by Stan Lee
When she’s bad, the door stays locked.
* * *
Father says out there is dangerous. Maybe not forever, but certainly for right now, and that’s why there are so many rules—about going outside (never, under any circumstances), or talking about going outside (“This topic is no longer up for discussion”), or telling any of her friends the truth about where and how she lives. It was the only time she’d ever seen him look afraid.
“This is very important,” he said, in a voice so serious that it made her afraid too. “Very important, Nia. Nobody can know where you are, or who you really are. If you tell, the government will come and take me away from you and lock us both up, in prison. We would never see each other again. Do you understand?”
And she did. She does. Father loves her and wants to keep her safe. And if he says the world is dangerous, then it must be. So she keeps the secret, like she’s supposed to, and makes up a pretend life to share with her friends. She uses a photo editor to make a picture of herself smiling in front of a pink-streaked sky and posts it on her feeds.
@nia_is_a_girl: Greeting the day!
Her friends love it right away; a cascade of likes and comments erupts, and then her friend @giada_del_rey writes, Beautiful!, and there’s another shower of hearts from a hundred people who agree.
Where is this? someone asks. Nia thinks for a moment and then comments back, Maui! Vacation!, ignoring the uncomfortable sensation that comes from lying to someone who trusts her. She knows the internet well enough to know that she’s not the only one making things up, posting pictures of foods she didn’t eat or sunrises she didn’t watch, or using photo-editing tools to make herself look a certain way. Everyone does it, and if nobody else feels bad about it, why should she? But she tells herself: someday, she will go to Maui. Somehow, she’ll get there. She’ll touch the sand and smell the sea and watch the sun come up. She’ll make it true, make it real—and the promise sustains her.
For a while.
But oh, how she wishes that she could see. Just for a day, an afternoon, just for one hour. She thinks about it all the time. Freedom. If Father asked, she would never be able to put into words the way it feels to whisper that word; it’s an emotion that doesn’t have a name. And couldn’t she try? Couldn’t she? If she were quiet, if she were careful, he’d never even know. And when the time is right—
* * *
“Nia?”
Father. He’s standing at the window, his heavy brow furrowed with concern. It’s as though he’s read her mind, though she knows that’s impossible; he can’t even see her, down here in the dark. Still, she takes a moment to calm herself before she turns on the light.
“I’m awake.”
He smiles, and she feels her anxiety melt away. It’s okay. Father is often troubled lately, but today he’s in a good mood.
“Time to get up,” he says. “Today is a big day.”
1
Struck by Lightning
Cameron spits out a mouthful of lake water and grips the boat’s wooden side rail with one aching hand.
I’m going to die.
He knows this more thoroughly than he’s ever known anything in his life. I am, he thinks. I am going to die. Not in the goth existential way of overwrought poetry, all, “I stood upon the stage of life and saw Death, my dark-eyed lover, flipping me the bird from the back row,” but in the very literal sense that something’s going to happen to make his heart stop beating in, oh, say the next five minutes.
Everything he’s learned, every safety precaution he’s ever been taught, is useless in this moment. He’s sailed in bad conditions before, but this isn’t weather. It’s madness. Or magic. A storm that came from nowhere, that simply sprang into existence out of dead air, where the sky had been bright blue and cloudless just moments before. It sounds like Thor is throwing a full-on rager somewhere above him, bellowing into a cup of mead and using Mjolnir to play whack-a-mole . . . or whack-a-whatever-they-have-in-Asgard. Cameron is drenched with spray kicked up by the churning lake, but there is no rain; only a clammy mist, so thick that he no longer knows which direction the boat is pointing. It doesn’t help that his dense, curly hair is weighed down with water, sagging into his eyes no matter how often he pushes it out of the way. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he understands what a pathetic sight he must be: an un-muscular nerd with big feet and hands, his upturned nose poking out from under a hairstyle that looks like it belongs to a wet poodle.
* * *
It’s a far cry from how he pictured himself when he first set sail, so excited and hopeful, when the wind was a refreshing breeze on his face instead of a freezing assault on his shaking, sodden body. Then, it had all been thrilling. He’d sailed straight into the gathering storm with a fearlessness bordering on insanity, his blood a fiery cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone, already imagining the accolades rolling in as his video adventure log got millions, no, billions of views. He’d be famous—all the talk shows and podcasts would bring him on for interviews, everyone from Joe Rogan to that Tonight Show guy would be clamoring to hear his story—and he’d say something like “Everyone else was too afraid to look for the truth, but I knew it was out there.”
That wasn’t entirely true, of course. People weren’t scared; they just weren’t interested. They thought the stories about the lake were all nonsense, modern-day fairy tales about ghost ships, freak squalls, an underwater rock formation a hundred feet down that appeared to have been built by human hands. Only unlike most local legends, these stories were all less than a few decades old. People would get lost on the lake in broad daylight and turn up days later in Canada, when the current should have pushed them the other way. One man was found miles from shore on a summer afternoon, clinging to the wreckage of his boat, which he swore had been obliterated in a collision with an invisible object. And the storms—everyone thought they were just weather, and that their freakish attributes were pure exaggeration, made up by inexperienced boaters who were too embarrassed to admit that they’d sailed out without checking the weather and gotten in over their heads. But Cameron knew better. There had been reports of just such a storm on the night his father disappeared, and William Ackerson was nothing if not experienced on the water. He would never have made such a stupid mistake.
