Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (52 page)

Mother Hestra screams, “No, Lyda! Come back!” She then shouts, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Lyda remembers running down this hill when she first left the Dome—that feeling of not having run since she was little, the freedom of it—and now she’s running back again. She pumps her legs as fast as she can. She keeps her eyes on the Dome.

A few more grenades go off. She can hear gunshots in the woods.

She knows that, if she’s lucky enough to avoid getting shot, she could end up back in her old cell with its narrow bed, white walls, untrustworthy clock, trays of food, little pills, and the image of the window, set on automatic to imitate changes of light throughout the day. Her head will be buzzed again, so close they’ll nick her scalp.

Her mother will be there, her cheeks burning with shame.

And Partridge—he’ll be there too, won’t he?

Finally, there are no more explosions, no more gunshots. In fact, it seems deathly quiet. The only sound is the wind tunneling in her ears.
Her throat is dry, her lungs cold. Is it bad to run when you’re pregnant? Women didn’t ever run in the academy.

She can’t hear much of anything over the pounding of her feet and her loud, hammering heart, but then she sees something out of the corner of her eye—a quick blur of motion.

Don’t look
, she tells herself.
Don’t look
.

She hears a click and the echo of a ping. She feels a sharp sting in the side of her thigh. She looks down and sees a fine metal prong, much smaller than the robotic spiders. It’s locked onto her leg, piercing her thick wool pants. She manages to take a few more strides, but then her knee buckles. Her leg feels numb. She falls to the ground and rolls to her back. She sees the ashen limbs of spindly trees, the black sky, and then a face—heavy jaw, sunken eyes, nostrils that pulse like gills.

She lifts her head and looks down at the prong in her leg, her woolens wet with blood around the wound. They could have killed her, but they didn’t. She remembers the pregnant dwarf deer in the woods, her fur soaked with blood, panting, the way she still tried to stand up as she was dying. Mother Hestra told her that they sometimes give birth when attacked. Will she lose the pregnancy?

“Don’t,” she whispers and lays her head back.

She’s suddenly very tired. Her eyes drift lazily back up to the sky then close. She feels someone lift her up, cradling her, then running. They’re taking her back . . . home.

N
OTHING’S WHAT HE THOUGHT
it was and, for some reason he can’t explain, he feels better knowing that this life that he woke up into—which was supposedly his
own
life—is a lie, as fake as this Nebraska farmhouse. Partridge’s father doesn’t love him. That’s the honest truth. He’s known it all along. He knows that he should reject the idea that his father wants to kill him. That alone should be proof that Iralene is having some kind of nervous breakdown—she’s gone silent and still, sitting with her back against the wall—but, deep down, he believes her.

His father says he just wants him to enjoy these few days before he starts to hand him vast amounts of power. But his father hasn’t ever wanted Partridge to enjoy himself. And Ellery Willux has never handed power over to anyone in his entire life.

Ellery Willux—the full name, just thinking it, turns Partridge’s stomach. “My father met your mother before your father was put in jail,” Partridge says to Iralene. “Did you ever have a problem with that? A suspicion?”

“Are you suggesting your father had a hand in my father’s incarceration?” She shakes her head. “No! You can’t think like that! Your father was
married
then, Partridge. I’m sure my mother would never, ever get involved with a
married
man. Your father is your father, Partridge. But my mother is good, deep down. She is good.”

“Okay, okay!” He knows that Iralene’s no fool. She’s thought it through thousands of times. She knows. Why else would she respond so angrily? There’s no time for that line of thought anyway. Iralene might be right about all of it. If his memory has been swiped, then he knows some truths—on a gut level. And this gives him confidence that he didn’t have before. Something is kicking in. He doesn’t have much time.

He wonders, How can you hide something to find later if you know you won’t even know to look for it? You’d have to hide it someplace where you know you’d find it—by accident.

He walks quickly around the room, his eyes ticking across the floorboards, the headboard, the cross on the wall. He flings open the wardrobe, hoping that he created a note that might fall to the floor. He pulls open the small drawer in the bedside table then slams it shut. He runs into the bathroom, turns on the faucet in the sink and the tub. He pulls the cord on the old-fashioned toilet. It pops. There’s no rush of water.

