Hydropower Chapter 1
It begins
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I’m happy and excited and nervous to begin this new journey with you… it feels like I should write something auspicious to accompany the first chapter, but I want it to stand on its own feet. So - without further ado…
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Chapter 1
Evie kicked her feet against the sturdy wall underneath them, her fingers grazing against the grains of sand that had blown across it. More was blowing now, snapping up into the air and tangling with the flyaway strands of her hair. Tomorrow morning, she would need a shower.
That was tomorrow’s problem.
She sighed, feeling the sound of it slough away from her and join with the susurrus of the waves crashing below them.
“Is this really how you want to spend the night before your birthday?” Ash asked beside her, swinging his own legs with more vigor and less violence.
“I like the energy,” she said, gesturing towards the waves.
Ash cast a dubious, sideways look at the horizon. “It looks… angry,” he pointed out.
He was right. The sky was roiling and black, not that it was easy to tell against the general blackness of the night. It was almost midnight, after all. Beneath them, the waves licked ever higher and closer, threatening to wet their feet. They would have the chance to move away before that ever happened. Besides, it wasn’t even raining yet – though in the occasional flash of light from a temporarily unshrouded moon, it was possible to see drops lashing down against the surface of the sea a distance away.
It wasn’t often that a wave rose high enough to wash over the beachfront wall, drenching dogwalkers and business owners who unwittingly braved the storm in one place that seemed relatively dry. If tonight was one of those nights, Evie thought she might like to see it anyway. Just… maybe from the safety of the parking lot, another level up the cliff behind them.
The thought of getting washed down, down, down into the depths of the water below them was not a pleasant one.
“Yeah,” Evie said, distantly. Angry. Maybe Ash was right.
It wasn’t what she felt. But maybe it was what she felt the world should feel about her. About how she was wasting her potential. Throwing her life away. All phrases she had heard recently from her darling mother, who was definitely coming down on the side of angry.
“It’s going to be okay, you know,” Ash said. He was quiet, but Evie could hear him above the waves, all the same.
She turned to look at him. Her best friend: the one person in the world she could trust unequivocally. His face was paler than usual in the scattered moonlight, backlit by the street lamps curving overhead in old-fashioned metal settings. His dark hair, usually an uncontrollable mess, was only visible by the way the wisps around his crown caught the light and cast themselves into silhouette. His brown eyes were wide, worried. Focused on her.
“If you’re trying to reassure me,” she said casually, “you should probably look as though you believe it yourself.”
A fleeting smirk crossed his face. Making each other laugh was the one thing they were reliably good at.
Especially lately.
“I mean it, though,” he said. “Dropping out of college… so what? No one’s even going to ask about this in ten years’ time.”
“Won’t they?” Evie asked, raising an eyebrow in reference to all the job applications that probably littered her future.
“Especially not if you go back,” Ash said, a little too quickly. “Try something else.”
“I’m not going back, Ash,” she told him, turning back to watch the sea.
Seven more minutes, and she would no longer be classified as a teen. Seven minutes until she was twenty years old.
Twenty, jobless, homeless, and no longer a student. Absolutely zero prospects, and not even any idea of what she wanted to do with her life.
It was a fantastic way to start a new decade.
Evie sighed and pulled one of her feet up onto the wall, hugging her leg against her chest – an unthinking barrier between the two of them.
Ash shifted back to face the horizon. After a long moment of silence, he reached out and put his hand on top of her arm. The small, tender gesture softened her, and Evie felt her shoulders relax.
“I am sorry,” she gave him. “I know we enrolled together, and we were supposed to graduate together. I just…”
“I know,” Ash said. He shot her a sad smile. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Your birthday’s about to start.”
Evie checked her phone again. Two minutes until she was twenty.
“It’s going to be a good one,” she said, straightening up.
“Yeah?” Ash straightened up, too, his face brightening. “Yeah! And you’re going to smash this year. You’re going to do so much amazing stuff, I’m going to start wishing I dropped out.”
Evie shot him a sardonic grin. “Probably not,” she said. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Hey, that storm’s getting pretty close,” Ash frowned, shoving his hands into his pockets. “It’s getting cold.”
A shiver traced over Evie’s skin at that exact moment. “You’re right,” she said, joining him in frowning at the horizon. “The sea’s getting a little higher. Maybe we should -”
And she never finished the sentence, except in a scream, because that was the moment when the lightning hit the water –
And the water rose up, a rogue wave out of nowhere –
And splashed down on them, soaking them to the skin –
And everything changed, in an instant, before the scream could get all the way out of her mouth.
Cairo was leaning back against the side of his pool, watching the momentary burst of moonlight shimmer across the surface, playing against the underwater lights. He took another sip of champagne and set the glass aside.
He turned his head casually, first one way and then the other: to the house, where scattered debris – empty bottles and cans; food fallen and crushed on the floor; a few items of clothing that had apparently not gone home with their owners – waited for his housekeeper in the morning. The faint sounds of some party playlist, still left running even though everyone was gone, reached his ears when he strained. Then, to the horizon, past the cliff that the house sat on, where a storm seemed to be sweeping over the sea.
It was far enough away. Cairo didn’t care, anyway. Rich kid zapped by God in his private pool after yet another awesome party. It seemed like a good enough headline to go out on.
