Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (41 page)

As she makes her way out of the underpass, she hears singing—a rough, low voice singing a love song about a man whose lover died in the Detonations. Pressia’s heard it many times before.

It has to be El Capitan’s voice. She puts her back to the side of the hill, stays quiet, and listens. His voice is sad, mournful, heartsick. She didn’t know that he had this in him. She wonders if El Capitan is in love with someone or if he’s lost someone he loves. There’s no other explanation for the depth of longing in his scratchy voice.

She doesn’t want to embarrass him by getting caught listening, so she walks back into the underpass and steps out again, coughing loudly.

He stops singing—mid-note.

She calls his name. “Cap?”

“What is it?” he says gruffly.

She climbs the hill and finds him sitting between the dented mangled tracks, cradling his gun. Helmud is on his back and El Capitan is rocking a little, as if he’s trying to keep a baby asleep—Helmud or the gun? He doesn’t seem to know he’s doing it. Fignan is there beside him, silent and unlit. “Why don’t you head in and get some sleep. I’ll take my turn.”

“Where’s Bradwell?”

“Asleep.”

“Really?” he says, as if he’s accusing her of something. Does he know that they kissed?

“Yeah, really. He’ll take his turn next. I couldn’t sleep.”

“I see.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” He stands up. “You want Fignan here or should I take him with me?”

“Leave him,” Pressia says. “If it’s quiet enough, I can do some research.”

“So far, it’s been quiet—more or less.” He starts toward the hill. “We’re really just starting out, and we’re already a man down. We need to focus. All of us.”

“I know that.”

He raises his eyebrows at her as if doubtful. She doesn’t like the suspicious look in his eyes. Helmud lifts his head sleepily. He sees Pressia and smiles. Pressia says, “Go back to sleep, Helmud.” El Capitan looks over his shoulder at his brother. “Yeah, go to sleep.” He turns and jogs down the hill.

It’s cold. Pressia wraps her arms around herself. She hums the song for a few minutes, thinking of Bradwell. The song is about waiting for someone who isn’t coming back. Her fears creep back in.

The terrain is desolate and quiet, so she says to Fignan, “Wake up. Let’s work.”

Fignan’s lights blink on. His legs buzz out from his body and he perches on them.

“I want more information about Ireland, and about Newgrange,” she says.

Fignan shows her a dizzying array of information—a history of wars, topography, weather, geology, even a few mentions of Irish mythology, poetry, storytelling. The air around her is lit as if she’s warming herself by a campfire.

Eventually, he homes in on Newgrange, which is older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and was built by an advanced ancient culture. Inside its dome, there’s a passage that reaches about sixty feet to the center of the mound. Once a year, during the winter solstice, the sunrise shines light directly into that passageway into the heart of the dome through some kind of special opening, called a roofbox, just above the entranceway. This now happens four minutes after sunrise, but five thousand years ago, it would have happened exactly at sunrise.

There’s something about it that makes her mind itch. She asks Fignan to tell her about the winter solstice—the shortest day and longest night of the year. “When is it this year?” she asks.

“December twenty-first,” Fignan says in his slightly metallic voice. “Sunrise is at eight thirty-nine a.m.”

“Why were they obsessed with the winter solstice?”

Fignan takes her to another page of information about how some researchers thought it had been a burial mound, but others thought it had been a place of worship for an astrologically based faith.

“Which brings us back to Cygnus,” Pressia whispers. “The constellation.” She feels strange all of a sudden. She has a sharp twinge in her chest and she’s breathless. It’s as if her body has figured something out that her mind hasn’t yet understood. Astrologically based faith. Sunrise. December twenty-first. Eight thirty-nine a.m.

“How long does the sun shine in the chamber?” she asks Fignan. “Seventeen minutes,” he reports.

“And it illuminates the floor, right? The floor of the chamber?”

Fignan lights up, as if confirming this information.

Pressia lifts Fignan and scrambles down the hill beside the underpass. She shouts, “Bradwell! Cap! Helmud! Wake up!”

Bradwell lifts himself to one elbow. “What is it?”

El Capitan, who’s sleeping just beyond him, says, “What the hell?” Helmud asks fearfully, “Hell?”

“Walrond,” Pressia says. “Remember what he said?”

“What? Can I get a little context?” Bradwell rubs his eyes with his beautiful hands, the hands that were on her body, the hands she loves.

