Mount St. Helens erupted at the end of February, two months ago. It wasn’t completely unexpected; there were predictions of an active period. But the degree of eruption was a shock.

Washington State was evacuated after many casualties. The world began to dim. And then… within a few days, the world went dark. Almost the whole contiguous United States and southern Canada were blanketed in a thick layer of smoke, blocking out the sun and interfering with electricity and gas flow. It could take months for the smoke to fade. It could take years. No one knows.

“It’s like we’re back in ancient times,” Tzvi marveled when the Dark Spring first began. “Without distractions, without electricity or cars, but also, no screens—”

My husband was good at looking at the bright side. I was more focused on what I could do.

My organization, Mishkan Ohr — Turning Technology into Chesed — has been at the forefront of anything cutting-edge since we first arranged advanced, affordable tissue regeneration treatments. New medical tools for hospitals. The best of modern educational software. If it’s being developed and it can help people, we’re there.

I wonder what the girls who hated me would think of me now, striding into meetings with askanim and rabbanim, being treated like someone with power. I wonder if they’d have rejected me so quickly if they’d known that one day, I would be the hero of the Dark Spring.

It’s a satisfying thought.

I’m on a flickering video call now, an obscene luxury I can manage because my phone is plugged firmly into a Q-Flow. “We’ll provide them to schools,” I assure the CEO of VoltaQ. “Our priority will be the sick, the elderly, and children.”

“Excellent. This is still a prototype,” the CEO reminds me. “We rushed this along, which means some shortcuts. I can send you the lab reports—”

“Sure. Send them over.” I can have someone take a look eventually. Right now, my priority is easing the Dark Spring’s grim agony.

Soon the shipments come in, filling our warehouse with slim, unmarked boxes. I’ll make the first East Coast run next week, I tell VoltaQ’s CEO when he calls to make sure I’d checked the reports.

“They’re in my travel bag,” I tell him. He sends me a form to fill out, acknowledging that I’ve read and understand the reports, a waiver to sign off on.

It’s really, really happening.

I trace my long list of towns and cities. Beside each one is the name of the liaison there, contact info, and the number of Q-Flows they’ll be getting. Cedarhurst, NY — 46 prototypes. Merrick, NY — 3 prototypes. Brooklyn, NY — 908 prototypes. Lakewood, NJ. — 796 prototypes.

My finger runs down the page, then stops, a chill running through me.

There it is. I should have expected it. Norton, NJ. — 17 prototypes.

And beside it, the liaison’s name. I don’t expect that one.

Dr. Avital Kruger.

I don’t think about it. I try never to think about Norton. Instead, I focus on my first stops.

I come a savior, heralded by heads turning as I emerge from my car. There are precious few cars on the roads these days, the expenditure of gas rarely worth it, but my car is electric — made possible through the Q-Flow.

“Chanala Price,” they whisper. Hopeful eyes follow me into each building, Bruno’s truck parking behind me.

I speak at events, staying for a few days while I divvy up Q-Flows with the liaisons and dole them out. Tzvi is still home, doing delicate surgeries under Q-Flow-powered lamps in his hospital, but I have no shortage of Shabbos invites.

“It’s always strange to be wanted,” I joke to a captive audience at one Shabbos afternoon talk. There are no lights yet. My liaisons are askanim, who usually bring along scientists and engineers, many of them skeptical of a prototype too good to be true. I have to push them sometimes, to remind them of the benefits. The Q-Flow speaks for itself.

So I’m with a group of women and girls in the dark, eating the subpar fruit that’s the only stuff that grows in the country now. “I had a rough time of it as a teen,” I tell a girl across the table. “I don’t know how anyone manages it in the dark.”

“Everyone has a rough time of it as a teen,” one woman puts in. “But you must have done something right.” I think she might be smiling.

“Oh, definitely not. I was miserable in high school,” I admit. “My friends all abandoned me one day without warning. It was awful.” I have fond memories before that shocking moment — laughing together at sleepovers, facing down class snobs with ridiculous secrets, getting the whole class to work on lighthearted projects together.

