Steady Ground | ✔

3 | And the heat rises

A 3.0 earthquake had enough power to match half a ton of detonated TNT, and a 6.0 could match that of an atomic bomb's.

Yet here Atlas sat, ten miles away from where the potential focus point would be, waiting for his team to start the mitigation tool using the coordinates he had captured over the course of the first week before his unit gave up the ghost. If everything went well, they'd release a tiny bit of that pent up energy and store it in a battery.

No one ever thought that one day the US would have the technology to capture the energy from earthquakes. It was a dual purpose - it'd incrementally reduce the sticks-slip tension along the fault lines, allowing earthquakes to shrink and therefore cause less damage when they did happen, and it could maybe, one day once it got tested further, be used to send energy into the country's electric grid as an alternative to nuclear power.

"I hope this works," he said for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. His stomach twisted into weird shapes as he couldn't help but imagine them setting off some insane 9.0 earthquake that caused a tsunami and killed everyone on the coast of Japan.

"Atlas, I swear you're making me anxious." Aronne shook his head. "We're not on a large enough fault to do too much more than maybe put a crack in the ground," he continued. "You know this - you measured and mapped it!"

"I know."

Ashe, for the first time since they had arrived almost three hours ago, added in. "It'll be fine."

"Yeah, see? You've taken enough geology in college to know this will go without any harm." Aronne spread his arms out wide. Atlas lifted his head up to watch him. "There isn't a single soul in sight, not for tens and tens of miles. There isn't a single track in the snow besides ours. There are few trees, mostly all rock. There's nothing to be afraid of."

He knew that. He didn't need to be told that. But that didn't stop him from worrying about messing up the last two coordinates. His gut told them they were right, that they were the same as everything else he compared. Perfect. Completely perfect.

They sat in the trunk of the SUV, looking over pure white snow, freezing their butts off, waiting. Atlas and a few others had shoveled a square of snow away so the team could set up a tent and attempt to secure it to the frozen soil, and although that had warmed him up, now that he had stopped moving, he could feel his joints and muscles slowly cramping with the cold.

If Atlas peered through it, he would be able to see the electric generator and the equipment set up inside to monitor the tool.

One of the scientists ran over and told them it would start in five minutes.

Aronne slid off of the trunk and walked with her, disappearing beneath the tent. Atlas glanced at Ashe, and they fell in silence that he knew he'd have no success breaking.

She watched everyone move about with keen eyes, her straightened, dark brown hair framing her cheeks.

He sighed, rubbing his hands together. "Want to turn the car on and get out of the cold?" he asked.

"Not really."

"Oh, okay."

Atlas hunched forward. Why was everyone more okay with the below freezing temperatures than he was? Was their curiosity that much stronger than his? He wasn't even needed anymore at this point in the process, neither was Ashe who had designed the structure they built on the mitigation site.

He heard someone shout over the others, and almost immediately an expecting silence fell over the whole team. Even he held his breath as he waited for something to happen.