by Trisha Leigh
Chapter 30.
Energy leaves my body at an alarming rate. My limbs are like limp pasta, unable to hold my weight, and I crash into the sea of my fire. It doesn’t consume me, because in some strange way it is me, but the rest of the kids scream, throwing themselves away from the boiling heat.
Pax’s element is no help; it would only feed the flames. As they rush away on four sides, devouring trees and racing toward the still-standing buildings, I watch through some kind of trance. Sweat drips off me, flowing like rivers across my skin.
It’s beautiful, my fire. It’s hot, and I love it.
Leah shouts something to Pax and they both run toward the Hall where we’ve been staying. Brittany and Mark gape at me, dragging a burned Sophie farther away. Soon it won’t be far enough. There won’t be anywhere the flames won’t go.
Then water and soil rain down around me in a torrent of muddy clumps, stamping out the fire in a matter of moments. Relief mingles with sorrow, the feelings the last thing I remember before the world disappears.
***
“Althea?”
Some shuffling noises, a cold compress on my cheek. I try to open my eyes but it’s too hard. I’m too tired.
“Keep talking. Her eyes are fluttering,” someone urges.
The voices are familiar and make me feel better even though they’re thick with worry.
Then it comes back to me. The neodymium. The fire. My eyelids fly open, finding a circle of worried faces and a throbbing in my head so intense that tears gather in my eyes. Panic sets in when I try to move, to sit up, but nothing happens. My body doesn’t respond.
Lucas hovers over me, his hands pressed against my cheeks. The cold makes the pain worse, but I can’t jerk away.
“Don’t… touch,” I gasp. “Hurts.”
He yanks his hands from my skin, desperation in his normally calm gaze. Pax sits on my other side, his form barely visible in my peripheral vision. He shines a flashlight in my eyes until I whimper, then clicks it off and picks up my hand. The rough feeling of his palm makes me want to scream—it’s as though my nerve endings were sawed off with a butter knife—but he doesn’t drop it and after a moment it’s bearable.
“Can you feel my hand?” he asks gently.
“Yes.” My own voice stings my throat.
“Good. Can you squeeze?”
I focus all my energy on moving the fingers lying in Pax’s hand, with no discernible results. At least not as far as I can tell. But the fact that both Pax and Lucas release relieved gushes of air says I missed something.
Pax sets my hand back on the blanket while Lucas keeps reaching out to touch me before remembering my pain and pulling back.
“Am I going to die?” I whisper, using every last molecule of resolve to tip my head so I can see Pax. It hurts so bad I close my eyes again.
“No way, Summer. You think we’re letting you out of this mess now?” He gives me a smile, and it’s enough to convince me he’s telling the truth, even though he’s worried.
“Why can’t I move?”
“You moved your fingers when I asked, and your head just now. As the neodymium wears off, it’ll get better.” He smiles again, more sure this time.
“Do you need anything? Water? Blankets?” Lucas almost chuckles at the last question, as though the girl who just set the university on fire would need some extra heat, but it chokes off. His eyes are a little calmer now, but behind his forced steadiness hangs the fright I gave him.
I wish I could reach out and reassure him somehow, but I can’t. By the time I can move again he’ll likely have moved on to giving me a piece of his mind for taking that sample without consulting him and Deshi.
That thought turns my mind to what happened, and for an instant having something else to focus on relieves the pounding threatening to tear apart my skull. “Is Brittany here?”
“She, uh…” Lucas looks to Pax for help.
“She’s not here right now,” Pax finishes lamely.
My stomach quivers as more memories creep back in. The fire everywhere, Sophie injured. Were they all hurt? Did I kill them?
A sob rises in my throat and I struggle to swallow it. “Where are they? Are they… did I hurt them?”
“They’re going to be fine, all of them. Griffin and Greer came—”
“They were here?”
“Yes,” Lucas finishes. “They healed a few burns and looked in on you.”
