Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) Read Online Free

his notes, hoping to avoid the herd—a group of boys who pretty much hate him—but he does. He even misses his classes. Hethinks of Glassings, his history teacher, in that moment he pulled him aside in the hallway outside the dance. Partridge was just about to steal the knife, so, in retrospect, it was the moment when he could have turned back, continued on with his familiar life.
    That’s not how it went. Somehow he ended up here, powerless.
    The irony is he has the vials, his mother’s life’s work—the vials are powerful. His father murdered for them—Pressia’s adoptive grandfather, as well as his father’s own oldest son and the woman his father supposedly loved, Partridge’s mother.
    The vials remind him of what his mother wanted him to become—a revolutionary, a leader.
    Partridge walks to the mothers’ pickled jars and picks one up, third from the corner. Under it there’s a narrow, deep hole, and a few beetles skitter away. He fits his hands down in and lifts a tightly wrapped bundle, lightly caked in moist dirt. He carries the bundle to his cot and unwraps his mother’s vials, four of them attached to syringes with hard plastic covers over the needles. After the farmhouse burned, Bradwell and El Capitan took them from his mother’s bunker, along with anything else that might be of use—computers, radios, medicine, supplies, guns, ammunition. Afterward, it seemed smart to split the group in two—El Capitan, Helmud, Bradwell, and Pressia went to headquarters; Lyda, Partridge, and Illia went with the mothers because they have the greatest ability to keep Partridge hidden and heavily guarded. If one group was found by Special Forces, at least the others could carry on. Bradwell and El Capitan took the bulk of his mother’s stuff, but Partridge hid the vials under his jacket.
    He checks each vial. They’re cool to the touch. Partridge’s mother took Partridge to Japan as a baby at Partridge’s father’s urging, because the Japanese were ahead of everyone else in creating biomedical nano-technology to repair trauma from detonations, in particular self-generating cells that would move into the body to repair it.
    From a very young age, Partridge’s father used brain enhancements—so much so that he lit up his brain with firing synapses—and now he has the telltale signs of Rapid Cell Degeneration: the palsy and skin deterioration, and eventual organ failure and death. It’s not justhim. Partridge remembers how, in the Dome, anyone who is sick, old, or weary is quickly whisked away to a cordoned-off wing of the medical center. In the last few weeks, he’s realized one very dark truth: Rapid Cell Degeneration will also eventually affect Special Forces and all the academy boys who’ve been enhanced, including, one day, Partridge himself.
    Before his mother died, she told him that if what’s in these vials is paired with another substance as dictated by a formula—a formula that’s gone missing—then this concoction could reverse Rapid Cell Degeneration. At the time, he’d been too overwhelmed with emotions—he hadn’t seen his mother since he was a little boy—to fully grasp what she was telling him. But now, he wishes he’d been more clear-minded, more rational. He wishes he’d asked more questions.
    His mother showed him a list of people within the Dome who were on her side, including Arvin Weed’s parents, Algrin Firth’s father, even Durand Glassings. They’re part of a network within the Dome. When Lyda was sent out of the Dome as bait to lure Partridge, one of the people in the network whispered a message to her: Tell the swan we’re waiting . When Partridge told his mother this, she whispered, “The Cygnus,” which he still doesn’t understand.
    She told him that the liquid in these vials contains powerful cell-generating material. But also that the serum is unwieldy, imperfect, dangerous.
    Holding up one of the vials to the dim light, he wants to know how, exactly, this