Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (57 page)

Blood—a fine mist of it exploding, filling the air. His mother’s blood. His brother’s blood. He remembers cameras—not the kind in this room but the tiny lenses in his sister’s eyes. He’s shouting. He’s crazed. He finally stops and there’s his sister’s face, her eyes, the doll—he sees that too. Lyda is there, calling his name, except this memory is silent
.

Partridge reaches into his pocket. He feels the capsule with the tip of his index and middle fingers. There are cameras in every corner of the room, as well as within the tent itself—even without them, he wouldn’t do it. He’s no murderer. This is the difference between his father and himself. He can’t allow that difference to erode. He shakes his head and pulls his hand out of his pocket. He won’t do it.

His father’s eyes open then. “Partridge?” His voice is a raw chirp.

“Dad.”

His father twitches the fingers on one of his blackened, curled hands, coaxing Partridge closer. “I have something I need before . . .”

“Before what?”

“Before the end.” Whose end? His father’s? Partridge’s? The difference between a murderer and the murdered, the difference between evil and good—it feels as see-through and flimsy as a damp veil.

“What is it?” Partridge asks.

His father looks stricken. His face clouds over with physical pain, or is it an emotion? His father clenches his eyes, juts out his jaw, and then finally says, “I want your forgiveness.”

This is what his father wants? Forgiveness for all his horrific acts, for millions of deaths, for what?

“Tell me,” his father says, “tell me you love me.”

Partridge tears away from his father’s bedside rail. He wheels around the room, the shiny white tile seeming to spin around him. This was why his father wanted Partridge’s memory swiped clean. He wants Partridge to know only what he knew before he left. His father wants forgiveness for some petty crimes, the normal ones sons harbor against their fathers. He wants false absolution, the words of forgiveness to pass over his son’s lips—forgiveness that would ride out and cover his infinite sins.

And after he gets forgiveness, his father can take over his body. Partridge braces himself with his shoulder against the wall. His father is choosing to make his own truth—a truth where his son loves him and forgives him. He feels a trickle of sweat run down his back. His pulse is loud and quick. He reaches into his pocket. There is the pill, just at the tips of his fingers.

“Partridge,” his father calls to him. “Come here.”

Partridge wipes sweat from his face. His fingers nudge the pill. And then he pinches it between his index and middle fingers and folds it into the center of his palm, holding it in his fist. He walks back to the bedside but can’t look at his father’s ravaged skin and curled hands.

“That’s all you want?” he says to his father, breathless. “Just forgiveness? Just for me to tell you that I love you?”

His father nods, his eyes wet with tears.

Partridge raises his fist to his mouth, pretends to cough, and pops the capsule under his tongue. The cameras bear down. He tucks the slick pill into his cheek.

Forty seconds will pass before the pill dissolves. Partridge won’t need forty seconds.

He grabs the bed rails. He imagines for a moment his father taking over his body, his life. He imagines his father living out a future with Iralene. His father touching her with Partridge’s hands. And Partridge’s own brain . . . gone? Suspended? He imagines Lyda—never seeing her again.

His mother dead.

His brother dead.

The entire world dead, dead, dying, and dead.

He leans over the rails. The blood pounds in his face, his neck. He whispers to his father, “You’ll never understand love. But I’ll forgive you—with a kiss.”

His father never kissed him and Sedge as kids; he never hugged them. He taught them to shake hands, like men. But this is on Partridge’s terms, this absolution, and as he leans down and gives his father a kiss, he blows the capsule from his mouth past his father’s lips to the back of his father’s throat. “Forgive you?” Partridge says. “Forgive me? What’s it matter now?”

His father’s throat hitches. He swallows. His raw, red-rimmed eyes go wide. He recognizes this moment. He knows what Partridge has done. He lifts his claw of a hand and grasps his son’s shirt.

“You
are
my son,” he says. “You are mine.”

