Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (6 page)

Pressia runs her finger over it. “What’s a copyright?”

“It’s a symbol to show ownership. It was widely used in the Before, but was usually followed by a year. This one isn’t.”

Pressia gives the box a quarter turn. “It could also be a
U
in a circle.” She turns it again, halfway this time. “Or an unfinished square or a table.”

“Black Boxes aren’t just boxes that happen to be black. They’re the name of anything—a device or process—that’s thought of in terms of input and output, when you can’t see how it’s being processed, what’s going on inside. A white box or a glass box, those are things where you can put information in and you can see what happens to it.”

“The Dome is a Black Box,” Pressia says.

“From our perspective, it is,” Bradwell says. “And so is the human brain.”

And so are you
, she thinks.
And so am I
. She wonders if two human beings can ever be white boxes for each other.

He puts Fignan on the table. “Fignan is an impostor. He’s supposed to fit in, but he was made with a different audience in mind. But he won’t just hand that information over to anybody. Some word made him light up and then he talked to me.” He puts his hands in his pockets and lowers his head. “Should I recite what I was saying? About you? I mean, it’s just us trying to figure this out. Nothing more than that, right?”

“Right.” She wants to stall. “But first, it lit up and talked to you. What did it say?”

“It said
seven
.”

“The number seven?”

“It said
seven
over and over and then it stopped and beeped as if waiting for a response while seconds were ticking off a clock, and then it stopped. Time’s up, like a game show.”

“A game show?” she asks. She knows that this is a reference to the Before, but she can’t place it.

“You know, TV shows where people answered questions asked by a host who had a microphone and prizes like sets of luggage and Jet Skis, while the audience shouted things at them and clapped wildly There was one where they gave electric shocks when the contestants answered wrong. People loved it.”

“Right, game shows,” she says, as if she remembers them. What’s a
Jet Ski? “But why do we care if this one box opens up or not? We have everything we could possibly want from the other five!”

“Fignan holds secrets,” Bradwell says. “He was programmed to guard them carefully.”

Pressia shakes her head. “This is about uncovering the truth, the past, more lessons in Shadow History? Don’t you know enough already?”

“Of course I don’t know enough! How many times do I have to tell you that we have to fully understand the past or we’re doomed to repeat it? And if we can understand Willux, the enemy, then—”

Pressia is furious. “We can improve people’s lives with what’s in these boxes, but you have to go after the mystery, the holdout? Okay, fine. So do it again. Make him do the game-show thing again.”

Bradwell shakes his head and runs his hands through his hair. “That’s just it. I don’t remember what I said exactly. Maybe I should retrace my verbal steps. You sure you’re okay with that?”

“Of course.” Is he needling her?

“Well, I was . . . rambling . . . about you. It was the middle of the night, and I was, well, describing you . . . I was talking about what you looked like—your dark eyes, the shape of them, and how they look like liquid sometimes, and I was talking about the shine of your hair, and the burn around one of your eyes. I mentioned your hand, the lost one, but that it’s not really gone, that it exists inside the doll, that the doll is as much a part of you as anything else.”

Pressia’s cheeks flush. Why would he talk about her scars, her deformity? If he were in love, wouldn’t his vision erase her flaws? Wouldn’t he see only the best version of her? She turns away from him and looks at the rows of boxes. Their lights blink dimly, small twinkling repetitions.

He says, “I might have mentioned your lips.”

The room is quiet now.

The flush in her cheeks spreads across her chest. She pinches the swan pendant and twists it nervously. “Okay, so it said
seven
. Why do we care? Let’s concentrate on the good boxes. Let it keep its secrets.”

Bradwell walks up to her and lightly cups her wrist. He stares at the necklace. His hand is rough but warm. “Wait,” he says. “I also mentioned
the necklace, how the pendant sits right in the dip between your two collarbones. The swan pendant.”

The Black Box lights up. It beeps a short punctuated alarm and says, “Seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven.” They both stare at it, startled. The beeping continues as the clock ticks down, and then it goes silent.

