Burn (Pure #3)(24)

“Kelly will be here directly,” Fedelma says, and she shuts the door.

“Bradwell isn’t here. I don’t know where he is,” El Capitan says, as if she’d only want to see Bradwell and not him.

“I’m glad to see you two,” Pressia says. “You’re not bleeding to death. It’s a real improvement.”

“And we’re all golden,” El Capitan says, “like movable statues.”

“Golden,” Helmud says.

“Yeah,” Pressia says, looking at her arms.

“It looks good on you,” El Capitan says and then looks down at the floor.

“Cap,” Pressia says, though she’s not sure what she should say next—I hope it’s not strange between us? I hope we can still…

But then the door opens again. Pressia knows it’s Bradwell before she turns. The deep rustling of his wings is noisy. She hears Fignan beeping at his boots.

“I’ll wait out here.” It’s his voice.

She turns and sees his quick dark eyes, his wind-struck cheeks, the gold tinge to his skin too. The wings are long and ragged—but also muscular and beautiful.

“No room for me in there,” he says to a caregiver at his side, a nervous young man. “Can’t you see that?”

“Sorry, so sorry,” the caregiver says. “I’ll wait with you out here.”

Before the door swings shut, Bradwell looks at Pressia like he wants to say something. She opens her mouth to ask him how he’s doing. But he turns before she has the chance. The door closes and he’s gone.





EL CAPITAN





BACTERIUM




Boars!” Bartrand Kelly says as he walks across the fields. “I’ll want to start with the boars!”

Pressia glances at El Capitan who shrugs.

“Boars!” Helmud says.

El Capitan elbows his brother behind his back. “Shut it,” he whispers.

Bradwell walks a few paces behind them with Fignan alongside him. He’s all shoulders and ribs—bigger and broader than anyone El Capitan’s ever seen, aside from Special Forces. The birds in his back must be large, though they’re hidden by their thick, broad wings, which are so big they hunch up around his neck and trail behind, frayed like old, worn hems. Every once in a while Bradwell’s wings arch from his back, revealing the thick angular overgrown bones and dense feathers of the birds. El Capitan feels for him. He knows what it’s like to haul something around on your back forever. Still, Bradwell’s got it easier than El Capitan, right? At least his birds don’t talk back.

Kelly is the one talking now. He’s backtracked from boars and is giving a lecture about Ireland from the Before—its monuments, its fertile earth, its rich history, its poets. El Capitan isn’t interested in a tour of the past. He wants to know where Kelly’s taking them and the status of the airship. When he and Helmud were found in the cockpit, El Capitan put up a fight. It turns out the guards didn’t want to kill him. They just wanted him out of there. They beat him up enough to subdue him and then marched him back to his room. He asked them about the airship—if they’d fixed it, if it could fly—but they refused to answer.

Kelly’s out in front of them walking with great energy and purpose, swinging a leather satchel. The green fields are empty. The wind cuts across them. It makes El Capitan’s eyes tear—especially the one that’s puffed nearly shut.

El Capitan learned to ride a bike in a field like this. His mother rigged a towel under his arms, around his ribs, and ran beside him until he had enough momentum to keep going—wind in his hair, bumping over the grass. When he thinks of it now, he imagines himself as light—not just without the weight of his brother but without the weight of his life.

They’re approaching a distant barn on the rise of a hill. Fignan powers through the fallen grass, his lights flashing across the top of his black-box exterior. “So where are you taking us?” El Capitan says, interrupting Kelly. “To the airship?”

Kelly turns around and looks at El Capitan as if noticing him for the first time. “I heard that’s where they found you. It’s going to take a couple more days to get it ready for the air. You took a little tour of it, did you?”

“It wasn’t a tour really. It’s my ship,” El Capitan clarifies.

“It’s my ship,” Helmud says, which sounds like he’s contradicting El Capitan. El Capitan particularly hates when Helmud does this in front of others.

“Really?” Bartrand Kelly stops and thinks about this. “Because I thought you’d stolen the airship.” He turns and starts marching again uphill into the wind. El Capitan can hear it gusting against Bradwell’s wings.

“It was my airship to steal,” El Capitan says. “Willux blackened the whole earth. He owed me one.”

“You had other options.”

“Did I? Because I’d like to know what those were, exactly.”

“How do you know he stole it?” Pressia says, but she seems to know the answer. El Capitan feels out of the loop. He glances at Bradwell to see if he seems to know something El Capitan doesn’t, but Bradwell’s expression is steely and unreadable.

Kelly doesn’t respond, and moments later, they reach the barn. He stops in front of its door, lifts a heavy latch, and swings the door wide. “I know things. I have my connections,” Kelly finally says.