Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  “She told me something,” I said to Katrina. “During the quake, she was—” I swallowed. “She was struck by lightning.”

  Katrina nodded. I searched her face for some sign of surprise at this news, but there was none.

  “Does that …” I had to swallow again. My throat was paper-dry. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  I remembered the words Mr. Kale had spoken inside my mind, the ones that had made me want to run as fast as I could away from him.

  I know who you are. I know what you are. And I know about the lightning.

  Katrina shook her head, like she was disappointed in me. “The Spark has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? I thought you’d have figured it out by now. You really do have a talent for self-deception, Mia.”

  My hand fell from her arm, and she turned from me. I watched as she spoke quietly to Jude. I could still see the tip of one branching lightning scar reaching out from beneath Jude’s hair.

  The energy that had my skin on edge, that magnetism I’d felt since we entered the Waste, only grew stronger as we neared our destination.

  We arrived as a group at the revolving front doors of the Tower, which had formerly been glass but were now shattered and boarded up, though one of the plank boards was missing.

  My eyes darted nervously as one by one the rovers filed through the door. Everything about this was surreal. The Tower rising above us; the Waste surrounding us; this bizarre mountain range of torn cement and granite and iron, all of it coated in glass dust, sparkling. The devastation was so complete it was almost like it belonged here, like it was the natural landscape, and only the Tower seemed out of place.

  Katrina tugged my sleeve, and I followed her into the expansive foyer, lit by the moonlight shining in through the high windows.

  “This is the best Rove location yet,” she said. “Normally they just use some abandoned warehouse or loft. I talked to a rover, who said some gazillionaire bought the Tower and he’s cool with hosting the Rove so long as it stays hush-hush.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Corporate sponsorship? How very un-bohemian. Won’t they have to change the name if the Rove doesn’t rove anymore?”

  “Not if it’s on a different floor every night.”

  I thought of what I’d seen when I touched Jeremy’s hands … when he put them over my eyes. Standing on the roof of the Tower; reaching for the clouds and calling the lightning down.

  I swallowed. “What floor is it on tonight?”

  “Sixty-nine, of course.”

  “You’re sure it’s not on the roof?” I asked, and when she nodded I exhaled the breath I’d held hostage. “But I don’t get it,” I said as we made our way toward a bank of elevators. “Why would the Tower’s owner let a bunch of rovers party here? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Katrina shrugged. “Don’t look a gift gazillionaire in the mouth.” She nudged me into the crowded elevator and the doors slid closed.

  “I guess that explains why the power’s on in this building.”

  I watched the floor numbers climb, tingling with anxiety. Or was it that strange energy radiating from the ground in the Waste that had my skin on edge?

  When we reached the sixty-ninth floor, the elevator came to a halt, the doors opened.

  I blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There was no light. That would have given away the Rove’s location. But black lights were set up around the room, so the relative darkness was filled with creepy, levitating smiles and white eyes that reminded me of Prophet.

  There were perhaps two hundred people, not that many considering how packed some clubs got. But the Rove was an exclusive party, if only because it was hard to reach.

  We moved into the room. Tandem DJs worked side by side at the turntables, like fry cooks sweating over a grill, spinning out fat, electro beats. People danced in orgies, filling the wide-open space. The party sprawled across the entire floor, sections of which were still occupied by modular cubicles that were now, I assumed, being used for more private kinds of partying.

  A guy wearing aviator sunglasses and an unbuttoned cowboy shirt handed out baggies filled with weed or white powder or tablets of X to the rovers, which they accepted gratefully, and paid for in cash. Apparently, the Rove was the one place in the city where drugs and alcohol weren’t in short supply.

  The windows on this floor had either been replaced or hadn’t shattered during the quake. The city was laid out in every direction below us. Katrina went to one of the windows, and I followed her, finding excuses to touch people as I passed, waiting to perceive the subtle electric buzz of someone with the Spark, searching every face for my brother’s.

  At the windows, we stared out at the city. The sky was dark, but Los Angeles glittered, an inverted night sky speckled with amber stars. But in a wide radius around the Tower itself all was blackness, as though the building stood alone in the center of a huge moat.

  I shuddered and turned my back on the window.

  Get this over with, I thought. Find Katrina’s recruits. Find Parker. Get out of the Waste.

  Katrina had her flask in hand, tipped to her lips as she surveyed the room. She offered the flask to me, but I shook my head. No more white lightning for me. I needed to stay focused.

  “How do we do this?” I had to shout in Katrina’s ear to be heard. “The recruiting, I mean. Do you have a system or something?”

  “Find an excuse to touch people,” she said. “If they have the Spark, bring them to me and I’ll give them the song and dance.”

  This sounded too simple. “You’ll ask them if they want to help save the world?” I asked. “Just like that?”

  “Basically. Yes.”

  “What if they say no?”

  Katrina’s mouth curled, something between a smile and a sneer. “That doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. Most people want to be a part of something larger than their insignificant little selves. They want to believe they have a higher purpose. And rovers, well, they’re not the type of people who want to see the world destroyed and remade by Prophet and his Followers.” She looked at me pointedly. “So far you’ve kind of been the exception to the rule. Happy hunting!”

