Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (12 page)

Bradwell jerks the gears, tugs the wheel as spiders pop and crunch under the tires. Luckily, this doesn’t cause them to detonate; they’re probably programmed to explode only when attached to flesh, which they’ve done expertly. Survivors stagger and call out to one another. Some run and climb. Others smash spiders with bricks. But some just give in and have half a dozen or more spiders locked onto their bodies like thick black ticks.

Wilda is between Pressia and El Capitan and Helmud in the backseat. Fignan seems to be putting on a light show for the girl, as if to distract her from the window. Pressia warns her that sometimes Fignan bites and pulls hair. And, sure enough, moments later, she sees Fignan scratch the girl’s arm, but it’s not too rough and barely leaves a mark. The girl doesn’t seem to mind. She goes back to the light show.

“The Dome wants Partridge back.
Our son returned
. . . What the hell are we going to do?” El Capitan says.

“Partridge can’t hand himself over,” Pressia says. “It would be a death sentence.”

“He’s Willux’s son,” Bradwell says. “That has its privileges.”

“What’s the alternative?” El Capitan says. “Is he going to let everyone die, one by one?”

“We need to get to him,” Pressia says.

“Before the Dome worshippers get their hands on him,” El Capitan says. “They say they want to hand him over, but they’re insane. They might hand him over by burning him up and sending his ashes off in the first stiff wind!”

“The mothers hear everything. They’re the eyes and ears,” Bradwell says, hitting a straightaway. The spiders under the wheels sound like crushed bones. “They’ll know we’re headed there before we even show up.”

“Okay then,” El Capitan says. He still looks pale from the blast.

“Thanks for grabbing me back there,” Pressia says.

“It was nothing. Don’t even think about it.”

“Think about it,” Helmud whispers.

Wilda stares up at Pressia. “We want our son,” she says. Pressia guesses that she’s tired.

Pressia pats her shoulder. “Rest your head.”

The girl leans on Pressia, lifts her arms. Pressia lets her hold the doll head to her chest, and then Wilda closes her eyes. Pressia thinks about the lullaby her mother used to sing to her, and her mother’s face appears in her mind. The bloody mist. She thinks of El Capitan saving her from the explosion. Couldn’t she have done that for her mother? There must have been something she could have done. Pressia leans close to Wilda’s ear and sings the song that pops to mind, the one sung by the man in the crowded, snowy lobby of OSR headquarters.

Her grandfather told her that she went to an all-girls school for kindergarten in a plaid pleated skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She knows who Peter Pan was—a boy who stayed young forever. Was this
her
childhood? Had her grandfather stolen this childhood from someone else? This song is about boarding-school girls who survived the blasts and walked to the river singing their school anthem. Some of the girls were blind because they’d been lying in the grass, staring up at the sky when the Detonations lit it up—at least that’s the way people tell it. They huddled by the river. Some waded in. Water was good because it soothed the burns, even though the water was warmed by the Detonations. Their skins turned papery, peeling away from their arms, curling like lace collars at their necks. In the end, people knew them by their uniforms—what was left of them.

The way the story goes, people wanted to save them but the girls didn’t want to be saved. They wanted to die together and they did, singing.

In some versions, they fused with trees that still stand by the riverside. In others, they became Dusts and rove the banks, and if you come close, they’ll devour you. In some versions, they fused with animals and became foxes or waterbirds. But in every version, no one can ever get them back.

Pressia thought of the ghostly girls often when she was Wilda’s age, haunting the shore in tattered uniforms and lace collars of peeled skin, a detail so grotesquely specific she was sure it had to be true. She tries to think of a happier story to tell Wilda, but the girl’s breath has gone deep. Her eyelids flutter with dreams. Pressia wonders what her dreams might look like. Hasn’t she been to the Dome and back? What did she see there? A fleeting smile plays across her lips; then it’s gone. Wilda’s grip on the doll head has loosened. Pressia puts her hand on the girl’s hand and feels a faint vibration. It’s not just the car rattling on the road, but trembling—from within Wilda herself.

