Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) (27 page)

She tries to imagine the girl who was vaporized on this spot so quickly her shadow was all that was left of her.

She looks up at the dormitories again. “I want to see Wilda.”

“What about the possible contagion?”

“I know I can’t be near her. But I just want to see that she’s okay. You should go back with Fignan and get more information about swans and Cygnus and Brigid. Everything we can get.”

“You sure you want to be alone?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She gets up and starts to walk off toward the dormitory but then stops. There’s something she can’t let go of. “When we were . . .” How would she put it?
When we were lying on the cold ground, practically naked, dying in each other’s arms?

She doesn’t have to say it. Bradwell knows what she’s talking about. “Yeah, in the woods.”

In the woods
. It’s a relief that they now have a phrase for it.
In the
woods
. Not naked, not dying, not lying with each other, skin touching skin. “Right,” she says, “in the woods. I said
Itchy knee
, and you said
Sun, she go
. You knew what I was saying. How did you know that? Where does it come from?”

“Japan was my father’s area of interest. It’s how he stumbled on the stories of the fusings from the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first place. I know some Japanese, and you do too, or you did as a child. I told you that it was still inside of you.”

“I was speaking in Japanese? I wasn’t talking about an itchy knee and the sun going away?”

She remembers being a little girl right after the Detonations—all these new memories that have risen up: the singed sheep, the body snapping with electricity, the dead bobbing in the water. She had her old language. She was holding on to what she knew

“You were counting,” Bradwell says. “You were saying one, two, three, four, five. I counted with you.”

A
FTER IRALENE LEAVES
, he can’t sleep. His mind wanders to Lyda. Just the idea that his father seems to want him to be pleased by Iralene feels like betrayal. He wonders where Lyda is now. Is she safe? Are the mothers taking care of her? He hears piano music—the sonata again. Iralene told him to follow the music. That was her way of helping him. He feels a surge of hope. Maybe Iralene will prove useful, but he feels the gnawing of dread too. He doesn’t want to be indebted to her now.

Moonlight shines through the window. He gets out of bed, hobbles to the door—his joints aching—and jiggles the knob. It’s locked.

Did she realize that he was locked in? He searches the bedside table drawers, the bathroom, even the window hinges for anything that would help him jimmy the lock. He flips up the bed skirt. On the edge of the mattress, there’s a rounded plastic corner that has a few inches on either side that run long and flat. He kneels down and pries it loose.

He walks to the door, wedges the plastic into the lock. He twists the knob. The door swings open. No alarm. He wonders if he’s supposed to leave the room, if this is part of someone’s plan.

Afraid of a shock, he edges toward the threshold slowly, waiting for a tingling sensation. He doesn’t feel anything.

He passes through the doorway. Iralene said that he was allowed to
walk through the house. Is it part of the secret within the secret within the secret where he now lives?

Fitting the piece of plastic into the lock to keep it from latching, he closes the door behind him.

The hallway is wide. The floor is terra-cotta. Partridge tiptoes to the stairwell and stares down into darkness. The music is coming from the lower level. As he descends, barefoot, the stairs lose the feel of terracotta. They’re rougher, more like cement.

At the foot of the stairs, he walks into a beautiful room of overstuffed sofas and armchairs, paintings of colorful squares, dots of color. On the white wool carpet, there’s a little white dog—the size that would fit in a handbag. It pants and stares at nothing. It doesn’t seem to know Partridge is there. People were allowed to bring their pets with them into the Dome, but most of those animals have died off by now. Miniaturesize dogs are the only kind allowed to breed.

The living room opens to a kitchen, where Mimi is at the stove pulling out a tray of muffins. “Take that from the top again, Iralene, will you? There was a misstep—a flat that should be a sharp.”

The piano music stops. Partridge turns and sees Iralene sitting at a piano, a dark mahogany upright, on the other side of the room. She straightens her shoulders, and the song starts at the beginning again. Iralene said she didn’t play the piano. Was she just being modest?

“Good morning,” Partridge says to Mimi, who hasn’t yet noticed him standing there. “Or is it still night?”

