Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (17 page)

He grunts.

Helmud grunts.

El Capitan touches the girl’s shoulder. “This way.” They push past saplings. The river opens up. It’s deep here, but up a little farther it’s shallow enough to pass. They follow the bank, then El Capitan stops. “I’ll have to carry you,” he tells Wilda.

She looks up at him and raises her arms.

He lifts her and the pain is brutal. Oddly, though, with her gripping his chest and Helmud on his back, he finds a new equilibrium. The water is frigid. It seeps quickly into his boots and up his pants. As soon as the iciness hits the wounds from the robotic spider, he wonders if the water will fry the little thing. Maybe it’s that simple.

The thought spurs him quickly to the other side of the river. He puts Wilda down and looks at his calf. While the girl is distracted, he inches up the wet pant leg, dark with blood. His eyes sting so much he has to blink and squint. It’s not fried. The timer reads,
1:12:04
. . .
1:12:03
. . .
1:12:02
.

It’s close to dusk. The sunlight is low in the trees.

“Helmud,” he says, “I’m going to try to make it, but if I don’t, we have to get the girl—”

“Don’t,” Helmud says, and it’s one of those moments when Helmud doesn’t feel like an echo. He seems to know that El Capitan is about to go soft, and he wants him to stop. These moments are rare but, God, El Capitan lives for them. It’s like having his real brother back again—that kid who buried guns with him, the smart one who sang.

“Okay,” El Capitan says. The fact is, if El Capitan dies, Helmud will too. He wants to tell Helmud what’s going on, just to say it aloud, just to have someone help shoulder the emotional weight of it. But Helmud understands what’s at stake.

The truth is that if it weren’t for Helmud, El Capitan probably wouldn’t have made it. He’d have already given up without someone to protect, even in his own twisted, love-hate way.

He continues walking. He’s got to at least try to deliver the girl to the outpost safely before the spider explodes. He wishes he could get there in time to try to dismantle it, but chances are they’d only set it off and die in the effort.

Wilda looks at him.

“It’s just a little farther. We’ll follow the edge of the woods around the meadow to the right. After that, we’ll see the roof of the outpost.”

Wilda is ahead of him on the narrow path. He keeps trudging forward, each step more excruciating than the one before it. He’s slowing down. Maybe he should just tell her to keep going. Maybe this is as far as he’ll get.

His knee buckles. He staggers, reaches out, and grabs a tree. He drops and lands with his bad leg kicked out to one side. Helmud hugs his neck.

Wilda rushes back to him.

“You’re going to have to make a run for it yourself,” El Capitan says. “Don’t come back.” He worries about OSR soldiers guarding the outpost. If they hear her running, they’ll open fire. “Can you sing?”

She shrugs.

“Sing the message as you run. Sing all the way. Sing!”

She turns and starts running through the woods, jumping over brush. Her dress flashes through the trees, then disappears. She’s not singing. “Sing!” El Capitan shouts, using all his breath. “Sing or they’ll shoot you!”

“Shoot you!” Helmud says. They might shoot her anyway.

By God, she’s still not singing.
Sing, sing, sing!
he begs her in his mind.

And just when he figures that maybe she really can’t, a voice rises up, clear, sweet, melodic. “We want our son returned!” Wilda sings, and it reminds him of Helmud’s voice when he was a kid, during the Before. Angelic. It made their mother cry sometimes. “This girl is proof that we can save you all!” Wilda holds the last note and it rings through the trees.

El Capitan closes his eyes, lets the song swell in his head.
We want our son returned
. . . And El Capitan wants to be returned. Coconut and tangerines. His mother mixing them in a bowl. Return, return. He feels a tug on his pant leg.
I’m hurt
, he would tell his mother if she were here.
I’m hurt
.

His eyes flit open. Helmud’s face bobs into focus for a moment, then
is gone. He feels his brother rummaging behind El Capitan’s back, then he hears the click of Helmud’s penknife. He shows El Capitan the shiny blade.

“No, Helmud. Jesus. No,” El Capitan says through grunts of pain. “You think you’re going to dig the spider’s legs out of me? Like whittling a piece of wood?”

“Like whittling a piece of wood,” Helmud says calmly

“It’s too dangerous. What if you trip the explosive? What if . . .”

“What if?” Helmud says.

