Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “Isn’t Arvin on our side?”

  “He was. But Willux has great pull. I’m sure he’s made him promises. Who knows if Arvin will be strong enough?” Glassings looks at Partridge. “It’s why you have to be careful.”

  “I’m not going to get pulled in by my father and I’m not going to kill him. So where does that leave us?”

  “If you change your mind . . .”

  “But we can’t even communicate.”

  “We’re around.”

  “I guess I should go.” Partridge stands up and walks to the ladder.

  Glassings rises too. “You know,” Glassings says, “I don’t have a son, Partridge. I probably never will have a child, what with the regulations. But if I did, I’d want him to be like you.”

  Partridge’s throat is too tight to speak. He looks down at his shoes and then his eyes catch Glassings’, who smiles at him—a smile tinged with both sadness and pride.

  Partridge smiles. “Beautiful barbarism—you said that once during a lecture about ancient cultures. It still applies to us now, doesn’t it?”

  Glassings nods.

  “See, I was listening to your lectures. Some of it stuck.”

  “Be careful out there.”

  Though it makes no sense, Partridge gives him a salute.

  Glassings salutes back.

  Partridge climbs the ladder, opens the trapdoor, and climbs back up onto the stage, closing the trapdoor behind him. He walks quickly farther backstage, following exit signs. He finds a door, pushes it open, ready to breathe the cold air.

  And then he’s outside.

  But that’s just it. No one’s ever really outside here.

  PRESSIA

  TEACUP

  IN THE BLACK SEDAN that once belonged to Ingership, courtesy of the Dome, they’ve made their way through the Deadlands teeming with Dusts. El Capitan is driving, hunched toward the wheel, Helmud perched on his back, busy whittling a bit of wood. Hastings, as navigator, sits beside El Capitan, his long legs crammed in tightly against the glove box. It turns out that Willux owns a fleet of airships built to survive the Detonations. Hastings is taking them to one that doesn’t have high levels of security. Hastings didn’t say why it isn’t highly protected; maybe he doesn’t know.

  Dusts fan cobra-like hoods, arch spiny backs, lift claws and teeth from the earth itself. El Capitan plows into them. It pains him to kill the Dusts this way but only because he loves the car so damn much. He groans every time it takes a hit, which makes him an emotional and erratic driver. Pressia and Bradwell, in the backseat, grip the headrests, the doors, the seats. Twice, their elbows brush each other when the car jerks to one side. She can’t stop wondering what would have happened if she’d let him finish telling her why he was going on the trip. What if she’d walked around the table to meet him on the other side? Would he have kissed her? She let the moment go. At the time, it felt like a relief, but now she wants the moment back; and at the same time she wants this gnawing in her stomach to stop. What is this gnawing? Love or fear or both?

  Pressia has placed Fignan between her boots. He’s now sampled the DNA of El Capitan, Helmud, and Hastings—stealthy pinpricks. He didn’t share the results; they weren’t anyone he was looking for.

  Bradwell and Pressia keep their guns pointed toward the shut windows, ready to use them. The cracking of the Dusts’ bodies and the sand, dirt, and soot that then explode and pelt the car are deafening.

  The car’s body is rutted with long scars, deep pocks, dings, a few old bullet holes. The front fender was already kinked from ramming Ingership’s porch and pummeling through Dusts, and now it’s mangled. The back bumper is gone, the front grille corroded. Each Dust they hit scours the chrome and the paint job. Pressia says, “Maybe if you didn’t slam into every Dust, the car would have a better shot of holding up.”

  “If this car dies, each dead Dust is one less that’ll kill us,” El Capitan says defensively. “You want to drive?”

  “Up ahead!” Hastings shouts. “See them?”

  “Yeah,” El Capitan says. He smashes through a small herd of Beasts with lean faces, dark eyes, and gaping maws. The creatures are stronger and stranger the farther they get from the Dome.

  The car hits a bump and the tires find a remnant of highway—gravel pinging the undercarriage. It’s enough of a road to cut off the Dusts. A few snap at the edges and then slowly retreat into the earth.

  “Where are we headed?” El Capitan asks Hastings.

  “Northwest.”

  “Can you get a little more specific than that?” Bradwell asks.

