Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (7 page)

“Not tonight.”

“You told me last time that the woman worked as the keeper of knowledge in the quiet place, and the man came to her and asked her to protect the seed of truth, a seed that would grow in the next world to come. What’s next?”

“Did I tell you that the woman fell in love with the man?”

“Yes. You said it was like her heart was spinning.” Lyda understands. She feels this way when she thinks of Partridge, especially when she imagines him kissing her.

“Did I tell you that the man loved her?”

“Yes. That’s where we left off. He wanted to marry her.”

She shakes her head. “He can’t marry her.”

“Why?”

“He’s going to die.”

“Die?”

“And she can’t die with him. She has to survive because she’s the keeper of knowledge; she has the seed of truth. It holds secrets.”

“What kind of secrets?”

“Secrets that could save them all.”

Is the story true? Is it set during the Before? “And how does he die?”

“He’s dead. And she dies inside.”

“What happens to the seed of truth?” Lyda feels anxious. She tells herself that it’s only a story, but she’s not sure she believes that.

“She marries someone who is chosen to survive so the seed of truth can live. She marries a man who has connections. The End is coming.”

A chill runs through Lyda. Illia is talking about herself. The man who has connections must be, in fact, Ingership—Illia’s husband, the one she killed. If Lyda brings up Ingership by name, she fears that Illia will retreat again. Isn’t she telling the story this way because she can’t face the truth of it, which is why it’s healing? “Tell me about the End,” Lyda whispers.

“An explosion of the sun. Everything became iridescent. Everything
broke open as if objects and humans all contained light. It was the brightest entry into darkness.”

“And the keeper survived?”

Illia pulls down part of the gray cloth and looks at Lyda now with her hooded eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m here.”

Lyda nods. Of course. But if Illia knows that she’s the keeper, why tell the story this way? “Illia,” Lyda says, “why not just say
I fell in love with a man
? Why not just tell me everything? Don’t you trust me?”

“What if I’m not who you think I am? Some little housewife, all knit up in her stocking. Some little beaten housewife who never knew anything, who had no past, who’d never known love, who had no power.” She lifts her arms, shiny and wet, her hands clenched in fists. “You don’t know the difference between these scars and these? Do you? You don’t know anything of scars.” Her arms are pocked and burned—a row of burns up one arm and a spray of shards in the other.

Lyda shakes her head. “I don’t.”

“I’m the keeper! So where’s the seed? Huh? I ask you that. Where’s the goddamn seed now?” Illia is furious. Her fists are shaking in the air.

“I don’t know,” Lyda says. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you mean.” She grips the edge of the tub. “Tell me. Tell me what you mean.”

“I couldn’t deliver the truth to dead people. I had to keep it.” Her voice sounds distant and haunted.

“What dead people? Which ones?”

“There were so many . . .”

“Illia! I want you to tell me what this means. I want you to tell me the true story. Tell me. For your sake and mine. Get it out. Tell me everything.”

“And now I can’t die until I have fulfilled my duty, until I have handed it over. I can’t die until then, Lyda.” She looks at Lyda as if maybe she’d like to die. Lyda can’t understand it. “I can’t die,” she says, as if confessing a deep sadness. “Not yet.”

“You’re not dying, Illia. Tell me what happened to you. Tell me, please. Don’t talk about dying.”

“Don’t talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They’re one and the same, child. One and the same.”

The room goes quiet. Lyda shrinks into the tub and closes her eyes and when she does, all she sees are Illia’s wet arms—the spray of debris in one and the strange orderly row of risen welts on the other. It’s the orderly scars that disturb her. The Detonations caused erratic fusings and scars, not tidy rows. She thinks of Ingership. She knows the difference between the two kinds of scars, after all. Some are from the Detonations. The others are from torture—nine years of torture.

She hears Illia draw in a sharp breath and then mutter to herself. At first Illia says,
I miss the truth. I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art
. Was she an artist? Lyda loves art. She once made a sculpture of a bird from wire. Illia then starts in about death.
I want to die! I want death. But the keeper can’t die. The keeper can’t die until she has fulfilled her role. The keeper must find the seed
. It’s not a myth or even a story anymore; it’s more like a mantra or a prayer.