I was well-liked, as popular as I am now. There was a lot of tension in my class, but it never seemed to touch me. I remember the cruel comments, the coldness between friends from one day to the next, the fighting and distrust that weighed upon them like the smoke lies heavy above us now. I had thought it would never touch me until that day, midway through junior year, when it all came crashing down.

I never did find out who turned everyone against me. But I have suspicions.

I remember Avital’s dark eyes, that secret smile. I remember how Avital stopped taking my calls. I remember how she never really forgave me for things out of my control. I remember gasping back despair in the bathroom as Avital walked in with a few former friends, their eyes flickering away from me and their chins high.

“There was only one high school, so it wasn’t like I could transfer. Eventually, my parents moved us away,” I tell the girl, conspiratorial.

I’m not looking forward to going to Norton. A town that houses Avital Kruger isn’t one that I trust.

It’s raining when I arrive in Norton, water seeping through the smoke and blending into toxic hail. The rain is good, the media reports. Rain will weigh down the smoke, will shift the airflow to allow for healthier breathing. April showers might just bring May flowers, promise weathermen, though I can’t imagine the Dark Spring is going anywhere anytime soon.

At the very least, it had better last until I distribute the Q-Flows all the way to California and Arizona, where the smoke is lighter, situated as they are southwest of the wind patterns of the volcanic smog. We had gotten the worst of it.

The air might be more breathable, but I don’t notice. The wetness is thick and humid, ash aggressively pouring onto my hood. I park at the end of the lot, so the truck is closer to the entrance, and Bruno carries a box of prototypes into the dark building.

I hurry him in. “Quickly, quickly! We don’t want water damage!” I’d had to apologize for his slow movements at the last location when he had left a stack of boxes in front of a building. I reproved him for it, but he doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson.

“Sorry about him,” I say to the male engineer who greets us, and we roll our eyes in solidarity as Bruno lumbers past, slothlike.

“No worries. I’m Rob Pollack,” he says cheerfully. “Before the Dark Spring, I worked with solar-powered cybernetics. Lately, that’s been obsolete. But I’m very interested in your charger deck! We’ve always been snobs about wind power — that’s really Avital’s area of expertise. This way—” I follow him blindly through the hall, to the relief of dim, generator lighting.

My relief fades in a flurry of stomach-twisting nausea when I see the girl standing at a diagnostic table.

Girl. Woman. She isn’t married, her honey-blonde hair in a casual ponytail, and she looks exactly the same. I want to vomit.

Avital looks up, and her eyes go opaque, lips setting into a grim line. “Chanala.”

“Avital.” We stare at each other. The chill that creeps through me is worse than anything I’ve experienced all Dark Spring.

Rob says brightly, “I’ll leave you to it!”

Bruno sets down the box of prototypes and returns to the truck.

And then, we’re alone.

With nimble, scarred fingers, Avital opens the box and removes a Q-Flow. She switches it on and bends to examine the internal fan. I’m taken back to 11th grade chemistry lab. I remember Avital hating science. But here she is, with her doctorate in engineering, studying the Q-Flow like she understands it.

I could comment on that. Instead, I sit silently, fidgeting with my skirt. I won’t demean myself to small talk with my onetime tormentor.

Finally, Avital looks up, her face unreadable. “I’m not convinced these are safe.”

“What are you talking about? Two dozen locations are already using them.”

“I’m not sure. I saw VoltaQ’s labs and I don’t think they’re—”

“They will be. This is prototype technology.” I can feel my irritation rise. “I’m giving Norton something good. Don’t tell me you’d give anyone else a hard time.”

Avital gives me a cool look. “I’m doing my job. It has nothing to do with you. I barely know you,” she adds, as though we hadn’t grabbed each other’s hands on the bus in first grade and hadn’t let go.

“Right,” I say, stymied and frustrated. “Well. We can discuss this further with your boss.”

But her boss is surprisingly supportive. “Avital’s brilliant,” Rob says. “I’m inclined to let her see this through.”

