Struck (35 page)

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.

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.