The Elementalists

Chapter 7

Sammi

'Musa? Are you awake?'

Nothing. Just the gentle flutter of his soft feather breath against my cheek. I lie, head resting on his chest, unable to sleep. Each time he inhales, I ebb and flow like the tide upon the sand, gentle as a lullaby. But still. I can't sleep.

My head is too full. With strangers, and strange words. Making sense of them is like stumbling through fog. "We'll crush them so hard, they'll never sully the surface of our world again."

How on earth am I supposed to process something like that?

I cling to Musa, my ship in a storm. His arms wrap around me, anchoring me, making the dark, cramped room the Resisters have given us seem that little bit safer. That other boy, Kass, is huddled next to us on a blanket. His shaggy hair has fallen across his face, but I can still make out the furrow of his brow; whatever he's dreaming about, it looks unpleasant. He's curled into a foetal position, knees hugged to his chest; it makes me cling to Musa even tighter. I can't imagine going through this alone. My chest aches, listening to Kass wheeze in his sleep.

He just looks so alone.

We haven't seen Cotton since our intense first meeting. It's strange. It almost feels like the Resisters exhausted so much in trying to find us, that now they have, they're not quite sure what to do with us. Eldred tried, but proved a scant tour guide, disappearing for hours at a time, leaving us to wander. Labelle found us inspecting a pipe that was leaking some sort of smoking tar . . . after that, he took over the role of keeping an eye on us. But he's been little better than Eldred—he just wants us to watch him work. Which isn't as interesting as it sounds; mostly, he squints at a screen, typing and muttering codes to himself.

It takes a few days, but eventually the other Resisters seem to cotton on that we're here, and we're bored. Volunteers start to pour in, a motley mix of soldiers, scientists and engineers who fight to take us to breakfast, show us the gyms, the virtual-reality room, and generally keep us out of mischief. Away from anywhere "important".

I wonder what it is they don't want us to see.

One of Labelle's men, who introduced himself as Dylan Tanner, caught us after breakfast one morning, offering to show us what he called the "weather-tunnels".

'If the Futurists are manufacturing their own climate, we need to understand how,' Tanner explained, pushing Musa's head beneath the dripping web of pipes on the ceiling. 'It just seems impossible. What we can't understand is if they have this technology, why aren't they using it to reverse some of the climate damage? It makes no sense.' He also showed us the "data centre", a room jam-packed with computers and whirring, clunking machines; one had a probe that every few minutes sent out a shock of lightning.

'Keller's team might do the science.' Tanner beckoned us forwards to watch the probe. 'But it's us, the engineers, who make everything. Well.' He gave a sheepish smile. 'Some of us do. I don't personally, I'm just a soldier trained to use and fix stuff in battle. Someone's gotta do it.'

We went to see Dr Keller's labs not long after. They were the only places that looked properly clean, gleaming with bright-white plastic. There were lab benches strewn with glass tubes and coloured liquids; robotic arms transferring substances from bottle to bottle; holographic molecules floating over sharp-coloured panels, while other robots rotated them, merged them together, then broke them apart. Sometimes they would take the holograms to a computer, where they would be sucked into a sensor and appear on the screen.

We found Dr Keller knee-deep in an enormous glass tank. We peered inside; it was full of billowing emerald leaves, fanning themselves in the golden rays beaming down from orbs of light suspended above us. Great velvet petals, so soft, I ached to touch them—pinks, yellows and reds formed clusters of rainbows along a trickling stream. I gazed in wonder at the crystal-clear water. It glittered, iridescent in the light. I'd never seen fresh water without mist before.