CHAPTER ONE: A STORM
     
     He was waiting in the shower when she came into the bathroom. He was 
sitting on the ledge, with the pink soap and the soft sponge. He straddled the 
tap, with his feet crossed in the drain. And he made no sound. And he reflected 
no light. And Amelia had no way of knowing that Simon was there.
     She shrugged off her robe, was naked, laid her clothes on the sink. She 
looked into the mirror, and smiled with the far corner of her mouth, with her 
head dipped, with the far side of her hair hanging behind her face. She looked 
unreal to even herself, and she liked it that way.
     But Simon didn’t watch. Instead, his eyes closed, he listened to her 
little laugh. He listened to her quiet breathing. He listened carefully, 
because outside it rained loudly, constantly, as he memorized the sounds she 
made. Most of the days, all of the nights, he memorized them, to have them 
after they would stop. He savored them especially now, because if things went 
right, they would stop very soon. Memories would be all that were left of them.
     He rubbed his fist in the opposite palm. He might have taken a long, 
deep, trembling breath, and held it tight against a pounding heart, tensing the 
fibers in his arms, if those things were necessary now. But they weren’t. He 
only waited and listened, pleased by the storm and aroused by her presence. 
Simon was steady.
     Amelia pulled back the curtain, but she didn’t scream. She was steady. 
Her eyes didn’t focus on him. Still outside the shower, she reached through his 
legs, turned on the hot, and turned on the cold. Quick water rushed past his 
feet. She made it splash on her fingers as she adjusted the temperature. 
     Steam rose around them, and her smell filled the room. It was good.
     Amelia put her hand between his thighs. She pulled up on the pin on the 
tap, pressure made it stand, and the shower began with a sputter. The action 
thrilled him. He couldn’t have expressed it himself. And it made him feel 
better about killing her. It made him feel more certain that this time he’d 
succeed.
     Amelia stepped into the shower with Simon. She closed the plastic 
curtain, sealing them in. She took the pink soap from beneath him, rubbed it 
into her opposite palm, washed herself with unconscious fluidity, washed 
herself as she always did. But as she did, she was stuck by something odd in 
it. Pausing, she concentrated on that vague feeling that something was 
different.
     If he had been watching, Simon would have seen that she was disturbed. 
But Simon concentrated on the storm. He found, again, that when he concentrated 
enough, lightning split the sky, which then thundered and rolled together 
again. And he found that the roar of the shower covered the roars he made with 
nature. It was good.
     So, uncommonly confident, he untangled his legs from the tap, and 
backed away from the ledge, into the wall. He thought more about the future he 
might create than about the difficulty and unlikeliness of what he was hoping 
to succeed, and he followed the pipes up from the showerhead, up through the 
arteries of the building, up into the battery of the storm. With the rain 
beating through him, star light and storm wind slashing though him, and making 
no sound at all, Simon again found the important place on the roof. 
     He thought into the wind, and it swooshed down and scooped up against 
the slope of the roof. The termite-brittled shingles tossed into the air, 
bearing no more resistance than autumn leaves. Exposed now, the old metal 
beneath scattered dull reflections into the storm. 
     Centering his awareness, Simon put his hands against the wet sheet of 
frail copper. He shuddered. It touched him, and was cold and wet. He touched 
it, and he could feel the uninterrupted line of metal, broken here and there 
only by small gaps, that reached its way down into the showerhead of Amelia 
Waverly’s bath. The storm rained down from the clouds, onto Simon’s solid 
hands, where they touched the cold metal. At the other end, water rained down 
from the cold metal, and touched Amelia’s soft body. Simon felt himself 
connecting with the girl below.
     And the spirit, manifest on the metal, called on the lightning to 
strike him.
     Below, the girl washed her face, and then washed downward, with the 
same quick fluidity as a hundred times before. But her mind was far away, 
worrying there, as her hands washed over her shoulders and around her neck to 
the back. 
     Then, suddenly, she found that the soap was spinning in the drain, 
having slipped from her fingers, having slid down her body, having rebounded 
and buffeted and stopped in the stream. At her chest, her hands had stayed. 
They’d found her pounding heart, and they lay there, cupped against her skin, 
feeling it drum away on its own. 
     Trembling, she removed her hands, and looked at them. She recognized 
immediately that they were like someone else’s. The body they touched was hers, 
but the hands seemed far away, like a daydreaming mind. 
     She stood frozen. She looked up into the showerhead, and saw the cone 
of droplets rushing down around her face. Those hands were back against her 
heart, feeling it pound. Those hands were someone else’s. She was standing 
outside of herself, as someone else, through those hands, touched her. 
     She hit the pin and stopped the water. She tore back the plastic 
curtain and stumbled from the shower. She leaned against the sink, leaving dark 
wet footprints on the white rug. She looked into the mirror, and her face 
didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have anything to do with her. She was standing 
outside of her body, watching herself.
     And for a second, she thought of Benedict Young. And it made her angry.
     She left the bathroom. She trudged down the hall. She collapsed on her 
bed. It was cold in her room, and it was dark, except for an orange nightlight 
and some street lamps seeping through the windows. But she felt fine to be cold 
and blind.
     Then, before she finished there the first sighing breath, lightning 
exploded too nearby. After the lightning, the force of thunder crashed down and 
smacked against the earth, too loud to hear. But the first thought that could 
crawl free into her mind was that the nightlight was dead. She never noticed 
the streetlights were gone too. And she never noticed that her hands were hers 
again.
     ***
     
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