Burn (Pure #3)(55)

The outpost that was once a boarding school might be the worst off—the survivors’ tents are blackened and have collapsed in on themselves like clenched fists. The buildings’ stone still stands, but the fires have gutted the buildings themselves. He gets close enough to see that there are some people still there, dazed and searching for those they’ve lost. Only a few of them look up when they hear the droning engine. But they don’t take cover. They only stop and raise their faces to the noise. The little cottage where Pressia helped Bradwell regain his strength is still there, but its roof has caved in and the trees around it that had limbs that tethered them to the ground like roots are only charred stalks.

Here and there, even the smallest structures have burned or are still smoking—the huts of shepherds and pickers, lean-tos, the wood roofs of hand-built altars, the posts around graveyards. Smoke shivers to the sky, gusts, and swirls across the terrain in gray billowing sheets.

Shortly after they picked up Hastings, he walked into the cockpit to tell El Capitan to prepare for devastation. He told him the stories of the survivors who’d made it to Crazy John-Johns. El Capitan nodded. “One thing I know is devastation, Hastings. Don’t worry.”

“Worry,” Helmud had said, and he was right. Nothing could have prepared him for this. His homeland has always been burnt and charred but fighting its way back. And now it’s as if all of the life and energy and strength that it took to rebuild have been wiped away.

He sees a sloping field where the Dome worshippers, once upon a time, built a pyre of their own. Gone. All of it. That’s where he’ll bring down the airship.

He takes them lower and lower and finally shouts to the others, “Brace for landing!”

“Brace, brace!” Helmud shouts and grabs hold of El Capitan so hard that El Capitan has to pop his elbows out to have enough mobility to work the instruments.

“Ease up, Helmud.”

The airship glides then bobbles as it starts to descend. The ground is coming at El Capitan too quickly.

“Ease up!” Helmud shouts. “Ease up!”

El Capitan slows a little, but the engines sound weak. He doesn’t want to stall out. So he lets the buckies take on more air—too much. The airship drops. One landing prong hits, drags, gouging the earth, sending up a black plume of ash. The airship pops to its other leg and also skids. The airship tips forward on its two front legs, teetering for a moment with the nose hovering just above the ground before it rocks back onto all four prongs solidly.

El Capitan whistles a sigh. Helmud echoes it.

El Capitan hears the cabin door open. He’ll let the others hop out. He’s in no rush to see more. He takes his time shutting the engines down. He doesn’t know when he’ll fly again. He pats the wall of the cockpit.

“We’ll miss it, won’t we, Helmud?”

“Miss it,” Helmud says, as if he’s ready to move on. They follow the others out onto the ground, which is stiff with the cold. They don’t talk. What the hell could any of them say? The smoke is so thick that it rolls around them as dark as the fog of Ireland was white. His eyes burn and tear. He covers his mouth with his sleeve.

Pressia turns a circle, trying to take in the destruction through the waves of smoke. “Where are Wilda and the others? How are we ever going to find them now?”

Bradwell extends his broad wings and then wraps himself in them—only his face shows, his jaw jutting out. El Capitan’s legs feel like they might buckle, and Helmud feels suddenly so heavy on his back that he rests on one knee.

Hastings stands in a wide-legged stance, balancing his weight between his real leg and the prosthetic. Finally he says, “This summer, I bought books for the whole school year.”

At first, El Capitan doesn’t know why he’d say something like that now, but then Bradwell says, “I remember giving those lessons in Shadow History. I had it all down. I knew what I was doing and why.” And El Capitan gets it. Hastings and Bradwell are wondering what the hell happened to everything they once knew to be true.

Pressia says, “I made windup toys. Sometimes they’d flutter, but I could never get them to fly.”

El Capitan says, “I had this journal. I’d test berries on the recruits to see which ones were poisonous. I had a system. I drew pictures in it. I was good at that.”

“I was good,” Helmud says, as if that sums it up. Once, long ago, before the Detonations, they were all good. El Capitan feels a surge of anger like he’s never felt before. He punches the cold ground with his fists. He feels the desire for revenge pulsing through him.

Bradwell’s the first to say it. “Let’s take ’em down.”

El Capitan says, “The bacterium is a gift. We were given a gift.” He can feel the twinge of the thick tape holding in place the box protecting the bacterium.

“A gift,” Helmud says.

“No,” Pressia says. “We have to talk to Partridge. Something’s gone wrong. He wouldn’t do this. I know it.”

This time she has someone to back her up without hesitation. “Partridge wouldn’t ever let this happen,” Hastings says. “I know him. We were friends. Trust me.”

“You were friends,” El Capitan says. “I know power firsthand. I know what it can do to your head. You come out on the other side of it twisted.”