Eye of the Storm (28 page)

Alex pages through DataSlate screens, one after another.

“Hurry up!”

The wind and rain, already impossibly loud, scream louder, and there's clunking, clanking coming from over our heads. Something—lots of somethings—being flung around like play toys, until finally, in an almighty howl of wind, the whole of the little building—everything above us, is ripped from the foundation and sucked into the sky.

I fall to the floor, grab on to one of the metal bars, and hold on. But impossibly, the wind lets up, and when I dare to peek into the screaming, high-whistling swirl above me, all I can do is stare.

The storm has lifted up; the tornado is no longer touching down, though it's close, and it is absolutely, directly on top of us.

The air feels heavy, like every last molecule of oxygen has been sucked into the sky, and this gray cloud has us encircled like a tomb.

Blue lightning flashes from the sides of the tornado. We are surrounded by a circular wall of clouds and electricity.

“We're inside,” I whisper, and only then do I become aware of Alex and Risha on the ground next to me, staring into the sky, too.

“It's . . . it's beautiful,” Risha says. But she is also the first to get her wits back. “But it's still moving. It could touch back down any second, and we'll have the other side to deal with.
Finish!
While we still have the computer!”

It's a miracle it still works; if the winds had raged on the ground a half-second more, it would be up there, swirling over our heads.
But it's here, and I crawl to it. There are two lines left to copy from the DataSlate. Alex reads, and I enter them with shaking, bloodstained hands.

“SEVEN-THREE-ONE,” he finishes.

I stare at the columns of numbers and let my finger hover over the words EXECUTE COMMAND.

What if?

What if we are wrong?

This storm over our heads will go . . . where? And will we strengthen it along the way?

Alex's hand presses down gently on my shoulder.

“It will work.” I tap the button.

Drop to my knees.

And wait.

The wind starts to blow again as the second wall of the storm moves over us.

Let it work. Please let it work.

I keep my head down and listen. I send all my hopes up into the sky.

Wind howls. Rain pelts down. The computer flies off the desk—“Look out!”—and Risha yanks Alex out of the way the instant before it explodes in a shower of sparks on the concrete floor.

We huddle close and hold on, waiting for the wind to rip us apart.

But it doesn't happen. The monster never quite comes back.

There are more distant pops from electrical explosions in blown circuits and transmitters. Branches and bits of ceiling and roofing
and God knows what else bang and scrape against the one wall that remains.

But the sounds start to fade.

And we are still here.

We lift our heads and watch the storm sweep away from us, back toward Placid Meadows.

“No, no!” Risha says, and starts to lunge for the computer, in pieces on the floor now.

“No, wait.” Alex's eyes are trained on the top of the storm cloud. “It's going to be okay. Watch.”

And yes. The churning gray monster is tired. It slugs away from us another quarter of a mile, stirring up dust and last year's leaves.

And finally, it lifts its tail up from the ground and snakes back up into its cloud.

And is gone.

There are no words to describe this sound.

The quiet after a storm has gone.

The absence of everything—birds chirping, HV motors idling, air conditioners humming.

Here in this broken shelter full of leaves and branches, shattered glass, and bits of buildings the tornado threw at us as it passed, there is almost total quiet.

Only the sound of our breathing—Alex and Risha and me, huddling together.

It feels like time should have stopped when the storm rose back into the sky, like this problem should be solved forever now that it's gone.

But I know it's not.

I know the storms will come again, on the next day when the clouds start swirling and the conditions are just right. They will come.

But right now, it's too soon to talk of next times. I am too thankful to do anything except stay here with my head on Alex's shoulder,
breathing this same air with him, holding on to Risha's hand, and feeling her bracelets, cool against my wrist.

Alex is the first to speak. “Thank God we had the numbers right.”

A few minutes later, Risha is the second.

“Look.” She points up, out of the shelter. We uncurl ourselves like fern fronds in spring and stretch our necks up, up to the line her finger traces toward the clouds in the east.

