Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) Read Online Free Page A

liquid is unwieldy, imperfect, and dangerous. What would happen, for example, if it touched a living creature’s skin? He wants to test it. Once the idea is there in his head, there’s no talking himself out of it.
    First, he needs something living to test the serum on.
    A beetle.
    He walks to the jars again and picks one up quickly. Again, a few beetles dash off, but he cups his hand over one of them. It has a glossy green back and a bright red head spiked with thornlike horns. Its legs fan out, knotted, bristled with spikes. He holds it in place until he feels the beetle tickling up his fingers.
    “Sorry,” he whispers to the beetle. “I really am.”
    He carries it to the plywood, opens his mother’s music box, gently nudges it into the box, and closes the lid. He hears the beetle scratching within it. He wishes Arvin Weed, the boy genius of the academy, were here. God, Partridge regrets not paying attention in labs.
    He picks up one of the syringes, uncaps it, and fills it with fluid from one of the vials. The needle shines. He knows that this means he’ll waste a drop. Just one , he tells himself. Only that .
    He upends the music box. The beetle starts skittering across the plywood, but he pinches it and holds it delicately in place.
    While its legs scurry, getting nowhere, a sharp tail curls up from under its wings, revealing a swaying stinger. Its small, rounded black eyes seem wet. Partridge looks at the needle, starts to depress the stopper when he feels the sting. His finger and thumb poised on either side of the beetle’s shelled back are quickly covered with tiny prickles of searing heat. The burning moves up into his hand, and the shock of it causes him to shout, but he keeps his hold on the beetle.
    As fast as he can, he moves the needle toward the beetle, but his hand feels so rigid with pain he has to let the beetle go. It clicks across the plywood, but not before a drop of liquid from the needle falls, landing—thick and wet—on one of its hind legs. The leg goes limp from the weighty trap of the liquid. The beetle drags itself forward.
    The shout has alerted Mother Hestra. Her knuckles rap the cellar door. “What was that noise?”
    “Nothing!” Partridge wraps the syringes, his burning hand blotched now, and he crawls to the jar, lifts it, and slides the bundled syringes in the hole. The beetle pulls itself under the plywood to darkness.
    The cellar door opens wide with a clang. Mother Hestra is backlit, dimly. “What’s the noise down here?” she asks.
    “It’s just a chant from the academy. It can get too quiet down here.” He rubs his burning hand but then stops. He doesn’t want any more questions.
    Mother Hestra has a thick body. Her son, Syden, a five-year-old, is permanently fused to her leg. She’s wearing furs stitched together and fitted to the shape of her body with a hole for the boy’s blotched head,just above her hip. Most of the mothers are Groupies, fused to children, and Partridge has never gotten used to it. During the Detonations, the mothers were holding their children or protecting them from the bright flashes, bent to them, tending to them. Partridge can’t quite imagine being stunted in that form, never growing up, always locked into place within the confines of your mother’s body. Syden’s face has begun to age. Will he grow old like this?
    Mother Hestra glares at Partridge. One of her cheeks is seared with words—a backward script burned into her skin during the Detonations—the impression of a blackened tattoo. Partridge doesn’t let himself stare at it long enough to try to read it. He doesn’t want to be rude. “Well, stop with all that,” she says.
    “I was just going to sleep anyway.”
    “Good. We leave in the morning. I’ll call on you early.”
    “Lyda and Illia are coming too?” He’d rather not have Illia coming along. She’s crazy. He can’t fault her. She was locked away in the farmhouse, abused by her husband, forced to hide her