The Elementalists Page 21

  “A giant snake with horns, legs, and wings?” Stan repeated with a flat voice and deadpan face. “You mean like a dragon?”

  Chloe shrugged. “Yeah, it looked pretty much like a dragon…and to be totally honest, I’ve kind of seen it around a few times before.”

  “You’ve seen a giant flying snake hanging around Charlottesville before?” Stan wasn’t sure if he should smile or frown. “Why haven’t you mentioned this?”

  “I’ve been having trouble with my memory since the lightning strike, and I wasn’t sure if I was going crazy or not.” Chloe pointed at the decimated tower with a conflicted sense of relief. “But I’m pretty sure that that’s real.”

  Headlights quickly approached along the road behind them. When Stan spoke again, he felt the subconscious need to whisper. “You were right, that’s pretty weird.” Two other black Suburbans pulled up on either side of Car 4 with tactical precision. Then a black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows came to a gentle halt directly behind them with its brights blasting through the windows.

  “Is it just me, or does this level of security seem a little weird, too?” Chloe asked as two men with outfits and haircuts like Brent emerged from their respective vehicles and converged in front of Car 4. The Town Car just idled menacingly.

  “What was that tower for?” whispered Stan as the men looked to the highlighted damage and then turned their hard stares toward Car 4.

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” Chloe declared.

  Her courage faltered as she spied a low-flying light approaching over the trees.

  “What’s that?” asked Stan as a rhythmic THWOP started to echo about the clearing.

  Chloe watched for a long moment as the sleek, black helicopter tore overhead violently shaking the trees and circling with a spotlight held on the broken tower. “Trouble,” she answered as the back door of the Town Car opened and a disheveled man with a coat slung over his pajamas stepped out and walked by Car 4 with his intense gaze squinting into the artificial wind. She recognized him as the same man from the library photos at Paul Markson’s party a few weeks back.

  “That’s Dr. Markson,” Stan confirmed as the pajama-clad man and the security team walked further into the clearing with stooped heads.

  The helicopter lowered onto the level terrain at the base of the hill, and Chloe could see the Daedalus Group insignia blazoned in white on the tail. She also recognized the jowly scowl of Mr. Roberts as he stepped from the helicopter door, wearing a light grey three-piece suit. He moved to meet his partner as the spinning rotors wound down.

  The two captains of industry nodded in greeting before moving their eyes back to the tower. Chloe watched as they shared a few terse words and then turned their formidable combined focus on former officer Brent Meeks. The two traded off, grilling him with curt questions that he responded to with short answers and a bowed head. Then all eyes swiveled back toward Car 4. Despite the tinted windows, distance, and darkness, Chloe and Stan both ducked.

  Chloe peered from behind the headrest as Brent spoke briefly into the walkie-talkie. She hadn’t noticed that the driver’s side door of the Lincoln had opened behind her, and she jumped with an embarrassing yelp as another square-jawed security man tapped on the car window with the butt of a flashlight.

  “Step out of the car, please,” he said without emotion.

  Chloe and Stan glanced to each other for silent moral support before taking deep breaths and opening the doors.

  “Come with me, please,” said the stone-faced man as he motioned them toward the waiting group in the field.

  Chloe stood and felt the damp squish of the naked earth between her toes, remembering only then that she’d left her shoes on the hill. Her previously perfect dress was now grass-stained and soiled, and her hair was tangled and frizzy. Still, she walked with righteous conviction as she focused on the men who had desecrated her sacred glen. Stan followed at her heels with wide eyes and a nervous little smirk.

  With the sound of the helicopter quieted, the clearing returned to a pregnant hush. Chloe was oddly aware of the padding of her own footfalls through the grass.

  “I believe we’ve met before,” stated Mr. Roberts before she’d come to a halt.

  She looked up to meet his gaze and forced herself to stand her ground as she had with the dragon. “Yes, sir.”

  “And is this the spot of your lightning encounter?”

  She nodded and looked to the mangled steel at the top of the hill.

