Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

“I’m going back out,” Bradwell says, handing Helmud the tin. “I think I know where the crack in the tank is. I’m going to get a closer look.”

  “Is it safe out there?” El Capitan asks.

  “Don’t know for sure. So far, it’s been quiet.”

  “I don’t like quiet,” El Capitan says. “Puts me on edge.”

  “On edge,” Helmud says.

  Bradwell stands up. “When I get back, I want you to have eaten all of it.” He nods at Helmud. “You hear that, Helmud? Make sure he gets it all down.”

  El Capitan feels Helmud jerk his head. A nod.

  As Bradwell starts to leave, El Capitan says, “I’d have stayed behind to save you.”

  Bradwell stops. “Thanks.”

  “Thanks,” Helmud says.

  Bradwell crawls out of the cockpit, into the cabin, and up out of its side. El Capitan listens to the scrape of his boots, feels the airship shift a little with his weight. He hears his footsteps overhead and then gone—Bradwell on the ground.

  Helmud pushes the spoon to El Capitan’s lips. “Wait,” El Capitan says, but as soon as his mouth is open, Helmud shoves the food in. El Capitan chews obediently. Helmud’s hand appears again, holding the spoon, ready to shovel it in. El Capitan’s the weak one now. Helmud is the strong one. And, for a minute, El Capitan lets his weight sag against his brother. He lets his brother hold him up, feed him, take care of him. When was the last time anyone took care of El Capitan? Not since his mother was still at home. When he got headaches, she’d take a cool rag and lay it over his eyes, and let him eat gummy candies. El Capitan closes his eyes for a minute. He gives in.

  And that’s when he hears the shout—Bradwell’s voice. “Cap!” The call is loud and short, as if his mouth has been muffled. El Capitan bolts forward, his skull struck by sharp, searing pain. “Bradwell!” he shouts. “Bradwell!”

  Nothing.

  Quiet.

  “Bradwell!” He hears only his breath and Helmud’s, both coming hard and fast. “Bradwell!” he says to Helmud. “He’s gone. Has he been taken?”

  “Taken,” Helmud says.

  El Capitan lurches forward. “We can’t just let him go.”

  “Let him go,” Helmud says. “Let him go.”

  “No!” El Capitan says, getting onto his hands and knees and beginning to crawl to the door. His elbows buckle. He falls to his chest.

  “Let him go,” Helmud says.

  “No!” El Capitan whispers. “No.”

  LYDA

  CHIRRUPS AND GRUNTS

  GROUPS OF MOTHERS are causing distractions in the Rubble Fields and the Meltlands, drawing Special Forces to them. Meanwhile Lyda and a troop are winding through the trees in a long, snakish line in the middle of the night with lanterns on sticks, bobbing over their heads. Groups of four carry small catapults on their shoulders like child-size coffins. Lyda is in the middle. She looks at the women’s faces, distorted by shadows, and wonders if some of them have been chosen to gain entrance into the Dome through the points of weakness. Are they to kill Partridge with a knife, a gunshot, an explosive? Even though she believes that the Dome will not be breached, the mothers scare her. They’re strong, crafty, and violent.

  She’d like to at least try to warn Partridge. At the same time, her instinct to run is undeniably strong. Maybe it’s the baby growing inside of her that makes her want to turn back the way they came, or maybe it’s her own cowardice. When she was escorted out of the Dome, she was sure she’d be raped, beaten, devoured; when no one was there at first, she pounded on the sealed door, hoping to be let back in.

  Now being inside the Dome scares her more than being on the outside. She loves the sooty air, the damp woodlands, the sharp breezes. It’s alive, and she’s alive in it.

  No one has explained to her why she’s here, and she hasn’t asked Mother Hestra, who walks in front of her in the line. Maybe Our Good Mother wants her to see this violence—a punishment for trusting Partridge and defending him in her presence. She worries she’ll be a sacrifice—like Wilda was—as a warning. But no. She represents the mothers—their abandonment—and carries the most precious thing of all to them: a baby. She’s not sure how or why, but she’s a pawn. That’s how she got out of the Dome and maybe that’s how she’ll wind up back inside of it.

