Catch the Lightning (2 page)

The Stop-And-Go down the block was still open. I could call Mario. But I would have to wake him up, and I knew he had been getting up early, trying to find a job. The last thing he needed was for me to drag him out of bed at one in the morning.

It was only a few blocks to where I lived. I knew the neighborhood well and most everyone knew me. So it was that I made the decision that changed my life. Maybe I knew, on a level below conscious thought, that something was different that night. Perhaps a neuroscientist could have mapped out the neural processes that prodded my decision, or a physicist could have calculated the changes in the electromagnetic fields produced by my brain. Whatever the reason, I decided to walk home.

I headed down a side street. Old buildings lined the road, tenements and weathered houses. Although most of the street lamps were dark, a few made pools of light on the sidewalk. Cracks in the concrete jagged everywhere, overgrown with grass. Debris lay scattered: chunks of rock, plaster, newspapers, candy wrappings, empty cigarette boxes, fast-food trash blowing along the street or caught up against a building. Somewhere curtains thwapped in the breeze. The smell of damp paper tickled my nose.

When my mother first brought us to LA, we lived in one of its more meager outlying areas. Although we didn’t have much in terms of material goods, she gave us a stable home and more than enough love. After her death, Manuel and I moved here, where we could better afford the rent.

As I walked home, I became aware of an odd sensation. A trickle. It ran over my arms like the runoff from a torrent of warm air rushing by in a nearby canon. But the canyon was in my mind, not in the city.

Two blocks later I saw him.

He stood about a block away, facing the road, a tall man with curly hair. I didn’t recognize him. The one working lamp on that stretch of the road was only a few feet behind where I stood, so as soon as he turned he would see me. I knew I should leave, but what he was doing was so odd, I hesitated, stopping to watch.

He held a box that hummed and glittered with color: red, gold, blue, green, purple, silver. Holding it in front of his body, he turned in a circle, his attention fixed on it. From the way he dressed, I would have expected him to be robbing stores instead of playing with gadgets. But then, when Manuel ran with Los Halcones, he dressed that way: sleeveless vest and pants tucked into his boots. This man’s clothes were black, though; Manuel had preferred T-shirts and faded jeans.

Thinking about Manuel brought me back to my senses. I backed away, intending to be gone before this guy saw me. But it was too late. He stopped turning and looked up. At first he just stood there, staring. Then he started toward me, his long legs devouring the space that separated us.

That’s it, I thought. I spun around and ran.

“
Esperate
,” he called. “
Habla conmigo
.”

I wasn’t sure why his terrible Spanish made me turn back. I could barely understand him. His voice was strange, too. On habla it rumbled with a deep note, like a low tone on a piano. But the warmth I had felt was stronger, flowing over my skin, a river now instead of a trickle.

He had stopped again and was watching me. I watched back, ready to run if he came closer.

He tried again. “
Preguntar mi tu decir
.”

His grammar made no sense. “¿Qué?”

“
Despierto mi
.” He paused. “
Yo espanol mal
.”

He Spanish bad
? That was an understatement. “How about English?”

“Yes.” Relief flickered across his face. “Much better.” His English was accented, but easier to understand. Every other sentence or so, his voice made that odd sound, like a musical note. They ranged through about an octave, one down low on a piano keyboard.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He held out his palms as if to show he had no weapons. It wasn’t reassuring. He could have a knife or a gun hidden anywhere. And he still had the box in his hand.

“Lost,” he said. “Help can find you me?”

“What?”

He paused, his face blanking like a cleared computer screen. Then he said, “Can you help me? I’m lost.”

“Where were you going?”

“Washington, originally.”

I tensed. Nug and his men hung around Washington’s liquor store. They all wore black, and wrist guards too, like this guy. I backed up a step. “You’re a long way from-Washington’s.”

“Yes.” He paused. “I decided not to come down in a continental capital.”

Did he mean Washington, D.C.? I wondered if he was on anything. He didn’t sound like it, though; his words weren’t slurred or wandering, he just didn’t speak English that well. “What’s in Washington?” I asked.

