TEMPESTRA: The Copper Spine

The story

On the Iron Plain, an endless rust flat under a permanent thunderhead, storm-drovers ride copper-shod bikes trailing kite-tethers, steering lightning into harvest towers that keep the valley towns watered and lit. Sela Vray, cast out after a strike she failed to hold killed her drove, scavenges fulgurite in the glass forest until she sees the sky go wrong: the great storm is being pulled north, funneled along the Copper Spine into the Anvil Vault, a caged crater where Marshal Dregan Oule bleeds it into batteries and sells weather back to the towns that once had it free. Sela finds her old mentor Bruhn Sahl half-dead in a stripped drover camp and a mute signal-boy, Odo, who flags the storm's movements with mirrors. Together they rebuild a kite rig from wrecked towers and ride the Spine against the current — a two-hundred-kilometer running battle with Oule's grounded lancers, whose insulated hulls can't be struck but can't strike either. Sela learns the vault's weakness: a caged storm still wants to close its circuit, and the Spine itself is the wire. In the glass forest she baits Oule's convoy into fulgurite ground that shatters under charge, and loses Bruhn holding the tether. At the Anvil, Odo climbs the mast and mirrors a strike path while Sela rides her bike up the vault's own conductor rail, dragging a live tether into the battery ring. Oule chases her onto the rail in his lancer and is welded to it when the circuit closes. The vault splits, the storm unspools upward in a column of white, and rain falls on the Iron Plain for the first time in nine years. Sela, scorched and one-armed, hands Odo the kite spool: the drove rides again.

Cast

• Sela Vray to break the vault and give the storm back to the plain
• Marshal Dregan Oule to drain the caged storm and sell the weather
• Odo to be seen, and to guide the strike
• Bruhn Sahl to redeem his last student and hold the tether
• Nissa Corr to defect from Oule's lancers and clear a path