Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  She’s still holding the blanket to his head wound. She shakes her head. “Cap,” she says. “You just . . .” Kissed me. El Capitan just kissed her. It must have been a mistake.

  Then he says, “I love you, Pressia Belze.”

  And there is no mistaking that.

  He drops his hands and his eyes glide away from her face. His lids close. Just like that, he’s out again.

  Helmud looks at her and says, “Pressia?” as if he’d like to know if she loves El Capitan in return.

  She feels like crying. That love song he sang. Was he thinking of her? She’s stunned. She wonders how long he’s felt this way, how long he’s walked around bearing this secret. Now she understands the look he gave her when she was holding on to Bradwell so tightly on the bridge.

  Bradwell stands up and walks to the cockpit door. He says, “I didn’t know.”

  “What do you mean?” She feels a surge of panic. Is he talking about her and El Capitan? Does he think that there’s been something going on between them? “There’s nothing to know.”

  Bradwell punches something. Pressia hears the sudden crack. The airship wobbles for a second. Is he jealous? Or just mad that he didn’t know something—even though there was nothing to know?

  “We’re not thinking straight!” Pressia says. “None of us! He didn’t mean it. He’s—”

  “He meant it,” Bradwell says. “I should know. I’ve been wanting to say those words for so long. And he comes along and says them?”

  “He’s taken a blow to the head!” Pressia says and then she stops, her mind running over what Bradwell’s just said. “You’ve been wanting to say those words?”

  His back to her, he freezes. He draws in a breath. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Helmud says, as if he’s known all along.

  She looks at Helmud, truly looks at him for the first time in a long while. She wants to ask him if he’s known about this secret. Helmud understands much more than he lets on. He scrapes his small row of upper teeth against his bottom lip anxiously.

  “What are we going to do?” Pressia says to Bradwell. “One of us has to keep going. One of us has to stay.”

  Bradwell doesn’t answer.

  She lifts the blanket. The bleeding has slowed. The wound is swollen but not gushing. “Helmud,” she says. “Put your hand where my hand is.” She offers him a fresh section of blanket. He takes hold and she pushes on his hand. “Apply steady pressure.”

  He says, “Pressure.”

  She gets up and walks toward Bradwell. She can see only his back, the birds shifting beneath his shirt. He’s looking at his knuckles, probably having cut them. There’s a dent in the wall—a spiderwebbed shatter in the lining. She passes him and climbs through the doorway and gets a bag of supplies—food and water. She carries them back into the cockpit.

  “I’m going to keep going,” she says. “You’re staying.”

  He turns around, shaking his head. “No, no, no. That’s not happening.”

  She pushes the supplies into his arms. “Yes, it is.”

  “There’s no way you should head out on your own.”

  “You forgot that I’m here, on some level, for selfish reasons.”

  “You’re not going to find your father, Pressia.”

  “If you go out there and you find him or some clue—one measly clue—about his existence, instead of me, I’ll never forgive you. This is my trip to make.”

  “It’s not just yours, Pressia. Walrond left that message for my parents before he killed himself, before I found my parents shot to death in their beds.”

  Of course he found them. She’d just never realized it. “You found them?”

  He looks at Helmud holding the blanket to his brother’s head.

  “Bradwell,” she whispers.

  “It was morning. I went down for breakfast. They weren’t in the kitchen. I walked through the house, calling their names. Then I started running . . . I opened their door. And there they were.”

  “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “I didn’t know they were dead at first. The blood didn’t look like blood. It’d dried. But when I got close and touched my mother’s arm, it was stiff and cold. And I could see the blue tinge of her skin.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve had years to get over it.”

  “You can’t get over something like that.”

  “So I’m selfish too. I’m doing this because my parents are dead. Willux had them killed. I’m not just along for the ride. I’m not doing this just for the greater good.”

  “Bradwell,” she whispers. “I’m the one who’s going to keep going. And you’re the one who’s going to stay, because my father might still be alive.” It’s cruel, but it’s the truth.

