leap. "We are the ones who help control and shape that world. Without the Wardens, the disasters you report on, the floods and hurricanes, forest fires and earthquakes - all these things would be far, far worse."
Somebody laughed. A few others took it up, and it grew in a ripple through the crowd. "You're kidding. This is what you have to tell us?" somebody shouted from beneath the glare of a video spotlight. "Where's Gandalf?"
That was pretty much my cue, although I would have preferred Galadriel. I stepped forward. The FBI had furnished me with a change of wardrobe - not my normal style, but workable. It included a navy blue pencil skirt, a severely cut jacket, a white shirt and serviceable granny pumps. I'd put my hair up in a bun, to complete the image of competence and authority, sexy-schoolteacher style.
I pointed up at the sky, which was full of lightly scudding altocumulus clouds - nothing out of the ordinary for Miami.
Lewis waited, patient as a stone, giving them absolutely no indication what was going to happen. We'd agreed that it needed to be big, spectacular, and easily captured on videotape.
I slowed the progress of the clouds and began packing energy into the system, careful to balance the forces as I went. I knew the Ma'at were standing by in case I screwed it up, but it was a point of pride not to need them to clean up after me. The shape of the clouds began to change, from sheer and wispy to solid white, then gray as the moisture condensed. Altocumulus.
Then nimbocumulus.
Once I had the system packed as full as I dared, while still remaining in control, I opened both my hands, palms up. I could feel the dawning sentience in the clouds above, as the energy accumulation granted it some very basic level of awareness, of hunger. Of anger.
What I was about to do was dangerous, and not just to me. If I got it wrong, there could be a lot of collateral damage.
Easy, I heard David whisper on the aetheric. I'm here.
I called the lightning.
Florida is the lightning capital of the U.S. With the daily, constant interaction of wind, water, sandy soil, and marshland, every reporter in the crowd had probably seen close lightning strikes.
None of them had ever seen this.
The bolt streaked down out of the clouds, long and purple, crackling with energy, and broke into two jagged prongs. It hit my outstretched palms exactly on target, and for a long, long second, I kept it there as the video cameras and photographers documented the event.
Then I clapped my palms together, and the lightning vanished. Thunder rolled loud enough to rattle windows, but there was no other visible damage, apart from a slight reddening on my skin. I'd deliberately kept the lightning to the bare minimum voltage necessary to stage a visible demonstration - about forty kiloamperes.
But damn, it ached inside me. I kept my smile in place with an effort, and hoped I wasn't sweating too much under the lights.
Lewis said, in the same dry, calm tone, "This is Joanne Baldwin. She is a Weather Warden. The demonstration you've just seen is one of several we'll conduct for you over the next few days. The rest will be under controlled conditions, and you can provide your own scientific experts if you'd care to do so, to document and question the experiments. But ultimately, you're going to find that what we're telling you is the real thing. We can control the weather. We can control the land. We can control fire. The problem is, all these things fight back."
Nobody seemed to know what kind of questions to ask, exactly. Already, they were scrambling to find a logical explanation for what they'd seen - some kind of magic trick would be the most likely one they'd land on. I was sure whoever was the most outrageous street magician du jour would be calling in to debunk what I'd already done.
But what gave it weight was the silent presence of the FBI behind me, and the fact that we were standing on the steps of a government building.
Eventually, somebody found a question that made enough sense to voice. "How do you control the weather? Is it some kind of machine, or . . . ?" He sounded as if he couldn't quite believe he was even asking the question. I understood that, too. An entire street full of very logical people had just been tipped over