EL CAPITAN
BACTERIUM
Boars!” Bartrand Kelly says as he walks across the fields. “I’ll want to start with the boars!”
Pressia glances at El Capitan who shrugs.
“Boars!” Helmud says.
El Capitan elbows his brother behind his back. “Shut it,” he whispers.
Bradwell walks a few paces behind them with Fignan alongside him. He’s all shoulders and ribs—bigger and broader than anyone El Capitan’s ever seen, aside from Special Forces. The birds in his back must be large, though they’re hidden by their thick, broad wings, which are so big they hunch up around his neck and trail behind, frayed like old, worn hems. Every once in a while Bradwell’s wings arch from his back, revealing the thick angular overgrown bones and dense feathers of the birds. El Capitan feels for him. He knows what it’s like to haul something around on your back forever. Still, Bradwell’s got it easier than El Capitan, right? At least his birds don’t talk back.
Kelly is the one talking now. He’s backtracked from boars and is giving a lecture about Ireland from the Before—its monuments, its fertile earth, its rich history, its poets. El Capitan isn’t interested in a tour of the past. He wants to know where Kelly’s taking them and the status of the airship. When he and Helmud were found in the cockpit, El Capitan put up a fight. It turns out the guards didn’t want to kill him. They just wanted him out of there. They beat him up enough to subdue him and then marched him back to his room. He asked them about the airship—if they’d fixed it, if it could fly—but they refused to answer.
Kelly’s out in front of them walking with great energy and purpose, swinging a leather satchel. The green fields are empty. The wind cuts across them. It makes El Capitan’s eyes tear—especially the one that’s puffed nearly shut.
El Capitan learned to ride a bike in a field like this. His mother rigged a towel under his arms, around his ribs, and ran beside him until he had enough momentum to keep going—wind in his hair, bumping over the grass. When he thinks of it now, he imagines himself as light—not just without the weight of his brother but without the weight of his life.
They’re approaching a distant barn on the rise of a hill. Fignan powers through the fallen grass, his lights flashing across the top of his black-box exterior. “So where are you taking us?” El Capitan says, interrupting Kelly. “To the airship?”
Kelly turns around and looks at El Capitan as if noticing him for the first time. “I heard that’s where they found you. It’s going to take a couple more days to get it ready for the air. You took a little tour of it, did you?”
“It wasn’t a tour really. It’s my ship,” El Capitan clarifies.
“It’s my ship,” Helmud says, which sounds like he’s contradicting El Capitan. El Capitan particularly hates when Helmud does this in front of others.
“Really?” Bartrand Kelly stops and thinks about this. “Because I thought you’d stolen the airship.” He turns and starts marching again uphill into the wind. El Capitan can hear it gusting against Bradwell’s wings.
“It was my airship to steal,” El Capitan says. “Willux blackened the whole earth. He owed me one.”
“You had other options.”
“Did I? Because I’d like to know what those were, exactly.”
“How do you know he stole it?” Pressia says, but she seems to know the answer. El Capitan feels out of the loop. He glances at Bradwell to see if he seems to know something El Capitan doesn’t, but Bradwell’s expression is steely and unreadable.
Kelly doesn’t respond, and moments later, they reach the barn. He stops in front of its door, lifts a heavy latch, and swings the door wide. “I know things. I have my connections,” Kelly finally says.
The barn has a few high windows. Shafts of light pour in, filling the dusty air with sun. They follow him in, Fignan first. One side of the barn has narrow stalls—twenty or more—all filled with massive boars. Their ribs are as wide as cow ribs. Their backs are arched. Their backbones are almost as big as fists running along a ridge divided by mounds of flesh. They have dark hooves and thick yellowed tusks that curl up from the sides of their large rubbery snouts.
“Connections?” El Capitan says. There’s only one person he could be connected to who’d have information about this airship, right? “You’re in touch with Willux, aren’t you?”
“Well,” Kelly says as he brushes his hands off and then crosses his arms on his chest, “I was, but not anymore.”
“Why’s that?” Bradwell asks. His voice seems rough from disuse.
“Because he’s dead.”
“Dead?” Pressia says.
The wind sweeps in and then hushes. It’s like Willux’s ghost—just a breath of him, here then gone. El Capitan’s mother believed in ghosts. For the moment, he can’t accept that Willux is dead. But then El Capitan has always thought of Willux as death itself. The mothers called all men Deaths, but Willux was the hardened sediment of it. El Capitan knows that it’s the truth. Willux is dead. It feels right—deep down. He’s gone.
It’s quiet as the news settles over them. There’s only the noise of what must be the boars’ grunting and the light hum of Fignan’s engine. El Capitan can feel Helmud holding his breath. El Capitan looks at Pressia and Bradwell, who look like they can’t quite believe it.
