The Lightning Conjurer

by Rachel Rener

  “Savannah-san, I don’t think—” Kumiko started.

  “You aren’t here to think,” Savannah interjected, the volume of her voice earning us a half-dozen admonishing looks from our fellow passengers. “Barish spoke to these villagers over fifty years ago. They’re the ones who taught him those anti-aging methods. They were very nice, from what he told me, but not interested in collaborating with the organization.”

  “When you say ‘anti-aging methods,’” Aiden clarified, “you’re talking about how he manipulated Air, Water, and Electricity to prolong his life, correct? I thought he was only able to do that because he was a Polymancer.”

  I let out a small gasp. “If he learned that from these villagers, then that means—”

  “They may still have a Polymancer or two on hand, yes, and they’re also probably much older than they look. I myself am curious to learn more about their anti-aging techniques,” Savannah added, popping open her makeup compact to powder her nose. “According to Barish, they’re a very quiet and subdued community. I already tried to warn Mei that it would be a waste of our time to speak to them but they’ve apparently grown in number so here we are. Expect a quick visit.”

  “Kumiko-san?” I asked, turning around in my seat. “Do you have anything to add?”

  Kumiko bit her lip and didn’t speak for a long moment. “We must be very careful,” she finally answered. “That is all I know.”

  Savannah clicked her tongue in annoyance but Aiden and I locked wary eyes. On the surface, meeting highly-reclusive, age-defying Elementalists certainly seemed exciting, but Kumiko’s apprehension was palpable. Was it nerves, or did she know something we didn’t? Whatever the reason, we’d certainly find out soon enough.

  ***

  Once the train arrived at the station – right on time, as usual – we had to take another two-hour bus ride to get to the Shirakawa-go UNESCO site. By the time we finally disembarked, I felt like I’d shrunk three inches from having my vertebrae compressed by sitting in planes, trains, and automobiles for so long. After retrieving one of the four large backpacks Mei’s team had provided us from the bus storage compartment, I stretched my arms over my head and took a deep breath of cold mountain air that reminded me of home. And Sophia.

  From the vantage of the bus station, I could see the quiet sprawling village nestled between the mountains. My breath caught at the postcard-worthy view. A thick layer of snow covered the A-line thatched roofs and the surrounding trees. Kumiko referred to the little cottages as “Gassho-style” farmhouses. They were just so quaint and beautiful, timeless in their own anachronistic way. Against the backdrop of the snow-capped mountains, white evergreen forest, and frozen rice fields, the village looked like something out of a Studio Ghibli movie.

  Unfortunately, we weren’t stopping there. Our final destination was miles away, through the thickest part of the forest and deep into the mountain valley – and the only way to get there was on foot. I’ll spare the details of how cold, miserable, and exhausting the trek was; there’s really no point in lamenting over the fact that we had to snowshoe through miles of knee-deep snow with thirty-pound backpacks, that the muscles of my legs were burning while my toes felt like they were going to break off like stubby icicles, that every minute of our hike was frigid, grueling, and beyond miserable. Sure, we had been outfitted for an Arctic expedition – Mei and her team were more than generous when it came to supplies, money, food, etc. – but no amount of gear could have made that slog endurable. If it hadn’t been for Aiden, who would periodically send a small ball of warming Fire my way, and Kumiko, who graciously dried out our shoes and winter gear every fifteen minutes, I might have just lain down in the snow and died. Given the amount of wailing and lamenting coming out of Savannah’s mouth, however, I tried to keep my suicidal sentiments to myself. Poor Aiden had to practically carry the woman along just to keep the caravan moving, a sight I was glad Aspen didn’t have to witness. Despite having the ability to warm the air around her – and apparently only her, brat that she was – Savannah was certainly milking her misery.

  An hour and a half into the hellish journey, I was seriously considering curling up in the snow and taking a permanent nap when Kumiko shouted something over her shoulder. Beaming widely, her snow-dusted cheeks were bright red and her fur-lined hood was fluttering in the wind.

  “Mina-san, look – straight ahead!” she pointed. About a hundred yards away, just over the crest of the hill we were traipsing, a faint orange glow rose up from behind the snow. “We are very close now!”