  Fignan maneuvers his way over the cockpit door.

  “You can’t leave me here with Cap after he kissed you, after what he said to you!”

  Is he blaming her? Does he think she led on El Capitan or was having a relationship with him at the same time as Bradwell? She turns and walks, unsteadily, along the walls of the airship, to the door in the cabin, now almost overhead, that leads outside.

  “Wait!” Bradwell says. “No! You can’t . . .”

  She uses the seats as a kind of ladder to climb up to the door. She turns the large wheel that locks the door into place and then lets it fall open.

  “You’re really doing this.”

  “Hand me Fignan. I’ll need him to help navigate.” She props herself on her elbows, pulling herself the rest of the way up then sitting on the side of the airship’s gondola. It’s dark, even with the glow of the airship’s light coming up from the door, the glass cockpit, the portholes.

  Bradwell runs his hands through his hair and rubs the scars on his cheek roughly.

  “I’ll go without Fignan. Is that what you want?”

  Bradwell sighs. He picks up Fignan and hands him to her through the cabin door. Fignan lights up a narrow spotlight that flits through the surrounding field, the distant trees.

  She slides off the gondola to the ground.

  Bradwell scrambles up after her. She looks at Bradwell, his hair sticking up messily on his head, his muscled shoulders, his eyes dark and wet. What does he think of her? What does he think of the two of them together? He’s a black box, unknowable.

  She can still feel El Capitan’s kiss on her lips. It surprised her maybe most of all because it was so tender. El Capitan isn’t the type to do anything tenderly. She doesn’t love El Capitan—not the way he loves her. But she does love him in some way. They’ve been through so much. When she had no one, he helped her. He saved her. And she’s pretty sure that in some elemental way she’s changed him. There’s so much between them now. It’s not a simple or easy relationship. How could it be? When she first met him, she was afraid he was going to shoot her.

  Bradwell looks at her expectantly

  She listens, for a moment, for what might be out there. It’s quiet and for some reason that scares her even more.

  She says to Bradwell. “I feel it right now.”

  “What?”

  An airy sensation in her stomach, her heart drumming in her chest like she’s falling, falling. “I don’t understand what we mean to each other or everything we’ve been through together. But . . .” She rubs a tear from her cheek. “I know that one day I’ll miss it—even the brutal parts, even the awfulness. I’ll miss you,” she says, looking up at him, “this moment, right now.”

  He looks at her like he’s memorizing her face.

  “I’ll make it there,” she says.

  “I want you to make it back.”

  PARTRIDGE

  NEBRASKA

  PARTRIDGE AND IRALENE’S DAYS are rigorously scheduled—a picnic by the soy fields, a visit to the planetarium, private dance lessons with Mirth and DeWitt Standing, from whom they learn the chacha, the rumba, the fox-trot. DeWitt counts loudly over the scratchy music. Mirth says, “Chins up! Chins up!” while Beckle
y stands by, smirking.

  And the polite chatter is relentless. Sometimes he’s furious for no reason. Maybe it’s just that his father supposedly wants him to be a leader and this is how he’s using his time?

  What’s worse is that he has no control. If he asks to do something else—catch up with friends or find Glassings so that he can apologize for Beckley pulling a gun on him—Iralene tells him that he’s too fragile. “You can have contact only with those fully screened for disease and illness.”

  Sometimes he wonders if it would be better to be unconscious than to be shuffled through one stupid little date after the next. And there’s never even a tiny spark of memory. The one thing that returns to him again and again is what Iralene said in the aquarium: But we don’t have time, Partridge. We don’t.

  While Iralene is changing shoes after a dance lesson, he asks her what she meant by it.

  “I don’t even remember saying that, Partridge. You know me. Sometimes I say silly things!”

  “I don’t know you,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

  She looks up at him, startled, and then lets out a quick peal of laughter, but as the laughter fades, it sounds like she might cry.

  “Sorry, Iralene. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “Hurt my feelings? What are you talking about?”

