Chapter 7: Grounded
The fuse box was in the hallway outside Andy Delgado's apartment, and two of the three breakers for the second floor were tripped.
I knew this because Andy told me while we sat on a park bench six blocks from his building, Tuesday after school, the kid hunched forward with his hands buried between his knees like he was trying to hide the evidence. The park was mostly empty — an older couple walking a terrier, a woman jogging the loop path with earbuds trailing a white cord to an iPod clipped to her waistband. October in Odessa meant the heat had finally backed off enough that people remembered parks existed.
"It happened Sunday night," Andy said. His voice was quiet and precise, the voice of someone who'd been rehearsing this conversation with himself. "I was playing a game — just sitting there, controller in my hands — and the screen went blue and then the TV popped. Not like, turned off. Popped. Sparks came out the back. And the lights in the hall went out. My mom thought it was the wiring."
"Was it?"
He looked at me sideways. The Evo-Sense reading was there — that sharp, crackling frequency, agitated and unstable, like a radio caught between stations. Stronger than yesterday. Whatever was happening inside Andy Delgado, it wasn't settling down on its own.
"You know it wasn't," he said.
"Yeah. I know."
Silence. The terrier across the park yapped at something in the grass. Andy pulled his hands out and looked at them — open, palms up, fingers slightly spread. The skin on his fingertips was reddened. Not burns. More like the flush you get from holding something hot for too long, except nothing hot had been held.
"There's stuff online," I said, picking my words the way you pick footing on loose rock. "People with — unusual things happening. Electrical stuff, specifically. It's rarer than you'd think, but it's documented. Message boards, forums. People talking about the same symptoms."
"You think I'm reading message boards right now?" His voice cracked up an octave. "I blew up my PlayStation. I fried the TV. My neighbor's car alarm went off three times last night and nobody touched it. That was me, man. I was lying in bed and I could feel it — like this buzzing under my skin, and every time it got worse, something outside went off." He dropped his hands. "My mom thinks we have bad wiring. The landlord's sending someone tomorrow. It's not the wiring."
"I know."
"How do you know?" Sharp now, the fear converting to challenge the way it did in teenagers and cornered animals. "How do you know any of this? You just walked up to me yesterday and started — what? Being nice? Nobody just does that."
"I saw the lights blow in the hallway. I saw your face when it happened."
"So?"
"So I recognized the look." I leaned back on the bench and kept my voice even — the same voice I'd used with Claire during the first quarry session, when she'd been halfway between excitement and terror and the wrong tone would have sent her one direction or the other. "Someone figuring out something big about themselves and having no one to talk to about it. I've been there."
It wasn't entirely a lie.
Andy stared at the grass for a long time. A jogger passed behind us, feet slapping the path. Somewhere a car horn blared and faded.
"The grounding thing you mentioned," he said finally. "Online. What is it?"
"Discharge. Your body's building up a charge it can't hold, so it dumps into whatever conductor is closest — wiring, electronics, metal. If you discharge into the ground intentionally — literally touch the earth, grass, dirt, concrete that's connected to soil — the charge dissipates without blowing anything up."
"That's it? Just... touch the ground?"
"It's a start. Think of it like — you've got a hose with no nozzle, and right now it's spraying everywhere. Grounding gives you a direction to point it."
Andy looked at his hands again. Then he stood up, walked to the edge of the path where grass met the park's dirt border, and pressed both palms flat against the ground.
Nothing visible happened. But on Evo-Sense, the crackling signal shifted — not gone, not calmed, but redirected. The sharp peaks of the frequency smoothed for a half-second, like a static channel briefly finding its station. Andy's shoulders dropped an inch.
"Huh," he said.
"Keep contact for thirty seconds. Let it drain."
He held position, kneeling in the dirt in his school clothes with his palms pressed flat and his eyes closed, and for thirty seconds the Evo-Sense reading steadied to the lowest level I'd recorded from him. Not clean. Not controlled. But stable, which was more than he'd been since I'd first detected him under the blown lights in B-wing.
Andy stood up and brushed the dirt off his hands. The redness on his fingertips had faded. He flexed his fingers experimentally, making a fist and releasing it.
"Do that whenever the buildup starts," I said. "Before bed. When you wake up. Between classes if you can find a patch of ground. The football field works. So does the dirt behind the gym."
"For how long?"
"Until you learn to control the flow without needing to dump it."
He looked at me with an expression I couldn't categorize — not quite trust, not quite suspicion, something in between that was uniquely fifteen years old and terrified and unwilling to admit either. "Why are you helping me?"
Because the Company operates out of a building six miles from here and they have teams whose entire job is finding people like you and making them forget they were ever special. Because three electrical anomalies in a residential zone within Claire Bennet's monitoring radius is exactly the kind of data point that ends up on a field report. Because you're fifteen and scared and the last time I watched someone deal with this alone, on a screen in a different life, it didn't end well for anyone.
"Because I saw the look," I said. "And nobody should have to figure this out by themselves."
[Quarry — October 10, 2006, 5:45 PM]
Claire had arranged the data in columns.
She'd brought a clipboard this time — actual clipboard, the kind with the metal clamp at the top — with printed graph paper and a ruler and her purple notebook open beside it. The quarry ledge served as her desk. The October sunset was coloring everything amber and she didn't look up when I arrived because she was mid-calculation, pen moving, the focused expression she wore when numbers were cooperating.
"You're late."
"Traffic." There was no traffic in Odessa. We both knew it.
"I started without you." She pointed at the camcorder, propped on the tripod and aimed at the ten-foot ledge. "Two jumps, both legs. First one at rest, second one after sprints. Resting fracture healed in eighty-seven seconds. Post-exertion healed in seventy-one. Sixteen-second differential."
"You jumped without me here?"
"I jumped without you here." Flat. Not apologetic. "I've been doing this for a month. I know the ledges. I know the landing zones. And I had data to collect."
The argument that wanted to happen — about safety, about evidence, about what happens when a tape of a girl healing from shattered legs ends up in the wrong hands — pressed against the inside of my teeth. I held it back because the look on Claire's face was the look of someone who'd made a decision about their own autonomy and was daring the world to challenge it.
"Sixteen seconds is significant," I said instead. "Supports the activation-state theory."
Claire's expression shifted — satisfaction, brief and sharp. She'd expected the argument. Getting analysis instead threw her off-balance in a way she clearly preferred.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn't check it.
It buzzed again thirty seconds later.
"Who keeps texting you?" Claire asked without looking up from her clipboard.
"Kid from school. Homework help."
"The same kid from the parking lot? Andy something?"
"Delgado. Yeah. He's having trouble with — it's chem stuff."
Claire's pen paused. She looked at me the way she looked at healing data that didn't match the pattern — with the calm, focused attention of someone cataloguing an inconsistency for later analysis. "You don't tutor."
"I'm trying something new."
She went back to her numbers. The phone stayed in my pocket. When I checked it on the drive home, there were two messages from Andy.
The first was a photo: a bare lightbulb, glowing, held in Andy's hand. The filament lit from within by a current that wasn't coming from any socket. His fingers were wrapped around the glass and the light coming through them made the skin glow pink and gold.
The second message: first time it did something good
I saved the photo and drove home with the window down, the cooling October air sharp against my face, and the particular exhaustion of running two operations simultaneously settling into my shoulders like a weight I hadn't agreed to carry.
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