[MyNumber Alert · Gifu Prefecture] Under the Special Ability Registration Act, every newborn must complete Quirk Screening within 30 days of birth. Penalty for non-compliance: ¥500,000.
* * *
Ikazuchi Village, Gifu — August 2050
"If that dish goes down the mountain, Kazuo, it's coming out of your pay."
"You don't pay me, Headman."
"Then it's coming out of your rice."
Kazuo Arashi didn't answer. He was lying flat on the roof of the community hall in the pouring rain, hugging a satellite dish with both arms while the wind tried to carry it off to the next prefecture.
Headman Fujita stood under the eaves below, holding an umbrella that had stopped being useful ten minutes ago.
That dish was the village's only link to the outside world. Weather alerts, market prices, government notices and messages from relatives in the cities all came through that grey plate of metal. When it went down, Ikazuchi went back to the old way of doing things, which mostly meant guessing.
The village had done a lot of guessing over the last twenty years. It hadn't enjoyed any of it.
"Zip tie," Kazuo called down.
"What?"
"Throw me a zip tie! The last bolt just fell off!"
Fujita looked at the bag of zip ties at his feet. He looked up at the roof, three metres above him. Then he looked at his own seventy-year-old arm.
"..." He threw one anyway. It hit the gutter and dropped into the mud.
"Thank you, Headman."
"Don't you get sarcastic with your elders!"
Kazuo dug a spare out of his tool belt with his teeth and lashed the dish to its frame. It wasn't pretty, but it would hold until morning.
Most things in Ikazuchi were like that. Not pretty, holding until morning, and Kazuo was usually the one holding them.
Since the port riots in Kobe nine years ago, spare parts came up the mountain road twice a month, and only when the road was open. A new solar inverter cost nearly ¥400,000 in Takayama, if anyone even had one in stock. So a man who could build a battery wall out of scrap car cells and keep a forty-year-old water pump alive was worth more to the village than a doctor.
That was how a quirkless farmer's son with no degree had become the most important man in Ikazuchi.
He just wasn't paid like it.
His phone buzzed three times in his chest pocket.
Three buzzes meant Ayaka. She had set it that way so he'd always know it was her.
Kazuo wedged his knee against the dish and pulled the phone out. The screen had been cracked since spring.
Ayaka: how's the roof Ayaka: no, don't answer, I can feel the wind from here Ayaka: small update Ayaka: i'm in labour. it's not bad yet but it's going to be soon. granny tome is on her way. please come home. carefully. but hurry.
"Small update" was a very Ayaka thing to write. She was in labour, alone, in a storm, and her husband was on a roof. The last thing she wanted was for him to panic and fall off it.
It didn't work. Kazuo read the last message and let go of the dish.
"Kazuo? Kazuo! The dish—"
He was already halfway down the ladder.
"It'll hold!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Probably!"
"PROBABLY?!"
* * *
Old Isamu Tsuchiya was standing on his porch halfway down the slope, holding his phone up at the sky.
"Kazuo! Look at the clouds!"
"Not now, Isamu-san!"
"They're going round in a circle! Right over your house! Sixty-eight years I've lived on this mountain and I've never seen—"
"Ayaka's having the baby!"
"Oh!" Isamu lowered the phone for exactly one second. "Congratulations! But look at the clouds!"
Kazuo was already gone.
Isamu went back to filming, and he was right: the clouds were circling. He had also been right about the drought six years ago, the rice prices three years ago and his own divorce, and nobody had listened to him then either.
This time, he was sure, people would have to listen. He had video.
* * *
The Arashi house had two rooms, a small kitchen and a steel cabinet in the corner that hummed.
The cabinet was Kazuo's pride and joy. It was a battery wall built from salvaged car cells, charged by the solar panels on the roof and controlled by a second-hand inverter he'd bought from a scrap dealer for ¥40,000. Tonight it was powering the lights, the fridge, the water heater and every machine Granny Tome had brought in her bag.