  A squeal similar in pitch to a dog whistle burst through my blue lips. I wanted to whoop and cheer and fling my snowshoes to the ground and cartwheel across the open snowfield ahead of us. And I almost did – until the dark silhouette of a figure standing on the ridge above stopped me dead in my tracks. I blinked as a half dozen more figures appeared.

  “Wilders?” Aiden murmured from my side. My teeth were chattering too hard to reply.

  A harsh male voice, amplified by Wind, shouted to us from the top of the hill. If I understood correctly – and let’s face it, I was so hypothermic I couldn’t even be sure he was speaking Japanese – he said something along the lines of, “Foreigners! Why have you come?”

  “He’s an Auromancer!” Savannah gasped. “Kumiko! Tell him we’re freezing and need shelter and hot food! Hurry!”

  The young woman chewed on her lip – weighing her options, I assumed. After a brief pause, she called, “Sir, we’ve traveled a long way and if it’s convenient for you, we would appreciate it very much if we could approach your village.” Again, probably not a perfect translation. But close enough.

  When he didn’t reply, Kumiko took out her phone and started muttering into it. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but at that moment, that was the least of my concerns. More and more figures were appearing on the ridge. From that distance, it was hard to make out their faces or ages, but I could sense their power: at least a dozen Elementalists stood atop the hill before us. When the man who’d called down to us finally raised a gloved hand, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking it was an invitation.

  As a massive gust of Wind knocked me clean off my feet and hurled me tumbling down the hillside, it occurred to me that I’d probably misinterpreted that.

  Chapter 9

  anding in a breathless, snowy heap, the four of us quickly became a tangled mess of snowshoes and flailing limbs. Aiden was the first to scramble to his feet, drawing a ball of Fire from his lighter. Once I was able to extricate myself from the weight of Savannah’s thrashing body, I stumbled over to his side, holding my bruised ribs.

  “What the hell!” I gasped.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he yelled to the group of villagers who were eyeing us from above. The flame in his hands burned brighter and I couldn’t help but be drawn to it like a hypothermic moth. The amount of snow I’d just accumulated on the inside of my clothes was almost as much as what was clinging to me on the outside. And based on the impromptu game of Twister that was happening between Savannah and Kumiko as they struggled to separate their interlocked snowshoes in two feet of powdery snow, my Hydromantic human clothes dryer wasn’t going to be functional anytime soon.

  “That was Auromancy, right?” I stammered at Aiden through chattering teeth. “Not just some freak gust?”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “Definitely Auromancy.”

  “Why have you come?” the same voice shouted at us again, this time in heavily accented English.

  “W-We’ve just come to say h-hello!” I stammered, steeling myself against a fresh series of chills that gripped my body. “Why are you attacking us?”

  “Asterians are not welcome here!” came the angry reply, along with another powerful gust of Wind.

  This time, Aiden and I both threw ourselves to the ground before it could strike – a good thing, too, since we still had half a mountainside to tumble down. Savannah and Kumiko, finally free of their snowshoes, army-crawled over to us
.

  “What the hell is going on?” Savannah yelped. “Kumiko, why are they doing this?”

  “I – I do not know, Savannah-san!” she gasped.

  Aiden muttered a string of curses under his breath before hoisting himself to his feet for the second time. The rest of us warily followed suit. An unnatural tingle fluttering down my spine let me know another attack was coming. Without hesitating, I flung my arm out in front of me, mentally reaching for the layers of rock beneath the snow and soil. It was time to shake things up – literally. As my hand clenched into a tight fist, a chorus of cries and shouts erupted from the ridge above while the Earth shuddered beneath their feet.

  I beamed up at Aiden. “That oughtta chill them out for a – oh, shit! Oh, shit!!”

