Alma was still high up and whole, but her heart and her hope felt broken and low as she swept the flashlight beam around the metal interior of the silo again. And again and again.
Nothing.
She had been so certain the Starling would be there. Her hands ached from gripping the ladder and the flashlight. The books of fear began to open.
Then a bolt of lightning ripped across the sky, a line of light like a door cracked in a darkened room, and thunder sounded, closer this time.
Alma shoved the flashlight back into her pocket and reached up for the next ladder rung.
The Starling was not there, but that was not the only reason she had come to this silo.
Alma was almost to the top when the storm that had been threatening to break loose for weeks finally swept in.
Wind whipped through the burned fields. Lightning struck, illuminating the farmland and the woods beyond. Thunder rumbled a second later, and the silo thrummed, its metal sides vibrating with the sound.
Alma climbed the last few rungs.
The top of the silo was rounded, with a flat circle at its center. The smell of smoke was stronger, and it was clear that lightning had struck there before. There were sagging, blackened patches and tiny holes in the dome, places where fire had eaten away at the metal surface.
Alma scrambled her way up the curving slope and to the center. She knelt there and opened her bag as lightning flashed again, followed immediately by thunder. Fumbling with her gauze-covered hands, she drew out the fire jar with the copper spike.
It wasn’t a candle, she had realized in her room as she watched the storm approaching.
It was a lightning rod.
Transforming the energy of lightning into true fire was an idea that Hugo had mentioned many times—in the General Store while they were gathering supplies, during his lecture with the image of the flaming forest under a forked-lightning sky, and as a possible solution suggested by Mrs. Brisa. It had seemed impossible because lightning was so powerful, but Alma understood now how it would work with the fire jar. She removed the lid and pulled the spike out to its full length.
The lightning would spark the fire just like the flyer and the quintescope and the Starling had sparked her Alma-ness weeks ago.
So Alma stood atop the silo in the middle of the burned fields with the wind howling and the rain falling and the stars shining.
“I am Alma of the Growing Light!” she called to the wind and the earth and the water and the stars, to everything, everything around her. “And I am here for fire!”
She lifted the jar into the air. The metal rod extended upward, pointing up to the heavens, up to those billions and trillions of stars whose names she did not yet know, those stars shining with the light that shone inside her.
Alma felt like that light was flowing into her, flowing in through her eyes, into her body, meeting her Alma-ness, until she felt like another star herself.
She felt as bright as the Starling had been that first night.
Then the thunder crashed, and the lightning flashed. The sky was split wide open, split by a jagged line.
A jagged line that dead-ended at the copper rod on the fire jar that Alma was lifting up high.
Suddenly, the world was alight. The world was on fire. And Alma was flying. She heard the wind screaming through the silo’s burned-out holes. She felt the rain, sharp and stinging on her face. And the earth, the earth was reaching up to meet her.
Alma fell from the silo. She fell and fell.
Until something caught her.
Something warm and strong.
Something that sang like a thousand bells.
Something that carried her, gently, gently, down to the ground, where the world went dark.