But a dark prayer, a terrifying prayer. Lyda keeps her eyes closed—the serum must cover every inch of her body, every hair on her head, the mother explained. She slides down, her backbone bumping the metal. Submerged, everything is quiet. She feels like she’s being held by the serum, the tub. Her held breath starts to burn her lungs.
Just another second of peace
, she thinks.
Just one more
.

P
ARTRIDGE IS PACKED AND READY
. The maps are rolled up in his backpack, the music box is in his coat pocket, and the vials are bound into place with a strip of cloth from his bedsheet, wrapped around his stomach. Still, when the cellar door slams open in the morning, he’s shocked by the dusty light pouring in and the gust of cold air.

“It’s time!” Mother Hestra shouts.

He barely slept. The beetle scrambled to the corner and shook spastically until finally it found a rat hole and disappeared. The image stuck in his head—the massive leg. But even without that pulsing behind his lids, he doesn’t like sleeping because he dreams of finding his mother in the academy again and again; her bloody, amputated body under the bleachers by the playing fields, in the hushed library, and, worst of all, in the science lab—as if she’s something his teacher expects him to dissect. He’s sure she’s dead, but then an eye will blink. Better not to sleep much.

He walks up the small set of wooden stairs. The wind gusts. The sky is shot through with dark, billowing sashes. This was once a nice subdivision—rows of cream-colored houses that now look like bleached bones.

He sees Lyda standing by the corner of a fallen house. Her cape billowing around her hips, she holds a homemade spear—a sharp blade
tethered to the tip of a broomstick. She looks at him at first like she’s scared but then she breaks into a smile that lights her face. Her skin shines from the waxy serum too. Her blue eyes are tearing—because she’s happy to see him, or is it the wind? Her hair is growing in, a soft fuzz on her head. With her hair short like this, he sees more of her beautiful face. He has the urge to run to her, lift her up, kiss her. But Mother Hestra would misinterpret it as aggression and might attack. Partridge and Lyda aren’t allowed to be alone. This was another one of the conditions—total protection of the girl.

He smiles and winks. She winks back.

Lyda walks to Mother Hestra and ruffles Syden’s hair.

Mother Hestra says, “We’ll travel in a line.”

“Illia isn’t coming?” Partridge asks.

“The ash in her lungs has taken on disease. She’ll stay here in the hope of recovery.”

“Has a doctor seen her?” Partridge asks.

“What doctor are they going to call?” Lyda says sharply.

“She is another victim of the Deaths,” Mother Hestra says coldly, eyeing Partridge. “They created this ash, and her lungs are sickened by it. One day, she will likely die of it. Another murder.”

“I’m not a Death,” Partridge says defensively. “I was a kid when the Detonations hit. You know that.”

“A Death is a Death,” Mother Hestra says. “Get in line.”

Lyda is behind Mother Hestra and Partridge is at the end, within three feet of Lyda. His stomach feels light. His heart pounds. “Hi,” he whispers.

Lyda puts her hand behind the small of her back and waves.

“I missed you,” he whispers.

She glances over her shoulder and smiles.

“No talking!” Mother Hestra shouts. How did she hear him?

He wants to tell her about the vials, the beetle’s leg, the strange feeling that it’s familiar to him somehow.
We need a plan
, he wants to tell her. That’s how they first got together, after all—his plan to steal the knife from the Domesticity Display, her keys to the knife case. He can’t stay here, guarded by the mothers for the rest of his life. But there’s no
place for him and Lyda to run away to. They’re stuck. Does she feel it too? She has to.

They’re leaving the Meltlands, heading toward the Deadlands, which are barren, windy, and dangerous. He imagines what he and the other two look like—Mother Hestra dressed in furs limping with the weight of her son, Lyda with her billowing cape, and him glancing around nervously.

Weaponless, he’s vulnerable and useless. Mother Hestra has a leather sack of lawn darts strapped to her back. He’d like to have something—
anything
, really. He’d gotten used to Bradwell’s various butcher-shop knives and hooks. In fact, he feels weirdly relieved that, while still in the Dome, he got some special coding into his muscles—strength, speed, agility. The strange gratitude to his father for dosing him twists his stomach.

