cygni, which runs on the fifty-third degree of the north latitude. It cuts a sixtynine-mile-wide belt around the world, passing over Dublin in Ireland, Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds in England, Hamburg in Germany, Minsk in Belarus, and a number of Russian cities.

  “Fignan, let’s run the fifty-third-degree latitude through the World Heritage Sites,” Bradwell says. “See what kinds of holy mounds pop up.”

  Fignan starts whirring through the data. A map lights up and sites start popping up on it as green lights—four in the United Kingdom, two in Germany, one in Poland, one in Ireland, and two in Belarus.

  “Ten?” Pressia says. “That’s about nine more than I wanted.”

  “Fignan,” Bradwell says, “screen the ones that aren’t really ancient—nothing medieval even—and then search only for domes. No castles, no important battlefields or towns.”

  The green lights in Germany disappear, then Poland, then the two in Belarus. One by one, the lights in the United Kingdom fade out until there’s only one left—in Ireland. Fignan zooms in on a place called Newgrange. They all lean in. A grassy mound encased in white stone appears.

  A dome.

  And then, just as he did when they fed him each correct name of the Seven, Fignan shines a bright green light—confirmation.

  “Are we right, Fignan?” Pressia asks. “Did Walrond program you to give us that green light? Is that what it means?”

  He flashes the green light again.

  “That’s it!” Pressia says. “Newgrange!”

  “But it’s an ocean away,” Bradwell says. “What the hell was Walrond thinking?”

  “Maybe he was thinking he didn’t have many options,” Pressia says.

  “We’d need a ship or a plane to get that far,” El Capitan says.

  “That far,” Helmud repeats.

  Pressia looks at all the faces lining the walls. This can’t be a dead end. The faces stare at her. They’re telling her to keep going, not to give up. “What can we do?” Pressia asks. “There has to be something.”

  “What? Build a plane or a ship tough enough to cross the Atlantic?” Bradwell says.

  El Capitan rubs the back of his neck and sighs. Helmud sighs.

  “But one airship already exists,” Pressia says.

  “What’s that?” Bradwell says.

  Pressia stares at the dome frozen in midair. “Remember how the Message first found us?” she says. “A few days after the Detonations, pieces of paper came flitting down from the sky. We heard the distant rumble of an airship. My grandfather always said that he saw the bulk of its body dip down from the dark sky, just once. A hull. He saw it. It exists.”

  “Okay,” Bradwell says. “But where would we find it? How in the hell would we ever get our hands on that airship?”

  The room is quiet for a moment, and then there’s a voice—a voice that’s deep as a bass drum. “My head,” Hastings says, and he sits up in the small bed. He puts his heavy boots on the floor, leans over with his elbows on his knees. “I have maps in my head.”

  PARTRIDGE

  PAPER SNOWFLAKES

  THE STREETS ARE EMPTY. Partridge is running along the narrow sidewalks under the low lights of Mitchard Theater, past the Good Morning Coffee Shop and elite housing complexes—the Oakes, Hawks Rise, the Wenderly. This is the second level, calle
d Upper Two, far superior to Upper One. From here, he sees Betton West, where he and his father and Sedge once lived. They had a balcony and private access to the roof garden.

  There are curfews and guards making security rounds. The only allowable reason to be out at this hour is an emergency, someone headed straight for the medical center on Level Zero, which is also home to the academy, where Partridge needs to be. The levels above Zero don’t reach all the way to the outer edges of the Dome. For purposes of light and circulation of air, Upper One, Two, and Three are encircled by thick, glass walls running the circumference. He can see the edge of this tier, the curved glass where it ends up ahead of him. To get to Zero, he has to make it to the Dome’s center to a set of elevators. But cameras are mounted in the corners of each elevator. Should he wait until the morning rush so he can blend in, or would that be worse? There’s one private elevator, used by his father and other higher-ups. He’s ridden it a few times with his father, once to Sedge’s small memorial service. But that one is heavily guarded.

  Partridge turns quickly down a dimly lit path—just wide enough for an electrical cart. He stays in the shadow of an apartment building, listening for the whir of a security cart’s electrical motor. The only sounds are his breath, his shoes on the cement, and the occasional circuitous hiss of the monorail in its spiral through each of the Dome’s tiers.

  He passes a restaurant called Smokey’s. He’s eaten there at least a hundred times. Supposedly real food, it always tasted fabricated—soy processed to feel like meat in your teeth, even manufactured bits of gristle. Better than soytex pills, though. The masses living on the first level might never get the chance to eat there—except on a honeymoon. Its decor never changes; neither does the waitstaff, nor the menus.

  He hears a strange ticking noise behind him. He turns and looks but nothing’s there except a streetlight, a moth flitting by the bulb. A moth? Birds sometimes escape the aviary. Sometimes you see a darting of wings, even a real nest propped in a fake tree. But insects are dealt with harshly. The grounds are laced with pesticides. Workers in white suits with tanks of poison on their backs make endless rounds. A moth is a rarity and it unnerves him, maybe simply because he’s not as completely alone as he thought he was.