Struck (20 page)

Katrina pointed. My eyes followed the path of her finger.

She was pointing at the Tower.

Of course she was.

As we neared the Tower, other people began to emerge from the darkness, joining us in our march toward the Rove. Our group grew until we numbered about thirty. It was a party on the way to a party, everyone talking and laughing, passing flasks and joints and pipes, seemingly unconcerned about the sentries that might be patrolling the Waste. Katrina informed me—which she should have done earlier—that many of the sentries doubled as ushers, winning themselves free passage into the Rove.

Katrina moved among the rovers as though they were old friends at a reunion, flirting shamelessly with the guys,
ignoring scowls from girls she cut in on. I noticed the way she touched people before she spoke to them, testing for the Spark. Though she kept talking and laughing as she made the rounds, her expression was one of extreme concentration whenever she touched someone new.

I searched the growing crowd for Parker, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he was already at the Rove.

Katrina made her way back to me. She gestured at the rovers. “Would it kill you to help me out here?”

“You seem to be doing fine,” I said. “Besides, I’m not here to help you. As soon as I find my brother, I’m gone.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you plan to get home? Walk? Call a cab?”

She had a point.

“Look, I’ll make a deal with you,” Katrina said, flipping her nonexistent hair back over her shoulder and then frowning as she remembered it was now an inch long.

“You always have a deal in mind, don’t you?”

She shrugged and adjusted her corset. Her boobs were dangerously close to freeing themselves. “Find me three people with the Spark, and I promise I’ll help you find your brother and I’ll take you both home. Otherwise, you’re stuck here until I say it’s time to leave.”

I turned to my right and picked out the person walking closest to me, a blonde wearing peacock feathers tied into her hair. I held out my hand to her. “Hi, I’m Mia. What’s your name?”

“Jude.”

Her eyes widened as our hands touched. So did mine. I felt a subtle hum of static crackling off her.

That was easy.

She snatched her hand back. I stared at her with my mouth open.

“You felt it, too, didn’t you,” she said softly.

I forced my mouth to work. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

Her eyes went to mine, wide and frightened. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said, keeping her voice low. “It started the day of the quake. I was downtown, you know … when it happened.” She bit her lip. “Now I come here every night. I don’t even know why. I just … I can’t stay away. It’s like something pulls me here. Is that how it is for you?”

Her eyes begged me to say yes, but I didn’t want to lie to her. “There’s someone you should talk to,” I told her instead. “She’ll explain everything.”

I caught sight of Katrina and started to raise my hand to wave her over when I glimpsed a mark on Jude’s shoulder blade, branching out from below her long hair, almost entirely hidden. She saw me staring and moved her hair over the veiny red line on her shoulder.

“It’s called a Lichtenberg figure,” she said, sounding defensive, as though I’d looked at the mark with disgust. “I’ve had it since the storm. It should have gone away by now, but … it hasn’t.”

“You said you were downtown during the quake?”

She nodded.

“Were you …?”

“Struck by lightning?” she finished for me. “No, but the woman standing next to me was. She had a heart attack and died on the spot. I tried to give her CPR, but she was gone like that.” Jude snapped her fingers. “I felt a kind of
jolt when the woman was struck, though, almost like I’d been stung. My doctor said the lightning might have struck me indirectly, jumped off her and landed on me for a second.”

“Excuse me,” I said to the girl, and left her standing there, looking confused.

I hurried over to Katrina, grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the guy she was hanging on.

“What?” she asked, irritated.

I nodded at the girl, Jude. “One,” I said.

Katrina smiled. “That was fast.” She started toward Jude, but I wouldn’t let go of her arm until she shook me off, wincing as though I’d been pinching her.

“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.