Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  The bodies, suspended.

  “Jarv,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says, “Jarv.”

  Iralene leads Partridge quickly out of the room and through the hallway, down a set of stairs, across a large, empty cement room with cracks in the walls, exposed pipes, and, oddly enough, an upright piano. It all feels eerily familiar. He’s been here before. His mind might not remember but his body does. A chill shoots through his spine.

  He doesn’t want to see his father’s darkness, but he has to. He can’t believe anything else on the list unless he can prove at least one thing—see it with his own eyes.

  She holds his hand and leads him down a hallway lined with doors. Each door has a placard with a name on it.

  They pass door after door and with each one, he feels sicker inside. “What is this place?”

  “I’ve spent much of my life here, suspended. So that I stay fresh and age almost imperceptibly over time.”

  “You’ve spent much of your life here? How old are you?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “The Detonations hit only nine years ago. How old can you be?”

  “This technology predates the Detonations, Partridge. My mother and I aren’t bound by years like others are. We started early.”

  “How early?”

  “I started doing sessions when I was four years old.”

  Her face is clean. No lines, no wrinkles. Her eyes are clear and bright. “Jesus, Iralene. How old are you? Just tell me.”

  “I’m your age, Partridge. I’ve been your age longer than you, that’s all. And I’ll be your age for as long as I can.”

  “Iralene,” he whispers. “What have they done to you?”

  She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

  Partridge walks slowly down the row of placards: PETRYN SUR, ETTERIDGE HESS, MORG WILSON. “But preservation isn’t why all these people are here. It’s not why Jarv is here. His parents—I know them. They’re good people. They wouldn’t try to preserve him.”

  “What was wrong with him?” Iralene says flatly.

  “Nothing,” he says defensively, but then he looks at Iralene sharply, because of course there was something wrong with Jarv. “What do you mean?”

  “The little ones come in sometimes because there’s something not quite right. Why waste resources on them? But on the other hand, we’ll need more people when we’re in New Eden. Once there, we’ll have enough for everyone. He can grow up when we get there. They didn’t euthanize him, Partridge. That’s the good news.”

  “That’s the good news? That they didn’t kill him for being a little slow to develop?”

  “So he was slow.”

  “I guess. His parents were worried. There were some issues. I don’t remember what exactly. It was last winter.”

  HIGBY NEWSOME, VYRRA TRENT, WRENNA SIMMS.

  “His little collection of relics,” Iralene says. “Some of them are people who should have been executed for wrongs, for treason. But he kept them out of sentimentality.”

  They take another turn and there’s a bank of windows instead of the doors. It’s like some twisted version of a nursery you’d find in the labor and delivery wing of a hospital. There are glass-enclosed, egg-shaped beds. The children are inside them. All are outfitted with tubes in their mouths to provide oxygen. He can hear a hum of electricity.

  He jogs down the row, looking for Jarv, and finally he finds him—fourth from the end. His name is clearly marked on the pod. There’s an infant in the pod beside him, but the last two are empty—waiting. Jarv’s cheeks are pale, and his lips around the tube have a bluish tint, as do his eyelids. But his arms and legs are still pink and fleshy—though that flesh is probably turgid. There are crystals on his kneecaps; one foot is covered in a silvery skin of ice, as if he’s wearing one lace sock.

  “How do we turn it off?” He walks down the row of glass. “Jesus! How do we get them out?” He finds a metal door. He yanks on it. It’s locked. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

  “Even if you could get in, it would be too dangerous for you to bring him out of his suspension. It can be done only by a doctor.”

  “Where’s a doctor? I can talk him into it. I can get him to reverse this!”

  “There’s no need for doctors to be here around the clock. The doctors show up when necessary. Those in suspension have their vitals monitored by computers. And if one fails, well, it’s never a tragedy, is it? The tragedy has already come.”

  Partridge leans his forehead against the window. “So his parents don’t know?” He starts to cry. He should have earlier, probably, when he read the note, but this is when it hits him.

  “They don’t know where he is exactly, but they probably have an inkling.”

  “They can’t know.”

