Prologue

  Josefa stood in a dark room in an even darker mood. She strained against the weight of her sister dangling from the ceiling above, feet kicking like a kid in too tall a chair. Her twin sister had, of course, forgotten a counterweight for this aerial operation, but Josefa was deemed heavy enough. Maria was a forgetful person, and Josefa could not believe that fact had slipped her own mind. Last time, they brought a few soiled sacks of potatoes for the job, fuzzy mold filling those cramped quarters in an instant with a sour stench. Josefa had complained about that job too, about the stench and about Maria’s general cheeriness, and here she was complaining again. Perhaps all this was more an indictment of her own self-control and attitude than it was Maria’s pension for detail. Perhaps Josefa would let that thought flit away and give her sister an earful anyway.

  They worked in a great, empty room adjacent to the Amphitheatre in this pyramid, a room with a catwalk near the ceiling and a general aura of disuse and unnecessity. They had been assigned to it regardless. Maria had been trying to pump Josefa up for their work all morning with a nervous energy than her typical and irksome too-sweet smiles. Josefa listened as Maria had droned on as they looked out over the Amphitheatre from the service room catwalk through the great mosaic window implanted in the stone, all curved triangles of glass and thin metal frame. Maria had said Storms were great repair people and always did faster and better jobs than the normies. While Josefa accepted that, she wasn’t happy to be fixing the light in this service room again.

  Now, Maria hung from a pulley in the ceiling, accessed by the catwalk, and they had checked on it with both their weights before stringing a thick rope through the mechanism and getting to work. She sat aboard a plank of wood wound through with the rope one hundred paces up, body swaying to a silent merengue beat, and her head nodded up and down. Josefa preferred banda.

  “Can’t you just fix this thing? We’ve been here too many times.”

  “Que, Josi? Just pull back a little more, and I can reach the last line!”

  Josefa mocked her sister’s earlier prattling under her breath, “Oh, you’re so strong, Josi. You can handle me; I hardly weigh a thing.” Bit delusional. “I’ll remember the rotten food next time.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nada!”

  Little white sparks and arcs zipped from Maria’s fingers through the empty room and into the infinity of the dark. The lamp by Josefa’s feet flickered on the glossed stone floor. The bits of light did not harmonize. She felt her sister’s weight pull and tug from under her armpits, almost a massage if it weren’t for the familial frustration. From the depths of the dark, a black scorpion crept forward to the lamplight, big as Josefa’s straightened hand, palm and fingers and all. She yelped, and her grip on the rope loosened. Maria squealed as she entered the open air on her plank of wood. Josefa caught her sister and breathed out hard. She clung tightly to the rope now.

  “Lo siento! I’ll get you back up!”

  Maria said nothing and let herself be raised. Josefa looked back at the scorpion, its deep black shell matched just so with the rest of the Ministry’s walls and floors, walls and floors hidden by a darkness identical to their own absence of color. Its legs tapped on the stone in the lightest of percussion. Josefa pointed and pushed a funnel of a shockwave towards it, and it lifted from the ground and disappeared. She imagined a thousand more just beyond the border of her lamplight in the darkness, and she shuddered. The Ministry was full to the brim of critters like that, and it always made Josefa’s skin crawl. She couldn’t wait to sleep in her own bed for a few nights, away from the pyramid and Maria’s odd absences of late.

  A white light exploded above their heads, and Josefa’s grip on the rope loosened in shock again. Maria let out a screech as she plummeted into the open air. Josefa squeezed her hands tight again, and the rope tried to take some of her palms racing to the pulley at the ceiling. Another screech echoed off the far walls as her sister came to a stop. A deep ache from that intense flash above forced Josefa’s eyes to close, and the pain in her hands squeezed tears down her cheeks. Another flash pierced the dark, and the web of veins in her eyelids were outlined in black on red.

  “Let me down!” Maria screamed.

