The Storm That Doesn't Need the Sky

The call connected at eleven minutes past midnight. Soren's face was lit blue from his screen. Behind Maya, a lamp made a warm circle on her wall.

"Are you watching it," Maya said. Not a question.

"The Iceland one. The livestream." Soren angled his laptop so she could see his second screen. A black mountain. Orange bleeding up its side. A column of ash climbing into a sky with no stars in it.

"Wait," Maya said. "Go back. There was a flash."

"That was probably the camera."

"It wasn't the camera. There."

Inside the ash column, a thread of white light cracked and vanished. Then another, lower down, branching sideways like something reaching.

Soren leaned so close his nose almost touched the glass. "That's lightning."

"In the volcano."

"In the cloud coming out of the volcano." He stopped. "There's no storm. Look at the sky above it. It's just night. There aren't even clouds up there."

Maya was quiet. On his screen he could see her looking at nothing on her ceiling.

"Lightning needs a storm," Soren said. He said it the way he said things he was checking, not things he believed. "That's the whole thing about lightning. Rain, ice, the tall cloud, all of it rubbing together. That's how you get the charge."

"So where's the charge coming from," Maya said.

"That's what I'm saying. There's no cloud to make it."

"There's a cloud. It's just made of the wrong stuff."

They both watched. Another flash, then two close together, stitching across the middle of the plume where the ash was thickest and blackest.

"Okay," Soren said slowly. "What's in a normal storm cloud that rubs together."

"Ice bits. Water. They crash into each other going up and down." Maya sat up. "And when they crash they scrape charge off each other. One goes positive, one goes negative. They stack up on different sides of the cloud."

"Until it's too much and it jumps. That's the lightning. It's the cloud getting rid of the difference."

"Right." Maya pointed at her screen even though he couldn't see where. "Now look at that thing. It's going up like crazy. It's boiling up."

"It has to be," Soren said. "The heat under it is enormous. Everything in there is getting thrown up fast and dragged down and thrown up again."

"Same as the storm."

"Same motion as the storm." He grabbed his notebook off the bed. His pen moved. A tall shape, arrows curling inside it, up one side and down the other. "But there's no ice. There's no water. It's all"

"Ash," Maya said. "It's rock. It's a million tiny bits of smashed rock going a hundred miles an hour into each other."

Soren stopped writing.

"Say that again," he said.

"Bits of rock. Smashing into each other. Millions of them." She was talking faster now. "You know when you drag your feet on the carpet and grab the doorknob and it snaps you."

"Static."

"You rubbed something on something and the charge came off. You didn't need a storm. You needed rubbing." She laughed, one short surprised sound. "The ash is the carpet. The ash is the socks. It's the whole thing. It's rubbing itself."

Soren looked at the plume. It did not look like weather anymore. It looked like a machine, a tall furious machine grinding rock against rock so hard it was tearing the charge off the pieces, one particle going a little positive, the next going a little negative, all of them thrown up and slammed down and thrown up again until the top of the cloud and the bottom of the cloud were two different things that could not stand being apart.

"It's building it," he said. "The whole column is a battery charging itself."

A flash answered him, the biggest one yet, a jagged white bone of light inside the black.

"There," Maya said softly. "That's it letting go."

They watched three more without talking.

"So a cloud doesn't make lightning," Soren said finally.

"No."

"Grinding makes lightning. Enough little things hitting each other hard enough makes lightning. The cloud was just the version we knew about."

Maya had her knees pulled up to her chin now, her whole face close to the screen. "There's lightning in dust storms," she said. "On Earth. Sand rubbing sand."

"Is there."

"I read it. And I bet." She stopped. "Mars has dust storms. Huge ones. The whole planet."

Soren's pen was already moving. He didn't look up. "So there'd be lightning on Mars."

"Nobody's ever been standing there in one."

"Somebody will be." He said it plainly, the way he committed to a guess. "Somebody's going to be standing on Mars in a dust storm and see it and know exactly what it is."

"Because we figured out what it is here." Maya's voice did something on the last word. "At midnight. On a phone."

Soren looked at his notebook. The tall shape, the curling arrows, and under it he'd written the word grinding, and under that, without deciding to, the word Mars.

"Everybody's asleep," Maya said. "Our whole town. And that thing's been sitting there the whole time making lightning out of broken rock and nobody's looking at it."

"We're looking at it."

"We're looking at it."

Another flash lit the plume from inside, and for half a second the whole climbing column glowed, and they could see the shape of the thing that had made it, boiling upward in the dark with no sky helping it at all.

Maya didn't hang up. Soren didn't either. They left the call open and set their phones against their pillows so the little windows still showed each other's dim rooms, and they turned back to the mountain, and every time it flashed one of them said there and the other one said yeah, and outside both their houses the real sky stayed empty and quiet, holding no storm of its own.