“You about done there, Albuquerque?” Zanna, the other sweeper in their unit set down two heavy cases of her own nanobot swarm on the sunbaked ground. The other eight cases were still in the back of the rusted red pickup truck—the Thunderberry— that Milo and the other freelancers used to follow the research van across the plains. Soon Zanna would take those cases out too, making five neat stacks beside her sleeping bag.

Milo watched his friend, resisting the urge to smile and shake his head. There was no real reason for Zanna to take her entire swarm out of the truck every time they stopped to set up camp for the night; if word came of a cloud in the vicinity, they might lose precious time loading everything back up and chasing the meteorological apparition across the wide open Oklahoma sky. But unlike Milo’s loaner bots, Zanna’s swarm was hers outright— her “getting-the-hell-out-of-Arizona” present, she called it, purchased with the cash she’d found stuffed between the coils of the foldout couch her grandmother died on, during the heat wave of 2280. The nanobots were a guarantee of job security in a time when half the country was on the breadline. Milo might share Zanna’s skillset, but even two years younger than him at seventeen, Zanna could join any Stormherding unit in the plains, without having to wonder if they’d have a spare set of bots lying around for her to struggle with.

“I think you’ve polished that particular bot to within an inch of its life,” Zanna said on her next trip over, adding two more cases to the group.

“Easy for you to say,” Milo said good-naturedly. “Your bots don’t have a solid half-centimeter of mud coating their receptors. No wonder the damn things won’t fly straight. I mean, look at this.” He held the dull gray ball out to show her where the grime was caked on.

Zanna pushed her long black braids out of her hair to peer closer. “Mm,” she agreed. “Mud’s a good sign though, right? Where there’s mud, there’s rain. Maybe your swarm’s lucky, Albuquerque.” No matter how many times he’d asked since they first met three weeks ago, she still insisted on calling him by the city he came from, instead of by his name. Zanna said it was easier that way; what was the point of learning names when the gig would be up in two more months? And at least that way, she’d remember something real about him. What good was a name, when it came down to it?

“I don’t think that’s why he’s concentrating so hard on that one bot.” Ravi’s hulking shadow cooled their bodies from the oppressive sun. With surprising grace, the young man lowered the stack of Zanna’s six remaining cases he carried to the ground. “Milo’s got it bad.”

Zanna frowned. “Got what bad?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she turned to Milo. “I swear if you’ve infested this camp with sand fleas—”

“Not ‘sand fleas’ it.” Ravi wiped an arm across the earth brown skin of his brow. He leaned in, whispering. “It it. The boy’s in loooooove.”

Zanna turned slowly from Ravi to Milo, her mouth open in mild disgust as if this revelation were somehow worse than sand fleas. Milo felt pinned by her staring, so he averted his gaze. Unfortunately, he averted it toward Tess Douglas herself, at the other end of their camp a dozen yards away. The girl stood against the endless blue of the Oklahoma sky, the afternoon sunlight making her reddish brown skin glow a radiant earthen copper. One stylus was buried deep in her thick black halo of coils, and she tapped another against the tablet in her hands. Tess worried her bottom lip between her teeth, the crinkle between her brows deepening as she glanced at the tablet, then up at the sky, then down at the tablet again. Each time she looked skyward, Milo found his eyes floating that way too, searching the horizon for any sign of a cloud their unit could transform into rain. Into life. It’d been, what, nine days since their last score? Nine days since they’d seen a cloud, gently guided it over to a Nutribiz compound, and pumped the cloud full of chemicals that encouraged it to rain on the crops waiting beyond the compound walls. Nine days since there’d been anything in the daytime sky besides the sun and its never-ending heat. Would today be the day they broke that streak?

“No,” Zanna said loudly. Too loudly; Tess looked over at them, and Milo scrambled to busy himself with the nanobot in his hands, nearly dropping it in the process.

“‘No’ what?” he asked Zanna, at a lower volume he hoped she’d emulate.

She did not. “No, you cannot be in love with Tes—”

“Testing new configurations for his nanobots!” Ravi helpfully intercepted. “Well, he is, Zanna. He can’t get enough of it. If loving his bots is wrong, Milo doesn’t want to be right. Right, Milo?”

“…Right,” Milo said hesitantly. He glanced out of the corner of his eye. Tess was still watching them, the expression on her heart-shaped face somewhere between irritation and confusion. Milo was grateful for Ravi’s help, but he wasn’t sure where they’d landed was, in fact, better than Tess Douglas knowing he was in love with her. Which he wasn’t, anyway.

“This one’s done.” Zanna forcefully pried the bot he was squeezing from his hands, placing it in a recess of worn foam inside the case. “Anyway, you can’t be in love with her. It’s like… a slug loving an eagle.”

“And I’m the slug, in this scenario?”

“We all are.” Zanna pointed to each of them. “You, me, Ravi. We’re only here until some other batch of freelance herders pops up, ready to do the job for half the pay, just like we did for the batch before us—”

“’Tis the way,” Ravi said, bowing his head in mock solemnity.

Zanna gave a curt nod. “Tess and the rest of the city folk geoengineers? They’re different from us. Educated. Even if she is just an intern, she’s in the stratosphere, my friend. And you’re a dog, shackled to the ground. Same as me.”