Mimi doesn’t respond. She’s icing the muffins. He’s pretty sure that she doesn’t like him.

He walks over to Iralene, and that’s when he steps on the woolly white rug. He’s barefoot, but the rug feels no different from the cement flooring.

This isn’t real.

He reaches out and touches the sofa. But his hand simply cuts through air. In his bedroom the images must be overlaid on top of real things. But here, there’s nothing.

“Iralene,” he says and touches her shoulder, but there is no shoulder. No Iralene. She wanted him to follow the music—to see this for himself.

He presses one finger to a piano key, and it resists then lets out a note that mixes with Iralene’s song. The piano
is
real. He hammers the keys with his fist.

He shouts, “Is anyone here?”

Mimi pulls out another tray of muffins and says, “Take that from the top again, Iralene, will you? There was a misstep—a flat that should be a sharp.”

It isn’t a new tray of muffins. It’s the same tray. They’re stuck in a short loop. Did his father create this fake world? Is it for Partridge’s benefit? Does his father think that he’d believe this? Be comforted by it? While Partridge was locked away in the academy, was this a world that his father retreated into? What makes Partridge angriest is how shoddy the work is. Maybe it exists just so his father can walk through the room and pretend for a moment that he’s part of a family—since, obviously, Partridge wasn’t enough—and then move on.

“Home sweet home,” Partridge says to no one. He walks to one of the walls, puts his hand on it, and follows it to the edges of the image. The walls are buttery yellow and occasionally decorated with a wall sconce or painting, except that those things don’t exist at all. What lies beyond this? Maybe a way out. Finally he comes to a corner that isn’t a corner. He runs his hands along the wall and continues on until he’s on the other side of the image.

He finds himself in a dimly lit hall, lined with doors close together on either side; a strange bass hum emanates from each door.

The doors are marked with placards. They read,
SPECIMEN ONE AND TWO, SPECIMEN THREE AND FOUR
. . . all the way to
SPECIMEN NINE AND TEN
. And then, on the rest of the doors, there are names etched on small, silver placards. Partridge reads name after name—all women, from what he can tell.

IRALENE WILLUX
. The placard is new, maybe because the last name is new. Iralene is now his stepsister, another Willux. Why is her name here? What does she have in common with specimens?

Below her name is another placard:
MIMI WILLUX
. It too is new, freshly polished, shiny, no spots of rust or tarnish.

This is what Iralene wanted him to find. The secret within the secret
within the secret—what layer of secrets is he in now? He doesn’t want to know what’s inside these small rooms.

He knocks lightly.

There’s no answer.

He knocks again. “Iralene? It’s me, Partridge.”

Again, no answer.

He turns the knob and opens the door.

There’s a gust of cold from the room; in fact, the air is the coldest he’s ever felt it in the Dome. He touches the wall with the flat of his palm, looking for a switch. His hand hits a button. The room lights up.

And there are two six-foot-tall capsules in a bare room. The capsules are fogged, their glass grayed with crystalline patterns of ice. Partridge walks up to one. He rubs the glass with his hand. A face frozen, completely still.

Mimi Willux.

Suspended
. That’s the word she used.

He staggers backward, running into the door. Ageless. This is how She saves time by preservation. Why is Mimi suspended? Is this how she stays young looking? Some cryogenic state, some self-induced hypothermia?

Iralene. He walks up to the other capsule. He lifts his hand, gathers his courage, and then wipes away the iciness. The capsule is empty. He presses his hand to the glass and realizes there is no humming motor keeping it cool.

Where is she? Why would they do this to her? She’s just a teenager. Or is she? Partridge remembers the way she looked at him when he guessed her to be only sixteen. Are Iralene and Mimi both much older than they seem?

He runs out of the small room, shutting the door behind him. There’s no exit down this hall. He runs back the way he came, his legs still weak. As he finds the brightly lit edge of the living room and starts to enter it, the room crackles. There’s a pop of light. A bright flash. And then the room darkens. It’s a basement. Nothing more. He sprints halfway across the empty room. No doors. No windows. But now he sees
a piano shoved under the stairs. A real piano with real keys and pedals and everything. A dream version of the one that had been stripped bare at the warden’s house, where he last saw Lyda.