Granny Tome Hirano was seventy-three years old. She had delivered more than three hundred babies in these mountains, and right now she was frowning at her medical tablet.
"The road to Takayama is closed," she told Ayaka, kneeling beside the futon. "Landslide warning. And the drone ambulance won't fly in this wind."
"So it's just you," Ayaka said.
"So it's just me. I'm sorry, dear. I know you'd feel better with a hospital."
"No." Ayaka squeezed her hand through a contraction, then let out a long breath. "Honestly? I trust you more than a drone."
Tome smiled for the first time that evening. "You should. The drone has delivered exactly zero babies."
The door banged open. Kazuo came in soaked to the skin, muddy to the knees, with a zip tie still clenched between his teeth.
"I'm here. I'm here! How are— are you— is it—"
"Kazuo." Ayaka held out her hand. "Take that out of your mouth and come here."
He spat out the zip tie, dropped to his knees beside her and took her hand. His was freezing. Hers was hot and damp and gripping hard.
"You're shaking," she said.
"It's cold outside."
"It's August."
"..."
"Go and dry off," she said, softer. "Then come back and hold my hand. That's your whole job tonight. Okay?"
He nodded, dried off in record time and came back. He had been married for four years. He knew when an instruction was really a kindness.
* * *
Ayaka had come up the mountain road six years ago with a backpack and nothing else, one more refugee from the Nagoya fires.
In her first week, she told Headman Fujita to harvest the rice two days early. He laughed at her. Two days later, hail flattened every field in the valley that hadn't been cut.
Nobody laughed after that.
Her quirk was called Weathersense, registered as a "minor sensory ability, Category E." She could feel the sky, the pressure, wind and clouds, about two days ahead. In Nagoya it had been useless. In a mountain village that lived and died by its rice, it was the reason she had a home.
Right now, it was telling her something she didn't like.
"Granny," she said between breaths. "The storm isn't moving."
"Storms always move, dear. Let the sky worry about itself tonight. You focus on breathing."
"I know storms move. That's my whole thing." Ayaka was staring at the ceiling. "Storms here come in from the west and leave to the east. Every single time. This one came from the west, and now it's turning. Round and round. Getting tighter."
"Hm."
"And the middle of it is right on top of this house."
Tome glanced at Kazuo.
Kazuo glanced at Tome.
"..."
"Don't do that," said Ayaka. "Don't do the look. I'm in labour, not crazy."
"Nobody thinks you're crazy," Kazuo said quickly.
"You were thinking it with your eyebrows."
He made his eyebrows lie flat. It was harder than it sounded.
Tome's tablet chimed. The monitor patch on Ayaka's belly was sending the baby's heart rate, Ayaka's oxygen and the strength of each contraction. The medical AI drew a neat green line across the screen.
Delivery estimate: 1h 40m. All values normal.
Then the green line jumped into a jagged red scribble.
Signal interference detected. Recalibrating.
A second later it settled back to normal.
"What was that?" Ayaka was watching her face. "Granny, what was that noise?"
"The storm is interfering with the signal, that's all," Tome said calmly, and turned the screen so Ayaka could see it. "Look. Your baby's heartbeat is strong and steady. Nothing to worry about."
It was a reasonable explanation, and Tome was a reasonable woman. Thunder cracked overhead and the window rattled in its frame. The lights flickered, and in the corner the battery wall clicked over to backup mode.
The red scribble came back.
Tome noticed, in a distant way, that the hairs on her forearms were standing straight up. She decided that was the storm too.
Over the next hour and a half, the tablet logged more than a dozen interference warnings. Tome stopped reading them after the fifth, and kept smiling at Ayaka every time.
* * *
Around the same time, eighty kilometres away at the Gifu Prefectural Weather Bureau, a junior analyst named Rena Kimura was reading an anomaly report.
