Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  He didn’t get far.

  “Coward!” cried one of the Followers whose hand the Dealer had held, a chubby, middle-aged woman, who had a sweet, round-cheeked face but the deadest eyes I’d ever seen. She kicked the Dealer square in the crotch and he fell to his knees. “After Prophet healed you! Traitor!” she squalled. She linked with the other Follower whose hand the Dealer had dropped, the two of them pummeling the Dealer with their bare feet, smashing at him with their heels. Other Followers within kicking reach joined in the fun. Rachel was one of them. She kicked at the Dealer with manic glee in her popping eyes.

  “This is what happens when you defy Prophet!” Rachel shouted, but she threw her words at me rather than the man she’d just stomped.

  The Dealer writhed in the sand, and then began to twitch, and finally stilled altogether.

  How were we going to get out of here? Mr. Kale couldn’t deprogram everyone before we were asphyxiated. Even if I could get past the Apostles, I’d have hundreds of Followers to contend with. They’d beat us to death before we got ten feet from the platform.

  I blinked the sting out of my eyes, and when they cleared, I finally saw through the murky air the person I’d been looking for. He’d entered the tent with several other red-cloaked Seekers, and when he saw me he lowered his mask to show me his face. Show me he was here for me.

  “Parker!” I shouted, tugging Mom’s arm again. “Mom, come on. Parker’s here!”

  Distracted by the sight of my brother, my grip on Mom’s arm must have loosened. She tore away from me. I whirled to see her rushing back to Prophet’s side. He curled one arm around her smoothly, as though he’d been expecting her. With the other hand he reached beneath the lapel of his white suit coat. I caught a flash of silver as he withdrew that familiar knife with the smooth, wickedly sharp blade. Mom continued to cling to Prophet, even when he pressed the blade to her neck. She actually sighed and tilted her head back to reveal more of her vulnerable skin.

  A part of her wants this. A part of her wants to die.

  “No!” I refused to let her go, let her give up.

  I moved toward her, but Prophet either sensed my motion or caught the blur of it in his faded vision. He slid the knife blade against Mom’s neck and blood appeared and trailed down her throat and beaded on her satin gown, dark pearls among the white.

  Some people in the crowd gasped in shock, but they stayed where they were. Even the sight of their beloved Prophet with a knife to an innocent woman’s neck did not break the hold he had over them.

  The sight of my mother’s blood made a bomb go off inside me. Fire charged through my bloodstream until it gathered in my hands. I felt the air around me begin to crackle with the energy.

  “Join the circle,” Prophet said, this time out loud, and slid the knife farther along Mom’s throat, sawing through her skin. More blood streamed. Mom was smiling again. Gazing back into Prophet’s milky eyes and smiling.

  “I love you,” she said.

  In answer, Prophet cut deeper.

  “Mia.” Jeremy was staring at my hands.

  I looked down and saw what he saw. My hands were on fire.

  No. Not on fire, but glowing with a light the color of blood, and they were so hot. So very hot. Little red threads of energy emerged from my palms and squirmed, as though searching for something to attach to. Halos of red light beamed around my hands.

  “Join the circle,” Prophet said again, with finality in his voice, and I knew this was the last time he would tell me.

  “Mia, you can’t,” Jeremy pleaded. “You know what will happen.”

  I met Jeremy’s eyes, but only for a moment before I had to look away. Before I held out my hands to the Apostles, my heart exploding with fury and desperation. Prophet would cut my mother’s throat if I didn’t do this, and I would watch her die. I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t watch my mother die, knowing I had failed to save her. Failed her one final time.

  So instead I would fail the world.

  Maybe the storm wouldn’t bring another earthquake, a part of me thought. Maybe Prophet’s plan would fail, even if I gave him the lightning.

  But another part of me knew the truth; knew Prophet’s plan would work because Jeremy had seen it work a thousand times.

