Burn (Pure #3)(8)

“Who am I?” Helmud says. Is he speaking philosophically? El Capitan’s glad that Helmud can only communicate in repetitive ways. If Helmud could really express himself, El Capitan’s afraid Helmud would push him to take the conversation one level deeper. El Capitan isn’t one for philosophizing.

El Capitan laughs. “Who are you? Let’s keep our shit together, Helmud, okay? Let’s not go off the deep end. You know what I mean.”

“You know what I mean,” Helmud repeats, and El Capitan knows to drop it. Helmud’s in one of those moods where he wants to assert himself. There’s no talking to him.

A knife would help, but he didn’t have time to go hunting for one. He wanted out. He wanted to see his airship, and he’s finally built up enough strength again to roam. He sneaked out, and now is he being watched from afar? Maybe. Who cares? He’s got a ship to get back in order and hopefully up into the air. He has people to get home—Bradwell, Pressia. He thinks of her and remembers the kiss.

Jesus.

He kissed her. Each time he thinks about it, his heart feels like a crooked thing in his chest, all bent, all wrong—a freak heart. His heart will beat for Pressia for the rest of his life. He’ll love her forever. Bradwell might have been able to turn away from her, but El Capitan could never do that. He’ll just have to take this ache. He’ll have to bear it inside of him forever. He’s survived this long under the weight of his own brother. He understands the burden. He feels aged by it, and yet he’s still young. He was a kid when the Detonations went off, just a little older than Bradwell, but he feels middle-aged—probably because he never had much of a childhood. Without a father and with his mother taken away and dying young, he was rushed right into manhood while still a little boy.

He only hopes that Pressia isn’t forever wrecked by what she did to Bradwell—saved him, yes, but killed him in a way too. A deathblow. El Capitan saw her face when she realized what she’d done, and he knew the one she really loved. It was over. Screw it. El Capitan had to simply move on—no matter how sick it made him feel. Homesickness—that he could fix. Matters of the heart? They just build up scar tissue. He’ll be thankful, one day, that she toughened his heart. “Scars are good. Right, Helmud? It’s the body’s way of making armor.”

Helmud is quiet. Maybe his silence means he doesn’t agree.

El Capitan keeps pushing through the vines, and after feeling around blindly for a few minutes, he finds the outline of the hatch.

He knows what to expect—the rot of their rations, his smeared blood, the chaos of the crash landing. The aft-bucky—one of the tanks that helped keep them aloft, dirigible-like—cracked in flight. It started taking on air and is the reason they went down. The other buckies might have broken on impact. But he won’t know these things unless the airship is running and the diagnostics are functional.

He pulls vines, loosening them enough to open the door.

He’s here just to see it, just to be in it again. There’s no other place on earth where he’s felt so powerful, so in control. He looks down into the airship’s interior. The vines choke so much of the light that it’s just a dark hole. It doesn’t smell like rot. Maybe rats worked their way in and ate the rations.

He swings his legs in first and tells Helmud to hold tight. He lowers their doubled weight down. His boots hit, and the airship shifts a little.

He loves this goddamn airship. “Baby,” he says, “I’m home.”

The airship has an underwater feel to it now. The vines stripe the windows, cutting up the sunlight. He walks past the seats, crawls through the cockpit door, and steps inside. He walks to the console, runs his hands over the toggles and switches and screens. They’re weirdly pristine. In fact, they seem freshly polished. The fractured glass of the window has been replaced. He touches it. No—the glass wasn’t replaced. It was somehow mended. He can feel the ripples of where the shatters once were, and the glass has a pale cloudiness to it, just in that one spot.

Who’s been down here? Some of Kelly’s men? If they fixed the glass, did they fix the aft-bucky too?

He feels hopeful. Is the airship operational? Of course he can’t get it airborne. It’s held in place by the vines, which have enormous collective strength.

“We might just be able to get this baby up in the air again,” he says to Helmud. “God, it felt right being up here at the helm. Didn’t it?”

“Didn’t it?” Helmud says.

“You’ll never get it—not like I do,” he says to his brother. “You don’t understand, Helmud.”

Helmud shifts his weight on El Capitan’s back. “You don’t understand Helmud,” he says.

And he’s right. El Capitan used to think he understood his brother because he thought his brother was a moron, a grotesque puppet that sat on his back, forever. But over the past few months, Helmud has changed, come into his own somehow—or maybe Helmud has always been more complicated than El Capitan’s given him credit for. “Fair enough,” he says to his brother. “Fair enough.”

He looks down where there was once the spray of food, the dark stains of his own dried blood, an errant tin cup. “I could have died here.”

“Could have,” Helmud says.

And then El Capitan remembers Pressia’s face, hovering over him—her beautiful face—and the way she touched his head and stared into his eyes. She was afraid he was dying. She wanted to save him. He wanted that to be proof that she loved him. Maybe that’s why he kissed her and told her that he loved her. He’d confused her tenderness with love. He was too afraid to tell her how he felt before. He’d wasted his time being a coward while Bradwell was moving in, winning her over. But in that moment, he shook off fear and chose to really live.