Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  Iralene whispers to Partridge, “It’s the scent of humanity, Partridge. It smells like mortality. Death.”

  Partridge remembers the stench of ash and death shuttled around on the wind. Blood. The iron-scented air after his brother and mother were killed. That’s death.

  People smile and nod, but not just at him—at Iralene too. The tissue is still blocking part of her face, but he can tell she’s smiling back.

  “We’re a couple,” Iralene says. “I’m the one who stayed with you through that coma, the first name on your lips when you woke up.”

  “Iralene—”

  She shakes her head. Her eyes are brimming with tears, but she manages to smile. “You were right. There are many truths. I can pick and choose anytime I want to. That’s how it can work, if you want it to, Partridge.” And then she slips her fingers into his hand, the one with the capped pinky.

  Partridge feels the eyes on him. He can’t pull his hand away. It would be seen as a rejection. Rumors would start flying. It would hurt Iralene deeply. It might even put her in danger. This is her role in life, her mission. And since he’s refused to kill his father, this is the truth that has to stand—for now. What will he say to his father when he sees him?

  The monorail glides through the tunnels, stopping at brightly lit platforms. People nod as they leave, and the new passengers are surprised by Partridge and Iralene’s presence. Partridge looks out the window. When the train hits a tunnel, all he sees is his own stunned expression blinking into the glass. He can pretend, for a moment, that Lyda is out there, on the other side of the glass somewhere. He wants to tell her that he’s not betraying her. This will pass. He’ll come back for her.

  The train jerks to a stop. Beckley gets up first, as if they need a human shield to get them to the door. Partridge takes his hand away from Iralene. He doesn’t want to have to hold it everywhere he goes from now on.

  They walk onto the brightly lit platform and into the fluorescence of the medical center itself. This is the smell that makes him feel sick—not humanity at all, but the astringent antiseptic smell of covering up sickness and the sharp, sulfuric scent of enhancements. He remembers the academy boys escorted to their rooms, where they’d strip down and get into their mummy molds, that feeling of near suffocation, the enhancements coursing through your cells. Afterward, Partridge felt slack with exhaustion, but also filled with a jagged, nervous energy, as if all his organs, tissues, and muscles were spent except for his nervous system, which was charged like a battery.

  As they make their way to the elevators, they get the same reaction as in the train. Fortunately, the elevator is empty. Beckley hits the fourth-floor button.

  “Why the fourth floor? That’s not where my father’s office is.”

  “He’s in a special ward now,” Iralene says.

  His father has been moved to the part of the hospital reserved for the seriously ill. The last time Partridge saw his father was on a screen in the communications room of the farmhouse. He looked weak, palsied, his chest was sunken, but his father, Willux, on the contagion floor? It seemed impossible. “He’s that sick?”

  “He’s in a weakened state—temporarily, of course,” Iralene says.

  Beckley radios ahead that they’re coming.

  The elevator is quiet except for a small tune leaking from an unseen speaker. It sounds computer-generated to produce a calming effect, but the fakeness has the opposite effect on Partridge. The manufactured music agitates him.

  When the elevator doors open, they’re met by techs holding white coats, paper slippers, masks, plastic caps, and gloves.

  Iralene and Beckley stretch out their arms for the white coats, raise their hands for the gloves, and bow their heads for the caps, obviously used to the drill.

  But Partridge says, “Don’t touch me. What’s your problem?” The techs stand by stiffly as he dresses himself. He can’t reach the ties in the back of the white coat, so one of the techs steps forward and does it for him. For some reason this is incredibly embarrassing, like he can’t tie his own shoes. He feels stupid in the puffy plastic shower cap. The gloves cut into his wrists. He starts to walk but the slippers are, in fact, slippery. He feels emasculated, childlike. His father is so deeply manipulative that Partridge wonders if this is part of his plan.

  Herded by half a dozen techs, they walk through automatic doors, passing two heavily armed guards. They turn onto a wing of empty rooms. Only the nurses’ station buzzes with activity. This wing obviously has only one patient—Ellery Willux.

