The Former Rebel of Sky

After two days, Lassa was defiant—another three, and she was enraged, brought to a boil by pain and loneliness and hopelessness. This fury carried her well into the seventh day, but then her temper simmered. And a few hours of this passive seething deposited her, quite abruptly, into the eighth day.

She surrendered on the eighth day.

It wasn’t even a record, Everett told her cheerfully as he handed over a cup of coffee and a blanket. He thought she might have cracked the top twenty; though he couldn’t be sure. Top fifty, for sure. Probably.

Which didn’t do much for Lassa’s self-esteem, but that was okay. It was over now.

“So are you ready to join the fold now?” Everett asked.

He had given her twenty minutes, enough time to shower and change. But even wrapped in two sweaters, she could still feel the chill on her neck, the daggers of hail on her shoulders, the electric buzz of lightning near her hair.

“Sign me up.”

And that had been it. One moment she was Lassa, the rebel of sky; the next, she was Lassa, giant corporate tool.

“We’ll start you off easy,” Everett said. “Seattle in spring. Make it rain, girl. Roll in that fog.”

Lassa imagined rolling in a thunderstorm into Everett’s face.

“Sounds good,” she said. She tried a fake smile and gave up halfway in.

Everett just shrugged. “Look, it pays well. It’s not glamorous, but it pays.”

She started the next day. In truth, she could’ve managed Seattle’s weather from anywhere in the world, but Weather Monopoly, Inc. liked to have their operatives on site.

Her first day on the job started off slow and meandered into a standstill by lunchtime.

“I’m bored,” she told Everett when he called to check up on her. She stared at the gray walls, out the gray windows. "This is boring."

"You want to know my secret? Sometime I make shapes in the clouds. Keeps things interesting. You should try it."

She did. As soon as she finished her sandwich, she made an army of big naked cloud people run down a fog bank. Lassa barely had time to enjoy the shocked expressions below before an alarm went off.

She got a slap on the wrist that day, a "demerit" from Weather Monopoly, Inc. and a disappointed phone call from Everett.

"Really, Lassa?"

"You said to keep things interesting."

"Nudity?"

"It was interesting."

After that, she submitted to the passing of hours, of days, of weeks... just like she had eventually submitted to the full might of a Weather Monopoly, Inc. onslaught.

She was just one person. She could give herself a pass, right? Maybe that's what growing up was—sacrificing the self-importance of one's youth for the anonymity of adulthood. The thought made her uncomfortable, but no more so than anything else. Her new life was one of constant, throbbing discomfort. Like a headache pounding a dull drum beat against her temple again and again and again.

Some days she'd get a Special Assignment. In Seattle, Special Assignments were always the same: a rich person paid a lot of money to ensure the day was sunny.

So Lassa shot a lot of sunbeams at weddings. If she hadn't already given up on love by then, the boorish parade of wealthy weddings would've done the trick.

Her old team contacted her once. Or, at least, what was left of the old team, all two of them. Gary had accidentally sucked himself into his own tornado, Lee had committed himself, and Norma had died ("How?" Lassa had asked, before remembering that a ninetysomething-year-old woman didn't need a reason to keel over, even if she could control the weather.)

"Sellout," Mick whispered into the phone when he and Anna called. It stung, but even thousands of miles away, Lassa could tell there was no bite to the words.

"They cornered me," she said, by way of lame apology; though she was sure they knew. There was nothing remarkable about the way she had been brought to heel.

"We miss you." This from Anna.

"We miss the old days." From Mick.

Lassa's lips went to part around "me too," but the words stuck in her throat. Her mouth was dry and her tongue heavy as lead.

What did she miss?

Not a cause, especially not a futile one. Not the danger, or not the dead friends it came with.

She missed open air. An open future.

So Lassa decided to quit. Resigning wasn't tolerated at Weather Monopoly, Inc., but she was pretty sure she was about to be off the job, one way or another.

On her last morning as Seattle's Weather Manager, Lassa called Everett and thanked the giant annoying idiot for being less of a giant annoying idiot than he could've been during her time with Weather Monopoly, Inc. Everett took this about as well as could be expected.

Then she visited the Space Needle and shouldered by tourists to claim a spot on the observation deck.

What was the plan again?

Oh, yes. To do whatever she wanted.

First things first, those clouds. She cast them aside with a flick of her wrist and watched them scuttle frantically back into hills and horizons. She pulled the sun closer, waved a trio of rainbows into existence, and hitched the temperature up to a balmy 90.

And then she got artistic. Spindle-thin tornados danced down highways, tickled automobiles. She set a pancake-flat hurricane at an angle in the sky, letting its torrential downpour fall parallel to the ground—to where? The ocean, maybe?

The sky was hers again, and she felt its call in every rain drop, every wisp of cloud, every rainbow glow.

And this time, when the Weather Monopoly, Inc. enforcers came for her, she'd give them more than eight days.






Word count: 977