  El Capitan shakes his head. “There’s a little problem with our navigator . . . ”

  “What’s that?” Pressia asks, leaning forward.

  “Hastings and I sat down last night to work out the route and we hit a snag. He’s got full programming—a knowledge of maps, internal compass, highly developed sensory perception, full automatic weaponry—but also behavioral coding. His strand of loyalty coding will allow him to give us only so much.”

  “Loyalty,” Helmud says.

  “Do you mean that Hastings can’t tell us the actual location of the airship?” Bradwell says.

  “I can’t give you everything you need,” Hastings says. “I can fight my coding only so much and lead as far as I can.”

  “No offense, Hastings”—Bradwell leans over the front seat, and Pressia knows that he’s about to say something offensive—“but how do we know that your loyalties aren’t still with the Dome and you won’t turn on us?”

  “Turn on us?” Helmud says.

  “You don’t know,” Hastings says.

  “Your coding is strong,” Bradwell says. “It’s probably drilled into your cortex, the stem of your brain, imprinted on your cells.”

  “Easy now,” El Capitan says.

  “Cap, if he decided suddenly to open fire on all of us out here, who could blame him? He’s been programmed to hate us, to see us as the enemy, right?”

  “He’s going to get us there, one step at a time. He’s fighting for it. It takes willpower to overcome that coding,” El Capitan says. “We should be thanking him, taking what we can get.”

  “What we can get,” Helmud says.

  “I think it’s smart to admit that there’s a risk,” Bradwell says. “I’m not saying I don’t trust him. It’s just—”

  “That you don’t trust him,” Pressia says.

  “I don’t trust the Dome. I think it’s stupid to underestimate them.”

  “Maybe it’s stupid to overestimate them too,” Pressia says. “Maybe that’s how they get away with so much. Hastings might be a good example of why we shouldn’t overestimate them.”

  Hastings shoots her a look, as if insulted.

  “I mean, it could be that the human part of him is stronger than the Dome thought. Maybe emotions are a real force. Maybe there are some things you can’t alter.”

  Bradwell looks like he wants to say something, but then Hastings says, “Don’t trust me. Will it change anything?”

  Hastings is right. They’re already about six miles into the Deadlands. They need him.

  “I can tell you,” Hastings says, squinting in concentration, “for one thing, this airship works in some ways like old-world airships.”

  Bradwell lifts Fignan, asking him to fill them in. Fignan explains how old-world airships worked on the principle of filling a balloon, or something like it, with a gas, usually hydrogen or helium, that’s lighter than air. The crafts, in fact, floated.

  “Airships,” Helmud says wistfully.

  El Capitan scratches his head. “But Willux must have known that after the Detonations no one would have access to those gases for fill-ups. It can’t work that way.”

  “It doesn’t,” Hastings says. “They created an extremely thin, lightweight material that was rigid and strong enough to hold something approaching a one hundred percent vacuum without being crushed by the air pressure around it.”

  Fignan searches
his data. “Endohedral fullerenes.”

  “What are those?” Bradwell asks.

  Fignan lights up a quick video. “Fullerenes,” a narrator explains, “are complex, variously shaped molecules of carbon, sometimes called buckyballs. Both terms were named in tribute to Buckminster Fuller, scientist, inventor, futurist.”

  “Good ole Buck!” Pressia says quietly, remembering that’s exactly what Willux wrote on one of his notebook pages.

  “And how does that relate to us?” El Capitan asks.

  Hastings tells him that under Willux’s watch, the small molecules had been grown large and combined with other molecules to make the thin, strong, rigid skin of the airship’s vacuum tanks. “To rise up, it simply pumps air out. To descend, it lets some back in, weighing down the airship.”

  “Wow,” Bradwell says, clearly impressed.

  Pressia stares out over the Deadlands. “They were so smart, and look at what they did with all that intelligence.”

  Hastings gives El Capitan his limited understanding of instrumentation and navigation. And Bradwell asks Fignan for a map of the area. The map is an old one of highways, churches, office complexes. Fignan gives facts about the geological makeup, weather patterns in this region, the population per square mile—all of it pre-Detonations.

  Out the window, there’s the barren landscape. That world is long gone. Pressia’s tired of his pre-Detonations facts. They seem only to illustrate all that’s been lost.

