Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  Our Good Mother puts a gentle hand on Lyda’s stomach. She looks at Mother Hestra and says, “A baby we can all hold. The first since the Detonations.”

  “The first,” Mother Hestra says. “It will be beloved.”

  Our Good Mother sighs and puts a finger to the baby mouth in her arm. She fits the finger into it and rubs the lower gums. “Two baby teeth,” she says. “Did I tell you that? After all these years, two small white buds.”

  PARTRIDGE

  FIBERS

  WHEN HE WAKES UP, Iralene is gone. Her side of the bed is perfectly made and she’s reset the room to the beach, which gives him a surge of panic in his gut. Will Iralene be good to her word and switch it back to the farmhouse when he comes back? If not, he’s screwed.

  Breakfast is set out for him—again, real food: oatmeal and pink juice. The cameras watch him with their glassy eyes. He stares into them, as if to tell those watching that he’s not afraid. It’s a lie. He’s so scared he can barely eat. He walks to the window and sees the old man combing the beach with his metal detector. He leans out the window and shouts, “Hey, stupid fake old man! You’re doomed! You’ll never find a damn thing!”

  The man turns, smiles, and tips his hat.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “Come in.”

  He assumes it’ll be Iralene, as she seems to be with him at all times. But it’s Beckley’s voice behind the door. “Here to take you in,” he says.

  “Already?” Partridge says. “Can’t you give me a minute?” He’s not sure what he needs a minute for. He’d like to turn the room into the farmhouse and check to see if the note’s still in the toilet box. Without Iralene, he can’t.

  “They need you to come in now,” Beckley says.

  “Goddamn it,” Partridge says. He hears the rattle of the key in the lock.

  Beckley swings the door open. “Ready?”

  Within an hour, Partridge is back in the medical center, scrubbed and dressed in a hospital gown, lying on an examination table in an operating room, alone.

  He hears the familiar click and hum of the air-filtration system. Straight up in the ceiling there’s an air vent. The air pours down on him and he wishes it were more like the feel of wind. The air vent was his escape route before. But now he has to stay. He has to have faith in Arvin Weed.

  A technician walks in. “Here to put on the straps.”

  “Straps?” Partridge sits up—an instinct. He tries to laugh. “Come on, now. Do I look like I need to be strapped down?”

  The tech is expressionless. “Dr. Weed said it was necessary.”

  Weed ordering straps seems like a really bad sign. “Doctor? Weed’s no doctor.”

  “He is a doctor now.”

  “Look, I don’t need straps.” Partridge puts his hand on the technician’s chest. The technician stares down at it and back at Partridge. And Partridge realizes that this is no regular tech. He’s been through enhancements, and before Partridge knows it, the tech has flipped Partridge’s arm across his body, paralyzing him with pain. His breath comes in short grunts.

  With a few more quick motions, the tech has him strapped in. He stands at the foot of the gurney until Arvin walks in, wearing full scrubs, even a mask, so Partridge can see only his eyes. “Give us a minute,” Weed says. “I want to talk the patient through the process, answer any questions.”

  The technician walks out.

  Partridge and Arvin are alone, though there are still cameras. Partridge is desperate for some reassurance, even if it is coded.

  “Why’d you have him strap me down? I don’t need to be strapped down.”

  “We have to restrain you when we put you under anyway,” he says, glancing at one of the cameras in the corner of the room.

  “Tell me this is going to work out all right,” Partridge says. “Can you do that?”

  “This is really groundbreaking work here, Partridge, and we will be recording it for posterity.”

  “All of it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can’t I have a real moment alone with you?”

  “Why would you want that?”

  Does this mean Weed won’t be able to give him any reassurances or that he never intended to in the first place? “You know why I’d want that, Weed.”

  “Well, how about I explain the science of memory and this process?”

  He doesn’t care about science right now. But he’s afraid that if he says a word, his voice will crack. He could break down, right here—and it would be recorded for all posterity He decides to let Weed talk while he steels himself.

