Afterlight Atlas

St. Elmo’s fire has a way of whispering before it bites. It stutters along slack wire and rusted pylons, blue tongues feeling for a path, and every hair on your arms knows the sentence before the sky speaks it aloud. Tamsin Hale crouched below the road’s shattered guardrail, watching the horizon grow a neon bruise. Her breath fogged her scarf; the scarf was glass-threaded, the only thing that never sparked when she moved. Behind her, winds combed over dunes of powdered glass, raising a sound like dry hail. They called it the White Sea when they were romantic, the Saltfall when they remembered what men had done to the sky.

The convoy came late, as the storm promised. Two trucks, ceramic-tired and chain-hung, crawled the Crackle Road with a third mule of a trailer clanking behind, its cargo crates stenciled with the Wardenry sigil: a fist around a bolt. They always rolled heavy when the air hummed; that meant fewer scavvers brave enough to try them and more chance for a clean pass. It also meant their insulators would be sealed in shockproof boxes that could ride out a lightning kiss.

“We don’t need the whole haul,” Tamsin whispered. “Just two crates of porcelain rings. Enough to keep the dew-nets drinking.”

Kite lay flat beside her, his namesake folded across his back, silk tails wrapped around his wrist in spidery skeins. He was more wire than boy, ribs like ladder rungs and hair cut blunt to stave off sparks. “Wind’s shifting. If we pop them now, the arcs’ll jump to the ridge.” He flicked his gaze to the stormfront. “We anchor or we fry.”

They had anchored. Their soaked hemp lines—brown snakes hiding in the scrub—ran from the guardrail down into a borrow pit where Tamsin had hammered in rebar and buried it in wet clay. Old Earthwork. She trusted ground more than she trusted men. That was the lineworker in her, her father’s hands living in hers: a grip like a clamp, a memory of how to bleed a storm before it bleeds you.

Below, the Wardenry trucks coughed through a field of cracked bottles and drifted windowpanes. The lead driver wore the common arrogance of a powered man, his coilgun sunning in the passenger seat. Behind him, a scout rode the trailer tongue, boots braced, scanning the cuts and gullies with a red lens that made him look like a wound. The Wardenry, keepers of order—or of monopoly, if you were thirsty enough to say it aloud.

Tamsin thumbed the copper disc sewn into her palm glove. It was etched with her dead brother’s call sign—Lark—and a pseudo-random phase key he’d used to ping the old towers when they were children and the world still had jokes. She rubbed it until the letters warmed. “On my mark,” she said. “Kite, throw to the axle. Rook, smoke.”

Rook, big-shouldered and quiet, unpinned a ceramic canister and rolled it down the slope. When it cracked, it belched a mica fog that hung heavy and dull, a blanket against line-of-sight coilfire. Kite rose into a crouch, snapped his wrists, and the silk jittered like a living thing. The convoy entered their reach. Tamsin stood, rope in hand, feeling the storm press forward like a crowd, impatient to be part of this theft.

“Mark,” she breathed, and everything jumped at once.