A smudge of broken rainbow leans against the storm-bruised sky, faint color in the day's last light. I stare hard at it, willing the colors to brighten.

They don't.

I am thankful anyway. Because hope has to start somewhere. And a glimmer is better than nothing at all.

It is the sound of tires crunching over broken boards and branches that finally brings us up out of the shelter to meet Aunt Linda's blue farm truck. Mom jumps out and looks as if she can't decide whether to hug us or kill us.

“Jaden!” She flies at me and pulls me into a hug that comes dangerously close to accomplishing the latter, but I manage to push away so I don't suffocate.

“You got my messages!”

Her eyes fill with tears. “I'm sorry I didn't come home sooner. I thought you were probably getting used to everything. A new house and Mirielle and—”

“Mirielle! Remi! Are they okay? Were they with you and Dad? Or are they home at Placid Meadows? And where's Dad?”

My stomach tightens. Is he okay? Is he back in his office at Placid Meadows sending down another storm?

Mom presses her hands against her eyes and shakes her head a little. “Mirielle and Remi are fine. They're safe. So is Dad, but . . . there's . . . we have a lot to talk about, Jaden.” She moves her hands and smiles a weak, exhausted smile. “And I need to say hello to your friends, too.”

“This is Risha. And Alex.” I wait while she shakes their hands. “Mom, where is everybody? What's going on?”

“What's going on,” she says, “is that we need to get the three of you someplace safe, where we can clean up those cuts, and you can eat something.” She looks at my matted hair. “And take a shower. Pile in.” She opens the truck door. “We'll talk on the way back to Linda's house.”

Dear Dad,

I hope things are going okay for you. I wish . . .

I stop and stare out the window, where fat raindrops are starting to fall, pelting the red leaves on our sugar maple in the yard. A long time ago, I used to love the way September storms would make Vermont's autumn leaves shine.

Thunder rumbles, and I set the pencil down.

It feels weird writing to him like this instead of talking at my DataSlate for a video-message, but it makes sense that one of Dad's restrictions at the energy farm includes the use of any electronic communication devices.

At first when Dad turned himself in and came clean about the technology he developed with Grandma Athena, it didn't look like he'd be doing time.

After all, it was the government that opened the floodgates on weather manipulation research when it changed the laws and even paid StormSafe to redirect hurricanes in the Gulf when they were
headed for populated areas. They wanted Dad's technology, so they pretty much gave him free reign, extended his patent for the Sim Dome, and didn't ask questions about how he made Placid Meadows so safe. It was the National Storm Center that funded Dad's tornado dissipation project when he came back from Russia. Weather manipulation won't be a crime until the new legislation takes effect next year.

But lying under oath has always been against the law, and Dad had testified before Congress about the failure of his dissipation research. He lied about the project he scrapped so he could go on to something bigger, technology that would let him rule the storms instead of simply sending them home to the clouds. The project Grandma Athena had always dreamed of. What she'd given up her life to do. And Dad finally got the attention he never had from her when he was a kid.

It's crazy that after all he did, all the lives he destroyed with his pet storms, that it was the lying that landed him on one of those energy farm bikes, sentenced to pedal for power in the sun for the next five years, paying back in sweat what he stole from society with his crimes.

Only he can never really pay it back. I think of Alex and Tomas whose family farms were ravaged and almost stolen away, of the countless people who lost their homes in Dad's redirected storms. Of Newton.

Thank God for Ms. Walpole, who helped Tomas's family get their farm deed back, along with a settlement so StormSafe will pay for his mother's treatment in New York, and then some. He and Alex
have had a chance to talk, too. I was right; Tomas trusted Van and had no idea what he and my father were doing.

Lightning flashes, and my stomach twists, even though the only storms around tonight are small ones. I run my hand over the cover of the poetry book I brought home with me from Dad's, and I breathe in slowly. It will be a long time before my heart remembers that storms aren't all evil. That they can be ordinary rain, with thunder and lightning and a bit of wind.

