The door to the basement slammed open. A girl with blue and green hair rushed inside and started down the stairs, stopping halfway. Her eyes went terribly round as she stared at the lightning. It ignored her, continuing to draw a hot white line down the center of the room.

“Cora!” shouted Christopher. “Stay exactly where you are!” Lightning was attracted to tall things, right? As long as she wasn’t the tallest thing in the room, she’d be safe.

It was also supposed to be attracted to metal, but it was hitting the floor, not the metal shelves against the wall or Jack’s old autopsy table. Christopher had draped a tablecloth over the table, making it a little less obviously morbid, but was that enough to discourage lightning? And lightning usually came out of the sky, not out of the ceiling. Why should he assume anything about this lightning was going to behave normally?

“What’s going on?” Cora had to yell to be heard. The air was so charged with static that her hair was frizzing and rising up from her shoulders. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny. At the moment, it was sort of terrifying. “We heard the noise all the way upstairs!”

The word “we” was worrisome. It could mean more people rushing into the basement, and hence into the striking radius of the lightning.

Of course, most of the students thought Christopher was a creepy freak, since he carried one of his bones around outside of his body, and had gone to a world populated by living, laughing, dancing skeletons, and voluntarily lived in the basement. So maybe Cora was the only one in hearing range who cared enough to check on him. He wasn’t sure he liked that idea any more than he liked the thought of half the school getting electrocuted on his stairs, but hey, what was life without a few contradictions?

“I don’t know!” he yelled. “It just started happening!”

“Maybe you blew a fuse?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Christopher paused to stare at Cora. She looked blankly back, her technicolor hair continuing to rise farther and farther into the electrically charged air.

“That’s not how fuses work!” he shouted.

“Do you have a better idea?”

He didn’t. Which was a problem, given the circumstances. Another bolt of lightning struck the floor, followed by another, and another, until the afterimages swimming behind his eyes were so heavy and bright that he could barely see the room.

Then it stopped.

Cora and Christopher stared at the blackened spot. The light fixture seemed undamaged, which was probably impossible, but was also less important than getting out of the basement before the lightning started again. Christopher sat up, cautiously stretching one foot toward the floor.