Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (43 page)

The idea of someone entering his brain with fibers makes him sick. “Voilà. You go into my brain and flash some lights.”

“That’s the short version.”

He swallows hard. “Lovely.” Arvin told him at the party that once the damaged pathways cut off access to the deep memories—the silt at the ocean floor—there’s a short period of time when you can still get at them before they’re sealed off forever. How long will he have? “Tell me something, Dr. Weed. How long do I have to swim down deep?”

“Swim? What are you talking about?” Arvin pulls out a needle. “I’m going to hook you up to an IV here, Partridge. So just relax.”

“How long, Weed?” Partridge begs, turning his head, not wanting to see the needle go into the soft skin in the crook of his elbow. Arvin uses some tape to hold it in place.

“Quiet now.”

Partridge looks at the stent in his arm, his skin, red and pinched from the tape, bulging around it. Arvin is tapping the tube that connects the stent to a bag of clear liquids hanging from a metal post. Soon, the room will go dark. Partridge will be gone, under, out. “How long to swim to the ocean floor?”

“Ha!” Arvin calls out to anyone who might be listening. “He’s starting to hallucinate a bit. He’ll be under soon enough.”

“How long?” Partridge says again. “Tell me!”

Arvin’s masked face begins to blur. He taps Partridge’s pinky cast. “How long do you think it’ll take to grow back the rest of the way? A week or so, right? Amazing. It’ll just come back—an entire pinky,” Weed says, almost singingly “An entire pinky. An
entire
pinky.”

An
entire
pinky, an
entire
pinky, an
entire
pinky, Partridge thinks. Is Weed telling him he’ll have one week to dredge up the memories? Just a week or so? He’ll have to find the list of seven simple truths by then. But even if he believes them, he’ll have no clue that he has only seven days to remember what was lost. The lights sway and flicker overhead. The room jerks and dips. Arvin’s face is so blurred now that Partridge isn’t sure that it’s him at all. A few more people in masks walk in, shifting around him.

Partridge can’t go under. He can’t let them put fibers in his brain. He
arches his back, fighting the straps. He shouts to Weed, but he’s not sure if any sound is coming from his mouth at all. The people in masks keep working, stoically, methodically.

He bucks and thrashes, thinking about the old man with the metal detector on the beach. Will he forget about him completely? He called him stupid, fake, doomed. What if the old man is real and he walks that beach every day and he thinks that Partridge is fake? Would it make a difference?

He is going limp. He closes his eyes, hears beeping. Is it the metal detector? He sees the man on the beach again, looking up at Partridge in the window. When he smiles and tips his hat, Partridge sees that it isn’t an old man. It’s a young man. It’s Partridge himself, happy to wave to a fake stranger from a real beach—with real things buried beneath real sand—and beyond him, an endless stretch of ocean.

T
O AVOID HEAPS OF RUBBLE
, they move south into Washington, down Rock Creek Valley. More than once they hear low moans, sharp cries, some of which sound human. Birds wheel overhead and perch heavily on limbs. Some have an oily sheen. A few have reptilian heads, and one is more like a bat, but large, with a swiveling head and quick jaws, snapping air. Its wings, tufted with light patches of downy fur, chop the wind. It caws like a crow.

After a little over two miles, Pressia sees a chopped tower, its top half fallen and shattered. There are piles of brick and stone, some arches still intact.

“What was this place?”

Fignan states their coordinates. “Thirty-eight degrees, fifty-five minutes, fifty seconds North. Seventy-seven degrees, four minutes, fifteen seconds West.”

“Enough with the coordinates,” El Capitan says. “What was it?”

“The Washington National Cathedral.” Fignan flashes an image of a beautiful structure with arches, flying buttresses, and spires.

“A church,” Pressia says.

“Only much bigger,” Bradwell says. Pressia knows that he’s drawn to churches. He owes his survival in part to the crypt of Saint Wi. “It was massive. People must have come from everywhere.”

“Let’s go see it,” Bradwell says.

El Capitan stares at him. “Why?”

“It’s elevated. We need a better view to see the best route in.”

They start to climb. The mound of rubble is enormous.

“Your parents didn’t believe in God, did they?” Pressia remembers that they didn’t go to church, refused to be card-carrying, but God?