  “Sometimes the young ones are released for a while, brought over to the medical center. The parents come in for visits. It’s rare. They have to have special ties to secure such permissions.”

  “This has to end.” He pushes away from the glass. “This can’t go on.”

  “He has plans for you too, Partridge. Worse than this.”

  Partridge looks at her. “It doesn’t make sense. You told me that he wants to kill me, but why would he be setting me up as a leader, as his successor, if he’s just going to off me?”

  “I don’t know.” She turns away.

  “You’re lying—you’re holding something back, aren’t you?”

  “You can end this. You know how.”

  “He’s the killer. You want me to become one too?”

  “I want you alive,” she says. “Keep the capsule on you. Forty seconds and its shell will dissolve and then within three minutes it will be over. Only you can get close enough to him to make it happen.”

  The capsule is in the envelope. It’s folded in his pocket. “I’ll keep it, but I don’t intend to use it.”

  “There’s someone else I want you to see,” she says. Partridge follows her to the end of the hall and around another turn. “I haunt this place when I can. I don’t want them to all feel completely alone. It’s not like you think in there, really. The researchers don’t think that we’re capable of knowing anything when we’re in that state. But I think we know when someone is with us, when someone visits.”

  They turn down another hall—more names on placards. FENNERY WILKES, BARRETT FLYNN, HELINGA PETRY.

  “I know when new people arrive, and when the circumstances are strange, I pay attention.”

  “Who is it?” Partridge says. He knows that his mother and brother are dead, a fact he made clear to himself.

  “It happened while you were out of the Dome. He was in from the medical center. I remember him because he’s different from the others. For one thing, he’s older than most people in the Dome. As you well know, the elderly aren’t worthy of resources and aren’t likely to even make it to New Eden anyway. But the other thing”—she slows her steps, looking closely at the names—“that caught my eye was that they didn’t put the oxygen tube in his mouth. They sealed his lips and, instead, put the tube directly into his throat.” She stops at a door and points to the placard. “Odwald Belze,” she says. “Do you know the name? Belze?”

  He feels the name stir some ill-lit portion of his brain, a spark of recognition. Belze. Belze. He wants to remember something more. He touches the placard with his hand. The cast on his pinky clicks. And, for a split second, he thinks of one eye—small and glassy. It’s open. Click. It’s closed. Click. It’s open again.

  The small eye of a doll.

  Iralene walks to the end of the hall. She puts her hand on a large metal door—locked and barred, an alarm system mounted on the wall. “And this one, heavily secured, unmarked. Who knows what’s on the other side of this door.”

  PRESSIA

  LIGHT

  FIGNAN COUNTS DOWN the miles and then the yards and then Pressia sees it, atop a grassy hill. Newgrange. The large mound hasn’t been obliterated
, wiped off the face of the earth. It remains.

  “How much longer?” she asks.

  “Six minutes and thirty-seven seconds,” Fignan says.

  The sky is already beginning to turn a hazy shade of pink. She runs as fast as she can. The bruised welts from the thorns ache with each step. Fignan’s light jostles in front of her, bouncing along the ruts and ivy. The cold wind stings her cheeks. Her lungs burn from pumping the chilled air—cleaner and clearer here.

  She sprints to the side of the mound, puts her hand on the massive, mossy stones, touching the spirals carved into the rock, then runs her hand along the cold quartz wall. She climbs a set of steps. Nearly lost in a curtain of ivy, the entrance is guarded by boulders, but not blocked. She grabs a handful of ivy and pulls it down as hard as she can, clearing not only the doorway but the window that sits on a stone ledge above it.

  The sun is edging up, approaching the horizon. She runs down the dark passageway—about sixty feet long and so tight that at one point she has to turn sideways to pass. She comes to a small chamber shaped like a cross. There are large basins, too. For what purpose? She can’t imagine. She thinks of the Saint Wi statue in the crypt where Bradwell first started to pray. She thinks of the boy in the morgue and her grandfather, who performed so many funerals but never had one of his own, and of her mother and Sedge, whose bodies joined the soil of the forest floor.

