Eye of the Storm (26 page)

“So that means . . .” I pull up a map of Logan County on the DataSlate and choose the satellite view, the one that shows all the roads and buildings. “If we can find a path without people . . .” In my mind, I draw imaginary lines from where the storm is now, trying every direction. But eventually, no matter which way it goes, the storm is going to hit someone. “It won't work. No path goes on forever.”

“It doesn't have to. Hold on.” Alex pulls up Dad's historical storms database. “The path just needs to be long enough for the storm's energy to run out. No tornado can last forever, and we already know what this one's got in it. It's already happened once.” He calls up the 10-10-20 storm and runs his finger down the screen, stopping at a line close to the bottom. “Thirty-eight miles. We need a path that's empty for thirty-eight miles.”

I look down at the map in my hands. It feels impossibly full of buildings. The path might as well be a million miles. “I can't—” The wind gusts, and the sound of rain on the roof turns harder, louder, like someone throwing stones. Hail.

“We have to hurry!” Alex brings the redirection folder back up. “I'll get this ready so when you find the coordinates, we can just do it.”

Risha leans in to look at the DataSlate, so close her hair brushes against mine. “What about here?” She drags the line I've drawn a bit farther southeast, and we zoom in to see the track. It would take the storm mostly through woods near one of the energy farms, then past what looks like a few orchards from the satellite view, and close—too close—to one old farmhouse.

“That won't work.” I point to the energy farm.

“They all have huge safe rooms,” Alex says. “They'll get a warning.”

“What about that house?” I point.

“It's not perfect, but we have to do something. That's the only building in the path,” Risha argues. “It's thirty miles out. The storm will be starting to weaken, and they'll have plenty of warning time.”

She starts to pull the DataSlate from me, but I hold on. “But it's still somebody's—”

“Jaden, will you look!” She lets go and points to the radar wall, where the storm on its current path is churning toward Placid Meadows. Ten minutes, maybe less, from swallowing up Risha's family. From Mirielle and Remi, who are sure they're safe inside the gates. None of them will ever see it coming.

I hand her the DataSlate, and she slides it onto the desk in front of Alex.

“Okay . . .” The computer screen reflects in his dark eyes. “What am I looking for here?”

Risha reads him the coordinates, and he scrolls down the list of command codes until he hits the one that matches. “Here?”

She double-checks it. “That's it.”

He clicks it open, copies the code, and taps back to the command entry field. “Jaden, you just typed it in here before?”

“Yeah. Then run it.” I look away from the screen, toward the radar, and hear his fingers tap against it.

Then quiet. Except for all of our breathing. All of our hoping.

Then the hum of the computer processing.

Risha and Alex turn to watch the radar. We hold our breath, and it feels like all of the air in the room has gone still while we wait.

The storm on the screen inches closer to Placid Meadows.

“Why isn't it turning?” Risha's voice trembles.

“It will.” I take her hand, and she squeezes so hard she crushes my fingers, but I don't let go. “It should. Any second.”

But it doesn't.

“It's not going to stop.” She doesn't scream or cry or yell at the screen. Her voice is flat, as if she's already died with them. “It's going to hit them.”

Turn, turn, turn
, I think, staring at the ceiling, imagining the satellites miles above us. Why aren't they doing their job? “Wait, look!” Alex's voice brings me back to the screen, and just as the storm is about to hit the fence, it slows, like it did that day in the park, the day Risha and I listened as the moms and kids shouted their rhyme to the sky. It listened.

And it's listening now.

“Oh, thank God, thank God!” Risha's tears flow again, this time tears of thankfulness. She takes a deep breath and walks to the window. Her fingers trace raindrops down the glass.

Alex sinks back into the chair as if the storm sucked away all his energy when it turned.

I stay at the radar screen, watching the storm pick up its pace, starting a race in its new direction, ready to devour the new meal set before it.

I pick up my DataSlate and zoom in to follow its path as it moves.