Pressia says to Kelly, “How do you know? Are you sure?”
Kelly nods emphatically.
“He’s really…dead?” Bradwell says. His face looks conflicted.
“That’s what I said,” Kelly says. “Is it so hard to imagine?”
Bradwell nods. He’s breathing a little hard. “It’s just…I didn’t expect for it to be this quiet. This matter of fact. I was expecting…” He grabs the front of his own shirt. “I wanted…”
“Yes,” Pressia says, as if picking up his thought. “It should be bigger. It should feel like more of a…”
“Relief,” Bradwell says. “Or ending.” But he doesn’t look at Pressia. He turns away from all of them. El Capitan wonders if Bradwell’s disappointed. The man who ordered his parents’ assassinations is dead, and Bradwell didn’t get to play a role. There’s no justice in it.
And then Pressia says, “Partridge.” Did Partridge actually organize a coup? She covers her mouth. She shouldn’t have said his name.
Kelly looks at her sharply. “Yes. Willux’s youngest son. He’s in charge now.”
“Partridge?” Bradwell says, scoffing. He turns back to face them. “You sure about that?”
El Capitan is stunned too. “How’d that happen?” He remembers the last time he talked to Partridge. They were in the subway car, locked underground. El Capitan thought he didn’t have long to live, and he trusted Partridge. He had to have faith in him. Still, he can’t imagine Partridge holding that much power. El Capitan knows firsthand that power can corrupt a soul.
“He did it,” Pressia whispers almost to herself. “He’s in! Partridge will change things.”
“Or,” Kelly says, “he could turn out to be just like his father.”
“No,” Pressia says. “He hated his father.”
“Yeah, but how far will he go?” Bradwell asks, a sharp spike of anger in his voice. “How hard will he push for change? Does he really have what it takes? The only way he’ll get anything done is if he’s willing to risk everything. Can he do that?”
El Capitan doesn’t know the answer. No one does. Bradwell is asking about the depth of Partridge’s conviction. Partridge himself might not know. El Capitan isn’t sure how deep his own runs. Was it a moment of weakness when he told Pressia he loved her? Or was that conviction?
“Sometimes the man makes the power,” Kelly says. “And sometimes the power makes the man.”
But then Pressia shakes her head and looks at Kelly. “You’re in contact with the Dome? How’s that?”
“You know that Willux and I go way back.” He looks at Pressia. “I knew your mother and father well too. That’s no secret.”
“So, were you on good terms with Willux before the Detonations?” Bradwell says quietly, as if to disguise the rage just beneath the surface. “Is that how you survived out here? Willux playing favorites?”
Fignan buzzes around the room on his nubby wheels, gathering information about the new place. He noses close to the stalls of boars—but not too close.
“He gave me a heads-up—just enough time to get into the safety of Newgrange. So maybe it helped that we were old friends, but I wasn’t just friends with him.” Kelly says to Pressia, “Your mother died recently. Her tattoo stopped pulsing. It was strong and then it stopped.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I was with her.” The wind whips around Pressia. She crosses her arms to shield herself from the damp chill. “Willux killed her and Sedge together.”
Kelly draws in a long breath. His cheeks flush red. He looks stricken but then furious. “How did he find her? I thought she was safe!”
“He used Partridge and me to find her. We were pawns.”
Kelly takes a few steps away, trying to gather himself. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, but it’s not clear what he’s sorry for—the fact that Willux used his own child as a pawn or the loss itself.
“You were close friends with my mother back then,” Pressia says. El Capitan knows that she craves details from her mother’s life. She was so little.
“We were all close once,” Kelly says.
“And what about my father?” Pressia asks. “Do you know where he is?” El Capitan can’t bear how vulnerable Pressia looks. She’s desperate to find her father again. He’s barely a dream to her. El Capitan understands. He never knew his father. He lived his whole life in the shadow of a man whose features he could never make out.
Kelly turns back around. “I know there are more of us. Pockets like this. Survivors. And I think Willux was in communication with many. If your father survived, it was because Willux wanted him to survive—for better or for worse.”
“What do you mean, for worse?”
“Your father’s pulse still beats on my chest—that’s all I know.”
Pressia curls the doll head to her chest, protects it with her good hand.
“Willux doesn’t just give people protection,” Bradwell says. “They have to have some value to him. You’ve been working for him all this time, haven’t you?”