  The technicians stop before they get to the door at the end of the hall. One says, “There’s a guard inside, but otherwise he’s requested to see you alone.”

  Everyone is watching now—the technicians, the doctors, the nurses, Iralene and Beckley, even the two heavily armed guards on the other side of the glass doors.

  Partridge nods. “Fine by me.” He starts to walk into the room, but Iralene touches his elbow. He turns and she kisses him on the cheek. Everyone sighs as if this is the sweetest thing they’ve ever seen. Iralene doesn’t seem to notice that he’s bristled. Instead she reaches up and touches his nose—ever so lightly—like it’s a playful secret sign. He looks around at all the staring faces.

  Iralene whispers, “Good luck!”

  He puts his hand on the door, but before he opens it, he suddenly has this incredibly optimistic hope—he’ll open the door and there won’t be a hospital room at all, but instead a little living room. His father will be healthy and sitting next to Partridge’s mother, and Sedge will be standing by a window. They’ll tell him it was all just a test, some kind of coming-of-age ritual that’s been passed down for generations. “We’re a family again,” his mother will say. And Lyda will pop out of a side door.

  But he knows that this is jaggedly insane.

  He pushes the door open and steps inside.

  The guard is there, as the tech said. He stands at attention beside the bed, which is covered by a clear, rectangular tent. The plastic tent shivers inward then puffs a little as if the tent itself is breathing. There are various pumps, chuffing and hissing. Machines chirp and beep; the only one he recognizes shows the rhythm of his father’s heart.

  These machines are trying to stall death, but it’s here in this room.

  For a minute, he thinks of his father, the man who held him as a baby who tucked him in some nights, who’s always been in his life. No matter how evil he might be, even if he’s a mass murderer—on the greatest scale in all of history—some part of Partridge will never forget that he’s his father. Your father can be the person you most hate and most fear, yes, but deep down you expect that he’ll be the one to save you. Partridge feels weak. He remembers what Lyda told him—he still wants his father to love him.

  And then Partridge hears his father’s voice. “Partridge.” And Partridge’s cheeks burn, his heart beats hard. This is the man who killed his mother and his brother. Partridge won’t ever forget that either. He steps closer to the tent. He sees the red oval ofhis father’s face, the raw skin. But now his neck and one hand are blackened, as if the skin is completely dead. The hand has atrophied and looks like a claw, curled on his chest as if guarding his heart.

  His father presses a button on the side of his bed. The plastic tent retracts on one side. His father’s eyes are closed, but his chin is crimped, as if he’s about to talk. His chest is enclosed in a large metal contraption, which is making the chuffing and hissing noises. The box must contain some instrument pumping his lungs. Oxygen tubes are screwed into the box on either side and run up into his nostrils. Partridge imagines pinching the tubes. It’s a floating image. But he can’t deny picturing it in sudden and vivid detail—his father gasping like a fish, his mouth gaping, stretching his cheeks until they’re taut and ready to rupture.

  “Partridge,” his father whispers as the box on his chest draws air. “I knew you’d come back.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say I volunteered,” Partridge says.

&
nbsp; “You came back . . .” His lungs compress and expand in the box. “Because you don’t hate me. Tell me that you don’t hate me.”

  “Are you going soft on me after all these years?”

  His father opens his eyes, blinking under the fluorescent lights. His eyes are slightly clouded. The skin on his clawed hand and neck is shiny, as if it’s wrapped in another coating of skin—clear and almost polished looking. “I set up a world for you here. A world where you could travel. A girl. Have you noticed that?”

  “You gave me a girl?” Partridge grips his father’s bed rails.

  The guard leans forward. “Sir?” he says to Willux.

  “It’s okay,” Willux says. “He’s fiery. Just young.”

  “Congratulations, by the way,” Partridge says, “on the wedding.”

  “Don’t be sullen.”

  “You’re a sick man.”

  “I’m dying.”

  “That’s not how I meant it.”

  “Are you going to take”—the machine gurgles—“what’s being offered? You’re a hero here.”

  “I don’t want to be a hero.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to be a leader.”

