Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (55 page)

And then as everything goes dark, he hears a voice—clear and sweet as an angel’s voice. It is his brother, singing the way he used to sing for their mother, the beautiful voice that made her cry. Maybe Helmud is an angel after all. Maybe that’s who he’s been all along.

L
YDA COMES TO
when the water hits her. It’s cold at first, maybe meant to wake her up. She’s in a white stall as small as a closet, with nozzles pointed at her—dozens of them. There’s a silver door handle in front of her. She reaches for it, but slips. She’s naked. She sees the bloat of her tender stomach. It isn’t obvious, but maybe they’ve done tests on her while she was knocked out. Her inner arm feels bruised. Do they know she’s pregnant?

The nozzles spray foam that smells strongly of the academy swimming pool, rubbing alcohol, and other acrid chemicals. She coughs and gags. Her eyes burn.

And then the water turns hot. The small room fills quickly with steam.

When the nozzles finally shut off, she reaches for the door handle again. As she suspects, it’s locked. A drawer opens from the wall. There’s a white jumpsuit from the rehabilitation center and a head scarf. She’s back where she started.

She picks up the clothes, starts to put them on. As she zips the jumpsuit, she imagines her stomach growing round and taut, filling it up. What will a child conceived out there amid the wretches look like? Maybe she’s a wretch now too. Dome officials wouldn’t let a child of hers be born in the Dome, would they?

The handle turns. The door opens. A voice says, “Step outside.”

But there is no outside. She steps out of one small enclosed space into another enclosed space. The air has no motion at all. It’s sterile and static. The Dome is the real wasteland. She remembers telling Partridge about the snow globe—she’s trapped again, except there isn’t even the watery swirl of fake, wet snow.

P
RESSIA’S GOTTEN USED TO
the horse’s stride, its pounding hooves, its snorting breaths. As Fignan gives directions, she tugs the reins and the horse responds immediately. It feels like she was meant to ride this horse. The formula in her pocket, the two remaining vials pressed close to her skin, she feels strong and powerful.

She sees the airship first. In broad daylight, it looks worse for wear. Toppled and rocked to one side, the ship’s tanks look fragile and exposed. It hits her with full force that it might not matter if she has the formula and the vials—not if they can’t get the airship back into the air. They’ll be stuck here forever.

Shaken, she scans the field that rises to a hill and then the distant perimeter of trees.

That’s when she sees what seems like a three-headed Groupie, furred in greenery. She pulls back on the reins, and the horse slows. It isn’t a Groupie. She sees the pale faces—Bradwell, El Capitan, Helmud. She gives the horse a kick and gallops toward them.

This close, she can see that only Bradwell’s face is blanched and slack. El Capitan and Helmud are looking at her, but with a distant look in their eyes as if they aren’t really seeing her at all. The blood on the gauze wrapped around El Capitan’s head has hardened and blackened. She pulls back on the reins. The horse stops; she swings her leg off and
slides to the ground. She sets Fignan down and runs to them. “What happened? What is this?”

“Souls,” El Capitan whispers.

“Souls,” Helmud says.

She sees the knife on the ground, picks it up, and almost starts to saw at the vines, but El Capitan shouts, “No. It only gets worse. They grow back.”

“What do you mean?”

He just shakes his head. “Don’t.”

She kneels, reaches up, and holds Bradwell’s face in her hands. “Bradwell!” she shouts. She cups her hand to his parted lips and feels the faintest hint of warm breath. “He’s alive.”

“We’re bound,” El Capitan says. “We’ll die together.”

“No,” she says, and she stares at the vines, looping endlessly around their bodies. “There has to be a root. If I can get to that . . .”

“Steal our souls,” El Capitan says.

“Souls,” Helmud says.

She runs her eyes over the vines frantically, searching for a common source. She puts her fingertips on a thin vine, hoping for some sense of a pulse, some energy she can follow. Finally, she feels more tension in one of the vines. She follows the tension as the vine winds down Bradwell’s body, across his chest, over one hip, around his leg. She keeps with this one vine, feeling a vibration as if the cord is really alive, as if somewhere—maybe deep in the earth itself—it has a beating heart.

