Burn (Pure #3)(44)

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Weed seems to appreciate this. “Okay.”

“Do you think the wedding will help—at all? I mean, do they really just need a distraction?”

“You ripped everything away from them. The wedding gives them something to orient themselves around again.” Partridge nods. He was hoping that Weed would have given him reason to back out. “Anyway, who wouldn’t want to marry Iralene?”

Partridge looks at him. He feels numb suddenly. “You know where my heart’s at.”

Weed scratches his head and shrugs. “To each his own.”

“I want you to bring me to the wards, now,” Partridge says. “I need to see things with my own eyes.”

Weed tilts his head. “And I want to talk to your sister, Partridge. If they don’t crash that ship, I want to know what she knows.”

“Do you think they’ll crash?”

“Who knows if they’ve got any real pilot aboard? Chances are slim, right?”

But Partridge isn’t so sure. He immediately thinks of El Capitan and how much he loved his car. He’d go crazy for an airship. No way he wouldn’t be at the controls. Would he be any good at it? Partridge doesn’t really know, but he feels a surge of confidence in El Capitan just based on the power of El Capitan’s will alone. “I can’t tell you what my sister might or might not know.”

“Trust me,” Arvin says. “She knows something!”





EL CAPITAN





CRAZY JOHN—JOHNS




El Capitan sits in the pilot’s seat, hunched forward because of Helmud on his back. Fignan is in the copilot’s seat, projecting bright maps of the surrounding territory. El Capitan’s scanning the horizon for Crazy John-Johns Amusement Park. He wishes he didn’t have to go back; they almost died there. In his mind’s eye, he can still see Helmud over his shoulder, stabbing each of the Dusts’ eyes as they blinked up from the earth, the big hulk of the ones that pulled themselves up from the dirt, and Hastings’ leg bitten by the teeth of a trap, how he ripped it free—his leg half gone. And his car—he loved that damn car; it’s stuck out there too.

Hastings? Did he survive surgery on his leg? Lots of things could have gone wrong—a clumsy surgeon accidentally snipping a main artery, a loss of blood, a lack of hygiene causing infection.

What if he’s dead?

Shit.

The landscape is still dusty and barren. Last time, he crash-landed. He’d like to do it right, but he’s already distracted. He’s thinking about what Pressia said—that one day, it might be possible for him and Helmud to be severed from each other. The vial has properties to regrow cells. These could be used on Helmud from the place where his ribs lock a little with El Capitan’s ribs and where his legs are melted into El Capitan. He imagines a procedure where Helmud is regrown bit by bit as they’re slowly, surgery after surgery, separated. Could it be possible?

Helmud has been a part of El Capitan for so long. What would it feel like to be alone again? He tells himself it would feel damn good. He wants to be that man—his own man. But there’s an ache in his chest every time he thinks of it, as if Helmud’s heart—which rides forever just behind El Capitan’s own heart—feels the betrayal and applies sharp pressure, heart to heart.

If it could work, would it allow Pressia to see him as a real person, a man who stands alone—someone she could fall in love with?

She and Bradwell are back in their seats. El Capitan wishes he could feel a twinge of hope that they’ll never get back together. But he also knows that he’s got no shot with Pressia—with Bradwell around or not.

Pressia’s got what she wants—the vial and the formula—and El Capitan has the bacterium. Back in his room, he asked one of the caretakers for strong tape, and he adhered the box holding the bacterium, flat and square, behind his back—right in front of Helmud’s chest. He says, “Check it, Helmud.”

And he can feel Helmud’s fingers pushing against the box. “Check!” Helmud says.

El Capitan doesn’t have his guns, but he’s the most armed he’s ever been in his life.

Crazy John-Johns starts to take shape through the ash. As he allows the buckies to take on air, the airship dips lower. He can see the elongated neck of one of the roller coasters jutting into the sooty clouds and the tilted merry-go-round, but the ash is too thick to see the giant cracked head of Crazy John-Johns himself—his permanent smiling clown face, bulbous nose, and bald head. The dust on the ground is too thick.

“Something’s wrong!” he shouts to Pressia and Bradwell.

“Something,” Helmud whispers.

Fignan lets out a series of nervous beeps.

“What is it?” Pressia calls to him.

He passes over the amusement park and then starts to circle back. A high fence surrounds the park, but the earth around it is shifting as Dusts tunnel up, pulling themselves from the dirt. Some are loping toward the fence while others claw at it. “The Dusts are rising up!”

The survivors are defending the park with beebees and darts. The Dusts’ weakness is their eyes—the spot where they’re most human. When struck in the eyes, they buckle and fall, and the other Dusts devour them quickly. “They can’t kill them fast enough. There are too many Dusts. Hundreds of them!”