I’m sorry to have missed them, but relieved that they came. I could have three more deaths on my head instead of a few injuries. Even so, thick guilt swims through me, infecting my throbbing brain. “Where’s Leah?”
“I’m right here, Althea.” Leah pushes past Lucas, who moves out of the way to make room for her. Her lower lip trembles and tears fill her huge gray eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop. I’m going to be fine. Tell me we learned something.”
She swallows hard, then tries to smile. “We think we didn’t dilute it enough, because it obviously worked.” Leah lets out a weak chuckle. “That’s one of the main variables we didn’t understand—how they mix it. What strength they take.”
“When I’m better we’ll try again. More liquid, less neodymium.”
Her eyes flick to Pax. “We’ve already got it right. We tried twice more, once on Lucas—it was too weak and barely affected him—and then on Deshi. It seemed to be the right balance with him, so we duplicated it with Pax. We have the synthetic.”
We know what’s in it. We have the building blocks, in all the right quantities. All that’s left is to learn how to rebuild it to our advantage.
“That’s good.” I know I should be reacting more to the news, be excited or worried over the guys being subjected, too, but fatigue takes over again and my eyes slip closed.
***
The next time I wake up, sun streams through the holes where the windows used to be and heat thickens the air in the room. No one else is around. I’m lying on top of the covers and wet with sweat. My skin and hair feel greasy and heavy, and my mouth feels like it’s stuffed full of fish-flavored cotton.
Relief courses through me when my body responds to the command to sit up. A bit of a headache remains, but I feel stronger, not ready to dissolve into pieces at the drop of a hat. The cool sheets don’t hurt as they press against the backs of my thighs, so my nerves seem to be back to normal as well. Though no sounds filter in from the hallway, there’s nothing to suggest I should be worried. Everyone’s things are scattered about like one would expect—I notice both sides of Deshi’s bed are mussed and guess that Lucas switched to make me more comfortable.
I get to my feet, a bit wobbly but soon steadier, and walk barefoot down the hall to the cleansing room. Lucas isn’t here to fill the tub, but he’s taken to leaving full buckets every morning and night so people don’t have to find him when they need some.
I dump a couple into the basin and heat the water, surprised when my power struggles to surface. It does, finally, but the water only heats to lukewarm before I run out of energy. It’s worrisome, but surely my power will restore like the rest of me, given enough time.
With clean hair and brushed teeth, I feel almost normal. Fresh shorts, bra, and tank top improve the situation even more, and my stomach growls its insistence for food so I pad down to the kitchen area.
Sophie’s on the couch. I hardly recognize her at first because her hair is shaved shorter than any boy’s I’ve ever seen and red splotches dot her skin like pieces of pepperoni. She grins happily at me anyway, her soft brown eyes and huge smile trying to make me feel better about almost killing her.
I know it’s not my fault, and that we couldn’t have known what would happen if they gave me too much, but seeing the evidence of my loss of control twists regret in my belly. Maybe we could have been more careful or, if Pax and I hadn’t been in such a hurry, Lucas or Deshi would have suggested we take more precautions.
I guess we could play the what-if game forever and it wouldn’t grow
Sophie’s hair back.
“Hey,” I say, smiling back even though it hurts.
“It’s good to see you up.”
“Where is everyone?” I ask before another glaring question hits me. “How long have I been out of commission?”
Her brow knits together like she doesn’t want to say, or maybe she thinks someone else should be the one to tell me. I sink down next to her on the couch, rubbing my temples, and she reaches out a hand and rubs the knot between my shoulders. “A week.”
“A week?” I shoot to my feet, shock numbing my limbs. That means we’ve only got a week more before the Summer Celebration.
“Don’t worry! We’ve been working hard, and the synthetic neodymium is ready. Phil and the others found the Celebration site a few days ago—they’re out scouting now.” Words tumble out of her mouth almost too fast for my stunned brain to keep up, but it’s all good news.