As the vine cuffs Bradwell’s ankle and then passes down below the heel of his boot, she grabs the knife again. She pins the vine to the ground with her doll-head fist and cuts it as fast as she can. The vine snaps and recoils into the ground with the hiss of a snake.

The thorns break, suddenly brittle and dry. She rips a fistful of vines from Bradwell’s chest and then another from El Capitan’s shoulder all the way down his arm.

Once his arm is loose, he starts clawing at the vines on his and Helmud’s bodies but Bradwell slumps to the ground. Pressia now sees all the blood. Thousands of tiny cuts all over him. She rolls him to his
side. The birds are limp on his back. If they die, does that mean he will too?

She cups his face. “Bradwell!” she says. “Bradwell!”

He doesn’t wake up, doesn’t move.

“Cap,” she says.

El Capitan shakes his head. “Don’t make me say those words.”

“Those words,” Helmud says.

“He’s not going to die!” Pressia says. “I won’t let him.” She grips his shirt, pierced with holes and wet with blood. “Bradwell! I’m here! It’s Pressia!” Her voice cracks. “Itchy knee!” She shouts the words from her dream of telephone poles, the words they said together when they thought they would freeze to death in each other’s arms. “Sun, she go!”

His eyes flutter open and squint. He purses his lips and whispers, “Did you get it?”

“I did. Yes.” Her hands are shaking. There’s too much blood. The center of his shirt is soaked. She finds a small hole, rips his shirt wide open. Along the center of his chest, the thorns have chewed an incision as if he were cut by a knife, as if the thorns were serrated like teeth.

She starts crying. “It’s okay,” she says, “it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Pressia,” Bradwell says. “I’m not going to make it. But you will. You’ll save them.”

“No!” she says. “El Capitan, tell him that it’s going to be okay!”

El Capitan shakes his head. He stands up heavily, steadying himself by holding on to the trunk of a lean tree. “I can’t.” He reaches out to another tree. He staggers toward the horse, standing elegantly in the field. She knows that he’s giving her privacy. He’s telling her that now is the time to say what she needs to say—including good-bye.

This makes her angry. She isn’t saying good-bye, because this isn’t the end. She puts her hands on Bradwell’s face. She’s crying—hot, angry tears. She’s crying so hard that she can barely speak. “You’re going to be okay. You can’t die.”

“It’s not up to you,” he says.

She curls forward, feeling her mother’s vials dig sharply into her ribs, and she remembers the Dust near the amusement park, how its hand
healed and swelled, strong and muscled. She has two of her mother’s syringes. They push the body to self-generate cells. Why not Bradwell’s wounds? “I can fix this!” She lifts her sweater and unwinds the cloth that holds the vials in place. She holds them up. “Look.”

He shakes his head. “I want to die Pure, Pressia.”

She shakes her head. “The drugs can be dangerous, but this is the time to take that risk.”

“I’m Pure already. You are too. Let me die that way.” He reaches up and touches her face. “Promise me.”

She nods. She’ll agree with anything he says. She wants him to stay with her. “Okay,” she says, as if she’s negotiating with him. “Just promise me you’ll stay awake. Don’t leave me.”

He shakes his head. “You’ll miss me,” he says.

“Listen to me, Bradwell! You can’t go.”

But he closes his eyes. His face looks calm, peaceful. She whispers, “No, no, no.” She couldn’t save her mother or Sedge. There was nothing she could do. But this time there is. She looks at Bradwell’s face, the two beautiful scars running down his cheek. She promised she’d let him die Pure. She promised.

But she’s desperate. She’ll never have this moment back—the moment when he can still be saved. She sets down the syringes, pulls off his coat, and rips a tear in the back of his shirt, exposing his bloody back and the three birds, their bodies entwined forever with his. Two look dead already. Their claws stiff, their eyes glassy But the third ruffles its wings and blinks at her.

She picks up one of the syringes. Her hands are shaking so badly that she can barely uncap the needle. Quickly, she fills it with the contents of the vial. She pushes the thumb rest just enough so that the plunger releases a small bead of thick, golden liquid.

She promised to let him die Pure, but she didn’t promise to let the birds die too. They’re connected—Bradwell and the birds—forever. She’ll inject the birds. It’s a loophole, a crazy loophole.

