An hour after they’d piled into the Thunderberry, Milo stepped out onto the dry ground laced with spiderweb cracks. He didn’t even look as he slammed the car door behind him; like the rest of the unit, his attention was on the sky, on the increasingly rare sight hovering miles over their heads. The cloud was small—for a cloud anyway— he guessed it was maybe half a mile wide, if that. Still, as the figure floated across the sky like a ghost, Milo’s breath caught in his throat. The entire unit seemed to move slowly, quietly, as if they were afraid to startle it. When the cloud slid between the ground and the sun, Milo’s skin tingled as much from sheer awe as from the cold.

“Douglas,” their leader Vaughn said in a gruff baritone. “What would you advise?”

The team turned toward Tess. The only intern, at eighteen she was the youngest of the geoengineers by decades. Tess stepped forward, paying no mind to her colleagues who wore smug grins that made Milo want to throw dirt in their instant coffee provisions the next chance he got.

“Winds are…” the girl appraised the air. “Southeasterly, maybe 4 MPH. Nutribiz compound 88-B is the closest as the crow flies, but north of here. I recommend we try to drop the cloud at compound 86-E—”

Beside Vaughn, a middle-aged geoengineer adjusted her glasses. “Which is over five miles away. If you load the cloud before you herd it, it’ll never make it that far.”

Tess frowned. “Well…”

“And if you herd it first, the sun will evaporate the cloud before you even get close to the compound.” The middle-aged engineer gave Tess a pitying “better luck next time” look. Milo had seen Tess withstand this kind of condescension before, knew she could push back against her seniors with no problem. But she hadn’t been herself these last three days. Now, he watched her hug her arms to her middle, folding in on herself, and something in him pulled tight like a fishing line.

“I can do it.” He stepped forward so quickly he stumbled, but quickly caught himself as Vaughn looked on. “Me, Zanna, and Ravi, I mean. We can get the cloud there before it evaporates. Won’t waste a drop either. Right guys?” He turned to Zanna and Ravi, brows raised with silent insistence.

Zanna’s full lips were pressed so tight he wondered if she’d swallowed them. But thankfully, Ravi’s muscular frame drew the team’s focus. “Absolutely,” Ravi said. Vaughn’s eyes shifted between the three of them, then finally back to Tess.

“Let’s see it, then.”   

They got to work quickly, devising a plan. Ravi would use a staggered approach, firing two of his three payloads into the cloud to sustain it for the journey to 86-E, then mounting the third in the bed of the Thunderberry. He’d fire that one off as they were in pursuit of the cloud, about halfway to the compound. They’d have to herd the cloud quickly before it got too heavy, which meant using both Zanna and Milo’s swarms together. There was no time to reconfigure all of the bots in one swarm to respond to the other’s remote, so one of them would have to use both remotes at the same time— easier than trying to coordinate with one another out loud. Milo offered that responsibility to Zanna, but she just muttered something about slugs and stalked off to the Thunderberry, jangling Ravi’s keys angrily.

“Guess she’s driving,” Ravi said. Milo and Ravi climbed into the bed of the truck, and Ravi slid a cannister of silver iodide into his cannon, which was mounted on a stand that had been bolted into place. A satisfying click told them that the cannister was loaded and ready.

Ravi grinned at him. “Never get sick of that sou…” His face froze, and Milo turned to see Tess climbing into the Thunderberry bed behind him.

“Can’t see the sky from inside the research van,” she explained. “We might need to make realtime decisions.”

Milo’s brain glitched for a second. She couldn’t ride back here! There was dust and rusty bolts and no seat belt and—

The scent of summer cucumbers filled his next breath, and his mind stilled. Tess sat beside him, their backs against the truck’s cab, their shoulders so close he worried the delicate white fibers of her engineer uniform would snag on the coarse threads of his used coveralls.

“Hi.” She turned her head, but didn’t quite meet his gaze.

“Hi.”

The truck’s engine whinnied, then roared to life, rumbling under their thighs. Ravi handed them both protective headphones. Milo was about to explain to Tess that as soon as Ravi fired his rocket, Zanna would floor the gas pedal, to catch up to the cloud as the nanobots pushed it toward the compound. Instead, he watched as Tess gripped the side of the truck bed, bracing. He found himself both proud of and relieved by her preparedness, but also surprised; had she watched them do this from the research van?

A flick of Ravi’s match. The fuse hissed before the rocket whistled up into the sky. They barely had time to watch it disappear into the cloud’s blinding white before Zanna took off across the plains. Milo already had his and Zanna’s bots waiting in the air nearby, close enough to intercept the cloud as soon as the rocket was clear. Gently, he nudged the joysticks on each remote forward, held his breath as he looked upward for a sign that the bots had received the signal, tried not to feel like the stakes were that much higher with Tess sitting beside him.

Suddenly, the cloud jerked forward, as if pushed by an invisible gust. Tess’s quiet gasp was lightning in Milo’s bones.

From there, he, Ravi, and Zanna worked as a team, maneuvering the truck, bots, and rocks as a single entity, to drive the cloud toward its final destination. Tess advised on wind gradient and liquid water content, and Milo was amazed at how much more efficient their team was with an engineer giving guidance in real time, instead of over the truck’s crackly walkie-talkie. Why didn’t they always do the job like this?

“Almost there!” Zanna shouted over the sound of the truck, and the wind in their ears. Milo peered around the front of the truck. The wall of Nutribiz compound 86-E was a thin gray strip on the horizon, stretching miles in either direction. He nodded to himself as the wall grew taller by the second. One final push should do it

“On my signal,” he told Ravi. “Wait. Wait. Now!” He jammed his thumbs against the joysticks, removing the bots from the cloud just as Ravi fired his final rocket. The effect was nearly instant; the cloud’s ethereal white shifted to dark gray. Milo could almost feel the weight of the thing as it hung in the sky.

“Go, Milo!” Tess shouted. The air crackled with the electricity of his name on her lips. He swung the bots back into the cloud, shoving it toward the wall as it grew even darker. Their bodies lurched sideways as Zanna floored the gas pedal to keep up and maintain the signal connection to the bots flying miles overhead.

“We’re not going to make it,” Tess said. “It’s going to burst early.” His stomach clenched with worry. Nutribiz fined Stormherding units for every ounce of water wasted on the wrong side of the wall. Even worse, an early cloudburst would go on their files, making it harder to find work in the future.

There was no time to reassure her. He pressed on the joysticks at an angle, so hard they dug into his thumbs.

“What are you—” Tess began, but stopped once she saw. Milo drove the cloud in a zig zag, creating additional wind shear on the way to the compound that would lighten it, slow down the chain reactions happening within.

“Milo!” Zanna shouted as she zoomed the truck after the wayward cloud, turning this way and that. Overhead, patches of the cloud were almost black.

Come on…

“Oh, shit!” Zanna cried, before the truck jerked sideways at a ninety degree angle, then came to a screaming halt. Milo hadn’t known what was happening, but when he dared to open his eyes, one arm was around Tess’s waist. Her face was buried in his chest. And the truck bed was inches away from the wall.

“My bad,” came Zanna’s weak call from the front seat. “Should’ve kept my eyes on the road, not on the sky. At least we made it though, right?”

Milo barely registered her question. The plains and the truck had vanished in a cloud of kicked-up dust. The world narrowed to Tess’s brown eyes, and the sound of rain on the other side of the wall.