From a very young age, Partridge’s father used brain enhancements—so much so that he lit up his brain with firing synapses—and now he has the telltale signs of Rapid Cell Degeneration: the palsy and skin deterioration, and eventual organ failure and death. It’s not just him. Partridge remembers how, in the Dome, anyone who is sick, old, or weary is quickly whisked away to a cordoned-off wing of the medical center. In the last few weeks, he’s realized one very dark truth: Rapid Cell Degeneration will also eventually affect Special Forces and all the academy boys who’ve been enhanced, including, one day, Partridge himself.
Before his mother died, she told him that if what’s in these vials is paired with another substance as dictated by a formula—a formula that’s gone missing—then this concoction could reverse Rapid Cell Degeneration. At the time, he’d been too overwhelmed with emotions—he hadn’t seen his mother since he was a little boy—to fully grasp what she was telling him. But now, he wishes he’d been more clear-minded, more rational. He wishes he’d asked more questions.
His mother showed him a list of people within the Dome who were on her side, including Arvin Weed’s parents, Algrin Firth’s father, even Durand Glassings. They’re part of a network within the Dome. When Lyda was sent out of the Dome as bait to lure Partridge, one of the people in the network whispered a message to her: Tell the swan we’re waiting. When Partridge told his mother this, she whispered, “The Cygnus,” which he still doesn’t understand.
She told him that the liquid in these vials contains powerful cell-generating material. But also that the serum is unwieldy, imperfect, dangerous.
Holding up one of the vials to the dim light, he wants to know how, exactly, this liquid is unwieldy, imperfect, and dangerous. What would happen, for example, if it touched a living creature’s skin? He wants to test it. Once the idea is there in his head, there’s no talking himself out of it.
First, he needs something living to test the serum on.
A beetle.
He walks to the jars again and picks one up quickly. Again, a few beetles dash off, but he cups his hand over one of them. It has a glossy green back and a bright red head spiked with thornlike horns. Its legs fan out, knotted, bristled with spikes. He holds it in place until he feels the beetle tickling up his fingers.
“Sorry,” he whispers to the beetle. “I really am.”
He carries it to the plywood, opens his mother’s music box, gently nudges it into the box, and closes the lid. He hears the beetle scratching within it. He wishes Arvin Weed, the boy genius of the academy, were here. God, Partridge regrets not paying attention in labs.
He picks up one of the syringes, uncaps it, and fills it with fluid from one of the vials. The needle shines. He knows that this means he’ll waste a drop. Just one, he tells himself. Only that.
He upends the music box. The beetle starts skittering across the plywood, but he pinches it and holds it delicately in place.
While its legs scurry, getting nowhere, a sharp tail curls up from under its wings, revealing a swaying stinger. Its small, rounded black eyes seem wet. Partridge looks at the needle, starts to depress the stopper when he feels the sting. His finger and thumb poised on either side of the beetle’s shelled back are quickly covered with tiny prickles of searing heat. The burning moves up into his hand, and the shock of it causes him to shout, but he keeps his hold on the beetle.
As fast as he can, he moves the needle toward the beetle, but his hand feels so rigid with pain he has to let the beetle go. It clicks across the plywood, but not before a drop of liquid from the needle falls, landing—thick and wet—on one of its hind legs. The leg goes limp from the weighty trap of the liquid. The beetle drags itself forward.
The shout has alerted Mother Hestra. Her knuckles rap the cellar door. “What was that noise?”
“Nothing!” Partridge wraps the syringes, his burning hand blotched now, and he crawls to the jar, lifts it, and slides the bundled syringes in the hole. The beetle pulls itself under the plywood to darkness.
The cellar door opens wide with a clang. Mother Hestra is backlit, dimly. “What’s the noise down here?” she asks.
“It’s just a chant from the academy. It can get too quiet down here.” He rubs his burning hand but then stops. He doesn’t want any more questions.
