Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (47 page)

He says, “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

A sprinkler goes off overhead, puffing out mist.

Partridge thinks of blood. A misty veil of blood. The image stains his mind. The butterflies become frantic. He looks over his shoulder for Iralene, but he can see only bits of her dress, her hair, as if all the wings have chopped her into small fragments of herself.

Even the halls that connect the butterfly house and the aquarium have been cleared. They walk through a glass tunnel, fish swimming on either side and overhead. The jellyfish puff and glide, puff and glide. Iralene presses her hand to the glass.

“I wish we had a camera,” she says. “I’d love to have a picture of this.”

“Don’t you have a million of them from when you were a kid?” There are only so many places in the Dome to take memorable childhood pictures.

“Of course I do!” She hurries away from the glass and grabs his hand.

They walk along quietly for a while, and then there’s a commotion up ahead, some quickly scurrying footsteps.

Beckley lifts his hand and tells Partridge and Lyda to stop. He walks ahead of them, toward a blind turn. “Who’s there?” he calls out.

A man’s voice calls out nervously, “Just me! I got lost on my way to the restroom!” Glassings rounds the corner. He’s flushed like he’s been running.

“Please turn back the way you came,” Beckley says authoritatively.

“Wait!” Partridge says, and he starts to jog toward Glassings but slows down because his head’s throbbing. “Glassings!” he says, reaching out his hand.

Glassings shakes it with great vigor. “Partridge!”

Iralene moves in between them. “We can’t talk now!” she says. “Partridge can’t have any visitors. His immune system is very weak! Right, Beckley?”

Beckley puts a firm hand on Glassings’ chest. “We need you to back off now, sir.”

“No, no,” Partridge says. “It’s just Glassings.” Iralene pulls on Partridge’s arm. “Let go of me!” he says to Iralene. “Leave him alone, Beckley! For shit’s sake, he’s my World History teacher!”

Beckley ignores Partridge. He draws his weapon, and although he keeps it pointed at the floor, he says, “I’m going to need you to walk away, Glassings.”

“Whoa, now,” Glassings says.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Beckley?”

“Everything’s okay,” Glassings says. “I was just saying hi. I hadn’t seen Partridge since he made it back.”

“Made it back?” Partridge says.

“Shut up!” Beckley says, and he raises the gun.

“Holy shit, Beckley!” Partridge shouts. “Back the hell off!”

Glassings doesn’t say a word now. He walks backward very slowly, his hands in the air.

Beckley says, “Keep moving, Partridge, and everything’s going to be okay.”

Glassings nods to Partridge.
This is serious
, Glassings’ expression reads.
Do as he says
.

“Come on,” Iralene says.

He lets her pull him around the corner. Once there, he rips his arm loose. “Quiet.”

There’s no gunshot. No scuffling. No noise at all.

In a minute or two, Beckley returns, as if nothing happened. He mutters, “Let’s move,” and walks on down the hall.

Partridge strides up to him. “What the hell was that back there?”

“Following orders. No contact with anyone other than Iralene. Period.”

“Glassings is just a teacher of mine from the academy, and you drew a gun on him!”

“Nothing personal. Orders.” He keeps walking, shoulders stiff, no expression.

Partridge doesn’t know what to say. He turns to Iralene. “Orders,” she says, “that’s all!” She tries to reach out to him, but Partridge shrugs her off. He’s so angry that he can’t even speak.

When they get to the small aquatic theater, Partridge takes a seat in the back and stares straight ahead at a wall made of super-strength glass. On the other side the beluga whales, beautiful and strong, pulse their thick tails through the water.

Iralene sits next to him. He can tell she’s gazing at him but refuses to look at her. “Why the hell did my father give the order not to talk to anyone but you?” Partridge asks, watching Beckley out of the corner of his eye.

“For your own safety, for your own good.”

“Stop it, Iralene. Something’s wrong. I know it.”

“Of course something’s wrong! You’re just coming back to your life. It’s a great shock, Partridge.”

“What did Glassings mean? He said that he hadn’t seen me since I’d been back. Back from where?”

“I don’t know!” Iralene says, jerking her shoulders up and down. “Maybe back from the brink. That’s the way I think of it. You were gone and now you’re back!”

