The Storm With No Sky

"That's not real," Soren said.

Maya didn't answer. She had the tablet propped against the fruit bowl, the volume up, the kitchen dark except for the screen. On it, a mountain on the other side of the world was throwing a column of ash straight up into the night, and inside that column, lightning was crawling.

Not once. Over and over. Thin white forks branching through the gray.

"It's real," Maya said. "The scientists are talking about it. Listen." She tapped to bring the captions up. The voice on the stream was saying something about a town being evacuated, calm and tired.

Soren leaned in until his nose nearly touched the glass. "Okay. But lightning needs a storm."

"That is a storm."

"No. It needs clouds. Rain clouds. Water that goes up and freezes and bumps into more water and the bumping makes the charge." He said it the way he said things he had read carefully. "That's how you get lightning. Ice rubbing on ice."

"There's no ice in that." Maya pointed. The plume glowed faintly orange at the base. "That's hot. That came out of the ground."

"Right," Soren said. "So it shouldn't work."

They both watched it work anyway.

A fork of lightning lit the whole column from the inside, so for half a second the ash looked like a tree made of smoke. Then it was dark again.

"Pause it," Soren said.

Maya paused it. The frame held a single jagged line frozen inside the cloud.

"Where does it start and where does it stop," he said, almost to himself. He traced the line with his finger. "It doesn't come down to the ground. It stays inside."

"All of it stays inside," Maya said. She scrubbed back and forth. Every flash lived in the plume. None of them reached the mountain or the sky. The storm had no top and no bottom. It was a storm sealed inside a chimney of dust.

Soren got the look he got. He pulled the notebook out of his back pocket and opened it flat on the counter and drew a tall narrow shape with quick marks all through the middle.

"Okay," he said. "Forget water. Forget ice. What's actually up there."

"Ash," Maya said.

"Ash is rock. Tiny smashed rock. Millions of pieces." His pencil kept going. "And the eruption is firing them up the chimney really fast."

"So they hit each other."

"They have to." He drew two little dots bumping. "They can't not. There's nowhere to go but up and into each other. The whole column is pieces slamming into pieces."

Maya went still over the tablet. Then she dragged her sock foot across the kitchen tile, fast, three times, and reached toward the metal drawer handle. The little blue spark snapped between her finger and the metal.

"Ow," she said happily. "Soren. That."

He looked at the drawer. He looked at the frozen lightning on the screen.

"Rubbing," he said.

"Rubbing," she said. "My sock rubbed the floor. The rubbing moved the charge. It piled up until it had nowhere to go and it jumped."

"The ice in a normal storm is just the thing that rubs," Soren said slowly. "It was never about being cold. It was never about water. It was about a billion little things rubbing past each other and stripping charge off each other until something has to give."

"And ash rubs." Maya's voice went up. "Ash rubs like crazy. There's more ash in that one column than there are raindrops in a whole sky."

Soren wrote a single word and underlined it twice, then put the pencil down because his hand wanted to point instead.

"So the mountain is making its own storm," he said. "Out of the ground. Out of broken rock."

"Out of nothing that was ever a cloud," Maya said.

They unpaused it. The flashes came again, and now they were not strange. They were the only thing that made sense. Each fork was the moment the column couldn't hold the charge one second longer.

"Wait," Maya said. "Wait wait wait." She put both hands flat on the counter. "If lightning means stuff is rubbing together hard enough to build charge, then any time you see lightning anywhere, even somewhere with no clouds, even on another planet, it's telling you something is up there grinding against itself."

Soren stopped.

"There's lightning on other planets," he said.

"There's lightning on Jupiter," Maya said. "I read it. And there's no ground on Jupiter. It's all sky."

"Then on Jupiter the lightning is telling us what's rubbing up there," Soren said. "Without anybody ever going." He pressed his palm against his own chest without noticing he did it. "You could read a whole world you've never touched just by the shape of where it sparks."

Maya didn't say anything. She was scrubbing the video back again, watching the smoke-tree light up and go dark, light up and go dark.

"Everybody on that stream is talking about the ash," she said. "Like the lightning is just decoration."

"It's not decoration," Soren said.

"It's the mountain telling us how fast it's coming apart inside." She finally looked up from the screen at him. "And nobody asked it."

The stream kept running. On the far side of the world it was still night, and the column still climbed, and deep in the gray where there was no sky and no rain and no cloud, the broken rock kept tearing past itself until the dark couldn't hold the charge, and split open with light.

Maya turned the volume all the way down so there was nothing left but the flashes, and they both leaned in and watched the mountain spell something out one letter at a time.