Struck

  My skin thrilled as a roiling black cloudbank massed over the city, marching steadily east. Bloodred light pulsed behind the clouds, and my skin throbbed with the charge. But the fire in my chest did not light up. I had released the fire, and now it was burning in the sky.

  Lightning flashed. I counted softly. “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi …” I reached six and thunder boomed. I felt it, a quake beneath my skin.

  The storm was six miles off. Maybe less. We had to hurry. Had to get to the top of the Tower, as close to the storm as possible. This was one instance when it would not do to arrive fashionably late for the party.

  We were close to the Tower now, and faint music could be heard from far above us.

  From the top of the world.

  But something wasn’t right. The rovers had abandoned the use of black lights to mask their locations. A spotlight on top of the Tower revolved and beamed a circle against the sky, and there was light on other floors of the Tower, too. On almost every floor. It wasn’t bright, but it was there, and the closer we came, the more I could make out, through the windows, figures moving and dancing. The many pounding beats coming from different DJs on so many floors was a crazy-making pandemonium of noise, especially with thunder crashing around inside my head.

  “He filled the Tower,” I said in a voice the wind tried to take. “There must be thousands of people in there!” Thousands more dead. But they would be just the beginning. The first to die.

  I would not let that happen.

  We ran like we were racing the wind, but when we came to the front doors of the Tower, Jeremy stopped me.

  “Mia—” His words choked off, thick with emotion.

  I frowned. “What is it?”

  He shook his head. His eyes slid away. I remembered his dark lashes flickering; his eyes flashing open.

  “Jeremy …” I still loved saying his name. “Did you see something new? About me?”

  A muscle in his cheek jumped. He turned his eyes back to mine. “No,” he said, and then so softly I could barely hear him over the thunder, “nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  I planted my hands on both sides of his face, and felt the heat of him on my palms. I guided his mouth onto mine, and the warmth became a fire and the fire melted us until there was no stop between him and me.

  But no vision opened inside my mind. Jeremy wouldn’t let me see it.

  I pulled away from him, breathing hard and fast. “Why won’t you show me?”

  He shook his head, shook it like he could loose the vision he was keeping from me. I pounded my fists against his chest. He was a statue, hands clenched at his sides.

  I gave up and let my head fall forward. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I already know what you saw.” The vision of martyrs. Emotion tried to dam the words in my throat. “I’m going to die.”

  At least Parker and Mom would be safe. And the world would go on. I would make sure of it.

  Not everyone has to die a martyr, I remembered telling Mr. Kale.

  Not everyone. But me … yes.

  I raised my head and looked into Jeremy’s eyes, and I saw my death there. He didn’t have to touch me to show it to me.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath, and I kissed him again, not so that I could see my end, but so I could feel what might have been.

  The Lovers and the Tower.

  Maybe there had never really been a choice.

  I kissed Jeremy like it was the last time, because it was.

  * * *

  The elevator doors opened onto the roof, and we were assaulted simultaneously by wind and music. I didn’t know which was louder, but the rushing air made my skin seem to writhe over my muscles, as though the particles of matter that made me were coming unbound, pulling apart.

  I gasped in pain. In agony. And I yearned for it to go on and on. Sensation roared through me. The siren song of the storm played on my skin, in my bones, in my blood.

  We stepped out onto the roof. Near the elevator door, a DJ with wild, dirty dreads spun out his beats on twin turntables. The floor was packed with rovers, here to celebrate the beginning of the end at the top of the world.

  A brilliant flash of red cut the sky, leaving an afterimage like a bloody wound. Rovers gasped, but kept on dancing, fingers pointed at the clouds.

  My heart felt like it would tear through my chest, and my breath shortened to gasps.

  “We have to get them out of here,” I panted. “The storm will be here any minute!”

  Jeremy stepped behind the turntables and grabbed the DJ’s mic.

  “Not again, man!” the DJ protested, but Jeremy shoved him back. Suddenly, the music went silent, and there was only the scream of the wind and hundreds of confused-looking rovers who wanted to know what had happened to the music.

  My heart pounded in swells, each beat a crashing wave.

  The storm was nearly here. Black cotton clouds, mountain clouds, anvil clouds were pressing toward us. Lightning flashed and pulsed. As much light as darkness in the sky.

  “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi—”

  Thunder shook the air.

  We were running out of time. Always running out of time.

  Then, a voice amplified through the speakers—Jeremy’s voice.

  “Listen to me. Everyone listen! It’s not safe for you here. Please vacate the building as quickly as you can.”

  “We’re not going anywhere! This is where we belong!” I looked for the owner of the voice and found a familiar face. Jude, the girl I’d helped Katrina recruit the other night. Everyone had stopped dancing, and stood staring at me now. Their eyes were unnaturally calm, and I realized these were not just any rovers. They didn’t need red cloaks and black masks to make them recognizable as Seekers. I could see it in the way they ceased dancing at once, the way they had begun to move in formation, like there was some invisible thread connecting them. In fact, the only person who didn’t seem to have some idea what was happening was the DJ.