“That’s not what it sounded like, though. It sounded different.”

“I’m going to ask the doctor if it’s normal for patients like you to be suspicious of the gap in their memory. I bet it is.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

The belugas glide by, two of them, side by side. Partridge is deeply tired. He rubs his eyes and lets them blur as he stares into the water. “Why are we doing all these things, Iralene?”

“We have to rebuild,” she says. “We fell in love this way. I can’t sacrifice all our past. It would break my heart if we couldn’t remake the memories.”

It surprises Partridge that a girl like Iralene
loves
him. She seems so normal, so perfected, and he’s never felt normal and has always been far from perfect. It seems cruel that he’s doomed to not remember any of it. He wonders how intimate they’ve been. It’s a fair question. Not one that he’s comfortable asking. What if they’ve acted like a married couple already and he doesn’t remember it? He’d love to know and, at the same time, he wouldn’t, because even though she’s attractive, he’s not attracted to her. He knows Iralene but he doesn’t; that’s the strange thing. They’re close and also strangers.

“Are we supposed to rebuild the memories or remake them?” he asks. “What’s the difference?”

“Do you believe that memories can be rebuilt? I mean, will I ever remember the first time we were here together? Or do we just have to redo everything?
Remake
the memories.”

“I don’t know,” she says. She seems to stiffen up a little. “Your father told us to have fun. It was an order.”

“Maybe I don’t like to be told what to do.”

“Don’t be like that,” Iralene says, and it’s the first time he’s heard an angry edge in her voice. It surprises him, in a good way. He’d like to think she has some fight in her. She glances at Beckley as if he weren’t just a guard but also an informant, a tattle. She points to the belugas. “They have belly buttons, you know. They’re a lot like us.”

The belugas swish their tales so powerfully it’s as if he can imagine
human legs like a mermaid’s beneath their skin. “Maybe we’re like them,” he says.

Iralene smiles at him. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.” She’s telling the truth. He can feel it in the way she’s gazing at him. And, too, she’s waiting for him to agree. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “You still love me, don’t you?”

The question makes Partridge panic. Beckley shifts his weight, glances at them and then away. He’s too far away to hear, but still Partridge hates that he’s here at all. It’s like he has an audience—a grudging one that sometimes pulls a gun.

How can Partridge tell Iralene that he’s not sure? He feels an ache of love. He feels it when he looks into her eyes. If he’s not in love, he once was. Still, he can’t honestly say that he loves her and he couldn’t possibly tell her that he’s not sure. He doesn’t even have a memory of having first kissed her, much less having loved her.

Her lashes are dark, her lips full. She’s there, waiting, and so he leans in and kisses her. She’s surprised by the kiss at first. She stiffens for a moment and then relaxes into it. He waits for the rush—something passionate or at least familiar. But the kiss doesn’t bring anything back. It’s as if this is their first kiss, except it doesn’t have the tingling of a first kiss. It feels hollow, empty.

When he pulls away, she says, “It’s okay, Partridge.”

“What’s okay?”

“I understand.” Does she understand that he can’t tell her he loves her? He wishes the memories would flood back to him. She deserves that much.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. “You really are.”

She puts her hand on his cheek.

He says, “I could . . .” What?
Try
to fall back in love with her? “We have time,” he says. “We don’t have to rush it.”

She shakes her head, puts her mouth to his ear. “But we don’t have time, Partridge. We don’t.”

T
HE NOISES OUTSIDE
are drumming loudly in Lyda’s ears. They’ve been at it all day—the mothers calling names from rosters, organizing the women into groups, hammering, sawing, children squalling. The place is a hive.

They’re preparing for their attack on the Dome. Lyda can do nothing to stop them. She sits cross-legged on top of her blanket, feeling useless. She resists the urge to slam her hands over her ears and pound the floor with her feet. The mothers haven’t explained their plan to Lyda, but she knows it’s doomed.

Mother Hestra walks into the room. She stands like a pillar beside cot number nine, staring down at Lyda. Syden coughs as if to get her attention, but she can’t look at them. She’s too distraught. “Were you true to your word?” Lyda finally says. “Did you look for them?” Pressia, Bradwell, El Capitan and Helmud—that’s who she needs now.

