The desert undulated before her, lit by bright starlight and the half-moon above. Rocky outcroppings and twisted juniper trees scattered across the low hills threw pale shadows across the sand. She avoided them and her home, leading Ace toward the wide strip of broken asphalt that had been the big road to Albuquerque. The road was cracked and lifted in chunks, melted black ribbons crumbling. The road led nowhere now. The people who had been the heart of Albuquerque were long gone, and past it was Native Nations desert territory and the Hell City that had been El Paso.
She preferred to ground near the road to nowhere. It was already broken and glassy in places, so she wouldn’t disturb the desert. But she couldn’t risk hiking four miles from the Pueblo tonight. The pride of lions roaming the Zone Three desert hunted at night. So did wolves. In her current condition, she couldn’t defend herself and Ace, and she had no desire to find more trouble.
You’ve already got enough trouble, Lena.
Her lips quirked, although it was pain not mirth behind the smile. She had cataloged the four-legged threats to their safety when the real danger to her life came in the two-legged variety.
She reached a long rise jutting out over a shallow indentation in the land, not quite an arroyo. It was clear of brush and junipers. It would do. She hopped down from the rise and quickly removed her clothes. Her hands, shaking now from cold, flipped and creased the fabric in sharp motions before handing it off to Ace and reminding him to stand back. He’d seen her ground before. He planted a quick kiss on the top of her head and moved well away. He couldn’t help her with this anyway.
Naked and shivering, she returned to the middle of the shallow bowl. She rubbed her hands together and took a deep breath. She paced for a moment, pushed her hair back behind her ears, and waited for the anticipatory nausea to subside.
With a cry that was half sob and half angry shout, she planted her feet and wrapped her arms around herself. Her head fell back, and her eyelids closed as she sent her mind down into the ground below her, burrowing deep into the cool dark of the earth. Even as she pushed down she could feel the Dust swarming up, coating her invisibly, to protect her from the worst of the discharge to come. She gritted her teeth and opened herself to the earth.
She forced the Dust immersed in her cells to unfold in a ripple of will and energy. They spiraled open like flowers, revealing the pulses of stored energy at their core. She harvested the charges, and each pulse joined together and flowed down her body in spurts, pulled by the charge-craving earth.
As they moved, they drew the earth’s energy up toward themselves. It seeped into the bottoms of her soles and pooled before creeping up. The flow down from Lena slowed and steadied, grew together, and filled her until she could taste the metallic tang, and the rich electricity filled her nostrils.
The initial crack of the electric channel forming as the two forces met within her deafened her to those that followed. The sound waves came so fast that they were indistinguishable from each other. She felt each one. The sear of the white hot energy was muted by the Dust coating her skin, but only enough for her to survive it. The terror of the heat grew. It filled her mind as it licked at her body, outside on her skin and inside at her muscle and bone. Her blood burned. She screamed; the sound became lost in the crash of discharging electricity. Heat filled her mouth, white static arcing between her teeth and then out, up from the ground through her to sheet across the sky.
As suddenly as the channel had formed, it released. The last of the feedback energy curled away as the lightning dissipated. Her collapsing body threw no shadow in the absolute dark following the loss of brilliant white, but as she broke the rippled glass that had been desert sand, the dull crack echoed.
A ghost of sound whispered through her lips. She curled onto her side until bile rose from her stomach and made her roll forward and lift herself to hands and knees. Her throat and sinuses burned, waking her from her grounding-induced stupor. She eased back onto her heels. Ace’s hands were there then. He was with her, easing her hair away from her face, checking to be sure the desert glass hadn’t cut her after she fell.
She needed time to recover, but the final bolt shooting up and sheeting across the sky might well attract those two-legged predators. Instinct would have animals headed in the opposite direction. Slavers were the danger after grounding. Those willing to trade in humans found a booming market for Sparks. Slavers didn’t often come this close to Native Nations territory, but it was good practice to not make oneself obvious. She usually grounded during the day when figuring out more than the general direction of a bolt was made more difficult. The hour after grounding was not the ideal time to try to fight away some bastard intent on dragging her off to sell to the highest bidder.
Or to best an agent intent on dragging her back to the Council.