Ever since she could remember she’d been fascinated by lightning. Her earliest memories were of pressing her nose to the window during storms, watching the dense black bullet-rain splatter heavily against the reinforced glass, watching the howling wet wind tear at anything left on the street (but not the people, even the homeless knew enough to stay inside during a summer storm in Salvation City), watching the blue-white light gather in the clouds and then split fork crash, and she saw the raw and pure energies of the storm with only the glass separating them.The first time she could work up the courage to go out in the rain was much later, when she was ten, maybe, or eleven, and her parents were not home. Her father called, told her that he and her mother were staying at the office overnight, unless the rain stopped. But the rain did not look likely to stop, because the weather people were saying that the annual winter fuel crisis had been worse than usual last year and now the fumes were drifting north to Salvation City, making the summer rains worse than ever. So would she please be a good girl and try not to stay up too late and not eat too much? Of course she would.
She took the roof-access stairs two at a time, and when she found that the actual roof-access door was locked with a chain and an old mechanical padlock (she had never seen one before, only the plastic disposable locking strips that some of the high-school kids used on their lockers) she took the stairs two at a time back down to the apartment, where she found the little blowtorch her mother used to light barbecues (when they still had barbecues in the summer) and spent the next twenty minutes melting the lock into a liquid blob of dripping red metal, because d—-d if she was going to give up an opportunity like this.
When the door finally opened the wind was so strong already that she nearly fell over with her first steps, narrowly missing the skylight to the old penthouse (where she had occasionally been, exploring, on other rainy days; the whole place was abandoned now but so huge she couldn’t imagine how one person could fill it all), and she had to work to stand upright. The roof was square, more or less, about five hundred square feet, and the edges of it were difficult to see with the rain and wind. This was why she was concentrating so hard on not falling to her death that she did not notice the bruises rising on her exposed arms where the heavy raindrops fell, nor the blurring of her vision. This was why she did not really see anything that she had wanted to see until the lightning struck and she could see everything and her eyes her eyes her eyes.
The doctors said there was no chance for eye transplants, even if her parents had had the money. Her retinas were damaged, they said, or maybe her optic nerves, they weren’t sure. Some of the compounds in the rain were deadly poison, and she was really lucky to have survived at all, let alone retain partial vision in full light. Maybe if someone had gotten to her sooner after the damage was done; but of course no ambulances would dare go out during a bullet rain. She spent weeks simply recovering from the other injuries, the blood and bruises and breaks of falling down two flights of stairs trying to get to her apartment with no sight.
Partial vision in full light turned out to be too optimistic. She could not see anything more than a colorless blur unless blinding white light was shone directly into her eyes. She spent months recuperating, trying to relearn the route through their apartment with no further injuries, while her parents argued in I-think-she-can’t-hear-us tones about whether to send her to a special school or not, but she didn’t particularly care, because it all seemed bland and meaningless compared to the stark white clarity, the everything she’d seen in the moment of the lightning strike. And whenever the building shook and the crackle of thunder sounded she would try weakly to stumble-crawl up the stairs to the roof-access door which nobody had bothered to put a lock on again, and she would turn her blind black eyes to the sky, just her and the storm, and she did not need to worry about falling because the lightning let her see everything.
The first time she tried to run she was thirteen, and her parents were away again, and her father called again, and he said try to get some sleep, because the storm wasn’t going to let up until eight hundred the next morning, and they would almost certainly cancel classes at the special school until any damage was repaired, so she could sleep in. He did not ask her to be a good girl, because she had no choice. She was blind, and blind girls do not have the liberty to be bad.
So she patiently nodded, knowing she was facing away from the computer, and he patiently told her which direction the webcam was, and she promised to get some sleep, and was sure to open the great black eyes to rub in her point. Then she took the steps up to the roof, two at a time, her old hightops slapping on the concrete, and pushed open the door, and every step was a lightning-flash, and her feet struck on the dented, rain-soaked metal like the beat of a drum, and she jumped from building to building until eventually the storm ended, at eight hundred the next morning just like the weather people had predicted, and she was hungry and tired beyond belief, and blind again now that the lightning was gone, and she was quite sure her arms were raw and bleeding from the corrosive rain, but there was really no way to tell.
The police picked her up that time, doing their usual sweep for anybody unlucky enough to have been caught in the storm, and they took her to Metro where she lay in a stark white room (at least, they told her it was stark and white) and a young doctor with a pleasant voice bandaged her arms and told her how lucky she was and what was she doing out in the storm anyway, a nice girl like her? And then there was a police man, or someone who sounded like a police man (his name was apparently Mr. Smith, but she didn’t believe anybody that boring-sounding who said his name was Smith) who asked her quietly but firmly all about why she had been up there, and did she know that she’d been several miles away from home, running all the way there without once touching the ground, and how could she do that if she was really blind? And he did various tests, apparently to satisfy himself that no, she did not know how many fingers he was holding up, and no, in fact, she could not dilate or contract her pupils at will.