And Pressia thinks of Willux, his tremor, the result of years of brain enhancements, ones that will hopefully result in his death sometime soon. But she remembers, in a sickening flash, asking her mother in the bunker why she didn’t dose Pressia with some resistance to enhancements, why they didn’t leach the meds she’d developed into the drinking water. Her mother said the doses that would work for an adult could kill a child. She could give Partridge resistance to only one form of enhancements, and she chose behavioral coding. She wanted him to have his own will. And why didn’t she give any to Pressia? Well, she was just that much younger. It was too dangerous.

What have they done to Wilda to make her Pure? Is the cure a new disease, just like Willux’s Rapid Cell Degeneration? Is it crashing her system? Is this trembling the very first sign?

An hour later, Bradwell parks on a hill between two fallen houses on the edge of the Meltlands. They have a view of the footprints of slab foundations, cracked cement holes that were once swimming pools—circular, oval, kidney-shaped—burned metal skulls of cars, and indistinct blobs of melted playground equipment. The semicircular streets fan into the dust bowl of the Deadlands.

Bradwell gets out and paces in front of the car. El Capitan and Helmud get out too and sit on the hood. Pressia stays with Wilda, who’s sleeping, her hands curled near her chest, shivering, ever so slightly. But
then she stirs, sits bolt upright, and says, “Proof that we can save you all?” She looks out the window.

“We’re waiting for help,” Pressia tells her. The girl grabs the door handle and jiggles it. “Do you want to see where we are?”

She nods.

Pressia unlocks the door and opens it. They step out and look at the Meltlands below, soot and snow dragged across them in dark billowing sheets. “Any sign of the mothers?” Pressia asks.

“Not yet,” Bradwell says.

“Can’t be sure if they’ll show up as caretakers or warriors,” El Capitan says. “Unpredictable lot.”

Wilda starts to walk toward one of the toppled homes.

“Call to us if you see them,” Pressia says, following the girl.

They both nod, Helmud too, staring out across the landscape.

Pressia stays close to Wilda, following her to the back of a house where there’s the impression of a cement pool. The deep end is cluttered with patio furniture and what might have once been a gazebo—crooked, splintered, and covered in ash and snow. It leans to one side like an off-kilter hoop skirt. Wilda sits on the edge of the shallow end, pushes herself off, and lands. “Wait,” Pressia says. She climbs in after her. Wilda walks over to the gazebo and sits down inside, cross-legged, on its floor. Pressia joins her. “It’s like playing house,” Pressia says. “Do you like to do that?”

The girl nods.

“I wonder,” Pressia says, taking Freedle from her pocket and letting him flit around, “if kids play house in the Dome.” If you weren’t always searching for a real home, if you lived in a safe and happy place, would you still need to play house? For a fleeting second, she imagines cooking in a cheery kitchen, and there’s Bradwell working with her. She has her doll head fused to her fist. His birds are still there nestled in his back. No. It can’t work. In fact, the idea of the two of them in a cheery kitchen scares her. It seems to invite only doom and loss.

Wilda looks at Pressia, startled. “If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages.”

“So you’re saying they were bad? It was scary in there?”

She looks across the pool and slowly shakes her head.

“Was it nice?”

Wilda shakes her head again.

“It wasn’t scary and it wasn’t nice. What was it?”

Wilda lies down, closes her eyes, and then opens them, blinking like there’s a bright light shining down on her. She presses fingers to thumb, opens and closes them—gesturing someone talking over her head. She does it with the other hand. Another person talking. The hands look down at her then to each other. More talking.

“You weren’t a hostage as much as you were a specimen? Something to be experimented on?”

Wilda nods. She sits up, pulls her legs to her chest, and rests her chin on her knees.

“You didn’t see how they lived or what was in their homes or anything much at all?”