It’s broken.

He closes the lid on the toilet, steps up on it, opens the box attached to the wall. A piece of tightly folded paper falls to the floor.

“I found something,” he calls to Iralene. He jumps down, picks it up. He sees the words
To: Partridge. From: Partridge
written in his own handwriting, which strikes him as some joke. He unfolds the paper and finds a list.

1. You escaped the Dome. You found your half sister, Pressia, and your mom. Your mom and Sedge are dead. Your father killed them.
   
2. You’re in love with Lyda Mertz. She’s outside the Dome. You have to save her one day.
   
3. You’ve promised Iralene to pretend to be engaged. Take care of her.
   
4. In this apartment building, there are living people, suspended in frozen capsules. Save them. Baby Jarv might be among them.
   
5. You don’t remember this because your father made you have your memory of your escape erased. He caused the Detonations. People in the Dome know this. He must be taken down.
   
6. Take over. Lead from within. Start over again.
   

He walks out of the bathroom and into the farmhouse bedroom in fake Nebraska. He lifts the paper in the air. His hand is shaking. He looks at Iralene. She says nothing. He takes the cast off and stares at his stub.

“That happened to you outside the Dome,” Iralene tells him. “Weed fixed it so it’ll grow back.” He puts the cast back on his trembling finger.

Glassings. He can trust Glassings. With what? World History?

Everything is too huge to process.

Iralene stands up and takes a step toward him.

Partridge thinks about the idea of having a half sister. He thinks of his mother, Sedge—alive, dead, alive, dead. “Lyda,” he whispers, remembering her singing in the choir. That was the face he saw earlier in his mind, looking at him from the rows of girls. He feels that ache again. He was right—not love, lovesickness. “Lyda Mertz.” He stares at Iralene.

She nods.

His chest feels like its breaking wide open—an ache, a release. His father, murdering his mother and his brother? Murdering the world? “My father isn’t perfect, but he didn’t cause the Detonations. I can tell you that much. That’s almost as crazy as me escaping the Dome.”

“It’s not crazy,” Iralene says. “And you know it.”

He feels suddenly furious. “You don’t expect me to believe . . .”

“You can stop him. Glassings told you how.”

“Glassings. I’m supposed to trust him.”

“And I wasn’t supposed to trust him.”

“What do you mean?”

She whispers, “I’ve played both sides.”

“What? Why?”

“I had no choice. You think survival is something only wretches have to think about, Partridge? Don’t be so naive.”

“What? Iralene, I thought—”

“I am who I am at any given moment, Partridge. That’s the only way you can know me.”

He doesn’t know what to say. “But I trust you, Iralene. I do. You’re good. I know you are. I can feel it.”

She closes her eyes, as if she’s very weary. She smiles. “You might be the only person I’ve ever really known,” she says. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“I do know what you mean.” To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he’d have ever thought it would. “Listen, Iralene. Tell me. How do you know Glassings?”

“I was taken for lessons. I’m not an academy girl but I had to be educated if I was going to be worthy of you. But they took me to lessons with all the ones they didn’t quite trust. I was there to test them, to listen. And I did.”

“Did you report?”

“I reported that I was bored. That my education was pointless. Glassings gave me something to give to you.” She hands him a small, plain white envelope. He opens it. There’s nothing but a capsule inside.

“What is it?”

“Poison—deadly and untraceable. You have to give it to your father. The capsule will dissolve within forty seconds and the poison will leach into his system quickly. He will die within three minutes.”

“I can’t kill my father. If you murder a murderer, you’re just as bad.”

“That’s what you said the last time you were asked.”

“Well, at least I’m consistent.”

“You might change your mind. I can prove your father’s darkness,” she says, “if that’s what you need. It’s here. It’s in this building.”

The bodies, suspended.

“Jarv,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, “Jarv.”