“So you’d rob Norton of the prototype on her word?”

The CEO’s voice is calming. I know mine must be pitched too high, on edge from Avital’s triumph. “You must have other places to visit,” he says gently. “We can evaluate it further on our own.”

It would be easier to pull ahead of schedule, give Q-Flows to people who appreciate them. But ceding control of my prototype feels like a victory for Avital, for her to take credit for it.

Instead, I say, “No, I’m happy to see it through.” The light in Avital’s eyes dims.

Quietly, I am satisfied.

I hover in the lab as she prods at the prototype, plugging in machines and texting notes to people she doesn’t specify.

Outside, the world feels a little brighter. The rain stops after another day of dusty hail, and I really can almost see the glow of the sun beyond the thick blanket of smoke.

The next day is Friday, and thanks to Avital’s paranoia I will have to spend Shabbos in this nightmare of my childhood.

I charge my Q-Flow outside, letting the wind energy power it to full, then check in with Tzvi. “I’m in Norton,” I admit, though I’ve never discussed my final year there with him.

“Oh, nice! Have you seen any of your old friends?”

“No.” I don’t count Avital as a friend.

“Should be a great Shabbos.” Tzvi sounds tired but happy. “The Q-Flow is a game-changer. Our generators at the hospital have been so limited. The extra lighting, the additional monitoring… I wish we had a dozen.”

“Once they jump through all the bureaucratic hoops, VoltaQ will be mass-producing them,” I promise him. “There won’t be a Dark Summer.”

“We can hope. Does it seem like it’s getting lighter out to you?”

I glance out the window of my hotel room and spot, in the distance, the building that had once housed my high school.

My smile stutters, and the world dims.

ON Shabbos, the trusty beep of my watch awakens me. I’ve conditioned myself to be alert to that tiny noise. The world is quieter now, and each electronic noise stands out like a jarring reminder of what was: a wealthy man’s phone pinging in the lobby; a single car on the road as I walk to my Shabbos meal at the rav’s home; the hum of an air purifier near a nursing home.

The sounds that most ring out in the quiet are the laughs of children and the wispy rustle of ashes drifting from the sky. There are nighttime animals out, bewildered by the change in light and climate, and they scurry away from me onto cracked, brown lawns.

The rebbetzin welcomes me. “Chanala Price! You’re doing incredible things, you know?”

My smile turns brittle when I make out the faces of some other guests. “Oh,” the rebbetzin says. “Avital tells me you knew each other in school?”

“Right,” is all I can manage. Avital has brought backup. I remember Kayla from high school, too, Avital’s replacement best friend. Now, Kayla sits with a baby on her lap and two children beside her. She leans over to murmur in Avital’s ear, and my throat clogs up with déjà vu.

“So,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and unbothered, “What have you been up to?”

Kayla doesn’t respond at first. Then I realize that she must have shrugged. Shabbos meals in the Dark Spring are always an awkward affair, chairs clunking into each other and elbows banging. There’s a bit more light than usual today, enough to see how Avital and Kayla whisper before they turn in tandem.

“I’m a Chumash teacher,” Kayla says at last. “I guess you wouldn’t have expected that.”

I remember Kayla struggling, barely capable of reading a full sentence in Hebrew without help. There were girls in school who used to play with the copy machine, using a setting to mirror their notes, then give them to Kayla to see if she’d notice. Kayla never stood a chance. “Good for you,” I say, and I’m glad she can’t see the expression on my face.

“And Avital is an engineer.” Her voice is challenging, as though she can intimidate me through Avital’s accomplishments.

It works. “I started Mishkan Ohr,” I say, an edge in my voice. “Maybe you know us from our tissue regeneration treatments? We implement technological solutions to solve issues in the Jewish community. Mostly, it’s just buttering up donors.” I try to tone it down with a laugh.

“I bet you’re great at that,” Kayla says.

