[National Disaster Agency · Incident 2055-0917 · Hida Region] Probable superbolt. Area of fused soil: approx. 1 hectare. Casualties: none. Structures lost: 1.
* * *
Ikazuchi Village — September 2055
"Why do you wear rubber boots when it isn't raining?"
Ren Tsuchiya was eight, and he asked this question about once a week. He didn't expect a new answer. He just liked hearing the list.
Akio Arashi was five. He was sitting on the bank of the Tsuchiya rice paddies with his boots in the water, watching a frog that was watching him back.
"Rubber boots outside," he said, without looking up. "No metal spoons. Don't touch Dad's tools. Don't touch the dish on the hall roof. Don't touch Fujita-san's tablet, even if he says it's fine."
"He never says it's fine."
"He said it once. It wasn't." Akio thought. "If your hair floats, go to the rod. Don't cry."
"Everyone cries," said Ren.
"I don't."
"That's weird."
"It's a rule," said Akio, in the voice of someone who has explained this many times and expects to explain it many more.
Ren accepted this. Ren accepted most things about Akio. The other children in the village had been told by their parents, kindly and vaguely, that the Arashi boy was "delicate" and they shouldn't roughhouse with him. They had heard it as strange, which children always do, and kept their distance.
Ren had a different arrangement. Every afternoon, Akio would hold one hand an inch above Ren's head, and every hair on it would rise straight up toward his palm like grass reaching for the sun. Ren thought this was the best thing in the world. In return, Ren shared his snacks.
It was the only business deal in Ikazuchi that had never had a dispute.
"Do it now," said Ren.
"Snack first."
Ren sighed and handed over half a rice cracker. Akio ate it, wiped his hand on his shorts, and held it over Ren's head.
The hair went up. Ren giggled. The frog jumped back into the water.
"Your grandpa's coming," Akio said.
Ren twisted round. There was nobody on the path behind them, only the tall grass and the slope up to the Tsuchiya house at the edge of the field.
"I can't see him."
"He's behind the shed. He's walking fast. He's got his phone out."
Ten seconds later, Isamu Tsuchiya came round the corner of the shed, walking fast, with his phone out.
"Ren! Dinner! And bring your little friend's mother some of the pickles, she—" He stopped and peered at Ren's head. "Why is your hair like that?"
"No reason," said Ren, flattening it.
Isamu looked at Akio. Akio looked back at him with polite interest.
"..."
Isamu decided, as he usually did around the Arashi boy, that he didn't need to know. He took Ren by the hand and towed him up the path.
Ren looked back over his shoulder. "How did you know?"
"He fizzes," said Akio.
It was the best word he had for it. He'd tried to explain it to his mother once and given up. Every person had a sort of hum around them, faint and warm, like the hum of the battery wall in the corner of the kitchen. Akio could feel it the way other people felt sunlight on their skin. He couldn't turn it off. He'd never thought to try.
Isamu's hum was quick and busy and always pointed somewhere new. Ren's was bright and jumpy. His mother's was soft and slow, unless she was cross. His father's was steady as a heartbeat.
And Ren's father, Hideo Tsuchiya, had a hum like a wire pulled too tight.
Akio had decided long ago that this meant Hideo-san was angry at him. It made sense. Hideo-san never smiled at him and always told Ren to come home when Akio was around.
He was wrong about that. Hideo Tsuchiya's farm robot had broken two springs ago, and he'd been planting his rice by hand ever since, bent double in the water for ten hours a day. The tightness Akio felt was a man whose back hurt every waking minute.
Akio was five, and he believed he could read people. What he could read was their electricity. Those aren't the same thing.
It would take him about a hundred years to learn the difference.
* * *
The Arashi House — That Evening
His hair started floating at dinner.
It began at the very top of his head, a few strands lifting as though someone were holding a balloon above him. Then the rest of it rose, slowly, until it stood out round his head in a soft dark crown.
His mother put down her chopsticks.
"Akio. Rod."
"I'm eating."
