Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

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