  “Had that tower stood there at the time, you never would have been affected,” he noted. “The upper dome was shielded against conductivity to the ground.”

  “What is it for?” Chloe asked.

  Mr. Roberts looked to Dr. Markson, who barely broke his gaze from the hill to give an assenting nod before he marched off toward the site.

  Mr. Roberts turned to his forced audience. “Have you ever heard of antimatter?”

  Chloe nodded and Stan shrugged.

  “Scientists have been trying to locate and harness the nature of antimatter for decades. You see, when it collides with matter, its annihilation produces a hundred percent efficient clean energy with no byproducts—the perfect power source.” He smiled coldly as his grey eyes moved back and forth between Chloe and Stan. “There’s even an experimental antimatter trap traveling on a satellite toward the center of our galaxy right now. It should be able to reach and sample from a huge cache of suspected antimatter positrons in about thirty years’ time.”

  Stan coughed nervously, but Mr. Roberts didn’t seem to notice.

  “But it turns out that particles of positron antimatter are also released every time a bolt of electricity is unleashed from the clouds.” He stared up at the grey blanket above for effect. “These particles float up into the atmosphere and travel along magnetic lines that circle the globe, spinning away right over our heads for all these years without us even knowing it.” He brought his gaze back down to Chloe. “But now the Daedalus Group has its own satellite, and if we can guess where lightning might strike, we can put our own positron trap along the path of the magnetic currents and snatch the antimatter right out of space.”

  Chloe began to grasp the enormity of what he was proposing. “How much antimatter could you collect?”

  “That depends on how much lightning we can predict, now doesn’t it?” Mr. Roberts turned back toward the broken tower with all hint of warmth stripped from his face. “Mr. Meeks tells me that he found you sitting on the hill just below the tower and that he saw the aircraft warning lights blinking as he drove up through the trees.” He crossed his hands at his back and cleared his throat. “Yet you insist that you never noticed the lights in the time that you were here?”

  Chloe swallowed hard. “That’s right.”

  Mr. Roberts turned toward Stan, who had been looking at his own feet the whole time. “And you, Mr. Strakowski? Dr. Markson tells me that he knows your family quite well, that you’ve attended functions at his house… Is that how you recall the evening?”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” Stan stammered.

  “I see.” Mr. Roberts frowned. “So you’re calling Mr. Meeks a liar?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Chloe muttered with a quick glance to Brent as he scanned the woods and feigned disinterest.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Roberts. “Mr. Meeks mentioned that he’d had some dealings with you before. He vouched for your character, Miss McClellan, though it seems you do not share his kind regard… Tell me, what time did you arrive at the hill tonight?”

  Chloe shrugged, “I’m not sure, maybe ten thirty…or so?”

  “Hmm,” said Mr. Roberts with a furrowed brow. “It’s strange, then, that we were getting readings from the tower right up until 10:58 and twenty-six seconds, almost exactly the same moment that Mr. Meeks radioed in to announce his scheduled check of the site.”

  “That is strange,” admitted Chloe without much conviction. She watched as Dr. Markson reached the top of the hill, s
urrounded by the glare of the spotlight. He was standing just a couple steps away from the clawed imprint from the dragon’s launch into the air. Chloe held her breath and willed him to not look down.

  “So you’re telling me that while you lounged on the cold, damp hill in the middle of the night, twenty or thirty tons of steel, cabling, and research equipment was ripped away from over your heads without you seeing or hearing anything?” Mr. Roberts’ flat little eyes locked on Chloe.

  “I’d really like to help you if I could, but I’m not sure what to say. I guess we must have fallen asleep or something,” Chloe said.

  Mr. Roberts turned on Stan.

  “Yeah, I totally passed out,” blurted Stan with a little bolster of confidence. “When I woke up, the spotlight was on us. The last thing I remembered was getting sleepy while talking to Chloe.”