“She brought the Q-Flow here.” Avital’s been silent, and I don’t realize until I look up that she’s been staring at me. I can’t see the hard lines of her face, the cruelty that lurks below the surface, but it’s in the acid of her voice, as biting as the chemical that had once burned her hands in chemistry lab. “Though I’m not sure it’ll solve anything.”

“It’s done wonders for my husband’s hospital.” The familiar defensiveness rises. “If it saves just a single life, it’s worth it.”

“It’s unstable.” Avital’s voice is terse.

“It’s new. So sometimes the electricity is disrupted. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just don’t hook it up to any life-support machines.”

Avital says nothing. I want to scream at the unfairness of it — is it so hard to admit that I’ve given you something precious? — but I’m left in silence, stewing at her ingratitude.

BY Monday morning, I’m behind schedule and on edge, putting off messages from gently inquiring liaisons. We’re very interested in the technology. When can we expect you?

But Avital still putters around her lab, plugging devices into the Q-Flow, then her generator, rubbing one scarred hand against her temple. I want to scream again. Instead, I wait until her assistant walks out and say tightly, “Haven’t you gotten enough data?”

“No.”

“This is ridiculous. You’ve been staring at the prototype for days. If you haven’t found anything wrong with it by now, do you really think you will?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“No, you won’t.” I’m sure of this. “This is some scheme to sabotage Mishkan Ohr. You’re trying to disrupt my work—”

“Not everything is about you.” Avital glares at me, coolness replaced with unvarnished disgust.

“Well, this is! You would have accepted these from someone else.”

Avital’s eyes flash. “Someone else would have given me the space to evaluate their prototype instead of breathing down my neck, desperate for accolades instead of putting safety first.” She rolls her eyes upward. “But this is typical Chanala, insisting that the world bends around you. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Oh, please. You were—” My phone rings, and I stop short, glowering at her. It’s rare that people call, unless it’s absolutely necessary. It uses too much battery. There are no spam calls in the United States anymore. I have to pick up.

I turn away pointedly, but Avital, stubborn as always, doesn’t take the hint to leave.

“Mrs. Price.” I recognize the voice of the mayor of Bayside, the last town I visited. “I thought you should know — the prototype you gave us seems to be defective.”

“Defective?” I keep my eyes on Avital, who goes rigid at the word. “Defective how?”

“It worked fine for me,” the mayor says. “And the schools are thrilled. But a nursing home reported that it’s been causing a feedback loop with anything that’s been plugged into it, and then a generator. The generators are breaking.” His voice cracks a little, sounds almost accusing. “They’re having trouble getting basic medical tools to work.”

I clear my throat. “That’s impossible.”

I hang up with him, Avital still watching me intently. I flush, embarrassed and irritated. “I have to go.”

“Don’t you dare,” Avital says in a low voice. “What did they say? What’s defective?”

“I am not talking about this—” I put my hand on the doorknob. It doesn’t budge. I jerk it a little harder. Nothing.

“It’s an electronic lock,” Avital says, eyes narrowed. “Powered by the generator. What’s going on?”

The generator. I jerk the door again, as hard as I can, and the lights flicker, then go dark.

“What have you done?” Avital demands.

Maybe it’s just Bayside’s batch. Or maybe we’re trapped, locked in a room as the weight of Q-Flow’s failure sinks down, down, as steady as ash upon the world.

The fire department is unhelpful. “Lady, this is the Dark Spring. We have a dozen emergencies a day. It sounds like you’re safe. We’ll come when we can.”

“Do you know who I am?” I demand. It sounds laughable. He grunts and hangs up.

Fine. I should conserve my phone battery, anyway. The Q-Flow still hums on the table, a sound that now feels vaguely menacing. Avital did this. Avital plugged it into the generator — I never told her to do that—

Tzvi. I have to tell Tzvi. The hospital… have they used the Q-Flow on generator items, too?

I send him a warning with shaky fingers. When I look up, the light of my phone has illuminated the room enough to catch Avital’s face.

“Water?” She holds out a bottle.

She hasn’t changed a bit. Her judgment hangs over us, and I am cast back to 11th grade, to the helplessness of rejection. “No, thanks,” I say, my voice creaky and hoarse.

