Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) Read online

  FUSE

  JULIANNA BAGGOTT

  Copyright © 2013 Julianna Baggott

  The right of Julianna Baggott to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8555 3

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise for Julianna Baggott

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part II

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part III

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  About the Book

  The second book in the PURE trilogy for fans of THE PASSAGE, THE ROAD and THE HUNGER GAMES.

  When the end came, the world was divided. Those considered perfect, the Pure, sheltered inside the controlled Dome. Outside, the Wretches struggled in a destroyed world, crippled by the fusings that branded them after the apocalypse that changed everything.

  Partridge, a Pure, has left the safety of the Dome in search of the truth. Pressia, a Wretch, is desperate to decode the secret that will cure her people of their fusings forever. Together, they must seek out the answers that will save humankind, and prevent the world’s annihilation.

  But the betrayal of Partridge’s departure has not been forgotten. As the Dome unleashes horrifying vengeance upon the Wretches in an attempt to get Partridge back, Partridge has no choice but to return to face the darkness that lies there, even as Pressia travels to the very ends of the world to continue their search.

  Theirs is a struggle against a formidable foe, and it is a fight that will push them over boundaries of land and of sea, of heart and of mind. They can only hope for success because failure is unimaginable …

  About the Author

  Julianna Baggott is an award-winning poet, novelist, and young adult writer. For years, she has been thinking about writing a futuristic dystopian novel about a society of haves – the Pure, who escaped the apocalypse and live in an uncontaminated dome-covered city – and have-nots – the wretched survivors who live in the nearly-destroyed outside world.

  By Julianna Baggott and available from Headline:

  PURE

  FUSE

  Praise for Julianna Baggott

  ‘A great, gorgeous novel, boundless in its imagination. You will be swept away’ Justin Cronin

  ‘Discomfiting and unforgettable’ The New York Times

  ‘This novel sizzles with invention and viscerally disturbs with its portraits of catastrophe’ The Sunday Times

  ‘She has a flair for keeping the pages turning with a combination of short, sharp action beats and drip-fed revelations. Strong stuff, and gripping to boot’ SFX magazine

  For my father, Bill Baggott.

  Thank you for helping me build worlds,

  especially the original world of my childhood.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people go into the brute work of this creation. I want to thank my steadfast agents Nat Sobel, Judith Weber—their entire team—and Justin Manask. I’m deeply thankful to Hachette—Jaime Levine, Jaime Raab, Beth deGuzman, Selina McLemore, and the brilliant art department—as well as Hachette UK, in particular Hannah Sheppard and Ben Willis and all of my dedicated foreign editors. Thank you Karen Rosenfelt, Rodney Ferrell, and Emmy Castlen for believing in the cinematic possibilities. I’m incredibly thankful for Heather Whitaker, who might just one day let me read her work.

  I’m thankful for the work of Andrew Collins, in particular his book The Cygnus Mystery: Unlocking the Ancient Secret of Life’s Origins in the Cosmos. Again, I’d like to thank Charles Pellegrino for his book Last Train from Hiroshima, which is still not currently available, but I hope for a revised edition to hit the shelves once more. Thank you Cheryl Fitch for inviting me into the Florida State University Molecular Cloning Facility for a tour. To the tour guide at Newgrange who took us in and to the kid who jumped up and down in the dark chamber, setting off his light-up sneakers. (Ireland, my soul sways.) Special thanks to Rick Wilber. I’m thankful for the vast collection of colleagues at Florida State University—the breadth and depth of their work inspires. And, oddly, I want to thank St. Andrew’s School. It’s been a long time, but it’s all still there.

  My family. You, kids. Dave. I love you tenderly. When I’m weary, I remember that I’m building this for you.

  And again, the Pure Trilogy is something that wouldn’t exist without my father, Bill Baggott—too gentle for wolves, you are the wisest man I know. You taught me to be curious and critical and brave. You remain my favorite interpretive dancer and the best model I know for living heart-first. I am so deeply indebted, for everything.

  Peace.

  PROLOGUE

  WILDA

  Lying on a thin coat of snow, she sees gray earth meeting gray sky, and she knows she’s
back. The horizon looks clawed, but the claw marks are only three stunted trees. They stand in a row like they’re stapling the ground to the sky.

  She gasps, suddenly, a delayed reaction, as if someone is trying to steal her breath and she’s pulling it back into her throat.

  She sits up. She’s still small, still just a nine-year-old girl. She feels like she’s lost a lot of time, but she hasn’t. Not really. Not years. Maybe only days, weeks.