  Mr. Roberts frowned. “That is most unfortunate; it seems you were in a unique position to shed some light on a rather perplexing mystery—millions of dollars of equipment lost, just as it was about to become operational. Your help could have been worth a great deal to our company.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chloe gulped, just as the three walkie-talkies crackled to life.

  “This is Air 2—repeat—Air 2, with a visual on the missing tower—over,” said the voice over the walkie.

  “Copy that, Air 2—go for coordinates—over,” answered the square-jawed security man who had come out of the Lincoln.

  “I have pieces of it scattered around an old quarry located 6.4 miles southwest of Tower 1—some of the support beams are sticking out of the water—no indication as to how it got here—over.”

  Mr. Roberts held up a hand, and the security man delayed his response. For an instant, Brent shot Chloe what might have been a look of warning before the other guards stepped closer. What was that?

  “Well, then, I suppose it is time for you to leave,” interjected Mr. Roberts with cold dismissal. “The team will see you back to your car, and Mr. Meeks will follow you out.”

  They began to usher Chloe and Stan back toward the cars, but Chloe brushed past the arms of one of the guards and took a step toward Mr. Roberts. “Why here?” she blurted. “Why did you have to build the tower here?”

  Mr. Roberts looked over his shoulder with a humorless smile. “I would think you, if anyone, would know the answer to that. This clearing is struck by lightning more than any other spot in Virginia. Perhaps you would be wise to steer clear of it from now on.”

  Firm hands grasped Chloe by the shoulders and directed her away. But before she let them push her back to Stan’s wagon, she spied Dr. Markson up on the hill, crouched in the dragon’s tracks with his hand pressed to the torn ground.

  Chapter 17

  I Am the Lightning

  That night, Chloe dreamed of flying. Not as a bird or like the one time she’d ridden in a plane when she was five—in the dream, she soared over Charlottesville on the dragon’s back, with the giant wings rising and falling on either side of her. She gripped a bony ridge at the base of his neck and squeezed tightly with her legs. She was oddly secure in her seat, as if it was meant for her alone. Despite the ponderous beats, the darkened buildings and trees below flashed by at a dizzying pace.

  “Faster!” she screamed into the wind as the luffed sails rose before catching the current again.

  As Uktena flapped, Chloe felt the surge beneath her, and she hunched lower. The dragon angled his head to glance back as a ripple of electricity lit his gaze.

  “Faster!” she called again, and the dark clouds ahead answered with a flash and a rumble. With one last powerful beat, Uktena carried them higher before dropping his wings back and diving toward the thunderhead. Chloe shut her eyes and hugged closer. She found herself laughing as they rocketed through the night. But in seconds, the speed made laughter and breath impossible as a static charge gathered within and around her. They were vibrating at the same frequency, faster than Chloe could comprehend. It felt like the molecules of her body might come unglued and drift away, even mingle with those of the monster below her.

  Still she wanted to scream out, “Faster!”

  In that instant, she and Uktena streaked forward with a brilliant burst of light, traveling miles in a blink, not as beast and rider, but as raw energy.

  It crackled in and around them as they arrived amid a dark cloud with a shockwave of sound emanating from that point. No longer was the dragon beneath her, and Chloe was no longer herself. They were free and inseparable. The wind gathered and heavy droplets of rain began to fall. They breathed in the storm, becoming one with the air and water. And they exhaled new life to both, spurring them on, telling them—why be a cloud when you can be a tornado? Why just rain when you could be a flood?

  The whole world was vibrating, everything and everyone moving at its own speed. It was they who could turn up the frequency. They called to the riled molecules of the storm and dropped their attention below. With a spark, they were born anew, firing down to the ground with a blinding lash that was hotter than the sun.

  In an instant, they met wood and soil, fusing with the earth just as they’d been one with the storm. And the dance of their twin vibrations gave birth to flame as the searing stroke bore down into the heart of the old oak beside the pond.

  Chloe heard her own voice again as she called out to her brothers and sisters—air, water, earth, and flame. She was the spirit who’d come to wake them and bind them. She was the spark that would set the world on fire.