  The mothers’ commands are chirrups and grunts. Some signal has been given. The line stops in unison. The lanterns are lowered. The mothers break from the line and move into the underbrush.

  Mother Hestra grabs Lyda’s hand. They move quietly toward the edge of the forest that opens to the Drylands. They crouch behind a thorned bush with waxy leaves.

  Through the stunted trees, Lyda sees the Dome on the hill, cold and sterile, brilliantly aglow. Will the grenades have any impact? In the Dome’s shadow, the grenades seem more like mosquitoes than weapons. “This is only going to make the Dome angry,” Lyda says, pulling her hand from Mother Hestra’s. “Doesn’t Our Good Mother understand how much firepower they have?”

  “What are we supposed to do? Wait forever? Be good and quiet?” Mother Hestra says.

  “This isn’t the right thing to do.”

  “I no longer rely on right or wrong,” Mother Hestra whispers. “I know doing and not doing. Sometimes you must do.”

  Lyda feels Freedle stirring in her pocket. She’s supposed to protect him for Pressia. She should have left him behind, but Freedle is her small, wing-beating protector.

  The leader is searching the Drylands. Lyda assumes they will head out into them, to get as close to the Dome as they can with the catapults.

  At this very moment, Partridge could be back at the academy, walking the halls to his room. Maybe he’s woken up in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep. Maybe he’s thinking of her. She squeezes her hands together, closes her eyes, and thinks of Partridge, as if she can warn him. If they’re connected, truly connected, maybe he’ll be able to sense her warning.

  And then the mothers roll the catapults uphill into the Drylands. Quickly and quietly, they load the grenades into the catapults—like what? Simple apples. Amputated fists. And then they dislodge the safeties.

  When they step back, they say, “Clear,” and another set of mothers releases the locks on the springs. The arms of the catapults eject the grenades.

  As they land, the sound is like a smattering of footfalls. Puffs of dust rise near the outer ridge of the Dome. A few hit the Dome’s hard outer shell.

  And then they begin to detonate. Powerful and concise explosions. Syden covers his ears and cries.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Mother Hestra whispers proudly.

  Once they start, they don’t stop. At first the Dome doesn’t shudder. They’re hitting the air-filtration system dead-on, but it’s sealed.

  And then a door opens—the one Lyda was sent out of, what seems like years ago now.

  A line of Special Forces soldiers pours out in a row—long, sleek, muscled—at high speed and starts tearing downhill toward them.

  “Why aren’t they firing?” Mother Hestra says.

  Lyda’s heart chugs in her chest. “They’d rather get in close and find out who we are.”

  “We want them to get in close.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We want some of us to be captured. We can cause real damage only from the inside. You know this.”

  Lyda shakes her head. “That’s crazy!”

  The mothers continue to load the catapults. They aim at Special Forces. The grenades land, thudding the ground around the soldiers, and then almost immediately explode. Most of the Special Forces scatter, but some stay in formation—as if they’re programmed and can’t react to the new situation. Their bodies are blown up—but not all at once. The grenades aren’t that powerful. They shatter chests, splinter legs, jaggedly tear off an arm.

  Lyda can’t stomach it. This is her fault. She grabs Mother Hestra and begs, “Make them stop! They’re just academy boys! They’re just kids!”

&nb
sp; “They’re Deaths, Lyda. Deaths!”

  Lyda realizes that no one is going to stop this. The mothers will continue to kill the soldiers except for those who broke formation, and those soldiers who have taken cover in the woods will return fire. She hears a shot from a sniper rifle. One of the mothers working a catapult goes limp and falls to the ground.

  Lyda has to stop this. If she runs to the Dome now, the mothers would stop firing. She’s pregnant. She might get shot by Special Forces or captured, but if someone has to get captured, it should be her. She has to get to Partridge and warn him. The baby—she worries about the baby, but she can’t let this go on, knowing that it’s her fault.