  “Short-term memory is chemical. But beyond that quick recall, memory gets lodged in your brain. It’s anatomical. Basically, we’ve learned how to turn on and off specific neurons and neuron patterns in the brain. When memories form, they create these patterns. So if we turn off the right ones, we can deaden those memories. It’s called optogenetics. We talked about it once, when new advances were unveiled, remember?”

  “Um, it rings a bell. Kind of.” In fact, Partridge was good at tuning Weed out when he got on a scientific jag. Now might not be the best time to confess to this.

  “First we select and then genetically alter the chosen neurons by using viruses bearing certain kinds of DNA. You know, microbiology, and, in your case, we will then introduce into the neuron a susceptibility to be deactivated by specific colored lights. We’ll go in with extremely fine optical fibers, which we will thread—very carefully—into your brain. And we’ll hit one of those patterns. In this way, we can then deactivate the neuron and its circuit by sending light signals through the fibers. And voilà!”

  The idea of someone entering his brain with fibers makes him sick. “Voilà. You go into my brain and flash some lights.”

  “That’s the short version.”

  He swallows hard. “Lovely.” Arvin told him at the party that once the damaged pathways cut off access to the deep memories—the silt at the ocean floor—there’s a short period of time when you can still get at them before they’re sealed off forever. How long will he have? “Tell me something, Dr. Weed. How long do I have to swim down deep?”

  “Swim? What are you talking about?” Arvin pulls out a needle. “I’m going to hook you up to an IV here, Partridge. So just relax.”

  “How long, Weed?” Partridge begs, turning his head, not wanting to see the needle go into the soft skin in the crook of his elbow. Arvin uses some tape to hold it in place.

  “Quiet now.”

  Partridge looks at the stent in his arm, his skin, red and pinched from the tape, bulging around it. Arvin is tapping the tube that connects the stent to a bag of clear liquids hanging from a metal post. Soon, the room will go dark. Partridge will be gone, under, out. “How long to swim to the ocean floor?”

  “Ha!” Arvin calls out to anyone who might be listening. “He’s starting to hallucinate a bit. He’ll be under soon enough.”

  “How long?” Partridge says again. “Tell me!”

  Arvin’s masked face begins to blur. He taps Partridge’s pinky cast. “How long do you think it’ll take to grow back the rest of the way? A week or so, right? Amazing. It’ll just come back—an entire pinky,” Weed says, almost singingly “An entire pinky. An entire pinky.”

  An entire pinky, an entire pinky, an entire pinky, Partridge thinks. Is Weed telling him he’ll have one week to dredge up the memories? Just a week or so? He’ll have to find the list of seven simple truths by then. But even if he believes them, he’ll have no clue that he has only seven days to remember what was lost. The lights sway and flicker overhead. The room jerks and dips. Arvin’s face is so blurred now that Partridge isn’t sure that it’s him at all. A few more people in masks walk in, shifting around him.

  Partridge can’t go under. He can’t let them put fibers in his brain. He arches his back, fighting the straps. He shouts to Weed, but he’s not sure if any sound is coming from his mouth at all. The people in masks keep working, stoically, methodically.<
br />
  He bucks and thrashes, thinking about the old man with the metal detector on the beach. Will he forget about him completely? He called him stupid, fake, doomed. What if the old man is real and he walks that beach every day and he thinks that Partridge is fake? Would it make a difference?

  He is going limp. He closes his eyes, hears beeping. Is it the metal detector? He sees the man on the beach again, looking up at Partridge in the window. When he smiles and tips his hat, Partridge sees that it isn’t an old man. It’s a young man. It’s Partridge himself, happy to wave to a fake stranger from a real beach—with real things buried beneath real sand—and beyond him, an endless stretch of ocean.

  PRESSIA

  AIRSHIP

  TO AVOID HEAPS OF RUBBLE, they move south into Washington, down Rock Creek Valley. More than once they hear low moans, sharp cries, some of which sound human. Birds wheel overhead and perch heavily on limbs. Some have an oily sheen. A few have reptilian heads, and one is more like a bat, but large, with a swiveling head and quick jaws, snapping air. Its wings, tufted with light patches of downy fur, chop the wind. It caws like a crow.

  After a little over two miles, Pressia sees a chopped tower, its top half fallen and shattered. There are piles of brick and stone, some arches still intact.

