Eye of the Storm (13 page)

“We had no clue until the wind kicked up. Thought we had time to get the chickens in, but debris started flying before I got back to the barn.”

Alex pulls open the door to the first aid station, and we step inside. The room is full of sunlight, and the white walls are so bright they make me squint. A bouncy young woman in scrubs—she must be Marcy—is scrolling through records on a DataSlate. She lifts her head, takes one look at Alex, and says, “Well, I don't need to guess which one of you is my customer, do I?” She starts rummaging in a drawer full of bandages and ointment.

Alex hops onto one of the stools near the window and motions me closer. “What'd you want to talk about?”

“I . . . can talk to you later.” I glance over at Marcy, who seems nice enough, but I'm not ready to tell anyone else about this. I'm not even sure I'm ready to tell Alex. But I have to.

“Here we go.” Marcy swoops over Alex and eases off his old bandage. “Ooh, that's a good one. Let's clean it and get you patched up.” She raises a UV wand, gives the wound a quick zap to sterilize it, and is reaching for a new bandage when the door opens.

It's Tomas. “Oh, hey, guys.” He waits until Marcy looks up. “Van sent me to get him something for a headache?”

“In the meds kit right there on the counter.” She starts unwrapping a bandage, but the door bangs open again, and one of the Beekman twins—I can't tell them apart—is holding her arm.

“I tripped on Ava's robot. I think I sprained something,” she whines.

Marcy sighs, hands me the bandage—“Can you finish up here?”—and reaches into the freezer for an ice pack.

While she's having Tess try to move her arm in different ways, I finish unwrapping the bandage. “When you were flying the drone yesterday,” I whisper, leaning in toward Alex, “I . . . I did see some of the numbers.” I cover his cut gently with the clean gauze and take a deep breath. “I wasn't sure I was reading them right, but . . . I think I was.”

His eyes light up. “And?”

“I'll be right back; I'm going to take her to the main office to file an accident report.” Marcy hustles out of the room with Tess, and we're alone with Tomas, still shuffling through the bottles of pain reliever.

He looks over at us, then picks up one of the bottles and grins. “Better get these to Van before he gets grumpy.” He leaves, and I turn back to Alex.

I have to force myself to say the words. He'll see for himself when we download the data anyway. “The storm wasn't dissipating at the fence.”

“But it turned away at the perimeter.”

“And kept going, remember? Whatever happened at the fence didn't weaken it, Alex. Wait until you see the numbers.”

“You saw the numbers?”

I nod. “I saw enough.”

He stares up at me from the stool, and I watch his eyes shift from a look of confusion to shocked understanding. “It left . . . and got stronger?”

I nod. “And then last night, my dad left his office open.” I take my DataSlate from my backpack on the floor and pull up another stool next to him. “I went onto his computer and looked up his results from his dissipation research, from the simulation he did that was like yours.”

“And? It failed, right? You told me that before.”

“That's what I thought.” I click into the folder I copied and turn the screen so he can see the full list of files. “Remember the abstract he printed up for me? The one that summarized his failed simulation?”

“Yeah.”

“This is it.” I point to the document.

AGM-FAKEABSTRACT

His eyebrows knit together, and the new bandage tugs at his skin. He raises a slow hand to it. “It . . . wasn't real?”

“This is the real one.” I click the other document open, hand him the DataSlate, and hold my breath.

Alex reads. His eyes grow wider with every word. Finally, he shakes his head. “Why?” He turns to me, as if I'm a stranger. “Why would he hide this? This information . . .” He taps the DataSlate screen, and his voice gets louder. “This is gold. This is going to solve everything. With proof of the simulation's success, they could have gotten government clearance to do an actual storm-trial using the satellites that are already up.” He's talking faster now. “I mean, I don't know if they're totally equipped to send down the right amounts of energy or if the accuracy is what it would need to be yet, given it's not the reason they were originally built, but still . . .” He shakes his head again and looks at me, angry. “What's your dad thinking?”