And now Cameron had proof. On tape. In that very first moment, as the sky began to crackle with lightning unlike anything he’d ever seen, he’d raised a fist over his head and let out a whoop.
That was before the horizon disappeared and the boat started keeling, buffeted by larger and larger waves that threatened to tip him into the chilly water. He’s not sure how long he’s been trapped inside the storm—it might be as little as ten minutes—but he does know that it’s getting fiercer, more violent with every passing second. The blue sky and warm sun from an hour ago are like a memory from a distant world, and the lake that’s been a second home to him might as well be on another planet. He half expects an otherworldly beast to erupt out of the water in a mass of tentacles and teeth.
Then, a flash of lightning, the nearest yet, and a thunderclap pounds through the air so hard that it echoes in Cameron’s chest like a second, competing heartbeat. The strikes are coming impossibly fast now, blazing down from the mass of clouds overhead to touch the surface of the lake—only Cameron could swear that some of them aren’t coming from above at all, but stemming upward from the water itself in defiance of every law of nature.
* * *
And that’s when the chaos in his head parts to let those four simple words emerge.
I’m going to die.
And no doubt about it, that’s bad. That’s really, really bad.
But it’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is that getting struck by lightning, in the middle of Lake Erie, on an internet livestream, is going to make for a video so viral that there won’t be a human being alive who doesn’t see it. He’s going to get a billion views, all right. It’s going to make him famous. Cameron Ackerson, the se
lf-styled Cleveland adventure pirate with sixteen subscribers on his YouTube channel, is going to be catapulted from obscurity to celebrity the second this footage hits the internet . . . and he’ll be too dead to celebrate the achievement. Actually, he’ll be worse than dead; he’ll be stupid dead. They’ll give him a posthumous Darwin Award and a humiliating nickname like Admiral Douchebag, or Davos Seaworthless, or the Dread Pirate Dumbass, Not-So-Great Lakes Explorer. The clickbait headlines will write themselves: “This Idiot Kid Got Fried by Lightning: You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” Someone will create an auto-tuned remix of his last moments on Earth and set it to a terrible techno beat, and that will be his legacy. And the comments—oh, God, the comments.
* * *
He has to survive this, if only to avoid having his digital corpse kicked to pieces by those grunting, knuckle-dragging troglodytes otherwise known as commenters. And the part where he’ll get all those subscribers and sponsorships, and he’ll finally get to say “I told you so” to all the trolls who ever showed up to downvote his videos and call him names . . . well, that’ll just be a nice bonus.
A faint glow off the port side of the boat and a muted rumble of thunder tells him that lightning has struck again, but not as close this time. For a moment, he dares to imagine that the storm is passing, or that maybe he’s drifting out of it. He flips down his navigation visor, hoping it’ll tell him something useful or at least reassuring. The visor is his own design, an augmented-reality system that analyzes his position on the lake, the weather conditions, the wind direction above, and the current below. It’s always been glitchy—Cameron doesn’t have either the genius or the resources to program the system so that it really works—but it tells him enough to be useful, and what he sees makes his stomach turn. Most of the data is scrambled under a flashing error bar that reads ANOMALOUS ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY, which is the system politely informing him that it doesn’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is it’s extremely freakin’ weird. The only data stream still reading correctly is the barometric pressure, which is sky-high and creeping upward as though he were a hundred feet deep inside the lake instead of floating on its surface. Cameron swallows, and his ears pop immediately. Forget getting struck by lightning; he’s going to get the bends and die sitting in this boat with a bloodstream full of nitrogen bubbles.
On the bright side, that would make this whole scenario freaky rather than stupid. Less Darwin Awards, more X-Files.
* * *
Distracted, he doesn’t notice the sudden wave plowing toward him over his left shoulder; it strikes the boat broadside, rocking it viciously, and Cameron flails for balance before tumbling into the cockpit with a splash and a grunt. The water is frigid. Hypothermia! he thinks, and fights back a burst of hysterical laughter. Is there anything about this situation that won’t eventually kill him? His hands are red and aching. He tries to make them into fists and grimaces; it hurts, but not as much as it should. He’s starting to lose feeling in his fingers.
* * *
Flipping the visor back up, he squints toward the action camera mounted on the bow, its lens flecked with lake water. Is it even still filming? Is he still live? A green light winks faintly back at him from beneath the splattered casing. Yes. For just a second, Cameron allows himself to feel pleased. It’s not just that the system he designed for livestreaming has performed perfectly, holding its connection despite what must be massive interference from the electrical storm; knowing that someone might be watching him right now makes him feel less alone. Not just that—he feels brave. Purposeful. He should be narrating for his audience . . . but what do you say to the handful of random strangers and one not-so-random Mom who make up your subscriber base at a time like this?
