On the day Nick Slate retrieved the twentieth object, and added the “stain remover” to Tesla’s Far Range Energy Emitter, two hundred and thirty-one verifiable instances of ball lightning were reported to the National Weather Service.

Bizarre pictures were being posted by people on every social media platform, which was not unusual—except these bizarre pictures featured throbbing blobs of atmospheric energy.

Ball lightning is extremely rare. So rare that for many years science refused to accept that it existed. It’s no surprise that Nikola Tesla was the only scientist ever able to produce it in his laboratory.

When ball lightning does appear naturally, it can take many forms. It can be a pulsating, sparking orb of light in the night sky. It can seem to be a blinding halo atop a flagpole or lightning rod. It can look like an ethereal jellyfish with deadly high-voltage tentacles. Or it can shoot across the sky like a fireball. Small wonder, then, that its appearance has often been interpreted by some as divine. And who’s to say it’s not?

Perhaps, as some thought in the wake of Armageddon’s near miss, a heavenly host had descended to observe these unprecedented happenings on planet Earth, and Gabriel the archangel was, at that very moment, breathing deep so he could at long last blow into his horn, heralding the arrival of Judgment Day.

Or maybe it was just a whole lot of weird lightning.

Mitch Murló could not have cared less about the massive static charge that was building in Earth’s atmosphere. He did know that judgment was coming, though. It was coming for the Accelerati, and he was the one passing judgment.

Mitch had been spending his time plotting. This was a curious thing, because Mitch never plotted. He usually just went with the flow of life. He was comfortable being a follower, especially when it came to Nick, who always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, even when he didn’t. As furious as Mitch had been the day he stormed away from the summit meeting in the attic, deep down he knew that Nick’s choice to use Mitch’s anger to get some answers was the right one.

The day that Nick was facing power-failure issues, Mitch, like Vince, stayed home sick, and he really was. He hadn’t slept, and he had a splitting headache from hating too hard—when your mind is overwhelmed with the kind of caustic, concentrated contempt he felt for the Accelerati, your head begins to throb. His mom, who had to go to work, left him with Tylenol, canned chicken soup, a game controller, and a kiss on the forehead. Once she was gone, Mitch called his father.

Getting through to a prison inmate was always an ordeal, and it was especially difficult when the call was not prearranged. In the end all he could do was leave a message, and then play the latest version of Grand Theft Psycho to pass the time, running down pedestrians indiscriminately. No matter how many people he killed and maimed with his monster truck, though, he felt no better.

Finally, at noon, a call came in with the familiar recorded voice announcing that “a prisoner at Colorado State Penitentiary is calling collect.”

“Dad, I found them,” he said once his father was connected. As calls from inmates were monitored and timed, he had to get to the point right away.

“Found who? Mitch, are you okay? You don’t sound right.”

“I found the creeps who did this to you. They’re a secret society called the Accelerati, they wear suits made from spiderwebs, and I’m going to take them down.”

There was complete silence on the line, and Mitch was afraid the call had dropped. Then he heard his father’s deep strangled gasp, like he’d been holding his breath in shock while Mitch was talking.

“Mitch, don’t. Don’t even try,” his father said. “Just forget about them.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“Mitch, listen to me.” His father’s voice was stern, sharp. “Stay away from them. They’re dangerous.”

“I know. I don’t care.”

“There are things you don’t understand! You don’t know what these people are capable of,” his father warned.

“And they don’t know what I’m capable of,” Mitch told him.

The truth was, Mitch himself didn’t know what he was capable of. He was now officially a loose cannon, and he liked that idea just fine.

While Mitch planned vengeance, Caitlin became a news junkie. She found it amazing how much pointless drivel filled the airwaves and Internet when it came to current events. So much so that important things vanished in the loud camouflage of celebrity sightings and car chases.

What Caitlin was able to tease out from the world soup offered glimpses of something very grim.

Entire flocks of geese were freezing to death, flying into the Arctic Circle instead of toward warmer climates. A record number of ships were getting marooned—not sinking, just lost at sea, unable to get their bearings and find land before running out of fuel. Power plants were going off-line with no official explanation. Not enough of them to cause a panic, but enough to raise a red flag for anyone who wasn’t focused on the latest high-speed chase.

Caitlin was too distracted in English that morning to write a coherent essay on Brave New World. Cowardly New World was more like it, considering how everyone seemed to be hiding from a truth that was becoming clearer and clearer to Caitlin: it was only a matter of time before the billions of little shocks ignited the atmosphere or electrocuted every living thing on the planet.

She caught up with Nick between first and second period. His eyes were bloodshot, his manner skittish. He was filled with nervous energy. Just like the world, thought Caitlin. Sparking with no way to release the charge.

She had come to realize that he was right—it was his task to assemble the machine. But he had to hold himself together in the process.