  With that, she lifted her arms above her head and danced off into the crowd. A dozen sets of arms enveloped her and she was gone.

  “Katrina, wait!” I called after her. But my voice was lost in the driving beat of the music. Great. How was I going to find her again if I did locate someone with the Spark? And how was I supposed to track down Parker in this crush of people?

  I had to. That was the only option. I wasn’t leaving here until I found my brother.

  I cut a path through the dancers with their glowing teeth and eyes, hands out at my sides like plastic flaps in an automatic car wash, touching everyone I passed. I wondered if it would be easier to feel the Spark if I took off my gloves. What I wanted to do was peel off every layer of clothing clinging to my skin and douse myself with ice water. Rovers pressed in around me, their hot bodies bumping and rubbing up against me, their skin slick, sweat making the air damp.

  I caught sight of Jude on the dance floor. She was grooving along with everyone else, but her movements were perfunctory, her gaze distant, as though her mind was far away. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking about.

  “Hey,” I said, approaching her. “Have you seen my friend Katrina? She’s the one … the one I sent to talk to you about … you know.”

  Jude nodded, leaning her head toward mine. “The Spark,” she said. “Katrina told me about it.”

  “Are you going to … join up?” I asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Really? You don’t want to think it over before you make any big decisions?”

  “I don’t need to. As soon as Katrina told me about the Spark and what it means, I knew she was telling the truth, that I wasn’t going crazy. This happened to me for a reason. Now it makes sense.”

  “It makes sense,” I repeated, wondering if Katrina had given
a better sales pitch to Jude.

  “It’s a relief, actually,” Jude said. “Now that I know I have something to fight against, I don’t feel so powerless anymore. It seemed like the whole world was spinning out of control, and there was nothing I could do about it. But now …” She smiled. “You understand.”

  “Sure,” I said faintly. She probably didn’t hear me over the pounding beat. I wanted to tell her the truth … that I wasn’t sure about anything. That I didn’t understand any of this. That I felt as powerless as I ever had. Instead, I muttered, “See you around,” and drifted off into the crowd.

  How could Jude be so sure about her role in Katrina’s end-of-the-world scenario, when I had so many doubts?

  A hand touched down on my shoulder. Suddenly the temperature in the room, the temperature in my body, spiked. I gasped as the heat overloaded my brain and bleached my vision. I swooned and stumbled, and thought for sure I was going to crash to the ground. Then the pressure of the hand was gone from my shoulder and the heat dimmed.

  “I told you to stay out of the Waste,” said a familiar voice, speaking close enough to my ear that I sensed that heat again, a fire that taunted me from just out of reach. A fire I wanted to touch, even knowing its source had wanted me dead.

  24

  I TURNED AND there he was. Jeremy. Eyes gleaming white and furious in the glow of the black light, he motioned me off the dance floor.

  I didn’t move, remembering the dream that was not a dream at all, Jeremy standing over me with that silver knife.

  The fury in his eyes grew when I refused to follow. He really did look like he wanted to kill me now.

  “We don’t have time for this,” he hissed in my ear. “I have to get you out of here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Oh, yes you are.” He grabbed my elbow and yanked me off the dance floor. I stumbled along beside him, with his heat sinking into me like sunlight, waiting for the darkness to follow. But for some reason it didn’t, although I felt it wanting to happen. Jeremy released me before it could, and as soon as his hand was gone I stopped moving.

  We were on the edge of the dance floor now. I crossed my arms over my chest, partly out of indignation, partly because I needed to trap them, keep them from doing what they wanted to do, which was to touch Jeremy. To feel the burn of him. How could I still be thinking this way about a guy who had considered stabbing me to death?

  “Please, Mia,” Jeremy said, the anger in his voice softening until he was almost begging. “You can’t be here.”

  My folded arms tightened, and I began scanning the room once again. “I’m not going anywhere without Parker.”

  Jeremy’s face froze between expressions. “Who … who’s Parker?”

  “My brother. He’s here somewhere, and I’m not leaving without him.”

  “Oh.” Jeremy’s shoulders dropped a little, as though he was relieved.

  Did he think I was talking about another guy? A non-brother guy?

  Jeremy, too, started scouring the room with his eyes.

  “Do you even know what my brother looks like?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I’ve seen him before.”

  My heart lurched. “When? Were you in his room? Were you going to stick a knife in him, too?”

  “No! I swear I’ve never gone near him. You were the only one I …” His words fell away, like they’d stumbled off a cliff. He must have realized there was no good way to say, You were the only one I considered murdering.

  But if he wanted me dead, why was he so intent on saving me?

  I let my eyes linger on Jeremy, studying him, trying to decide if I could see past the knife incident to trust him. But the only thing I could think about when I stared at him was how I wanted to keep staring, never take my eyes away. Even with his eyes and teeth glowing, he looked miles beyond good, in a beaten black motorcycle jacket and white jeans that were luminous under the black light. The white jeans threw me off for a second, but on Jeremy they worked.

  I pried my eyes from Jeremy and stood on tiptoes to see over the mass of people bunched together on the dance floor. “Let’s pretend I would consider going anywhere with you,” I said. “I assume you have a car?”

