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His eyes cut to mine.
“Except for you,” I added.
He went back to ignoring me, reading his machines, all while the winds picked up and the storm darkened.
“Why do I have a bad feeling about this?” I asked.
“Because you’re a pessimist.”
I gasped. “I am not.”
Jeremiah raised one eyebrow. “You need to trust the science.”
“I do trust science. But lightning is a great unknown. Unpredictable, dangerous. You can’t harness it or control it. You can study it your whole damn life and still won’t know all there is to know because you can’t put it in a lab. You can try to recreate it, but it won’t be the same.”
He was staring at me. “So should I stop? Should I just never try because you think it’s impossible?”
“No, I—”
“I could almost guarantee you that every scientist who did something great was told they were foolish for trying. Do you think the scientists who try to create cold fusion are wasting their time? They’re so close to breakthroughs that could solve the world energy crisis, yet people dismiss it because they think it’s impossible.”
“No, that’s not—”
His eyes met mine, cold and blue. “I don’t know why I thought you were different.” He snatched the RF antenna out of his bag, ignoring me.
I wasn’t expectin’ his bite to hurt so much. “Jeremiah,” I murmured.
A clap of thunder cracked right above us, makin’ me duck on instinct. Of course, Jeremiah didn’t even flinch, with his back to me, his shirt blowing in the wind.
Jesus Christ.
I opened my mouth to tell him I was sorry just as the clouds opened up instead. Rain, fat drops, truckloads of them, heavy and drenching. It was falling so hard I could barely see Jeremiah just a few metres away.
“Well, that’s fuckin’ great,” I yelled over the rain.
But then it got even greater.
Thunder and sheet lightning, the clouds so low and close it felt as if I could touch them. More intra-cloud lightning lit up around us like a strobe party and I had an eerie realisation.
We couldactuallydie out here.
For real. No jokes, no snarky comebacks. For actual real.
“Jeremiah,” I yelled again.
He turned to look at me then.
That fucker was grinning. “This is awesome!”
He trudged back to the screen like he was having the best experience of his life.
For fuck’s sake. I was beginning to think he was legitimately insane.
He zipped up his backpack in the pouring rain, and taking the screen from me, he handed me the backpack. “Hold this!”
Thunder boomed again, so loud and so close that it shook us both. Cracking and rumbling, non-stop now, the clouds so dark that flashes of lightning were the only way I could see.
“This is crazy,” I yelled.
