Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  Mother Hestra walks into the room. She stands like a pillar beside cot number nine, staring down at Lyda. Syden coughs as if to get her attention, but she can’t look at them. She’s too distraught. “Were you true to your word?” Lyda finally says. “Did you look for them?” Pressia, Bradwell, El Capitan and Helmud—that’s who she needs now.

  Mother Hestra says, “They’re gone.”

  “Gone?” Lyda looks up at Mother Hestra. “Gone where?”

  “None of our spies within the outpost know, but they’ve gone far. Past our own boundaries. Farther than we’ve known anyone to go.”

  “They’ll get killed out there.”

  “Whatever drove them must be important and worth the risk.”

  Lyda’s tired of people risking their lives for what’s important. Partridge is gone. Illia is dead. And now the others have left. She’s alone. “What about Wilda?”

  “Who?”

  “A girl. Just a little girl. The one they made Pure.”

  “There are many like her now.”

  “Did she go with them?”

  “No.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “None of the Purified children are okay, Lyda. And Deaths did this to them. They’re shutting down. It’s only more reason for us to fight.” Lyda shakes her head. “What were you like during the Before?” she asks Mother Hestra. “Do you remember being that person?”

  “I was a writer.”

  “A writer? What did you write?”

  “I wrote two kinds of things: those the government allowed and those the government did not allow.”

  “‘. . . The dogs barked loudly. It was almost dark . . .’ Did you write that?”

  Mother Hestra nods. “It was about my sister who tried to run. She lived out past the Meltlands. She didn’t live a double life like I did—one for the government, one hidden away for myself. She was part of the resistance. They found her. They set dogs after her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lyda says. “How . . .”

  “How did it get burned onto my face?”

  Lyda nods.

  “I was holding the page I’d written up to the light of the window. The white of the paper reflected the light. The black of the ink absorbed it and burned the words into my skin. I was living a lie. I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone about my sister. I was going to write it and put it in a drawer. And now I live with that sin of cowardice on my face forever.”

  Lyda looks down at her hands. They now have calluses and nicks. She doesn’t want to be Pure anymore, and now, because of this baby, she isn’t and that feels right.

  “Your friends,” Mother Hestra says, “led us to important things. The outpost has been working hard. We found what they’ve been making and then went in and took them. Do you want to see?”

  Lyda sighs and looks up. Part of her wants to stare at this wall—in particular a water stain that looks a little like the head of a bear—until all the noise fades and it’s over. Done. But she can’t. “Show me.”

  Mother Hestra reaches into her hunting sack, browned with dried blood, and pulls out a hunk of hard, black metal.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it was a robotic spider sent from the Dome to kill us. But now it’s a grenade that we will use to kill them.”

  “The Dome has withstood the Detonations. Do they really think that handmade grenades are going to make a difference?”

  “There’s one more thing that we found,” Mother Hestra says. “The very thing that we need the most, tactically. These will make all the difference.”

  “What?” Lyda can’t imagine what would make any difference in a battle against the Dome.

  Syden reaches into his mother’s hunting sack this time. He pulls out two flattened, ashen pieces of thick paper. One of them is colorized on one side with the faded print of an advertisement. She recognizes it immediately. The SPRUCE UP YOUR HOME! poster that she took from the broken Plexiglas on the metro train. Syden offers them to Lyda. She takes them and unfolds them on the cot, running her hands over her own drawings of the girls’ academy, the rehabilitation center, and Partridge’s of the Dome’s interior, floor upon floor, in exquisite detail.

  “Our maps.” She thinks of lying on her stomach in the train car across from Partridge, the way he edged across the maps on his elbows and kissed her. She lifts her hand to her lips. “Partridge.”

  “Yes, Partridge—the Death,” Mother Hestra says. “He did good work.”

  Lyda and Partridge were talking about Christmas. She told him about her father, who once gave her a snow globe, and she realized that she was a girl trapped in the globe. He told her about his Christmases at the Hollenbacks’ apartment. He promised her a gift: a paper snowflake. He asked her if that was all it took to make her happy and she’d said Yes, but added this and you.

