The god walked the drowned street ankle-deep in his own rain, and no one saw him but the dogs. He had been a thunder-god once, in the loud bright dawn of the world, when men built him mountains and fed him the first of the harvest and asked him, plainly, to smite their enemies. The asking had been simple then. The smiting simpler.
Now he stood outside a glass tower where a small cruel man counted money that had drowned the district below — a man whose ledgers had condemned ten thousand families to live where the flood would always come, so that the cost of the levee could stay in his pocket. The god could feel the charge gathering in his chest, the old verdict wanting out. One bolt. The tower a torch. The man a cinder and a lesson.
But the god was older now, and the years had taught him arithmetic the young storm had never bothered with. The strike would arc the soaked grid. The grid fed the hospital nine streets over, where the flood's victims lay on ventilators that ran on the same current he was about to turn to fire. To punish one guilty man from the sky, he would have to weigh every innocent standing downwind — and the wind, tonight, blew toward the helpless.
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