Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “I want to see her,” Partridge says.

  “I thought you wanted to see your father,” Beckley says.

  “Partridge,” Iralene says, “we should stick to the plan.”

  Partridge can’t help it. He’s compelled. A girl from the outside, a girl with a buzzed head. He has to see her. He starts walking fast toward the clutch of doctors and technicians standing in front of an open door. Beckley catches up with him and jerks him backward, hard.

  Partridge spins with great speed and grabs Beckley by the throat. He applies steady pressure. Partridge says in a low gruff voice, “You’re here to protect me, remember that?”

  Beckley jerks his head—a slight nod.

  Partridge lets go and calls out down the hall, “What’s going on here?”

  The doctors and technicians glance at one another. “A medical case,” one of them says.

  “I want to see the patient!” Partridge says, striding up to them.

  “You can’t. There’s the possibility of contagion,” one of the doctors says.

  “Contagion?” Partridge asks.

  “She’s been on the outside, sir. She needs . . .” The technician stalls mid-sentence and looks around, unsure of how much he’s supposed to divulge.

  “What?”

  A doctor steps forward, blocking Partridge from the door. “Medical intervention.”

  Mummy molds. Beautiful barbarism. A knife.

  Partridge shoves the doctor in the chest. He slams into a wall and falls to the floor. Other techs grab hold of Partridge from behind, but he shakes one loose and grabs the other’s coat until Partridge has flipped him over his back and he’s sprawled on the ground.

  Partridge rushes into the room. There’s a glass window separating him from Lyda. She’s sitting on the edge of a metal examination table. She’s wearing a white suit and paper slippers.

  The doctor shouts at everyone to disperse. “Go on! Go about your business!” He steps into the room. Iralene follows him with quick, mincing steps. Beckley guards the door, making sure everyone does, in fact, disperse.

  The doctor lowers his voice, trying not to shout. “You can’t be in here! Do you understand me?”

  Partridge ignores him.

  “It’s a one-way observation mirror. She can’t see you,” the doctor says.

  He knocks on the glass, and Lyda looks up.

  Her dress, the feel of it in his hands as they dance under a ceiling of fake stars.

  “We have to go, Partridge,” Iralene says.

  Partridge ignores Iralene. He’s staring at Lyda. Her sharp cheekbones, her blue eyes. A child’s body fused to a mother’s body. Lyda stooping to talk to the child, cupping its chin in her hands. Lyda walking across an ashen desert, running back to him, kissing him in a gust of wind. She’s looking in Partridge’s direction—but her eyes scan past him, almost through him. He feels that sharp pang, that vague feeling of loss and lovesickness, but now it has a name—Lyda. And that sense of grief that made his body feel waterlogged, heavy and deadened—he knows what’s caused it: that face. Her face. “Why is she here? What’s wrong with her?”

  The doctor sighs. “It seems she’s been impregnated while on the outside. We don’t know what kind of creature might be taking root. Most likely the child is the result of a rape, as we all well know what the wretches are capable of.”

  Partridge feels like the wind has been pounded from his lungs. “What did you say?”

  “Pregnant, sir. The wretch who was once Pure is pregnant.”

  Partridge tries to swallow, but his throat is dry. His lungs are still, airless. Everything feels like it’s come to a stop: Lyda is pregnant. His eyes fill with light. A windswept sky, a loud battle, an old weary house, a room with no roof, a rusty brass frame with no bed. Lyda and him, under his coat. Skin on skin. “I have to talk to her.”

  “Partridge, no,” Iralene says softly. Beckley walks into the room. “Tell him, Beckley. He can’t talk to the wretch! Not now!”

  “Not before you see your father,” Beckley says. “There’s no way. He’s going to undergo surgery and so are you. You can’t risk contagion.”

  “Get out!” Partridge says. He looks at Iralene and says, “Iralene! Get out! You know what this means to me! Get out!”

