Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (26 page)

Hastings walks up close. He towers over El Capitan and stares at him. El Capitan hears a click and looks down. The knife in Hastings’ boot—a claw of a knife—has popped out.

“Easy now,” El Capitan says as he looks back up at him.

“Easy now,” Helmud whispers.

Hastings steps back and claws at the dirt, writing.

Set me free
.

El Capitan doesn’t say anything for a moment. He’s trying to process this. Hastings is asking for what, exactly? How could he be set free? He belongs to the Dome. He’s their creation.

Hastings walks over to a rock.

“Wait,” El Capitan says. Could he actually set Hastings free? He and Helmud have been surgeons these past weeks. If they could sedate him and debug him, he’d be free and extremely valuable. Hastings stares at him pleadingly. He knows the look
—put me out of my misery
. The last time he saw it he was with Pressia in the woods. He shot a boy caught in a trap. He’s not asking to be killed, though, is he?

Hastings pushes the heavy rock toward El Capitan and turns his back, kneeling down. He bows his head and opens his arms wide.

El Capitan opens the back of the truck. “Hand me that bag.” The soldier gives him the sedatives. He walks back to Hastings, who’s still on his knees.

He touches Hastings’ massive shoulder then squeezes it tight. Hastings stiffens—expecting a blow to the head? El Capitan sees Hastings’ pulsing jugular, slips the needle under the skin, releases the sedative
into his bloodstream, then pulls the needle out. He watches as Hastings slouches forward, catching himself with one locked arm. He twists and looks up at El Capitan, his eyes floating with tears. He’s confused at first then strangely relieved. He smiles, ever so slightly. As his elbow buckles, he falls hard to the ground.

“Looks like we’ve got another patient, Helmud—a big one.”

P
RESSIA HAS EXPLAINED
to Bradwell everything she’s learned, including her theory about the death of Ivan Novikov, plus the strange images and phrases that repeat—entwined snakes and talk of being forged by fire, made new by flames, strange sets of numbers, the poetry, and the appearance of her middle name, Brigid. They’ve split up the work. She’s devoted the day to Willux’s number obsessions, and Bradwell has concentrated on words and patterns. They’ve taken turns using Fignan—who buzzes happily when being put to good use—and have agreed not to interrupt each other unless absolutely necessary.

Still, she’s aware of Bradwell’s every move. Sometimes he breathes in like he’s about to say something. She stops and turns. “What is it?” He looks up and stares at her for a moment. Their eyes catch. She wonders if he’s lost his train of thought. He looks down at his papers again and says, “Nothing. Just trying to put things together.”

Now it’s dusk, and Bradwell starts to cough like he has croup—harsh, seal-like barks that make him wheeze. He sits on the edge of the bed, hunched over, each cough racking his lungs.

Pressia says, “Let’s get some air.”

Fignan beeps.

“You can come,” she says.

They put on their coats quickly, the birds on his back shifting their
wings. On their way out, Pressia points out one of the faces painted on the wall—the one that reminds her of Fandra. “I had a friend who looked like this girl. Fandra.”

Bradwell leans in close. “Gorse’s sister? She was one of the last”—he starts coughing again, but then draws some slow, deep breaths—“one of the last to use the underground before we shut it down.”

“We were like sisters, and then one day she was gone.”

They step into the open air. Fignan sticks close to their boots. As Pressia bolts the door, she asks where the underground led.

“We hoped to get people out, but the territories surrounding this place are deadly. We wanted to think there was a place on the other side where people were surviving—maybe peacefully, maybe living pretty well. Her brother Gorse came back alone after they tried to make it out and said he’d lost Fandra.”

“Why did you shut the underground down?” They head into the orchard, dipping under the limbs rooted into the ground, stepping over the bulbous roots.

“We sent people out and few came back. They told brutal stories. A lot were simply missing and others died. We lost hope. Or nerve, or both.” Bradwell pauses, maybe to catch his breath. He leans against a tree. “I still hold out hope that some survived, but what if they all died out there? It’s a thought that I can’t shake.”

“If they didn’t try to make it out, they were probably going to get picked up by OSR and, back then, that meant they’d have to start killing people in Death Sprees or, worse, get used as live targets. What choices did they have? You were doing your best.”

