IN MY HEAD¹ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐈𝐈𝐈: Contents Under Pressure

     What? Lyra looks down at her fingers. Raven is right. The stupid radio's betrayed her, sparks crackling through the air and singing the skin on her fingers until they're raw. As Lyra stares stupidly, Raven grabs them and solders the two together swiftly using scrap metal from the dropship as filler to let the electrical current flow.

     "And can you stop talking to yourself?" Connor grumbles from the side, cross-legged on the floor. "It's distracting."

     "That's what I keep telling myself!"

      "So fuck off," Octavia snaps to him. "Maybe try being useful and help everyone else bring the tents inside."

     Connor looks at her mutinously, but Octavia doesn't hesitate to shoot him a withering glare. Weighing his options briefly, he seems to decide against furthering the argument, and instead climbs to his feet and strides down the ramp into the storm. Rain is beating furiously down upon the ground, drops falling so thick and so fast that it's almost impossible to even make out the manmade walls guarding their dropship. Thunder roads like one billion infuriated wasps, violent and condemning. Lightning flashes and it cracks the dark sky into one thousand fissures as it splinters the rain for a heartbeat.

      Dax shoves past Lyra, dragging a soggy tent behind him. Whoever isn't helping gather materials instead gather inside the dropship and hover on the lower level, waiting anxiously for progress. Lyra can barely focus on anything other than the way Monroe breathes beside her, the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the staccato of her heartbeat. 

     "I can't get a signal!" Wells shouts in a panic from the transmitter and as Raven is too busy soldering another wire, he turns around to survey the dropship for any help. "Where the hell is Monty?"

     "Doing something stupid," Octavia answers sourly. She's been. . . pissy ever since she got back.

      He considers this. "He's with your brother?"

      "Yeah."

     "You're up, then," he calls out across the chaos to Lyra.

     Right. OK. Easy.

     Easy, easy, easy.

     Running through every single factoid she's got stored in her brain under the label Electromagnetic Waves and the Electromagnetic Spectrum, Lyra hurries to the transmitter she set up earlier with Raven's busted control panel. She doesn't have to push her way through the crowd. Everyone parts for her instantly. Someone, she thinks it's Drew, gives a hasty "You got this!"

     One, two, three. . . Lyra counts her heartbeats, her palms shaking as she furls and unfurls her fists. She stares down the transmitter. The oscillator, modulator, and amplifier stare back at her. Quickly she tried to calculate a typical radio wave frequency ( 88~108 MHz) and then moved to the wavelength (3.41×109 ~ 2.78×109 nm). But they'll all have to be amplified dramatically ━━ she's trying to send a signal using a toy car transmitter all the way through the atmosphere.

     One, two, three. . . One, two, three. . .

     Logarithms flash across her vision. Numbers dancing in front of her eyes. Equations that are somewhat easy to sort through, even though her fingers are shaking and her heart is pounding.