  Josefa blinked the tears from her eyes and a flash came again. She heard her sister shouting curses at her and at the light and at the Parents above. Maria’s cheeriness seemed to have fled with the light. Josefa’s hands worked one under the other to let Maria down, and she didn’t dare let the rope slip now in their hurry. It wouldn’t do to let Maria’s blood and brains stain the stone, killing them both. Other voices shouted from inside the Amphitheatre.

  “What in all the punishments in the Father’s cruel imagination is going on!?” Josefa cursed back at her sister. “You hit another live line with your arcs, didn’t you!”

  “Get me down! I knew we were taking too long!” Maria screamed back down to her.

  What did Maria know about this? This was not some training session become a little too hardcore. Something was very wrong. But there wasn’t time for internal deliberation. Josefa needed her sister down, and they needed out of this place. Her hands worked the rope furiously, and her shoulders prayed to her for relief. “Let me know when you think you can jump! I can’t keep this up after holding up your great weight all day!”

  “I’m not JUMPING! Estas loca?! We should be ok in here!” Maria yelled back.

  The room rang like a struck metal drum, and the ground trembled. Crack and bang and the ground began shaking. There was a fight in the Ministry. There must be.

  A boom struck Josefa’s chest unlike anything. It flung the air in her lungs to her spine, her heart fluttering with the bass.

  The twinkle of glass shattering tore Josefa’s attention up to that mosaic window in horror. A swarm of falling glass shards dazzled a foreign night sky of twinkling little stars onto the walls. Big and jagged, tiny and piercing, the glass fell towards them in league with pieces of sharp metal turning in the air, quiet and promising, seeming to fall slow and lethargic. Maria screamed and covered her head with her hands.

  Josefa wouldn’t just stand there and take it, so she got reckless with the blessings in every way she’d been trained not to. Riling that energy in her gut, she pushed from her shoulders and head into the falling cloud of sharp death seeking her and sister. The Thunderhead must protect the Bolt. For there cannot be thunder without lightning.

  Three successive shockwaves blitzed straight up and into the debris cloud, thick walls of white shot through with lightning flashes from the fight in the other room, thickly condensed air to punch anything in their path away.

  Anything but Maria.

  The waves split just around the woman holding onto her rope and plank, then they struck into the cloud of glass. The closest pieces collided with the ceiling and into the walls far away from the twins, an avalanche of deathly ice against black stone in the night. In the thin wake of the split shockwaves, shards of glass and cracked metal fell still, but fewer in number. Some nicked Maria, some the Bolt melted with her lightning, a static ball of charge hanging in the air around her, while others fell past and toward Josefa.

  A large piece of glass slammed into the lamp at Josefa’s feet, sending angry hornets and burning oil in a ring around the impact. Several of those pieces bit into Josefa’s leg and her woven wool pants caught fire. She felt only the impact without the pain, shock and pumping blood keeping her focused. A chorus of similar, bright crashes echoed around her. It could have been beautiful. A small shockwave pushed from Josefa’s calf took care of the fire, and she continued pumping the blasts into the air to clear as much away from Maria as she could.

  Shocks caught more of the falling metal now, but it was heavier and harder to move. A piece missed the meat of Maria’s body, thank the Parents, but crashed into the plank she clung to. It spun the perch round and round. The rope yanked at Josefa as her sister’s weight was flung about from the hit. Her feet were dragged across the glossed ground through a thin film of shattered glass and oil.

  Maria screamed. Josefa screamed too.

  A piece of glass sliced Maria on the thigh before continuing down, and her cries turned desperate. The piece hit the ground and shattered. Blood red shards skidded to a halt at Josefa’s feet. Her hands became slippery with her dreadful rope burn and her sister’s dripping blood.

  “Is it bad?!” Josefa called at her sister, knowing Maria’s optimistic answer wouldn’t back up the evidence all over the floor.

  “It won’t be bad if you can get me down soon!” Predictable. The woman up above grasped at her leg and held her head in her other hand. Josefa could see the wrote disbelief on Maria’s face.