  It’s not logical. She doesn’t have it all sorted in her head. She just knows she has to do something, as Mother Hestra said. And so she edges away from Mother Hestra, stands, and starts running.

  Mother Hestra screams, “No, Lyda! Come back!” She then shouts, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  Lyda remembers running down this hill when she first left the Dome—that feeling of not having run since she was little, the freedom of it—and now she’s running back again. She pumps her legs as fast as she can. She keeps her eyes on the Dome.

  A few more grenades go off. She can hear gunshots in the woods.

  She knows that, if she’s lucky enough to avoid getting shot, she could end up back in her old cell with its narrow bed, white walls, untrustworthy clock, trays of food, little pills, and the image of the window, set on automatic to imitate changes of light throughout the day. Her head will be buzzed again, so close they’ll nick her scalp.

  Her mother will be there, her cheeks burning with shame.

  And Partridge—he’ll be there too, won’t he?

  Finally, there are no more explosions, no more gunshots. In fact, it seems deathly quiet. The only sound is the wind tunneling in her ears. Her throat is dry, her lungs cold. Is it bad to run when you’re pregnant? Women didn’t ever run in the academy.

  She can’t hear much of anything over the pounding of her feet and her loud, hammering heart, but then she sees something out of the corner of her eye—a quick blur of motion.

  Don’t look, she tells herself. Don’t look.

  She hears a click and the echo of a ping. She feels a sharp sting in the side of her thigh. She looks down and sees a fine metal prong, much smaller than the robotic spiders. It’s locked onto her leg, piercing her thick wool pants. She manages to take a few more strides, but then her knee buckles. Her leg feels numb. She falls to the ground and rolls to her back. She sees the ashen limbs of spindly trees, the black sky, and then a face—heavy jaw, sunken eyes, nostrils that pulse like gills.

  She lifts her head and looks down at the prong in her leg, her woolens wet with blood around the wound. They could have killed her, but they didn’t. She remembers the pregnant dwarf deer in the woods, her fur soaked with blood, panting, the way she still tried to stand up as she was dying. Mother Hestra told her that they sometimes give birth when attacked. Will she lose the pregnancy?

  “Don’t,” she whispers and lays her head back.

  She’s suddenly very tired. Her eyes drift lazily back up to the sky then close. She feels someone lift her up, cradling her, then running. They’re taking her back . . . home.

  PARTRIDGE

  BROKEN

  NOTHING’S WHAT HE THOUGHT it was and, for some reason he can’t explain, he feels better knowing that this life that he woke up into—which was supposedly his own life—is a lie, as fake as this Nebraska farmhouse. Partridge’s father doesn’t love him. That’s the honest truth. He’s known it all along. He knows that he should reject the idea that his father wants to kill him. That alone should be proof that Iralene is having some kind of nervous breakdown—she’s gone silent and still, sitting with her back against the wall—but, deep down, he believes her.

  His father says he just wants him to enjoy these few days before he starts to hand him vast amounts of power. But his father hasn’t ever wanted Partridge to enjoy himself. And Ellery Willux has never handed power over to anyone in his entire life.

  Ellery Willux—the full name, just thinking it, turns Partridge’s stomach. “My father met your mother before your father was put in jail,” Partridge says to Iralene. “Did you ever have a problem with that? A suspicion?”

  “Are you suggesting your father had a hand in my father’s incarceration?” She shakes her head. “No! You can’t think like that! Your father was married then, Partridge. I’m sure my mother would never, ever get involved with a married man. Your father is your father, Partridge. But my mother is good, deep down. She is good.”

  “Okay, okay!” He knows that Iralene’s no fool. She’s thought it through thousands of times. She knows. Why else would she respond so angrily? There’s no time for that line of thought anyway. Iralene might be right about all of it. If his memory has been swiped, then he knows some truths—on a gut level. And this gives him confidence that he didn’t have before. Something is kicking in. He doesn’t have much time.

  He wonders, How can you hide something to find later if you know you won’t even know to look for it? You’d have to hide it someplace where you know you’d find it—by accident.