  With a scream, I grabbed his arm and threw us to the ground as a literal avalanche of snow began galloping down the mountain, heading straight towards us. Luckily, Kumiko was much smarter and more quick-witted than me. With a loud battle cry, she dug her heels into the snow and flung her hands in front of her Super Saiyan-style. Instead of crashing into us and turning the four of us into frozen, oxygen-deprived corpse-icles, the torrent of frozen murder powder churned together to form a humongous levitating orb of snow. Then, with nary a flurry breaking free, the wintery mound floated skyward and hovered ominously above the entire mountain. The group of villagers on the ridge cowered beneath its shadow, eyeing it – and us – with obvious apprehension.

  “Kumiko-san, you got that alright?” I asked quietly, inching closer to her. Aiden and Savannah followed suit, nervously eyeing the swirling tempest above us.

  “Hai,” she grunted.

  I nodded, then turned back to the villagers. “How about now?” I shouted. “Is now a good time for a visit?”

  “We should turn back, Eileen-san,” Kumiko huffed. “We are not welcome here.”

  “We can’t go back yet,” Savannah muttered tersely. “We have to finish this!”

  Before I could reply, Kumiko’s monster ball of frigidness exploded in the air like a powdered sugar bomb, dusting the entire mountain – and us – in a half-foot of snow.

  My shriek was muffled by a mouthful of frozen powder.

  “Goddammit,” Aiden groaned, his Fireball completely extinguished. Enveloped by frozen Water without a flame in sight – not a good situation for a Pyromancer. Or any of us.

  “Kumiko, did you do that?” Savannah spluttered, every inch of her coated like a powdered donut.

  She shook her head helplessly. “No. It was their Hydromancers. At least three of them. I’m no match against their combined strength.”

  “But what if we—”

  “Come!” a voice barked. The four of us jerked our heads toward the ridge. It was the same man who had spoken before. Without waiting for a response, he turned his back to us and disappeared behind the ridge. The rest of the villagers quickly followed suit.

  “Did – Did he just tell us to follow him?” I asked the others.

  “You heard the man,” Savannah said. “Let’s go.”

  “So they can kill us and feed our corpses to the Abominable Snowman?”

  She rolled her eyes at me and stomped back up the hill, her snowshoes leaving a trail of tennis racket-shaped footprints in the fresh snow. “Let’s go, Kumiko! We’re not leaving until we talk to them!”

  The young woman sighed and followed suit, casting me an anxious look as she did.

  I glanced up at Aiden, whose eyes were closed tightly as though he were ruminating over a feasible course of action. Or possibly praying for another avalanche.

  “What do we do?” I asked. I was seriously praying his next words would be, “Turn back.”

  “Well, we can’t call in reinforcements – there’s hardly any service here,” he replied. “And we can’t turn around without abandoning Kumiko.”

  I almost snickered at his failure to mention Savannah but my cheeks were too cold to crack a smile. “I really, really want to take our chances and vamoose back that-a-way,” I pointed back toward the forest. “But… if we turn back now, we’d be letting everyone down – and possibly leaving the door open for Kaylie to swoop in.”

  “God, I hope Aspen and Ori are having a better time than we are,” he muttered, kneeling to strap his snowshoes back on.

  I wanted to throw my hands in the air, but again, arms were too cold to function. “How could they not be? They’re giving a cushy speech in a heated amphitheater where they’ll get to schmooze with their adoring constituents over champagne and tiny weenie dogs afterward. I hate their guts!”

  “We definitely pulled the short straw,” he agreed. “If we make it out of here alive, I’m giving Ori a piece of my mind. Which may or may not include a piece of my fist for demonstrative effect.”

  I allowed myself to be comforted by that glorious image as I traipsed after him, choking on frigid air while my frostbitten feet carried me up that snow-covered Mount Doom where death almost certainly awaited us on the other side.

  As we finally crested the hill and surveyed the smattering of farmhouses below, I railed against that stupid idiot Ori for dragging me into this, that stupid idiot ex of his for trying to bring about a dystopian apocalypse, but mostly I cursed my own stupid idiot self for cutting short my Caribbean vacation with my smoking hot wife to go on this godforsaken murder voyage in the first place.

  I seriously needed a steaming mug of hot chocolate. With rum. Lots and lots of rum.

