Both Zek and Ferro had little sparks hopping between their fingers already. Clearly, they’d done this before. Mina looked at Jyx. She had sparks in her hair, causing strands of it to defy gravity, as well as sparks between her thumbs and her index fingers. I think you’re supposed to give me electricity? Channel it through me?

«I don’t know how to do that.»

Try?

He tried. She felt him concentrating—​his thoughts felt like a weight, pressing against her mind. «Spark, spark, spark!» White and blue sparks danced all over him, across his scales. She felt them tickle against her skin where they touched her. But no sparks appeared between her fingers.

“Good. Excellent,” Vira was saying to the others. “Mina? Pixit? What are you doing?”

Mina winced. “Concentrating?”

“You look like you have gas,” Vira said. “Look, this is easy. If you so much as scuff your feet on the ground, you build up electric charge. Happens all the time naturally. And your beast naturally absorbs it. All he has to do is transfer that charge to you. You just need to think like a lightning guardian.”

But what does that mean? She thought of the books she’d read, both aloud to Pixit and in Professor Dano’s library. Storm guardians made a difference. They made the world better. She didn’t know, though, what it meant to be one, at least not the way Vira meant.

“Come on,” Vira urged. “You’re a lightning guardian! You are fearless! You are fast! You will not be stopped! You will not be silenced!” Her voice rose louder and louder. “You are a thunderstorm come to life! Loud and ferocious!”

Silently Mina wailed, I’m not any of those things!

«You’re my Mina. And we can do this!»

“It should be instinctual, through your bond,” Vira said. “You should feel drawn to the fire in the air. Use the fire in your soul!”

They tried again.

Mina thought back to her lessons with Professor Dano. He’d explained the science behind it, how everything was made up of atoms, how a charge was created when electrons were stripped away from their atoms, how positive and negative charges were drawn to each other, how electricity was the flow of that charge, how the beasts arrested that flow by storing the charge until it was ready to be discharged and used. He’d drawn lots of equations on the board, and she’d dutifully memorized them. Understood them too. But she didn’t understand how to get electricity from Pixit’s belly onto her fingers.

I don’t have “fire in my soul”!

«You sparkle inside, your papa said.»

That’s not the same!