Burn (Pure #3)(9)

He wonders now if he should have told her earlier. Maybe he waited too long. But then Helmud starts humming behind his back—an old love song: I’ll stand right here and wait forever ’til I’ve turned to stone—and he knows that it wouldn’t have mattered. She wasn’t going to fall in love with him anyway. He feels his chest well up. He refuses to feel sorry for himself. “Shut up, Helmud!” he says. “Nobody wants to hear that shit!”

“Shut up, shit!” Helmud shouts back.

“Are you calling me a shit?”

“Nobody!”

“Screw you, Helmud. You hear me? If it weren’t for you, Pressia might have been able to fall for me. Don’t you know that? Do you think anyone’s going to ever fall in love with either of us? We’re sick. You understand me? We’re grotesque. And we always will be.”

Helmud pushes his head into El Capitan’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for you…”

“If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.”

“You’d be dead.”

“I know. I know,” he says. “You think I don’t know that we need each other now? I’d have killed you a long time ago if it didn’t mean killing myself.”

“Killing myself!” Helmud says, like he’s lobbing a threat.

“Don’t talk like that. Don’t be so dramatic. Shut up.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” Helmud says. “Shut up.”

El Capitan backs sharply against metal. Helmud lets out a huff of air.

“Shut up,” Helmud wheezes once more.

El Capitan slides down and sits there, feeling a pang of guilt for shoving his brother so hard. He hates the guilt. They’re still relatively new, these pangs. He didn’t really have them before he knew Pressia—or he did but didn’t know what they were—and he wishes they’d go away.

He looks at all of the windows curtained with greenery. What’s the point of going home if he can’t be with Pressia—not here, not ever? “You know what the real wreck is, Helmud? Love. Love is what really wrecks us.” He lets his chin drop to his chest. “What do you think, Helmud? Don’t just repeat me. What do you really think?”

Helmud is silent for a moment, and then finally he says, “Think. Really think.”

El Capitan shuts his eyes. What would Helmud have to say about love and its wreckage? “I don’t know what you’d say, Helmud.” But then it comes to him—as if they are truly wired together in some elemental way. “Maybe you’d say that we’re already wrecked, so what’s a little more wreckage?”

“What’s a little more wreckage?” Helmud says. “We’re already wrecked.”

And then there’s noise—rustling vines, boot scrapes overhead—and voices. Have others come to claim the airship for themselves? Did they follow El Capitan and Helmud here? Are they armed? There’s nowhere to go. “We’re trapped,” El Capitan says to Helmud.

How many are there? Two, maybe three…maybe more.

“Trapped,” Helmud whispers.





PARTRIDGE





IN MEMORIAM




In the receiving line, Partridge’s desire to confess to his father’s murder is worse. The grief comes at him like an assembly line. Guards stand on either side of him; Beckley, whom he’s come to trust, is to his right. Beckley has offered to move the people along, but Partridge wants to be an approachable leader—real, human. And maybe it’s part of his punishment. His own sadness is so fraught with anger that it barely counts as grief, so he has to accept theirs. He’s a repository for it, a storehouse.

Partridge looks down the long line for Arvin Weed. This memorial service is reserved for dignitaries, and Weed has certainly become one. They were friends at the academy—not all that close, but still. Arvin was the brain of their class. In fact, he’s proven to be smarter than anyone ever would have guessed. He was Partridge’s father’s personal physician, the one who was going to transplant his father’s brain into Partridge’s body—his father’s plan for immortality, requiring Partridge’s death. Weed performed his father’s autopsy and declared his death to be by natural causes, but Partridge hasn’t seen him since. He wonders if Weed knows the truth, if he covered up the murder for Partridge, if he can be trusted. Partridge could use an ally.

Also, Weed might be the only one he can ask about his father’s “little relics,” the bodies his father suspended—frozen, but still alive—and kept in the building Partridge lived in before his father’s death. Weed might know who’s trapped down there and how to free them. Pressia’s grandfather is down there and Jarv Hollenback, who’s just a toddler. Partridge’s father pawned Partridge off on Mr. and Mrs. Hollenback—both on the academy faculty—for the holidays, and Partridge has grown fond of them.

Mr. Hartley, an old neighbor, is next in line. Behind Hartley is his wife and then Captain Westing and the Elmsfords—their twin sons are Partridge’s age; he knew them in the academy, and they’re now in Special Forces. They’re teary-eyed—because they’re mourning his father or because Partridge reminds them that they have, in a way, lost their sons? He’s not sure.