  The Apostles broke their circle and received me, and when my hands joined with theirs I felt the crackling fire-storm surge out from my heart, through my arms to my hands and into the circle. Ivan and Iris, the Apostles to my right and left, screamed in agony as I scorched them, but they didn’t let go. They couldn’t if they’d wanted to. I’d welded them to me. Threads of bloodred energy wound around their arms and grew and lengthened, stretching like my lightning scars to encompass the Apostles. There was terror in their eyes as the energy twisted around their limbs and torsos, wrapping them completely. Cocooning them in blood lightning.

  I felt the charge on my skin as the haze of storm clouds above us thickened and bunched, clouds darkening to the color of ink, permeated with electricity. With my electricity. The clouds filled the tent and pushed through the ceiling and into the air outside. Rain began to patter on the roof of the tent.

  And then crimson light blasted the sky, and thunder detonated.

  “Thy will be done!” A maniac grin spread on Prophet’s face as lightning lit up the sky and thunder boomed again. And I found I was grinning, too, caught in the thrill of the lightning, feeling it all over my skin, feeling more alive than I ever had before, and I wanted it to go on and on. This was no regular storm. This was my storm, and it had been waiting such a long time to get out.

  “Mia!”

  I barely heard the voice hidden beneath the sound of thunder. If it hadn’t been a voice I knew better than any other, I might have missed it.

  “Parker.” My voice seemed to come from a hundred miles away.

  I turned my head to look over my shoulder and saw him there. My little brother, moving toward the platform behind the rest of the Seekers as Mr. Kale cut a path. But slowly. Too slowly.

  They were too late. The storm had already begun, and now it was moving. I could already feel it traveling away from us, and quickly, as though something were pulling it, reeling it in.

  The Waste. The energy there, humming like a power plant under the ground … it was like the Spark or the Light. What you called it didn’t matter. It was energy, and certain types of energy attract other types of energy. A positive charge attracts a negative charge. I had given my energy, the energy stored inside me, to the storm, but clouds were not an efficient storage container. Clouds sought to release their energy, to connect to the right source.

  And they would find that source in the Waste, deep in the chasms that cracked the surface of the earth.

  The sixth seal. The Puente Hills Fault.

  But the sight of Parker broke the trance the lightning held me in, and Jeremy, detecting the change, took two steps and stood before me. Red light washed his face. My heart … my incinerator of a heart … ached for him. I didn’t want to cause him more pain, but I seemed destined to do so.

  “Mia, take back your hands,” he said softly.

  I nodded, but when I tried to pull my hands away, to break the circle, I found it impossible. I had fused myself to the Apostles.

  “I knew you couldn’t be trusted,” Iris said through the pain of being linked to me. “But you played your part anyway, didn’t you? You gave Father what he wanted.” Her smile was hate. It was triumph.

  I tried again to jerk my arms away, and nearly dislocated my shoulder. Merely pulling away from them wouldn’t work. I had to withdraw my energy, pull it back inside myself. But I had no idea how to do that.

  The sky lit up, so bright I was momentarily blinded. An earsplitting crack of thunder sounded.

  When my vision returned, I saw Prophet over Jeremy’s shoulder … his eyes wild with rapture. He still held the knife to Mom’s throat. “You’re too late,” he called, and he didn’t need the mic to make his voice heard throughout the ten
t. “The storm is moving toward the Waste! Soon the ground will quake, and the last Tower will fall, and the evil children of this city will fall with it. Here is where the end begins!”

  His grip on Mom had tightened as he spoke, and with his last words he convulsed as though in exaltation. The blade of the knife he still had pressed to her neck bit deep and her eyes widened, and blood … so much blood … poured from her throat.

  “Nooo!” I screamed, and in one agonizing rush sucked back the energy that wrapped the Apostles, rent my hands away, and shattered the circle. A great surge of energy went up like a mushroom cloud, and the Apostles cried out and fell back, tumbling off the side of the platform onto the Followers. Pain like my bones were breaking and my muscles snapping ripped through my body. But the pain didn’t matter.

  Jeremy grabbed me and held me back. I fought and kicked to get free, but he wouldn’t let me go.

  Mom’s body had gone limp in Prophet’s arms. Prophet’s mouth was parted in confusion. I realized he didn’t know what he’d done, didn’t understand why Mom had turned into a life-size doll in his arms. He couldn’t see her.