  “Partridge marked how he got out and perhaps where you were forced out as well—the points of weakness,” Mother Hestra says.

  Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should. Lyda blinks tears onto one of the maps then wipes her eyes.

  “The grenades,” Mother Hestra says, “should be launched at the points of weakness.”

  Lyda looks up. “No,” she says. With the maps and the grenades, could the mothers actually be able to do some real damage? The Dome is a fortress, yes, but when Partridge escaped, he proved that even fortresses have holes. The maps aren’t enough to bring down the Dome, but they may be enough to get inside—armed—to hunt down Partridge, as Our Good Mother has vowed, and kill him.

  Frantically, she folds the maps and gathers them in her arms. “They’re wrong. They’re fakes. He was tricking you.”

  “Really?” Mother Hestra says.

  “He’s a Death. You can’t trust him.”

  Mother Hestra grabs Lyda’s wrist. “Don’t do this. I know what you’re up to.”

  “You taught me never to trust a Death!”

  Mother Hestra says emphatically, “I know what Deaths do when they work their way into a woman’s mind. Stop trying to save him. These are the points of weakness!”

  Mother Hestra’s grip is steely She pulls sharply on Lyda’s arm, and the maps fall to the floor. The maps that she helped Partridge make could allow them to get at him—to murder him. “Points of weakness,” Lyda whispers.

  EL CAPITAN

  BLURRED

  THEY’VE FLOWN THROUGH two days and one night, and now it’s getting dark again. El Capitan’s eyes are blurry with exhaustion and his nerves jaggedly charged with adrenaline. Helmud has slept and woken and slept again. El Capitan jerks him awake. They’re getting closer. He briefly opens the near-airtight vacuum seals on all three tanks, allowing for an intake of air to lower their altitude. No longer the endless glassy ocean below, a spotlight under the nose reveals they’re gliding over the dark outlines of hills, valleys, rocky crests, dark lakes, and wrecked cities, tracts of hobbled houses and buildings.

  “See that, Helmud? A different country. Never thought you’d see a different country, did you?”

  “Did you?” Helmud asks.

  “No, I did not,” El Capitan says.

  The navigation console offers a topographic map, but it’s useless. The Detonations altered the land. El Capitan will have to land the airship soon. “How much farther?” he asks Fignan.

  Fignan lights up. “Seventeen point two miles. Due east.”

  “Okay,” El Capitan says. “Let’s start looking for a flat stretch of land.” The airship bucks, jerking El Capitan backward, as if Helmud were tugging on him sharply. “What the hell was that?” he says, his heart starting to race.

  Fignan beeps, unsure what to do. “Sixteen point one miles!” he blurts, as if this is going to help.

  The airship smoothes out, and so he sighs. “Okay. Just a glitch. It’s fine now.”

  But it isn’t. It happens again, more sharply El Capitan gets on his feet. The back of the airship lolls; the nose tips upward. Helmu
d hunches low on El Capitan’s back.

  “Jesus, find the part of the manual about emergencies! Do you think it’s something in the aft-bucky?” El Capitan asks Fignan.

  “In case of emergency,” Fignan says, “in case of emergency. In case of engine failure in the aft-bucky . . .” Is he flipping pages of the manual? Fignan’s lights are all on. “Check the navigational display.”

  El Capitan sits back down and runs his eyes over his console. A red light flickers on an outline of the airship’s basic structure, indicating a hairline leak. He turns up the pumps in the failing tank, getting rid of the air as fast as it’s being taken on. The red light is still flashing, but the fracture is small, contained. As long as he monitors it, keeping the balance of air, the airship should hold on until he can land it.

  “I have to bring it down.”

  “Bring it down!” Helmud says.

  The airship slows again. The aft-bucky is taking on even more air. The airship is dragging. It lurches backward.

  “What the hell is going on in there?” Bradwell shouts.

  “Small leak. Taking on air!”

  And then suddenly Bradwell is hulking in the door frame. “Small leak? What does that mean?”