The Deadlands that lie before them were incinerated during the Detonations. They were stripped bare and still are—no trees, no new vegetation, only the remains of a crumbled highway, rust-rotted cars, melted rubber, toppled tollbooths.

Partridge slows and rubs his face, stiff with cold. He clenches his fists. The one stung by the beetle is still taut with pain. Cold radiates through his bones even down into the lost tip of his pinky, which seems impossible but he would swear to it.

They have to be careful now. Curved spines arch in the sand, which whips in spirals. Dusts are creatures that, during the Detonations, fused with the earth and rubble itself, and now they’re trawling. Encrusted with dirt, stone, sand, they come in all sizes and shapes. They blink up from the ground, and can circle and attack. But Dusts know the mothers. They fear them.

Lyda has slowed, allowing space between her and Mother Hestra to grow so that she’s closer to Partridge. On purpose? He picks up his step.

“Was it this bitter cold when we were little?” he asks.

“I had a blue parka and mittens that were connected by yarn and wound through the sleeves of my coat so I wouldn’t lose them. We should be attached,” she says, “so one of us doesn’t get lost.” She stops.
He keeps walking up to her. She glances at Mother Hestra and then she turns toward him. He kisses her. He can’t help it. She quickly touches his cheek—their skins coated in that waxy ointment feel strange. “Something happened,” she says, “with Illia.”

“What is it?” Partridge says.

“She knows things. She says she can’t die until she plays her role. She kept talking about the seed of truth.”

“Is she hallucinating or something? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Lyda says. Before Mother Hestra has a chance to yell at them, Lyda turns and strides quickly to reclaim her place in line.

Mother Hestra stops at the edge of a rise. Below is a splintered gas station and billboard half devoured in sand. “Stay here. I’ll call you when it’s safe to follow.”

Partridge looks at Mother Hestra’s son’s head bobbing beside her as she heads down an incline toward the beaten highway. “I’m still not used to it.”

“Used to what?”

“Children fused to the mothers’ bodies. It’s, I don’t know, disturbing.”

“I think it’s nice to see kids for a change,” Lyda says. Because of limited resources in the Dome, only certain couples are granted procreation rights. But still this exchange feels like a rift between Lyda and him. “There were so many children during the Before,” she adds. “Gone.”
The Before
—that’s a phrase that the wretches use. She’s already picking up the mothers’ habits and language? The change makes him feel uneasy. She’s the only one who really understands him here. What if she becomes one of them? He hates himself for even thinking this way—
us, them
—but it’s ingrained.

“Are you happy here?” he asks.

She glances back at him again. “Maybe.”

“It might not be that you’re happy
here
. But just happy in general. You know, one of those people who starts whistling the moment they wake up.” She can’t really be happy
because
she’s here, can she?

“I don’t know how to whistle.”

“Lyda,” he says, his voice so forceful it surprises him, “I don’t want to go back. But it’s inevitable. Home is no longer a place.” Partridge hears
his father’s voice in his head saying,
Partridge, it’s over. You’re one of us. Come home
. There is no home.

“If home isn’t a place, what is it?”

He tries to imagine what this place was like before it was wrecked and the drifts of sand blew in. “A feeling,” Partridge says.

“Of what?”

“Like something perfect just out of reach. It was stolen. Home used to be simple.” He can see Mother Hestra and Syden making their way to the next rise. She might wave to them to follow at any second. He says to Lyda, “I know what’s in the vials. I experimented a little.”

“Experimented?”

“I saw the stuff grow cells, build them up. I doused a beetle’s leg and it grew and grew. My father wants what’s in those vials, and now I know how potent it is.”

“Like that kid who won first prize in the science fair last year.”

“What? Who?”

“I don’t know his name. He was the kid who always won, every year.”

“Arvin Weed?”

“Yes! That’s his name.”

“What the hell did Weed win for?”

“Did you go?”

“Yeah, I think so. I vaguely remember walking around the booths with Hastings.”

“I was on a team that made a new kind of sensitive-skin detergent.”

“Nice!”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t make anything for it, not even a volcano with baking soda.”