Drew Wilson had spent the last three weeks watching his life collapse into numbers that no longer meant anything.

  Rejection emails. Missed calls. A calendar that kept moving without him.

  Q3 was over, and so was his job.

  Aerospace engineer, unemployed. Twenty-five years old, suddenly optional.

  His girlfriend had lasted a week longer than the severance. She said she couldn’t sit and watch him disappear into his own head. Drew didn’t argue. He didn’t have a plan to offer her, or himself.

  So he’d come up here instead. Hiking the slopes of Mt. Antero in the San Isabel National Forest, chasing thin air and sore muscles. Physical effort still made sense. Angles, distances, elevation gain, those rules hadn’t changed.

  He checked the sky again.

  Gray clouds were rolling over the ridgeline.

  Late. Again. He should’ve started earlier. But, with nothing better to do, he hadn’t hit the trail until closer to lunch.

  Drew exhaled slowly and looked down the slope. The scree shifted under his boots.

  His brain did what it always did when life got loud.

  Reduce it. Quantify it. Pretend it was solvable.

  Slope angle: roughly thirty degrees.

  Loose scree. Low friction.

  He hated that his brain still worked like this.

  He hated that it was the only part of him that did.

  The wind picked up, tugging at his rain jacket.

  He rolled up his left sleeve to check his watch and saw the hairs on his arms standing straight up.

  That was probably not good.

  Drew stopped. Not because he was brave. Because part of him refused to sprint until he understood the failure mode.

  Static buzz. Patterned. Like a transformer about to blow.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “No,” he muttered, and it came out like he was arguing with physics. “Not like this.”

  He had ignored the storm because he wanted something to blame. Now it was coming for him.

  He dropped into a crouch and started toward a pile of rocks to his right. Lower ground. Anything that was not him on a ridge with metal on his body and lightning in the air.

  Bam.

  A flash detonated overhead, so bright he went blind. He staggered, blinking spots away, and saw arcs of electricity dancing along the very rocks he had been crawling toward.

  “Shit!” he screamed.

  Lightning. Close. Too close.

  He ran. Down slope. Scree sliding under his boots. Carelessness vanished. Terror took its place.

  Boom!

  The air shook with a fresh concussion as he jumped, sliding down the slope. He could feel the electricity in the pebbles around his fingers.

  Shit, shit, SHIT!

  Sliding down a good 15 feet he stopped shy of a short drop.

  Looking around wildly he saw nowhere to hide. Uphill there were sparks of electricity dancing between the rocks. He just about pissed himself right there.

  Running towards the edge of the small cliff, he reached a short drop. Nothing below but more exposed rock. He whipped his head around, heart hammering.

  There!

  Just below the ledge a narrow opening. A cave?

  He scrambled over the edge, forcing one leg into the narrow opening, then the other. He shoved himself in feet first, twisting his shoulders sideways to fit. He was stuck!

  Another giant crack shook the heavens above him. He pushed harder against the opening his sides scraping painfully against the opening. With a final grunt he was able to push himself fully in and then with terror felt the sensation of falling.

  He fell only a few feet but a primal fear of falling down an infinite drop overtook him. Rolling and landing in a heap he just lay breathing raggedly.

  Just grateful to be alive, grateful for another breath of the thin mountain air.

  The ground beneath him shook.

  Did lightning cause earthquakes? Or was that the thunder shaking the mountain?

  The intensity of the storm was so beyond anything he had ever experienced it was hard to believe. Sitting up, he could see the small hole in the cave wall he had climbed in. The crevice was repeatedly lit by flashes of lightning.

  He stretched his arms into the darkness. Where he expected stone, there was nothing, the cave opening wider beyond the crevice.

  Standing up he promptly hit his head on the low ceiling. Falling back to his knees with a curse, crawling forward he felt out with his hands for the opposite wall which he didn’t find.

  Crawling forward a few more feet deeper into the cave he could make out a slight blue glow. Slowly moving forward he could see now that the slight blue glow was not remnant sunspots in his eyes but small aquamarine crystals that clung to the sides of cave forming a small tunnel.

  As the ground beneath him shook again the crystals brightened in response.

  Entranced he crawled a little further before seeing a pale aquamarine plant. A slender vine made up of several strands the thickness of a broom handle. It glowed in rhythm with the crystals surrounding it. The glow from the vine was a little more neon in color than the crystals and pulsed.

  Something in him leaned toward it. Curiosity before caution. Always. The vine didn’t grow from the stone so much as through it, the rock warped and reshaped around its path.

  Reaching out and grasping the vine, he could feel a slight static charge running through it. It tickled a little.

  The ground shook again and his whole body came alive with the pain of fire.

  His hand tightening reflexively on the vine. His body spasming, convulsing cramping. He tried to scream but could not.

  His whole world turned aquamarine and electric.

  Just pure, blinding pain.

  Then… Nothing.