Catch the Lightning Read Free

orbital scans.”
    “I mean, why this street in particular?”
    He blinked at me for a full ten seconds before he answered. “I don’t know. It seemed—the right place.”
    “What are you looking for?”
    He made a frustrated noise. “Something to make sense. I seem to be in the wrong century. But the date and location, they are both correct. Except this isn’t like any Earth I know.”
    I smiled. “You go to Caltech, right? My friend Josh is a freshman there. He told me about those role-playing games you play. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”
    “Caltech? This means California Institute of Technology, doesn’t it?”
    “I guess so. Josh never calls it that.” Now that I thought about it, if Althor came from Caltech, what was he doing here, by himself, in the middle of the night? He looked more like Nug’s friends. Once in high school, Nug and his men had cornered Joshua behind the gym. They tied his hands behind his back and lined up in front of him with their rifles like a firing squad. They thought it was funny. Joshua was so shaken he didn’t come back to school for a week. He was afraid to tell anyone besides me, but I told Los Halcones and after that they looked out for him.
    “I’ve heard of Caltech,” Althor said. “I never went there, though. I graduated from DMA years ago.”
    “DMA?”
    “A military academy.”
    The thought of Nug’s creeps going to a military school made me want to laugh. Boot camp would be even better. I could just see a drill sergeant yelling in their faces.
    But it was obvious Althor was serious. At the time, I saw his words through the filter of my own experiences, which included an intense desire for college and no money to pay for it. If someone had told me back then that someday I would have advanced degrees with honors in both sciences and the humanities, I would have laughed.
    I spoke gently. “It don’t matter to me if you don’t have a fancy degree.”
    “I do have degree,” he said. “It’s in inversion engineering.”
    I smirked. “Perversion engineering?”
    He reddened, as if unsure whether I made a joke or he made an embarrassing mistake in English, “inversion.”
    I liked that, the way he cared what I thought he said. “So you’re supposed to go to a party tomorrow night?”
    “It is a reception at the White House for my mother.”
    “The White House, huh? She must be important.”
    “She is a mathematician. She has an equation named for her. But that was long ago. For many years she had been ****”
    “Been what?”
    His face blanked again. Now that I was more tuned to him, I felt the change. He turned metallic. Then his warmth returned, eddying around us and softening the banks of my barricaded emotions.
    “Key,” Althor said. “This is the closest translation I find.” She was Key? That didn’t sound like any of Joshua’s games. Nor had I ever heard of anyone having their mother, of all people, as a player. “What does she do?”
    “Sits in Assembly. She is liaison between the data webs and the Assembly.”
    “Oh.” I had expected something more flamboyant, like sorceress or queen. Then again, maybe “liaison” was code. “Does that mean she’s a warrior queen?” I grinned. “That make you a prince? If I kiss you, will you turn into a frog?”
    A sleepy smile spread across his face. “Maybe you should find out.”
    I flushed. I had only meant it as a joke—well, yes, maybe flirting a little. But I wasn’t coming on to him and I knew it sounded that way. Why did I keep dropping my guard with him? After only a few minutes he was affecting me more than people I had known for years.
    Althor held out his transcom as if he were a vaquero, a cowboy offering sugar to a skittish horse, trying to lure it nearer so he could catch it. “Want to see how it works?”
    I stared at the box. One reason Joshua and I had become friends, despite the differences in our backgrounds, was because we both liked gadgets. He enjoyed