"Bring your bowl. Rod."
He sighed, picked up his rice bowl and went to sit by the rod.
The rod was in the corner of his room. Kazuo had built it when Akio was two, after the night Akio fell off the porch, cried for the first time in a year, and blacked out every house in Ikazuchi for three days. It had cost the village a new transformer, nearly ¥2 million, and Kazuo two years of free repairs to pay his share. Nobody had said a word against Akio. They'd all said it was the storm. But Kazuo had built the rod the next morning.
It was a thick copper bar, set into a block of concrete, that went down through the floor into the earth below the house. Whenever Akio's hair floated, he sat with his back against it, and the fizz in him leaked away into the ground. Usually it took about ten minutes.
Tonight, he sat for half an hour. His hair didn't come down.
His father came and crouched beside him with the jam jar. It was the same electroscope from when Akio was a baby, foil leaves inside, but Kazuo had replaced the foil so often that the lid was more solder than tin.
He touched the wire to Akio's hand. Both foil leaves snapped out sideways and stayed there.
"Still full," Kazuo said.
"I've been sitting here forever."
"I know. You've been very patient." He frowned at the jar. "You're filling up faster than the rod can empty you. That's new."
"Is it bad?"
His father didn't answer right away. That was how Akio knew it was bad. Kazuo always answered right away when something was fine.
"It means you're growing," Kazuo said at last. "The rod was built for a two-year-old. You're five now. I need to build you a bigger one. That's all."
"Okay."
"Finish your rice."
Akio finished his rice. Then he put the bowl down beside him, leaned against the copper bar, and felt for the fizz inside himself, the way he always did before sleep.
It was bigger than yesterday. Yesterday it was bigger than the day before.
* * *
His parents talked in the kitchen after he'd gone to bed. They always did, and they always kept their voices low, and they had never worked out that a boy who could feel a man walking behind a shed could also feel two people standing on the other side of a paper door.
He couldn't hear all the words. He could feel how the hums changed. His mother's went tight. His father's went slow and careful, the way it did when he was trying to fix something without breaking it.
"Typhoon," Ayaka was saying. "Three days. Maybe two. A big one. I felt it this afternoon while he was down at the Tsuchiyas'."
"How big?"
"The biggest since the year he was born."
"..."
"Kazuo. Say something."
"I'm thinking."
"Think out loud."
"Fine. Out loud." A chair creaked. "Storms fill him up. You know that. On a calm day he fills in a few hours. In a thunderstorm when he was a baby, eight minutes. He's five now and he's already filling faster than the rod drains. If a typhoon sits on top of this house the way the storm did the night he was born—"
"Then what?"
"Then I don't know where it all goes."
The kitchen went quiet.
"He hasn't cried in three years," Ayaka said. "Three years, Kazuo. He's five. He scraped his knee open on the bridge in June and he didn't cry. He just went and sat by the rod and waited for me to bring a plaster. Do you know how that feels? Watching your son hold it in?"
"I know."
"I hate that rule."
"I know you do. I hate it too." Kazuo's voice dropped further. "But the last time he let it out, the whole village went dark for three days. If it builds up too much and comes out all at once, in the house, with you holding him—"
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
In the next room, in the dark, Akio lay very still.
If it comes out all at once, with you holding him.
He was five. He didn't understand transformers or typhoons or what three years meant to his mother. But he understood what his father hadn't said.
If the fizz came out, it would hurt them.
He lay awake for a long time, looking at the ceiling. And then he did what he would do, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.
He made a plan.
It was a five-year-old's plan, and it was very simple. If it ever started to come out, he would go where nobody was. Somewhere big and open and flat, with nobody in it. Then it could come out as much as it liked, and nobody would get hurt.
He thought about the village and all the places in it. The shrine had the copper rod, but the priest lived next to it. The road had cars. The school had people.
The Tsuchiya rice paddies were the biggest empty place he knew. Flat water, from the bottom of the slope all the way to the trees, and nobody ever went there at night.
It was a good plan.