  Since the kiss in the aquarium, she’s been a little more keyed up. Maybe she’s waiting for him to fall in love with her again. He’s trying. God knows, he’s trying. I mean, what kind of a jerk would take a blow to the head and tell a girl that he didn’t love her anymore? He couldn’t do that to her.

  Still, he feels manipulated and powerless. Later in the backseat of the motorized cart, he leans forward and tells Beckley that he wants to see his father. He’s said this many times and Beckley always makes up excuses. This time Partridge adds, “Let me guess, Beckley. I can’t see my father because of back-to-back meetings or a long dinner with other leaders or a presentation he has to prepare for?”

  Beckley doesn’t answer. Iralene pats his knee. “I’m sure he’ll call you in for a visit soon!” As if Partridge is hurt by his father’s lack of attention.

  He’s not hurt. He’s suspicious.

  And he’s exhausted. His head still aches. Sometimes when people ask him questions, he feels like he’s trying to read their lips because he can’t quite hear them; it’s like he’s inside the tanks with the belugas, staring out from behind the thick pane of glass. “Excuse me? Sorry. What was that?”

  His exhaustion is bone-deep. He remembers this feeling just after the Detonations, after his mother died. He walked around waterlogged, too heavy to move. Blessed, blessed. That’s when the word became so prevalent. We’re blessed to have gotten in. If you’re blessed, it’s hardly your fault that you got in and others didn’t. Being blessed is beyond your control. It was no one’s fault—the blessed and the unblessed had been, before the Detonations, a hidden quality, something buried in the soul. But it had been made plain who was and who wasn’t blessed. It was so clear, in fact, there was a list.

  This meant you weren’t allowed to feel guilty. Guilty of what? God’s love? His blessings?

  Partridge was supposed to be joyful. They all were. If they weren’t, they were squandering God’s blessings. He tried, but the grief—unspoken, unexpressed—only got heavier. The grief was physical. That’s what this postcoma feeling reminds him of—the physicality of grief.

  But he’s got nothing to grieve. His life is better than he even remembers it. He confesses to Iralene one night, looking out over the beach scene, that his life feels so much better that it’s almost uncomfortable. “It’s like I’ve been stuffed into a body that’s not quite mine.”

  “The wrong body? That sounds awful!” Iralene stares at him. He’s trying to get used to the fact that she takes everything he says literally.

  “Okay, fine, not the wrong body. It’s more like when I’d sometimes accidentally pick up someone else’s blazer at the boys’ academy and it was too tight across the back, too short in the sleeves. Just wrong.”

  “That’s just because you have to catch up to this moment. You’re still back there and you have to work to get to the future, which is right now.”

  “Huh.”

  “It’s not wrong. It’ll start to feel right when it’s familiar, that’s all. What do you have to complain about now anyway?” It reminds him of the blessed and the unblessed, the wretches out there, living their doomed existences. What are their lives really like? He rubs the back of his neck and imagines the taste of dirt, ash. And the imagining is so real it almost feels like a memory.

  Once the academy has closed for the Christmas holiday, Partridge suggests that they walk the grounds. “Come on!” he says. “Can we do just one thing that I want to do?”

  “Okay!” Iralene says. “If it’ll make you happy, let’s do it!”

  The doors to the dormitories have already been locked, but Beckley lets them slip into an open window on the bottom floor.

  Partridge shows Iralene his old room, cleaned out, empty. He tells her about Hastings, the old nag, the way he always said, “I won’t take it personally,” but he always did. He misses Hastings. “He was this big lanky lug of a guy. He just wanted to have fun, shoot the shit. He lived for that kind of thing.”

  Iralene wanders around the room, bounces on the lower bunk bed. “Was this one yours?”

  “No,” he says, pointing up the ladder.

  Iralene smiles then climbs the ladder and lies down on the mattress, stripped bare, crossing her arms behind her head. “What did you dream about up here?”

