Firestorm

I reached out to try to stabilize the system.

Too late.

Lightning exploded, down in the real world, expending immense power upward, and slamming it down like a pile driver into the ground on the other end. There was so much energy involved that it literally knocked me for a loop in the aetheric. The roar in the physical world was devastatingly, deafeningly huge.

I felt the pulse of alarm from David, and saw something happen on the aetheric that I'd never witnessed. Never heard of, either.

An enormous column of energy erupted up from the ground in a thick, milk-white stream, heading for the sky.

What the hell was that?

I stared at it, stricken, and willed myself to move closer. Movement happens fast on the aetheric, unless you're careful, and I wasn't careful enough. I zipped forward, realized that I was moving too fast and the stream was closer—and larger—than I'd thought, and fought to slow myself down.

That should have been easy. It wasn't.

I could feel the suction. This thing was moving, and I mean fast as a freight train. It looked stable, but it was really a wildly speeding column of energy erupting up from the ground and fountaining into the sky, an uncontrolled bleed as if the plane of existence itself had popped a blood vessel.

I dropped back into my body, hurtling out of the sky at a disorienting speed, landed in flesh and jerked from the psychic impact. It didn't hurt so much as leave me reeling. David's grip on my hand steadied me. I opened my eyes and looked at him. "You saw it?" I asked. He nodded. "What is it?"

"There's too much aetheric power in the ground," he said. "It's not the only fissure that's opening. Just the closest."

"What do I do to stop it?"

He looked grim as he said, "I don't think you can."

"And?…"

"And bad things are going to happen," he said. "Very bad things. Look, this problem is too big for the Wardens. Too big for the Dji

"No. I don't accept that. What, you want me to just shrug and say, Oh well, some casualties are expected? You know me better than that! David, tell me what I can do!"

He hesitated. And he might have persuaded me that there really wasn't anything to do, that there were some things beyond my control, but right about then a lightning bolt shattered the sky and struck a light pole about fifty feet away, across the road.

The actinic flash seared across my retinas, even though I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face away, huddling against the car door; I felt David fling himself forward, and then his hot-metal weight covered me.

I didn't need protecting, but it was nice that he had the instinct.

When he let me up, I blinked back Day-Glo smears and looked around.

The metal light pole was half melted, and it was tipping over with majestic slowness. A tree falling in the forest. I yelled and pointed. It picked up speed, groaning, and slammed down across the road with a heavy glass-breaking thump, trailing hot wires that hissed and jumped.

Missed us by ten feet.

The traffic was relatively light, but hardly nonexistent; an SUV squealed brakes and skidded sideways, banging into the fallen pole. Then a car hit it. Then another.

Then a minivan plowed full force into the snarl of metal.

"Oh my God," I whispered, and fumbled for my door latch. I made it out of the Camaro and stumbled across wet gravel to the road. It was littered with hot glints of broken glass, and power lines were sliding wildly over the crushed metal. The minivan barely even looked like a vehicle, and it was about the size of a Volkswagen, postimpact. Somebody's engine was still ru

"Help me," I said, and looked around for David.

He was gone.

I couldn't believe it, honestly couldn't. He'd left me? In the middle of this, when people needed help? What the hell?…

No time to waste in thinking about it. I climbed over a crushed bumper and got to the window of the SUV. Two college-age boys in there, steroid-pumped, looking dazed.

"You guys okay?"

Their air bags had deployed, and they both had bloody noses, but they seemed all right. One of them gave me a wordless, shaky thumbs-up as he unbuckled his seat belt.

"Get out of your car and off to the side of the road," I said. "Watch the power lines, they're live."

I moved on to the next car. A woman, unconscious. I watched the snaking power lines nervously; they were coming closer, and I knew how these things went. Power calls to power. Sooner or later, they'd be drawn to me. I could control fire, but I wasn't exactly skilled at it yet, and this was hardly the final exam I wanted. Power lines were notoriously difficult to deal with, because of the continuous stream of energy.

I put that problem aside and concentrated on the woman in the car. Hard to tell what was the bigger risk—leaving her in the car or moving her. If she had any kind of spinal injury…

I made the hard decision and left her where she was. Somebody was screaming for help in the minivan.

The power lines suddenly swerved, blindly seeking me. I danced back out of the way, watching them the way a snake charmer watches a cobra, and edged around to the back bumper of the wreck of the van. I tried the door. Locked, or jammed. The back window was broken. I leaned in to have a look.

There was a man in the driver's side, looking limp and at the very least dead to the world, if not dead in fact. The woman next to him was the one doing the screaming. She was pi

No way I could get her out alone.

I eased around the wreck to the passenger side and slid along the crumpled metal, watching my feet—not so much for the glass and metal as for the power lines, which had whipped craftily out of sight.

"Hey," I said, and risked a look into the shattered passenger window at the woman trapped there. She was middle-aged, pleasantly plump, and under normal circumstances she might have been pretty; stress and injury had reduced her face to a mask of blood and terror. She was whimpering softly, no longer screaming. Her eyes flew open and fixed on me. One pupil was larger than the other.

"Help my daughter," she said. "Help my little girl."

I hadn't seen any kids in my quick survey. "In the back?" I asked. She nodded. "Okay. You hang on. Help is coming." I had to assume it was; when everybody over the age of ten had a cell phone, the 911 operators had probably been flooded with calls.

I tried to see into the back, but it was an inky mess, no sign of life. I needed the Jaws of Life or something. Not that I knew what I was going to do when I found her…

A slender black shape hissed from the shadows under the van and struck at my feet. I screamed and skipped backward, and the power line rolled and writhed at the limit of its leash. Wanting me. Wanting to ground through my flesh.

Damn, that had been too close.

Just as I thought it, I sensed another surge, this one coming from my right, and catapulted up into Oversight. The lines looked like neon whips up there, and there were at least four of them writhing around me. Struggling to reach me. I edged left. One rolled to cut me off, then lunged.

Nowhere to go. If I tried to run, I was dead. If I stayed where I was…

I tried, hopelessly, to break the flood of power through the metal, but I was out of my element. Badly. Worse, every elemental control I did have would make things worse.