“Please,” she scoffs. “You’re not accomplishing anything by dehydrating yourself.” The unspoken you haven’t accomplished anything is nearly as loud.

And I am so sick of her superiority, of how she looks at me like I don’t measure up. Of how she still treats me like we’re in high school, like I deserve her disdain. “Don’t patronize me,” I bite out. “We’re not friends.”

“Don’t I know it,” Avital says darkly.

I press my fingers against my phone so hard they must be white. “And whose fault was that?” I demand.

Avital lets out a laugh. “Are you going to pin it on me?”

I don’t understand how she can be so casual about it, so unbothered — how someone can shrug off ruining a child’s life, 15 years later. “I know you turned the whole grade against me,” I snap. “One day, you were my best friend. The next, no one would talk to me. And I’ve never understood what you said  — how you persuaded everyone — but even more than that….” The words come quickly, bottled up for too many years. “Even more than that, I’ve never understood why. Why did you do it? After eleven years of friendship, how could you decide to destroy me?”

I’m heaving shuddering breaths, brought back to the child I was. And Avital… Avital chuckles like she can’t contain her amusement. Sociopath. I am humiliated in my vulnerability, giving her more ammunition but incapable of stopping. “I never did a thing to you. I would have done anything for you. And you—”

“I got out,” Avital says, and I can almost hear her lip curl. “I’m sorry that doesn’t feed your victim narrative.”

Rage washes over me like hot lava pouring down Mount St. Helens. “Don’t you dare—”

“Oh, no. I think it’s my turn to talk,” Avital says, her words trenchant and corrosive. Her fist wraps around her bottle, water leaking from beneath the cap. “You’ve said your part. And I know how you can remake the truth and use it as a weapon.”

“I never—”

“You always.” Avital lifts her hands, and I can see the splash of damage across them even in the dim light filtering in. “I was there, Chanala. I remember what you turned us all into, those years of high school. I remember the mind games you played with Kayla, tormenting her because she couldn’t read—”

“Don’t make it out like that was me.” It was the way that school was, back then. Eat or be eaten. Lash out or be destroyed. We were all a little terrible, and I was just the one who got swept under.

“It wasn’t just you, spreading rumors about Malka’s weight, either, or isolating Rikki.” Avital leans forward. “It wasn’t just you, sabotaging school events until they ended in tears, faking phone calls and twisting conversations until we all hated each other. But you were the only one in the middle, weren’t you?”

I am silent. I have nothing to say to Avital, who would reframe our entire past to make me the villain. She’s lying. None of it is true.

Not exactly.

I have vague memories of whisper networks and snide comments, of laughing with my friends at mean girls and dredging up secrets in desperate attempts to be liked. But I was only one of many, except —

“And it was only you who did this,” Avital says, holding her hands out to me. “Can you blame anyone else for that?”

I breathe hard. “It was an accident. I didn’t spill the acid on purpose.” It was too dangerous for classroom experiments, and I had said as much to the principal before our teacher had been fired.

Avital scoffs. “Right. I used to believe that.” She sucks in a breath. “And then I realized that it was after I’d pushed back against something you said about Kayla. Right after I tried to develop a backbone. I was terrified of… I didn’t even want to go into the lab with you again after that. I didn’t want to be around you. But I knew that the only thing worse than being your friend was being your enemy.”

In the quiet, dark room, her words are like knives, slicing into me without hesitation. Lies. Lies. Lies.

“You tormented everyone in the grade, pitting us all against each other until no one knew who to trust or what to believe. You had this… reign of terror going, and we were all too afraid of the consequences to stand up to you. Twelve girls applied to schools out of town by the end of eleventh grade just to escape you.” Avital swallows, and the dry sob of it echoes through the room. “It ruined the school. It ruined me. And then you left, anyway, because you couldn’t handle a few weeks of being a social pariah once we’d all stopped listening to you.”

It’s ridiculous. It’s not fair. It’s not true.