Mother Hestra has a thick body. Her son, Syden, a five-year-old, is permanently fused to her leg. She’s wearing furs stitched together and fitted to the shape of her body with a hole for the boy’s blotched head, just above her hip. Most of the mothers are Groupies, fused to children, and Partridge has never gotten used to it. During the Detonations, the mothers were holding their children or protecting them from the bright flashes, bent to them, tending to them. Partridge can’t quite imagine being stunted in that form, never growing up, always locked into place within the confines of your mother’s body. Syden’s face has begun to age. Will he grow old like this?
Mother Hestra glares at Partridge. One of her cheeks is seared with words—a backward script burned into her skin during the Detonations—the impression of a blackened tattoo. Partridge doesn’t let himself stare at it long enough to try to read it. He doesn’t want to be rude. “Well, stop with all that,” she says.
“I was just going to sleep anyway.”
“Good. We leave in the morning. I’ll call on you early.”
“Lyda and Illia are coming too?” He’d rather not have Illia coming along. She’s crazy. He can’t fault her. She was locked away in the farmhouse, abused by her husband, forced to hide her scars beneath a stocking made to look like a second skin. Recently, she’s reverted to wrapping herself in swathes of cloth—because she’s ashamed of her skin? Or is it simply a habit? She murdered her husband—a scalpel to the back—and it messed her up good. Lyda is the only one he wants to see. Lyda.
“Lyda, yes. Illia? I don’t know,” Mother Hestra says.
“Where are we going?” Partridge asks.
“Can’t say.” And with that, she heaves herself out of view. The cellar door slams shut. For a second, Partridge is blinded by the news. No more confinement. He’ll see Lyda tomorrow. Everything will be different soon; it’s coming. He can feel it. God, he misses her.
That’s when he hears the rasp, low and heavy. And then there’s a noise like a shovel in dirt. But that’s not it either—a thick scraping noise.
He feels like he’s not alone.
His mother’s music box lies in the dirt. He reaches for it and sees a long black talon on a thin spoke—the leg of an insect, a massive insect—sticking out from under the plywood. It’s too big to be the beetle’s leg. Still there’s rasping.
He puts his hand on the plywood and begins to lift it. The leg crimps, disappears from view.
He takes a breath and yanks the plywood so hard it flips over; he forgets he’s been coded with extra strength sometimes.
There’s the beetle. Its tail clicking against its own shell, its wings convulsing wildly and uselessly, rasping as it struggles for breath.
It has one spiny, thick, massive leg.
The liquid in the vial worked. The cells of its leg weren’t injured, and so, with incredible speed, the cells didn’t repair trauma—they built on healthy tissue and bone; even the ornate spikes on this one hind leg have ordered themselves perfectly. And, for some reason, this seems familiar to him—the delicacy of rebuilding a small limb. Has he ever heard of something like it before?
Partridge doesn’t want to touch it. His hand still tingles with heat. Unwieldy, imperfect, dangerous. That’s what his mother called the serum. The beetle’s leg jerks uncontrollably, gouging a claw mark in the dirt.
And Partridge feels a strange rush of power. He made this happen with one tiny drop of liquid. His head pounds and his ears ring, and he thinks of his father’s power. What did the old man feel when the Detonations hit—blast after blast of bright blinding light pulsing around the earth?
My God, Partridge thinks. What if Partridge’s father loved the power of it
all? What if it made him feel like he was lit up? What if it felt like this infinitesimal moment expanded exponentially, infinitely, inside of him?
The beetle’s wings fold in tightly to its body. The leg spasms a few more times, and then the beetle digs its powerful leg into the dirt like a knife and pushes itself up. Its small legs dart beneath it, and the massive leg contracts, then extends. The beetle springs into the air and flaps its wings. The leg is too heavy for the wings to support. It falls to the ground, but the massive leg is there to soften the landing. It contracts again, springs forward, flaps, lands, contracts, springs forward . . .
The beetle is no longer what it was moments ago.
It’s a new species.
