Eye of the Storm (12 page)

Those are Grandma's initials.

Athena Grace Meggs.

As I click to open the folder, there's a faint sound from the other side of the door. Footsteps on the kitchen floor.

I freeze.

My father's voice drifts in, muffled. “No, honey, I'm fine. Go back to bed. Couldn't sleep, so I'm going to get some work done.”

My heart freezes, and my hands are shaking so much it's all I can do to close out the folder and log out.

The fingerprint sensor beeps.

The lock mechanism clicks.

The door will slide open in seconds, and no matter how wildly I look around the room, there is nowhere to hide in this sparse electronic workspace.

I race to the power switch, hit it, and the room goes dark. In the
blackness, I dive under Dad's desk just before the door hums open and he turns the lights back on.

He's wearing dress shoes with his pajama bottoms. They click on the floor and echo off the walls and make my heart pound harder.

He steps right up to the desk and pauses in front of his computer. If he sits down, will he notice that his chair is warm?

The dust under here tickles my throat. I swallow a cough, eyes watering.

What am I doing? Why am I hiding from my own father in the house that's supposed to be my home?

I should come out; he'd probably laugh. But something in the click of his shoes, something in the faces I've already seen him wear this week, tells me to stay still. And quiet.

Dad doesn't sit. He walks to the satellite wall and touches the panel under the screen. He's facing away from me, and I let my eyes move around the room again. At least I got logged out of his computer. At least there's nothing to—

My heart bolts up into my throat, and I almost choke on it. Because right there, its corner hanging over the edge of Dad's desk above me, is my DataSlate.

I can't let him see it.

I take a deep breath and inch forward on the floor.

Dad turns, and I freeze. He stands still for a second—is he looking at the radar screen above the desk?—and then turns back to the satellite wall.

I stretch my arm up slowly, silently.

I can't reach it.

I slide one knee forward, then the other, and reach again. My fingers close around the edge of the DataSlate just as Dad's DataSlate chimes.

I startle, and it falls from the edge of the desk and almost through my fingers, but I make a last mad grab and catch it.

“There you are! It's about time,” Dad says quietly.

“That's a fine way to say hello, Stephen.” A woman's voice. I lean out the tiniest bit, but the screen is facing away from me, so I can't see her face.

“Shh . . . hold on, let me plug in my earpiece so we don't wake the whole house.”

Under the desk, I pull my DataSlate back into the shadows and try to slow my breathing while Dad talks. I can hear only his side of the conversation now.

“I know,” he says into the DataSlate's camera. His shiny black shoes click back and forth, louder and fainter, over and over. When he walks away, I breathe.

“Yes, good timing.” He laughs a little. “It was a monster. They won't be able to find their roof in the morning. And maybe they'll decide they don't love that farmland as much as they thought. We'll have the bulldozers here before you know it.”

Dad walks away again, but I keep holding my breath. My father is
laughing
at the storm that just came through.

“Yep. Listen, I need to get some work done, but I'll see you tomorrow. . . . Love you, too. Good night.”

I gasp, then hold my breath, afraid he's heard. His shoes click closer again, and I tense as he sinks into the leather office chair.

Above, there are clicks on the keyboard. I calm my breathing, but my brain feels like it's about to explode.

Love you, too?
Who
was
that? He was talking like she knew all about the storm and the lawsuit. It must be someone he works with.
Love you, too.
No wonder he spends so much time at StormSafe. My heart sinks, thinking of Mirielle, so understanding while Dad's at work all the time.

“Hm.” Dad's heel lifts off the floor and he starts bouncing his knee, something he's always done when he's thinking hard.

More clicks.

A sigh.

Then the chair pushes back from the desk. Shoes click all the way to the entrance, then out and through the kitchen until the door slides shut and I am alone in the office again.

I don't come out.

Not yet.

I wait with my itchy nose in the dust for what must be another ten minutes until I'm sure he won't be back until morning.

Finally, I unfold my cramped legs, climb out, and slide into the leather chair.

I log in, go straight to the AGM folder, and start reading data files.

The numbers look almost exactly like what Alex shared with me, right down to the formulas, the projected kilowatts necessary to warm a downdraft enough to stop rotation within a storm.

I read through file after file, willing my eyes to stay open.

This data should work. It all makes sense, just the way Alex explained it. The simulation should have worked, too.

I go back to the beginning and start reading again. There must be something here I'm missing. Something that will give me that understanding, that vision of how it all fits together.

But the numbers blur.

They start to spin and mix with dust and broken glass and tree limbs. I look harder. There has to be a pattern, but everything is moving so fast it's blurry.

Then the whole screen swells and darkens, and there is a monster tornado coming. I'm riding my bike, and someone is behind me—sometimes it's Risha, sometimes Alex, and sometimes Amelia from home. The voice keeps changing but it always shouts the same thing, “Go! Faster! Hurry!” But no matter how fast I try to go, how hard I push down on the pedals, they just spin effortlessly, and I go nowhere. I can see the house—not Dad's concrete block but our house back in Vermont—and I keep pedaling, pedaling, as the storm gets closer and closer. The drone flies back and forth, back and forth. Roof tiles start flying off the house. Windows shatter, and in one of the gaping empty windowpanes, I see Mom's face for a split second before the blackness swallows her up.

“NO!!”

I wake up with a jerk. My hands are sweating, despite the air-conditioning in Dad's office. And the computer clock says 4:30 AM.

How could I have let myself fall asleep? What if Dad had come back?

I take a last look at the computer screen, the folder full of
swirling file names, and this time, one file stands out. Not numbers, but initials and words.

AGM-FAKEABSTRACT

Was it even here before? How could I have missed it? I shiver and click on the file.