  Iralene cries out. She turns, dizzily, and reaches for Beckley’s shoulder. She misses but he catches her as she stumbles out of the room, onto her hands and knees on the tile floor. The doctor rushes to her side. She looks at Partridge for a moment and then rolls her eyes back in her head and goes limp.

  She’s faked it. He’s sure. Iralene might be brilliant.

  This gives Partridge time to slam the door and lock it. He tries to take a deep breath but his lungs feel shallow. Lyda’s pregnant. It’s not some creature. It’s their child, together.

  They’re in the wrecked subway car again. “Paper snowflakes,” he hears himself saying. “Is that all it would take to make you happy?” And Lyda whispers, “Yes. And you.” She kisses him. “This.”

  He pulls the square-shaped list from his pocket. It’s the only paper he has. He folds it into triangular sections. He tears off the tip, chews small holes from the sides quickly with his teeth, then rips the other end jaggedly.

  He takes the envelope out of his other pocket and slides the list into it. He extracts the small capsule and puts it back in his pocket. He seals the envelope.

  He opens the door. There’s Iralene in the hall, having survived her fit quite well. She’s been given a folding chair. Beckley stands by her side. The doctor is holding her wrist, taking her pulse. When Partridge walks out of the room, she stands up, jerking her arm from the doctor, and walks up close to Partridge.

  He hands her the envelope. She holds it to her heart with one hand and wraps her other arm around him. “Don’t ever get mad with me again,” she says.

  He whispers in her ear, “Iralene, I want the girl to have this. Got it?”

  Iralene nods.

  “I trust you,” he says. “Do you trust me?”

  She nods again. Sometimes he forgets how pretty she is, perfect really, and it catches him off guard even under all that meticulous makeup—her petite features, her pert chin, her white, shiny teeth. She’s smiling at him, but the sadness in her eyes is plain. Whatever happens next will change them. Partridge kisses her cheek. It surprises her. She touches the spot.

  He turns and walks down the hall. People scatter as he approaches. Soon, Beckley’s at his side. They walk in silence. The power dynamic has shifted. Beckley’s a little afraid of him now.

  He guides Partridge through the halls, then stops in front of a door.

  “This is it?”

  Beckley nods. Partridge can’t tell if Beckley hates him or grudgingly respects him.

  Partridge opens the door and Beckley follows him into his father’s room. There’s another guard beside his father’s bed. “I need a moment alone with him,” he says to Beckley. “Take this guard with you.”

  Beckley meets Partridge’s eye, and for a second Partridge wonders if Beckley is going to challenge him. Partridge holds his gaze. “I want both of you guarding the door,” he says. “I want this private time with my father protected.”

  “Of course,” Beckley finally says, and he nods to the other guard. They both walk out.

  Partridge walks up to the rectangular plastic tent surrounding his father’s bed. The tent itself seems to breathe. It’s alive with beeping, humming machinery, and the huff and hiss of a small iron box around his father’s ribs. This all feels familiar. Partridge has been here before.

  He has to confront his father. But he can’t commit murder. He doesn’t have it in him. And he can’t believe Iralene’s story—not completely—because it still doesn’t make sense; why would his father go to the trouble of having his memory swiped if he was only going to cast his brain off?

  He pulls back one side of the plastic tent. His father’s eyes are closed. His own skin is rejecting him—it’s all either raw o
r blackened. Both hands have curled inward and are tucked under his chin. Even in sleep, he shakes and trembles—a palsy that won’t quit.

  But the sight of his father’s body, so twisted, so ruptured and wasted, shocks tears to his eyes. This is his father. This is his body. This is death. His father’s skin, festering as if scalded from within, some of it covered in a plasticine gauze. It shines.

  Blood—a fine mist of it exploding, filling the air. His mother’s blood. His brother’s blood. He remembers cameras—not the kind in this room but the tiny lenses in his sister’s eyes. He’s shouting. He’s crazed. He finally stops and there’s his sister’s face, her eyes, the doll—he sees that too. Lyda is there, calling his name, except this memory is silent.