  Another bit of the mosaic window burst from the wall, and Josefa pushed her shockwaves again toward the danger, the fight on the other side continuing unshaken by the sisters’ plight, the burning in Josefa’s shoulders intensifying from a deep soreness to a sharp searing with each push. She smelled hair singing on her arms as they heated with the stress of her thunderclaps.

  Thunderheads weren’t supposed to focus shocks on the same body parts over and over, but she had no choice.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  With her feet planted and her hands moving in a steady rhythm lowering Maria, she cleared a protective bubble of sound and pressure around herself. The pain in her shoulders became too much while both saving her sister and shoving away glass. Her skin became blistered and angry red with the overuse of her blessing. Frustrated, Josefa drew back into herself and glanced back up to her sister.

  Maria dangled about twenty paces off the ground now. The rage of lightning and thunder in the Amphitheatre shook her and cast her shadow on the stone, blinking in the pulsing lights and looking all the unnatural ways a body could contort in death. Josefa called to her, “You need to jump!”

  Nineteen paces in the air.

  “Que?! I’ll shatter what’s left of my leg!”

  Eighteen paces.

  “You’re going to lose it to a piece of that window if you don’t!”

  Lightning arced into the room and struck the roof. The broken light turned on. Stark whiteness blinded and chased the shadows to the corners of the pyramid.

  Seventeen.

  “Just a little more!”

  Sixteen. Fifteen.

  An explosion of electricity and a powerful shockwave broke through the last of the mosaic above.

  “JUST JUMP!”

  Panes of glass refracted light onto the walls like a chandelier. Josefa felt her eardrums burst with the pressure. The catwalk broke free of the stone.

  Maria jumped.

  Josefa watched as her sister floated towards the ground, mouth opened in a silent scream. The twinkling glass and metal sought a resting place with their hearts and within their bodies, and it tumbled like it was flowing in a stream of honey. Time crawled as Maria’s arms and legs swung in empty space.

  Then it all came down at once.

  Flashes of light stabbed Josefa’s eyes. Eruptions of sound buffeted her ears. Maria smacked into the ground like a rag doll.

  Chunks of the catwalk came down around them. Josefa summoned her remaining energy and shoved her hands out with a shockwave to protect her sister. It was too little too late.

  Glass broke on twisted metal, and something crashed into Josefa’s chest. She fell and saw her sister lying broken on the ground. A thin line of blood ran past her lips. Josefa’s vision went black, and the ache in her eyes faded. The Mother called to her.

  Buenas noches, mi hija.

  Buenos días, mi hija.

  Josefa's eyes cracked open at the Mother’s greeting. Her chest was hit with a hammer of pain as she breathed. What had transpired was a fresh scar in her memory, and she worried over the extent of damage to her body. She lay in a bed with her torso upright at a slight incline, and thin sheets covered her legs. She tried to sit up straight, but her body refused her commands. She wiggled her toes to make sure she wasn’t crippled. They flinched, at the very least. It felt like her ribs were broken, and a great number of bandages were wrapped around her. She had no shirt, but the bandages covered more skin than most of her work vests anyway. She lifted her hands to her chest to feel out the sources of pain.

  The skin there was all somehow numb and sensitive at the same time, like she was using someone else’s hand to touch her chest, but she got to feel all the pain. She shifted and her left shoulder seized, a bandage thicker than the rest there holding fast to her skin with a strong adhesive. A small red dot stood out at its center. That must be where she’d been struck in the chest after Maria had hit the ground.

  Oh Father, Maria!

  The Bolt must be alive, or Josefa would be a mess of meat and bone. She frantically looked about herself. The room was very dark, but her eyes were beginning to adjust to the blackness. Dim light, the whiteness of the floor lights Maria repaired day in and day out, crept its way under a door on the far side of the room, a few steps from the end of the gurney. Josefa tried extending her arms to the side to see if Maria was lying next to her. A stand with metal trays and more bandages stood between Josefa and another gurney. Her outreached arm knocked a tray to the ground, and a form on the other bed shifted.