“I’m sorry,” Bradwell says, “about Fandra.”

She shakes her head. “I hold out hope too. I can’t help it. I do.”

They continue on, passing a set of fallen stables, a shattered greenhouse. Fignan buzzes along and then uses his arms to walk over roots, stones, and shards of glass. Bradwell takes deep breaths, pulling the cold into his lungs.

Pressia sees the dormitory where Wilda is probably getting ready for bed. She stares at one of the lights in the windows. Wilda. She wants to tell her that they’re trying to figure it out.

Bradwell stops in front of a spot where the cement wall was buffered by a demolished school building and survived intact. When Pressia stops, too, and studies the wall for a moment, she sees what he’s looking at: the shadow-stain of a person left on the wall, someone who was reaching down to pick something up when they were vaporized on the spot.

“There used to be so many of these throughout the city,” Bradwell says. “Some were made into small shrines.”

“My grandfather pointed them out. They used to scare me when I was little, like they were dark ghosts.”

“But they’re beautiful,” Bradwell says.

“You’re right.” Pressia remembers what he said to her about finding beauty everywhere but never in herself. She looks at her doll-head fist, ugly, beaten, ashen. He’s right, she thinks.

The wind whips up then dies. Fignan situates himself between Bradwell’s boots.

“I think Partridge was right about something,” Pressia says.

Bradwell doesn’t like it when Partridge is proven right. “About what?” he says a little sullenly

“The mark on Fignan, what you thought was a copyright, is pi.” Fignan lights up at the sound of his name. “Walrond was giving us a clue. There were twenty-two of the Best and the Brightest who were selected for an End-of-World scenario, and from that Willux chose seven. I looked up pi, and Fignan says that people usually expressed pi as three point one four but also as twenty-two divided by seven. Remember when El Capitan counted the number of words in the two messages from the Dome?”

“Twenty-two plus seven is twenty-nine,” he says. “But that could be just a coincidence.”

“Every coincidence is worth looking at closely. Willux’s mind is still thinking in obsessive ways. Pi is a number that goes on forever. And, most important, it’s necessary for circles.
Domes
are circles. He was obsessed with domes.”

“Huh,” Bradwell says, and it sounds like a small concession. “Domes. Let’s say that Walrond created an empty file for the formula, as a clue,
and hid the formula somewhere. He says on the video that he had to look into the future.”

“I’ve thought about that too,” Pressia says. “He would have had to look into the future to find a place to hide the formula that might survive the Detonations. What if Willux wanted to spare certain places—ones he found holy? He was in charge of the Detonations—the strategic annihilation—so he could have left some places untouched.”

“Walrond did call him a romantic, right?” Bradwell says. “Maybe domes were a soft spot.”

“Exactly,” Pressia says.

“But domes existed everywhere, in every culture. Which dome was the most holy?”

“I guess that’s where things fall apart.” She reaches out and touches the shadow-stain.

“Willux has this string of numbers, mixed with a few letters. I keep trying to fit them into Fignan, but no matches come up.”

“What are they?” Pressia asks.

“Twenty point sixty-two, forty-two point oh three, NQ-four.”

“They sound like coordinates.”

“I can’t find a place anywhere on this entire planet that they’d work for.”

Bradwell tilts his head and looks up at the sky. His neck is strong, his collar loose enough that she can see his collarbones. He’s gotten thinner since he got sick, leaner, his cheekbones more cut.

“Maybe they’re not for this planet,” Pressia says. “If the formula is hidden somewhere out there in the universe, we’re screwed.”

“There
are
coordinates for stars.” Bradwell looks down at Fignan. “Run the series of numbers I just mentioned and see if they match anything beyond us—out there, in the universe: constellations, stars, planets.”

Fignan buzzes quietly, the inner red egg whirring. Pressia doesn’t know much about the night sky. The stars have been dimmed by ash for so long that it’s rare to see them. Her grandfather drew them for her—Orion, the Big Dipper, the Milky Way. He told her that there were myths about stars but that was about it. Fignan finally lights
up and shows a slowly rotating model of the night sky. The words
right ascension: 20.62 h; declination: +42.03°; quadrant: NQ4; area: 804 sq. deg
. are written next to a constellation that reads,
The Northern Cross (Cygnus)
.

