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.
“Hey, maybe this is important.” Justin interrupts a quiet so intense it’s almost vibrating with our combined concentration.
“What?” Leah asks, perking up.
“We’ve been operating under the assumption that the Others use a version of neodymium, since the isotopes have been altered in the sample Deshi brought us, right?” He looks around until we all nod, then points at a page in his book. “There are a couple of articles in here about known uses for something called praseodymium, another common rare earth metal in the same family. What if that’s what it is?”
“What are the uses for that kind?” Katie asks, stretching her legs again.
Even Justin isn’t immune to the force that is Katie’s personality and perks up, his cheeks coloring as he stumbles over the next couple of words. “It’s a superstrong metal, and it can also be made into salts and glass. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, but those are pretty much the same general uses for neodymium. Is it magnetic?” Jordan asks, closing her eyes and leaning back on her hands.
“I know. And yes, it is. Just a thought. They’re not exactly the same, or they wouldn’t be listed as separate on the periodic table. Maybe switching one for the other would be easy enough, and would alter their substance enough that it wouldn’t do… whatever it is they need it to do.” His frustration buzzes around all of us like the bugs I swatted earlier.
“Maybe if we can figure out how praseodymium differs fundamentally from the neodymium on the periodic table?” Laura suggests, squinting as though the question hurts her brain somehow.
I know it hurts mine.
“Without samples of each to work from, I don’t think we can do it.” Leah sighs. “Even if we could find the chemical makeup of each in one of these books, reading about it probably isn’t enough without seeing the isotopes separated.”
She’s thinking about Rita again—I can see it in the lines that deepen around her mouth. Our old Monitor outlined how to tear apart elemental isotopes and how to analyze results to be able to put it back together, and Leah must have asked her a million questions.
Leah joined our guilt club when Rita, who she recruited to help, was killed. It’s not a group I wanted her—or anyone here—to be part of, but it’s done now.
Justin shrugs, going back to his volume, and none of us have the answer. Irritation pumps into the air, absorbing the previous concentration.
Even though I haven’t been cooped up in here reading for days without finding the answer we need, they have. It’s clear that everyone needs a break, and it’s going to be too dark to read in here soon, anyway. I stand up and stretch, tucking the journal under my arm. “It’s a fair thought, Justin. You guys go back and figure out what we’re having for dinner. I’m going to the labs to get Mark and Brittany. Leah, you want to come?”
She nods and we follow everyone else out of the room, parting ways with them outside the library when they head back toward Perkins Hall. The late-afternoon sun blinds us as we turn toward the science building, but we don’t have to go in because Mark and Brittany are slouched on the front steps. I’ve never seen two people look as tired as they do, except maybe my own reflection the winter I hardly slept for two weeks to avoid being tortured in the hive.
Brittany gives me a weak smile and Mark raises his eyebrows at my appearance.
“Yep, I’m awake. Any luck?”
“Aside from getting the synthetic element figured out, nope. Anything in the library?” Brittany asks, eyeing Leah.
“Not really. Justin thinks praseodymium—an element that’s missing from our periodic table—could be what they’re using. And maybe if we switched it for the real neodymium it could be enough of a molecular change to throw them off.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think we can do it.”
“We can work on it.” Mark sighs, standing up and turning as though he’s going back up to the lab.
“No. You guys need a break. Everyone except me does, so tonight, no one’s working. We’re going to do something fun. Leah, come with me.” I pin Brittany and Mark with a serious glare. “I mean it, you two. Back to Perkins and wash up. If Phil and the guys are back, have them take Wolf out hunting so we can have a good dinner.”
They listen, shambling off at a tired pace. Leah follows when I move past the rest of the housing buildings. There are several like the one we’re staying in; we’ve explored most of them and found nothing different than what’s in Perkins.
“How long have Greer and Griffin been staying when they come to work with you guys on fighting?” I ask Leah as she scrambles beside me.
“A few hours, but they sometimes stay for dinner. Why?”
“I have a question for them.”
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Here.” I struggle up the crumbled steps of a building that’s name has been wiped away. Some of us poked around inside our first couple of days here and found it filled with unfamiliar equipment that we think is used for exercise or sports of some kind. Like quidditch, or the game Finny made up in
A Separate Peace
. None of us grasp the concept of a sport, really, but after reading about it, it seems like something fun we could do tonight, maybe shake loose some nervous energy and forget our troubles for an hour or two.
In my experience, those moments are often when the answers arrive, as though they simply want the chance to emerge on their own instead of being dug out by hours of effort.
Navigating the exercise building takes concentration—parts of the ceiling have fallen in, and the stairs leading down to the equipment area are mostly rubble—but Leah and I get in and out in a half hour or so. I grabbed a black-and-white patterned ball and tossed Leah a brown oblong one that’s laced up like a shoe, and we head back to Perkins Hall, equipment in tow.
Greer and Griffin have finished up with the kids they’ve been training, and everyone’s soaked with sweat but grinning. They seem to be enjoying themselves, which is good.
I approach the Sidhe as the kids take off, probably to clean up and change clothes, and toss Greer the black-and-white ball. She catches it easily in one hand, swiping hair off her sticky forehead with the other. She looks much better than she did a few weeks ago, but knowing her well, it’s easy to see she’s not the same. Maybe she’ll never be the same after losing Nat.
It’s there in the haunted pain edging her eyes, not banished by a smile. In the slight stoop of her slim shoulders, as though the loss weighs heavier than any real burden. Greer carries her grief every minute of every day, and though it may be invisible to most, it isn’t to me.
“What’s this for?” she asks, dropping the ball to the ground and setting her foot on top.