“We can cross the washboard off the list,” Nick told her. “I got it back and added it to the rest.”

“That leaves twelve things to find,” Caitlin said.

“We just have to keep at it,” Nick said. “We’ll get them eventually, I know it.”

Nick treated each find like a victory in a game, but eventually wasn’t good enough anymore. He had directed Caitlin’s attention to the big picture, but now there was an even bigger picture that he didn’t see. He was already obsessed with the machine—how much worse would he be if he knew they were running out of time?

“Maybe we can’t do this on our own,” Caitlin dared to suggest. “Maybe we need to turn this over to—”

“To who?” Nick stared at her as if she had just slapped him. “The Accelerati? The government? No! This landed in my hands for a reason. I was meant to do this, Caitlin. We were meant to do this.”

His manner was getting increasingly intense whenever he spoke of his place in the workings of the mysterious machine. Nick saw himself as not just the steward of Tesla’s dream, but as an inheritor of it.

“I’m just saying we need help.”

The late bell rang, and Caitlin had the urge to race to class. How strange that mundane things like school schedules still held sway over her life when such larger things were brewing. She resisted the desire to leave, and pressed Nick one more time.

“This is too much for us to do alone. Just promise you’ll think about it.”

“All right,” Nick said. “I promise.”

Nick resented the fact that Caitlin didn’t trust him to do this himself. But maybe she was right. He wasn’t all-knowing and all-powerful. When he stood close to the machine, he felt like he knew things—but he wasn’t sure what those things were. It wasn’t that the machine spoke to him. It was more like listening to music. Even if you’ve never heard the tune before, you can sense the next note. You can predict where it needs to go next. This instinctive sense inspired confidence. Maybe too much confidence. Perhaps he did need to take Caitlin’s advice.

And so, during lunch, he lingered at the back of the line and approached the food counter after all the other kids had been served. He was a bit embarrassed to approach Ms. Planck after freaking out in the cafeteria for no reason the other morning, but he had unfinished business with her.

“Ms. Planck?” he said, getting her attention. Then he slipped a folded piece of paper beneath the glass sneeze-protector. “Remember our conversation last week? Well, these are things I’m still trying to find. Anything you can do to help would mean the world to me.”

Ms. Planck took the paper and carefully slipped it into her apron with a warm smile. “Of course, Nick. It’ll be my pleasure.” Then she gave him a double helping of lasagna.

Vince didn’t have Nick’s uncanny ability to figure out where things went in Tesla’s invention—but it was pretty obvious to him that the globe would fit comfortably in the drum of the dryer. That would make it the centerpiece of the machine. Inconveniently, it was now at the bottom of an extremely deep, extremely murky Scottish lake. One that might or might not have a monster in it. As unfortunate as that was for Nick, it was very fortunate for Vince, who had no desire to give up his life so the contraption could be completed.

He had no idea that Nick had just unknowingly handed the Accelerati a list of every missing item. But even if Vince had known, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. He doubted the Accelerati were readers of the Planetary Times. And even if they were, he doubted they would have caught the small photo on page 17 of the previous week’s issue. As long as Vince kept silent, no one would know where the globe was and no one would ever complete that machine.

Wayne Slate’s interest in the electrical anomaly besieging the planet was mostly limited to its effect on the photocopy machines at NORAD. He repaired the older, analog variety, much more common than one might expect at such a high-tech, cutting-edge installation. These vintage copiers transferred toner through an electrostatic charge. Thanks to the atmospheric interference, all the pages were coming out completely black.

What began to concern Wayne more than his additional workload, however, were the huge unmarked personnel carriers ferrying people into the massive stronghold under Cheyenne Mountain.

Of course, this was the government—they always knew things no one else did. But the commotion seemed eerily similar to when, only a few weeks earlier, important people had scurried beneath the mountain to hide from the end of the world.

Danny had grown up in Florida, where unexpected thunderstorms were a way of life; thus he found nothing unusual in the increased electrical activity. He actually enjoyed pranking his friends by shuffling his feet on the carpet, then sneaking up behind them and touching their earlobes, delivering a shock that would make them jump.

He knew his brother was probably involved in something he shouldn’t have been, but he idolized Nick; therefore, while he sensed that Nick was in over his head, he chose to believe that Nick could handle it.

Sure, maybe there were creepy inventions doing creepy things in their creepy attic. But hadn’t Nick just taken him and his new friend Seth out for ice cream? He wouldn’t do that if he were in any sort of real trouble, would he?

So Danny continued to shock his friends and watch the non-northern lights, convinced that everything was fine and that in his next game he would finally catch a ball for real.

Through all of this, some fifteen thousand miles away, Celestial Object Felicity Bonk was growing excited—in the electrical sense. And she couldn’t wait to share some of that excitement with the planet below.