  Bradwell interrogates Fignan about Cygnus—the constellation, various swan species classified under the term, mythology. Fignan’s voice drones on, soft and low.

  They pass old fast-food-chain signs on tall poles, now fallen, one after the next, like trees felled in a storm. Some of the signs shattered. Others cracked like eggs. Whatever was within them—tubes of light? electrical wires?—has been destroyed or stolen. The wind has pushed the dust into drifts that seem to be eating the rubble of hotels, restaurants, and discount outlets. Still, Pressia sees small signs of human life—an occasional house made of a roof blasted loose from a gas station, primitive lean-tos on the wind-protected side of a partially demolished Hardee’s.

  And as Pressia keeps her eyes on the passing landscape, Fignan is retelling a Greek myth about two close friends, Cygnus and Phaeton, who were always in competition. They challenged each other to a chariot race across the sky. But they both flew too close to the sun. Their chariots burned and they fell to earth, unconscious. When Cygnus woke up, he searched for Phaeton and found his body trapped by the roots of a tree at the bottom of a river. Bradwell touches her arm. “Did you hear that?”

  She knows what he’s thinking—Novikov and Willux, the accidental drowning that might not have been an accident at all. She nods.

  Fignan goes on. “Cygnus dived into the water to retrieve Phaeton’s body for a proper burial. Without it, his spirit wouldn’t be able to travel to the afterlife. But Cygnus couldn’t reach him. He sat on the bank and cried, pleading with Zeus to help him. Zeus answered, saying that he could give Cygnus the body of a swan, allowing him to dive deeply enough to pull Phaeton from the river. But if Cygnus chose the body of a swan, he would no longer be immortal. He would live only as long as a swan lives. Cygnus became a swan, dived into the water, pulled up Phaeton’s body, and gave him a proper burial so Phaeton’s spirit could make it into the afterlife. Zeus was so moved by this selflessness, he created a constellation in the image of Cygnus—a swan—in the night sky.”

  “Willux would have been Cygnus. Novikov was Phaeton.” Pressia turns to Bradwell. “Do you think Willux was really trying to save him?”

  “The myth is weirdly prophetic,” Bradwell says. “If Novikov had the formula, if he was really already experimenting with reversal—successfully—on his own body, and if Willux killed him, then he did become mortal. He sealed his fate. Like Walrond said . . .”

  “He killed the one person who could have saved him,” Pressia says. “Even if he didn’t fully understand this myth, he must have heard it. I mean, he chose the swan as a symbol for the Seven. He had to have researched what the swan means—it’s not crazy to imagine that he came across this stuff.”

  “I think Walrond was right about Willux’s obsessive mind, the importance of Cygnus—the constellation—the tip of its wing passing over Newgrange,” Bradwell says. “I wasn’t sure before, but, I don’t know—I feel like I’m starting to see the patterns of Willux’s mind.”

  Pressia looks out at the remains of large factories hulking to the west. Corrugated roofs peeled loose, the factories look both airy and gutted. “I wonder who survives out here.”

  “I don’t know, but they must be tough.”

  “No more road,” El Capitan says.

  The road crumbles away. The Dusts are rippling on the horizon. Pressia tightens her grip on her gun, holds it to her chest.

  In the distance, there’s a large, skeletal, serpentine structure—a tall neck that ends abruptly, a backbone that dips toward the earth, and then a loop, like the old-fashioned letters her grandfather taught her, cursive. “What’s that?”

  “It’s an amusement park,” Hastings says. “We’ll have to pass it to the east.”

  Bradwell leans forward over the front seat. “Jesus. I know that place. I went there as a kid. It was brand new, but really retro. You know how the Return to Civility loved anything that felt old-world. It was called Crazy John-Johns. There was a clown—a huge clown with a bobbing head—a Tilt-A-Whirl, and old-style roller coasters. Not just the simulators in theaters, but the real thing. Real wind in your hair, filling up your lungs. My father took me there. We rode Rolling Thunder and the Avalanche.”

  “Crazy John-Johns,” El Capitan says. “I remember advertisements. My mother never could scrape together enough money.”

  “Mother,” Helmud says, tucking away his knife.

  Pressia thinks of her grandfather, Odwald Belze, who told her, again and again, about a trip to Disney World that she took during the Before—a story he invented to give her a life, one he knew nothing about.