  “The ceiling,” she whispers to Fignan. He shines the light overhead, and there is a corbelled arch, the stones neatly fitted in place to keep the whole structure tight and sound. She wishes she weren’t alone. She wants Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud to see this. She imagines the ghostly girls, their faces staring out from the walls of the stone cottage. They would be proud of her.

  I’m here, she wants to tell them.

  She tells Fignan to power off. “There can’t be any light.”

  And seconds later, it’s dark.

  She sits down, her back to one of the walls. She hears Bradwell’s voice in her head: The box we stored God in kept getting smaller . . . until only a speck of God still exists, maybe only an atom.

  Right now she’s sure that at least one atom of God survived, because how else can she explain that—as the sun climbs the sky and then pours light into the small window above the door and shines down the passageway, illuminating a bright, glowing strip on the floor—she’s sure that this is a holy place?

  Fignan sits beside her. “You’re not a box,” she says, repeating Walrond’s message. “You’re a key.” But the truth is she has no idea how he’s going to become a key. She feels a rise of panic. She’s put her faith in a box. A box filled with information, but a box nonetheless.

  Fignan seems to know his role. He buzzes to the middle of the chamber. A thin glass lens rises up from his center on a long, thin arm. The lens is almost as wide as Pressia’s doll-head fist. Fignan holds the lens steady. The light thrown from the sun pours through the lens.

  Pressia holds her breath. She feels the cold stone through her coat. She keeps her eyes on Fignan as the sunlight fills the lens and illuminates the floor.

  At first, she sees nothing—only the floor made of pulverized stones or maybe hard-packed clay.

  But then, there’s something iridescent. Some pattern on the ground shines.

  She hears a voice. Footsteps at the entrance. The light flickers as someone’s body casts a shadow for a second or two. Pressia holds her breath. Go away, she urges. Leave!

  The floor illuminates again, and there are three interlocked spirals—altogether they’re about a foot wide. Pressia crawls to the spot on the ground and touches the spirals. She pushes on the hard dirt, hears the voice again down the long, tunneled entrance, but she can’t make out any words. She wants to dip back out of sight into the alcove of the cross, but she can’t afford to hide.

  “You’re a key!” she says to Fignan, and with a buzz, small tools emerge from the box. He starts to dig into the ground where the iridescent spirals are lit up. He strikes metal, revealing three concentric circles, like the stone carvings. “What is this, Fignan? What are these shapes?”

  Fignan doesn’t respond. It’s as if he’s concentrating on absorbing the light.

  She hears footsteps pounding toward her. She tells Fignan to turn off his power again. The chamber is lit by the rising sun. Pressia picks up Fignan, slips around the corner of one of the alcoves, and holds him high over her head, pressing as hard as she can with her doll-head fist.

  “Who’s there?” It’s a man’s voice. “Who is it?”

  The figure, short and stocky, is standing just a foot away, breathing hard, his white shirt lit up by the morning sun—a shirt so bright white that she’s not sure she’s ever seen something that brilliant. For the briefest flash of a moment, she hopes that this is her father—Hideki Imanaka—and she freezes. But she knows the chances of this are impossibly small.

  She draws in a breath, arches her back, raises Fignan as high as she can, and brings the box down—heavy and sharp—on the back of the man’s head. He pitches forward and catches himself with one hand on the stone wall. He reaches up and touches the blood that’s already seeping from the gash, wetting his thick gray hair, and stares at his hand. He isn’t fused to anything, but he isn’t a Pure either. The pitted scars of burns ride up one side of his face, but his skin holds a strange golden hue. He manages to say, “Who?” but then he slides down the wall, his loose white shirt billowing, then he lands hard on his back, on top of the three grooved spirals.

  Pressia listens for more voices and footfalls. She hears nothing. She sets Fignan back on the ground. Her hand is shaking. Even her heart feels like it’s trembling.

  She reaches down and tries to push the man off the three grooved spirals. He’s heavier than she thought he’d be. She sits and shoves him with her boots, using all the strength left in her legs. He budges a little. She shoves again, and he budges a little more. The sleeve of his shirt is now mud-stained. She keeps pushing and finally the three spirals are exposed.