  “A bike.”

  “A bike as in motorcycle?” I shook my head. I wouldn’t be ditching Katrina after all. “Where’s my brother supposed to sit?”

  Jeremy cursed under his breath. His jaw clenched. Fists clenched. “You’ll have to go without him.”

  “No way. Why do you want me to—” My words stopped. I thought of what I’d seen when Jeremy pressed his hands to my eyes, me falling into the chasm. The same chasm I’d almost plunged into tonight. “Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?” I said, eyes widening. “You saw it.”

  Jeremy didn’t get a chance to confirm or deny. At that moment the elevator doors opened, and a new group of rovers filed into the room.

  They were dressed in white. All in white. They glowed under the black light like a pack of ghosts.

  “This is bad,” Jeremy said.

  The Followers glided toward the DJ station, their feet barely seeming to touch the ground. They were young. Not one of them looked older than twenty, but that might have been due to the air of innocence they carried in their empty expressions.

  Some of the rovers on the elevator side of the dance floor had noticed the Followers, and their movements slowed to a stop, like windup toys that had run down. The two DJs looked up to see the procession heading straight for them, and they gawked, forgetting their records. They missed a transition, and more rovers took notice. Voices rose in complaint and quickly fell as more and more people saw the Followers.

  The two Followers at the head of the procession, a boy and a girl, both with hair so blond it glowed as bright as their whites, came to a stop at the DJ table. I recognized them from The Hour of Light. They were two of Prophet’s adopted children, the freakishly tall twins.

  The rest of the Followers looked familiar, too. I thought of the headline I’d read on Schiz’s blog—Where Is Prophet’s Twelfth Apostle?—and counted them. There were only eleven, but I was sure these were Prophet’s adopted children.

  I looked at Jeremy, at the grim expression on his face. Had he known Prophet’s Apostles were coming? Had he seen it, the way he’d seen me coming to the Waste, falling into the chasm?

  Panic twisted my stomach into cruel knots. Where was Parker?

  The twins spoke to the DJs for a moment in voices no one else could hear. There was a lot of head shaking on the DJs’ end. But the other Apostles surrounded the DJ station, and finally the DJs gave the twins what they wanted.

  They handed over their microphones and shut off the music.

  The room went so quiet I felt like I’d gone spontaneously deaf.

  The twins faced an audience of stunned rovers, glowing eyes empty, smiles lifting the corners of their mouths to unnatural heights.

  Jeremy nudged me and jerked his head toward a door on the far side of the room. There was a little plaque next to the door with a picture of a stick figure man walking down a flight of stick-figure stairs.

  I shook my head.

  “Hello,” the she-twin said into the microphone, her voice booming.

  “Good evening.” The he-twin gave a tiny bow. “You’re probably wondering why we’ve interrupted your party.”

  Silence from the rovers. I kept expecting the uproar to start, but they seemed to be in shock.

  “We’ve come to deliver an important message from Rance Ridley Prophet of the Church of Light,” the she-twin said, her smile stretching wider, though if it continued to grow it would extend the limits of her face. “In two days, you will all die.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for the silence to deepen, but it did. Until the he-twin broke it.

  “Unless,” the he-twin amended, “you come to Prophet with a penitent heart and surrender your souls to his mercy.”

  “It’s not too late,” said the she
-twin. “You can still be saved. All you have to do is ask humbly, and he will grant you his blessing.”

  “And the fires of hell will never touch you.”

  “You will be protected on the last day of earth.”

  “You will be raptured to Paradise.”

  “God speaks to Prophet and tells him so.”

  “But if you refuse to heed this warning … if you continue down the path of iniquity … you—”

  The twins cast their eyes about the room, as did the rest of the Apostles. I looked at Jeremy and saw his head was lowered, hair hanging in his face. He almost looked like he was praying.

  “—you,” the she-twin continued, “will be the first to die when the sixth seal is broken. The first to perish when the earth is rent asunder and the stars fall from the sky and the moon turns to blood. You will be—”

  “Shut up, you psycho bitch!”

  The voice rang out like a bell and seemed to reverberate through the room for seconds after it was raised.

  The she-twin’s smile shriveled. “Who said that?”

  The he-twin put his arm around his sister’s shoulder. “Who dares speak ill of my sister?”

  “Your sister’s a freak, and so are you!”

  Suddenly the rovers were all shouting at once. Cursing and hurling insults. And the Apostles were shouting back. I couldn’t make out their words. It was like someone had turned on a hundred blenders and thrown every voice in.

  One of the DJs tried to snatch the mic out of the she-twin’s hand. Her brother reacted, lashing out with his fist, connecting with the DJ’s throat. Another rover, this one twitchy and wild-eyed and definitely on something, launched himself at the he-twin, knocking him backward onto the floor. The rover landed on top and started pummeling the he-twin with both fists. The she-twin tried to pull the rover off her brother, and he shoved her away. She fell and hit her face on the corner of the DJ table, and when she got to her feet her mouth was gushing blood from a split lip. The blood dribbled down her chin and made dark splotches on her white dress.

  That was when the fighting really started.