  Partridge reaches into his pocket. He feels the capsule with the tip of his index and middle fingers. There are cameras in every corner of the room, as well as within the tent itself—even without them, he wouldn’t do it. He’s no murderer. This is the difference between his father and himself. He can’t allow that difference to erode. He shakes his head and pulls his hand out of his pocket. He won’t do it.

  His father’s eyes open then. “Partridge?” His voice is a raw chirp.

  “Dad.”

  His father twitches the fingers on one of his blackened, curled hands, coaxing Partridge closer. “I have something I need before . . .”

  “Before what?”

  “Before the end.” Whose end? His father’s? Partridge’s? The difference between a murderer and the murdered, the difference between evil and good—it feels as see-through and flimsy as a damp veil.

  “What is it?” Partridge asks.

  His father looks stricken. His face clouds over with physical pain, or is it an emotion? His father clenches his eyes, juts out his jaw, and then finally says, “I want your forgiveness.”

  This is what his father wants? Forgiveness for all his horrific acts, for millions of deaths, for what?

  “Tell me,” his father says, “tell me you love me.”

  Partridge tears away from his father’s bedside rail. He wheels around the room, the shiny white tile seeming to spin around him. This was why his father wanted Partridge’s memory swiped clean. He wants Partridge to know only what he knew before he left. His father wants forgiveness for some petty crimes, the normal ones sons harbor against their fathers. He wants false absolution, the words of forgiveness to pass over his son’s lips—forgiveness that would ride out and cover his infinite sins.

  And after he gets forgiveness, his father can take over his body. Partridge braces himself with his shoulder against the wall. His father is choosing to make his own truth—a truth where his son loves him and forgives him. He feels a trickle of sweat run down his back. His pulse is loud and quick. He reaches into his pocket. There is the pill, just at the tips of his fingers.

  “Partridge,” his father calls to him. “Come here.”

  Partridge wipes sweat from his face. His fingers nudge the pill. And then he pinches it between his index and middle fingers and folds it into the center of his palm, holding it in his fist. He walks back to the bedside but can’t look at his father’s ravaged skin and curled hands.

  “That’s all you want?” he says to his father, breathless. “Just forgiveness? Just for me to tell you that I love you?”

  His father nods, his eyes wet with tears.

  Partridge raises his fist to his mouth, pretends to cough, and pops the capsule under his tongue. The cameras bear down. He tucks the slick pill into his cheek.

  Forty seconds will pass before the pill dissolves. Partridge won’t need forty seconds.

  He grabs the bed rails. He imagines for a moment his father taking over his body, his life. He imagines his father living out a future with Iralene. His father touching her with Partridge’s hands. And Partridge’s own brain . . . gone? Suspended? He imagines Lyda—never seeing her again.

  His mother dead.

  His brother dead.

  The entire world dead, dead, dying, and dead.

  He leans over the rails. The blood pounds in his face, his neck. He whispers to his father, “You’ll never understand love. But I’ll forgive you—with a kiss.”

  His father never kissed him and Sedge as kids; he never hugged them. He taught them to shake hands, like men. But this is on Partridge’s terms, this absolution, and as he leans down and gives his father a kiss, he blows the capsule from his mouth past his father’s lips to the back of his father’s throat. “Forgive you?” Partridge says. “Forgive me? What’s it matter now?”

  His father’s throat hitches. He swallows. His raw, red-rimmed eyes go wide. He recognizes this moment. He knows what Partridge has done. He lifts his claw of a hand and grasps his son’s shirt.

  “You are my son,” he says. “You are mine.”

  LYDA

  TREMBLE

  AND AN ENVELOPE SHOOTS into the room from under the door. It glides for a moment, catching air, and then slides to a stop. Lyda stares at it—plain and white, an ordinary envelope with a slight bulkiness in its middle.