  “Josi, I’m glad you’re awake,” Maria rasped at her. Despite the weak sound of her sister’s voice, it was still stronger than Josefa felt. “I’ve been awake for a while,” Maria continued, “they said they heard your thunder and the catwalk falling. They came for us and brought us to the infirmary.”

  Josefa blinked with relief and confusion. How could anyone have picked them out from the cataclysm going on in the Amphitheatre? And Maria seemed in remarkably good condition for the fall she’d taken.

  “Are you not hurt?”

  “Ha,” Maria coughed a little, “you got the short end of the stick on this one. I only busted my lip and broke some ribs. They said it was a good thing I didn’t land on my feet. No mame?s. But I’m happy you’re even awake. It’s been a week since the attack.”

  A week? Josefa had been unconscious a whole week? It seemed she was making fun of Maria for not wanting to get out of bed just that morning. Espera.

  “Attack? What do you mean attack?”

  The door to their room opened, and a slight figure outlined by the floor lights outside hobbled in. “I heard you two chatting in here. Que suerte.” The figure jabbed a finger out to the hall, “I need some conversation in this gloomy place.”

  “Hola, Socorra,” Maria raised a hand towards the figure.

  Josefa noticed her sister’s hand was ghastly pale, but that was nothing compared to their apparent company. “Socorra? Like the Arm of the Monastery Socorra?” Josefa was dumbstruck. Storm or not, people of her and her sister’s station did not just stumble upon a person in one of the highest positions under the Parents. The Monastery wasn’t the center for governance, but its monks were famous, providing all the spiritual support and scientific progress for the people of La Terra.

  “Hola, soy Socorra. Yes, the one from the Monastery. I pulled a piece of metal from your chest and helped sew you right back up a few days ago. It’s not in my office now.”

  “Que?”

  “Ah, Maria,” Socorra kept speaking without missing a beat, “how do your ribs feel today? On a scale of un perro to… uh… whatever the highest level is, can you run down the halls?”

  Maria croaked out a laugh, “I do not think I can run at all, Child.”

  Josefa lowered her brows trying to make sense of the situation. “How do you two know each other?”

  The little old lady hobbled over to Josefa’s bed while ignoring her question. A bony finger prodded the bandage on her chest. Her body seized with pain, and she gasped.

  “Oh hush, I already took out the metal and didn’t keep it,” Socorra chastised.

  Josefa, breathing heavily, snapped, “Why do you insist on telling me you didn’t keep it?”

  The bag of bones turned to look at Maria. “Your sister seems to think I have it as a keepsake. Tell her I don’t.”

  Josefa was steaming. She felt her awareness move to her hands, an instinct to remove the old hag from the room. They screamed a retort, and Josefa lost her breath.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Josi,” Socorra said the nickname for her with mocking derision and smiled, “your hands might get more broken.”

  Why was this woman here? This made no sense. Josefa glared at the putrid sack with disdain. Five seconds with the woman and Josefa already hated her.

  “In any case, if we leave now, we can get front row seats for the executions.”

  Socorra called in nurses to wheel the sisters in their mobile beds out into the hall. They were pushed along slow curving hallways wrapped up in the glossy stone of the Ministry. Every hallway, ceiling, and floor reflected their figures like shiny ink. Thin, white strips of light made a continuous stream of luminescence down the halls where floors met walls. Josefa found the smooth glow too artificial, too gloomy, preferring the wild cast of fire by night. Gloomy. That was one thing Socorra had right.

  After what felt like an eon of bumps and shakes of the bed torturing Josefa’s body, the hallway opened to the Amphitheatre. It was an enormous room with a domed ceiling and lighting like the hallways, but it had additional overhead lamps fixed three-quarters of the way up the two-hundred-pace high dome. Men and women could be covered by a pinky at the opposite side of the room. Deep scoring marked the walls and floor. That was new. The mosaic window was blown out halfway up the arc of wall to their right. The service room was likely in shambles on the other side.