“A reception.”

I almost laughed. “You’re going to a party there dressed like that?”

“This is my duty uniform. My dress uniform is on the ship.”

I wondered if he realized how strange he sounded. I hadn’t heard of anyone like him in the neighborhood. “What’s your name?”

“Althor.”

It sounded like a nickname. All of Nug’s men took one, though most of them were less creative about it. “You mean Thor? The guy with the hammer?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know to whom you refer.”

Whom? I didn’t know people existed who actually used that word. Despite my wariness, I was growing more arid more intrigued. I motioned at his box. “What is that?”

“Transcom,” he said.

“What does it do?”

“Transmits and receives waves. Right now I scan radio signals.” He came closer, showing me the box, and I backed away. As I stepped into the halo from the street lamp, he stopped and stared as if he had just seen me. In a sense he had, since I had only then moved into the light.

“Gods,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

I kept backing toward the drugstore.

“Don’t go.” Althor started toward me again.

As soon as he moved in my direction, I took off running.

“Wait,” he called.

I stopped. Turned. Looked at him. Why? Something about him was familiar, but for the life of me, I couldn’t place it. I felt it too, like tendrils of mist coming off a river. A sense of warmth. Affection, almost. So I hesitated, ready to run but waiting to see what he would do.

Althor backed up to the street lamp so I could see him better. He was tall, about six-foot-four. His eyes were dark, black it looked like, though it was hard to see in the dim light. He had fair skin and curly hair that, as far as I could tell, was the same color as the bronze bracelet my mother gave me before she died. I had to admit he was nice looking. Strange, but handsome. Just because he was handsome, though, didn’t mean he was all right.

“You run with Nug?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Nug. You know.”

“I do not know.”

“You must’ve seen him around. Tall guy. Anglo. Blue eyes. Buzz hair.”

“I don’t know this man.” He considered me. “You don’t recognize my uniform, do you?”

“I’ve never seen no uniform like that.” I winced. “Any uniform.” Even now, when I speak seven languages, I sometimes forget to avoid the double negative in English. It seems a strange language, not allowing you an extra negative to make a point.

“I am ****” he said.

“What?”

He said the word again and it still sounded like gibberish.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Literally I think it translates as Jagernaut Secondary.’”

“Jagernaut?”

He nodded. “Secondary is similar to what you call a naval captain.” He paused. “Actually, it comes closer to your air force. Major, maybe.”

“You’re a soldier?”

“Pilot. ISC Tactical Fighter Wing.”

A pilot! Wariness followed my initial excitement. He didn’t look like a fighter pilot. “What’s ISC?”

“Imp—” He hesitated. “Space Command.”

At the time, I was sure he was a nut case or stoned, or else that he thought I was stupid enough to believe him. “Yeah, sure.”

“Why do you think I make this up?”

“Well, I don’t run into many fighter pilots on my way home.”

Althor smiled. “I guess not.”

His smile caught me by surprise. No cruelty showed in it, nor was it a false smile, or the too easy smile of someone who never had reason to cry. It had history to it, complicated history.

I relaxed a bit. “So how come you’re in LA?”

He considered me, as if trying to decide whether or not I was a threat. It was funny, really. Five-foot-two me in a fluffy miniskirt threatening six-foot-four him. When he finally answered, I figured that same thought had occurred to him. I had no idea then of the true reason he chose to trust me, nor of the extensive calculations that went into his decision.

“I’m in the wrong place,” he said. “Actually, it looks like the wrong time. According to positions of the stars, the date is exactly as I expected. But everything is different.” He pointed to the streetlight. “For one thing, I never knew this, that Los Angeles had such lamps.”

I blinked. The street lamps were the same as everywhere else in LA: tall antique poles, each ending in a scalloped hook. The glass lamp hanging from the hook was shaped like the bell on an old Spanish mission. Books about California never failed to show them.

“They’re angel bells,” I said.

“Angel bells? I have never heard this before.”

“You really must be new. They’re as famous as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.”