The bureau's AI had flagged a storm cell over the Hida mountains. It had stayed in one place for almost two hours. Its winds were tightening instead of spreading out. There were four times the usual lightning strikes for the region, and almost every one of them had landed inside a single square kilometre.
Recommend: forward to National Disaster Agency for review.
Rena looked at the report.
Then she looked at the clock. 11:40 p.m. Her shift ended at midnight, and her first holiday in eight months started one minute later.
A storm that refused to move could easily be a sensor fault. Half the ground stations in Hida hadn't been serviced since the budget cuts. Forwarding it meant a forty-minute report, an annoyed call with someone in Tokyo, and possibly no holiday.
She marked it Probable sensor error and closed the file.
It was a sensible decision, made by a tired person for sensible reasons.
There were a small number of people in Osaka who quietly paid good money to read every anomaly report in Japan, especially the strange ones. They were looking for unusual quirks, and they worked for very patient employers.
They never saw this one.
Rena Kimura went to Okinawa for a week and had a lovely time.
* * *
"I can see the head," Tome said. "One more big push, Ayaka, and you get to meet him."
"You said that ... twenty minutes ago ..."
"And this time I mean it. Push!"
Ayaka pushed. She also said something about the Prime Minister that would have gotten her arrested in Tokyo.
And then he was there.
Tome caught him with hands that had done this hundreds of times. A boy. Small and red and slippery, with a smear of dark hair. She turned him, cleared his mouth and rubbed his back with a warm towel.
He breathed in. His chest rose and fell, slow and easy.
He didn't cry.
"Granny?" Ayaka was trying to sit up. "Why isn't he crying? Is he okay? Granny, is he—"
"He's breathing, Ayaka. Look, see how pink he's getting?" Tome turned him so his mother could see. "Some babies take their time. He's perfectly fine. Lie back for me, dear."
His colour came in warm and healthy. The tablet showed a perfect heart rate. Tome counted to ten in her head, the way she always did, and let herself breathe out.
Then the baby opened his eyes.
Newborns don't look at things. Their eyes drift around, unfocused, like they're still deciding whether to wake up.
This one looked at the ceiling light. Then he turned his head and looked straight at Tome. Pale grey eyes, steady and clear. He held her gaze for three full seconds before he blinked.
"..." Tome looked back at him.
'Is he ... looking at me?' she wondered. Then she decided she was an old woman, it was past midnight, and she should go to bed the moment this was over.
She picked up the clamp and the scissors.
The second the steel touched the cord, pain shot from her fingertips to her elbow, like touching a car door on a dry winter day, only a hundred times worse. Her hand jerked. Her wedding ring went hot against her skin.
"Granny?" Ayaka had seen her flinch.
"Ahh, these old hands," Tome said lightly. "Cramping up at a time like this. Don't mind me, dear." She steadied her grip, cut, clamped, wrapped the boy in a clean towel and laid him gently on his mother's chest. "There. Say hello to your son."
Then she turned to her bag and looked down at her palm.
A thin red mark spread out from its centre in branching lines, like a fern pressed into the skin. She had seen a mark like that only once before, decades ago, on a farmer who had been standing under a cedar when lightning hit it.
She closed her hand and said nothing.
Some midwives would have said something. But two years ago, the Hayashi family down the valley had a baby girl who set her blanket smoking at four months old. Officials from the Prefectural Office came with a tablet, a policeman and a brochure for a "Special Development School" in Nagoya. The Hayashis signed.
The school had promised Mrs. Hayashi a message every week, with photos. She had written to the school every week since.
Two years later, she was still waiting for it to write back.
Tome zipped her bag shut, very neatly.
* * *
Kazuo was sitting on the floor because his legs had stopped working.
"He's so quiet," Ayaka whispered, stroking the baby's back with one finger. "Is he supposed to be this quiet?"
"Maybe he takes after me," Kazuo said.
"Oh no. A whole house of men who don't talk." She smiled down at the bundle on her chest. "What do you think, little one? Is your father boring?"
The baby blinked at her.
"He agrees," said Ayaka.