EL CAPITAN
NEW
IT’S BEEN SNOWING OFF AND ON, and now it’s started up again. Snow shudders down from the sky, lightly drifting between the dark trees and scrub, settling on gnarled boughs. Many of the limbs have grown thick coats of fur this cold autumn. El Capitan runs his fingers up the spindly limb of a sapling, and there it is—not a fuzzy coating of something plantlike. No, this is the downy fur you’d find on the belly of a young cat. “One day they’ll grow legs and walk off,” he says to his brother, Helmud, the weight forever rooted to his back.
“Walk off,” Helmud whispers. He looks out over one of El Capitan’s shoulders then bobs to the other. He seems anxious today
“Stop shifting around,” El Capitan orders.
“Shifting around,” Helmud says.
El Capitan has given Helmud things to keep his hands busy. Helmud has always had nervous hands. Used to be that his brother was secretly fashioning a lariat to kill El Capitan, but then Helmud saved El Capitan’s life. After that, El Capitan decided that he had to trust Helmud. He had no choice. To keep his hands busy, El Capitan gave Helmud a little penknife and things to whittle. “You sure you want to do that?” Bradwell asked him once. El Capitan said, “Of course I’m sure. He’s my brother!” But the knife might just be a test, as if he’s saying, Go ahead. You want to kill me? You sure? I’ll make it easy. Sometimes when El Capitan leans forward, a small flurry of wood chips flutters to the ground. Helmud is whittling today, quite madly.
El Capitan sits down on the large root of a tree and sets his rifle at his boots. They left without breakfast and now he’s hungry. From a sheet of waxed paper, he unwraps a sandwich made of bread heels. He prefers the heels—the extra toughness in his teeth. He says to Helmud, “Time to eat, brother.”
El Capitan is used to Helmud’s constant repetitions; usually they’re just a dim-witted echo. Sometimes, though, the words mean something. And this time, Helmud repeats the phrase slightly differently “Time to eat brother,” he says, as if Helmud intends to devour El Capitan. It’s a little joke, meant to keep El Capitan on his toes.
“Now, now,” El Capitan says, “is that nice, Helmud? Is it?”
“Is it?” Helmud says.
“I shouldn’t even share this sandwich with you. You know that?” Before they’d gotten involved with Pressia, El Capitan wouldn’t have shared, but he’s changed some. He feels it throughout his body, as if change happens cell by cell. He wonders if Helmud notices the change too, since they share so many cells. It’s not that he’s gotten sweet all of a sudden. No, El Capitan still feels a near-constant, fiery rage in his chest. But it’s more about having a purpose, that there’s something worth protecting. Is it Pressia herself?
Maybe it starts with her, but, no—it’s larger than that.
El Capitan rips off a hunk of the bread and the small wedge of meat between the heels. He hands it to Helmud. He has to share with Helmud. Their hearts pump with shared blood, and if El Capitan is going to help bring down the Dome—and he’d like to live to see that day—he needs Helmud on his side and healthy Being cruel to Helmud is the same as being cruel to himself. And maybe that’s it. El Capitan hated himself plenty before he met Pressia, but that’s eased up a little. He thought of himself as an abandoned kid. First abandoned by his father—some pilot kicked out of the air force for going mental. El Capitan tried to be like him—figuring out everything he could about flying jets—as if that could make him worthy of a father. Then his mother died. It seemed he wasn’t worthy of having parents at all. He went a little mental himself, but he doesn’t have to get stuck that way. Right? Pressia sees something worthwhile in him, and she could be right. “See how nice I am?” he says to Helmud.
“Nice I am,” Helmud says.
El Capitan set out earlier this morning to follow the electrical pulses. He doesn’t like the way they seem to be circling closer to headquarters. They’ve been eluding him. But now he’s sure he senses something. Although he can’t read the pulses, he can tell when they’re moving at a higher rate, which means that one of them has sent out a call of some sort and the others are responding.
He folds a cloth over what’s left of the sandwich, shoves it in his sack, and heads toward the pulses. He sees a set of tracks in the snow—each footprint crisscrossed with treading. A few figures darting up ahead. He follows at a respectful distance.