Ravi frowned. “I’m confused, I thought he was a slug—”

“My point is, you come from two different worlds.” Zanna nodded at an older man who sat alone on the edge of camp, his weathered face turned from the group. “When Vaughn gives the call to move out, Tess and her crew will ride with him in the research van, with air conditioning and shock absorbers and… chocolate éclairs for all I know. Whereas the best you can do is pray you don’t get the side of the Thunderberry that has the spring poking out of the seat.”

Milo shifted his weight, remembering the uncomfortable three-hour ride from the old grasslands the other day. “I’m not in love with anybody,” he grumbled. “I’ve barely even spoken to the girl.” This was true. The longest conversation— the only conversation— he’d ever had with Tess had been over a week ago, when he asked for clarification on the advised altitude for the rapidly-growing nimbostratus they’d needed to shift northward, before it wasted its bounty on the cracked soil under their feet. Milo had deftly maneuvered his swarm of bots to corral the cloud over the looming wall of the nearest Nutribiz compound, encircling it to bring it to a perfect stop just as Ravi unleashed his rockets of silver iodide, turning the cloud’s white wisps a heavy gray, too laden down with water to keep hanging in the sky. When Vaughn got the radio signal from the powers-that-be inside of the compound that the job had been a success—that the crops that fed the country were now getting the water they desperately needed—their entire unit had let out a cheer.

“Nice driving,” Tess had told him, her voice soft under the group’s celebration. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes to savor the petrichor.

“Nice navigating,” he said back. She opened her eyes, brown and radiant. In that moment, Tess’s smile was brighter than the unfiltered sun on his back. He’d started to seek out that smile, relish all hints of its warmth, even when it wasn’t meant for him— which was every other time since that day. Tess would grin cheerfully when emerging from her tent in the morning, or beam under a senior engineer’s praise when she answered a challenging question correctly. But something—Milo had no clue what— had changed in the past three days. Tess’s smile had vanished, behind a cloud even he couldn’t steer away.

From the other edge of camp came a familiar alarm, the chirp of Vaughn’s two-way radio. The old man spoke low into the device, but even from this distance, even with the man’s back turned, Milo saw the exact moment the spark ignited within him. An energy rippled across Vaughn’s muscular shoulders. He clicked off the radio and spun toward the waiting group, sunlight glinting off the black sunglasses Milo couldn’t remember ever seeing him without.

“Accumulation spotted, about seventy miles east. Take your gear, but leave the camp; we’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Milo and the rest of the unit sprang into action, loading their respective vehicles with all the equipment needed to transform the wisps someone had seen in the sky into rain for Nutribiz’s crops— into sustenance for people hundreds of miles away on the country’s coasts. “Gear” for the geoengineers meant a tablet or two; for the most part, the only equipment they needed was their minds, the years upon years of schooling they’d completed to be able to predict where a payload of silver iodide should be placed, or how quickly a swarm of nanobots should flutter. The geoengineers waited patiently in their research van as Milo and the rest of the freelance team hustled to finish loading their truck full of the firepower needed to get the job done— crates of chemicals and chrome-plated bots.

Of course, Zanna’s cases were the last thing to finish loading. As Ravi shoved a stack of them onto the Thunderberry’s truck bed, Milo doubled back to get the last three cases. He turned, and almost collided with someone carrying them already.

“Sorry,” Tess said, swaying to balance the cases in her slender arms. “I thought if I helped, it might go faster.”

He blinked at her. In all of the jobs Milo had taken over the years, he’d never seen this. Technically, there was nothing preventing a geoengineer from helping in this way— the line between the geoengineers’ mental acuity and the herders’ mechanical strength wasn’t an official one. But it was still there.

Tess’s eyes widened with sudden embarrassment. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry—”

“No, no no.” Milo squatted to scoop the cases from her arms. As he did, he caught the scent of her hair on the wind, some kind of cucumber spray she used. Against his will, Milo could sense this knowledge creating its own shelf space in the vault of his mind. Eighty years from now, rains willing, he’d be an old man on his death bed, and he would still remember that Tess Douglas’s hair smelled of summer cucumbers.

“Thanks for these.” He motioned to the cases. “Zan insists on snuggling up to them each night like a damn teddy bear.”

“Hmm.” Tess considered the hard plastic cases. “Not the most comfortable bunkmate.”

“Right!” He laughed. “I’m pretty skinny, but even I’d be a better cuddler than— I mean, not that I’m offering my services, as a cuddler. I’m sure you’ve got your pick of people to cuddle with. You’ve probably cuddled with hundreds of—” His stomach dropped into his boots. What was he even saying? What was wrong with him? “Um—that is—”

The thin honk of the Thunderberry’s horn made them both jump. “Albuquerque!” Zanna cried from the truck’s second row. “You coming, or planning to walk the seventy miles?”

Milo blinked hard to clear his mind. Was Tess walking too? Because if so, he might consider it. He turned back to her, catching a flash of something like discomfort on her features. Of course. She was being polite, trying to help speed things up by carrying the case. And he’d kept her from the van with his inane rambling. Not wanting the torture of the interaction to last a moment longer, Milo turned and loaded up the last of the cases, then hopped into the van. He winced as the protruding coil dug into his backside, but it was no match for the ache in his chest as Tess climbed into the research van. Back where she belonged.