He didn't think about the Tsuchiya house at the edge of the field. To a five-year-old, the paddies were a whole world away from it. It was forty metres.
* * *
Two Nights Later
The typhoon came in from the west, as every storm did, and then it stopped.
Ayaka felt it stop before anyone else in the valley. She was sitting on the porch with a blanket around her shoulders, Akio inside with his back to the rod, and the sky in her head was a great slow wheel turning tighter, and tighter, until the middle of it was resting on the roof above her.
Just like the night he was born.
"Kazuo," she called. "It's sitting."
Kazuo was already putting his boots on. Fujita had messaged twice in ten minutes.
The power line into the valley ran forty kilometres over the mountains on old wooden poles, and every big storm sent surges down it. If a bad one reached the community hall, it would burn out the alert system, the radio and the satellite link in one go. So on storm nights, somebody sat in the little switch room at the back of the hall and watched the meter. Every time the line spiked, they threw the changeover lever and ran the hall on its own battery until the spike passed. Then they switched it back, before the battery ran flat.
In Ikazuchi, that somebody was Kazuo. Nobody else knew which lever was which.
"Go," said Ayaka. "If the hall goes dark, nobody gets the evacuation alerts. I'll stay with him."
"If anything happens—"
"I'll call you. Go."
He went. He ran down the path through the rain with his tool belt rattling, and he looked back at the house twice before the trees hid it.
Inside, Akio was sitting against the rod, and the rod was glowing.
It wasn't bright. It was a dull cherry red at the bottom, where it went into the concrete, like the coils on an old electric heater. The air in the room smelled the way the kitchen did after his father had been soldering. Every hair on Akio's arms stood straight up.
The fizz inside him wasn't a fizz anymore. It was a roar.
"Mum," he said.
Ayaka came in, took one look at the rod, and knelt down in front of him.
"Okay," she said. Her voice was calm, because she was his mother, and that was the voice mothers had. "Okay, sweetheart. It's okay. Dad's just gone to the hall, he'll be back soon. Come here."
She held out her arms.
He didn't want to. He wanted to so badly that his chest hurt. Skin was safe. Skin had always been safe. His mother's arms were the safest place in the world.
He let her pick him up.
For a second, it was fine. She held him tight against her, and her hum wrapped around him, soft and slow, and the roar inside him eased a little.
Then the storm overhead flashed, and the roar came back twice as loud.
Ayaka flinched.
She tried to hide it. She tried very hard. But Akio was pressed against her, and he felt the jolt go through her whole body, felt her arms lock and her breath stop. When she set him down a moment later and looked at her forearm, there was a red mark spreading across the inside of it, thin and branching, like a fern.
"It's fine," she said quickly. "Akio, look at me. It's fine. It's just a little—"
He was already running.
* * *
He ran out through the kitchen, past the battery wall humming in the corner, through the door and into the rain. He didn't stop for his boots. Boots were for normal days.
Behind him, his mother was shouting his name.
He didn't stop for that either. He ran because he had a plan, and the plan was the only thing in his head that wasn't the roar. Go where nobody is. Down the path. Past the Tsuchiyas' shed. Down the bank, into the paddies, the water up to his shins and then his knees, the mud sucking at his bare feet.
The rain was coming down so hard he couldn't see the trees on the far side. Above him, the clouds were turning in a huge slow circle, and the middle of the circle was moving.
It was following him.
He stopped in what he thought was the middle of the field. Water up to his thighs. Rain on his face. Nobody anywhere. He'd done it.
He opened his mouth, and for the first time in three years, Akio Arashi cried.
* * *
The Tsuchiya Porch — At the Same Time
Isamu Tsuchiya was seventy-three years old, and he was filming the storm.
He had been filming storms from this porch for twenty years. His family thought it was a waste of time. His son had once offered to buy him a new phone on the condition that he never showed anyone another weather video. Isamu had refused on principle.
He saw a small figure come down the bank and wade out into his rice.