“Cygnus?” Bradwell shakes his head, mystified. “All roads lead back to that word.”

“What do you mean?”

“I spent some time on your middle name today,” Bradwell says. “
Brigid
means ‘fiery arrow.’ And Brigid was a saint and before that a pagan goddess. She’s associated with fire and was known for poetry, healing, and blacksmithing. She invented the whistle, of all things. She was the first to keen—a way of mourning by crying out. Her son died. Half of her face was beautiful, half of it was ugly.”

Pressia looks at the ground. She can feel the burn marks around her eye, a flush as if the burn is fresh and spreading a searing heat across her face. Doesn’t that describe Pressia—half herself, half destroyed?

“But most of all, Pressia, her symbol was the swan.”

The wind stings Pressia’s eyes. She reaches up and touches the swan pendant that sits in the dip of her collarbones. Pressia’s
mother
was the swan, not Pressia. She looks at the sky, which is windy and dark, gauzy with ash. She feels a great pang of loss, an unexpected welling of sorrow mixed with confusion.

“Your mom must have wanted to pass that down to you for some reason,” Bradwell says quietly. “It’s a good legacy. To have that part of her.”

“I don’t want it. What good did it do my mother to be the swan wife? To be caught between two powerful men? To have to hide me away like a shameful secret? I’m not the swan. I don’t want anything to do with her legacy.”

“Sorry,” Bradwell says. “I thought it might make you happy.”

She points to the light—the one she imagines belongs to Wilda’s room. “If we’re going to save Wilda, the only thing that’s important to ask is why Willux was so obsessed with the swan. What did it mean to
him?
That’s what we have to focus on now. We have to be simple and practical.” She puts her hand on the shadow-stain. “You said fire,
right? Brigid is associated with fire, a fiery arrow. Willux said that he was forged by fire. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“At some point, I think we’re going to have to accept that there are mysteries we can’t solve.” She thinks of Willux’s stupid love poems and those damn entwined snakes that he drew again and again. Maybe that’s just the weird kind of thing a disturbed young man would doodle, madly, for no real reason.

“Maybe we can get enough answers. Just enough. That’s what Walrond said—the box will unlock the next move. That’s all we need.”

“So we’re not asking the right questions,” Pressia says.

“What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. I mean, okay, my middle name means something, so what about Partridge’s and Sedge’s names?”

“Do you know their full names?”

She shakes her head. “Ingership called Partridge by his full name once. I know his first name is really Ripkard but I don’t remember the whole thing.”

“And Sedge?”

She shrugs.

Bradwell asks Fignan to pull up the full bio on Ellery Willux.

A cone of light brightens above their heads; it shows a document. “Two sons,” she says. “Ripkard Crick Willux and Sedge Watson Willux.”

“Watson and Crick,” Bradwell says excitedly.

“What about them?”

“They discovered the structure of DNA.”

“But how does that fit with anything?” Pressia sighs.

“The snakes,” Bradwell says.

“What about them?”

“You said there were always two snakes entwined, right?”

She nods.

“DNA—the double helix. That’s how DNA is structured.”

For some reason this only makes her angry. “That’s fantastic,” she says sarcastically. “It doesn’t help, though. I swear, this feels personal. Willux is messing with us. Isn’t it enough that he killed my mother?” It’s
the first time she’s ever said it out loud. She feels the sting of tears, pressure building in her chest. She presses her hand against the wall, covers her eyes, and tries not to cry

“Pressia,” Bradwell says, “it’s okay to be angry and miss her.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I think you
should
talk about it.”

“No.” She uncovers her eyes and looks at the shadow-stain again. A ghostly girl, most likely. Here, then gone.

“Pressia,” Bradwell says, “I’m serious about this. It’ll eat you up. Trust me. I know.”

“You don’t talk about them.”

“My parents?”

She nods.

“I was so angry for so long, and I still can get angry. But it’s different now. I’ve had time.”

She removes her hand from the wall and bends to match the shadowstain’s shape. “What do you think she was reaching for?”

“Maybe something she’d lost and then found again.”