  Chapter 10

  he shower water had turned cold fifteen minutes earlier but that was nothing new for me. I’d taken hundreds of cold showers in my life. It streamed down my back as I leaned against the cool tile and buried my face in my arm. It had been a long morning but the rally went well. The crowd itself was so much bigger than I had expected. We’d planned for a thousand or so members from the East Asian Chapters but the final number was closer to three thousand. I hadn’t seen so many Elementalists gathered together since Aspen’s Christening. But it made sense. For several years, fresh Aggregators from every chapter had been doubly incentivated incentivized to bring more and more members into the Order. And they’d succeeded. In just four years, our ten thousand members had grown to nearly twenty.

  At least there were a lot of friendly faces in the crowd, even some of my colleagues and friends from my time in the military. There weren’t many Elementalists in the Israel Defense Forces but those of us that were had all been put in a special elite team. And the most dangerous and exciting and impossible missions were all assigned to us. Well, not to me. Not anymore. But it was pretty cool to see that Avraham had actually given them leave to come in person when vacation was typically reserved just for funerals. Seeing their faces made me miss the old days, the nonstop crazy adventures. It also made me grateful that those days were behind me. Too many close calls. Too many deaths. And too many memories I tried every day to forget. I tried extra hard to ignore those thoughts as I stepped on the stage earlier that morning.

  When I stood at that podium with so many faces watching and cameras flashing, it took me a long minute to find my voice. The words that came to mind were in my mother tongue, and anxiety always made it harder to switch over. Luckily, I had a pile of cue cards and Aspen’s cheering smile from just offstage. When I did speak, I saw many nodding heads in the audience as I shared my ideas: more strategic partnerships to decrease monthly membership dues, better channels of communication to allow regular members to say their concerns and ideas all the way up to Parliament, budget allotments to host more worldwide conventions and events. And of course the usual stuff: less corruption, more transparency, fewer regulations, extra benefits for members and their families – even the non-Elementalist ones. For a guy who only learned he was running for minister less than a month ago, I think I did pretty good.

  Still, I saw the signs at the back of the auditorium: Community First, Heed the Natural Order, Lions Before Sheep. It made my throat dry. My own grandfather had numbers tattooed into his wrist to mark him for
what he was: a slave to those who called themselves supreme. His brothers didn’t make it out of the Holocaust. Some of them didn’t even make it to the camps. They were shot before stepping on the train. I did my best to avoid looking at those signs and the cold faces that glared at me from below them. Baruch hashem, Aspen’s appearance saved me in more ways than one. When she walked onto that stage in that blue dress, the crowd erupted. No one had seen her in months. There had been whispers, even within Parliament, that she’d turned her back to the Asterians. But then she was there, speaking to them, praising the accomplishments of our new government, praising me.

  It was like a dream.

  Our speeches had been short but the crowd took hours to disperse. Everyone wanted a photo with Aspen and me, though she was, of course, the shining star. When I watched her smiling and speaking to each person in turn, I was in amazement. I knew how shy and uncomfortable she felt, maybe even more than me, but her pink cheeks were the only sign to give that away. She would never admit it, but she was a natural in the spotlight. Afterward, Saul, my campaign manager in Denver, called me to say that the polls following our rally were crazy positive. No U.S. presidential candidate had ever achieved those kinds of ratings after announcing their intention to run. And it was all thanks to Aspen.

  Aspen. Standing under the shower’s ice cold water, I groaned into my elbow. Elohim, the girl looked gorgeous on that stage. Her dress was made out of crisscrossing layers of see-through blue material and was tightly wrapped around her slim body. She’d pulled half of her hair away from her face, exposing those cute little ears and the pale skin of her lovely neck. And her breasts…

  I shook my head and tried to erase the image. But other parts of me were waking up, stiff and neglected parts. My mind creeped to places I had tried so hard to push away, ever since the first day I met her. In the safety of my cold shower, I imagined her gorgeous eyes staring at me over her shoulder like she was inviting me. Her hand reaching behind her back to unzip her dress and peel it away slowly… What would she look like without that thin fabric covering those perfect breasts, that slender waist, those hips, ripe for grabbing and thrusting and—