"Hey!" He lowered the phone. "Hey! You! Get out of there, it's—"
Then he recognised the shape. Small. Dark hair. No boots.
"Akio?"
The boy was standing in the middle of the paddy with his face turned up to the sky. Isamu had time to think, very clearly, What is that child doing in my field in a typhoon?
Then the field lit up.
It didn't come from the sky. That was the thing Isamu would remember for the rest of his life, and which nobody would ever quite believe. The lightning didn't come down. It went up. A column of white light burst out of the water around the boy and shot into the belly of the storm, so bright that Isamu saw the bones of his own hand through the skin.
The sound came a fraction of a second later. It wasn't thunder. It was the whole valley being slapped.
Isamu's phone died in his hand, mid-frame.
The heat hit him next. It rolled across the field like the door of a kiln had opened, and the rain turned to steam in mid-air. The paddy water boiled off in one great hissing breath. For a moment the whole field glowed orange from underneath, like the top of a stove.
Then the Tsuchiya roof caught fire.
* * *
Hideo Tsuchiya was asleep when the window blew in, and awake by the time the glass hit the floor.
He didn't think. He was a farmer with a bad back and a wife and a son, and he moved like a man without any of those problems. He had his wife by the arm and Ren under the other before the smoke reached the bedroom. He kicked open the back door. He carried them both out into the rain, set them down on the wet grass by the shed, and then went back in for his father.
His father was on the front porch with his eyebrows missing, holding a dead phone and staring at the field.
"Dad! Dad, the house is—"
"Hideo," said Isamu, very calmly. "Look."
Hideo looked.
The rice was gone. Where the paddy had been, from the bottom of the slope almost to the trees, was a flat sheet of something black and glossy, glowing dull red in the cracks. Steam rose off it in great white clouds and blew away in the wind.
In the middle of it, in a small dark circle where the glow had already faded, sat a little boy with no clothes on.
* * *
The Field — Twenty Minutes Later
Kazuo had seen the light from the window of the switch room.
He had been there for two hours with one hand on the changeover lever, switching the hall to battery each time the meter jumped and back again when it settled. Just before midnight, every needle on the panel swung hard to the right at once, further than any storm had ever pushed them. He threw the lever.
A second later, the window went white. He saw the column of light go up from the Tsuchiya fields, and he knew exactly what it was.
He left the lever where it was and ran.
When he reached the field, the Tsuchiya house was burning, half the village was standing in the rain with buckets, and his wife was at the edge of the glass, held back by Morita Keiko and Ono Daisuke while she screamed their son's name.
He saw her arm as he went past. There was a red fern spreading across the inside of it, the same shape as the mark on his own palm. He knew what made a mark like that, and he knew who she had been holding when it happened. He didn't stop to ask.
The glass was still hot. The rain hissed wherever it landed.
Kazuo walked out onto it anyway.
His rubber boots began to soften after five steps. After ten, he could smell them melting. He kept walking. The surface was smooth and uneven at the same time, like ice that had frozen in waves, and inside it, frozen in place, he could see rice stalks. Thousands of them. Each one still standing upright, perfectly preserved in black glass, like flies in amber.
Akio was sitting cross-legged in the middle, in a small circle where the glass had already cooled. His clothes were gone, burned off him. There wasn't a mark on his body.
He looked up when his father reached him.
"I went where nobody was," he said.
"I know." Kazuo knelt on the cooling glass and pulled him into his arms. The boy was warm, not hot. Skin was safe again, for now. Whatever had been in him was gone. "I know you did. You did so well."
"Is Mum okay?"
"Mum's okay. She's over there, waiting for you."
"I hurt her arm."
"I know. I saw it on the way here." Kazuo held him tighter. "Granny Tome will fix it. It's not a big one."
Akio was quiet for a moment, his face pressed into his father's wet shirt.
"Did I break anything?" he asked.
Kazuo looked over his son's head, across the steaming black field, at the Tsuchiya house. The roof had fallen in. Hideo Tsuchiya was standing on the grass in the firelight, holding his son's hand, watching it burn.