The trees planted alongside Placid Meadows. When the sun comes up tomorrow, they'll be in splinters scattered over miles.

Better trees than farms, though.

I follow the path past the energy farm. Criminals or not, I hope they all get to their safe room in time.

I swipe the screen through ten, twenty, thirty miles of woods until the trees thin and arrange themselves into lines, and I know this is the orchard that the storm will level soon—in twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.

Past the orchard and just a hair off to the east is the one house still in the path.

I zoom into the satellite view, hoping in a corner of my heart that I'll see a FOR SALE sign or already-broken windows and an empty garage to tell me no one lives there.

In another corner lives the cold, raw fear of what else I might see. Cars in the driveway. Dogs on a leash, waiting for someone to come play. Swing sets and tricycles.

I take a deep breath and zoom in as far as the satellite view allows.

And there is something I hadn't imagined even in the darkest corner of my heart.

A house with peeling white paint.

A stable and a brown mare.

A split-rail fence that I reached over with a handful of sugar cubes.

A rickety farm stand with a sign that I can't read in the satellite image, a sign I don't need to see to know that it offers sweet raspberries, fresh peaches, and compliments.

This is Aunt Linda's house.

And we have just sent a storm to swallow it up.

This can't be happening. Not now. Not when it was all supposed to be over. I let out a moan.

“What?” Alex jumps from the chair, but even his shoulder brushing mine can't warm the chill that's settled on me.

“This house.” I tap the screen, and it zooms in closer. The wreath Mom sent last Christmas is still on the door. A bird has built a nest in its gentle curve. “It's my great-aunt Linda's.”

Aunt Linda, who fed me pie in that kitchen. Who gave me the poetry book, the one thing that's made Oklahoma feel a little like home. Who told me the truth.

Alex's face darkens. He stares at the screen, processing the information, then hands the DataSlate to me. “Call her. She may not even be home.”

I nod and bring up her contact page. The call goes through, straight to Aunt Linda's video-mail, and I've never been more relieved. “Leave a message!” she says, but I don't. If she were home, she'd have answered.

“Feel better?” Alex asks, and I nod.

But then my DataSlate dings with a new message. “That's weird,” I say. “I've had it on all day.”

“We've probably been getting interference,” Risha says, turning away from the window. “I couldn't get through before.” Her eyes have relaxed some; they aren't as puffy, and her breathing is finally back to normal. “My DataSlate never connects right on storm nights.”

“It's my father.” Where is he? Is he on his way up here? I need to know, but I can't bring myself to open the message. Can't make myself let him into this room, even if it's only a recording. I can't help imagining him, looking right through the dark, shiny screen, seeing us here, seeing everything we've done.

But Alex is insistent. “Play it.”

So I do.

Dad's face fills the screen. He's not 3-D like he is on the holosim at Eye on Tomorrow, but otherwise, it's just as realistic.

Only where did he record this? The shelf behind him is full of old dishes. He's definitely not here at StormSafe. And it's not our house in Placid Meadows, either.

“Jaden,” Dad says from the screen in my hands. “I know where you are.” He puts a hand up toward the camera in a gesture meant to keep me from freaking out, meant to keep me from throwing the DataSlate across the room and running like I want to. “I need you to stay there for now. You're not in trouble, and I—” He takes a deep breath, and instead of the usual fire in his eyes, the focused intensity, there is something else. Are they shining with
tears
? “I don't want you in danger. I can explain things to you later. It's not what it looks like.” His voice breaks, and he looks down.

Alex laughs a quick, bitter laugh and walks away, but Risha stays by me and listens as Dad goes on. “But no matter what, I'm sure you're going to want to go home with Mom. She's on her way here now. So as I said, please stay where you are. Mom will be here in”—he looks at his watch—“ten to fifteen minutes, and after she and I talk, she'll be right there to pick you up.”

The screen goes black.

Mom?