My mouth goes dry. “I don't know.” I'm afraid to tell him more. About the wall of satellites, about the digital kilowatt readings fluctuating during last night's storm.

And I cannot bring myself to tell him the detail that haunts me, that makes my stomach hurt the most. That when the whirling cloud of dust and debris swept across the river last night, my father was happy. As happy as he had been all day.

Without warning, Alex springs up. His stool clatters against the counter and almost tips over. “We need to rerun this simulation.” He waves the DataSlate at me. “We can use your dad's original numbers . . . and then try our new data from the drone, too. Let's
see if there's availability this morning. It's early in the project, so most people haven't had time to get their sims set up yet.”

I follow him to the door, and when he pushes it open, Tomas jumps back to avoid being smacked in the face.

“Oh!” He holds up the bottle of headache meds—“Got the wrong kind. See you guys later on”—and hurries past us back into the first aid room.

Alex walks down the hallway, out the door, and across campus so fast I can barely keep up.

Van's working on the main computer when we get to the Sim Dome. “Hey, champ,” he says to Alex.

“Do you think we could run that simulation once more?” Alex blurts out, waving his DataSlate.

“Seriously, my friend?” Van folds his arms in front of him.

“I know it failed before, but I'm positive I have the numbers right now.” He turns to me. “We know that—”

“That sometimes a minor input error can throw off a whole experiment,” I interrupt. Was he actually going to
tell
Van that I
stole
my father's data? My eyes flash a warning at Alex before I turn back to Van. “We have two sets of numbers we want to double-check.”

Van chuckles and shakes his head, but he walks to the access panel and slips in the key card that provides access to the simulation computer. “You found a kindred spirit, Alex. She's as stubborn as you are.” He winks at Alex as the door slides open. “Go for it, but this is the last time I can let you run this one. It's a waste of resources.”

“Okay, thanks.” We step into the control room, just as Tomas
arrives, hopefully with the right meds this time. We need Van in a good mood.

Alex plugs his DataSlate into the mainframe and feeds in the numbers. The same numbers my father used for the successful simulation he ran up at StormSafe. The one that worked.

The computer beeps, and a red button appears with the words BEGIN SIMULATION. Alex looks over at Van, who's huddled close to Tomas, talking. Finally, he glances up and gives us a sharp nod. Alex takes a deep breath, clicks the button, and leans back in his chair to watch.

A new button appears on the computer screen—INITIATE VARIABLE—but Alex's eyes are on the charcoal clouds forming high up in the dome to his left. They darken and swirl as they cross the river, and right before they reach the model city laid out on the grid in front of us, a funnel cloud drops down.

“Okay,” Alex whispers. “Here we go.” He watches, intent as the funnel widens and stretches toward the field of faux grass and synthetic trees, and just as it looks ready to touch down, he triggers the variable, presses the button that tells the computer-generated tornado that three hundred virtual kilowatts of microwave energy are blasting into its heart, heating the air in the downdraft. He's told the tornado to imagine the exact circumstances that would lead to its death.

I hold my breath and watch.

There is a spark from the vortex of the storm, and it seems to pause as if it's considering the new variable. Then the funnel cloud swells and pushes forward into the model city. It devours the library,
the fire station, the school, four-five-six-seven houses, and grows fat with debris, heading for the business district.

Then the computer screen goes blank. The wind stops blowing, the clouds disappear, and the swirling-whirling-flying debris clatters to the floor. The lights in the dome flicker and go out.

When they come back on, Van and Tomas are stepping out of the observation room. Tomas leaves the dome without waving or even looking at us. “Sorry,” Van radios into our cube, “I don't see the point in continuing. You're done.”

Alex slides open the door, steps into the main dome, and throws his hands up in the air. “I don't understand how—”

“What you don't seem to understand is that it's time to give up on this one.” Van ushers us toward the door.

“Van, wait. We have another set of numbers, different data.” Alex doesn't say where the new data came from, thank God, and Van doesn't ask.