She wedges the needle under the feathers on the back of one of the birds and slowly injects it with about a third of the serum. The bird opens its wings and jerks and bucks for a moment or two and then
settles down. She injects the second bird and then the third until the syringe is empty.

She crawls over Bradwell’s legs to face him again, and she runs her hand through his hair. “Bradwell,” she whispers.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink. His lips are parted but he’s not going to speak.

She sobs, her ribs convulsing. Her heart throbs in her chest. She covers her mouth with her hand and then tells herself that he’s going to come back. She can’t lose him, not now. They’ve come so far.

He’s coming back.

He’s coming back.

She lies down on the bloody ground, the curve of her body against the curve of his.

He’s coming back.

She pulls his arm, heavy with muscle, around her waist. She stares out into the field. El Capitan and Helmud are standing by the horse, whose muzzle is bent to the grass.

And then she hears a breath. Bradwell’s arm tightens around her. His hand curls into a fist.

She turns her head.

His eyes are wide.

He moans and then cries out in pain. Even under the dried blood, she can see the wound on his bare chest—the skin and exposed muscle—stitching itself back together. Each small nick tightens to a hardened knot of skin.

Bradwell says her name, just once. “Pressia.”

She hears her name in the distance too. It’s El Capitan. She hears a pretty voice ringing through the trees, singing her name. Could it be Helmud’s?

She stands up and sees El Capitan loping toward her. “He’s back!” she shouts. “I brought him back!”

El Capitan’s face is ghostly white, frozen in a grim mask. Terrified. “What did you do?” he says as he reachers her.

And then she hears a feathery shudder—like the thrum of a massive handheld fan. She touches the tree beside her, afraid to turn around.
She feels the rough bark under her hand. She looks at El Capitan. His mouth is opened as if he’s about to speak, but he can’t.

She has to turn and see what he sees. She feels sick, but she twists her head, looks back over her shoulder.

There is Bradwell—alive but in anguish. He writhes on the ground, flexes, and throws his head back in pain. He staggers to his feet, his bare chest ripped open and now sealing itself, blood-caked, knitting into a long, dark scar. His arms look stronger and, for a second, it seems like he’s wearing a thick, dark cape—a feathered cape.

But Pressia knows that it’s not a cape. She knows that the birds have taken hold. What else did she think would happen? She isn’t sure, but not this . . .

Arching from his back in either direction are wings, large and sleek—and not just one set. No. Six wings start to riot on his back. His whole body shaking violently, he looks at Pressia. “What did you do to me?”

For a few moments, her voice is lost in her throat, and then finally she’s able to tell him, “I brought you back.”

B
ECKLEY IS THERE IN THE MORNING
, knocking on the door with what sounds like the butt of his gun. Partridge is dressed. The pill sits in the envelope in one pocket of his pants, and the list is in the other. He should destroy the list, but he can’t. He needs to have some kind of truth he can hold on to.

When Partridge opens the door, he’s not surprised to find Iralene standing in the hall, her arms folded on her chest, her eyes darting around nervously.

“You ready?” Beckley says.

Partridge nods, but he’s not ready. He spent the night trying to apply logic to the situation, and he decided that his father isn’t going to kill him. His pinky—nearly grown back now, its nail bud forming above the final knuckle—and his memory swiped clean are proof. His father wouldn’t do these things if he was going to kill him. Why bother? He’s decided that Iralene must have gotten it all wrong somehow. Still, he doesn’t leave the pill behind. Is there some nagging doubt in his mind? Maybe.

They use the private routes to the medical center and arrive a little early. A tech ushers the three of them to a private room. “You can wait out here,” she says to Beckley. “Guard the door.”

The room is small and beige. There’s a bed covered in a sheet of
white, crinkly paper, a few chairs, a computer fitted into the wall. “I’d like to see my father before this starts,” Partridge says.

“That’s not part of the plan.”

“We’re here early, and he’s here, isn’t he?”

The tech nods but looks flustered. “I can’t okay that kind of thing.”

“I’d like to see Dr. Weed, then,” Partridge says.

“I don’t think Dr. Weed was planning a consult before the procedure. You’ll talk to him after.”

Iralene links her arm around Partridge’s and gives him a small pinch just above his elbow. She says to the tech, “You know who this is, right? Or, should I say, who he’s going to be one day? One day soon, you realize. Very soon.”