“Walrond said
Time is of the essence
in the message. Remember? You wondered why he’d say something like that, didn’t you?”

He sits up. “Yeah. I mean, time was only of the essence when they had a shot at stopping Willux before he detonated the world—not now.”

“What’s this about?” El Capitan says.

“I was just researching Newgrange, and there, time is of the essence only once a year,” Pressia says. “On a certain day at a certain time.” She explains the mound, the passage, and the light that illuminates the chamber. “For only seventeen minutes.”

“Do you think that’s where Walrond might have hidden the formula?” El Capitan says.

“If Walrond knew there was a good chance Willux would spare the dome in Newgrange, he’d have hidden it there and maybe this is how he pinpointed it,” Bradwell says. “This could be his
X
marking the spot.”

“We have to go now,” Pressia says. “We have to collect our things and go. December twenty-first is only three days away. We need the light on the floor. We need those seventeen minutes.”

“The box is a key,” Bradwell says. “A key,” Helmud says. “A key.”

The terrain is flat, windswept, dusty, ashen. The sun edges up on the horizon. Fignan has Hastings’ coordinates and has set a course. Dusts rise up here and there. They take turns shooting them—in most cases a single bullet from a rifle suffices. Aside from that, they’re all quiet.

Bradwell glances at Pressia. She wants to believe they share a secret, but El Capitan is suspicious. Did he see them kissing?

El Capitan eventually breaks the silence. “It’s like the pulsing tattoos on your mother’s chest, Pressia. Those survivors at Crazy John-Johns must be proof that there are little clans of survivors like this, maybe all over the world. Anybody wondering who else is out there?”

Pressia thinks of her father. “Yes,” she says.

“It’s possible,” Bradwell says, glancing at Pressia again. “But we can’t get our hopes up.”

“If it’s possible that people have survived,” she says, “it’s also possible that, somewhere, some of them have thrived.”

El Capitan says, “It’s theoretically possible.”

Helmud nods, thoughtfully.

“We can’t be thinking theoretically right now. Okay?” Bradwell stops dead in his tracks. “Listen. We’re all hounded by the same thought, aren’t we?”

El Capitan and Pressia stop too.

“What’s that?” El Capitan says.

“We can be as optimistic as we want, but we’re all afraid we won’t make it. Chances are we’ll die out on this trip.”

“We can’t afford to think like that,” Pressia says.

“We can’t afford not to,” Bradwell says.

She looks down at her doll-head fist, its eyelids, clotted with ash, fluttering in the wind. It’s as dangerous to fall for someone as it is to be optimistic. Is that what he means? She told him she was falling, but he said they were making each other. Is he backpedaling now?

“Let’s just all shut up and keep moving,” El Capitan says. “Let’s not think at all, just take the next step and the next.”

“Not think at all,” Helmud says.

“Fine,” Bradwell says.

The terrain eventually opens to hills, scrub pine, stalks of barren trees. They follow a road that’s been blasted to gravel. Some of the bits of rock still hold on to the yellow paint of the old dividing line.

They come to a river. Upstream there’s a dilapidated dam. The top of the dam is still intact but it’s covered with cracks and fissures, one of which leads to a hole that seems punched out of the middle of the dam, forming a spout. The river has reasserted itself below, churning and rushing, and Pressia can’t help but think of almost drowning, the deep chill of being locked underwater.

When they reach the dam, El Capitan climbs to the top of it, bends to one knee, and inspects the ground. “It’s passable,” he shouts. “There are animal tracks running across it, both ways.”

Bradwell says to Pressia, “We get to stay dry this time.” There’s something about the shine of his dark eyes that makes her want to dive into the water and almost drown just to lie down with him again—that feeling of being close to him.

“I guess we do.”

She climbs to the top of the dam. From there, she sees small clumps of rubble, collapsed buildings, ripped roads, a few charred husks of cars, a bus fallen to one side, disintegrating into the ground.

Bradwell follows her, and Fignan claws up next. “Quaint Americana,” he says.

“How much farther, Fignan?” El Capitan asks.

“Farther?” Helmud says.

Fignan calculates and says, “Eighteen point two miles.”

Bradwell stops. “Eighteen point two miles? That might put us close to DC. Can you put those coordinates up on a map from the Before, Fignan?”