  He dreamed about girls like Iralene walking into his dorm room and climbing the ladder to his bed, but just then he hears the click of the airventilation system. They regulate the temperatures even when no one’s here. He walks to the window. “What did I dream about?” He imagines the girls lined up on the field below, doing their morning exercises. That one girl turns her head. She looks straight at him. Who is she again? What’s her name? Doesn’t her mother work in the rehabilitation center? Does she sing in the choir? “Mertz,” he says.

  “What’s that?” she says nervously.

  “Nothing,” he says, looking up at her. “I was just trying to remember someone’s name and it came to me. You know how that is.”

  She nods.

  “I just can’t picture Hastings toeing the line in Special Forces.” He walks to the mirror where Hastings used to fuss over his hair. He remembers Hastings standing there, in that very spot, dressed in a suit. “The dance, right?”

  “What about it?”

  “Hastings—I just remember him giving me a hard time for not being ready to go.” He looks up at Iralene. “And I met you after the dance?”

  “I was there meeting a friend. Not everyone goes to the academy, you know.”

  “I know, I know,” he says gently. He doesn’t want to hurt her feelings again. The academy is reserved for the kids of the elite. “Didn’t I have a date? Wasn’t I with someone?”

  Iralene looks at him sadly. In fact, it’s almost as if she’s going to start crying. This is how it goes with Iralene. Partridge can’t tell what’s going to set her off.

  Beckley whistles. Partridge walks over to the window and looks out. Beckley’s there waving them down. “Beckley,” Partridge says. “He’s like a mother hen.”

  Iralene climbs halfway down the ladder and then says, “Catch me!”

  Partridge walks over. She reaches out and wraps her arms around his neck. He holds her up off the ground for a moment and then dips her to the floor, but she doesn’t let go. It’s the kind of hug you’d give someone you were saying good-bye to, someone you might never see again.

  “Iralene?” he whispers. “You okay?”

  “We need to be alone. We have to. I can ditch him,” Iralene whispers. “I know how to ditch everybody. I’ve got a plan.”

  And she does.

  Later that night, Iralene and Partridge are in hi
s bedroom. He’s wondering what might happen next. They haven’t kissed since the aquarium. It hadn’t sparked any memories and it hadn’t been the most exciting kiss in the world, but, hey, shouldn’t he at least try again? Iralene is beautiful. He was in love with her at some point.

  But as soon as he thinks about the possibilities, he feels a wave of exhaustion. Honestly, he’d like to get in bed, alone, close his eyes, and let this entire day blur to the background of his mind. He almost says, I want to go home. Why does he feel so homesick?

  But Iralene has a sense of urgency now. This is the one place they can get away from Beckley, but it seems strange. Partridge is well aware of the cameras eyeing them from the corners of the room, but still, he was never left alone with a girl before. All coed academy interactions were hawked by dowdy chaperones lurking in corners. Cameras are fine, but there’s nothing quite like the physical presence of a wheezy calculus teacher to break the mood.

  Iralene opens the orb. She presses in a code, and, as the handheld glows through the cracks in her cupped fingers, the room starts to change. The billowing curtains kicked by the automated ocean breeze turn to a dusky yellow print with blue flowers. They hang, thick and lank, in the windows, which are closed up tight. The bed turns into an old four-poster, a patchwork quilt folded at the foot of it. There’s also an old tilted wardrobe and a rickety bedside table.

  “What happened to the beach house?” Partridge says.

  “You made me promise to take you back to this place.”

  “Really? What is this place?”

  “An old farmhouse. Somewhere in Nebraska, I think.”

  “I wanted to come back to Nebraska?” Partridge says. It doesn’t make sense. “Are you sure I said this place? Was I joking? When did I make you promise that?”

  Still holding the orb, she crosses her arms as if she’s cold and turns a slow circle. “You just did, okay?” She’s agitated. She walks up to him, puts her hand on his shirt, runs it up under his collar. “I think we should be alone.” She flits her eyes to the corners of the room where the cameras are perched.