Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (16 page)

“We can’t leave him,” she says, looking out across the dusty, loud, snow-covered battlefield. “What’s wrong with your leg anyway?”

“It’s just an old injury coming back to haunt.”

“I thought you said it was a muscle cramp.”

“That was the injury,” he says. He coughs into the bend of his arm. “The air here—if a Dust doesn’t choke you, it will.”

He’s hiding something. She looks at Helmud, who stares at her, wide-eyed with fear. “Choke,” he says. “Choke.”

Pressia looks down at El Capitan’s leg. “There’s blood on your pant leg. Muscle cramps don’t gush blood.” She reaches for his leg, and he staggers back.

“Don’t. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” Helmud says.

“You have to show me,” she says.

El Capitan shakes his head and stares up at the sky, letting out a deep breath.

And then Pressia knows what it is. One of the spiders. She whispers, “No.”

He nods.

“You’ve had it on you since the city?”

“Yes. It got me just outside the car.”

“It got me,” Helmud says. If his brother explodes, he does too.

Pressia’s throat cinches. “When you were saving me?”

He looks away, and she knows that’s when it happened. She feels ripped through with guilt. She reaches out and touches El Capitan’s chest, just above his heart. “How long do you have left?”

“About two hours. Long enough to get us to the medical outpost.”

Her surge of guilt is quickly overrun by anger. “We could have taken this time to get you to a doctor back at headquarters! We could have left the city immediately and—”

“No,” he says. “It would have distracted everyone, wasted time—”

“But”—she’s rethinking all the decisions made in the subway car—“you were the one who convinced me to let Partridge and Bradwell have more time together to figure out the box, to finish the maps . . .”

“I said that sometimes people are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good. That’s the truth.”

She’s furious with him. “There’s still time, isn’t there? We have to get you—” There’s a massive explosion. The bottom hunk of the smokestack explodes into dust and shards. She’s blown onto her back, slammed by a dozen fist-size chunks of cement and mortar, her breath shoved from her lungs. All sound is muffled. Special Forces are pulling out the heavy artillery. She runs her fingers over the vials nervously.
They’re all intact. She rolls to her stomach and looks around. Smoke and dust fill the air. “Wilda!”

“Here!” El Capitan is holding her in his arms, protecting her with his body.

Another blast hits the ground between them.

“Run!” Pressia shouts. “Take her and run!”

El Capitan gets on his feet.

“We’ll see each other again!” she shouts. “This isn’t the end!” It can’t be.

He smiles at her sadly, then turns and runs, hobbled by his bad leg. As they head off through the smoke, Helmud raises his spindly arm in the air. A wave good-bye.

Her chest feels like it could tear open at any moment. The spider locked on El Capitan while he was saving her, and now how much time does he have left? Only two hours? She has to focus. She blinks tears from her eyes and looks onto the battle scene.

Bradwell. She has to find Bradwell.

And where are Partridge and Lyda? Are they already being led to the Dome?

She runs down the ruins of the shattered smokestack, her legs heavy. A small cluster huddles about two hundred feet away, their motions frantic. She thinks at first that it’s a Groupie but then realizes it’s a pack of Basement Boys who’ve dragged a compact and broadly muscular Special Forces soldier, now dead, away from the battle. They’re gutting the body for weapons and parts. She feels sick. She hates this world.

Bradwell. Where the hell is he? Is he ever coming back? What if he’s dead already? Gone?

Off in the distance, the Basement Boys start to fight over what’s left of the dismantled soldier. At the center of it, something small and sharp spins through the air and then thuds into the ground.

A lawn dart.

And then another.

The mothers are here, rooted on the far side of the buckle. They kick up a wild spray of lawn darts, spears, arrows. Why the sudden upsurge? But then she figures it out. The mothers are laying down cover for Bradwell
, who’s now running toward her through the dust and snow, Fignan under one arm and the rolled maps under the other. Alive. Her chest feels swollen suddenly, tight with . . . relief? Joy?

“Bradwell! Here!” she screams.