  He walks quickly around the room, his eyes ticking across the floorboards, the headboard, the cross on the wall. He flings open the wardrobe, hoping that he created a note that might fall to the floor. He pulls open the small drawer in the bedside table then slams it shut. He runs into the bathroom, turns on the faucet in the sink and the tub. He pulls the cord on the old-fashioned toilet. It pops. There’s no rush of water.

  It’s broken.

  He closes the lid on the toilet, steps up on it, opens the box attached to the wall. A piece of tightly folded paper falls to the floor.

  “I found something,” he calls to Iralene. He jumps down, picks it up. He sees the words To: Partridge. From: Partridge written in his own handwriting, which strikes him as some joke. He unfolds the paper and finds a list.

  You escaped the Dome. You found your half sister, Pressia, and your mom. Your mom and Sedge are dead. Your father killed them.

  You’re in love with Lyda Mertz. She’s outside the Dome. You have to save her one day.

  You’ve promised Iralene to pretend to be engaged. Take care of her.

  In this apartment building, there are living people, suspended in frozen capsules. Save them. Baby Jarv might be among them.

  You don’t remember this because your father made you have your memory of your escape erased. He caused the Detonations. People in the Dome know this. He must be taken down.

  Take over. Lead from within. Start over again.

  He walks out of the bathroom and into the farmhouse bedroom in fake Nebraska. He lifts the paper in the air. His hand is shaking. He looks at Iralene. She says nothing. He takes the cast off and stares at his stub.

  “That happened to you outside the Dome,” Iralene tells him. “Weed fixed it so it’ll grow back.” He puts the cast back on his trembling finger.

  Glassings. He can trust Glassings. With what? World History?

  Everything is too huge to process.

  Iralene stands up and takes a step toward him.

  Partridge thinks about the idea of having a half sister. He thinks of his mother, Sedge—alive, dead, alive, dead. “Lyda,” he whispers, remembering her singing in the choir. That was the face he saw earlier in his mind, looking at him from the rows of girls. He feels that ache again. He was right—not love, lovesickness. “Lyda Mertz.” He stares at Iralene.

  She nods.

  His chest feels like its breaking wide open—an ache, a release. His father, murdering his mother and his brother? Murdering the world? “My father isn’t perfect, but he didn’t cause the Detonations. I can tell you that much. That’s almost as crazy as me escaping the Dome.”

  “It’s not crazy,” Iralene says. “And you know it.”

  He feels suddenly furious. “You don’t expect me to believe . . .”
r />   “You can stop him. Glassings told you how.”

  “Glassings. I’m supposed to trust him.”

  “And I wasn’t supposed to trust him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She whispers, “I’ve played both sides.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I had no choice. You think survival is something only wretches have to think about, Partridge? Don’t be so naive.”

  “What? Iralene, I thought—”

  “I am who I am at any given moment, Partridge. That’s the only way you can know me.”

  He doesn’t know what to say. “But I trust you, Iralene. I do. You’re good. I know you are. I can feel it.”

  She closes her eyes, as if she’s very weary. She smiles. “You might be the only person I’ve ever really known,” she says. “Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I do know what you mean.” To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he’d have ever thought it would. “Listen, Iralene. Tell me. How do you know Glassings?”

  “I was taken for lessons. I’m not an academy girl but I had to be educated if I was going to be worthy of you. But they took me to lessons with all the ones they didn’t quite trust. I was there to test them, to listen. And I did.”

  “Did you report?”

  “I reported that I was bored. That my education was pointless. Glassings gave me something to give to you.” She hands him a small, plain white envelope. He opens it. There’s nothing but a capsule inside.

  “What is it?”

  “Poison—deadly and untraceable. You have to give it to your father. The capsule will dissolve within forty seconds and the poison will leach into his system quickly. He will die within three minutes.”

  “I can’t kill my father. If you murder a murderer, you’re just as bad.”

  “That’s what you said the last time you were asked.”

  “Well, at least I’m consistent.”

  “You might change your mind. I can prove your father’s darkness,” she says, “if that’s what you need. It’s here. It’s in this building.”