“Do you know how fast he has to be?” Jonquille demanded. She nearly crawled out of the crevice. “He hit it quicker that time. He knows it’s coming the way I do. I want to go up there. I wish I could talk to him the way you do. I should have asked him if we could do that. It would have made things so much easier.” She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.
“Hang on a moment and don’t do anything dumb like move.”
“There’s another one coming,” Jonquille warned again.
This one was very dangerous, directly over Rubin’s position. He directed it with seeming ease this time. It was all Jonquille could do not to sprint back up the mountain toward him.
“I’m a strong telepath, Jonquille,” Diego surprised her by saying. “I asked Rubin if he minded if I looped you in. He agreed, so I’ll start you out. That way you can talk with either of us when you need to.”
“That would be so perfect, thank you.”
Rubin, she’s all yours.
She is, Rubin agreed.
I’m coming up there. The minute I start moving, the lightning will start striking. The lead stroke will look for me.
Even down here? Diego asked. We’re quite a bit below Rubin’s position.
Yes. I’m fast though. After the next strike I’ll start running. Rubin, do you think you can redirect when the lightning is targeting me?
Rubin was silent. She could tell he was thinking it over. I know I could if you were up here. The idea is to practice for every situation though, so this is good for me. I don’t want you hurt. It’s building again. Stay put, Jonquille. Wait one more time.
She wanted to get to him, but she waited, the pull terrible now, especially because it was doubly so, the need to get to Rubin almost as strong as the magnetic charging happening to her body.
Diego, your eyes. Both Rubin and Jonquille warned him at the exact same moment, and she realized Rubin had been warning his brother every strike. She thought it was significant that Rubin knew the strike was imminent the exact moment she did. The bolt slammed toward something Rubin must have laid out in the field to attract it, but this time, even faster, it was redirected much farther than the last one, hitting something she couldn’t see and sending up enough sparks that it looked like the Fourth of July.
She didn’t wait. She was up and running. She might be short, but she had been given enhancements as well, from Whitney, and she used them to her advantage, leaping huge distances, fully across the gorge, racing up the other side to get to the bald top.
Her body was lighting up. Glowing. Going hot. Her hair pulled straight out and up. Her eyes went fully silver. She was exactly what the lead stroke looked for when it came charging toward earth. She put her arms up. If the bolt struck her, as it did others so many times a year, she wouldn’t be harmed in the way they were. She didn’t have to huddle in fear. She would absorb the strike. She had no idea why, or how it was possible. Neither did Whitney. He only knew that she’d been born attracting energy and he’d enhanced that to the point that she had become a freak of nature, and there seemed to be no way of undoing what he’d done to her.
The cloud seemed to open and fire rained on the earth in the form of white-hot silvery jagged spears. She had known there were going to be multiple strikes, not just one. Rubin was going to have his hands full. She tended to attract more than one strike. She should have warned him. The bolts came so fast it was impossible to see them, so she hoped Diego was actually getting them on his recorder so they could slow it down later because Rubin managed to redirect every single one. The last came close enough that she felt the whisper of its burn before it was gone, whisked away by an astonishing force of energy every bit as strong and willful.
The storm was still moving, the wind pushing it toward the valleys, where it was slowly dying down in strength. A few more streaks of lightning leapt at her sideways, and each time, Rubin pushed them away from her.
Shut it down, Rubin, you’re getting too tired. You still have to go see Mama Patricia today, Diego said.
Jonquille realized it was true. Rubin was exhausted. She looked over at him, and he was lying in the blackened section where the first lightning strike had been directed. He lay motionless looking up at the clouds.
I’m sorry, Rubin, I can take a few hits. The storm’s moving away. Just rest for a while. If the lightning keeps coming this way, it won’t for long. You’ve practiced enough. She didn’t dare go over to him, not when the top of the mountain was so bare. She’d lead a strike right to him.