Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (21 page)

He stares out the hole in the roof. What’s snow and what’s ash? Both are gray and light and whirling. He can’t tell the difference from here.

P
RESSIA’S EAR IS PRESSED
to Bradwell’s chest, her head weighty, and she hears his faint heartbeat, like a slow watch wrapped in cotton. His breaths have gone soft. His arm has lost its hold on her and now lies on the ground, limp. She pulls it in close to their bodies, sees the imbricate skin of ice that’s formed over it. Her own arm is glittering with snow, a thin new skin of shining gray crystals. She has no voice. Her lashes are dusted with snowflakes, heavy. She wants to close her eyes. She wants the snow to cover the two of them in a gray blanket. She wants to be buried in this lace.

Her own breaths are shallow. She’s tired. It’s night. She whispers, “Good night,” knowing it might be the last words she ever says.

Her eyes are heavy—too heavy to keep open. And as she closes them, she knows she isn’t falling asleep. She’s dying because she sees spokes of light blinking through the trees. The ghostly girls now angels . . . She hears their voices drifting toward her as if carried by the snow.

H
E’LL NEVER BE PURE AGAIN
. It’s not possible, but this is how they will make him clean.

Transfusions of new blood, new marrow, a rush of new cells. His mummy mold still exists—lightweight, durable. It fits more snugly than before because he’s gotten stronger. His body disappears into it for hours. There’s still nothing to be done about his behavioral coding. But they try different angles, applying new advances. Nothing works. There has been a cold sheet pack, his body iced and restrained. “Lumbar puncture,” someone says once, and a needle is injected into his spinal column.

He’s drugged to sleep and to stay awake and to talk—a white-tiled room with a recording device on a table. The words rattle up from his mind, his chest. As soon as they whirl in his mind, they’re on his tongue.

Sometimes, he hears his father’s voice over an intercom. He hasn’t seen the man even though he’s asked again and again.
Where’s my father? When will I see my father? Tell my father I want to see him
.

He thinks of Lyda. Sometimes he calls out for her, her name ringing in the room before he realizes that he’s the one calling. Once he reached for a white coat. He grabbed a fistful and said, “Lyda! Where is she?” The tech pulled away, and Partridge’s hand hit a tray of sharp, steely instruments
, which clattered. “Goddamn it!” someone shouted. “Sterilize those!”

A woman in a lab coat will sometimes tell him what day it is, not based on the calendar but on his arrival here.

You’re on day twelve. You’re on day fifteen. You’re on day seventeen
.

When will this end?
She won’t say.

His pinky is another way to mark time. Lyda was right. Arvin Weed figured it out with his three-and-a-half-legged mouse. My God. And if he’s gotten this down, is he closing in on a cure for his father? The fine collaboration of Partridge’s bones, tissue, muscle, ligaments, and skin cells is being re-created through repeated injections. The stump is capped by a fiberglass cast that his finger will grow to fit. The laboratory technicians, surgeons, and nurses look at the pinky through scopes. Sometimes they apply needlelike points of heat, as if soldering.

It’s regenerating nicely. We’re pleased. The coloration of the skin is nearly flawless
.

Starfish can do this. Do starfish still exist somewhere?

The thing is, he doesn’t want the finger back. He sacrificed, and now that sacrifice is being erased. The past, the world out there, what happened to him and the others, the death of his mother and his brother—it seems to exist less, to fade, with the infinitesimal growth of cells.

Twice, Arvin Weed appears. His eyes hover over Partridge’s head—the rest of his face hidden by a mask. Partridge would talk but there’s a tube in his throat. He’s strapped to an examination table.

Arvin doesn’t address him, but, once, Arvin winked at him. The wink was so quick it almost looked like a twitch. But Partridge believes it was more than that. Arvin is here; he’s going to make sure Partridge is taken care of, right? Partridge wants to tell Weed about Hastings and what’s happened on the outside. He wants to say the name
Lyda
.

He wakes up without a memory of falling asleep. His head is heavy, eyes swollen, the tube gone. He’s being rolled along on a gurney, its wheels clicking over the tiles. He passes a bank of windows. Behind them, there are rows of babies in incubators. Tiny babies—almost the size of puppies, but human nonetheless. They fit in the palm of a nurse’s
hand. Could there be this many premature babies being born at the same time in the Dome? But the babies aren’t perfect, aren’t Pure. They have scars and burns and are flecked with debris. Is he dreaming of wretch babies? What’s real? The incubators stretch on and on.