  Then he must have felt the blood soaking Mom’s white dress, spreading until the dress was more red than white, because he shook his head and his mouth formed “No.”

  Mom’s eyes were still open. She looked at me. She. The Mom I knew. The one from before Prophet. Before the quake. The one I’d thought was gone forever.

  And now she really would be.

  She opened her mouth as if to speak, but her vocal cords must have been severed, for nothing came out. She sagged, dead weight in Prophet’s arms.

  Prophet’s eyes rolled upward toward a sky strobing with electricity.

  Everything in me turned red. I wrestled against Jeremy’s hold and suddenly broke free. Jeremy slumped to the ground, his eyes twitching behind his lids as a vision stole him away.

  I left him lying there and stepped toward Prophet. “Look at me,” I said.

  Prophet brought his blind eyes to mine. “This was not part of the plan,” he said. “She wasn’t supposed to die.”

  I raised my hands, heat boiling and crackling in my palms. That bloodred light had seared away my white satin gloves; new veins of light, like incandescent wire, grew from my hands.

  “I don’t have a plan,” I said. I concentrated every ounce of will into my palms, and then … I let go.

  All the years I had held on, fighting for control, struggling to keep the fire trapped inside me … I let it go. Everything I hadn’t given to the storm went into Prophet.

  Red branches of light thick as rope blasted from my hands and entered Prophet’s body. He released Mom and let her slip to the ground, but not before a few stray veins of light entered her as well and made her jolt. Her back arched momentarily as the veins wrapped her and sank inside her.

  She slipped from Prophet’s arms and landed in the growing puddle of her blood.

  Then the lightning was for Prophet only.

  Prophet’s mouth screamed without sound, but the Followers, so many thousands and thousands of Followers, screamed for him. The tent was filled with their deafening banshee shrieks. Prophet’s lush white polar-bear hair sizzled to ash and snowed from his head. His white suit exploded in tatters of black cloth and his skin turned to charcoal, and then cracked to reveal the blood and muscle underneath the charred skin.

  I let go and let go and let go until Prophet was unrecognizable as anything that had ever been human. I emptied the fire until there was nothing left.

  Then the lightning was gone, and despite the flames that ate the tent walls, everything seemed dark in comparison.

  The congregation’s collective paralysis broke then. Followers ran for their lives. I saw Iris mowed down. Ivan tried to help her up, and then he fell, too, and I didn’t see either of them get up. Rachel with her Skyline gang tried to rally people to stay and fight, but first her gang deserted her, then the rest of the Followers shoved her aside. Prophet’s hold on them had been broken, and now everything was chaos and confusion.

  Finally, Rachel seemed to realize she was no longer under Prophet’s control, and she, too, broke for the exit.

  The Seekers fought their way toward the platform, their hands no longer linked.

  I registered all of this, and cared about none of it.

  I fell to my knees beside Mom’s body and gathered her to me. She was so light, but her blood weighted the wedding dress like stones sewn into the hems.

  I should have been crying, but I wasn’t. I felt hollow inside, like some essential part of me, maybe my soul, had vacated with the lightning. I was distantly aware that my bare hands were now truly bare. The scars were gone. I wondered if they were gone from my entire body now that I’d finally released the lightning.

  I held Mom’s body and rocked her, and I didn’t look up until Parker was beside me. I released a shuddering breath. A breath of giving up. We had to get out of here. The smoke was pressing down toward us and I could feel heat from the flaming tent walls. Time to pick up Mom’s body and take her out of here. At least Parker would be with me for that. I didn’t think I could do it without him.

  Prophet’s body could stay here. His Followers and his Apostles had left him. He would remain here alone while everything white turned as black as his charred remains.

  I looked at Parker, expecting his face to mirror my own feelings. But he was … smiling? No, he couldn’t be smiling. Unless he’d lost his mind, or my smoke-filled eyes were playing tricks on me, or—

  Or …

  I followed my brother’s eyes to Mom’s.