  Josefa assumed the executions would be for the massive attack that caused all the mayhem a week before, yet just twenty men and women stood bound at the center of the Amphitheatre. They must be blessed. Ten Storms on their own would already be a force to reckon with, but if they were well-trained… The nurses stopped pushing the beds fifty paces from the line of people.

  “The attackers and their conspirators,” Socorra whispered in Josefa’s ear. The woman’s breath reeked of old cheese. The men and women in chains were certainly related.

  “All Storms?” Josefa hadn’t heard of an attack or revolt by the blessed in La Terra’s history.

  “Si?, all power plants from the lower levels,” Maria interjected.

  “How would you know?”

  “I was awake before you,” Maria said, “Socorra told me.”

  “Si?, si?…”

  Socorra’s attention never left the bound Storms.

  The company of near-cripples and nurses waited as many people filed into the Amphitheatre from just as many hallways, like the center of some great hive. Nervous murmurs in the crowd echoed around the room and filled Josefa with a sense of anxiety. And all the while, the Arm kept staring at the prisoners. Josefa tried to follow her gaze to a particular one, and she was almost certain the Child’s eyes tracked to the man and women on the right side of the line. Maria stared there now with just as much… sadness? For these criminals?

  Loud, metallic footfalls overtook the melancholic crowd, and everyone fell silent. Twenty men and women in gray armor hammered with the fury of thunder and lit with the blaze of lightning filed in and stood before the prisoners. This new group must be the Ministry’s defensive force of the Parents’ blessed children, delivered by those that bore them to the Ministry for any purpose the Parents required. Today, the gods required death. And just as those Greatstorm demon babies were executed each year, the Parents would eliminate those that stood against them. Ten of the defensive force carried Bolt-arms, two metal bars strapped together and a small projectile placed on an armature between them.

  The Thunderheads unlatched a stand for the weapons and set them on the ground. Their Bolts took their place behind the weapons. They aimed the Bolt-arms at the chest of ten of the prisoners in front of them. The air was sucked from the room with the sound of the faint clanks and clicks of the adjusted weapons. Every person in the crowd stood tense.

  “No, this is barbaric…” Josefa said under her breath with realization. Capital punishment was useful, by the Parents’ guidance, but this would be torture.

  “It is what must be done,” Socorra replied. There was a waver in the old woman’s tone.

  A voice called through the room and above the shifting crowd of Ministry workers, “In accordance with the Parent’s guidance, these men and women will be put to death. At the request of the Father, the harshest punishment will be carried out. Thunderheads, ready your arms.”

  The Bolt-arms had been ready the whole time.

  “Bolts, call your lightning.”

  Sparks of electricity lit and roamed across the bodies of half the execution force. Their arcs sprinkled the Amphitheatre with fine pops. The faint smell of a sun-filled rainfall drifted through the crowd.

  “By the Parent’s guidance, let their children be punished.”

  The sparkling men and women placed fingers on both bars of the Bolt-arms. A sound like a hammer hitting an anvil smacked Josefa in the stomach. People in the crowd choked on their cries in horror. The Bolt-arms were lowered, now empty. One by one, ten of the prisoners collapsed, blood spreading on the black stone. Under that manufactured light, it was impossible to tell where the blood stopped and the stone carried on.

  Screams began to fill the empty space left by the Bolt-arms ring. The rest of the prisoners dropped and writhed on the floor, backs arching to an unnatural angle. Their arms began snapping, and their legs bent the wrong direction at the knees. Their screams went hoarse then turned into something like pig squeals then to quiet gurgles.

  Still, they writhed. An execution of just the Bolts, so their twins broke as a result. There cannot be thunder without lightning.

  Josefa could hear her sister’s sniffling, but that was not her reaction. It wasn’t in her. A hot rage pulsed in her temples instead at the sight of the executioners.

  “Let us return to the infirmary,” Socorra said. The nurses turned the beds and pushed them away.