"He's ten minutes old. He can't agree with anything yet."
"He has opinions. Look at his face."
Kazuo shuffled closer on his knees and looked. The face was small, squashed and red, and, he had to admit, a little bit judgmental.
His throat went tight.
"Hello," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. "I'm your dad. I'm the one who fixes things around here."
The baby studied him with those pale grey eyes.
Then his whole face scrunched up, his mouth opened wide, and for the first time in his life, he cried.
The ceiling light flared white, too bright for any bulb. Thunder slammed down directly on top of the roof. In the corner, the battery wall made a sound like a car crashing inside a tin can, then a deep, flat bang.
Darkness.
The lights were gone. The fridge was silent. Tome's tablet was black, and so was Ayaka's phone, lying face-up on the blanket.
The baby stopped crying.
Outside, the storm that had sat over the house all night rolled away down the valley, as if someone had called it home. Within a minute, the thunder was only a mutter behind the next ridge.
Three adults sat very still in the dark.
"Kazuo?" said Ayaka.
"That was a lightning strike," Kazuo said at once. "A close one. The surge must have come down the solar line and blown the inverter."
He said it quickly, because it made sense, and because it was his fault. That cheap second-hand inverter was the one he'd meant to replace before the baby came. He never had, because the money was never there.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should've bought the new one."
"Kazuo." Ayaka found his hand in the dark and held it. "Nobody's hurt. The baby is fine. That's all that matters tonight."
Tome clicked on a flashlight. In its cold white beam, her face showed nothing at all.
"A close strike," she agreed.
Ayaka didn't say anything else. She lifted the baby an inch off her chest, then lowered him again. Then she lifted him again. Her face went very still.
"What is it?" Kazuo asked.
"Nothing," Ayaka said. "Just tired."
That wasn't true. She was very tired, but that wasn't it.
When her son lay on her chest, the sky-sense in her head went completely silent. When she lifted him away, it came back.
For the first time since she was six years old, Ayaka Arashi couldn't feel the weather.
She decided to tell Kazuo tomorrow. Tonight he had wrestled a satellite dish in a typhoon, run through a storm, and cried while introducing himself to a baby. He'd had a full day.
* * *
Village Chat · Ikazuchi Residents
Isamu Tsuchiya: [video 2:04:37] Isamu Tsuchiya: WATCH THIS. it spun over the Arashi place the whole night then just LEFT Morita Keiko: isamu it's 2am Isamu Tsuchiya: WATCH IT Ono Daisuke: it's two hours long. no Headman Fujita: The dish survived. Thank you, Kazuo. Headman Fujita: Kazuo? Morita Keiko: the whole Arashi house is dark, his phone's probably dead Morita Keiko: ALSO granny tome says IT'S A BOY 🎉🎉 Ono Daisuke: congrats!!! Headman Fujita: Congratulations to the Arashi family. We will discuss the dish later. Isamu Tsuchiya: is anyone going to watch the video
Nobody watched the video.
* * *
Morning came up clear and bright, as if the storm had never happened.
Kazuo unbolted the front panel of the battery wall with a screwdriver and a heavy heart.
The inverter was dead, as he'd expected. It was blackened and split down one side like a roasted chestnut.
What he hadn't expected was the copper.
The bus bars, the copper strips that linked the cells together, were as thick as his finger. They had melted. Not scorched. Melted. The copper had run like candle wax, dripped and hardened again into a row of smooth, shiny beads hanging off the terminals like a broken necklace.
Kazuo pried one loose and held it up to the light.
He had fixed eight years of storm damage in this village. He knew what a power surge did to copper. It scorched it, pitted it, maybe welded a contact shut.
It didn't do this. To melt copper that thick, you needed heat well over a thousand degrees, held for whole seconds. Lightning that close would have blown a hole through the roof.
The roof was fine.