I pick up the pencil again.

Set it down.

What do you write to someone who is so much like you and yet nothing like you at all? What do you say to a parent who is no one that you want to grow up to be?

And what can I say about this summer that was supposed to be our time to reconnect?

I've only been home—real home with Mom—two months, but Eye on Tomorrow already seems like forever ago. Placid Meadows, the campus, the playground . . . they all feel like memories of some high-definition dream.

That afternoon when the storm was raging, when we crouched clinging to metal bars in the storm cellar, I wanted to wake up like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
and find a cold compress on my forehead because it was never real.

Just a dream.

Did Dad ever really want to know me again? Or was I there like all the others—another Eye on Tomorrow kid to watch and shape and ultimately hire to help keep secrets?

Mom unloaded the truth on the way back to Aunt Linda's house that night. When she left for Costa Rica, she hadn't known how Dad's research was evolving, how his interests had taken such a dark turn. When she finally got my message—the video-message of me crying by the side of the road—she called Mirielle, who broke into Dad's office—I still don't know how but it doesn't surprise me that she figured it out—and pieced together what was happening. That's when she learned, all at once, that her dead mother-in-law was alive and that her husband was not doing the work he said he was.

She told Mom everything. And Mom borrowed an HV, drove straight to the airport, and caught the next flight home.

Aunt Linda had picked her up at the airport, and when Dad met them at her house, Mom gave him a raging earful about the promises he'd made to her, to me, about my summer and keeping me safe.

And that's when Grandma Athena's message got through. Her face appeared on Dad's DataSlate, right there in Aunt Linda's kitchen, talking about how the storm wasn't performing as they'd planned, how she locked me in the outbuilding. I was more of a problem than he'd imagined, she said, and so the two of them would need to talk. Dad swore up and down to Mom that she never really would have hurt me. I don't think I believe it.

Dear Dad,

I hope things are going okay for you. I wish this summer could have been different. I really wish . . .

I roll the pencil between my fingers, then snap it in half.

Thunder rumbles again, and rain pours down my window in thick rivers. Everything outside looks warped and blurry and wet.

What do I wish? I wish Eye on Tomorrow had been real, a legitimate opportunity for kids like me and Risha, Tomas and Alex, to collaborate and solve this world's problems.

I wish Dad was the father he used to be, or pretended to be anyway, the dad with the strong shoulders and rainbow sprinkles.

I wish that his corporation never existed. That he'd never gone to Russia and found Grandma Athena.

I wish I had a grandmother like Risha's, who stirred curry stews and kissed my head, instead of one who tied me to chairs.

And yet . . . I wish I'd had a chance to talk with her, really talk with her, about her life and her ideas and her choices, before she died.

I pick up a jagged pencil piece and turn it over in my hands.

It's been two months, but we haven't had a funeral yet. Mom and I will have to go make arrangements because with Dad locked up, we're the only ones who can take care of her burial.

Mom's waiting to book plane tickets. The storm was so huge it's taken them weeks to clear the debris. If Grandma had entered the main StormSafe building, or if she were right outside, she'd have been buried under a mountain of glass and steel when the tornado hit.

“Jaden?” Mom knocks at my bedroom door, then walks in with a pile of clean clothes and balances it on my dresser. “Done with the letter?”

I push the paper away. “I don't think I have anything to say.”

I run my finger over the end of the pencil piece, then pick up the other one and try to fit them back together, but splintery edges stick out. Breaks are never truly clean.

“Did he really used to love me?” I try to say it as if I don't care, but my shuddery voice gives everything away.

“Yes.” Her eyes are sad. “He really did and he still does, Jaden.”

I almost laugh.

“Truly.” Mom puts a hand on each of my cheeks so I have no choice but to look right at her. “It wasn't until that night you were in danger—you, his little girl—that he could finally see what he had done. Remember what he looked like when he called you on the videophone?”