Except that wouldn’t do, because he was only twenty-six, and that was no way to get yourself into the twenty-seven club.
He drained the last of the glass and hooked his elbows over the rim of the pool, thinking about hauling himself out. Maybe he’d let a storm take him in some incredible fashion next year.
Ugh, but he was tired. Maybe there was something lingering on the coffee table in there, something that could perk him up – but he’d have to go inside first – and, god, wasn’t there anyone he could call to bring it to him so he didn’t have to get up?
The lightning was so bright, so close, that it blinded him temporarily. He only had a moment to register that the water was suddenly hot – so hot – sizzling around him – before the flash was gone again, leaving behind only a momentary terror and the sudden surprise that he had not, in fact, boiled to death at all.
Or, perhaps that was not the only thing left behind.
Fletch eyed his boot wearily. It was only now, in the glow reflecting from the streetlight at the end of the alley, that he realized he’d put his foot down into a puddle when he chose this spot.
He hoped it was, at least, rainwater.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t have the energy to draw the boot back in towards himself, where he slumped against the dirty, cold, and rough wall of whatever dive this alley belonged to. He didn’t even care if it wasn’t rain. What was one more stain on a pair of boots that had seen far too many miles of road?
He tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. It was cold. A storm wind was blowing off the water, but in a coastal town like this there were few places to hide from the sea wind – and even if he’d been able to get into a shelter, he didn’t trust places like that anymore.
He needed to sleep, at least for an hour or twenty minutes, before the rain started. Then, it wouldn’t matter what kind of liquid his boot had been in. It would all wash off, all the same.
He jolted to alertness again, a brief noise out past the alley catching his attention. He stared. His hand itched towards the other boot, the one that was drawn up against his body – the one that contained the knife…
Nothing else came from the mouth of the alley. It had probably been the wind stirring some loose garbage around. Even if it wasn’t, there was nothing much he could do. The knife was no longer in his boot. He kept forgetting.
And if there was someone out there in the street – let them attack him, anyway. What else did he have left? The only things that hadn’t been stolen were his boots, the clothes on his back, and his life. None of those amounted to anything much, and losing either of the first two would pretty surely do away with the third as well.
Fletch leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.
They were shut when the lightning flashed down, a few streets away, far enough that it was only the light that shot across his eyelids – even if they had been open, he wouldn’t have seen the actual fork.
But the water around his boot was boiling all of a sudden, or at least it seemed to be until he snatched it back –
And stared, because the water was flat and still once more.
Maxie stopped working on a particularly tough stain on one of the pans – what had the cook been doing, to be so distracted that the stuff was practically etched onto the base, not just burned on – and scrubbed the back of her arm across her face. All she succeeded in doing was moving a few strands of hair around – one of them even more directly into her eye than it had been.
She sighed with frustration and dropped the pan into the water, letting it soak a bit longer. She peeled off one of the ill-fitting yellow gloves so that she could push the sweaty hair back from her forehead properly – only to yelp in surprise as her ring came off with the rubber, landing with a plash into the water of the sink.
She scrambled after it without thinking, her fingers closing on it at the same time as one of the cook’s knives found her. The fingertip that grasped the ring as she pulled it out of the water was bleeding red, the color spreading down her finger and hand, tracing through the droplets that already lingered there until it was diluted pink.
Maxie swore, reaching for a band aid – the sole grace here being the fact that the kitchen was well-stocked with them, given how often they were needed. She slicked the blue sticking plaster over the cut, cursing how clumsy she had been. She was paid by the shift, not by the hour, and if it took her longer to get these done, she wouldn’t be rewarded for it.
The clock on the wall over the service window told her it was almost midnight. If she didn’t get home soon…
There was tomorrow’s shift to think about, and the one after, and the one after.
She pushed the hair off her forehead at last, feeling the rough texture of the band aid graze her skin, and reached with her eyes half-closed in fatigue to pick up the ring from the sideboard where she’d dropped it.
With a tinny chink and another mocking plash, it spun away from her and fell merrily back into the water.
Maxie set her jaw.
Not today.
She was not doing this today.
She reached for the ring –
Never knowing that outside a lightning bolt was striking the water –
And for a moment, it seemed like the water boiled around her hand.
She snatched it back, then looked again – and, seeing the water still, ran a hand over tired eyes to wipe the hallucination from them.
When the water in the tub around her began to bubble, Jasmine had been staring into it for so long that it had begun to cool. For a mad, over-tired moment, she wondered if she had managed to cry so much that it had actually changed the properties of the water somehow – like magic out of a fairy tale.
But when she blinked the tears back enough to look again, she realized she was wrong. There was no heat to the water. There were no bubbles.
There was only her, slowly losing her mind under the weight of everything that she faced.
Scott was scrubbing his hands hard, trying to get them clean, casting uneasy glances at the door as if it would burst open at any moment. If someone out there was waiting to catch him with the evidence all over his fingers, they were missing their moment.
The water scalded him for just a second, making him snatch his fingers away with a yell of discontent – only to test it a moment later and find that the uneven spurts coming from the crooked tap were just as cool as they had always been.
The moon hung heavy over Crowhill Cove, as the storm that had been building all night came to a sudden pass: the skies cleared, and clear silver light shone down across calm waves, illuminating a mostly-sleeping town.
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