“What else?”
“It’s close to the first place Griffin and Greer brought us—maybe that’s why they chose it even though it wasn’t very livable. And everyone else has pretty much been digging through the remnants of books in the library, trying to figure out how to turn the element against the Others.” She smiles. “See? We’ve been making good progress even though some of us have been a little under the weather.”
Under the weather. Sophie could have died, but here she is generously understating my accidental attack. “How are Brittany and Mark?”
She waves a hand. “They’re fine from the burns, if that’s what you mean, but they’re killing themselves in the lab.”
Something else she said registers. “What’s a library?”
“It’s a whole building full of books, Althea, you won’t believe it. Most of them are destroyed—we haven’t figured out how they trashed the inside of the building when the outside is mostly intact—but enough of them are salvageable that we might be able to learn something.” Her eyes sparkle. “You want to see it?”
“Sure. Let me get something to eat first, okay?”
I eat a can of tuna and some crackers, down one bottle of water and snag another, and rejoin Sophie out front. Heat shimmers off the pavement, and the sun hits my skin with sleeves made of light and warmth, making me smile in spite of our looming deadline. On the grassy area stretching between buildings, some of our group has gathered in a circle. As I watch, they break apart into pairs and start fighting.
Chapter 31.
Panic trips my feet forward, and I almost drop my water. “What are they doing? Come on, help me stop them!” I shout over my shoulder at Sophie.
Her giggles stop me in my tracks and I turn, peering at her suspiciously. Has everyone Broken while I’ve been recovering?
“They’re not actually fighting. They’re practicing fighting,” she explains.
“Practicing? How? Who’s teaching them?” I ask, spinning back around. It takes a second, but then two shining blond heads threading between the pairs lift my heart into my throat and I remember what Pax said about fight training. “Greer!”
Her head whips toward the sound of her name, and when she sees me hurrying toward her she breaks into a grin. I launch myself at her, wrapping my arms around her slim waist and nearly toppling us both to the ground.
She hugs me back, then shoves me away playfully. “It’s good to see you, too, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Who?”
Greer laughs, as she always does when I don’t get one of her references. “How are you feeling?”
“Better. Almost back to normal, I think.” I glance around at the pairs of kids resuming their play fights now that they’ve decided there’s nothing interesting to overhear between me and Greer. Even so, I lower my voice. “My heat ability is weak.”
“You’re going to be fine, Althea.”
I nod, watching Griffin stop two boys from fighting to give them some indecipherable instruction. “So Pax convinced you to help, huh?”
“There’s no way to know if you’ll be able to wrangle the chemistry in time to use the element to your advantage.” Her jaw sets into a hard line and her lilac eyes turn darker. “It’s a good idea, their being able to defend themselves, if it comes to that.”
I don’t disagree, even though I’d like to. I don’t want to think about our friends in hand-to-hand battle with the stronger, faster, invincible Others. We’ve experienced their acid weapons, and without Deshi’s help I wouldn’t have survived the encounter. It’s safe to assume there are more unknown factors we’d encounter in a fight. “Okay.”
She smiles at me, shaking off whatever thought turned her face dark a moment before. “I’ll teach you some, if you want.”
“Maybe later. Sophie’s taking me to the library.”
“Okay. We can’t stay more than a few hours, but we’ll be back in a couple of days.” She hugs me again, then swats my arm as I walk away.
“Bye.” It’s hard to leave her so soon, but her attention should be on her students, and I want to see this building filled with books.
Sophie and I walk side by side across the blooming sidewalks. Flowers and weeds reach through cracks in the cement, determined to touch the sun, to survive. Bugs exist here, not like inside the Sanctioned Cities where they’re kept out or exterminated, and they cross the paths, buzzing around my sweating forehead until the urge to swat them is too much.
A building, more decrepit than some at the university but less than others, looms at the end of the walk and up a busted set of stairs. The left side of the building slopes down, disappearing into a pile of blackened brick, but the right side is intact.