El Capitan walks over.

Fignan shows a map, a wide angle of where they are and where they’re going.

“Close up on the destination,” Bradwell says.

Fignan tightens the screen.

“Is that DC?” Pressia asks.

Fignan’s screen freezes.

“That can’t be right,” Bradwell says.

“What is it?” Pressia asks.

“A dome,” Bradwell says. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

“What dome?” El Capitan says.

“It’s DC, all right,” Bradwell says. “Didn’t anyone ever take you on a field trip, Cap?”

“I went to a colonial village once,” he says. “We watched people make wax candles.”

“Is it a famous dome in DC?” Pressia asks.

Bradwell shakes his head. “It can’t still be standing.”

“What
can’t be standing?” Pressia shouts. “Tell us!”

“The Capitol.”

“The capital of what?” Pressia asks.

Bradwell shoves his hands in his pockets and stares out into the distance. “The Capitol of the United States of America,” Bradwell says. “In other words, the Capitol Building. It was a dome. It was a beautiful dome.”

“Jesus,” El Capitan says. “The US Capitol Building?
That
dome? Is
that
where the airship is?”

Bradwell nods. “What’s left of it, I guess. Can’t be much.”

“Willux parked an airship at the US Capitol Building?” El Capitan says. “Now,
that
is sentimental!”

“Willux,” Helmud says, amazed.

The wind whips around them. Bradwell says, “You’re going to get your field trip after all, Cap.”

Pressia starts walking across the top of the dam. The wind is strong and when it gusts, she’s afraid it will kick her off. She hunkers lower. The wind lifts her hair, billows her pants and coat. She tries to imagine an airship inside a massive dome. What would that look like?

She makes the mistake of glancing over the steep edge, the water shooting from the hole, pounding and foaming below, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. When she looks up, she sees something dart out—a small, bristly-haired Beast. Its back is up, arched almost catlike. But it’s more like a large rat with sharp teeth, bared. It emits a sharp, high squeal. Its feet are thickly clawed, perhaps retractable. “We’ve got a friend here,” she says.

“I’ll take it out,” El Capitan says.

The Beast’s eyes are slightly rubied. “It’s going to pounce,” Pressia says. “You better have good aim.”

El Capitan raises his rifle very slowly. Helmud covers his ears. When the Beast hears El Capitan cock the gun, however, it leaps at Pressia. She crouches and rolls. El Capitan fires, but the Beast is in motion and he misses. Its narrow, fanged muzzle is now in Pressia’s face. She punches and rolls too close to the edge. Her legs slip off, just over the gaping hole spouting water. She’s holding on to the edge with her one hand and the elbow of her arm with the doll-head fist, her cheek skinned by the cement. The Beast is snarling in her face.

El Capitan lunges at the Beast this time, gripping the skin at the back of its neck as it bites and claws. Bradwell grabs Pressia’s arms. She holds tight to Bradwell’s coat sleeve, her knuckles against his muscled shoulder. He pulls her in close. She keeps a hold of his coat, steadying herself, catching her breath—soaking up the feeling of being close to him.

Helmud hits the Beast, trying to get it away from his brother. El Capitan finally wrestles loose. The Beast has drawn blood, but it caterwauls and limps away.

Hands on his knees, El Capitan is breathless. He looks up at Pressia and seems to notice the way she’s still holding on to the sleeve of Bradwell’s coat. If he thought there was a deeper allegiance between
Bradwell and Pressia, it might not sit right with him. El Capitan is unpredictable. She lets go of Bradwell, brushes dirt from her pants.

Bradwell says, “What the hell
was
that?”

“Some kind of weasel,” El Capitan says.

“I was almost killed by a weasel?” Pressia says.

“But you weren’t,” Bradwell says. “We saved you. Some would even call that romantic.”

“Not my definition of romantic,” El Capitan says.

“You’ve got a definition of romantic?” Bradwell says, surprised.

“What? I can’t be romantic?” El Capitan says. “So happens I believe in that kind of thing. But not just saving a girl. That’s only chivalry.”

Pressia remembers El Capitan’s voice, mournful and rough. Maybe the idea of Pressia and Bradwell together reminds El Capitan of the love he lost, the one he was singing about. It’s hard to imagine El Capitan in love, but of course he’s capable of love. He’s human, no matter how tough he pretends to be.