He comes to a clearing and stops. A few Special Forces cluster. They’re beautiful and strong—almost majestic. Some are bulky, others sinewy. They seem unaffected by cold, as if their thin second skins are regulated to insulate them. They have a profound sense of smell. One lifts his head and tenses his nostrils, smelling El Capitan and Helmud, and then he locks eyes with El Capitan, who doesn’t move but doesn’t stiffen either. He doesn’t want to seem fearful.
He’s noticed over the last few weeks that this new group isn’t as robust as the ones he and Helmud battled in the woods alongside Bradwell and Lyda. They seem not as fully formed, as if the changes to their bodies were rushed. They’re not as agile. They sometimes lurch. They seem less comfortable with the weapons locked into their arms. When they cluster like this, it’s like they need one another, a closeness—the way humans do.
The other three creatures also look at Helmud and El Capitan, alerted in some unseen way by the first. They never say a word to him, though he knows they can speak. It’s as if they accept his presence as part of the environment, as they do the sharp scree-scree of an occasional wing-warped bird with a metal beak or the humanlike child-cry of an animal caught in one of El Capitan’s traps. They aren’t looking for him. That’s not why they’re here. They want Partridge, El Capitan is sure of it, and he’s afraid they might be attuned to Pressia too—she shares a bloodline with her brother and she could be of use to the Dome, particularly to draw Partridge in.
El Capitan would like to talk to them. He knows their loyalty to the Dome is programmed, but there was one who went rogue when they fought near the bunker—Partridge’s brother, Sedge. They’re human, on the most buried level. He feels that one small connection would help. He’s been waiting for the right moment.
He walks out from the trees and kneels down in the snow, the cold and wet seeping through his pants. He opens his arms, a gesture of supplication. He lowers his head, a bow of sorts.
He hears the scuttling of footsteps, the snapping of branches. He looks up and they’re gone.
He sits back on his heels. “Shit.”
“Shit,” Helmud says.
“Don’t talk that way,” he says to his brother. “It’s a bad habit.”
He stands up, but then hears a sound behind him. He slowly pulls his rifle around to his chest. He turns.
A solitary Special Forces creature stands in the middle of the path not more than twenty feet away. El Capitan has never seen him before. He isn’t sending out any low pulses, which reverberate off other Special Forces in the area. Interesting. Maybe he doesn’t want anyone else to know where he is.
He’s tall and the thinnest Special Forces soldier El Capitan has seen. In fact, his face still holds on to its humanness—and not just in the eyes, which always seem human in Special Forces, but also in the delicacy of his jaw and small nose and nostrils. His shoulders and thighs are strong but not hulking.
He has two weapons embedded in his forearms, still shiny with polish—never used.
This one is very new.
He eyes El Capitan warily.
El Capitan raises his hands slowly. “Listen, let’s take this easy and calm.”
“Calm,” Helmud says, whittling nervously behind El Capitan’s back.
“What do you want?” El Capitan says.
The creature cocks his head, sniffs the air.
“You want something to eat? If I’d known you were coming, I’d have packed more.”
The creature shakes his head. He leans down, clearing snow from the path, exposing the bare, ashen dirt. He stands, then lifts his foot. One thick dagger pops from the boot’s toe. El Capitan flinches, wondering if he’s going to get gutted, but then the creature sticks the dagger into the dirt, raises his chin, looking out through the trees, and starts to claw out a word. El Capitan is fairly sure that the creature’s eyes and ears are bugged—as Pressia’s once were. He’s played this game before. The creature wants to tell him something without recording it.
Beneath the word, the creature seems to draw some kind of symbol.
It’s all too far away to read. Plus, it’s upside down.
The creature backs away, takes a few leaps into the woods, then jumps, gripping the girth of a tree—its top half gone and its pulp dug out by bugs.
El Capitan takes a tentative step forward. He looks at the creature, who is still staring off into the trees. El Capitan walks around the word and reads it to himself—Hastings. Is it a name? A place? He thinks of the word battle. Doesn’t Hastings have to do with war somehow? El Capitan knows not to say the word aloud. He stares at the symbol. It’s a cross, which is the way the Dome ended its Message—just after the Detonations—on small slips of paper that fell down from the sky. A cross with a circle around the center.