  “It’s inhabited,” Hastings says. “The roller coaster is a lookout tower. Can you see them?”

  “Who?” Pressia asks, but then, at the top of the roller coaster, she sees a few small figures sitting on the vertical tracks, probably having scaled them like a ladder.

  “The last time I was here,” Hastings continues, “they proved to be dangerous. They have a power source and gunpowder left over from fireworks displays and—”

  The sedan suddenly jerks sideways and spins a tight circle. The back tires churn dust. The car jerks to a stop.

  “And traps,” Hastings says.

  “What the hell?” El Capitan shouts. He pulls the rifle strap over his and Helmud’s head, reaches for the handle.

  “Don’t go out,” Hastings warns.

  “Go out,” Helmud whispers.

  “I’ve got to see the damage.” El Capitan opens the door and steps out. He crouches by the front tire then rises and rubs the frame. “Damn it!” he shouts. “Why would someone do this to my baby?”

  “My baby!” Helmud shouts.

  “What’s wrong?” Bradwell calls.

  The Dusts are not far off. The air is still.

  “Someone dug some kind of something right into the ground,” El Capitan says. “A pink hole with teeth! Some giant freakish mouth!”

  Pressia slides across the backseat. “This I have to see.”

  “Me too,” Bradwell says.

  “Be careful and quick,” Hastings warns as the two of them get out of the car.

  The punctured tire sits in what is, in fact, a perfectly round large pink hole, maybe made of fiberglass. Inside it, there’s a set of large, sharp spikes, a few of which are dug deeply into the dead tire. A tarp, now loose, flutters from it like a wild veil. “Smart,” Pressia says. “They covered it with a tarp, let the sand and ash cover it, and waited.”

  Hastings steps out of the car. He stands a few feet from them, his eyes scann
ing the horizon.

  El Capitan kicks the ground, cursing loudly.

  Bradwell knocks on the heavy-duty fiberglass with his knuckles. “It’s a teacup,” Bradwell says. “From a teacup ride.”

  “A teacup ride?” El Capitan says. “My car was taken down by a teacup from a Crazy John-Johns teacup ride?”

  Pressia thinks of her grandfather’s stories of his childhood—the Italian festivals, the goldfish in plastic bags given as prizes, the cannoli, the games and rides. She looks across the terrain between them and the amusement park’s chain-link fence. The Dusts are huddling nearby. “Do you think there are more traps?”

  “Yes,” Hastings says. “Get back in.” He locks his vision on the amusement park now. “On this route, we lost three Special Forces soldiers—heavily armed and combat-ready.”

  “Three of them? Dead?” El Capitan says, stunned.

  “What’s the plan?” Bradwell says.

  “The plan was not letting my car get eaten by a teacup,” El Capitan says.

  “How many more miles, Hastings? Can you tell us that much?” Pressia asks.

  “Thirty-five point seven two miles.”

  “We won’t make it all in one day now,” El Capitan says. “We’ll have to try to get around this and find a place to sleep for the night on the other side.”

  “If we make it to the other side,” Bradwell says.

  “If there is an other side,” Pressia says.

  “If,” Helmud says.

  “Do you hear it?” Hastings says.

  “What?” El Capitan asks. His anger has shifted to fear.

  But there’s no need for an answer. They all feel it, up through the soles of their boots—the earth rumbling under their feet.

  PARTRIDGE

  CHRISTMAS TREE

  PARTRIDGE WAKES UP to the face of Hollenback’s five-year-old daughter—Julby Hollenback. This was the room he used to wake up in during the winter holidays he spent with the Hollenbacks. He can hear Mrs. Hollenback singing in the kitchen; she always did love songs about snowmen and sleigh rides. Julby’s older now. Her two bottom front teeth are missing.

  He came here last night just after leaving Glassings. He walked up to Hollenback’s apartment and saw the small knocker in the shape of a lion’s face, the academy’s mascot, draped in curlicue ribbon—something Mrs. Hollenback teaches the girls to make in the History of Domesticity as an Art Form. Below the ribbon were two snowflakes—paper ones, like those taped to the school’s plate-glass windows. It’s as if Lyda were here with him all the time. And for a moment he imagined the family asleep, cocooned in their sheets. He didn’t want to wake them up.