I have read this document before. Dad put a copy on my DataSlate. It is the file that summarized his research on storm dissipation and its failure. That's what he told me.

With my heart racing, I search the folder, looking for another document, but there is nothing else labeled abstract or summary or AGM.

Nothing.

I open up each of the remaining documents. Only more data.

Now the computer clock reads 4:52. And I know that no matter how late Dad stays up, his alarm goes off at 5.

I need to get out of here.

But I can't.

I have to know.

I run a full hard-drive search.

Find: AGM

The list that scrolls down must be a hundred documents long, and it looks like all of them are in the folder I just finished reading through.

I scroll to the bottom.

All but one.

A file named AGM-AB buried five folders deep in a file called 2048 TAXES.

The digital clock reads 4:57.

I double click the file and realize I've been holding my breath.

It starts out like the other summary. I suck in words as if they're oxygen until I get to the spot in the document where it diverges from the one I've already read.

The rest of this summary is nothing like the one on my DataSlate.

The simulation did not fail.

Dad's experiment worked.

The computer clock turns to 4:58, and there is no time for questions. No time to ask why he gave me a phony summary, why he wanted the world to think he failed. I grab my DataSlate, click out the data-transfer stick, plug it into the back of Dad's drive, and drag the file over. I go back to the original folder with the data and copy that, too.

4:59.

The progress bar can't move quickly enough, and it makes me want to pound the computer.
Faster! Transfer! Go!

The last file copies as the clock turns.

Forcing myself to keep breathing, I unplug from Dad's computer, log out, and press the button to make the steel door slide open.

Dad's alarm is beeping in the bedroom.

The SmartKitchen is brewing his coffee.

As the office door begins to slide closed behind me, I look back at the wall of satellites, the wall of radar images, of storms, and dissipation data and secrets, wondering . . . what really goes on in this room?

Alex isn't at camp. When we left the park yesterday, his plan was to recover the drone and then head home. Did he find it? Has he seen the data it collected? What if that second storm hit before he made it home?

I sit through Van's morning directions with my DataSlate in my hands, half expecting him to snatch it away, even though I have permission to have it. It's off, but I can feel its weight, its danger, practically burning my hands with what I learned last night. Part of me is dying to talk to Alex about our results from the drone flight now, to show him this new data and see what he makes of it. But there's also a knot in my stomach. What if he sees something awful?

The holo-sim turns on, and Dad rises out of the floor. In today's lecture, he's talking about responsibility, integrity of data, and cooperation. My chest feels tighter with every word.

Responsibility? Integrity?

He lied. He lied about everything. Why?

I need to talk to Alex, but at the same time, I'm terrified. I've started the conversation with him in my head a thousand times,
and I've thought about never telling him at all. But he needs to know that his research was solid. I want to give him that.

“Hey.” I know it's Alex behind me from his whisper as he leans forward.

“You're here!” I turn in my seat to see him. “I need to—”

Even in the dim light, the sight of his face steals my words. He's hurt again. And the scrape on his temple from the other night is nothing compared to this. There's a gash across his right cheek, butter-flied together with a steri-strip. Another over his left eye still bleeds under its bandage. His chin is scraped raw.

“What happened?” I whisper.

But even as the words leave my mouth, I know it was the storm I saw on the radar.

The storm that made my father smile before he went to bed.

The one he laughed about in his office with his
love-you-too
woman on the video call.

“I'm okay. And I got the drone.”

“But you're not okay. Where—”

“Shhh . . . we'll talk later. Turn around now, or Van's going to get on your case,” Alex whispers, so I turn back to face my father. His holo-image talks over my head, smiles at the back of the auditorium. How can he do this? How can he
laugh
at someone's farm being hit, someone's body being beaten like this? How can he have the power to stop these storms and not use it? I want to throw myself at him, pound him with my fists.

But he's untouchable.

I'd fly right through him to the floor.

“Now that you have your partners and your focus, we'll skip the lectures and go straight to morning research. This is the last day you'll see me for a while,” holo-Dad says.

Unless you happen to live in my house
, I think.

Dad's image disappears, and I shiver. Knowing what I know about Dad's research, what he found and isn't telling anyone, makes me wonder about camp.

The high-tech equipment. The library. The top-of-the-line computers. Why is education such a big part of his company's mission? Why spend so much money on—

“You coming?” The lights are back on, and Alex is standing halfway down the row of seats, waiting for me.

I tuck my DataSlate in my backpack as Van comes walking up the aisle. “What happened to you?” Van pauses next to Alex and raises his eyebrows. “Get in a fight with your girlfriend here?”

Alex laughs a little.“Got caught out during the storm last night.”

“Be more careful, my man. We're counting on you here.” Van frowns at the bandage on Alex's forehead. “Stop by the first aid station before you get to work today. Marcy'll fix you up.”

“I'll come, too,” I say. “I need to talk to you . . . about stuff.”

Van tips his head in a question, but I don't answer. He shrugs, says “You go easy on him today,” and heads out the back door.

Alex and I walk down a long hall to the first aid station, tucked into a bright room near the entrance. Every time I turn to say something, the bandages on his face feel like accusations. Dad knew how to stop the storm that did this. He chose not to.

I finally find words. “So that weather hit while you were out looking for the drone?”

Alex shakes his head. “Not really.” He turns toward me and says quietly, “I got the drone, and it's fine; it's back at the house, but I haven't downloaded the data yet because that storm . . .” He shakes his head. “It came out of nowhere.”

“Why weren't you in a safe room?”

“Never got the alert.”

My face falls. “Was your DataSlate out of power, or—”

“There
was
no alert. You didn't get an alarm on yours last night, did you?”

I shake my head. I'd had it right in my lap, going over and over that data. The alarm that should have sounded on every data device within a ten-mile radius never went off.