  “What was this place?”

  Fignan states their coordinates. “Thirty-eight degrees, fifty-five minutes, fifty seconds North. Seventy-seven degrees, four minutes, fifteen seconds West.”

  “Enough with the coordinates,” El Capitan says. “What was it?”

  “The Washington National Cathedral.” Fignan flashes an image of a beautiful structure with arches, flying buttresses, and spires.

  “A church,” Pressia says.

  “Only much bigger,” Bradwell says. Pressia knows that he’s drawn to churches. He owes his survival in part to the crypt of Saint Wi. “It was massive. People must have come from everywhere.”

  “Let’s go see it,” Bradwell says.

  El Capitan stares at him. “Why?”

  “It’s elevated. We need a better view to see the best route in.”

  They start to climb. The mound of rubble is enormous.

  “Your parents didn’t believe in God, did they?” Pressia remembers that they didn’t go to church, refused to be card-carrying, but God?

  “They believed in facts; they had faith in the truth. In that way, they were devout.”

  “And what do you believe in?” Pressia asks. She’d like to believe in God. She almost does. Sometimes she can feel something beyond all of this. She likes to look up at the sky, the one thing people in the Dome don’t have, which makes her feel sorry for them.

  “What if God and the truth are the same thing?” Bradwell says. “What if the truth is at the center of everything? If you believe in that, you believe that the truth will win out in the end. It will reveal itself . . .”

  “Like God?” Pressia asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “During the Before, the box we stored God in kept getting smaller and smaller. On the one hand there was science. And with all that science, Willux thought he could play God. And then on the other hand, there was the church invented for their own purposes—where the rich knew they were blessed because they were rich. Once one person’s better than another, it lets people get away with all kinds of cruelty.” Bradwell shrugs.

  “The box we put God in blew up in the Detonations like everything else,” Pressia says. “Or maybe it just kept getting smaller until only a speck of God still exists, maybe only an atom of God.”

  “Maybe that’s enough for God to survive.”

  El Capitan has gone ahead and calls to them. “We’ve got a view! Come and look!”

  Pressia and Bradwell scramble up the rubble. Mixed in with it are pieces of multicolored stained glass. Even dusted with ash, the colors are still vivid. Pressia picks up a shard. It’s sharp-edged but its surface is smooth. It once was part of something beautiful, she’s sure, something to inspire people.

  Once they’re at the top of the cathedral’s rubble, Pressia looks down into its sunken top. And there, lost down the deep hole of the airy cathedral itself, is what once was a green copper roof, collapsed in on itself. Shining up from gritty layers of ash and dirt are some yellows, some reds, and shattered, senseless, patternless stained glass. But Pressia’s heard that art is supposed to reflect the world, which means these broken panes are still art.

  “So this is what’s left of the city,” Bradwell says, staring out at the view.

  Pressia turns and looks down at the flattened landscape ahead of them. The city has been overtaken by a swampy, cold marshland. Beasts and birds scuttle through the wet underbrush. Huge tracts of rubble lead to the spectral remains of a severed obelisk. It’s a nub and a line of cracked stone—maybe marble, now blackened.

  “The Washington Monument,” Bradwell says. “The pencil.”

  “Where’s the White House?” Pressia asks.

  “It would be out there,” Bradwell says, pointing just north of the fallen obelisk. “It’s gone.”

  “And the museums?” El Capitan says, Helmud gazing excitedly over his shoulder. “You promised me a field trip.”

  “There they are. Archives, National Gallery, American History, Natural History, Righteous Red Wave Museum . . . See all that blasted stone in a line to the east of the pencil?” Bradwell points to heaps of rock. “The Declaration of Independence could still exist. It’s supposed to drop, at a moment’s notice, into an underground vault. Supposedly it could have survived a direct hit.”

  “Look there,” El Capitan says, pointing a little farther east. “Isn’t that what we’re looking for?”

  The US Capitol sits up against the horizon like a delicate soap bubble. It’s rickety, yes, but it’s there, on a small hill that rises up from the marshland. It’s a broken dome made of pale stone, now gray. Its roof is mostly gone, fissured and cracked. It’s missing chunks from its walls and therefore seems airy and, from a distance, almost lacy Pressia thinks of the way moths eat wool, leaving thin, gauzy holes.