He’s right. They’ve got nothing to lose. “Oh, God. Helmud.”

“God Helmud!”

For once, their lives are in Helmud’s hands. There is no other alternative.

“The girl isn’t around, right? I don’t want her to be anywhere near us.”

“The girl isn’t around.”

El Capitan bows his head. “Okay.”

Helmud twists around. His arms are long enough to apply pressure to El Capitan’s ankle, a firm hold. There’s a breeze and then a pain so sharp he punches the dirt. “Shit!” El Capitan screams.

Helmud takes just a bit of the word this time—“Shhh. Shhh. Shhh”—and keeps digging.

O
NCE THEY’RE DEEP ENOUGH
into the woods and stop to catch their breath, Bradwell says, “Let’s try it again.”

“Try what?”

“Fignan.” The Black Box has been keeping pace, using a mix of wheels and long arms to get him over uneven ground. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I want to try it again with all seven names and Partridge not here. Just us.”

“Okay,” Pressia says, “but this time don’t—”

“Don’t what?” She was going to tell him not to pin his hopes on Fignan, but she can’t. His voice is so passionate, his gaze so forceful, how could she tell him not to have hope? How could she tell anyone out here in these wrecked wilds not to have hope?

“Nothing,” she says. “Let’s try it.”

They both kneel down on either side of Fignan. “Swan,” Bradwell says.

After Fignan finishes his litany of
sevens
, Bradwell quickly rattles off the names. “Aribelle Cording, Ellery Willux, Hideki Imanaka, Ivan Novikov, Bartrand Kelly, Avna Ghosh, and Arthur Walrond.” A green light flashes after each one. The eye of a camera appears on the top of the box. It gazes at Bradwell and then Pressia. “He knows us,” Bradwell says. “He must be matching our faces with the DNA samples he took.”

Fignan’s inner motor churns, as if he’s having trouble computing. Finally he says, “Matching Otten Bradwell and Silva Bernt. Male. Matching Aribelle Cording and Hideki Imanaka. Female.”

“That’s us,” Bradwell says. “See?”

Pressia is stunned.

“Clearance,” Fignan says. “Playing message for Otten Bradwell and Silva Bernt.”

And then a flickering bright ribbon of light spirals up from Fignan into a cone and there, hovering, is lit air—motes of ash riding on the wind.

“It worked!” Pressia says, amazed.

“I told you it would,” Bradwell says.

A face appears through static, one that Pressia doesn’t recognize—a man in his thirties with messy blond hair and a blond mustache. He blinks erratically as if he’s been too wired to sleep and has been awake for days on end. He says, “If you’re seeing this, it means you’re someone I trust. You’re one of the Seven who I still have faith in, or you’re Silva and Otten, who I trust with my life.” He stops, presses his hand flat to his chest. His eyes tear up. “And you’re alive.”

Bradwell leans close to the man’s face. He’s stunned, like seeing a ghost.

Pressia reaches up and touches Bradwell’s sleeve. “It’s Walrond?”

He doesn’t look away from the man, only nods and mutters, “It’s him.”

“By the time you’re watching this, I’m probably dead. Maybe the whole world is dead. Maybe nothing we’re trying to do right now will work. But I had to try. And the box knows,” Walrond says. “Sorry about the DNA sampling. It was an extra layer of security. I had to do it.” He looks around, bleary-eyed. He steps out of frame for a moment, maybe looking for something or someone, being watchful, but then he’s back. “This box contains all the notes, from the very beginning, since the inception of the Seven—all of Ellery’s ideas that went into it. All of his madness.”

He crosses his arms on his chest. “People don’t just decide young to be mass murderers. A person has to work up to an act of annihilation,
and Ellery has. He still is. But he started small. I was there early on. I should have done something then. I see that now, looking back. The thing is, he killed the one person who could have saved him. That’s the irony.”

Bradwell’s eyes are filled with tears, but he’s not crying. He loved Walrond. The pain is etched in his face.

“It’s all here for you and it’ll lead you to the formula,” Walrond says.

The formula. Walrond had it and can lead them to it—still? After all this time?

