I was with my girl when it happened. What we were doing is nobody’s fucking business but ours, but yeah I was with her when it happened.

  Her name was Vicki. She’s a bender like me, and I think she still thinks we’re getting married. We’re not. I asked my grandfather about it like two years ago and he said that I would be getting married to a girl from one of the nearby fiefdoms. The daughter of their lord, in order to secure our alliance.

  I didn’t have a choice in the matter. If I’d pressed it, Grandfather would have only made Vicki suffer for it, so I didn’t. And I let her keep on thinking that we were soulmates, because…well, I’m sixteen and I get horny, okay?

  It’s not like she gets nothing out of the retionship. Everyone treats her way better than a normal bender girl because she’s my girlfriend. And she’s more into the power that the retionship gives her than she is into me. I know, because I also know that she’s cheated on me twice.

  So, yeah. So much for soulmates.

  Anyway, it happened so suddenly that it caught us completely off guard. One moment everything was great, and then bck was white and white was bck and all the colors in between were gray.

  I ran to the boy’s locker room and as soon as I was inside I began stripping. It was only a few moments between the fsh of cosmic powers and hot water running over my body, and I beat even the examiners to the showers.

  But it was the first time I’d taken a fsh aboveground, and I was scared as hell.

  Down in the basement, I knew, the kids would be stripping down and getting sprayed with hoses. I’d been down there myself, and I knew how scared they’d be.

  The fshes were worse for kids. They basically killed any fetuses still in the womb no matter what, and the under-fives would be sickly for weeks because of this. Some of them wouldn’t make it, maybe.

  I knew that, but at the moment I was still focused on myself.

  “You’ll be fine,” one of the guards said, cpping me on the shoulder. “I about shit myself the first time I took a fsh aboveground too, but you’re big enough that it’s safe.”

  “You think so?”

  “Fuck if I know,” the man admitted. “But probably. They say it goes by muscle, and you’ve got plenty of that for a d your age, so you’re probably fine.”

  “Yeah, they say that,” I said.

  The water flowed down the drain. It was pink. Most of us were bleeding from the ears.

  Ten minutes passed as we scrubbed ourselves and each other with rusted iron wool pads and once we were nice and raw, we finally stepped out of the showers to let the next priority of citizens take our pce.

  I was sitting outside in a towel when my grandfather stepped up next to me in a simir attire and patted me on the shoulder. “You were on the first floor when it happened?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be fine. There’s less shielding up here, but honestly the only reason I didn’t kick you out of the basement two years ago was because you’re blood,” he expined. “I know I haven’t really expined things to you as well as I should have, perhaps, but the customs are more than just rules handed down from on high. The old ways mix with the new ways that mix with the old ways. The scientists who survived the Return of the gods did measurements and studies on these things. You could probably survive a fsh outside in the open at this point.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t be pleasant,” he admitted. “But yes.”

  “You willing to bet my life on that?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I do think you’d survive if you got locked out with the starvelings when the gods are having discourse.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to go find my pants,” I said.

  And that was the end of that conversation.