There’s another room. His father’s voice rings over an intercom. “He’s a child. There must be punishment. The punishment will Purify him. The Purification will be by water. A baptism.”

The woman tells him that this is day twenty-one.

His head is securely strapped to a heavy white board, tilted so his head is low. His shoulders are pinned. He can’t move. They’ve made such progress with the pinky—which has grown incrementally and is tingling with nerves—that they must be careful. It can’t get wet.

The white board is motorized to lower him into the water slowly. The technicians stand by, following orders with timers and small handheld devices. Partridge’s head feels the water first, cool but not cold, soaking his hair, filling his ears, creeping up the sides of his face. He pushes out his breath and quickly pulls one in. He holds his breath, tries to jerk himself loose. His eyes are wide. The water is clear and bright. The room is lit by fluorescent bulbs. He can see the warped faces of the technicians.

He lets some air escape from his nose. Just a bit. How long will he be held here? His father doesn’t want him to die but maybe to get to know death. He lets out more air. His lungs feel pinched.

Just when he can’t take anymore he feels the small tug of the white board. His chin emerges, his mouth. He drags air back into his lungs. Is the baptism over? Has he been saved? He feels the motor again, reversing him back into the water. He pleads with the technicians, “No, no, no!” It’s possible that their ears are sealed in some way to protect them from his begging.

He can’t shake his head, can’t arch his back for air.

He’s submerged again and again—a baptism that just won’t take? He stops pleading. He works to time his breaths. He tries to develop a method. His mind loses track of time. He’s only trying to meet the surface, to be in the air.

He tries to hold on to the image of Lyda’s face, the exact color of her
eyes. He comes up for air and his larynx spasms, closes shut. This time, there is no air. No sound. No breath. He tries to signal his panic to the technicians with his eyes.

They make notes.

The motor hums again. He’s going back under without having taken a breath.

One of the technicians seems to understand that something’s gone wrong. He reaches for an intercom.

But Partridge is now submerged. He can’t hear what’s being said. He can’t breathe even if he wanted to draw water into his lungs. That’s when the bright glossy light of the room fades to a smear of darkness—ash. He thinks of ash and snow and Lyda—her face coming apart piece by piece and floating up into the sky.

P
RESSIA AND BRADWELL
are living in a small cottage, where the search party brought them the night they almost died. Small, with stone walls covered in moss both inside and out, it was chosen because it was easy to heat with its potbelly stove. Pressia rebounded quickly from hypothermia, but Bradwell’s lungs have taken on water. One thing survivors know well is labored breathing, coughs, how to determine which are serious. Pneumonia causes short grunts at the end of each exhale.

For three weeks now, Pressia has dedicated herself to two things—poring over Fignan and all the notes that Walrond left behind, and tending to Bradwell, who mostly sleeps.

She started writing on paper, which is precious, but soon ran out and began writing on the surface of a narrow table. When she ran out of room there, she started writing on a small chopping block, and then on stones she’s brought in from the orchard. She keeps her print tiny. In cones of light flickering in the air above him, Fignan projects video clips, images of scanned documents—birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices, diplomas, transcripts—and Willux’s handwritten notes about books he’s reading, giving page numbers without titles or authors, and convoluted screeds. Pressia jots it all down.

Meanwhile Bradwell rouses just enough to take a sip of water or pork broth. El Capitan has arranged for soldiers to bring food, and nurses visit. Fignan offers medical information and data about pneumonia,
various risks and treatments and medicines that they don’t have access to. She can’t fault him. He’s trying to be helpful.

El Capitan begged Pressia not to stay with Bradwell, whose sickness could be contagious. She told him she couldn’t leave him. “I’m a loyal friend.”

Friend
—is that still what they are? Pressia remembers his body, stripped of clothes, wet. Sometimes, she thinks of him seeing her undressed, almost completely naked. She knows it’s silly to be embarrassed. They were dying. So what if he saw her undressed? He saved her life. But now, just thinking about it, she feels suddenly shy—flushed, nervous—as if it’s happening at that very moment. Her mind wanders to the feeling of his skin against hers, trembling because of the cold, and she feels like she’s falling again, headlong, down into some unknowable darkness, a terrifying rush. Falling, falling, falling—in love?