  I turned from them and faced west, toward the coming storm. Lightning stuttered through the sky over Koreatown.

  “Not long now,” I said, and my voice sounded faint, like the voice of someone leaving. Someone almost gone.

  Far below, I saw the lights of dozens of vehicles entering the Waste, heading toward the Tower. More rovers? I wondered. They should have come earlier. They’d missed the party.

  The storm was nearly here, and I was feeling less and less whole. I was breaking apart, particles of me starting to rise into the air.

  I moved to the center of the roof, amid the rovers. I could feel the Spark humming off them, crackling against my skin. The energy that brought them here in the first place. I thought of the Tower card I had drawn; the people falling to their deaths.

  Jeremy dropped the mic and began forcing his way through the crowd toward me.

  “You should go now,” I told him. “It’s not safe for you either.”

  He shook his head. “I’m staying.”

  “Then stay back.” I looked around at the rovers. Their eyes were for me. “All of you, stay back.”

  The rovers backed away, but Jeremy didn’t move. I looked at him, and for a moment I started to feel whole again, the particles of me that had risen descending toward me.

  “Mia—” he began, and then lightning flashed, and thunder rent the air, swallowing his words.

  Lightning shot through the clouds, reaching for me, and thunder jarred the night, seeming to shake the Tower to its very foundation. My arms shot toward the sky. The first drops of rain splattered my palms.

  As lightning streaked and pulsed and branched across the clouds, my blood screamed for more. My skin itched to drink in the heat.

  “One-Mississippi—”

  Crash!

  The elevator dinged open, and red-cloaked Seekers poured from inside, moving as one. They melted into the circle the rovers had formed around the roof and joined hands, as though the action were instinctual. br />
  Jeremy did not join them. He couldn’t, I realized, because he was not bonded to them. He could not share his power with them. He stood separate, as close and as far away from me as he could allow himself to be.

  More lightning. More thunder. Light and noise, blinding and deafening.

  I felt like my skin was going to peel right off my flesh.

  Another spurt of rain splattered the roof, and then the downpour began. The electricity in the air went wild; my Spark responded like my body was strapped with explosives. Every hair stood on end. My ears rang. I tasted copper and knew I’d bitten my tongue.

  I turned my face to the clouds. “Come back to me,” I whispered to the lightning.

  I screamed as it struck, spearing down into the palms of my hands.

  And then …

  I was on fire, and I was the fire.

  The pain was more than pain. A word had not been invented to describe this pain, because it was also perfect. An agony of pleasure.

  The ringing in my ears grew to a shriek. The air sizzled with electricity. Another bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, a great blazing tree growing toward me at the speed of light.

  I was struck. Again. Again. Again.

  Jagged arms of light reached to embrace me. To hold me. And I grabbed them and held them as long as I could, to take back the lightning I had given.

  Light the color of blood beamed around the circle of Seekers. Another circle, a circle of Followers, had created the storm. Would this one, made up of people with the same power but with a different intent, end it?

  Maybe, but not before the storm ended me.

  The heat tore through me. Shattered me. This lightning was more than I had created—the storm had grown it. I had taken my own lightning back, and then some. I had reached capacity.

  I dared a look down at myself and found that the terrible bridesmaid’s dress had been incinerated, leaving my skin bare. The lightning scars were back, etching me with red light. The veinlike markings were opening up. I was cracking apart like glass.

  Breaking … shattering … my body lanced by bolt after bolt of lightning, jerking and convulsing. The burned cinders of my clothes surrounded me. The lightning scars blazed like incandescent blood on my skin.

  I couldn’t take much more.

  The red light surrounding the Seekers intensified until I could feel the tremor of it in the air all around me.

  And suddenly I realized that the world had gone silent. The thunder had stopped.

  I turned my face up to the clouds, saw a hole had formed in their center. The eye of the storm. Only it was growing, expanding, opening wider and wider. The storm was breaking, tearing itself apart, and behind it lay a clear black sky dusted with stars, glittering like glass dust.

  I smiled as I felt my heart beat for the last time. And then it was still. Everything was still.

  I let go of my life.

  My eyes began to close, and my body to fall. Death wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. I would finally get some rest.

  And then I saw Jeremy dash forward to catch me before I could hit the ground, and fear squeezed my heart so hard it thumped once … twice …

  No, don’t touch me! I wanted to scream at him. “DON’T TOUCH ME!”

  I scrambled back from Jeremy.

  Was I still alive? I had to be, didn’t I? I could move, and I could feel … I could feel so much heat swimming through me, settling into my body to make itself at home.

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked. “It’s … not safe … to touch me … not yet. Too hot … still.” My heart hammered in my chest, in my head, in my hands and feet. I was so charged. I was lightning incarnate. Again.

  Jeremy stared at me, mouth open. “I thought you were dead.”

  I wheezed out a laugh. “I was, a bit.”

  We both looked at the sky. The clouds departing, dissipating like smoke, thinning to nonexistence.

  I smiled. Then I saw how Jeremy was studying my face, his brow creased with worry. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, and began removing his white button-up shirt.