“It’s not all laid out pretty. I couldn’t risk something that simple. And listen, if you get to a point in your search and you can’t go any further, remember that I knew Willux’s mind as well as anyone. I pored over these notes and I had to look into the future. This box wasn’t safe enough for me. I couldn’t simply store everything here. If you know Willux’s mind—and you all do—it became our life’s work, didn’t it? Trying to figure out his next move and all that. Well, if you just think about his mind, his logic, you’ll be able to understand the decisions I’ve made. And when you get to the end, the box isn’t a box at all. It’s a key. Remember that. The box is a key and time is of the essence.”

He leaves the camera’s field of vision again. Is there a window nearby? Is he checking for people following him? When he returns, he says, “I can feel them closing in on me. We’re running out of time. If you’re hearing this, it means all our attempts here have failed.” He almost laughs—or is it a sob? Pressia can’t tell. The man’s chest heaves for a second and then he says, “Willux—he’s a romantic when all’s said and done, right? He wants his glorious story to live on. I hope one of you hears this, and I hope you give his story
an ending
. Promise me that.” He stares up at the ceiling. The image sputters for a moment and then returns. “Not that I deserve your word, especially not Silva and Otten. Your word is too good for me. I’ve broken so many promises. You two are better than me,” Walrond says. “You always have been. And Bradwell’s the best of both of you put together.” He looks directly at the camera then, directly at Bradwell. “In fact,” Walrond says, “what if he’s the one to survive out of all of us? Maybe I’ll add one more feature, just in case. All your kids,” he whispers. “God, I hope they outlive us all. I
hope they survive what’s coming. I hope they have a world left to survive in.”

The light fades. The small camera that projected the hologram clicks down into the Black Box.

It’s quiet.

“Are you okay?” Pressia says. She can’t imagine the shock of seeing Walrond again.

“Fine. Just fine,” he says, staring at Fignan. “It’s the formula after all that. He’s got it in there somehow The formula. So, there you go.” He takes a deep breath. “Let’s go.” While Fignan’s inner motor keeps churning, he starts walking so fast that Pressia has to run to catch up.

“Wait,” she says. “What did you want from Walrond? Isn’t the formula good news? If we can get it, we need only one more ingredient and then we can save Wilda and—”

“It is good news for you, I suppose.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The Dome can Purify people. They’ve figured it out, but it causes Rapid Cell Degeneration,” Bradwell says. “And then there’s this hope, this little chance that if you could get your mother’s vials and one other ingredient plus the formula on how they would work together, the Dome could Purify people, and then have some meds to offset the side effects. Life would be perfect, right?”

“When Willux and the people of the Dome decide the earth is clean enough again for them to return, Willux has it worked so there will be two obvious classes—the Pures and the wretches who’ll serve them,” Pressia says. “This could erase his plan.”

“Or they could come out here and face us. Face what they did to us, and accept us for who we are.”

“You can’t ignore the fact that a cure is an interesting possibility.”

“You mean a
tantalizing
possibility.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean!”

“I know what you’re hoping for, Pressia. You want your hand back. You want to erase your burns. You want to be like them.”

“Is there something so wrong with that? Really? Is wanting not to be disfigured and burned such a crime?”

“And if you got what you wanted, Pressia, what would that really change?”

She isn’t sure, but it feels like she’d get some part of
herself
back. She says, “I still have this memory of who I was. I want that person to exist. I want to be wholly me.”

“You
are
whole,” Bradwell says. “This is who I am—scars, birds in my back. I’m whole now. I accept that. You go around seeing beauty in all this wreckage, but when will you see it in yourself?” He reaches up and runs his finger along the curve of the crescent scar around her eye. “
This
self.”

Pressia wants to jerk her head away, but she doesn’t. It’s the way he looks at her—so intensely. “At least the formula is real. You just wanted to dig around in the past. You just wanted old truths, didn’t you?”

“There is one truth,” he says. “We have to find it and keep it.”

“I don’t know,” Pressia says. “Sometimes I think you believe everyone else’s truth is malleable, changeable, untrustworthy—but not yours.”

Finally she turns her head and looks across the river. A light fog drifts across the surface. Something rustles in the underbrush not far away. They both peer through the leaves.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Pressia says.

Bradwell looks up at the sky broken by limbs. “Why would time be of the essence?” he says. “It’s like Walrond forgot that we’d be listening to that message after the Detonations. Time was only of the essence during the Before, when they could still hope to stop Willux. It doesn’t make sense.”