Chapter 5
ATLAS
The tomato is how the dream starts. Always the tomato. The quiet before the literal storm.
Mom standing at the counter chopping a tomato with a paring knife while the radio plays something old and comforting. There's the smell of whatever she was baking while she prepped dinner—lemon cake, always lemon cake in the dream even though I don't remember if it was lemon cake that day.
I was seven. I remember the tomato. I remember the radio. I remember the way the light came through the window and caught the dust in the air and made it glow.
Then the light changes.
It goes wrong—too bright, too white, not sunlight anymore but something else.
Something that comes from inside her, that wants out.
She drops the bowl. Her hands are glowing.
Her whole body is glowing, and I'm standing in the doorway watching my mother turn into a thing made of light, and the radio is still playing, and she looks at me—
She looks at me.
That's the part I can't survive seeing in my dreams. Her face, full of love and terror, knowing what's about to happen and not being able to stop it. She reaches for me. Says my name.
And then the kitchen is gone and she's gone and everything is noise and heat and I'm lying in the rubble of what used to be my house with my ears ringing and my arms burned and my mother's name in my mouth and nobody to hear it because everybody who could hear it is dead.
I wake up with lightning in my hands.
The ceiling of the motel room in Missouri has a new scorch mark. That makes four, in five states, since we started running. My conductor is white-hot—I must have been gripping it in my sleep—and the air smells like ozone and burnt plaster.
The lamp on the nightstand is dead, the bulb shattered, the outlet on the wall scorched black around the melted plug. Again.
"Atlas." Everly's voice. Close. Careful. "Hey. You're here, okay? You're with me."
She's sitting on the edge of my bed. She's just there when the lightning starts to fade, her hand already on my arm.
The lightning is still crackling up my arms and writhing around me.
The conductor is channeling it, or trying to, but there's too much so it's leaking out the sides, arcing between my fingers, scorching the sheets.
She puts her hand on my arm. She always puts her hand on my arm.
Every time. Even though it hurts her—I can feel it through the bond, the jolt of electricity biting into her skin, demanding a little pain for her effort, but she doesn't pull away from me.
That's the thing about Everly Grey that makes it hard to be around her.
I don't deserve the way she's looking at me, how softly she's touching me, how concerned her expression is.
I almost killed her once, on a rooftop, because Catalina Bolingbroke told Callum to tell me to scare the scholarship girl and I did it.
Not because there was something personal about it, some sort of reason, but because the lightning came when I was angry and I liked to let it have a target to hit.
She tackled me. Pink tennis shoes on wet stone, that face fierce and brave, and the lightning hit the spot where she'd been standing, and she lay on top of me dripping wet and furious and alive, and I looked at her and knew I'd almost taken something from the world that the world couldn't afford to lose.
I've been trying to make up for that ever since. I don't think you can make up for almost killing someone. I think you just carry it.
"Missouri," she says. "Remember? That motel with the questionable vending machine. You're here."
The lightning dies. Slow. It always goes slow—embers cooling off instead of a switch being flicked. My hands stop sparking. My chest relaxes. The ozone smell fades.
"What time is it?"
"Three-something. You lasted longer tonight."
She says it like it's progress. Like the nightmares letting me sleep for four hours of my night instead of two is something to celebrate. Maybe it is. The bar's underground at this point and I still might stumble over it.
I sit up. She's cross-legged on the mattress beside me, her hair messed up, the moose shirt wrinkled and loose on her shoulders. Tired. Worried. Stubborn. The same three things she's been since we left. She never stops being any of them.
"You should sleep," I tell her.
"Can't." She shrugs. "The bond wakes me when you spike. It's like having an alarm clock that runs on lightning."
"Sorry."
"Stop apologizing. I mean it."
I look at my hands. The scorch marks on my fingers, the calluses from the conductor, the faint white lines on my forearms from the burns that night. Seven years old, lying in the rubble, arms on fire.
"She was like you," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. Everly goes very still.
"My mother. She was—" I stop. Start again. "She could do what you do. Absorb things. Channel more than one discipline. Dad called her gifted. The Administration called her a threat to the magical world."
Everly doesn't speak. She's gone still—the kind of still that means she's afraid of breaking something if she moves.
"What happened?"
"She overloaded." My voice is flat. Flatter than I want it.
"The magic—she took in too much of it, too fast, and nobody taught her how to deal with it because nobody was supposed to know she could do it.
She kept it hidden for years. From everyone except Dad.
And then one Tuesday she was baking a cake and it—"
I can't say it. Can't make the words for what it looked like when my mother became light and then became nothing.
"The kitchen," I say instead. "That's the dream I have every night. I'm in the kitchen as she dies."
Everly's hand is still on my arm. Not gripping. Just there.
