Beneath the City
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About This Book
Elle is Deaf. Meen is blind. Teena has cerebral palsy. Thrown together in a New York City group home, these three teenage girls discover they share something beyond their status as wards of the state: elemental powers that defy explanation.
Elle commands the wind through the same hands that shape American Sign Language. Meen controls fire and temperature, her heightened senses now extending into the thermal spectrum. Teena moves the earth itself, feeling through stone and concrete the way she learned to feel every obstacle the world placed in her path.
Their names encode their identity. Take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, and Christina Sarah, and you spell EleMenTs. They are wind, fire, and earth. They are the elements the world forgot to fear.
The EleMenTs Series
This is the first book in a trilogy that follows three young women as they navigate a world that has always underestimated them. The foster care system sees them as problems to be managed. Society sees their disabilities before their humanity. But a shadowy organization called Prometheus Applied Sciences sees something else entirely: subjects to be studied, assets to be controlled, powers to be exploited.
Beneath the City introduces the girls to each other and to their abilities. In the tunnels beneath New York, they will discover what they can do. In the books that follow, they will discover what they must become.
About the Characters
Eleanor (Elle) lost her hearing at age three. She learned to read the world through vibration and movement, through the shape of lips and the grammar of hands. When her powers manifested, the wind became another language she could speak. She signs with one hand and bends the air with the other.
Mingzhu (Meen) was born blind. She navigated the world through sound and touch, through the heat signatures her skin learned to read before she understood what she was doing. Now she controls fire itself, and the darkness she lives in has become her greatest tactical advantage.
Christina Sarah (Teena) has cerebral palsy. Every movement costs her something. Every step is a negotiation with muscles that refuse to cooperate. But the earth responds to her in ways her own body never has. Through stone and soil, she can feel the entire city. Through concrete and bedrock, she can move mountains.
Continue the Series
Book Two: The Invisible Hand picks up three months after the tunnel. A new volunteer named Sarah arrives at the group home asking too many questions. A fourth girl named Tal discovers she can feel water the way the others feel their elements. And Prometheus Applied Sciences springs its trap.
Book Three: The Reckoning takes the fight to Washington. A Senate hearing on a registration bill. A shadow corporation exposed. Hundreds of people with abilities coming forward publicly. The conclusion of the trilogy asks what it means to be seen, and whether visibility is liberation or the final vulnerability.
See Also
The Invisible Hand (Book Two) · The Reckoning (Book Three) · About David Boles