A
ND AN ENVELOPE SHOOTS
into the room from under the door. It glides for a moment, catching air, and then slides to a stop. Lyda stares at it—plain and white, an ordinary envelope with a slight bulkiness in its middle.

She picks it up. She imagines it’s some kind of invitation, but she knows she’s never going to be invited anywhere here.

She slides one finger under the back flap, peeling it up.

A torn piece of folded paper, words written in pencil. It looks worn out, pocked with holes.

She picks it up and unfolds it.

A small paper snowflake. Her heart starts thrumming.

She sees the ghostly imprint of words in reverse. She flips it over and sees those words floating on the page.

Lyda
. She sees her own name. A few numbers, as if this is a list. The words
capsules
and
memory
.

There’s only one explanation for this snowflake.

She looks up at the one-way mirror. Is he there? Has he seen her?

It’s his gift to her, the one he promised to give her back when they
were in the subway car. He kissed her on the lips so softly. She lifts her fingers to her mouth, remembering the kiss. He’s with her. He knows she’s here. They’re still bound.

The paper snowflake trembles in her hand. She loses her grip on it and it sways on the air, back and forth, falling to the floor.

I
T’S QUIET, BRADWELL LIES
on the ground bare-chested. His ribs—larger now, heavier—rise and fall quickly. But he’s otherwise still. Pressia has been keeping watch and finally she crawls to him. The wind ruffles his hair, his wings, one of which is curled around his shoulder—a feathered vault protecting his body. The scar rides up the center of his chest. She touches it, and without opening his eyes, he winces.

El Capitan sits with his brother’s back resting against a tree, his fists clenching dirt. Maybe El Capitan does love her. She thinks of Bradwell, El Capitan, and Helmud bound in vines, dying. She has to believe that it’s better this way. Better. It has to be.

Fignan churns his wheels. There’s nowhere to go. The horse whinnies. It wags its mane, which falls along its thick neck. A giant animal with a giant heart. She hasn’t told them where the horse came from or about the people she saw in the sacred mound. Kelly is here and alive. They aren’t alone. And yet it feels like they are completely alone on this earth, cut off.

She hears the sound of her own heart in her ears—her ragged, wild, beating heart. It’s the same sound she heard underwater when she was drowning—the deep bass thrum, the rest of the world gone nearly silent. She broke her word to someone she loves.

She
loves
Bradwell.

There it is. The truth of it. It isn’t a weakness and it doesn’t take courage. Her love for him simply is. They didn’t die together on the forest floor, their bodies covered in ice. She couldn’t let him die here, without her. Is that a selfish love? If it is, she’s guilty of it. She can’t apologize for saving him, for turning him into this creature with three giant winged birds in his back.

She leans down over Bradwell, holding tight to the last remaining vial, the formula still deep in her pocket, and she whispers, “You’re still Pure. It’s only the inside that counts. You taught me that.”

She saved him—whether he wanted to be saved or not. There’s been too much loss.

He’s alive. Sedge isn’t. Her grandfather isn’t. Her mother isn’t. What would her mother tell her? Her mother is unknowable. What would her grandfather say? Nothing. He would hold her tight, the way he did from the beginning when she was just a stranger to him, a lost little girl who didn’t even speak English. Itchy knee sun she go.

She thinks of Partridge. Where is he now? Did he ever really think she could get this far? Will she ever be able to get back?

For some reason she can’t explain, she knows that they will return. There’s something calling her home.

Maybe it’s Wilda and all the others like her. Pressia might be able to save them still.

Pressia no longer believes solely in this world. It’s a myth. It’s a dream. And Newgrange is a place touched by a world beyond. Maybe, here, fireflies still exist; maybe somewhere there are blue butterflies—real ones. Maybe one day she will see her father and he will hug her and she will hear the beating of his actual heart. She isn’t alone. She is part of a constellation. Scattered stars—lit souls, brightly burning.

“Itchy knee,” she says to Bradwell.

And his lips tremble. He whispers, “Sun, she go.”

The End of Book Two