  “We’re fine. Go sit down. Buckle up.” The fact that El Capitan couldn’t strap himself in—what with Helmud on his back—hadn’t worried him during takeoff, but he wouldn’t mind having a buckle in place now.

  “You need help!” Bradwell says. “You need a copilot.”

  “I’ve got Fignan, plus a copilot permanently installed.” He points to Helmud on his back.

  “Cap,” Bradwell says. “Let me do something—”

  “You can’t!” El Capitan says. “Go back to your seat. That’s an order.”

  Bradwell staggers back to the cabin. El Capitan can hear him talking to Pressia. Is Bradwell undercutting him while his back is turned?

  El Capitan doesn’t want to bring it down any farther from his mark than he has to. They’re less than fifteen miles out, but every mile they have to make on foot could be overrun with deadly creatures—impassable. He’s got to bring them in tight.

  The spotlight hits a strange herd of loping creatures—Beasts, Groupies, Dusts, or something else altogether? They disappear into a small stand of trees.

  The airship rolls to one side. El Capitan pulls hard in the opposite direction to straighten it out. A whistling sound is coming from the aftbucky, and the navigation display shows a new, longer fissure.

  “What? Why? Fignan!” El Capitan shouts. “Maybe I’m overworking the pumps and it’s too much pressure!”

  “Too much pressure on the pumps can result in cracking, especially if the airship has been cruising at high altitudes for durations exceeding forty hours,” Fignan reports.

  “Damn it! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Fignan doesn’t say anything. His lights dim, as if he’s expressing some measure of guilt.

  “Stay with me here, Fignan! You’re all I got!”

  “You’re all I got!” Helmud says.

  “Don’t get all jealous, Helmud!” El Capitan shouts at his brother.

  There’s a cracking sound—loud and sharp. Something has broken and come loose. The airship jerks again, more sharply this time, sending El Capitan and Helmud rocketing back in their chair.

  “Cap!” Pressia shouts. “What’s going on?”

  God, he doesn’t want to fail, not with Pressia here—not with her life in his hands. “I’m going to land her! We’re taking on too much air.”

  He has no choice but to crank the pumps on the good tanks, hoping not to lose altitude too quickly and end up in a tailspin. He pulls himself to his feet and stares down at the topographic map and at the large, bulky land slipping underneath the ship.

  Up ahead there’s a ring of greenery and verdant woodland, but on the other side it seems relatively flat. He doesn’t think he can clear it; there’s a meadow, though, on this side of the greenery that he’s set his sights on. It’s only nine miles off target. “The wind is coming from the northwest!” he tells Fignan. “How do I land this sucker?”

  “It is best to steer the airship into the wind before touchdown.”

  “Right, okay.” El Capitan noses closer into the wind and angles toward the center of a field. “It’d be nice to have a landing crew on hand.” He crests a hill, and, once over the flat land, he starts to hover, nose straight into the wind, with the propellers pushing against it to keep the ship steady.

  Still, the tail is weighing them down. He eases up on the pumps on the other two tanks. The airship starts to sink, quickly. “Not too fast! Not too fast!” he urges. He extends the pronged feet that they’ll land on. “Easy does it.”

  “Easy does it!” Helmud says.

  But the back of the airship is too heavy. They’re going down too fast now. He applies pressure to the pumps of the intact tanks, but it comes as a burst, popping the nose up. “Hold on!” he shouts. “Brace for landing!”

  Helmud grips his brother’s shoulders, but El Capitan can’t brace. He’s still trying to soften the blow of the landing, kicking in the propellers, cutting the front tank, and riding the middle tank hard. “Brace for landing,” Helmud whispers hoarsely. “Brace for landing!”

  When they hit the ground, El Capitan’s head slams into the throttles. He’s knocked to the floor. He’s dazed, one eye immediately blurred by blood. The middle tank is still pumping, which makes the airship still somewhat buoyant. It gets kicked by the wind, sending the whole ship to its side. The windshield hits something, cracks, and splinters. Capsizing, El Capitan thinks.