And then they sent her home, and there were more arguments with her parents, or between her parents, and eventually they decided to take her out of school, if it was really making her unhappy enough to run away. She said nothing, because there was nothing to say about the real world once you had seen everything in a single flash of lightning.
She ran a few more times before her sixteenth birthday, and most of the time the police found her, although one time she ran into an intrepid out-of-towner who rather naively offered her a ride home, and must have felt more confused that anyone else she’d ever met. Every time there were more arguments, and they usually either put her back in school or took her out of it, depending on which one she wasn’t doing at the time.
She was sixteen now, and she could see everything.
She could see herself coming home from school on the tram, hearing on the news that a storm was about to begin and everybody who did not have a stop in the next three miles should stay on the tram until it reached one of the sheltered stations and get off there to wait out the storm, which would likely only last about ten minutes, and preferably call your family or loved ones now anyway to let them know you’d be delayed, or maybe dead.
She could see herself walking up the stairs blindly and hearing someone in the hall. Her father, home early from work to beat the storm, his voice repercussing angrily down the corridor: “-don’t have any reason to be here and I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
She could see Mr. Smith standing in the hall; imagine his broad-shouldered presence beneath his black silk dress jacket, hear his smoothly quietly boring voice: “We have a warrant, and besides she’s necessary for research-”
She could see the man next to him, a calm cold intonation in his speech, probably tall and thin and lanky: “A unique case-”
Mr. Smith: “-wildly beyond our expectations-”
The other man: “-powers of sight we can only guess at-”
Her father: “I don’t care, she’s too young, she’s only a child, she’s sixteen for C—-sake and I won’t have her dragged off to some-”
“We have authority.”
“The h–l you do.”
Bang. She could see that, too. A sound-suppressed bullet does not exactly make a bang, more of a muted pop. In a confined space, however, it is still quite loud. Her father did not scream. She did.
She took the stairs three at a time, because her legs were long enough now. She could hear them following as she stumbled blindly on the top step.
The first raindrops were falling as she stumbled outside. She stood stock still, hoping desperately for lightning to give her sight. She knew they were after her and she was blind and her father was dead, dead, dead.
Then the lightning struck, and in the stairwell were two men, both strongly built, one broad-shouldered and solid, the other tall and thin. Both held guns and the lightning flashed and she realized that they did not know she could see, and they fired and fired, fired at her, and kept firing.
Bullets spattered hotly on the cement. She was already moving, running for the skylight. If she could just drop down into the penthouse they would not be able to follow her-
The dead weight of the tall man descended squarely on her shoulders, and she stumbled and rolled, and he rolled too, right onto the skylight. He stood tall for a moment, at his full height, and then the thin glass broke beneath its tarpaulin and he stood tall on thin air. He fell soundlessly, and the lightning drowned out the impact. She was up again, moving for the edge. The quiet, benign voice of Smith called out to her, somehow cutting through the chaos of the storm. “You’re right on the edge. Be careful. I’d hate for you to fall.”
There were cracks in her lips, deep cracks from too much time in the rain poisoned and heavy with industrial waste. “I don’t fall.”
He shrugged in the lightning. “You’re blind, I’m afraid, and you could fall at any moment. Don’t do anything rash or I will shoot to incapacitate you.”
“I’m not blind,” she said, and there was a look in his eyes that could have been fear. “I can see everything.”
The lightning struck, and she could. The spent magazine of his pistol was in his hand. He was reaching for another one. His gun was empty. She ran.
“You’re blind,” she heard him say as she blurred past him. “You’re g-dd–n blind.” There was definite fear now. She planted one sneaker solidly on the edge of the roof, jumped.
The lightning stopped very abruptly, while she was in midair, without fanfare. She landed on one knee (a whole building away, an alley a hundred feet deep between them), rose, turned, looked deep at Smith, saw his pale brown eyes against the empty black of her own. “No,” she said. “I told you I can see everything.”
And suddenly she could.
He reloaded with practiced speed and his gun snapped up, firing at her legs. Bullets hit the roof, spraying chunks of concrete, but she was long gone already, her hightops slapping on the cement and metal of the next roof, the rain stopping, the lightning stopping, but her heart and her feet pounding so fast that they made lightning of the universe behind her.