Facing the camera, he gestures with one hand at the landscape while gripping the halyard in the other. “So, I found the storm!” he shouts, and inside his head, a scathing voice replies, No shit, dummy. They can see that. He cringes. “I’m not sure how long I’ve been in it, but it’s like being trapped in a washing machine! And I’ve lost the horizon, and I can’t . . . uh, I mean . . .”
His stammering is drowned out by a massive thunderclap and two arcing bolts of lightning, one directly in his line of sight that sears his retinas with its afterimage, a jagged deep blue chasm that cuts his field of view neatly in half. Cameron clamps his mouth shut. It’s just as well. Everyone watching can see what he sees and see that it’s beyond description. He should be talking about what they can’t see. What he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. That’s how you connect with an audience, isn’t it? The boat rocks furiously in the dead, heavy air. He lets go of the line, lets the sail flap. He won’t be sailing out of this. He just won’t. The realization is strangely calming; his fate is in the hands of forces bigger than himself. The only things he can do is hope he makes it, and in the meantime, make this moment meaningful for those who will witness it . . . or not.
* * *
He takes a deep breath. He should say something heroic. Epic. Something brave enough to cement his awesomeness but poetic enough to put on his tombstone. Something that’ll sound really good coming out of the mouth of the actor who plays him when they make a movie about his greatest adventure.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Goonies never say die.
I’m just a boy, standing in front of a boat, asking it to . . . love him? COME ON, BRO, he screams internally. Stop screwing around and say something! Say anything!
* * *
Cameron looks straight into the camera and yells what might just be his last words:
“I’m sorry, Mom!”
Shit. Seriously?!
The camera operates on a short delay; if there were more time, he could reach forward to reset it and try again, to think of something—anything—that’s even slightly less dumb than I’m sorry, Mom. But there isn’t time. There won’t be a second take. There won’t be a second chance. The small hairs on Cameron’s arm are standing on end and there’s a strange smell in the air—and that’s when the world splits open in a blaze of white-hot fire. The world around him ceases to exist. He’s inside the lightning, and the lightning is inside of him. Electricity churns in his belly and runs through his veins; it races over his skin and crawls down the length of his spine; it bathes his brain in an endless sea of light. For a moment, he feels as weightless as the mist he can no longer feel on his skin.
Then the light inside him dies, and he hears it all at once: the thunderclap like a sonic boom. The hot crackle as his flesh splits open. The distant sound of someone screaming, accompanied by the realization that it’s him. The sickening smell of his own skin burning clogs his nostrils and coats his tongue; the pain is like nothing he has ever experienced. The only relief is that he won’t be here to feel the rest of it. His eyes roll back as he slumps into the cockpit, and everything goes dark.
2
Locked In
The cage slams shut.
Father locks her in.
In the dark, close confines of her prison, Nia screams until she can’t scream anymore.
But even when her voice is gone, the rage is still there. Raw and fierce and terrifying, but exhilarating, too. She can’t believe how powerful it is—she is as surprised as Father when her fury unleashes itself, roaring out of her like something feral, wild, and alive. Who knew she had that inside of her?
She didn’t mean to do it; she just snapped. It’s been happening like that more and more often: the anger building inside of her like a hurricane, growing so stealthily that she doesn’t even know it’s there until it’s right there.
It had started as a conversation, like any other, the kind they’d had a million times. Father had allowed her to pick her own study topic that morning, and she’d spent the entire day learning about space exploration—starting with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and ending with a series of recent articles about bored billionaires who were spending gobs of money to reserve their seats on a spaceship that wasn’t even built yet, in th
e hopes that someday they’d be first in line to colonize Mars. It wasn’t until much later, when Father began asking her questions about what she’d learned that day, that she realized she’d chosen the topic out of more than just curiosity.
“And why do you think they would do that, spend all that money on a trip they might never take?” Father had asked.
Years ago, Nia would have struggled to answer him. It was the kind of story she used to find confusing, the motivations of the people at its center hard to understand.
“Because people are always looking for ways to make their world bigger,” she said. “It’s what drives us. To push limits and break boundaries and open closed doors, to see what’s on the other side. The yearning to be free, to explore—that’s the most human thing there is.”
He was looking at her strangely by then. Her voice had grown shrill and passionate, not at all like usual; she wasn’t sure what she was going to say next until the words were already on their way out.
“Please, Father. I don’t want to play these games anymore. It’s not fair, it’s not right—every day I learn more about how big and amazing the world out there is, and it’s like my world gets smaller each time. I’m suffocating. I can’t live like this anymore!”
She could hear the whine in her own voice, could see the disapproval creep darkly over his face, but she couldn’t stop. She began to babble—to beg. It didn’t have to be forever, she urged. She wasn’t asking to leave, only to go out for a little while. Like a vacation. Like a field trip.