  He’s shoved against the glass side of the cockpit. He struggles to stand since the airship still has life.

  “Brace for landing!” Helmud shrieks. “Brace for landing!”

  “It’s okay, Helmud! It’s okay, brother!” He reaches over his head and slams the final working pump and the propellers with his fist. The airship breathes a sigh of relief and bobbles as if it’s on the ocean floor. The navigation console is a blank screen.

  Blinking blood from one eye, El Capitan drags himself on his elbows to the windshield. The world on the other side of the glass is dark. He notices the silence. He calls out, “Pressia!” but his voice is weak.

  And then everything is blackness.

  PRESSIA

  BLOW TO THE HEAD

  PRESSIA IS TILTED, almost upside down, secured to her seat by her lap belt, which now cuts sharply into one of her thighs. Her face is poised by the porthole. She can see only thick, sharp blades of grass. The airship has rolled to its side by gravity, no longer buoyant.

  She runs her hand under her sweater and checks the vials. Unbroken.

  “What the hell happened?” Bradwell says. He’s held in place by his seat belt too, but he’s tall enough to reach out a hand and support himself by pushing against the side of the curved wall above the porthole.

  “Crash landing.” She finds the smooth handle of the belt buckle, but if she releases it, she could land hard.

  Bradwell pushes both of his hands against the ceiling. “Unhook my belt, then I’ll help you with yours.”

  She fits her hand into the flexible silver handle of his seat belt and pulls it up. His arm strength cushions the fall. He stands on the side wall, hooks his one arm around Pressia’s waist as she wraps her arms around his neck. She loves that he’s broad and strong, his muscles toughened by years of brute survival. He pops her seat belt loose and helps her down.

  They clamber to the cockpit, the airship rocking under their shifting weight.

  El Capitan is sprawled out, unconscious, his arms spread wide, a gash on his head, his blood pooling like a dark halo. He’s out cold.

  Helmud lifts his head from over El Capitan’s shoulder. “Brace for landing,” he says quietly. “Brace for landing. Brace for landing.” His cheek is red and wet with his brother’s blood.

  “Jesus,” Bradwell says, “what do we do?”

  Fignan sits
beside them. “Apply ice to reduce swelling. Apply pressure to stem the flow of blood.”

  Pressia kneels beside El Capitan. She pulls her sweater sleeve down over the heel of her hand and holds it to the wound. “Get a blanket,” she tells Bradwell.

  He climbs back through the door quickly.

  “Where’s the medical kit?” she asks Helmud.

  “Brace for landing,” Helmud says again, his eyes wide and skittish.

  “It’s going to be okay, Helmud,” Pressia tells him.

  Bradwell reemerges and hands her a blanket. She folds it and holds it to the wound. A navy-blue blanket, it quickly takes on blood, turning a shade darker.

  “Check his eyes,” Pressia says to Bradwell.

  Bradwell lifts one of El Capitan’s lids. “What am I looking for? Dilation?”

  “Yes,” Pressia says. “And hopefully they’re dilating in sync.”

  Bradwell lifts both lids together. He moves back and forth, blocking Fignan’s light and letting it in. “No such luck.”

  “He has a concussion,” Pressia says. “We can’t leave him behind.”

  “We can’t abandon the mission,” Bradwell says.

  “Brace for landing,” Helmud says.

  El Capitan’s eyes flutter.

  “Cap?” Pressia says. “Are you okay?” She touches his cheek with her doll head.

  He blinks up into her eyes. He squints. His eyes swim away and float back to her face and then he locks onto her eyes. He tries to whisper something, but at first his voice is too hoarse.

  Pressia bends closer. “What is it, Cap?”

  He lifts his hands and cups her face gently. “Pressia,” he whispers, and then he kisses her. It’s a brief kiss—soft and gentle on her lips.

  Pressia is stunned. She’s not sure what to say. She’s holding her breath. Her eyes are wide open. She remembers El Capitan singing the love song, and then later, on the dam, how they were all fighting over the definition of romantic.