“They believed in facts; they had faith in the truth. In that way, they were devout.”

“And what do you believe in?” Pressia asks. She’d like to believe in God. She almost does. Sometimes she can feel something beyond all of this. She likes to look up at the sky, the one thing people in the Dome don’t have, which makes her feel sorry for them.

“What if God and the truth are the same thing?” Bradwell says. “What if the truth is at the center of everything? If you believe in that, you believe that the truth will win out in the end. It will reveal itself . . .”

“Like God?” Pressia asks.

“I don’t know.”

“During the Before, the box we stored God in kept getting smaller and smaller. On the one hand there was science. And with all that science, Willux thought he could play God. And then on the other hand, there was the church invented for their own purposes—where the rich knew they were blessed because they were rich. Once one person’s better than another, it lets people get away with all kinds of cruelty.” Bradwell shrugs.

“The box we put God in blew up in the Detonations like everything else,” Pressia says. “Or maybe it just kept getting smaller until only a speck of God still exists, maybe only an atom of God.”

“Maybe that’s enough for God to survive.”

El Capitan has gone ahead and calls to them. “We’ve got a view! Come and look!”

Pressia and Bradwell scramble up the rubble. Mixed in with it are
pieces of multicolored stained glass. Even dusted with ash, the colors are still vivid. Pressia picks up a shard. It’s sharp-edged but its surface is smooth. It once was part of something beautiful, she’s sure, something to inspire people.

Once they’re at the top of the cathedral’s rubble, Pressia looks down into its sunken top. And there, lost down the deep hole of the airy cathedral itself, is what once was a green copper roof, collapsed in on itself. Shining up from gritty layers of ash and dirt are some yellows, some reds, and shattered, senseless, patternless stained glass. But Pressia’s heard that art is supposed to reflect the world, which means these broken panes are still art.

“So this is what’s left of the city,” Bradwell says, staring out at the view.

Pressia turns and looks down at the flattened landscape ahead of them. The city has been overtaken by a swampy, cold marshland. Beasts and birds scuttle through the wet underbrush. Huge tracts of rubble lead to the spectral remains of a severed obelisk. It’s a nub and a line of cracked stone—maybe marble, now blackened.

“The Washington Monument,” Bradwell says. “The pencil.”

“Where’s the White House?” Pressia asks.

“It would be out there,” Bradwell says, pointing just north of the fallen obelisk. “It’s gone.”

“And the museums?” El Capitan says, Helmud gazing excitedly over his shoulder. “You promised me a field trip.”

“There they are. Archives, National Gallery, American History, Natural History, Righteous Red Wave Museum . . . See all that blasted stone in a line to the east of the pencil?” Bradwell points to heaps of rock. “The Declaration of Independence could still exist. It’s supposed to drop, at a moment’s notice, into an underground vault. Supposedly it could have survived a direct hit.”

“Look there,” El Capitan says, pointing a little farther east. “Isn’t that what we’re looking for?”

The US Capitol sits up against the horizon like a delicate soap bubble. It’s rickety, yes, but it’s there, on a small hill that rises up from the marshland. It’s a broken dome made of pale stone, now gray. Its roof
is mostly gone, fissured and cracked. It’s missing chunks from its walls and therefore seems airy and, from a distance, almost lacy Pressia thinks of the way moths eat wool, leaving thin, gauzy holes.

And through those holes, Pressia can see that the dome isn’t empty at all. Something sits inside of it, glints of metal. The airship—its bulky frame, its hull. Could it really be in there?

“Look, Helmud,” El Capitan whispers to his brother. “There it is.’’

Pressia wishes her grandfather could see this. He told her many times about that day after the Detonations when the airship skimmed through the clouds, droning in the sky, and how all those white pieces of paper fluttered down, each printed with the Message. They thought it was something to give them hope—the Dome, from which their brothers and sisters were watching benevolently They were going to join them again one day in peace.

And now, as beautiful as the Capitol Building is and the promise it holds—that airship—it feels like a betrayal, a deep and hateful wrong. It’s not even surrounded by chain-link fence like Crazy John-Johns. It’s just sitting there, unprotected, proof of Willux’s arrogance. He never believed a wretch would make it this far alive, and if they did, he probably didn’t believe they’d have the courage to steal it.