“This has to do with my mother,” Pressia says. Her mother told her a lot of things that Pressia didn’t understand. She spoke quickly, almost in a kind of shorthand. Pressia didn’t ask her to clarify because she assumed there would be time later to hear everything she needed to know. But she does remember her mother talking about the importance of the swan as a symbol and the Seven. “The Best and the Brightest,” Pressia says. “It was a large, important program, recruiting the smartest kids they could find. And from that group, they made another, more elite group of twenty-two—and from that, Willux formed an inner seven. This was when they were our age. Early on.”

“The Seven,” he says.

“The swan was their symbol.” Fignan starts up again. “Remember, I told you that they got tattoos, when they were all still together and young and idealistic, a row of six pulsing tattoos that ran over their own hearts, which was the seventh pulse.” Three of the pulsing heartbeats had stopped, but not her father’s. Pressia knows she should be content that he survived. She shouldn’t long to see him, but she can’t stop herself from longing. Sometimes all she wants is to get out, to search for him. Even now, the thought of it makes her heart pound with extra beats, like the pulsing tattoos themselves.

Bradwell, El Capitan, and Partridge latched on to the idea of heart-beats still pulsing. It meant that other survivors, maybe other civilizations, exist beyond the Deadlands. But how far? For Pressia, it’s personal.

She walks back to the box, leans down, and stares at it. “Swan,” she says and it starts up again, repeating the word
seven
, seven times, then beeping. “It’s asking us for a password—or seven of them.”

“Do you know their names?” Bradwell asks.

She shakes her head. “Not all of them.”

“Swan,” Bradwell says.

The Black Box says
seven
again and when it’s done and the beeping starts, Bradwell says, “Ellery Willux.” A green light blinks from a row of lights near the camera eye. “Aribelle Cording.” Another green light sparks.

“Hideki Imanaka,” Pressia says, and it accepts this name too. She’s said her father’s name aloud so few times that this small green light feels like an affirmation. He truly exists. He is her father. She feels hopeful in a way she hasn’t in a long time.

“And the others?” Bradwell asks.

She shakes her head. “Caruso would have helped. He would have known.” Caruso lived in the bunker with her mother. When Bradwell and El Capitan went back to the bunker after the farmhouse burned, they thought they’d talk him into coming with them. But he’d killed himself. Bradwell never said how he did it, and Pressia didn’t ask. “I wish he’d known how much he could have helped us. If he’d known, maybe he wouldn’t have . . .”

“Was Caruso one of them?” Bradwell asks.

“No.”

“Try to remember,” Bradwell says.

“I can’t remember!” She squeezes her forehead. “I don’t even know that she said all the names.” Her mind is blank except for the image of her mother’s death—her skull, the mist of blood.

“If we can get these passwords, who knows what we’ll have access to.”

“No!” She’s angry now. “We have to focus on what we can do here, now, today, for these people. They’re suffering. They need help. If we let ourselves get pulled into the past, we’re turning our backs on the survivors.”

“The past?” Bradwell is furious. “The past isn’t just the past. It’s the truth! The Dome has to be held accountable for what they did to the world. The truth has to be known.”

“Why? Why do we have to keep fighting the Dome?” Pressia has
given up on the truth. “What could the truth possibly matter when there’s all this suffering and loss?”

“Pressia,” Bradwell says, his voice going soft, “my parents died trying to get at the truth!”

“My mother’s dead too. And I have to let her go.” She walks up to Bradwell. “Let your parents go.”

He walks down the rows and stops in front of the drawer at the end. “You should see the dead boy.”

“No, Bradwell . . .”

He grips a chest-high handle. “I want you to see him.”

She takes a deep breath. He pulls the handle, and the slab slides out. She walks to his side.

The boy is about fifteen years old, bare chested, his lower half wrapped in a sheet. His skin has turned the color of a dark bruise, his lips purpled as if he’d eaten blackberries. His hands are curled up around his neck, twisted claws, and one foot pokes out of the bottom of the sheet. He has short, dark hair. What’s most striking is that embedded in his bare chest is a silver bar that stretches from one side of his ribs to the other. He was a little kid when the Detonations hit, a kid on a tricycle. The handlebars are mottled with rust. They curve around him like an extra pair of ribs. His skin attached to the metal is thin, almost like webbing.