Alex starts to turn back to the control panel. “Couldn't we—”

“No,” Van snaps. “At some point, you need to accept when a theory isn't working.” He opens the door for us to leave, and a rush of warm air flows in. “Go back to the drawing board and consider some other ideas. You've tried the heat-the-downdraft approach, and it failed. Look into wind shear or another theory. But it's time to let this one go.”

Alex's hands are clenched into fists. “But I know this should work.” He looks back into the dome as if there might be someone else who will give him permission to run the other numbers. But there's just Van blocking the way.

“Has the Sim Dome been checked over since last year?” Alex asks. “Has it been recalibrated to make sure the storms react in line with the data? And the software's up to date and everything?”

Van's face relaxes into a little smile. “It stinks to be wrong, doesn't it? I wish I could tell you it wasn't you, my friend, but this Sim Dome is as up-to-date and fine-tuned as they come. It was checked over, top to bottom, and recalibrated over the weekend.”

Alex sighs. “Well, couldn't the guy have made a mistake?”

“I doubt that very much.” Van walks us to the door, smirking. “The guy was Dr. Meggs himself.”

Alex doesn't say a word as we walk across the quad. He doesn't hold open the library door.

“So now what are we going to do?” I ask Alex.

He wheels around, eyes burning. “
We
?” He looks at me hard, then lets out an incredulous little laugh. “
We
aren't going to do anything because
we
just got completely shut down. I'd say this one's in
your
court now.”

“Alex, why are you mad at
me
? What's wrong?”

“What's wrong? Your father did the maintenance on the Sim Dome himself. He could calibrate that system in his sleep. Do you think for one second it's an accident our simulation didn't work?”

“Well, maybe . . . ,” I begin. The thought had already crept into my brain—no, into my gut, in an awful twisting way—before we even left the observation cube. But part of me needs to believe that the dad who used to sing to me at night might still have something good inside.

Alex doesn't wait for me to finish my sentence. He plows into the library and stomps toward the table where we were working.

“I know what it looks like,” I whisper, “but maybe we could talk to him about this. There might be a reason. Maybe he has, I don't know, some other information that . . .”

Alex's eyes burn the rest of my words into ashes. “Listen to you.” He leans back against a bookshelf and stares at me as if I'm someone he's never met before, someone he wouldn't want to know. “This isn't a computer game.” His voice trembles, and his hand shakes as he raises his arm and gestures back in the direction of the Sim Dome. “This is about people's lives. About my family. What your father is doing here is—”

“You don't
know
what he's doing.”

“Yes I do, and so do you. It doesn't take a genius, Jaden. And unless you do something about it—”

“Unless
I do something about it
?”

Ms. Walpole pokes her head around the corner. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine, yeah.” Alex pulls a book from the shelf and starts flipping through it.

She frowns and steps up beside us. “Shall I ask about the ‘library materials' I loaned you yesterday? Or shall I presume you've returned them already?”

Alex looks up at her. “The plane is fine, but it's—”

“Mr. Carillo, the book that I loaned you is a rare volume, and I trust it will be returned in good shape when you're finished.” Ms. Walpole raises her eyebrows at him and raises a finger to her lips.

I look around, but we're the only ones in the library that I can
see. Is she suggesting that the place is bugged? That someone's listening in? What kind of camp
is
this?

Alex nods slowly. “The book has been very useful. Thanks. It's at my house, and I'll return it soon.”

“Perfect.” She walks back to her desk, picks up her book, and starts reading.

Alex goes back to flipping pages in the book he's holding, but I put out a hand to stop him. “You say you want me to
do something?
What am I supposed to do?” I whisper, and my thoughts are swirling so much I hardly care who's listening.

He looks up from the book, and says in a voice too low for anyone listening in to hear, so quiet I can barely make out the words myself, “Get yourself into the dome at his company somehow,” he whispers. “Run the numbers there.” His eyes are urgent, pleading. But I'm already shaking my head.