Even though El Capitan is close, he stands on the other side of Bradwell, and so Pressia slips her hand into Bradwell’s. Their fingers weave together as if they’ve done this a million times, as if it’s already a familiar habit.

“It was here all this time,” Bradwell mutters.

“Damn,” El Capitan says.

“Willux didn’t build that with his own goddamn hands,” Bradwell says. “The people built it. People he thought of as expendable.”

“People like us,” El Capitan says.

“It’s ours,” Pressia says. She squeezes Bradwell’s hand and he squeezes back. “It belongs to us.”

“Hell yes,” El Capitan says.

“Hell yes,” Helmud says.

“So,” Bradwell says, “let’s take what’s ours.”

They move quickly back into the creek valley and, within half an hour, their boots are wet from tromping through marshes. They’ve had to wade through some swamps, thigh-deep on Pressia. The water is icy. Pressia’s feet ache from the cold.

“They used to call this area Foggy Bottom,” Bradwell says. “Somewhere around here.” True to its name, the air is misty. “Let’s stick to the high ground.”

This will mean climbing the rubble around them. El Capitan, weighted by his brother, looks worn out already. “You sure?”

“I like being able to see what’s in the water,” Pressia says.

This is the deciding vote. They climb, but the rubble holds its own dangers as they don’t know if Dusts and Beasts have survived out here. They veer east toward the Capitol.

It starts to rain a little. Pressia hunches her shoulders against the damp. Bradwell’s hair beads with droplets. He shakes it roughly. Soon they’re surrounded by thin saplings. The water, cold and dark, covers their boots again.

Pressia is the first to hear the growling. She stops and crouches.

“What is it?” El Capitan whispers.

A roar rips through the air. It’s louder and deeper than any other growl Pressia’s ever heard. “I don’t know what that is, but it’s big.”

“I just thought of something,” Bradwell says, “about that field trip, Cap.”

“What?” El Capitan says.

“The National Zoo.”

Something glides over Pressia’s boot. She sees a large, blunt, gnarled, lizard-like head, crusted in dulled glass—maybe Plexiglas. She freezes. The Beast is probably three feet long. Its tail swishes as it swims on. Pressia knows what were once caged in zoos—exotic animals, both beautiful and ferocious. “This isn’t good,” she says.

The Beast roars again, and then lets out a series of sharp, highpitched yaps. Small, slippery Beasts start paddling madly away from the noise. Some have giant ears and rodent-like faces. Others have rubbery
coats and are snakish but also otter-like in shape. The birds take flight. The air is alive with wings—small, slick birds with darty eyes. One is massive and pink. Its broad wings are magnificent, its beak askew. Deer—or
are
they deer?—spring up and dart. They’re hooved and swift. Some are black, others striped. Some have antlers—flat, sharp, entwined, or coiled. They have various hides—furred, woolly, slick and reptilian, burned and scarred, dotted with shards of glass and rock. They’re light on their feet, bounding over rubble, then disappearing.

“It’s coming,” El Capitan says. “I say we run too.”

And so they take off, splashing through the marsh, guns held tightly to their chests.

Up ahead, Pressia sees a shape lumbering toward them. They all stop. El Capitan points his rifle out and takes aim.

“Wait,” Pressia says. She can’t help but think that if you were once caged here, it’s your right to reclaim the land. “We’re the trespassers.” She lowers herself to the underbrush.

The mist is so thick that, at first, the Beast is only a dim shape, but slowly, from between the trees, the shape defines itself—a hulking gorilla. It limps; its left leg is splinted by a kind of metal rod. It has rubber covering its entire chest, something deeply grooved, and is holding a baby gorilla, but the baby is limp and partially decayed. Not fused to it, no. The baby was born and now has died. The stench is strong. Pressia assumes that the infant died of dehydration. How could the mother nurse with a chest fused to rubber?

The gorilla cries out angrily.

And Helmud lets out a cry in response.

“Shut it,” El Capitan says over his shoulder.

“She’ll get violent, protecting her baby,” Pressia says.

“What’s left of it,” El Capitan says.

“She hasn’t given up,” Pressia says.

They hear another roar now—this one is catlike, far off.

“Were there lions at this zoo?” El Capitan asks. “Do I even want to know?”

Bradwell sighs. “Unfortunately, they had just about everything. Well stocked.”