  • • •

  Chloe woke the next morning with the pressure of a migraine waiting to break free and wash over her. A few minutes later, it did. She’d wanted to talk with Dr. Liou again, knowing that she needed to act fast in case her memory started to slip once more, but by lunchtime, the worst headache of her life had settled in. By seven o’clock that evening, she’d sunk into such an emotional and physical mess that Audrey had been forced to take off the late shift at Pete’s and then the following morning at her office job in order to stay home and tend to her sallow and quivering daughter. That Monday would be the second school absence that Chloe had taken in years.

  For those twenty-four hours of torture, when Chloe’s eyes were open, the light seared through her temples like an electric current. But in the darkness, when she clenched her lids tightly against the throbbing, she saw the deep, lightning-filled eyes of the dragon staring back. Finally, after countless trips to face the toilet and a sheet-clenching, sweat-drenched night, the onslaught relented and she found sleep again.

  When she woke on Monday afternoon to find her life as she had left it, she wept in a way that she hadn’t since she’d been a little girl. Not with a sense of relief or because of the pain she had felt, but because of the profound loss of connectedness to the greater world that she’d known when traveling through the elements as living lightning. The absence of that freedom left her hollowed out and stripped bare. Audrey had rocked her and whispered soothing words, but Chloe knew that her mom could never understand why.

  Audrey left for the evening shift at Pete’s with her brow creased with worry as Chloe slouched into the sofa with a bowl of chicken soup balanced on her stomach. It was the first food other than five Saltines and a Pedialyte popsicle that she’d eaten since Stan had taken her out to dinner with his father’s money before the dance.

  The TV flashed terrifying images from Berlin, where a massive car bomb had gone off in city center earlier in the day. The news channels replayed pictures of screaming, bloody people and burning buildings as the “BREAKING NEWS” logo pulsed in bright yellow across the bottom left quadrant of the screen: NOW 416 CONFIRMED DEAD IN WORST TERRORIST ATTACK ON EUROPEAN SOIL.

  The smoke and ash cloud that was billowing out of Mt. Kilimanjaro was so last week, though nothing had been done to move the half a million refugees that were encamped in its shadow. The news flavor of the moment had swung back to humanity’s amazing affinity for killing itself. Like the rest of the world, Chloe felt numb.

&
nbsp; But this time, she would not forget what she’d seen; she could not. The dragon had said that he was not supposed to wake for another two cycles of the moon.

  Only two months until “the inevitable.” Chloe had to find out what that meant. She had to find Uktena.

  • • •

  Maintaining the daily appearance of normalcy was another challenge. Since their run-in with the Daedalus Group, Stan had sent more than thirty texts looking for answers that she didn’t have to give. And since Homecoming, any semblance of anonymity in school had become impossible. It had been one thing when there’d been a small undercurrent of fascination with the notorious Lightning Girl, but now everyone knew Chloe McClellan by name and sight—as if her secret identity had become more popular than the superhero persona she’d been hiding behind.

  She was relieved to have Stan in on her new, and most bizarre, obsession to date, but she hadn’t felt right about divulging the full extent of her interaction with Uktena. Perhaps it was the inescapable fear of being labeled as “CRAZY” like her father, or perhaps it was due to the lingering connection she’d known with the dragon in her lightning dream… Regardless, she still couldn’t bring herself to mention the lengthy conversation she’d had with the creature, preferring to keep her late-night research into the history of horned serpents in Native American lore to herself for now.

  And then there was everything else: Ezra still being his obnoxious, charming self, Kendra still plotting to kill her, and above all, the fact that Kirin was possibly interested, though still grounded and almost entirely unavailable…

  After a few days, she wasn’t sure if she needed the trials of adolescence to help her forget about the insanity of monsters and evil corporations or if perhaps it was the other way around. On Saturday, after another victorious cross-country race, her mom took the long way home, and they drove past the Daedalus Group turnoff to the pond. Now the dirt road was barred by a keypad gate, and the “NO TRESSPASSING” sign had doubled in size.