“You might have noticed it’s smart to stay on Willux’s good side,” Kelly says angrily, and then he makes a sweeping gesture with both arms. “I was setting up a number of labs in Ireland and the UK just before the Detonations. One of the facilities was funded through Willux’s connections and sat within the three-mile radius he would spare. He told me, in no uncertain terms, where I needed to be to survive. I knew him well enough to believe him. I brought only my immediate family with me. That was all he told me I was allowed.” The boars grunt and paw the dirt. “It makes me sick to think about it now. Could I have alerted anyone who had the power to change the course of it? I don’t know.” He rubs his hands through his hair. El Capitan’s sure that this is the thought that keeps him up nights. El Capitan knows the signs of festering guilt—intimately, from the inside out.
“There was a tour going on—and I urged as many people as I could into the mound. We were spared, as well as the environs, but many died after the fact from disease, fire, and, to be quite honest, despair—one of my two daughters and my wife among them.” He steps into one of the sun shafts, bits of hay spinning around him, all golden. “My daughters died first. My wife died of despair.”
“We know despair,” Pressia says. “It’s something we all have in common.” Her eyes cut to Bradwell, but he still won’t look at her. El Capitan wants Bradwell to glance at her at least; can’t he give her that? It kills El Capitan to see the look in her eyes. Helmud must sense some suffering in El Capitan because El Capitan can feel his brother leaning away from Pressia as if trying to pull El Capitan’s focus away from her—for his own good.
“The boars,” Kelly says, reminding himself of the matter at hand. Fignan moves toward the animals again. They startle at first but then sniff in his direction. “Boars can be vicious and unpredictable, but when genetically mixed with cows, they can become bigger and more docile. And yet they’re tractable too. They can attack on command.”
“A word? A sign?” Bradwell asks.
“Either,” Kelly says.
El Capitan registers the threat. Kelly’s brought them here for a reason. Is he setting them up? “So you get some sympathy for the deaths of your wife and daughters, and then you politely inform us that you can have us skewered at any moment.” El Capitan walks up to the edge of a stall and one of the boars lets out a short, high-pitched squeal. “Tell me if I’ve got this right.”
“The term is gored, not skewered,” Kelly tells him calmly.
Fignan reverses from the boars back to Bradwell’s boots.
“The boars were a successful experiment.” He shakes his head and looks out one of the windows. “There’s another that went horribly wrong.”
Worse than the boars that attack on command? What’s out there? No one has the guts to ask.
El Capitan can see the boar’s wiry hairs, the blackened folds of its snout, the sharp curve of its tusks. He imagines the tip of a tusk piercing his rib cage, tearing up through his chest.
Pressia says, with a hint of suspicion in her voice, “You could do this to a man, couldn’t you? Splice the genes between species. Why not humans?” She looks at Bartrand Kelly, narrows her eyes. “Did you give your research to Willux?”
Special Forces. El Capitan imagines them as he first saw them, shifting through the trees—some had the muscularity of elk or deer and others seemed to hold the meaty bulk of bears. They lifted their faces to the wind, their nostrils tensing as they were alerted to different scents. Animallike. He thinks of his friend Hastings—is he actually a Beast, one genetically created under Willux’s orders with Kelly’s research?
Kelly says, “You do what you have to do.”
Bradwell’s wings arch and broaden. “Some people do what’s right.”
“Research is research. How Willux chose to use it is his own sin. Not mine.”
El Capitan recognizes the rationalization. He’s tried it out himself. Sin is sin—individual and collective. His life is full of it.
Bradwell walks up to Kelly. “You knew how he’d use it.”
Kelly raises his hand in the air and snaps his fingers. The boars tense. Their heads turn, heavy tusks and all, almost in perfect unison. “How about you take a few steps back?”
Bradwell looks at the boars, their eyes all trained on Kelly’s hand. Bradwell walks toward the barn door, looking out at the sky.
El Capitan steels himself. “Why don’t you just tell us what you want?”
“I probably want what you want.”
“What’s that?”
“To be left alone.”
“But Willux saved you,” Bradwell says, “and you’ve been playing nice with him.”
“He’s dead,” Pressia says. “And Partridge is in charge now. Everything’s about to change.”
“You have more faith in human nature than I do,” Kelly says.
“Well, we don’t want to be left alone,” Bradwell says. “We want the truth to come out. We want justice.”
Pressia shakes her head ever so slightly. It seems for a moment that’s the only contradicting she’ll do, but then it’s as if she can’t stop herself. She says, “No. We want the vial that belonged to my mother and the formula that we found. And we want to bring them back—to save lives.”
Bradwell looks at Pressia. For a second, El Capitan thinks Bradwell’s going to break through all of the anger and resentment, walk over to her, and kiss her. But he says nothing. He has always simply wanted the truth to be known—to fulfill his parents’ mission. Willux arranged for the death of Bradwell’s parents before the Detonations and forced Arthur Walrond to end his own life—Walrond, a family friend who loved Bradwell. All three of them, gone. Pressia’s mother, dead.