  She tugs her thick coat in tight around her ribs. The coat is proof. She touches its silver buttons. There’s a scarf tucked down into the coat, wound twice around her neck. Who dressed her? Who wound the scarf twice? She looks at her boots—dark blue with thick laces, new—and her hands fitted into gloves, each finger encased in a taut cocoon.

  A curl of her dark red hair sits on her jacket, her hair shining. The end of each strand is thick and perfect as if newly cut.

  She pulls up the sleeve of the coat, exposing her arm. Just as it was under the bright light, the bone is no longer warped. There are no thin plastic ridges bubbled along the skin. She isn’t stippled with shards. Not even a mole or a freckle. Her skin is white—white, the way snow should be, maybe even whiter. She’s never seen really white snow with her own eyes. The light veins ride blue beneath the white. She touches the soft inner skin of one wrist to her cheek, then her lips. Smooth skin on smooth skin.

  She looks around and knows they’re close; she can feel the electricity of their bodies filling the air. She remembers what it was like when they first took her from the other strays; motherless, fatherless, they slept in a handmade lean-to near the markets. She isn’t sure why she was chosen, lifted into the air, clutched. One cradled her in its arms and hurdled across the rubble while the others bounded around them. Its breath chugged, mechanically. Its legs pumped. Her eyes teared in the wind, so its angular face was blurry. She wasn’t afraid, but now she is. They’re here, their strong bodies buzzing like massive bees, but they’re leaving her. She feels like a child in a fairy tale. In her mother’s stories—she had a mother once—there was a woodsman who was supposed to take a girl’s heart back to an evil queen, but he couldn’t force himself to do it. Another sliced open a wolf to save the people it had eaten. The woodsmen were strong and good. But they left girls in the woods sometimes, girls who then had to fend for themselves.

  Light snow falls. She stands slowly. The world lurches as if it’s suddenly grown heavy. She falls to her knees and then hears voices in the woods; two are people walking toward her. Even from this distance, she can see the red scars on their faces. One wobbles from a limp. They’re carrying sacks.

  She tugs the scarf over her nose and mouth. She’s supposed to be found. She’s a foundling; she remembers this word was used in the room with the bright light. “We want her to be a foundling.” It was a man’s voice, quavering over a speaker. He was in charge, though she never saw him. Willux, Willux, people whispered—people with smooth skin who weren’t fused to anything. They moved easily around her bed, surrounded by metal posts where clear sacs of fluid were clamped and dripped into tubes, among little beeping machines and wires. It was like having mothers and fathers, too many to keep track.

  She remembers the wide light in the room, its brilliant bulb, so bright and close it kept her warm. She remembers how she first ran her hand over her skin, and when she touched her stomach, it too was smooth. Her navel—the thing her mother always called the button of her belly, and what the voices in that room called her umbilicus—was gone.

  She reaches up under her coat and shirt and runs her hand over her stomach. Like before, there’s only a stretch of skin and more skin.

  “Healed,” the voices said behind white masks, but they were concerned. “Still, a success,” they said. Some wanted to keep her for observation.

  She starts to open her mouth to call to the distant figures carrying sacks, but her mouth doesn’t open all the way. It’s as if her lips are slightly stitched on either side—the edges sealed.

  And what would she say? She can’t think of any words. The words whirl in her mind. They’re furred. She can’t line them up or utter them. Finally she calls out, but the only words that form in her mouth are “We want!” She doesn’t know why. She tries again to call for help, but again she shouts, “We want!”

  They walk up, two young women. They’re pickers; she can tell by the warts and scars on their fingers. They’ve touched a lot of poisonous bulbs, berries, morels. One of them has silver prongs, like those on an old fork, in place of two of her fingers. She’s the one with the limp, and her face, though seared a deep red, is strangely pretty, mostly because of her eyes, which glow a golden orange like liquid metal—stained by the brightness of the bombs themselves. She’s blind. She clutches the other picker’s arm and says, “Who’s you?” It sounds like a birdcall. The girl heard birds in the bright room, recorded and piped in by the unseen speakers. Cooing, the girl thinks, and then she hears other birds in the woods. These birds have the kinds of calls she grew up with—not clear, sweet notes as in the bright room, but scratches and rattles.

  The two young women are scared of her. Can they already tell she’s different?

  She wants to tell them her name, but it’s gone. The only words in her mind are Fire Flower. That’s what her mother used to call her sometimes; born from fire and destruction, she took root and grew. She’s never known her father, but she’s pretty sure that he was lost in the fire and destruction.

