Worldwide, lightning usually causes about eighty deaths and three hundred injuries per year. But the steadily increasing number of electrical storms in the past few weeks had laid waste to all previous statistics. Folks on all continents were getting fried like flies in a bug zapper. But of course, unless it happened to you or someone you knew, it registered as little more than distant thunder. Something to be filed away under “Stuff Happens.”

So far, the only major entity affected by the electromagnetic weirdness was the airline industry, which experienced random navigation and telemetry issues. More than one airplane had landed at the wrong airport. In one instance, vacationers in plaid shorts and mouse ears en route to Orlando found themselves landing, with no explanation, in Honduras, where the resident rodents were more likely to give rabies than rides.

Meanwhile, the Slate household was dealing with its own electromagnetic woes: a sudden and inexplicable lack of power.

“Nick, get up! We’re late!”

It was his dad’s voice. Nick opened his eyes and reflexively looked at his alarm clock. The screen was dark.

“Power failure!” his father shouted up the ladder to him.

“How late are we?” he called down.

“No clue!”

Nick grabbed his phone, but it was dead, even though he’d left it charging. The power must have been out all night.

He quickly pulled on some pants and a shirt, hurrying downstairs with his shoes untied.

Danny ate Cheerios in the unlit kitchen. “I don’t like eating in the dark. I can’t see if there are bugs in my cereal.”

“It’s not dark,” Nick pointed out. “Just dim.”

“I don’t like eating in the dim either.”

As it turned out, no one’s phone was working, so they were forced to consult Great-Aunt Greta’s grandfather clock, which was always off by ten minutes—fast or slow—and thus was only slightly better than nothing.

“We needed to be in school either three or twenty-three minutes ago,” Danny griped. “Can any of Tesla’s stuff help with that?”

Nick shrugged. “Not any of the things we have.”

“Figures.”

Nick’s father was running up and down the stairs and cursing as he kept remembering things he had to bring to work.

Apparently their bad luck was nowhere near an end, because when they went out to the car, it didn’t start.

Mr. Slate pounded the steering wheel in frustration. “I can’t even call to let them know I’ll be late,” he complained.

“Maybe the whole grid is down,” Nick suggested, “and NORAD is out, too.”

“NORAD doesn’t lose power,” their dad said flatly. “Even when the world was ending it didn’t.”

Nick could see, through the dreary, morning haze, that the lights were on in the house across the street. So their father went to use their neighbor’s phone while Nick and Danny rode their bikes to their respective schools, which were in opposite directions.

Nick was usually observant, but he was so preoccupied with thoughts of the Accelerati that he didn’t notice how cars stalled when he pedaled next to them. He wasn’t aware of the neighborhood lights flickering off as he approached and flickering back on after he had passed, or that traffic lights were winking out, causing near collisions.

Instead, his mind was filled with the very unpleasant prospect of having to shake Jorgenson’s hand.

Mitch’s prophetic blurts were never wrong. So did this mean that, to save their lives, they would have to enter a truce with the Accelerati—or worse, join them?

Nick locked up his bike, and as he walked into school, the hallway light flickered out. Then, when he went to hand his tardy slip to the Attendance Czar, all the lights turned off in the main office.

“Don’t panic,” he heard one of the secretaries say. And then: “That’s funny, the flashlight on my phone isn’t working.”

That’s when Nick knew. He quickly left the office. When he was farther down the hall, the lights in the office came back on, but the fluorescents above his head went out.

Deep in his head Nick could hear Dr. Alan Jorgenson’s mocking laughter.

For the entire day it felt like there was a storm cloud over his head. Wherever he went, anything nearby lost power. The calculators in his math class, the SMART Board in English, all laptops and tablets and phones were entirely drained of juice.

“I don’t know what they did to me,” he told Caitlin during lunch, in a dim half of the cafeteria, sounding more desperate than he meant to. Here he could see exactly how far the nullifying field extended. It had a twenty-foot radius all around him.

“Don’t panic,” Caitlin said. “It’s not like it’s going to kill you.”

“No,” Nick admitted. “But once people figure out I’m the one causing their hardware to crash, they might kill me.”

“The Accelerati are trying to keep you off balance, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s working.”

Caitlin took a deep breath. “You have to figure out what’s doing it. There must be some sort of device or…ray or…something.”

Nick looked down at his clothes. He’d already checked his pockets. He’d even gone so far as to brush his hair, on the off chance the mechanism was disguised as a fleck of dandruff.

“For all I know,” Nick said, “they could have replaced my deodorant with energy-suck spray.”

Caitlin smirked. “Well, it’s good to know you use deodorant.” Which made Nick blush only slightly.

Then she reached over and gently took Nick’s hand. She didn’t even hide the gesture—it was in full view of everyone. The fact that no one was looking didn’t matter; it was daring in that anyone could have seen it.

“Well,” she said, “whatever it is, it doesn’t wipe out all electricity.”

And although Nick blushed a little bit more, he didn’t mind at all.

Rumors about Nick’s involvement in the strange energy drain began to circulate, and before lunch was over, he was summoned by the principal. Suspicions were further verified when he entered the main office and the lights went out again.

When he opened the door to Principal Watt’s office, the man looked up, smiled at Nick, and then his head promptly flopped down into the plate of Chinese food he was eating.

Having seen Vince die on multiple occasions, Nick quickly put two and two together and realized that the man must have a pacemaker. So he promptly left the way he came in.

Principal Watt soon regained consciousness, only slightly suffocated by the egg foo yung in his nostrils, but no worse for the wear.

Nick decided it was time for him to make an early exit from school.