El Capitan says, “I wouldn’t mind a little old-fashioned revenge. I don’t think I’m alone.”
This gets Kelly’s attention. “I gave Willux what he wanted, but I’ve been working on another agent as well, not unlike the thorned vines—a living but nearly undetectable bacterium that can eat the radiation-resistant material of the Dome.”
“How does it work?” El Capitan asks.
“It acts incredibly quickly.” He fits his hands in his pockets.
“Are you saying that you have something that can bring down the Dome?” El Capitan says. His heart starts hammering in his chest.
“Bring down the Dome?” Helmud repeats for clarity.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Kelly says.
“That’s not what we want at all,” Pressia says. “We need the Dome. If we get the vial back and the formula, we can get them to Partridge. He’ll find the right person on the inside who’ll help us. We can reverse fusings—with no side effects. We can make everyone equal again.”
“Including you. Finally you’ll be able to free yourself of the doll head,” Bradwell says to Pressia, “so you can be a Pure. What’s more selfish? Your desire to make yourself whole or revenge?”
“That’s not fair,” Pressia says. “I want Wilda and the other children to survive. I want to save people.”
“But admit it,” Bradwell says. “You’ll save yourself in the process.”
El Capitan grabs his head with two hands. He feels dizzy. He says, “We can bring down the Dome, Pressia. This is why I survived. This is my mission! Jesus! Once and for all, we can end this.”
“That’s no ending. That’s just more destruction!” Pressia’s eyes are angry and yet shining with tears. She looks at the barn’s wide floorboards. “Now that Partridge is in charge, we can make a difference. We can cure people of their fusings.” She turns to El Capitan and Helmud. “I think there could come a time when you two could be your own people again.”
El Capitan hasn’t ever thought this was possible. Could he and Helmud be made Pure? Could they be taken apart and made whole? No, he thinks. No—it’s not possible. The idea terrifies him. It’s all he’s ever really wanted, and yet he refuses to believe it.
Pressia says to Bradwell, “You could have those wings you hate so much taken from you.” Bradwell opens his mouth to fire back at her, but she raises her hand. “Look, you don’t have to want it for yourself. But think of other people out there. Don’t answer for them. Let them have a chance to answer for themselves.”
“Pressia,” Bradwell whispers, but he doesn’t say any more than that. It’s a soft whisper, more like he’s pleading with her—for what?
“She has a point,” Kelly says. “The people in the Dome have survivors’ guilt. They hate all who survived on the outside because they hate themselves. But if they have a new role and paternalistically save you all, well, they’ll be able to redeem themselves and feel like heroes.”
“And maybe the survivors can forgive them because the Pures are finally doing the right thing. See?” Pressia says to Bradwell. “It could work.”
“Hell no!” Bradwell says.
“Why not? We could start to rebuild,” Pressia says.
“I’m not letting the Pures get out of this,” Bradwell says, his voice rough with anger, “and I sure as hell am not letting them come out as heroes. Not after what they’ve done. Never.”
El Capitan understands. His gut agrees with Bradwell, but he knows what Pressia’s thinking: What does it matter who comes out a hero if there’s a shot at starting over? It’s quiet again. Kelly’s waiting for the next question, and El Capitan knows what it has to be. He says, “What are you proposing exactly?”
“I’ll give you the vial and the formula and get you airborne again, but you have to take the bacterium with you. If you choose not to use it, there’s nothing I can do.” He looks at Pressia for a moment and then back to El Capitan and Bradwell. “But if you want what’s yours, you’ll have to take what’s mine.”
Airborne again. This is what El Capitan really wants right now—to be up in the air.
Pressia turns to Kelly. “If we agree to this, how soon can you get us out?”
He pauses, taking in the volatility of the conversation and then says, “Well, as El Capitan has seen, the airship is nearly repaired. We’ll need another few days, and you’ll need to time the trip so that you’re landing during daylight.”
He opens his satchel, reaches in, and pulls out a small metal case. He pops a small clasp and opens the lid. The box is velvet lined and molded to protect a flat square slide—two pieces of glass held together by a thin welded metal border. He holds the square up to the light, illuminating small red flecks. The bacterium.
“So, are you going to take it with you in exchange for your vial and formula and an airship home?” Kelly says. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime—for all of us.”
El Capitan reaches forward before he even realizes it.
“Wait,” Pressia whispers, but he’s already holding it in his cupped palm.
“The opportunity of a lifetime,” El Capitan says to Pressia.
“For all of us,” Helmud says.