  His father pushes another button on the bed rails, and the head of the bed rises. “I’ve been waiting . . . to hear you say these words.”

  “You have?”

  “Who else would I want to replace me? Who else but you, my son.” He reaches out his good hand and holds it to Partridge’s cheek. His eyes are wet and shining. Partridge has never seen his father cry. Sedge was his father’s favorite, the one destined to do great things.

  “Is that possible?” Partridge asks.

  “You can be the one to lead them—out.”

  “Out of the Dome? Into the New Eden?”

  “I won’t make it.”

  “You really think I can do it?” Maybe he doesn’t have to kill his father or even wait for him to die. Maybe his father will give it all to him.

  Partridge’s father pulls his hand from Partridge’s cheek. “You’ll have to prove your willingness to leave the past behind, to move forward, with us, here in the Dome. Prove it not just to me but also to those in my inner circle, who know the truth of your departure.”

  Partridge doesn’t like the sound of this. “How can I prove my loyalty?”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  The metal box around his father’s lungs chugs and then releases a long hiss of air. “Your mind.”

  “My mind?” Partridge feels sick. “What do you mean?”

  “I want the part that remembers leaving us, that blue-eyed girl, those wretches you were with out there—everything outside this Dome—gone.”

  “What?” Partridge says. “No.”

  “Aren’t you haunted by the vision of death?”

  He rears away from his father’s decaying body. He walks to the far wall and spreads his hands on the cool tile; the cast on his pinky makes a sharp click. “You mean visions of murder.”

  “They would be erased too. The bad, the ugly, the dark.”

  He sees Sedge’s bloody body, his mother’s face shattering as his brother’s skull explodes. Blood. A thin spray of it like a bursting cloud. For a moment, he wishes it were gone—that memory—but he can’t give it up, and he refuses to lose everything that means something to him. “No,” he says.

  “It’s the only way,” his father says. “It’s the only way I’ll let you in. You want in, don’t you?”

  “Think of something, anything else.” He looks at his father. He imagines cuffing his throat, bearing down with his thumbs.

  “This is the only way,” his father says. “You’ll marry the girl.”

  “Iralene?”

  “You’ll marry her and prove your loyalty by letting go of those memories, that slim section of your past—and that’s it.” His father closes his eyes.

  “And what if I say no?”

  His father smiles, some skin on his face cracking. “I’m not a forgiving man.”

  Partridge shakes his head. “It’s not even possible. You couldn’t erase memories that specific even if you wanted to. You’re bluffing.”

  “Arvin Weed is a boy genius,” his father says quietly, as if he’s almost drifting off to sleep. “He can do almost anything. Almost anything.”

  Arvin Weed can erase Partridge’s memories of his escape, of meeting Pressia, his sister, of Bradwell and the mothers, of El Capitan and the Dusts, of his mother and his brother, of being with Lyda in the brass bed frame on the roofless house.

  But he can’t save Ellery Willux from degenerating, cell by cell. He can’t save his father from death. Not yet, at least. But as these machines hum and hiss to keep him alive, isn’t the race on? If his father dies, he wants Partridge in charge. But the unspoken here is that if Arvin discovers the cure, his father won’t need Partridge to lead. So if his father is willing to hand over the reins, Partridge needs to grab them, quickly.

  PRESSIA

  DUCT TAPE

  THROUGH THE FENCE, Pressia spots an old merry-go-round, offkilter but still sound. Its roof of bare spokes attaches to the horses’ poles. The circular parade of horses is frozen and warped, their bodies partially melted, their muzzles contorted. A white horse bares its teeth, but its neck and mane are lank and twisted. There are torqued hooves and chopped tails. But worst of all are their eyes: still and wide, some melted down the slopes of their faces. Once upon a time, this merry-goround was pristine—innocent and whimsical—which makes it all the worse now.

  “You can’t come in,” Fandra says. “They’ve seen him.” She nods at El Capitan and Helmud, who’s resting his chin on his brother’s shoulder.

  El Capitan is standing next to Hastings, whose bleeding has slowed but whose face is contorted with pain. “Me? What’s wrong with me?” El Capitan says.

