Chewing Cables in a Gale

Rule forty-seven of the Tana-Mega Linesman Safety Code was clear about cloud gales: when horizontal rain hits forty knots, tie off to the nearest iron strut and pray the lightning rods hold. It said nothing about what to do when someone is sitting on the crossbeam eating the high-voltage wire.

The gale screamed across the gorge, spitting sulfur and wet mist against my goggles. Sixty feet below my boots, the canyon canopy vanished into churning white foam. My canvas harness groaned under the wind shear, but the twin carabiners bit hard into the galvanized steel spar of Tower 44.

"Just a downed limb," Boss Gali had barked an hour ago at Depot Seven, shoving a clipboard into my chest while blowing steam off his ginger brew. "Line Three went dead during the first squall. Go up, clear the pine branch, splice the copper, and get back before the morning shift whistle. Don't be delicate."

I had not been delicate. I had dragged fifty pounds of vulcanized rubber tape, splice collars, and steel crimpers up sixty rungs of rain-slick iron in the middle of a monsoon surge.

Except there were no pine branches up here. The Tana-Mega plateau was bare basalt and whistling cable spans.

I wiped rain from my lenses with a soaked glove and clipped my safety lanyard to the secondary bracket. The top platform of Tower 44 was three planks of creosoted teak bolted to iron framing. Right at the apex, where the three-thousand-volt main trunk split into the regional relay lines, something rustled against the storm.

A pair of bare legs dangled over the abyss.

They kicked lazily back and forth, completely indifferent to the hundred-yard drop into the fog. Above the legs sat a slender figure wrapped in shreds of storm-blown blue silk. Long, iridescent feathers—the sharp, electric-indigo plumage of a cloud-shifter—fanned from her shoulder blades, beating the gale with crisp, snapping cracks.

She held the severed end of the regional telegraph line in two small, soot-stained hands.

A human being touching that line would have detonated like a sack of damp flour. The trunk was live, humming with enough raw atmospheric voltage to power the signal lamps in five harbor towns.

She was gnawing on it.

She peeled back the gutta-percha insulation with her teeth, spit out a mouthful of blackened tar, and bit straight through the thick bundle of braided copper. Bright blue sparks exploded across her cheeks, illuminating sharp cheekbones and a wide, gleeful grin. A low, vibrating hum resonated from her chest—a sound that was half cat purr and half transformer overload.

"Tasty," she murmured. Her voice cut clean through the howling gale, sharp and ringing with pure static.

I stared at her for three whole seconds while the wind whipped my collar against my jaw.

My handbook did not cover wild shifters harvesting company infrastructure as an afternoon snack. It covered frayed lanyards, rusted cotter pins, and emergency ground rods.

"Excuse me," I said, raising my voice over the thunder.

She flinched. The blue feathers on her back flared instantly, standing on end like a startled hawk. She whipped around on the wet beam, crouching on all fours with preternatural balance.

Her eyes were not human. They were wide, luminous rings of cobalt fire, crackling with ungrounded current. A smudge of soot striped her left cheek, and a loose strand of raven hair clung to her wet forehead.

"You're loud," she snapped, baring small, sharp teeth that held a leftover ember of orange plasma. "And you smell like burnt rubber."

"That would be my company-issued insulated coat," I shouted back, keeping my hands visible on the safety rail. "Which exists so I don't turn into a grease stain when I repair the lines you're currently digesting."

She tilted her head. Her feathers gave an irritated twitch, throwing off a spray of bright azure sparks that fizzled in the rain. "This is sky-food. It runs along the iron bones. I was hungry."

"That isn't sky-food. That is the commercial dispatch cable for the Western Reach. You just ate three days of agricultural shipping manifests and two marriage proposals."

She looked down at the frayed, glowing copper stub in her hands. She gave it a speculative lick. Another jolt of blue fire snapped against her tongue. She swallowed it with an audible gulp, her throat glowing faintly through translucent, pale skin before the light faded into her collarbones.

"Tasted bitter," she decided, wrinkling her nose. "Too much tin in the alloy. Who made this junk?"

"The Ministry of Works. And they take property damage out of my pension." I unclipped my crimping pliers from my belt ring and took a cautious half-step along the teak platform. "Slide off the beam, please. I have eighty feet of copper to splice before the five-o'clock carrier wave fries us both."

"No," she said.

"What do you mean, no?"

"The big steam towers to the south drank all the thunderheads this afternoon," she said, her voice dropping into a fierce, ragged growl. The playful shine in her eyes vanished, replaced by a sudden, jagged desperation. "The sky is dry. The clan is starving on the ridges. If I don't take the juice from the wires, my wings won't lift by sunrise."

My grip tightened on the cold steel handle of the pliers.

Down in the lowlands, the Continental Power Trust had been firing up their new condenser engines for weeks. Monstrous iron boilers that sucked raw atmospheric static from storm fronts to power city dynamos. The union boys at the depot had complained about erratic grid surges, but nobody cared about the ridge tribes living above the clouds.

"Look," I said, keeping my voice steady while rain battered my hood. "I don't run the condensers. I just climb towers and replace fried wire so harbor dispatchers don't crash mail barges. But if you bite that junction box behind your left elbow, you'll short fifty miles of trunk line straight through your ribs."

She glanced back at the heavy cast-iron transformer casing. A fat arc of violet electricity danced between the ceramic insulators, buzzing like a hornets' nest.

"Looks juicy," she whispered.

"Don't," I warned.

She didn't listen. Shifters never do.

She reached out with a claw-tipped hand, aiming straight for the primary terminal lug.

I didn't think about the Safety Manual. I didn't think about rule fourteen regarding ungrounded contact. I lunged across the slick beam, reached past the sparking insulator, and grabbed her bare wrist.

The second my skin met hers, a shockwave of raw, unbridled lightning blasted through my arm.

Any other lineman in the five republics would have charred to ash on the spot. But my cells didn't burn. They opened.

The voltage poured into my bloodstream in a violent, scorching tide. My hair snapped straight up under my leather cap. A familiar, metallic taste of tin and ozone flooded the back of my tongue. The static built behind my teeth, vibrating down my spine until my muscles locked in a rigid, buzzing hum.

The girl gasped.

Her glowing cobalt eyes dilated until they filled her face. She tried to yank her arm back, but the magnetic pull of the circuit held us locked together. The blue fire on her skin didn't sear through me; it grounded into my bones, draining away from her trembling fingers into my feet and out through the iron frame of the tower.

"What... what are you?" she stammered, her voice shaking with pure shock.

"A guy... b-b-zzzt... trying to... k-k-keep his job," I managed to squeeze past my vibrating jaw, static crackling across my consonants.

She looked down at where my bare fingers gripped her wrist, then slowly raised her gaze to my face. The wild, feral hunger in her expression didn't vanish—it shifted, turning razor-sharp and intensely focused.

"You didn't burn," she whispered.

The gale screamed around the iron spar, whipping her electric feathers against my canvas coat.

She leaned in close, her breath warm with the scent of ozone and sweet rain, and smiled a slow, dangerous smile.

"I think I found something better than copper."