One Hundred at Once

The flight was cancelled at nine, but nobody came to take them home, so Maya and Soren sat in the weather office with Soren's aunt Priya, who kept saying give me one minute and then not having one.

The office had no windows worth looking through. Instead it had screens. One whole wall of them. Priya was watching a storm crawl across the map like something alive, and she was not really watching the two of them at all.

On the biggest screen there was a map of the country, and the map was blinking.

Maya noticed the blinking first. Little yellow flashes, popping up and vanishing, all over. Not in one place. Everywhere. Texas. Then Ohio. Then somewhere near the Gulf, three at once, then two more before the first three had faded.

"What are those," Maya said.

"Strikes," said Priya, not turning around. "Lightning. The network catches them. Every one gets a dot."

Soren leaned in. He had his notebook open on his knee and a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He was counting.

He got to eleven and lost his place. The flashes came faster than he could keep them. He started again at a corner of the map, tried to count only Florida, and lost that too.

"You can't count them," he said.

"No," said Priya. She almost sounded proud of it. "Not by eye. Nobody can."

Maya put her finger near the screen, not touching, following one flash to where the next appeared. The gaps between them were nothing. Before her finger arrived, the place had already gone dark and somewhere else had lit.

"How many," Maya said. "In a second. How many."

Priya rolled her chair back at last and looked at the map with them, the way you look at weather you did not make and cannot stop.

"Over the whole planet? About a hundred. Every second. Right now, while we're talking. A hundred times a second, somewhere, the sky is doing that."

Soren wrote the number down. One hundred. Then he sat looking at it.

"That can't be right," he said. Not rude. Just checking. "That's since we sat down. That's, what." He did the arithmetic on the page. "We've been here twenty minutes. That's a hundred and twenty thousand. Just while we were bored."

"More," said Priya. "The map only shows the big ones over land. There's more out at sea."

Maya was still watching the flashes. She had gone quiet, and then she said the thing she had been circling.

"Each one of those is hot."

"Each one of those," said Priya, "is about thirty thousand degrees. In the channel, for a heartbeat. That's five times hotter than the surface of the sun."

Soren's pen stopped.

"The dot," he said. "That yellow dot. That's five suns."

"For a fraction of a second. Then it's gone."

Maya looked at the map, at the dozens of little flashes she could not count, and Soren watched her look, and he could see her doing the sum that had no clean answer. A hundred a second. Each one hotter than the sun. All of it happening right now, in the dark, in places with no name where nobody was watching except a machine that turned each one into a dot too small to matter.

"Why don't we hear it," Maya said suddenly. "If it's that hot. Something that hot should be loud."

"It is loud," said Priya. "That's thunder. The air gets slammed so hot so fast it can't get out of its own way. It expands faster than sound can travel. That's the bang. Thunder is the sound of air breaking the sound barrier."

Soren wrote that down too, and then he did something Maya did not expect. He put the pen down and went to the door of the office, the one that opened onto the outside, onto the wet tarmac and the grounded planes.

"There's a storm south of us," he said. "You said. On the map."

Priya checked. "Forty miles. You won't see much."

But she let them stand in the doorway with the rain coming sideways under the roof edge, and they looked south into the dark.

They waited. Nothing. The map inside was blinking, they knew, a hundred a second, but out here the world was just black and rain.

Then the whole southern sky went white and soft, once, low down behind the clouds. Not a bolt. Just a bloom of light, like a lamp behind a sheet.

Maya counted under her breath. One elephant, two elephant, on and on. She got past thirty before she gave up.

"Too far," she said. "The sound didn't make it."

"But it happened," said Soren. "The bang happened. Forty miles ago the air broke the sound barrier and we just watched the light with no sound."

Maya turned to him. "Every one of those dots is doing that. Every one has a bang. There's a hundred bangs a second happening on the Earth right now and almost all of them, nobody's close enough to hear."

The sky bloomed white again, further off this time, over the Gulf where no one lived.

Soren looked back through the doorway at the map, blinking and blinking, a whole planet flashing, and then out again at the one real flash he could actually see with his own eyes.

"They're the same thing," he said quietly. "The dot and the sky. That dot on her screen is this."

They stood there. The rain kept coming under the roof. Inside, the machine counted what no person could, and outside, one silent bloom of light after another lifted the clouds from underneath and let them fall dark again.

Maya stopped trying to count. She just watched the horizon and waited for the next one, and it came, and then another, each one a piece of the sun striking down somewhere with a sound too far away to reach her.

Behind them the yellow dots kept appearing on the map, faster than either of them could point, all night, all over the turning Earth.