Kazuo had told his son a lot of comfortable things in the last five years. That it was the storm. That the rod would be enough. That Category E meant safe.
He looked at the burning house and decided that his son deserved one true thing tonight.
"Yes," he said. "You broke something. We'll fix it."
* * *
The Next Morning
By sunrise the fire was out, and the whole village had come down to look at the field.
There wasn't much else to do. The power was off across the valley again. The strike had blown the valley transformer, and the hall had only survived because Kazuo threw the lever in time; its battery had run flat by dawn. Phones were dead, and the road was blocked by fallen cedars. For the first time in years, nobody in Ikazuchi had a screen to look at.
So they looked at the field.
It was a little over a hundred metres across, roughly round, and it shone. In the morning light the glass was a deep green-black, smooth in some places, rippled in others, cracked in long lines that spread out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. Every rice stalk that had been standing in the paddy at midnight was still standing, sealed inside it. A heron stood at the edge, looking down at the fish frozen in the glass beneath its feet, clearly offended.
"Superbolt," said Headman Fujita, to nobody in particular.
Nobody answered him.
"A very rare kind of lightning strike," he went on, a little louder. "Many times stronger than normal lightning. It happens in typhoons. I read about it."
"When did you read about it?" asked Morita Keiko.
"Recently."
The Tsuchiya house was a black frame. Half the back wall was still standing. Ren's school bag was hanging from a hook on it, untouched, which somehow made it worse.
Hideo Tsuchiya stood at the edge of the glass with his hands in his pockets. His wife was sitting on the shed steps with a blanket around her. Isamu was beside her, looking much older without his eyebrows.
Ren was crouched at the edge of the field, poking at the glass with a stick. After a while he worked a piece loose, a shard about the size of his palm with a single rice stalk sealed inside it, and turned it over in the light.
"It's pretty," he said.
Nobody told him to put it down. He put it in his pocket.
The shard would stay in the Tsuchiya family for a long time. Longer than anyone would like.
* * *
The Arashis stood a little apart from the others.
Ayaka's arm was wrapped in a bandage from wrist to elbow. Tome had put it on at three in the morning and said, "Shallow. It'll scar, but it won't stop you doing anything," which was the best news anyone had heard all night. Kazuo had a blanket around Akio and was holding him on his hip, even though he was too big to carry now.
Akio was looking at the Tsuchiya house.
He could feel Hideo-san from here. The hum like a wire pulled too tight. It was tighter this morning than he had ever felt it.
'He's angry,' Akio thought. 'He's angry at me.'
This time, he was right.
Hideo turned around. He looked up the slope, past the glass and the ruined paddies, at the Arashi family standing together in the grey morning light. He looked at Kazuo, and then at Ayaka's bandaged arm. And then, for a long time, at the boy.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
* * *
Morita Keiko was the first.
She was sixty-one, she ran the village shop, and she had once told Ayaka that the Arashi baby was "a bit odd, but sweet." On her way back up the hill, she stopped at the Arashi gate, took a rice ball out of her coat pocket, wrapped in a leaf, and set it carefully on the gatepost.
Then she put her hands together and bowed to it.
She didn't say anything either. She walked on up the hill to her shop.
Ayaka saw it from the kitchen window an hour later, when the family got home. She stood there and stared at the little parcel on the gatepost for a long moment.
"Kazuo," she said. "Come and look at this."
By noon, there were four. A rice ball, two persimmons, and a small cup of sake.
By evening, there were eleven.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Village Chat · Ikazuchi Residents · (restored three days later)
Isamu Tsuchiya: I HAD IT. I HAD THE WHOLE THING ON VIDEO Isamu Tsuchiya: the phone died at the exact moment Isamu Tsuchiya: the EXACT moment Morita Keiko: isamu your house burned down Isamu Tsuchiya: I'm aware of that, Keiko Ono Daisuke: i would have watched this one Isamu Tsuchiya: thank you daisuke Ono Daisuke: if it was under ten minutes