Pressia closes her eyes. She wraps her arms around her own ribs. “What happened to him?”

“No one knows.” Bradwell pulls up the bottom of the sheet as Pressia opens her eyes. The boy has only one leg. The other is newly gone. The rupture is so jagged with exposed bone that Pressia gasps. “The leg exploded,” Bradwell says, “and he bled to death.” He walks to a counter near the sink, picks up a small cardboard box, and brings it to Pressia. The only thing she can imagine is a human heart, still beating.

He lifts the lid. The box is filled with scraps of metal and plastic. One piece has a metal joint connecting two smaller pieces of broken metal—each about an inch long. Bradwell says, “This stuff was found near his body. Some shards were still embedded in what was left of the flesh on his leg.”

“What was it?”

“We don’t know.” He closes the lid on the box and looks at the dead boy. “The Dome did this. They aren’t going away. Special Forces are only becoming more aggressive, hungrier. I’m not turning my back on
anybody
, Pressia. We have to find a way to push back.”

T
HE ROOM IS AIRY WITH NOTHING
in it but two large metal industrial-looking tubs and two chairs, lit by the dusky sunlight illuminating the battered windows. They’ve been bathing at night, but they were on lockdown during the last dark hours. Special Forces were buzzing nearby, so the baths were delayed.

Illia was let into the room first because she can’t be naked in front of anyone. She doesn’t even like to bare her face, which is now draped in gray cloth as she reclines in one of the tubs. As Lyda is led in, Illia says, “You’re here.”

“And so are you,” Lyda says, and she means not just here physically but emotionally too. The baths were first a recommendation for Illia. The ash of the Meltlands has collected in her lung pockets, the mothers fear, and bacteria has taken root. Illia needs rest and special care.

But then five nights ago, in these tubs, something miraculous happened. Illia, who’d been so vacant and silent, came to, like a fever broke. She started telling Lyda stories, odd, nameless, placeless stories about
the woman
and
the man
, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood.

Lyda told Mother Hestra about Illia’s breakthrough, and Mother Hestra called it
a healing
. Lyda loves this. They never used the word
healing
in the rehabilitation center. Unlike her own mother, the mothers
here are fierce but also fiercely loving. Ironically, for the first time in her life, she feels protected in a way that she never did within the protective bubble of the Dome.

Each day since the healing, they’ve bathed in the hope that it would continue. And it has. During the day, Illia is a dimmed light, coughing in a private room, but the bath changes her.

“Yours is not water tonight,” Illia says. Her voice is meek and soft, a little hoarse from disuse. “It’s something else.”

One of the mothers told Lyda that she needed to go all the way under. “The serum must cover every inch of your skin, every hair on your head.” The air smells syrupy and medicinal. Lyda takes off her cape and hangs it on the back of a chair. She dips her fingers in the warm, cloudy bath. They turn slick and dry quickly, leaving a strange film.

“They say it’ll mask the human scent,” Illia says. “Safer for traveling tomorrow.”

“How does it feel?”

“Mine is water. I can’t go and I don’t want to.”

“Neither do I!” Lyda wants to see Partridge, desperately, but she likes it here. They’ve started her on combat training and hunting. Her muscles have grown strong. Her aim is good. She’s learned to lie in wait silently It’s dangerous, but strangely peaceful. Even now, undressing, she isn’t bashful like she was in the girls’ academy locker room. She feels like she’s in her skin, and that’s good. She folds her clothes on the chair and climbs over the edge of the tub, lowering herself into the strange mixture.

“I’d prefer to die here,” Illia says.

“You’re sick, not dying.” Lyda doesn’t want to talk about death. In the Dome, it was rarely mentioned. The word itself wasn’t appropriate. Lyda’s father was escorted to the medical center, the quarantined wing, at the first sign of sickness, and she never saw him again. Disease and death are shameful, and she wonders now if her father, like Willux, had taken some enhancements that had started to wear him down.
Your father has passed on
, her mother told her.
Passed on
.

“Tell me a story! I look forward to them all day.” This is a half-truth
. The stories also scare Lyda. There’s something doomed about the telling—it’s not a story that’s going to end well.