  And then her name appears: Wilda. She is Wilda.

  She puts her hand on the cold ground. She wants to tell them that she’s new. She wants to tell them that the world has changed forever. She says, “We want our son.” The words startle her. Why did she say this?

  The young women look at each other. The blind one says, “What was that? Whose son?”

  The other has a scar running down one cheek as if she had a braid fused to her face now covered in a layer of skin. She says, “She’s not right in the head.”

  “Who’s you?” the blind one says again.

  The girl says, “We want our son.” These are the only words that she can say.

  The pickers look around suddenly, even the blind one. They hear the electrical synapses now, firing through the air. The creatures who took her are restless. “There’s many,” the one with the braided scar says, wide-eyed. “They’re protecting her. Can you feel ’em? They been sent by our Watchers to look over her.”

  “Angels,” the blind one says.

  They start to back away.

  But then Wilda pulls up her sleeve and exposes her arm—so white it seems to glow. “We want,” she says again, slowly, “our son returned.”

  PART I

  PRESSIA

  MOTHS

  THE LOBBY AT OSR HEADQUARTERS is dotted with a few glowing handmade oil lamps strung from the exposed beams of the high ceiling. The survivors are bedding down on blankets and mats, curled together to keep warm. Their bodies hold a collective humid heat despite the fact that the tall windows haven’t been boarded. Their bare casements are fringed with the gauzy remains of curtains. Snow starts to flutter and gust, flutter and gust, in through the windows as if hundreds of moths have been lured in by the promise of lit bulbs to bash themselves against.

  It’s dark outside, but almost morning, and some of the early risers are waking. Pressia’s stayed up all night again. Sometimes she gets so lost in her work that she loses track of time. She’s holding a mechanical arm she’s just made from scraps that El Capitan brings her—silver pincers, a ball-bearing elbow, old electrical cord to cinch it, and leather straps that have been measured to cuff the amputee’s thin biceps. He’s a nine-year-old with all five fingers fused together, almost webbed. She whispers the boy’s name hoarsely. “Perlo! Are you here?”

  She makes her way through the survivors, who shift and mutter. She hears a sharp, mewling hiss. “Hush it!” a woman says. Pressia sees something writhe beneath the woman’s coat and then the silky black head of a cat appe
ars at the side of her neck. A baby cries out. Someone curses. A song rises up from a man’s throat, a lullaby . . . The ghostly girls, the ghastly girls, the ghostly girls. Who can save them from this world? From this world? The river’s wide, the current curls, the current calls, the current curls . . . The baby goes quiet. Music still works, music calms people. We’re wretches but we’re still capable of this—songs rising up inside us. She’d like the people of the Dome to know this. We’re vicious, yes, but also capable of shocking tenderness, kindness, beauty. We’re human, flawed, but still good, right?

  “Perlo?” she tries again, cradling the prosthetic arm to her chest. Sometimes in crowds like this she now looks for her father—even though she doesn’t remember his face. Before Pressia’s mother died, she showed Pressia the pulsing tattoos on her chest—one of which belonged to Pressia’s father, proof that he’s survived the Detonations. Of course, he isn’t here. He probably isn’t even on this continent—or what’s left of it. But she can’t help searching the faces of survivors for someone who looks a little like her—almond-shaped eyes, black shiny hair. She can’t stop from searching, no matter how irrational it is to believe she might one day find him.

  She’s made it all the way across the lobby and comes to a wall plastered with posters. Instead of the black claw, which once struck fear in survivors, this is a poster of El Capitan’s face—stern and tough-jawed. She looks down the row of posters, his eyes all lined up, his brother Helmud a small lump behind El Capitan’s back. Above his head, it reads, ABLE AND STRONG? JOIN UP. SOLIDARITY WILL SAVE US. El Capitan made that up and he’s proud of it. At the bottom, fine print promises an end to Death Sprees—the teams of OSR soldiers assigned to cull the weak, collect their dead in an enemy’s field—and mandatory conscription at sixteen. For those who volunteer, El Capitan promises Food without Fear. Fear of what? OSR has a dark history. People were captured and hauled in, untaught how to read, used as live targets . . .

  All of that is over. The posters have worked. There are more recruits now than ever. They wander up from the city, ragged and hungry, burned and fused. Sometimes, they come as families. He’s told Pressia that he’s got to start sending some back. “This isn’t a welfare state. I’m trying to build an army here.” But so far, she’s always talked him into letting them stay.