Wilda shakes her head. No. She looks like she’s going to cry, so Pressia changes the subject. “Do you know how to swim?”

The girl stares at her.

Pressia lies down and pretends to swim on her back. “I don’t know if I ever really learned how to swim,” she says. “Funny. It’s something you think I should know about myself, right?”

Wilda lies down and pretends to swim too.

Then they hear a thud—Bradwell’s boots landing in the shallow end. He walks over. “They’ve been sighted. Not far off. What are you two doing?”

“Swimming. What else? We’re in a pool,” Pressia says.

He ducks into the gazebo. “Of course,” he says with a smile.

“Do you know how to swim?” she asks him.

He nods.

She sits up. “Too bad the cadet didn’t know how to swim.”

He looks at her.

“I read the clippings in the morgue.”

“Were you snooping?”

“Were you hiding them?”

“No.”

“Then I wasn’t snooping,” she says. “Why do you have them out?”

Wilda gets up and starts chasing after Freedle, who dances around her head.

“After my parents’ funeral, I found them in a small plastic ziplock bag in their footlocker. My parents were building a case to bring Willux down. They thought they might have a lead.”

“But Willux was awarded the Silver Star for trying to save the cadet. What kind of dirt were they looking for?”

“I’ll never really know.”

“In the clipping, Walrond called Willux’s attempt to save the cadet
heroism
. Maybe Walrond and Novikov were members of the Seven. My mother said that one of the Seven died young, just after the tattoos were put in.”

“I don’t know about Novikov, but Walrond wasn’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just am.”

“Are you saying you’re going with your instincts here, ignoring reason and fact?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve done research. After my parents were murdered, I followed every lead. The day of the Detonations, my aunt told me to stay close to the house. My uncle was working on the car. They were on the inside, awaiting word. But I didn’t know what was at stake for them that day. I told them I wouldn’t go far, but I rode my bike to the old training grounds. That’s where I was when the Detonations hit. Why do you think I’ve got
waterbirds
in my back? I was running from the bounce of light on the river. My bike fused to the tree I’d leaned it against. It took me hours to get back to my aunt and uncle’s, where I found them wrecked and dying. It went on for days. You know all that. I was in bad shape, and there was the dead cat in the box, the engine, the way he begged her to turn the key.”

“Yes.” Pressia imagines Bradwell alone by a river, dazed by the bright white light, the searing pain of the burns and the feel of daggers in his back. “I’m sorry.”

“About what? I don’t want your pity any more than you want mine.”

“Okay then,” Pressia says. “Tell me one good reason Walrond can’t be one of the Seven. Just one.”

“Because if he was one of the Seven, it means he became friends with my parents only to pump them for info. It means he was a double agent, and he might have been playing both sides against each other, which could have gotten my parents killed. And even in that stupid little newspaper clipping, did he mean what he said to the reporter, or was he already playing everyone? Was it heroism, or did he know the truth about the cadet?”

Pressia looks at Bradwell. He’s staring out through the gazebo’s tilted frame. His eyes look red, his cheeks flushed and streaked with ash. “What’s the truth?”

“It was murder.”

“What kind of murder?”

“Willux’s first.”

Pressia remembers the grainy newspaper photograph of Ivan Novikov—his seriousness, the haunted expression. She sighs. “Novikov and Walrond were connected to Willux at the time when the Seven was first started—tightly connected. They’re two important names. There’s no way around it.”

“He was good to me,” Bradwell says, and he looks at Pressia. “You know what I mean?”

She nods. “But it doesn’t mean he was all good, all the time, to everyone.”

“We should go. The mothers should be here.”

Wilda is holding Freedle in her cupped hands. She gives the cicada to Pressia, who tucks him back in her pocket and gets up. They walk back to the shallow end and hoist themselves out of the pool. Pressia glances back and tries to imagine what it was like before the Detonations—the blue water, the gazebo, tall and white with gauzy curtains. Who lived this life?