"That's why Catalina—"
"That's why Catalina everything. Why she watches you. Why she tested you. Why the Bolingbrokes have been handling people like you for fifty years." I hear the bitterness in my own voice and can't stop it. "Because sometimes it goes wrong. And when it goes wrong, it takes a city block with it."
Silence. The bond pulses between us—her fear, my grief, both of them tangled together in a chord I can't separate.
"Is that what you think will happen to me?"
I look at her. Pink tennis shoes girl. Endless optimism girl. The girl who tackled me on a rooftop instead of running, who keeps putting her hand on my arm every time I wake up burning, who is sitting here at three AM asking me if I think she's a bomb.
"No," I say. "That's what I'm afraid of. There's a difference between you and my mom, a lot of differences actually, but the main one is that you're so much more fucking powerful than her that I'm not sure it would be just a city block if you went that way."
She doesn't say anything else. Just stays. The motel settles around us—Felix's breathing from the other bed, Callum's silence from the bathroom, Ren's careful heartbeat from the chair.
I don't tell her the rest. That my father brought me to campus after the funeral. Handed me to Catalina Bolingbroke like luggage. Said keep him safe. She said of course. He drove away. Never came back.
I've been hers since I was nine—the Tempest scholarship, the fraternity presidency, the dormitory, the meals. All of it hers. I was hers. Until that fateful day in the amphitheater when I aimed my lightning at Everly and let her take it in until she nearly died and took us all with her.
I don't tell her any of that. Not tonight.
Tonight I let her sit with me until the sky turns grey and the nightmares don't come back.
---
The gas station fire is my fault.
I'll own that. What I won't own is the accusation that I did it on purpose, because I didn't—I did it because Callum said we should go north through Kansas and Felix said we should stay on I-44 through Oklahoma and Callum called Felix's judgment unreliable and Felix called Callum's mother's surveillance network amateur and I lost my temper because they wouldn't shut the fuck up.
Losing my temper means lightning.
I didn't aim for the gas pump. I was aiming for the sky—a reflex, the way some people punch walls, except my wall is the atmosphere and my fist is a few thousand volts.
The bolt went up. But lightning doesn't care about intention.
It arcs. Finds the nearest conductor. And the nearest conductor was a twenty-year-old fuel pump fifteen feet away.
The explosion isn't as bad as it could be. One pump. A modest fireball. The canopy over the pumps catches fire. Somebody inside the station screams very dramatically. A car alarm goes off.
"Go." Callum is already moving, shadows swallowing the security camera above the door. "Go. Now."
We go.
Everly drives. She's the only one whose hands aren't shaking. She pulls out of the station at exactly the speed limit—not fast enough to draw attention, not slow enough to catch the fire trucks on their way in—and she doesn't say a word for three miles.
Nobody does.
The plume of black smoke is visible in the rearview mirror for ten minutes.
I watch it and I count the things I've burned since we started running.
One ceiling, four lamps, a bedspread in Pennsylvania, and now a gas pump in Missouri.
That's my contribution. That's what I bring to this—property damage and nightmares and the ability to make a bad situation actively worse with a flinch.
Felix breaks the silence first. Of course he does.
"Well." He's in the back, cards somehow already in his hands, shuffling with a steady rhythm that doesn't match the chaos in the bond. "That happened."
I don't answer.
"For what it's worth," he continues, "the odds of anyone identifying us from that are low. Callum got the camera. No injuries. The fire was dramatic but contained."
"It was a gas station." Ren, quiet, from the passenger seat. "He blew up a gas station."
"Technically one pump—"
"Shut up, Felix."
Silence again. The highway stretches ahead. A sign announces that the Oklahoma border is coming up in twenty miles.
Then Everly laughs.
It's small. Bitten-off, like she tried to stop it and couldn't. She's got both hands on the wheel and her shoulders are shaking and she's trying to swallow it and failing.
"Sorry," she says. "I'm sorry. It's not funny. You blew up a gas station."
"One pump," Felix says from the back.
She laughs harder. Ren covers his mouth. Felix is grinning—actually grinning, the real one, not the fake one, because nothing is funny about any of this and that's exactly why it's funny.
Even Callum's mouth twitches. A crack in the ice. Small. Nearly invisible. But there.
I stare out the window at the Missouri farmland and feel something shift in my chest that has nothing to do with lightning. Something warm and inconvenient and terrifying.
"For the record," I say, "I was aiming at the sky."
"Sure," Everly says. "And the pump just jumped in front of it."
"Basically."
"Very brave pump. Real hero to take the lightning bolt like that."
The laughter runs through the car like a warm wind—not electric, not the kind I make. Just five people who've been running scared for two weeks remembering they can still be absurd.
I don't smile. But only because I'm watching Everly laugh in the rearview mirror, and if I let go of what I'm feeling while I'm looking at her, the bond will broadcast it, and I'm not ready for four people to know the only secret I've got left.