The Lightning Dancer — Part One
By Deborah L. Davitt
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow Readers! This week, we have a thundering new story, and a first for the magazine, a third story from the same author! Please enjoy this hat-trick closer by Deborah Davitt, prolific and talented writer, emerging Daily Tomorrow darling, and (according to our researchers) onetime author of the longest complete written work in the English language. The art is an 1808 print of Lake Thun, Switzerland, by the British artist J. M. W. Turner. —Jeffrey
Josephine Tremblay could count her rivals on the fingers of one hand. She raised that hand now for a glove, staring stolidly at the chaotic sprawl of Lichtenberg fractals that scarred from her fingertips down the back of her hand, disappearing under the sleeve of her suit. Underneath, they ran to her shoulder.
A lover’s kiss from a storm that had torn a glove from her hand; a kiss that might have killed her, but hadn’t.
She still didn’t know why she’d lived.
Most prima ballerinas wore white full-length tutus for a ballet blanc; Josephine wore a Faraday suit crafted of copper and nickel and a helmet that might not have looked out of place on a medieval knight, with a tinted glass visor behind a cage of metal wire to protect her eyes from light brighter than that of any arc-welder.
And yet, the outfit was the most exquisite marriage of science and magic—modern technomancy at its finest. For instance, embedded in the forehead, a carbuncle ruby glimmered; a scrying stone to allow viewers on the ground to see what she saw, high in the air.
Around her, the junior dancers of the troupe were getting ready, checking each other’s gear, buckling straps. Each of them had similar gems above their visors, to try to catch the fast-moving action. A low, cheerful hum of voices from the other women, but none of them tried to assist Josephine, or even get in her line of sight. None of them wanted to break the prima ballerina’s concentration before a performance.
She appreciated that more than words.
Her dressers pulled the Faraday material tightly around her—a little too tight, in fact, and she waved them off impatiently. “I’ll finish on my own, thank you.”
She adjusted the gloves, and checked again the harness inside the suit—a perfect confluence of science and sorcery. It would take the million volts of a lightning strike and convert them to propulsion to power her flight, just as the Faraday suit would transform her into a living capacitor, untouched by the storm’s wrath.
The dressing area was carefully cordoned off from the cameras on the roof of this skyscraper, but she could feel the thrum of the Tesla coils in her teeth as their ‘orchestra’ played interlude music to warm up the crowd, both here, and on black and white television sets around the world. The orchestra would look like dancers themselves, undulating with the arcs of electricity coming off the big generators . . . but none of them dared to fly with the storm itself.
As she warmed up at the barre with the other women, still out of sight of the crowd, she heard the first rumbles of thunder in the distance. “Have you heard about Thomas?” the second-highest ranked dancer, Ariana, murmured to Josephine sidelong.
Josephine gave her a pointed look. She didn’t take kindly to gossip. But Thomas was the lead danseur, with a temper as volatile as any storm, as any number of girls from the chorus had discovered over the years. He’d often berated them for bad moves, lack of grace, flubs that made the principles look bad. He wasn’t wrong to correct errors. It was just the way he went about it, leaving girls in tears, that left a bad taste in Josephine’s mouth. And these were things that could have been left to the director, too. “He is going to dance tonight, yes?”
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Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, From Voyages Unreturning, Xenoforming, and To Love Unquietly, see www.deborahldavitt.com.
Copyright © 2025 Deborah L. Davitt