Inside, the scent of mildew and paper and glue overwhelm the smell of the outdoors. Sophie shows me around, telling me what they’ve figured out about how different kinds of books were kept in different rooms, then leads me down into a musty, dark underground room. The sound of our footsteps bounces in the concrete stairwell, making the deserted space seem crowded.
“What’s down here?” I ask.
“The reference books—science, history, all of the factual papers and studies humans did. They stuffed them into giant volumes kind of like the ones at Cell but not so cut and dry,” she whispers back, as though she’s uncomfortable with the noise we’re creating, too.
It’s not as though the Others are going to overhear us, but something about this place makes me want to keep quiet. It’s a little creepy down here, to tell the truth, and when the rest of the kids come into a view I breathe a sigh of relief.
They’ve found a room toward the front of the library with small windows just above the ground that let light in. Mark and Brittany aren’t here—I assume after what Sophie told me they’re in the labs—but Leah’s hunched over a scratched wooden table.
Her face lights up at the sight of me and she leaps from her chair, flinging her arms around my neck, pushing more light into the room with her grin. “You’re awake! And walking around.”
Relief floods her gaze and I give her hand a squeeze. “I’m fine. What’s everyone reading?”
Jordan, Laura, and Katie are crowded in a tiny circle on the floor, their legs crossed, a tower of books piled in between them. Justin’s by himself, propped against the wall under the window. He must be pretty engrossed in his tome because he doesn’t even look up to say hello. I can’t recall where’s he’s from. He’s quiet but he’s not disengaged. Maybe just waiting for the right idea to cross his mind before he shares it.
Alice’s short blond hair looks greasy, her fingers rubbed black on the ends from whatever half-charred material she’s been handling at the table with Leah.
Outside I saw Ben, Ryan, Christian, and Kerstin learning to fight, so that’s everyone.
“Nothing,” Alice snaps. “It’s mostly principles they’ve taught us in Cell, except we’re still missing the bits of information about this element that we need. Like how they use it.”
Jordan pipes up, her long brown hair hanging down her back in a ponytail. “We’re not giving up, though. There has to
be something.”
“Yeah,” Laura adds, shooting a look at Alice. “It’s here. I can feel it. If we only knew more about how their bodies functioned.”
I sit down at the table with Alice, suddenly exhausted from the trek across the university grounds. Katie stretches her long legs out to either side, pointing and flexing her toes, probably trying to work out cramps from being cooped up in here.
She catches me watching and gives me a rueful smile. “Greer and Griffin have been kicking our asses.”
I snort. Apparently they’ve been teaching everyone new words, too.
“Are you all taking turns outside?” Now that I’ve seen the Sidhe in action, the training seems like a good idea and I want to make sure everyone learns.
“Yes. Except Brittany and Mark,” Leah says, settling into the third chair at our table. “They’re obsessed.”
“We just need to find something concrete for them be obsessed over,” Justin says quietly from the floor, not raising his eyes from the pages.
He sounds irritated with my interruption and everyone falls silent, going back to their reading. I wander the room and rifle through a few of the toppled shelves outside the door, finally settling on a paper volume titled Journal of Applied Physics. Applied physics sounds right, and it’s not like we know what we’re looking for, anyway. It’s a needle in a haystack.
I flip through articles on plasma generation and high-resolution X-rays, skimming each one until I determine there’s nothing of use. There’s an essay about something called the magnetocaloric effect—basically, how refrigeration works—that snags my interest, but a large part of it only makes vague sense, even with years of advanced science instruction from the Others.
We’re still sitting in silence an hour or so later, after the sun has crested and begun to fall. The room darkens as the sun slips farther out of view, and I know we’re going to have to head back soon. As disappointed as I am about our lack of findings, and as jittery as having less than a week to come up with something makes me, I’m dying to see Lucas. And Pax and Wolf and Deshi.
