Some Fine Day (39 page)

It’s hard to convey what being inside the eye of a hypercane looks like. We’re standing in a coliseum hundreds of miles across, except it’s made of fluffy white cloudbanks that soar tens of thousands of feet into the air. The circle of sky above is clear and blue.

Just a few miles away, a maelstrom of rain and winds that shatter the Beaufort scale are raging. But here, it’s peaceful. A small herd of what looks like reindeer picks its way down the slope. I take the presence of animals as a good omen. If they can survive here, we can too.

As the adrenalin rush ebbs, my head starts to throb. I lean against the cockpit ladder.

“You’re still bleeding,” Will comments. He takes me by the arm and leads me to a patch of grass. “Lie down,” he orders, donning his physic face.

The grass is soft beneath my head. I watch him walk to the plane. His short blonde hair gleams silkily against his neck and his black T-shirt stretches tight across his shoulders and even though I’m dizzy and half-sick, I want him. God help me, I do.

I stare up at the blue sky. A minute later, his face appears, looking down at me. He kneels in the grass and opens up the first aid kit.

“You probably have a concussion,” he says, swabbing my forehead with something that feels cool and tingly at the same time. “Hold still.” He leans over me and I can feel the warmth from his skin.

“When you were at the Helix. . . You said you thought about me.” Will is winding a bandage around my forehead. He pauses for a split-second, then secures it with a metal clip.

I take a deep breath. “I thought about you too. When they sent me back to the Academy.”

His blue-grey eyes meet mine and he doesn’t look away. But it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking.

“I just. . . I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I basically stayed in bed for two months after they brought me back. But nothing was the same. I couldn’t do it anymore. I got myself kicked out. Right after I found out about Project Nix. My mom. . .” I swallow. “My mom helped me. If it weren’t for her, you’d still be in that place. And now they’re going after my parents.” I feel a tear slide out of the corner of my eye and trickle down to my ear.

“I’m so sorry, Jansin,” Will says. “I know what it means to lose all the people you care about.” His gaze softens as he looks at me. “Almost all of them.”

He twines his fingers in mine and electricity sparks between our palms. Will smiles, the warmest, most beautiful smile, like the sun coming out from behind a thunderhead. I realize I haven’t seen him smile like that since the Helix. Part of me was scared I never would again.

“The first time I saw you. . . you looked even worse than you do now,” he says, and I raise an eyebrow. “And you were still the prettiest girl I’d ever laid eyes on.”

I start to say something, I’m not sure what, and then his mouth is on mine, soft at first and then with a fierce hunger he can barely control, and I can’t believe I ever compared this boy to an actuary. We stay that way, just breathing into each other, for an endless moment. My lips feel swollen and bruised when he finally slides his mouth off mine. He kisses my chin and moves down the line of my jaw, and I can feel my pulse fluttering wildly against his lips. He’s so alive in my arms. So real and solid and undeniably
here
. Our tongues touch and the ground spins away. We cling to each other like drowning people, burying our sorrow and grief in the mingled heat of our embrace. He’s careful in the way he touches me, he knows where I hurt, and I can tell he’s holding himself back. His breath is ragged as he finally pulls away.

“We have to stop now,” Will says. “Or I won’t be able to.”

“Oh,” I say, flushing to the roots of my hair.

Will lies beside me, and I nestle my head on chest. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he murmurs.

“Mmmmm. Maybe I do.”

He sighs. “I’ve been thinking about something, Jansin. If they built this plane, they can build another.”

“Yes, they could,” I say. “But they won’t.”

I tell him that I know how they think, the factors that are calculated into every decision. If we were down below, reachable in the ordinary course of things, they would send more agents. Mostly to make a point: No one hurts them and gets away clean. But we’re not worth the political capital it would require to finagle a new budgetary allocation and engineer an incredibly complex aircraft for no other purpose than extracting two dissidents from a place that doesn’t officially exist.

They also have bigger fish to fry at the moment. Like Greenbrier.

I look around the valley, somehow both lush and severe at the same time. Like Charlie said, life goes on. It evolves. It pushes back. Maybe the canes were nature’s answer to a species that was making the whole planet sick. Or maybe we just brought it on ourselves.

Then Will kisses me again and I forget all about being so serious.

We bask in the sun, with the grass tickling our bare feet, until it begins to sink behind the eyewall. He touches my hand and points to a distant ridge. There’s a figure outlined black against the dying light. Human. Or human-like.

The clouds catch fire, their edges shimmering with flames of molten gold, as we arm ourselves and start walking towards it.

Like most, this book went through many incarnations. The earliest readers—my wonderful agent, Jeff Ourvan, and my perceptive and generous cousin Eva Thaddeus—were nice enough to get their hands dirty with the raw clay. Their insights kept the whole thing from derailing.

My mother, who believes she's better than me at solving
New York Times
crossword puzzles but is sadly mistaken, was more than happy (gleeful, one might say) to point out typos, plot holes and logical inconsistencies. We still have the prodigious list in a Word document somewhere. Thanks, Mom.

Simon, my beloved, slogged through the drafts again and again, asking important questions and correcting the typos that even my grammar-Nazi mother overlooked. He also dictated every single fight scene, because he teaches krav maga and knows all kinds of wonderful things about full airway chokes and how to grab someone by their eyeballs and nostrils simultaneously, etc. Thank you, my darling! Although not so much for demonstrating them on me. . .

Thank you, Dad, for reading and believing, and Nika, for inspiring me to create a smart, funny, powerful character. Double air punch!

I also owe a debt of thanks to Dr. Kerry Emanuel at MIT, who graciously answered my questions about how hypercanes form and didn't laugh (or maybe he did, since we communicated by email). He is precisely the kind of scientist we should really be putting in charge of things.