  And through those holes, Pressia can see that the dome isn’t empty at all. Something sits inside of it, glints of metal. The airship—its bulky frame, its hull. Could it really be in there?

  “Look, Helmud,” El Capitan whispers to his brother. “There it is.’’

  Pressia wishes her grandfather could see this. He told her many times about that day after the Detonations when the airship skimmed through the clouds, droning in the sky, and how all those white pieces of paper fluttered down, each printed with the Message. They thought it was something to give them hope—the Dome, from which their brothers and sisters were watching benevolently They were going to join them again one day in peace.

  And now, as beautiful as the Capitol Building is and the promise it holds—that airship—it feels like a betrayal, a deep and hateful wrong. It’s not even surrounded by chain-link fence like Crazy John-Johns. It’s just sitting there, unprotected, proof of Willux’s arrogance. He never believed a wretch would make it this far alive, and if they did, he probably didn’t believe they’d have the courage to steal it.

  Even though El Capitan is close, he stands on the other side of Bradwell, and so Pressia slips her hand into Bradwell’s. Their fingers weave together as if they’ve done this a million times, as if it’s already a familiar habit.

  “It was here all this time,” Bradwell mutters.

  “Damn,” El Capitan says.

  “Willux didn’t build that with his own goddamn hands,” Bradwell says. “The people built it. People he thought of as expendable.”

  “People like us,” El Capitan says.

  “It’s ours,” Pressia says. She squeezes Bradwell’s hand and he squeezes back. “It belongs to us.”

  “Hell yes,” El Capitan says.

  “Hell yes,” Helmud says.

  “So,” Bradwell says, “let’s take what’s ours.”

  They move quickly back into the
creek valley and, within half an hour, their boots are wet from tromping through marshes. They’ve had to wade through some swamps, thigh-deep on Pressia. The water is icy. Pressia’s feet ache from the cold.

  “They used to call this area Foggy Bottom,” Bradwell says. “Somewhere around here.” True to its name, the air is misty. “Let’s stick to the high ground.”

  This will mean climbing the rubble around them. El Capitan, weighted by his brother, looks worn out already. “You sure?”

  “I like being able to see what’s in the water,” Pressia says.

  This is the deciding vote. They climb, but the rubble holds its own dangers as they don’t know if Dusts and Beasts have survived out here. They veer east toward the Capitol.

  It starts to rain a little. Pressia hunches her shoulders against the damp. Bradwell’s hair beads with droplets. He shakes it roughly. Soon they’re surrounded by thin saplings. The water, cold and dark, covers their boots again.

  Pressia is the first to hear the growling. She stops and crouches.

  “What is it?” El Capitan whispers.

  A roar rips through the air. It’s louder and deeper than any other growl Pressia’s ever heard. “I don’t know what that is, but it’s big.”

  “I just thought of something,” Bradwell says, “about that field trip, Cap.”

  “What?” El Capitan says.

  “The National Zoo.”

  Something glides over Pressia’s boot. She sees a large, blunt, gnarled, lizard-like head, crusted in dulled glass—maybe Plexiglas. She freezes. The Beast is probably three feet long. Its tail swishes as it swims on. Pressia knows what were once caged in zoos—exotic animals, both beautiful and ferocious. “This isn’t good,” she says.

  The Beast roars again, and then lets out a series of sharp, highpitched yaps. Small, slippery Beasts start paddling madly away from the noise. Some have giant ears and rodent-like faces. Others have rubbery coats and are snakish but also otter-like in shape. The birds take flight. The air is alive with wings—small, slick birds with darty eyes. One is massive and pink. Its broad wings are magnificent, its beak askew. Deer—or are they deer?—spring up and dart. They’re hooved and swift. Some are black, others striped. Some have antlers—flat, sharp, entwined, or coiled. They have various hides—furred, woolly, slick and reptilian, burned and scarred, dotted with shards of glass and rock. They’re light on their feet, bounding over rubble, then disappearing.