Iralene leads Partridge quickly out of the room and through the hallway, down a set of stairs, across a large, empty cement room with
cracks in the walls, exposed pipes, and, oddly enough, an upright piano. It all feels eerily familiar. He’s been here before. His mind might not remember but his body does. A chill shoots through his spine.

He doesn’t want to see his father’s darkness, but he has to. He can’t believe anything else on the list unless he can prove at least one thing—see it with his own eyes.

She holds his hand and leads him down a hallway lined with doors. Each door has a placard with a name on it.

They pass door after door and with each one, he feels sicker inside. “What is this place?”

“I’ve spent much of my life here, suspended. So that I stay fresh and age almost imperceptibly over time.”

“You’ve spent much of your life here? How old are you?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“The Detonations hit only nine years ago. How old can you be?”

“This technology predates the Detonations, Partridge. My mother and I aren’t bound by years like others are. We started early.”

“How early?”

“I started doing sessions when I was four years old.”

Her face is clean. No lines, no wrinkles. Her eyes are clear and bright. “Jesus, Iralene. How old are you? Just tell me.”

“I’m your age, Partridge. I’ve been your age longer than you, that’s all. And I’ll be your age for as long as I can.”

“Iralene,” he whispers. “What have they done to you?”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

Partridge walks slowly down the row of placards:
PETRYN SUR, ETTERIDGE HESS, MORG WILSON
. “But preservation isn’t why all these people are here. It’s not why Jarv is here. His parents—I know them. They’re good people. They wouldn’t try to preserve him.”

“What was wrong with him?” Iralene says flatly.

“Nothing,” he says defensively, but then he looks at Iralene sharply, because of course there was something wrong with Jarv. “What do you mean?”

“The little ones come in sometimes because there’s something not quite right. Why waste resources on them? But on the other hand, we’ll
need more people when we’re in New Eden. Once there, we’ll have enough for everyone. He can grow up when we get there. They didn’t euthanize him, Partridge. That’s the good news.”

“That’s
the good news? That they didn’t kill him for being a little slow to develop?”

“So he was slow.”

“I guess. His parents were worried. There were some issues. I don’t remember what exactly. It was last winter.”

HIGBY NEWSOME, VYRRA TRENT, WRENNA SIMMS.

“His little collection of relics,” Iralene says. “Some of them are people who should have been executed for wrongs, for treason. But he kept them out of sentimentality.”

They take another turn and there’s a bank of windows instead of the doors. It’s like some twisted version of a nursery you’d find in the labor and delivery wing of a hospital. There are glass-enclosed, egg-shaped beds. The children are inside them. All are outfitted with tubes in their mouths to provide oxygen. He can hear a hum of electricity.

He jogs down the row, looking for Jarv, and finally he finds him—fourth from the end. His name is clearly marked on the pod. There’s an infant in the pod beside him, but the last two are empty—waiting. Jarv’s cheeks are pale, and his lips around the tube have a bluish tint, as do his eyelids. But his arms and legs are still pink and fleshy—though that flesh is probably turgid. There are crystals on his kneecaps; one foot is covered in a silvery skin of ice, as if he’s wearing one lace sock.

“How do we turn it off?” He walks down the row of glass. “Jesus! How do we get them out?” He finds a metal door. He yanks on it. It’s locked. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

“Even if you could get in, it would be too dangerous for you to bring him out of his suspension. It can be done only by a doctor.”

“Where’s a doctor? I can talk him into it. I can get him to reverse this!”

“There’s no need for doctors to be here around the clock. The doctors show up when necessary. Those in suspension have their vitals monitored by computers. And if one fails, well, it’s never a tragedy, is it? The tragedy has already come.”

Partridge leans his forehead against the window. “So his parents don’t know?” He starts to cry. He should have earlier, probably, when he read the note, but this is when it hits him.

“They don’t know where he is exactly, but they probably have an inkling.”

“They can’t know.”

“Sometimes the young ones are released for a while, brought over to the medical center. The parents come in for visits. It’s rare. They have to have special ties to secure such permissions.”

“This has to end.” He pushes away from the glass. “This can’t go on.”

“He has plans for you too, Partridge. Worse than this.”