  “What are you—” I glanced down. “Oh.” I tried to cover myself, but I didn’t have nearly enough arms. The rovers and Seekers who ringed the Tower graciously turned their eyes away from my nakedness, but I caught quite a few of them checking out the strange marks on my body.

  Jeremy held out his shirt to me, but he made no effort to avert his eyes. He was seeing me, naked, lightning scars and all. I searched his face for evidence of revulsion, but there was only him. The lightning scar on his chest stood out starkly against his bare skin, like a red star exploding.

  “Can I touch you yet?” he asked, smiling a little.

  I took the shirt from him, and, when my touch didn’t turn it to ash, I nodded before pulling it over my head.

  Jeremy reached out tentatively and ran a finger down the vein of a lightning scar on my neck. He winced, but didn’t withdraw. His hand moved to cup my cheek. He ran the ball of his thumb over my skin, and a momentary shadow passed over his face. Then it was gone, and he was kissing me, and all I could do was hope I wasn’t burning him.

  No vision overtook my mind.

  Jeremy touched me, and I touched him.

  And it was just the two of us, the Lovers and the Tower.

  EPILOGUE

  I am not afraid of storms,

  for I am learning how to sail my ship.

  —Louisa May Alcott

  A part of me thought things would go back to normal after that night in the Waste. The night I died a little bit. The night I quit being ashamed of the lightning scars and accepted who I was … the Tower girl. The night Mom stopped being afraid all the time, and Parker and Mom and I forgave each other for things that didn’t matter anymore. The night I fell in love with a boy who could see my future, and kissed him under a clear night sky in the ruins of Los Angeles while my skin sang electric.

  The night I killed a man named Rance Ridley … a man who called himself Prophet. Who had purchased the Tower under an alias and offered to host the Rove in his building, even though he’d publicly defamed the rovers. But no one could ask Prophet why he’d done such a thing, because Prophet was dead, burned to black during a freak lightning storm.

  Yeah, things weren’t quite back to normal.

  Returning to Skyline wasn’t an option for me. I had changed, and even though I no longer felt the need to hide my lightning scars, I couldn’t go back to school the way I was. The scars had grown again, veins of red stretching across my right cheek, between my eyes, and over my forehead.

  My eyes were the real problem. The lightning had entered them, veining the whites to red. And my pupils … there was light in them, subtle, but definitely there. No matter how much I blinked, it wouldn’t go away. I wondered, if I used some of the lightning inside me, if I let go a little, would the red retreat from my eyes? I didn’t know, so I was keeping the lightning to myself for now. I had a feeling I might need it again. I wanted to believe I had played my part for the Seekers, but I remembered Madam Lupescu’s reading. I remembered that Hierophant card, my potential. Another possible future.

  For now, I was content to spend my days with Jeremy. He had nowhere to go now that Prophet was dead and the Apostles scattered. He didn’t even want to return to the beach house to claim his things.

  “That part of my life is over,” Jeremy told me. I knew that wasn’t quite true. I could still see the deaths of the people who were killed during the quake haunting his eyes. I wondered if Jeremy would ever be able to forgive himself. I knew firsthand how hard that would be.

  Jeremy didn’t go back to Prophet’s beach house, but I did. Only once. There was something I’d left behind, in the topmost bedroom.

  The Lovers card.

  That was something I wanted to keep.

  Jeremy had been sleeping on our couch since the storm, but because neither he nor I needed much sleep, we spent nights tangled in
each other’s arms and legs, kissing until the heat became too much to bear and we broke apart, gulped water, and then started over again.

  Jeremy was still hesitant about touching me, even though he hadn’t had a vision since the storm. Luckily, he had no reservations about me touching him.

  So I did.

  A lot.

  Mom remembered very little from the time she started watching The Hour of Light until her near-wedding/near-death. In fact, the majority of Prophet’s former Followers were dealing with a sort of mass amnesia. Even people who had only watched his show and never come to a revival in person to receive his “blessing” were foggy on the events of their lives up until his death.

  I asked Mr. Kale if Prophet’s mind-control ability had been so powerful it worked even through a TV show. He shook his head. “That had nothing to do with his power, and everything to do with the power of his words, and the time he chose to say them. He spoke to people’s fear, and the fear listened.”

  I nodded, thinking of how Prophet had succeeded in brainwashing me, and how he couldn’t have done it if a part of me hadn’t wanted to listen.

  But that was the old Mia. I was different now.

  When you’ve been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time. But I had a feeling the worst was behind me, and I think Mom felt the same way. She told me she had died for a moment, after Prophet cut her throat, but it hadn’t been like her near-death experience during the quake. She didn’t see a light or anything like that, but there had been something … a feeling that she was not alone, and that there was more waiting for her after this life than darkness.

  One week after the storm, Mom announced that I was having a birthday party. I was turning eighteen. I’d completely forgotten.

  The party was small, and Mom was barely able to scrounge up ingredients to make a cake, but it was still bigger than any birthday party I’d ever had. Mom invited Katrina and Mr. Kale, and Parker invited Quentin and Schiz. Jeremy was the only person I invited, though he hardly needed an invitation.