He looked up the slope to the ridge, where the old Raijin shrine stood with its copper lightning rod pointing at the sky. If lightning had struck anywhere near the house, the rod should have taken it first. That was the whole point of a lightning rod.
The rod was clean. The shrine roof wasn't even singed.
'It must have hit the ground somewhere,' Kazuo told himself. 'Out in a field. Lightning does strange things.'
It was a reasonable explanation. He held onto it tightly, the way a man holds onto a ladder.
"Kazuo."
Granny Tome was standing at the gate. She was wearing her good coat, and her hair was neatly pinned. She looked like someone on her way to a government office, or a funeral. She also looked as if she hadn't slept at all.
"Good morning, Granny. Ayaka and the baby are still asleep. I wanted to say thank you for last night. Really. I don't know what we'd have done without—"
"You're welcome, Kazuo. You can thank me properly later." She came through the gate and lowered her voice. "Right now I need to speak to you and Ayaka together. It's about the baby. Put the kettle on and wake her gently, please."
Kazuo slipped the copper bead into his pocket and went inside.
* * *
They sat around the low table in the kitchen. Ayaka was wrapped in a blanket with the baby asleep on her chest. Kazuo poured three cups of tea with hands that weren't quite steady. Tome took hers and didn't drink it.
Instead, she put her right hand flat on the table, palm up.
The red, fern-shaped mark ran from the middle of her palm to the tips of her fingers.
"I got this last night," she said quietly. "When I cut the cord."
"..."
Kazuo took the copper bead out of his pocket and set it on the table next to her hand.
"This came out of the battery wall," he said. "It used to be a copper bar as thick as my finger."
Ayaka looked at the bead. Then she looked at Tome's hand. Then she lifted her son an inch off her chest and lowered him again.
"When he's touching me," she said, "I can't feel the sky. Not at all. The moment he's in my arms, it's just ... gone."
Nobody spoke for a while.
Outside, a chicken walked past the window, looked in at the three of them, and kept walking.
Tome took out her phone and turned the screen toward them. At the top was the alert the prefecture sent to the registered midwife for every birth.
[MyNumber Alert] Quirk Screening required within 30 days.
"The screening is at the hospital in Takayama," Tome said. "A blood test, a scan and a field test. If he has a quirk, it goes on his permanent record and he's given a category. Category C or above, a case officer visits the family." She paused. "Category A or B, they 'recommend placement.'"
"The Hayashi girl," Ayaka whispered.
"The Hayashi girl was Category B," said Tome. "She burned a blanket."
All three of them looked at the bead of copper on the table.
"..."
"And if we don't register him," Kazuo said slowly, "the fine is half a million yen. We don't have anything close to that."
"No," Tome agreed. "So either you find a way to not register him that's cheaper than the fine, or you take him to Takayama and hope."
She set her untouched tea down.
"I've been a midwife for forty years. I have never once kept a birth off the books." She looked at Ayaka, then at Kazuo. "But he's not my son. He's yours. So I'm asking you. What do you want to do?"
The baby stirred. His pale grey eyes opened, and he looked up at his mother's face.
Ayaka looked down at him for a long time. Then she looked at her husband.
"We have thirty days," she said. "Thirty days to understand what's happening to our son. Before anyone else gets to decide what he is."
Kazuo looked at his son, and then at the melted bead of copper that no tool he owned could explain.
"Then we'll find out," he said.
It was the first time in his life that Kazuo Arashi had promised something he had no idea how to do.
Out of a clear blue sky, a single roll of thunder passed over the mountains.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Repair Log · Kazuo's phone (recharged at the community hall)
Battery wall: inverter dead, bus bars melted. Cause: lightning.
Ayaka's phone: dead. Cause: lightning.
Granny Tome's tablet: dead. Cause: lightning. (Tome disagrees.)
Fridge: dead. Cause: lightning?
Baby monitor (new, still in its box, never plugged in): dead.
Cause: ——
[Shared note edited by Ayaka, 9:02 a.m.] Stop typing "lightning." We both know who it is.