  “Fignan,” she says, breathlessly. “Don’t stop now.”

  Fignan beeps. He buzzes to the triple spiral. A thin chest plate retracts. A grooved metal spiral—just one—appears on a long robotic arm. Pressia bends down and brushes the pebbles away. Fignan fits his spiral into the center spiral and it locks in place with a series of clicks. With a quick jolt, Fignan pushes on the spiral, which makes the three spirals turn a few inches, interlocking. Pressia reaches down and pulls on the edge of one of the spirals. It opens while still attached on one side by hinges that connect to a box buried underground. The three spirals are decorating the lid of the box.

  Fignan shines a light inside the box, which is made of metal—cold and damp. Within it, Pressia sees a pale square. She reaches in and pulls out an envelope. It has one word scribbled on the front of it: Cygnus.

  Pressia grips the letter, holds it for a second to her chest, then rips it open. Inside, there’s one sheet of blue-lined paper ripped from a notebook. Written on it, in a messy scrawl, are numbers and letters separated by parentheses, pluses, and minuses. A formula.

  The formula.

  The man on the ground lets out a moan. She quickly folds the sheet, slips it back into the envelope, and shoves the envelope into her pocket.

  Fignan buzzes to the man.

  “No!” Pressia whispers harshly.

  But Fignan doesn’t listen. He reaches out and pulls a few strands of bloody hair from the man’s head, testing DNA, as he did to Bradwell, Pressia, and Partridge.

  Pressia stands up and walks to the man’s limp body. His cheeks are ruddy, his lashes dark. His white shirt is handmade. It laces up the front instead of using buttons and is loose at the collar, the result of Pressia’s shoving him with her boots. The collar is so loose that she sees the rise and fall of the man’s bare chest.

  And as Fignan lets out a sharp beep, she kneels next to the man and sees a row of six small squares embedded in his chest—two of them pulsing.
r />   “One of the Seven,” she whispers.

  And Fignan says, “Bartrand Kelly.”

  She reaches out and touches his shirt. Bartrand Kelly—a man who knew her mother and her father. One of the Seven.

  One of the pulses belongs to Ghosh. Who knows where she is?

  The other belongs to Hideki Imanaka, Pressia’s father.

  She stares at the two pulses. Her father is still alive. This pulse is her only tie to him.

  Bartrand Kelly moans. There are more voices down the passageway and what sounds like the braying of an animal.

  Pressia grabs Fignan and gets on her feet. She doesn’t know whose side Kelly’s on, after all. His eyes flit open. He stares up into the corbelled ceiling and then he sees Pressia. She raises Fignan again over her head, but halfheartedly

  “Wait a minute. Steady now,” he says. He lifts himself to one elbow and holds out his hand.

  “Are you Bartrand Kelly?” she says.

  “Who’s asking?” He blinks and rubs his eyes.

  “Where is Hideki Imanaka?”

  “Imanaka?” he says, as if he hasn’t heard the name in years. “How do you know Imanaka?”

  She hears the voices coming closer now. She hears footsteps moving down the corridor. “Where is he?” she shouts.

  “Why do you want to know?” he says.

  “He’s my father,” she says. My father. My father. The words feel foreign in her mouth. “He’s my father,” she says again and her chest seizes, but she refuses to cry

  Bartrand Kelly stares at her face. He whispers, “Emi Brigid Imanaka,” the name Pressia was given at birth, the name that was obliterated by the Detonations, the girl she never got to be. “Is it really you?”

  He reaches for her and she steps backward. The fact that he’s alive means that he might have made a special deal with Willux. She has the formula in her pocket. She has the vials strapped to her ribs. If Kelly has ties to Willux and if Kelly captures her, Willux would have everything she’s risked her life for.

  She grips Fignan and takes off down the corridor but is blocked by a man and a woman—both young and strong. The man grabs her by the wrist of her doll-head fist. His grip is leathery and callused. He pulls the doll head up and gasps when he sees it.