Bullets whine and crack, hitting the fallen smokestack. His eyebrows are covered in dust, his face streaked with dirt. She’s filled with relief. And then he’s down. Taken by a bullet? He’s still got hold of Fignan and the maps, but a Dust has him by the leg, a claw clutching an ankle. Pressia runs to him as fast as she can. Bradwell kicks the Dust with his free boot as viciously as he can, digging in with his elbows to hold his ground.

Pressia pulls a stray lawn dart out of the ground and plunges it deep into the ripple of rising and falling ribs—into the heart of the Dust. She hears a guttural cry and hiss as she then rips it from its body.

She helps Bradwell stagger to his feet. The remaining hunk of the fallen tower bursts open and rains down. The artillery is deafening.

They run in the direction of distant trees, the woods that lead to the river, and make it to an old outbuilding with a cinder-block foundation. They stop to catch their breath.

“El Capitan and Helmud,” she says. “A spider. Lodged in his calf. He’s got only a couple of hours left.”

“Why didn’t he—”

“He didn’t want to distract us.”

“Where is he? Where’s Wilda?”

“He’s taking her to the medical outpost, past the river.” The river. Pressia’s never been out that far. “He said you know the way.”

“I do,” Bradwell says. “More or less.”

“Do you think they’ll make it?” She was lying when she said to El Capitan,
We’ll see each other again. This isn’t the end
. She was lying to him and to herself. And he knew it. She remembers his look of sad resignation. Shouldering his brother all these years, he’s always accepted the truth of his life—now his death. “He’s gone,” she says, and it feels like a part of her is gone. She had no idea how empty and vulnerable and disoriented she would feel at the
idea
of losing him. She raises her hand to her throat and looks out across the dusty terrain. Smoke has clouded everything.

“El Capitan?” Bradwell says. “Never count him out.”

T
HE HOUSE IS PROPPED ON
one side by a chimney and on the other by a staircase. The outer walls are gone for the most part, making the house feel exposed. A piano stripped of keys and strings and pedals sits on its side, a slain carcass. She hears someone behind her, turns. It’s Partridge. Just him. They’re alone.

“Did they follow us?” she asks. Her heart beats quickly in her chest, but, for some reason, she feels calm.

“I don’t think so.” He touches a cracked windowsill. “This may be the warden’s house. Some of them lived near the prisons in big, beautiful houses.”

She tries to imagine this house as beautiful. It’s now ravaged.

They take the stairs, which have survived a fire. Whorls of black soot stain the walls. The handrail has detached and lies on the stairs, useless. Silky ash makes the stairs slippery

“Where are we going?” Partridge asks.

“Up.”

On the third floor, there’s only air overhead.
A roof of sky
, she thinks. She’ll miss the sky—dusky as it is. She’ll miss wind, air, and cold. The walls have nearly crumbled away, and the room is bare except for a tall four-poster brass bed frame. It’s a miracle—this bed frame. The mattress, sheets, blanket, dust ruffle are long gone, swept up with the roof or looted. But this brass frame, covered in soot, remains.

Lyda wipes the brass ball on one of the posts. She sees her own reflection, and behind her Partridge, warped and rounded. “It feels like a gift,” she says.

“Maybe it’s our Christmas gift,” he says.

She steps over the rails into the middle, where the mattress once was, and says, “Maybe so.” She sits down and, in slow motion, pretends to throw herself back onto the soft blankets.

“How will we get back into the Dome now?” Partridge says.

Lyda doesn’t want to talk about it. “We have to wait out the battle. We can’t do anything until the soldiers and Dusts are gone at least.” She smiles. “We need to plump the pillows.”

Partridge steps over the rails, picks up a pretend pillow, gives it a few punches, and hands it to her.

“Share it with me,” she says, pretending to put it down on the bed.

He lies down next to her. Side by side, they stare up at the clouds.

Partridge rolls toward her. “Lyda,” he says.

She kisses him. She doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say. They’re in this windy world in a house without a roof in a bed that’s no longer a bed. They’re free of the Dome’s chaperones and the mothers. They’re alone. No one knows where they are. No one at all. They don’t even have to exist. What they’re doing is make-believe.

Partridge’s mouth is on hers and then on her neck. His hot breath sends shivers across her skin.

