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  EL CAPITAN

  ARMOR

  El Capitan doesn’t have a knife. “Don’t need one,” he explains to Helmud. “We’re all dosed up.” He first noticed the change of skin color on Helmud’s arms—always dangling around his neck. At first he thought it was jaundice, but then, as soon as the caretaker told him it was a chemical that repelled those vines—their thorns as sharp as canines—he asked to have his dosage upped. “Two hearts here, two sets of lungs, two brains—more or less,” he said. “We need double the meds. Got to keep that in mind.”

  And now his skin looks like he’s been at the beach for an entire summer. Not red and blistered, but golden brown. It’s almost got a metallic shine to it. He remembers getting tan on his arms, face, and the back of his neck as a kid—a farmer’s tan, or so it was called. But his tan was always mixed with dirt too. He and Helmud were the kinds of kids who spent a lot of time on dirt bikes, climbing trees, rooting through mud. Maybe he was more like this than Helmud. In fact, as a kid, Helmud had seemed somewhat refined. El Capitan had been the bully, the brute—he’d had no choice. He was the man of the house so young.

  His hands wrapped in towels stolen from a cabinet in his room, he uses the vines to climb to the hatch, which, as the airship has rolled to its side, is now on top. But where’s the hatch? It’s not sticking up, which is how he left it when he went out looking for Bradwell. The vines must have shut it when they wound their way around the airship.

  The vines seem to sense the chemicals that are emanating from his and Helmud’s skin. They don’t recoil but they certainly aren’t aggressive and do seem to shift away. El Capitan hears the skritch of their thorns against the airship’s exterior. It kills him that they’re scratching it up.

  The vines spook him—not just because they almost killed him once, but because they’re not natural. “There’s something not right about this place,” he says to Helmud. He means the herd of creatures grazing on the hillside—are they giant boars? And the children—all of them are under the age of nine, or so it seems, which means they were born after the Detonations. Plus, too many of them look alike. It doesn’t make sense to him, but he knows it’s messed up. “Not right at all. But who am I to talk, right?”

  “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.

  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.

  They shake Partridge’s hand with both of theirs—smothering it. They slap his shoulders, hug him so close he can smell their powders and colognes. They cry and pull tissues from their pockets and purses, and blow their noses.

  Some others bring their children, as this is as close as they might ever get to the new leader. The heir. “Shake his hand,” they tell their kids. “Go on.”

  “We’re so sorry.”

  “It’s such a loss.”

  “You’re holding up so well. He’d be proud of you.”

  He wants to tell them they’re right; his father would be proud of him. When a murderer is killed by his own son—the one he always pegged as weak and worthless—isn’t there a glimmer of pride, just before death?

  Partridge still hates his father. Can you hate someone for forcing you to kill him? Forced. That’s how it felt. It doesn’t seem right and yet it’s why he hates his father most right now.

  Partridge watches a young mother, holding a toddler, steady herself by putting one hand on the glass enclosure surrounding his father’s urn. Her thin ribs contract under her black dress as she sobs. One of the cameramen in the crew gets a close-up of her tear-streaked face and her child, who seems to know that this is a somber occasion.

  His father doesn’t deserve this outpouring.

  I killed him, Partridge wants to say. I killed him, and you should thank me for it.

  Then, when he least expects it, there stands Arvin Weed.

  Partridge grabs Weed’s hand and pulls him into a hug. “I want you to do a favor for me,” he whispers. “Those people suspended on ice. You know about them?” That’s all he can get out before the hug is over.

  Weed nods. “Yes.”

  Partridge looks at the line of mourners, the guards—and, not too far off, Foresteed’s talking to Purdy. How can he get his point across with all these people around? “I miss the academy,” he says. “How are Mr. and Mrs. Hollenback?” Mr. Hollenback taught science. Mrs. Hollenback taught domestic arts at the girls’ academy. “And their kids?”

  Weed nods, like he understands that the suspended people and the Hollenbacks are linked. “Fine, I think.”

  “Check on them for me. Especially little Jarv. I miss him.” He remembers finding Jarv in the row of glass-enclosed egg-shaped beds that held children with tubes in their mouths and ice crystallized on their skin.

  Weed says, “I’m sorry for your loss. I imagine it’s almost impossible to get over something like this.” Does he mean the death of his father or the fact that Partridge killed him?

  “It’s good to see you, Arvin,” and then, as if overcome with emotion, he grabs Weed again and hugs him. “Belze,” he whispers. “He’s an old man. Get him out of suspension too.” And then he lets him go.

  Weed nods and starts to leave, but Partridge says, “Wait. Have you heard anything from our old teachers at the academy?”

  “What?”

  “You know—our teachers. Do you keep up with any of them?” He wants Arvin to bring up Glassings.

  Arvin shakes h
is head. “Like I have time for that,” he says. “I know you won’t find them here.” He’s right. The professors at the academy aren’t elite enough for this invite-only crowd. Arvin walks away. Partridge wishes they’d had more time, more privacy.

  A ten-year-old is next in line. He’s wearing a navy blue suit and a striped tie. He doesn’t say a word. He simply salutes Partridge.

  “Take it easy,” Partridge says. “At ease.” The boy is frozen like that. Where are his parents? “You can stop,” Partridge says.

  One of the cameramen senses the moment and edges in for a close-up of the kid.

  Now Partridge has to stand there and accept the salute. But it’s clear the kid is waiting for a salute in return. Partridge won’t do it. He doesn’t want to be seen as a military leader. He doesn’t want to align himself with world war and annihilation. He reaches out and ruffles the kid’s hair. “Go on now,” he says gently. “It’s almost time for the service, okay?”

  The kid raises his hand and touches his head where Partridge touched it as if awed by the personal contact.

  The cameraman zooms in on Partridge. He stares straight ahead, refusing to look directly into the camera. The truth, he thinks to himself. It’s time for the truth.

  Finally, the line dwindles, and Partridge is escorted to the front row of the hall.

  There is Iralene, the shock of her: her upright posture, creamy skin against her black funeral dress (she seems to have an unlimited supply of them), and her perfect features lilting in the soft sadness of her expression. He specifically asked that she not be here, and yet there she is. Iralene was raised to be the perfect wife, one who does as she’s told. She’s been groomed for her role so thoroughly that she seems always prepared, but that facade clouds her motives. Partridge rarely knows what she really wants. Did they ask her to leave and did she politely refuse? This is absolutely possible. Iralene can talk people into or out of nearly anything with such stealth that they walk away thinking that they’d just convinced her of something and not the other way around.