Burn (Pure #3)(26)

Kelly draws in a long breath. His cheeks flush red. He looks stricken but then furious. “How did he find her? I thought she was safe!”

“He used Partridge and me to find her. We were pawns.”

Kelly takes a few steps away, trying to gather himself. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, but it’s not clear what he’s sorry for—the fact that Willux used his own child as a pawn or the loss itself.

“You were close friends with my mother back then,” Pressia says. El Capitan knows that she craves details from her mother’s life. She was so little.

“We were all close once,” Kelly says.

“And what about my father?” Pressia asks. “Do you know where he is?” El Capitan can’t bear how vulnerable Pressia looks. She’s desperate to find her father again. He’s barely a dream to her. El Capitan understands. He never knew his father. He lived his whole life in the shadow of a man whose features he could never make out.

Kelly turns back around. “I know there are more of us. Pockets like this. Survivors. And I think Willux was in communication with many. If your father survived, it was because Willux wanted him to survive—for better or for worse.”

“What do you mean, for worse?”

“Your father’s pulse still beats on my chest—that’s all I know.”

Pressia curls the doll head to her chest, protects it with her good hand.

“Willux doesn’t just give people protection,” Bradwell says. “They have to have some value to him. You’ve been working for him all this time, haven’t you?”

“You might have noticed it’s smart to stay on Willux’s good side,” Kelly says angrily, and then he makes a sweeping gesture with both arms. “I was setting up a number of labs in Ireland and the UK just before the Detonations. One of the facilities was funded through Willux’s connections and sat within the three-mile radius he would spare. He told me, in no uncertain terms, where I needed to be to survive. I knew him well enough to believe him. I brought only my immediate family with me. That was all he told me I was allowed.” The boars grunt and paw the dirt. “It makes me sick to think about it now. Could I have alerted anyone who had the power to change the course of it? I don’t know.” He rubs his hands through his hair. El Capitan’s sure that this is the thought that keeps him up nights. El Capitan knows the signs of festering guilt—intimately, from the inside out.

“There was a tour going on—and I urged as many people as I could into the mound. We were spared, as well as the environs, but many died after the fact from disease, fire, and, to be quite honest, despair—one of my two daughters and my wife among them.” He steps into one of the sun shafts, bits of hay spinning around him, all golden. “My daughters died first. My wife died of despair.”

“We know despair,” Pressia says. “It’s something we all have in common.” Her eyes cut to Bradwell, but he still won’t look at her. El Capitan wants Bradwell to glance at her at least; can’t he give her that? It kills El Capitan to see the look in her eyes. Helmud must sense some suffering in El Capitan because El Capitan can feel his brother leaning away from Pressia as if trying to pull El Capitan’s focus away from her—for his own good.

“The boars,” Kelly says, reminding himself of the matter at hand. Fignan moves toward the animals again. They startle at first but then sniff in his direction. “Boars can be vicious and unpredictable, but when genetically mixed with cows, they can become bigger and more docile. And yet they’re tractable too. They can attack on command.”

“A word? A sign?” Bradwell asks.

“Either,” Kelly says.

El Capitan registers the threat. Kelly’s brought them here for a reason. Is he setting them up? “So you get some sympathy for the deaths of your wife and daughters, and then you politely inform us that you can have us skewered at any moment.” El Capitan walks up to the edge of a stall and one of the boars lets out a short, high-pitched squeal. “Tell me if I’ve got this right.”

“The term is gored, not skewered,” Kelly tells him calmly.

Fignan reverses from the boars back to Bradwell’s boots.

“The boars were a successful experiment.” He shakes his head and looks out one of the windows. “There’s another that went horribly wrong.”

Worse than the boars that attack on command? What’s out there? No one has the guts to ask.

El Capitan can see the boar’s wiry hairs, the blackened folds of its snout, the sharp curve of its tusks. He imagines the tip of a tusk piercing his rib cage, tearing up through his chest.

Pressia says, with a hint of suspicion in her voice, “You could do this to a man, couldn’t you? Splice the genes between species. Why not humans?” She looks at Bartrand Kelly, narrows her eyes. “Did you give your research to Willux?”

Special Forces. El Capitan imagines them as he first saw them, shifting through the trees—some had the muscularity of elk or deer and others seemed to hold the meaty bulk of bears. They lifted their faces to the wind, their nostrils tensing as they were alerted to different scents. Animallike. He thinks of his friend Hastings—is he actually a Beast, one genetically created under Willux’s orders with Kelly’s research?

Kelly says, “You do what you have to do.”