Mother Hestra says, “They’re gone.”

“Gone?” Lyda looks up at Mother Hestra. “Gone where?”

“None of our spies within the outpost know, but they’ve gone far. Past our own boundaries. Farther than we’ve known anyone to go.”

“They’ll get killed out there.”

“Whatever drove them must be important and worth the risk.”

Lyda’s tired of people risking their lives for what’s
important
. Partridge
is gone. Illia is dead. And now the others have left. She’s alone. “What about Wilda?”

“Who?”

“A girl. Just a little girl. The one they made Pure.”

“There are many like her now.”

“Did she go with them?”

“No.”

“Is she okay?”

“None of the Purified children are okay, Lyda. And Deaths did this to them. They’re shutting down. It’s only more reason for us to fight.” Lyda shakes her head. “What were you like during the Before?” she asks Mother Hestra. “Do you remember being that person?”

“I was a writer.”

“A writer? What did you write?”

“I wrote two kinds of things: those the government allowed and those the government did not allow.”

“‘. . . The dogs barked loudly. It was almost dark . . .’ Did you write that?”

Mother Hestra nods. “It was about my sister who tried to run. She lived out past the Meltlands. She didn’t live a double life like I did—one for the government, one hidden away for myself. She was part of the resistance. They found her. They set dogs after her.”

“I’m sorry,” Lyda says. “How . . .”

“How did it get burned onto my face?”

Lyda nods.

“I was holding the page I’d written up to the light of the window. The white of the paper reflected the light. The black of the ink absorbed it and burned the words into my skin. I was living a lie. I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone about my sister. I was going to write it and put it in a drawer. And now I live with that sin of cowardice on my face forever.”

Lyda looks down at her hands. They now have calluses and nicks. She doesn’t want to be Pure anymore, and now, because of this baby, she isn’t and that feels right.

“Your friends,” Mother Hestra says, “led us to important things. The
outpost has been working hard. We found what they’ve been making and then went in and took them. Do you want to see?”

Lyda sighs and looks up. Part of her wants to stare at this wall—in particular a water stain that looks a little like the head of a bear—until all the noise fades and it’s over. Done. But she can’t. “Show me.”

Mother Hestra reaches into her hunting sack, browned with dried blood, and pulls out a hunk of hard, black metal.

“What is it?”

“Well, it was a robotic spider sent from the Dome to kill us. But now it’s a grenade that we will use to kill them.”

“The Dome has withstood the Detonations. Do they really think that handmade grenades are going to make a difference?”

“There’s one more thing that we found,” Mother Hestra says. “The very thing that we need the most, tactically. These will make all the difference.”

“What?” Lyda can’t imagine what would make any difference in a battle against the Dome.

Syden reaches into his mother’s hunting sack this time. He pulls out two flattened, ashen pieces of thick paper. One of them is colorized on one side with the faded print of an advertisement. She recognizes it immediately. The
SPRUCE UP YOUR HOME!
poster that she took from the broken Plexiglas on the metro train. Syden offers them to Lyda. She takes them and unfolds them on the cot, running her hands over her own drawings of the girls’ academy, the rehabilitation center, and Partridge’s of the Dome’s interior, floor upon floor, in exquisite detail.

“Our maps.” She thinks of lying on her stomach in the train car across from Partridge, the way he edged across the maps on his elbows and kissed her. She lifts her hand to her lips. “Partridge.”

“Yes, Partridge—the Death,” Mother Hestra says. “He did good work.”

Lyda and Partridge were talking about Christmas. She told him about her father, who once gave her a snow globe, and she realized that she was a girl trapped in the globe. He told her about his Christmases at the Hollenbacks’ apartment. He promised her a gift: a paper snowflake.
He asked her if that was all it took to make her happy and she’d said
Yes
, but added
this
and
you
.

“Partridge marked how he got out and perhaps where you were forced out as well—the points of weakness,” Mother Hestra says.

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should. Lyda blinks tears onto one of the maps then wipes her eyes.

“The grenades,” Mother Hestra says, “should be launched at the points of
weakness
.”