She pulls off his coat. There are the small, delicate buttons of their shirts, and then the shirts are gone. His skin touches hers—so hot it surprises her. With wind this cold, how could such warmth exist?

They cocoon themselves in his coat. Her body rubs against his. She’s surprised by how good it all feels—his lips on her ear, her neck, and her shoulders. She feels flushed, but not just her cheeks—her whole body. In fact, his body and hers—what’s the difference? There’s this abundance of skin, all of it tingling as if it’s just come alive for the first time.

The waxy sheen from the baths turns slick. Is this how it should be between a husband and wife? She thinks back to her health lessons in the girls’ academy
—a happy heart is a healthy heart
. They said nothing of love and sex, though she knows bits of these, the small amounts
of science that the girls are allowed to know, what some mothers will whisper to daughters and girls will whisper among themselves, which gets spread so thin who knows what’s true and what’s a lie?

He takes off the rest of his clothes, and she undresses too. All of it gone. Is this even happening? They’re completely alone, unseen, unwatched, and she feels something like hunger, but it’s not hunger exactly. She loves his lips on hers. She runs her hands through his hair. She wraps herself around him, arms and legs.

Partridge pulls back. He looks surprised, scared even. He says, “Are you sure?”

She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Is she sure she’s coming with him into the Dome? She didn’t know she had a choice. But of course she has a choice. This isn’t the girls’ academy. This is the real earth and sky, and she’s alive in it. Maybe she can stay here. She doesn’t want to ruin this moment by telling him the truth—if she doesn’t have to go back into the Dome, she won’t. She says, “I’m sure.” She’ll explain it to him later. Why waste this precious time?

And then he’s inside of her. She feels a sharp, brief pain, then pressure. An expansion of herself. She lets out a gasp.

“Should I stop?” he asks.

Is this what he meant? Was she sure that they should do
this
, something she’s only heard rumors about—stories of grunting animals and husbands and blood and babies?

She should tell him to stop, but she doesn’t want him to. His skin and his lips and their bodies—where does his body end and where does hers begin? They’re fused—this is what comes to her now. The two of them are Pures, but fused. She loves him in this moment. Everything feels so warm and wet and fascinating and new that she doesn’t want it to end. “Don’t stop,” she whispers.

What if this is the last time they see each other before they’re separated forever? Now that she knows she’s not going with him, she’s desperately sad as well as freed. She wants to be his wife—if in no other moment than this one, all they might ever have.

He says, “I love you. I’ll always love you.”

And she says, “I love you too.” She loves the way it sounds.

She’s sure there’s blood. She’s sure that this is wrong, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to do anything differently. He shivers and lets out a soft sound. He holds her then, close.

She looks up at the sky over Partridge’s shoulder—the scudding clouds, the windswept ash—and she imagines she’s above them, atop a roofless house, two bodies locked together in the center of an empty four-poster bed.

She misses him already. She can already feel herself longing for him. He’s going to go. She’s going to stay. What will happen to the two of them without each other?

“Good-bye.” She whispers it so softly that she isn’t sure whether he’s heard it or not.

T
HEY’RE WINDING THROUGH TREES
, heading uphill. El Capitan can hear the river, can almost smell it. He walks behind Wilda, keeps his eyes moving, but they blur with sweat. The pain keeps trying to draw on his old pain, but he tells it to shut up. Some were vaporized so fast that their bodies left only a shadowy stain behind. Some turned to char. After the Detonations, he found a woman in her yard, bent over her melted rabbit cages—a thick coal statue. He reached out and touched her shoulder, hoping she’d turn; instead, a chunk of her shoulder fell to the ground in a puff of ash. His fingers were stained gray. He was lucky he wasn’t char. He was lucky he didn’t drink the black rain even though he was dying of thirst. He found an old water tank, and he and Helmud drank from it instead. So he didn’t die, days later, from the inside out. He and Helmud were both sick and weak, but they ate canned tangerines—something his mother used to put in a dessert with apples and coconut flakes.

The pain winds its way up through his body. Now his chest hurts. His heart pounds. He steadies himself by putting his hand on the rough bark of a sapling. The pain reminds him of the other kinds of suffering—loss. His mother. The plastic bag of coconut flakes—gritty in your teeth and sweet on your tongue.