  “Me?” Helmud says, clearly insulted.

  “You rule the OSR,” Fandra says to El Capitan, suddenly overtaken by rage. “You’ve killed people we’ve loved. Do you think we could ever forget it?”

  “Oh.” What could he say, really? He was a vicious and cruel leader.

  Pressia tries to step in. “He’s changed,” she says, but she knows it will do no good. She sees the set of Fandra’s jaw. “He saves lives now. He helps people.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The only reason he hasn’t already been shot”—she glances over her shoulder at the top of the roller coaster’s broken neck—“is because he’s with a prophet.”

  “A prophet?” Pressia asks.

  “Bradwell,” Fandra says.

  Bradwell looks a little stunned. “Well, I’m no prophet—”

  El Capitan interrupts. “Look, hate me if you want and love him, but we’ve got a soldier who needs help.” Hastings.

  “They’ll take the dying one,” Fandra says. “They take in the dying. It’s how I came to live here.”

  This small mention fills Pressia with hope. The survivors who live here aren’t just those who escaped the OSR in the city. There were people already in place who survived the Detonations. Maybe there are more groups like them—and her father could be among them.

  Just then, there’s an electrical buzz. The gate opens. A few scrawny survivors appear, carrying a handmade stretcher constructed from a sheet wrapped around two metal poles.

  “I need to know about my brother,” Fandra says, looking at Pressia and Bradwell. “The last time I saw Gorse was during a bloody battle. Did he make it back?”

  “He did. He’s fine,” Bradwell assures her.

  “I knew he’d make it. I knew it.”

  It takes all the survivors who’ve stepped out of the gate to lift Hastings onto the stretcher. The plinking music is still blasting through the PA system to ward off the Dusts. The survivors keep their eyes peeled, and they all steal glances at Bradwell, obviously awed by him. A prophet.

  “Wait,” Hastings mutters. “You need the
destination.”

  “And your behavioral coding won’t let you give it to us,” Bradwell says. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Hastings shakes his head. “No.”

  “Put him down a minute,” El Capitan says. The survivors ease him to the ground.

  “No, what?” Bradwell says.

  “You were right not to trust me. It wasn’t the behavioral coding that wouldn’t let me give it to you. I’ve got the strength to override it.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” El Capitan asks.

  “If I told you, it’d be one less reason to keep me around. I don’t want to be expendable.”

  “Tell us now,” Pressia says.

  “Fignan,” he says. “I want to tell Fignan. He’ll understand the information I have.”

  Bradwell unstraps the box from his back. Fignan lights up.

  “Thirty-eight degrees, fifty-three minutes, twenty-three seconds North, seventy-seven degrees, zero minutes, thirty-two seconds West,” Hastings says.

  Fignan whirs while accepting the data and blinks a green light when he’s got it.

  “Wait—tell us why this airship is different. Why isn’t it with the others and heavily guarded?” Pressia says.

  “All I know is what I heard,” Hastings says. “It has sentimental value for Willux. I don’t know how or why. And it’s not guarded because Willux doesn’t think a wretch could ever make it there alive.”

  “Oh,” Pressia says.

  “Sorry,” Hastings says. “You wanted the truth.”

  They lift the stretcher again and start to carry Hastings into the amusement park.

  “You’re going to take good care of him?” El Capitan calls to Fandra.

  “We’ve got some medical supplies and an EMT who was here the day of the Detonations with his kids. He knows what he’s doing.” The fence closes behind Hastings’ stretcher with that same electrical hum.

  Pressia is trying to remember her grandfather’s explanations about amputations—the angles the sawing should take, how best to keep the bone shavings away from the wound, the best dressings and the uses of certain oils to keep the wound from adhering to the dressings, the elasticity of woolen socks, even pressure. “Tell him that you don’t want to let up on the arteries. Every drop of blood is a great loss. If they add up, that’s how you’ll lose him.” Her grandfather lost one once. A young girl with a crushed leg who bucked on the table, loosening the tourniquet. Her grandfather tried to get it back on, but the girl’s thrashing and the slickness of the blood made the tourniquet hard to grip.