Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [100]
“You were a little preoccupied last night?” her partner suggested mildly, getting up to rinse his mug and put it in the dishwasher. She accepted the truth of that. His building was modern and heavy and really well insulated; add in her own emotional distress, and it wasn’t all that surprising she hadn’t picked up on the storm tendrils reaching into the city. “A front moved by just to the south of us last night, according to the news, but it probably wasn’t close enough to get you hungry.”
Which she was, now. Starving, in fact, for something no amount of food could ever satisfy. Sergei took one look at her face and hustled her downstairs. The doorman whistled them up a cab and packed them into it, Sergei coming along with her. She didn’t even bother to argue. There had been an incident almost five years ago, involving a storm and a narrow balcony, that she was never, but ever going to live down.
By the time they got downtown to her building it was midmorning, and the air was heavy, thick, as though trying to recalculate itself into a solid. Wren dropped her bag off in the apartment and then climbed the fire escape up to the roof. She stood a safe distance away from the railing, surrounded by other brownstones and storefronts, the landscape of her neighborhood. She was hyper-aware of the rising noises of traffic from the streets below. The smell of the city in springtime, the sharp tang of ozone coming down from the sky competing with the harsher exhaust rising from the street. But in her mind she was standing on a hill, with grass underfoot, and the fresh, clean breeze of an oncoming storm tickling her skin, watching a front move closer to where she waited.
It was more difficult in the city. But difficult wasn’t always a bad thing. Having to work for something meant you were more willing to follow protocols. Protocols—the structure for drawing down power—eased the difficulty. They also meant that you were less likely to get caught up in the current surrounding you.
Less likely to wizz.
A low rumble of thunder sounded again, the growing darkness overhead promising a spring thunderstorm. The wind had picked up in the past few moments, and Wren’s T-shirt billowed where the wind caught at it, making her thankful for her leather jacket. But even without the signs, the accumulation of cumulonimbus clouds earlier during the day, or the thunder just now, or the warnings on the news, Wren would have known a storm was coming. Known it in the way the hairs on her arms and neck tingled. Known it in the edginess which invaded her system, and the way her breathing kept wanting to speed up without having exerted herself.
Like calls to like. An electrical storm carried with it power in a multitude of forms. Benjamin Franklin hadn’t been looking for a new way to light up houses when he went out with his kite and his metal key. For most Talents, man-made electricity was the only way to go. Pick your source according to your ability, your need, and siphon off what you want. It was already tamed, controlled. There was no risk it would sweep you over, snap the bindings that kept you inside your own head and send you flailing into an uncontrollable wild current.
Less risk. Less satisfaction. Less chance of addiction. Wren could tell herself that she was merely on the roof in order to get some fresh air. That she only wanted to feel the pressures shifting as the storm front rolled in. But if she didn’t lie to Sergei often, she almost never lied to herself. Her eyes closed, face lifted to the east where she could feel the front coming in from New Jersey.
Long ago, they used to blame changes of weather for people’s moods, a pseudoscientific