Althor frowned. “I’ve studied American history. If these bells are as famous as you say, I would recognize them.”

“Maybe your teacher didn’t know LA that well.”

“My ‘teacher’ was a computer chip. It had no record of these bell-lamps.” He looked around at the debris-strewn street, the broken windows in the building closest to us, its crumbling steps. “You live here?”

I didn’t like him asking where I lived. When I didn’t answer, he said, “Why do you live like this?”

I gritted my teeth. “Because I do.”

He jerked, as if my anger had struck him. “My sorry. I meant no offense.”

After an awkward silence, I said, “So where are you from?”

“Originally, Parthonia.”

“Where?”'

“Parthonia. The seat of the Skolian government.”

“Never heard of it.”

“After everything else I’ve found here, or not found, I’m not surprised.” He sat on the steps of the building next to us and poked at his box. “Everything is wrong. The only transmissions I find are at radio frequencies.”

I stepped closer to see the box. As he moved his fingers over the panels on its faces, they glowed different colors. He turned over his wrist and pressed the box against his wrist guard. It wasn’t leather after all, at least not all of it. Parts were metal, and wires crisscrossed it, what I now know are ceramo-plex conduits, superconducting lines that power a miniature computer web.

“I haven’t seen wrist guards like that before,” I said.

“They have a new web architecture.” Althor spoke absently, pulling his box off the guard. “At least I can reach my Jag.”

“Is that your car?” He didn’t look like someone who could afford one.

“My fighter.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I wondered if he was an actor rehearsing for a movie. More likely his brain had lost a few bolts. But nothing about him tripped my mental alarms and my intuition about people was generally solid.

He held up the transcom. “I’ve checked radio wave, microwave, optical, UV, X-ray, and neutrino channels. Nothing.”

“Why did you come down here to check?”

He shrugged. “The Jag can do the orbital scans.”

“I mean, why this street in particular?”

He blinked at me for a full ten seconds before he answered. “I don’t know. It seemed—the right place.”

“What are you looking for?”

He made a frustrated noise. “Something to make sense. I seem to be in the wrong century. But the date and location, they are both correct. Except this isn’t like any Earth I know.”

I smiled. “You go to Caltech, right? My friend Josh is a freshman there. He told me about those role-playing games you play. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

“Caltech? This means California Institute of Technology, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. Josh never calls it that.” Now that I thought about it, if Althor came from Caltech, what was he doing here, by himself, in the middle of the night? He looked more like Nug’s friends. Once in high school, Nug and his men had cornered Joshua behind the gym. They tied his hands behind his back and lined up in front of him with their rifles like a firing squad. They thought it was funny. Joshua was so shaken he didn’t come back to school for a week. He was afraid to tell anyone besides me, but I told Los Halcones and after that they looked out for him.

“I’ve heard of Caltech,” Althor said. “I never went there, though. I graduated from DMA years ago.”

“DMA?”

“A military academy.”

The thought of Nug’s creeps going to a military school made me want to laugh. Boot camp would be even better. I could just see a drill sergeant yelling in their faces.

But it was obvious Althor was serious. At the time, I saw his words through the filter of my own experiences, which included an intense desire for college and no money to pay for it. If someone had told me back then that someday I would have advanced degrees with honors in both sciences and the humanities, I would have laughed.

I spoke gently. “It don’t matter to me if you don’t have a fancy degree.”

“I do have degree,” he said. “It’s in inversion engineering.”

I smirked. “Perversion engineering?”

He reddened, as if unsure whether I made a joke or he made an embarrassing mistake in English, “inversion.”

I liked that, the way he cared what I thought he said. “So you’re supposed to go to a party tomorrow night?”

“It is a reception at the White House for my mother.”

“The White House, huh? She must be important.”

“She is a mathematician. She has an equation named for her. But that was long ago. For many years she had been ****”

“Been what?”

His face blanked again. Now that I was more tuned to him, I felt the change. He turned metallic. Then his warmth returned, eddying around us and softening the banks of my barricaded emotions.