Fuse (Pure Trilogy 2) Read Online Free PDF

Some are bulky, others sinewy. They seem unaffected by cold, as if their thin second skins are regulated to insulate them. They have a profound sense of smell. One lifts his head and tenses his nostrils, smelling El Capitan and Helmud, and then he locks eyes with El Capitan, who doesn’t move but doesn’t stiffen either. He doesn’t want to seem fearful.
    He’s noticed over the last few weeks that this new group isn’t as robust as the ones he and Helmud battled in the woods alongside Bradwell and Lyda. They seem not as fully formed, as if the changes to their bodies were rushed. They’re not as agile. They sometimes lurch. They seem less comfortable with the weapons locked into their arms. When they cluster like this, it’s like they need one another, a closeness—the way humans do.
    The other three creatures also look at Helmud and El Capitan, alerted in some unseen way by the first. They never say a word to him, though he knows they can speak. It’s as if they accept his presence as part of the environment, as they do the sharp scree-scree of an occasional wing-warped bird with a metal beak or the humanlike child-cry of an animal caught in one of El Capitan’s traps. They aren’t looking for him. That’s not why they’re here. They want Partridge, El Capitan is sure ofit, and he’s afraid they might be attuned to Pressia too—she shares a bloodline with her brother and she could be of use to the Dome, particularly to draw Partridge in.
    El Capitan would like to talk to them. He knows their loyalty to the Dome is programmed, but there was one who went rogue when they fought near the bunker—Partridge’s brother, Sedge. They’re human, on the most buried level. He feels that one small connection would help. He’s been waiting for the right moment.
    He walks out from the trees and kneels down in the snow, the cold and wet seeping through his pants. He opens his arms, a gesture of supplication. He lowers his head, a bow of sorts.
    He hears the scuttling of footsteps, the snapping of branches. He looks up and they’re gone.
    He sits back on his heels. “Shit.”
    “Shit,” Helmud says.
    “Don’t talk that way,” he says to his brother. “It’s a bad habit.”
    He stands up, but then hears a sound behind him. He slowly pulls his rifle around to his chest. He turns.
    A solitary Special Forces creature stands in the middle of the path not more than twenty feet away. El Capitan has never seen him before. He isn’t sending out any low pulses, which reverberate off other Special Forces in the area. Interesting. Maybe he doesn’t want anyone else to know where he is.
    He’s tall and the thinnest Special Forces soldier El Capitan has seen. In fact, his face still holds on to its humanness—and not just in the eyes, which always seem human in Special Forces, but also in the delicacy of his jaw and small nose and nostrils. His shoulders and thighs are strong but not hulking. He has two weapons embedded in his forearms, still shiny with polish—never used.
    This one is very new.
    He eyes El Capitan warily.
    El Capitan raises his hands slowly. “Listen, let’s take this easy and calm.”
    “Calm,” Helmud says, whittling nervously behind El Capitan’s back.
    “What do you want?” El Capitan says.
    The creature cocks his head, sniffs the air.
    “You want something to eat? If I’d known you were coming, I’d have packed more.”
    The creature shakes his head. He leans down, clearing snow from the path, exposing the bare, ashen dirt. He stands, then lifts his foot. One thick dagger pops from the boot’s toe. El Capitan flinches, wondering if he’s going to get gutted, but then the creature sticks the dagger into the dirt, raises his chin, looking out through the trees, and starts to claw out a word. El Capitan is fairly sure that the creature’s eyes and ears are bugged—as Pressia’s once were. He’s played this game before. The creature wants to tell him something without recording