Right now, it’s selfish and stupid to even think about things like that. She sits on the edge of his cot, waiting for that moment when Bradwell comes to, blinking into the light, knowing who she is. The alternative is that he doesn’t get better, that his lungs fill with too much fluid and he drowns from within. She can’t let herself think of it. She has to work. She has to have something to show him when he emerges. She emerged once from drowning. He will too.

She stands and leans against one of the lichen-covered walls. From all the video clips that Fignan has stored within him, there’s one she keeps coming back to—the one of her parents when they were both young. Pressia’s taken detailed notes about it. It feels like an indulgence each time she asks him to play it, but now as a reward for slogging through Willux’s notes, she says, “Show me again, Fignan, that footage of my parents.”

Fignan turns on, creating a flickering cone of light. There’s Pressia’s mother, laughing in the sun and brushing her curly hair from her eyes, then a young man who must be Pressia’s father. He has dark, almondshaped eyes, like hers, and a quick, unpredictable smile. They’re in a field, wearing their cadet uniforms, open-collared, untucked. They wave to the camera.

Pressia wants to walk into that sunlight, to grab the hands of her
mother and father, to tell them,
It’s me. I’m your daughter. I’m here. Right here
. The image of her parents—so beautiful, so real—is punishing and wonderful. It allows her to miss them specifically, in incredible detail.

In the background, she sees Willux—she’d recognize him anywhere—with his notebook. He’s talking to the guy whose face Pressia remembers from the clipping, tucked under the bell back at the morgue—the cadet whose death was ruled an accident. Ivan Novikov. Their heads are bent in quick conversation. Her mother walks up to them, showing them that the camera is on. She’s telling them to wave. She reaches for a hand, and she takes the dead cadet’s hand—Ivan Novikov’s, not Willux’s, not Pressia’s father’s. Ivan pulls her close and kisses her. Willux tucks the notebook under his arm. He waves then puts his hand in his pocket and walks away.

Pressia turns from the flickering light, which makes the moss-covered walls shimmer. Does that kiss mean her mother was dating Ivan? Did
everyone
love her mother? Who was Aribelle Cording anyway? Pressia can’t imagine how someone could give and take love so easily. Did her mother have a weak constitution? She followed her heart, not her head. Pressia should be thankful for it; it’s the reason she was born. But still, she wishes her mother had been . . . what? Stronger? Less susceptible to love? Love is a luxury. It’s something that people are allowed to indulge in when they’re not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive. Pressia can’t help but think of her mother as love-rich, lovespoiled, and what good did it do her?

Bradwell moans. One of his feet kicks the covers. She says his name, hoping this is the moment he’ll come to, but then his body is still again. If he did open his eyes just now and recognize her, what would she say to him?

Pressia knows that it’s fear that keeps her love in check. But what if falling in love is a sign not of weakness but of courage? What if it isn’t falling or crashing but taking a leap?

The footage stutters to its end. The room dims. She runs her hands over all of the stones, covered in her hand-scrawled notes. The nurse has told her to talk to Bradwell. “It’s good for him. He really might be able to hear you, even in his dreams.”

And Pressia has kept him updated. She’s told him that even though they don’t know for certain that Partridge is back in the Dome, they suppose he is because the robotic spiders have been deactivated. The day after they made it to the outpost, word came from the city that the robotic spiders all crackled with life for a moment, their legs seized, and then their screens went blank. She’s told Bradwell that El Capitan is in a medic station set up in the city, where he’s been removing the robotic spiders, which are all still lodged in people’s bodies.

She hasn’t told him the bad news—more children have disappeared. Some have been returned. A few days ago, one was found asleep in the woods. Two more were wandering the market. Another was in his bed as if he’d never been gone except, like Wilda and the others, his body was perfected. These children have had every scar or burn healed, all amputations regrown, and their umbilical wounds covered in new skin. El Capitan has them all brought here and guarded in the dormitory so they don’t fall into the hands of the growing cult of Dome worshippers. Wilda lives here too. Pressia misses her, but she can’t visit; Bradwell might be contagious, and Wilda’s immune system might be slipping as her cells degenerate.