Lyda. He’s glad she isn’t here. What would they do to her?

He takes the stairs two at a time. The terra-cotta is gone. His door is open. Hadn’t he closed it behind him?

He walks into the room, which is bare except for a few stark furnishings—a plain bed, a bedside table, an old lamp, a wardrobe.

Iralene is there by the window, which is open, but there’s nothing beyond it—no ocean, no moonlight.

On the bed, there’s a metal key—the key to his collar.

“I saw it, Iralene,” he says. “I saw what they’re doing.”

“You don’t even really know,” she says. She turns and looks at him. “You can’t really understand it all.”

“Who’s down there? How many?”

She looks at the window casement, rubs it with one hand. “I can’t even begin to explain. There are so many things I’m not supposed to understand.”

He walks over to her and takes her hand. He needs to know that she’s real. Her hand is trembling. “Why do you do it?”

She looks at him as if he should know the answer to this question. “We exist only when needed. The cold slows any damage to our cells. My mother and I can both stay young.”

“For my father?”

She rips her hand away from him. “For our own self-esteem! This is for us! Not your father, not you. It’s so we can feel good about who we are—inside and out.” Her voice is high and ragged in her throat.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She walks to the wardrobe, opens it, and pulls out a suit on a hanger and then two shiny black shoes by their heels. “You’ll need to fit in.” She walks back to him and shoves the suit and shoes at his chest. She turns her back, and he starts to undress quickly. “I overloaded the system with requests—India, China, Morocco, Paris, the Nile. It will repair itself quickly. You need to hurry.”

He puts on the pants and zips them, pulls on the shirt and jacket
without buttoning them. He loops the tie around his shirt collar. “Socks?” he says.

She walks back to the wardrobe, searches the single drawer at its base. “There aren’t any.” She looks like she’s going to cry. “An oversight! I can’t believe it!”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He buttons his shirt now and shoves on the shoes. He goes to the bed, picks up the key, feels the iron collar for the lock, fits the key in, and turns.

The collar pops open. He throws it on the bed, the key still in it, and rubs his chafed neck.

“You can walk the ledge outside of the window to the fire escape,” she says as she walks over to him. She lifts the ends of the necktie and starts looping it into a knot. “Then you can run.”

“Come with me,” Partridge says. “You don’t have to stay here.”

“I can’t go.”

“Of course you can. You don’t even have a collar.”

“I don’t have one because they know I’d never leave.” She tightens the knot around his neck.

“Iralene, they’ll know you arranged for the system to go down. They’ll know you helped me out of here.”

“I was being honest when I hit all those buttons. I really want to go to India, China, Morocco . . .” Her voice trails off.

“I don’t trust my father. I don’t know what he’ll do to you.”

“Go, Partridge. Just go.”

“I won’t forget this, Iralene.” Partridge goes to the window, climbs out onto the ledge, and, still gripping the frame, says, “Thank you.”

“It was our secret,” she says. “We shared it. It was ours.”

“That’s right,” he says.

“Go.”

He walks down the ledge, foot over foot. The Caribbean breezes are gone. The air is static again. He climbs onto the fire escape in his shiny, thin-soled shoes and looks down to the cement below.

He looks up and sees a building of windows. None of them are lit.

P
RESSIA WALKS QUICKLY UPHILL
toward the dormitory lights. The night is blustery. She pulls her collar up, crosses her arms, tucking the doll-head fist out of sight, the way she used to in the market. She can feel the burn on one side of her face like it’s fresh. Brigid—half beautiful, half ugly. It’s as if Willux ordained it, and he
did
ordain it, in a way, by burning and mutating them all. He was forged by fire—what did that mean? He was made new. The survivors weren’t.

She walks along the side of the building and glances quickly into lit windows, not wanting to pry but needing to find Wilda. In one, a soldier’s studying some papers. In another, there’s a kitchen with people working in a steam so thick that some of the windows are opaque.