Heat Stroke(63)

No!

I couldn’t stop it, but I could try to mitigate it. At the same time as that compulsive part of me started authoring destruction, the other part of me—the part that was still partially free, at least—started desperately weaving together the wind. Not enough time for this, not nearly enough; weatherworking required subtlety, delicacy, like neurosurgery. This was more like a battlefield amputation, with the patient alive and screaming. I increased the density of the air, heated it faster than a microwave oven, created a corresponding cold front and slammed the two together.

Instant chaos. Overhead, beyond the hot fury of fire that was gathering over the town, I saw clouds exploding in blue and black mushrooms. Silent, but incredibly powerful. I watched it in Oversight as the cotton white anvil cloud boiled up, and up, and up, hot air struggling to climb over cold, water molecules slamming together in so much violence that the energy generated exploded outward in waves. The collisions sparked even more motion, forced expansion against the unmoving wall of the low pressure system.

Go, go, go! I was begging it to move faster, even though it was the fastest I’d ever built anything like this—fifteen seconds, from clear sky to first pale pink flash of lightning.

I wasn’t looking for rain, though. Rain wouldn’t even begin to derail the firestorm I was about to unleash on this place. It would instantly evaporate into steam, and for all I knew, kill even more people. The kind of power I was carrying wasn’t something that could be put out with a fire hose, anyway.

The kids on the street stopped, looking up, open-mouthed with amazement. The dog started yapping.

Thunder boomed like cannon. It rattled glass in windows. Two car alarms shrieked in fright, and I felt the pressure of bad weather building, hot and still and green. Yes.

I couldn’t hold the fire. It was coming down, an acid rain of napalm from the sky. It hit the tallest building in sight—a bank, maybe—and draped it in orange-red streamers that exploded white-hot when it found something to feed on. Seven floors above the street, hell had descended. I could feel people screaming, feel the pulse of their terror, and I couldn’t stop it.

Fire crawled lazily over the building, dripping in hot strings from windows. Burning the place from the outside in, from the top down. Get out. Get the hell out, now! Because that place would be an inferno in minutes. Could I do something else, anything?

I looked down at myself and saw that I was surrounded by a thick, sparkling layer of blue. Cold-light, moving over me like a crawling blanket. Oh God. What in the hell was it doing to me? I couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel it at all.

I stared blindly up into the storm, willing it, begging it to do what I needed it to do.

And something answered. It was raw and primitive and barely more than an instinct, Mother Nature twitching in a nightmare. The blast of energy broke over me like a drowning wave, and I went to my knees, still staring up at the arching, strangely beautiful firefall that was going to destroy this place.

And then the tornado formed above it.

It started small, an indrawn breath of the storm, a tentative wisp of vapor like a tongue tasting the air. I fed it energy. Come on, baby. Live. Work for me. It pulled in strength, drove down in a black twisting rope toward the tasty, tempting energy buffet that was the firedome.

It connected, swelled, and took on a roaring, freight-train stability.

Nothing can resist that force when it gets going. Especially not fire, which is nothing but energy given plasmatic form; it’s just food for the process. A stream of fire broke free of the dome and spiraled up inside the tornado like a gas flame into a lantern.

The result was unholy. Beautiful, terrifying, like nothing that most human beings had ever seen or would ever want to… a storm shot through with crawling, vivid orange as the fire struggled to keep its cohesion. The tornado sucked up the thick, clinging plasma like Jell-O through a straw.

The firedome broke apart. Individual napalm-hot streams fell like ribbons on the town, but the majority of it was drawn into the tornado and spewed out in a fading glow above the anvil cloud, where the thin atmosphere of the mesosphere starved it of fuel. The rapid cooling would help feed the engine of the tornado, as air sank and was drawn back into the express-elevator rush of the spiral.

The compulsive part of me was still trying to fulfill my master’s command, which meant I kept forming fire up there in the sky, trying to put the dome back together. The tornado kept vacuuming it safely away. It occurred to me with a cold shock to wonder how long the compulsion would make me do this. I could feel my fuel tanks edging down toward empty. The energy output was enormous, and I couldn’t even draw strength from the sun, because I’d created an instant overcast.