  She picks it up. She imagines it’s some kind of invitation, but she knows she’s never going to be invited anywhere here.

  She slides one finger under the back flap, peeling it up.

  A torn piece of folded paper, words written in pencil. It looks worn out, pocked with holes.

  She picks it up and unfolds it.

  A small paper snowflake. Her heart starts thrumming.

  She sees the ghostly imprint of words in reverse. She flips it over and sees those words floating on the page.

  Lyda. She sees her own name. A few numbers, as if this is a list. The words capsules and memory.

  There’s only one explanation for this snowflake.

  She looks up at the one-way mirror. Is he there? Has he seen her?

  It’s his gift to her, the one he promised to give her back when they were in the subway car. He kissed her on the lips so softly. She lifts her fingers to her mouth, remembering the kiss. He’s with her. He knows she’s here. They’re still bound.

  The paper snowflake trembles in her hand. She loses her grip on it and it sways on the air, back and forth, falling to the floor.

  PRESSIA

  WINGS

  IT’S QUIET, BRADWELL LIES on the ground bare-chested. His ribs—larger now, heavier—rise and fall quickly. But he’s otherwise still. Pressia has been keeping watch and finally she crawls to him. The wind ruffles his hair, his wings, one of which is curled around his shoulder—a feathered vault protecting his body. The scar rides up the center of his chest. She touches it, and without opening his eyes, he winces.

  El Capitan sits with his brother’s back resting against a tree, his fists clenching dirt. Maybe El Capitan does love her. She thinks of Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud bound in vines, dying. She has to believe that it’s better this way. Better. It has to be.

  Fignan churns his wheels. There’s nowhere to go. The horse whinnies. It wags its mane, which falls along its thick neck. A giant animal with a giant heart. She hasn’t told them where the horse came from or about the people she saw in the sacred mound. Kelly is here and alive. They aren’t alone. And yet it feels like they are completely alone on this earth, cut off.

  She hears the sound of her own heart in her ears—her ragged, wild, beating heart. It’s the same sound she heard underwater when she was drowning—the deep bass thrum, the rest of the world gone nearly silent. She broke her word to someone she loves.

  She loves Bradwell.

  There it is. The truth of it. It isn’t a weakness and it doesn’t take courage. Her love for him simply is. They didn’t die together on the forest floor, their bodies covered in ice. She couldn’t let him die here, without her. Is that a selfish love? If it is, she’s guilty of it. She can’t apologize for saving him, for turning him into this creature with three giant winged birds in his back.

  She leans down over Bradwell, holding tight to the last remaining vial, the formula still deep in her
pocket, and she whispers, “You’re still Pure. It’s only the inside that counts. You taught me that.”

  She saved him—whether he wanted to be saved or not. There’s been too much loss.

  He’s alive. Sedge isn’t. Her grandfather isn’t. Her mother isn’t. What would her mother tell her? Her mother is unknowable. What would her grandfather say? Nothing. He would hold her tight, the way he did from the beginning when she was just a stranger to him, a lost little girl who didn’t even speak English. Itchy knee sun she go.

  She thinks of Partridge. Where is he now? Did he ever really think she could get this far? Will she ever be able to get back?

  For some reason she can’t explain, she knows that they will return. There’s something calling her home.

  Maybe it’s Wilda and all the others like her. Pressia might be able to save them still.

  Pressia no longer believes solely in this world. It’s a myth. It’s a dream. And Newgrange is a place touched by a world beyond. Maybe, here, fireflies still exist; maybe somewhere there are blue butterflies—real ones. Maybe one day she will see her father and he will hug her and she will hear the beating of his actual heart. She isn’t alone. She is part of a constellation. Scattered stars—lit souls, brightly burning.

  “Itchy knee,” she says to Bradwell.

  And his lips tremble. He whispers, “Sun, she go.”

  The End of Book Two