Mom is in town? Does that mean she was getting all my messages but couldn't respond? Did she get the last one? Does she already know what Dad has done?

And Grandma! Does Mom know Grandma Athena is alive?

Where
is
Grandma Athena now? I picture her bony fingers, curled around the Shock Wand, and I shiver.

“We can't stay here.” I run to the window, where the rain should be letting up, but it's swirling harder, faster in the wind. “My grandmother might come back.”

“Your grandmother?” Risha looks bewildered, and I realize I never told them. There was no time. There is no time now.

“We just—we have to go.”

“Now that the storm's gone, let's go back to your house. Wouldn't that make more sense than you waiting here for them to come pick you up?”

“They're not
at
the house.” It wasn't Dad and Mirielle's house in the video; there are no painted plates in Mirielle's shiny steel kitchen.

But where are they? I rewind the video-message and zoom in to see the background more clearly.

A wooden shelf.

Faded red apples on the wallpaper.

I suck in my breath. Not there. No.

Then I see the coffee mug with Emily Dickinson's face and know it's real.

Dad is at Aunt Linda's house.

And Mom is on her way. Or
was
. . . I check the time-stamp on the video. 7:22 PM. It's 7:45 now. Plenty of time for Mom to have arrived, sat down at Linda's big, wooden kitchen table with a cup of tea. Time for her to be devoured by a giant storm.

I lunge toward the radar screen. The storm is racing forward, showing no signs of weakening.

Alex points to the DataSlate in my hands. “Try calling again.” His voice is so steady and calm I could scream.

I pull up Aunt Linda's contact page again.

No response.

I call up Mom's.

Nothing.

And Dad's.

Nothing.

I slam the DataSlate down on the desk and start typing blindly at the computer keyboard.

“Jaden, what are you doing?! You can't just—”

“Yes, I can!” I swipe at the tears filling my eyes, blurring my vision, and pull up the last sequence of numbers we entered, the code to turn the storm. I feed it back to the machine in reverse
order. If we sent this storm to Aunt Linda's, then we can take it away, erase its path as if it never planned to flatten the white farmhouse at all. As if it never found this course toward the building with everyone I love inside.

That is the story I tell myself, and I am willing it to be true.

I finish the code, press the command button before Alex can protest again, and turn to watch the radar screen.

Like before, the storm inches forward a few more seconds before it slows and then stops, and then changes direction. And only then do I realize I was holding my breath. Aunt Linda is safe. My mother is safe. My father is . . . safe.

“Are you
insane
?!” Alex pushes me from the computer and starts entering code. “You have it coming right back at us!”

I stare at the radar image.

The storm had been so real when it was chasing us down the road, but between then and now, it's started to feel like something artificial. Something that lives in the colors of a map instead of in the real world.

My eyes trace its new path, back through the woods, along the road, around a curve, and up the driveway to the compound where we sit watching. It is headed straight for StormSafe. Straight for us.

It feels real again.

“What have you
done
?” Alex is tapping the computer screen but can't get back to the page that will let him redirect the storm.

“I had to do something!” My throat closes tight. I slump against the window and watch the clouds swirling above us. Then I whirl
back to Alex. “Wait! Stop the redirection codes—what we need to do here—it's what we've needed to do all along! We have to run the dissipation code instead.”

Risha shakes her head. “But that's not—”

“Not tested, I know! But it's all we have. Otherwise we can keep turning this storm around and redirecting it every two minutes, and we're going to end up with more people in danger. We have to—” I'm so certain of what I'm about to say that it surprises even me. “We have to take it out.”

Alex doesn't say a word. He walks to the window, presses his forehead to the glass, and closes his eyes.

Risha stares at the computer screen with big eyes, as if she expects it to make the decision all by itself.

“We have to do this.” I say it again and look at my watch. For another six minutes, the storm will be swallowing up nothing but forest and fields before it gets back to the populated area. We have six minutes. “There is no. Other. Choice.”