Time passes. The room is oppressively silent. I’m back to conserving phone battery. I can only pace, back and forth and back and forth, anything but speak to the woman tapping her fingers against the Q-Flow.

There are ghosts in this room, whispers of haunting accusations. I push them aside and they mold to my hands, refusing to be dismissed. I shake my head and there is only the faint note of laughter at the back of my mind.

My laughter. A girl, 16 and flush with power, using it mercilessly to get what she wanted. You were never a victim.

“It’s not true,” I say faintly.

Avital laughs, low and bitter. “Do you really still think that?”

“It’s not—” I swallow. “I didn’t—”

My phone rings, and I snatch it up, heedless of the draining battery in favor of an escape. It’s Tzvi, and I remember, suddenly, what’s at risk.

Tzvi sounds desolate, breathless with grief. “Everything went dark,” he says. “Just like you warned me. I saw it too late. We lost some patients. I was mid-surgery. I shouldn’t even be on the phone right now. I just had to let you know.”

My voice cracks, parched like farmland without rain. “I’m so sorry. This is all—”

“It isn’t your fault. We had no idea. They worked fine for weeks.” His pain leaks through the phone line. “I have to go.”

And then he is gone, and I am left with undeniable, speechless horror.

I did this. I pushed VoltaQ, handed out the Q-flow without reading the reports. And now… a catastrophe.

It’s not my fault. VoltaQ — they should have—

And I haven’t forced anyone to use the product — it’s already done so much good, even if it backfires now—

Tzvi says it isn’t my fault. What does Avital know?

But there is a nasty little voice in the back of my head, an echoing sound like Avital’s sneer, saying, Here we are, in crisis, and still, all you can think about is yourself.

I sink to the ground, my face in my hands as though it will blot out the darkness. As though the darkness hasn’t seeped within me with the steadiness of ash rain, forcing me to reckon with sharp words that dig their claws into me and refuse to let go.

And then, a voice, reluctant and unobtrusive as a flashlight’s beam. “You’re not the same now,” Avital murmurs. I haven’t said a word, but there is something about growing up with someone that exposes you to them, leaves me vulnerable before her. “You’re still Chanala, but you’ve channeled some of your worst traits in positive ways.”

She sighs. “That charisma. The tenacity. The way you always had to be in control. You’ve used them to do a lot of good.

“I’ve been following Mishkan Ohr for a long time,” Avital admits. “You… you’ve done a lot of chesed. You’ve done good work in schools and hospitals. And there was… my hands were worse,” she says quietly. “Before you started subsidizing regenerative tissue treatments in the Tristate area.”

“I thought of you. When I negotiated for those treatments… I thought of you.” I don’t know why I’m admitting it, as though anything might change. As though there remains absolution for me.

As though, beyond the Q-Flow, there might be things I still have to atone for.

The fire department arrives two hours later. A man breaks the door and releases us from our captivity with a frown at Avital. “Electronic locks are a bad idea in the Dark Spring,” he says as though she’s very, very stupid.

We stumble out of the lab, disoriented and exhausted. It’s still daytime, and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face, the glow of it through the clouds—

Through the clouds—

I look up.

It isn’t much. It’s a crack, really, where the smoke is wispier than usual. The rain has eaten away at the smoke, has weighed it down until it’s given way, and the sun shines through that crack, strong and ceaseless as though it has never been gone.

The sky is orange-gray, the streets illuminated with streaks of light. I gape upward. Had this been coming all along? There had been clues, little hints that the Dark Spring was beginning its decline, but I’d ignored them. A world with light wouldn’t need me to illuminate it.

“It opened earlier today,” one of the firemen observes. “It’s really something, huh? Hard to imagine that the sun was there all along, just waiting for us to see it.”

My throat aches. Ash falls, steady and slow, white powder upon the ground. “Yes,” I manage.

Avital steps up beside me, her face turned upward as well. There is a sprinkling of ash on her hair already, a dusting on her hands. “It’s a new day,” she says.

“A new day,” I echo, and the world glows with possibility.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 966)