  They were open. And they were alive. Not alive on the way toward dead, but really alive.

  Mom reached up and touched her neck, where Prophet had cut her. But the blood was no longer flowing from the cut. She had a new scar, or what would become a scar in time. The wound was cauterized, a long line of red-black tissue. It wasn’t pretty, this cauterization, but it had sealed the wound and kept the blood in.

  I thought of those stray veins of light that had wriggled over Mom’s body when I struck Prophet. I almost laughed, thinking of the one thing I knew for certain about lightning: it was unpredictable. When it struck, you never knew what effect it would have.

  Mom was alive, sitting up. I found I was crying, and Parker was crying, and then we had our arms around each other.

  Then lightning lit up the sky, burning through my relief and thrilling my skin, reminding me that this night wasn’t over. There was something I still had to do. The storm was traveling to the Waste, and I had to get there first.

  I had to take back the lightning I had given to the storm.

  People were coughing violently.

  “We need to get out of here,” I heard someone say. It sounded like Mr. Kale, but maybe everyone sounded like Mr. Kale with smoke in their throats.

  Jeremy was easy to spot among the Seekers. He was the only one dressed in white.

  “Can you get me to the Waste?” I asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

  He nodded. The sadness and rage were gone from his eyes, replaced with grim determination.

  I turned to Parker. He had Mom propped up against him, her face as white as her dress used to be. She’d lost a lot of blood before I’d sealed the cut in her neck. It was soaked into her wedding dress, turning it the color of the Seekers’ cloaks.

  One of the Seekers standing nearby removed her black mask. “Don’t worry,” Katrina said. “We’ll get your mom to a hospital. Do what you need to do.”

  Her eyes strayed to the hunk of blackened flesh that was Prophet. “Thank you,” she said. She leaned against her uncle, and Mr. Kale nodded at me. “Thank you,” he echoed.

  There was no time for long goodbyes. To Parker, I said, “Take care of Mom.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, alarmed, his body tensing like he might try to grab me, stop me from leaving. But he didn’t let go of our mom.

  I took a moment to touch his arm, and his
eyes widened slightly. He looked at my hand.

  “I can feel it,” he said, his voice awed. “Your Spark.”

  “Goodbye, Parker.” The note of finality in my voice was hard to miss, but Parker didn’t try to stop me from what I had to do. He let me go.

  I can’t say I would’ve done the same for him.

  39

  WIND HOWLED THROUGH the Waste, and my skin howled with it. The sky overhead was still clear, but I could see the storm moving toward us. How long until it arrived? It was impossible to judge, seeing as how this was no natural storm, but a man-made one.

  A Mia-made storm.

  There were no sentries with tranq guns guarding the ramp that led into the Waste tonight. Perhaps they’d gotten the word that the rovers were first on God’s hit list and decided to err on the side of caution and steer clear of the Rove.

  Jeremy navigated his bike through ravaged streets of the Waste, driving so fast that any accident would equal us dead. But if we didn’t make it to the Tower in time, we might as well be, anyway.

  When he stopped the bike and we got off, my feet stuck to the spot where I stood, my whole body paralyzed by the rush of red-hot pins and needles prickling my skin. With the pain came exhilaration, a kind of euphoria that let me know I was alive, that I was connected to everything, every molecule that surrounded me. There was no point at which my body ended and everything else began. This was the feeling, this longing to join with something larger than myself, that had gotten me struck so many countless times. But I had never felt it this strongly. I had loaned the lightning to this storm, and I could feel it wanting to return to me.

  I closed my eyes and let the glass dust shower my face and burrow into my skin.

  “See you soon,” I whispered to the storm. I promised.

  I turned to Jeremy and saw his eyes were closed, too. His lashes flickering. And then his eyes flashed open and I saw fear. Nothing but fear.

  He turned his eyes away from mine.

  And I returned to aching for the storm.

  Jeremy and I ran through the Waste with the wind in our faces, blasting us with cement and glass dust. We shielded our eyes against the spray. Looking down at myself, I saw I was sparkling from the glass particles that clung to my bridesmaid dress.