Eye of the Storm (16 page)

Alex's mom is leaning against the concrete wall, holding a first aid kit. It looks small and pathetic in her hand. She shakes her head. “Maybe . . . maybe tomorrow.” She looks out over the farm, at debris that's scattered all the way out to the main road. What can we possibly do to help tomorrow? Or any day? What can anyone do?

Risha tugs my sleeve, then slides her hand down to hold mine again. Tight. “We should probably go,” she says.

But I can't. I can't move from this place, watching Alex's shoulders heave under his father's arm. His dad waits until the sobs slow and finally stop. He doesn't say a word. What can he say? That everything will be all right? It won't.

“Hold on,” I tell Risha. I make my way to Alex and put a hand tentatively on his back. I expect him to whirl around and push my hand away, but he doesn't. Alex's dad gives his shoulder one last squeeze and leaves us alone.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper.

He doesn't answer. He stares at that one wall left of the barn with empty eyes.

The sky is so quiet now it's hard to believe what has happened. How can something vanish so quickly and leave so much brokenness behind?

“Alex, please just know that—”

“Shh!” He holds up both hands and squints his eyes shut tight, and I'm sure it's because he can't even stand the sound of my voice. But then I hear it, too.

A whimper.

“It's coming from over there!” Alex pushes past me back toward the one wall that's left of the barn. He steps over boards and twisted metal.

“Newton!”

He starts to step over another pile of rubble—did it used to be the goat pen?—but stops and collapses to the barn floor.

I run, tripping through the debris, until I reach him.

And then I stop.

Newton is splayed in the dust, panting with shallow breaths. His head is bleeding between his ears. A patch of fur is gone, and the rest is matted with blood and dust. One of his legs is twisted at a sick angle, bleeding, too. My breath catches, and my stomach twists, and I have to look away.

“Get some water,” Alex's father says quietly behind me. I run back to the shelter because it's the one thing I can do instead of crumbling. I climb down the ladder, stumble down the hallway into the blackness. I crack my shin on the daybed frame, fall forward, and feel the shelf. I flail my arms around until they connect with cool smooth plastic. I take two water bottles and find my way back up into the light.

“Here.” I kneel down next to Alex and unscrew the cap from one bottle. He takes it from me and pours it first over the open break in Newton's leg, then over the cut on his head. The bleeding has slowed, but Newton's breaths are coming fast and shallow.

“Shhh . . . it's okay, boy.” I put a hand to Newton's shoulder and feel his heartbeat, rapid. Scared.

“We need . . .” Alex is choking back sobs. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. “I gotta have a bandage or . . . or something.”

Risha slips the scarf from her hair and hands it to him. She walks off and sits down in the grass next to Tomas, still in shock.

“Wrap it around the leg just enough to secure it,” Alex's father says, leaning over us. “We'll try to get him into town to the vet. Maybe . . .” But his voice trails off.

Alex wraps the scarf around Newton's leg, careful to avoid hurting him even more. He swipes at his eyes with his shirtsleeve and stands, staring over the debris of the barn. Not far from the trap-door he finds a long piece of board and drags it back next to Newton. Together, we ease the dog onto it.

“Careful,” Alex whispers. It must hurt, and I'm expecting Newton to snap at me, but he never does. He just keeps panting, looking up at Alex with big dog eyes that seem to say a million things at once.
How could you let this happen to me?
But also,
I trust you. Please help
.

“I'll get the truck,” Alex's dad says quietly. Somehow, it survived the storm, parked at the edge of a field not fifty yards from the barn, as if the tornado couldn't be bothered with it. Alex's mom has already gone back to the safe room with Julia. She doesn't need to see all this.

Alex kneels next to Newton, rubbing behind his ear. His hand is caked with blood.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper.

He doesn't look up.

“I am.” The words are choked, but I force them out. “About Newton and the farm, and about not doing anything. This is awful, Alex, your family and Newton . . .” And Aunt Linda and Nutmeg, I think. Did this storm hit them, too?

“Alex, I was wrong. It
is
worth the risk. Stopping this is worth almost anything.” Hot tears streak down my cheeks. “I'll do it. Okay? I'm going to go up there. I promise.”

He turns to me and shrugs. The pickup rumbles up, and he stands to help his father lift Newton into the back.

I watch as Alex climbs in next to his dog, holding him close as the truck pulls away.

It's a full week before I can make good on my promise.

A full week of watching and waiting. Of making weather small talk with Dad, chitchatting with Mirielle, and playing peek-a-boo with Remi.

A full week of camp, going through the motions without Alex.

A full week of wondering when he'll be back. Wondering if Newton is going to be okay.

Finally, on Monday morning, Dad finishes breakfast and heads to his office. Mirielle is out shopping, so there's no one to swoop in and clear the counter. I watch the door close, grab what I need, and call Risha. “I got it.”

She's been amazing since the storm. I told her everything when we got back home that night, about Alex, our argument, and what I promised him I'd do. I confessed my plan to somehow get into my father's work office and access his computers. Instead of telling me how crazy I am, Risha asked about the security systems at Storm-Safe. When I told her it was probably a fingerprint scan, she smiled.
“That'll be the easy part then,” she said. “You just need the right fingerprints.”

And now I have them.

I meet Risha and we ride as fast as we can to camp; we get there half an hour before it starts.

Risha scans her print and ushers me into the Finger Factory, the nickname she and Tomas gave Eye on Tomorrow's cloning center.

We step into what amounts to a coatroom, with hooks on the walls and a row of lockers. Risha opens one and hands me a lab coat, hair cover, and latex gloves. “Put these on, okay? We don't want any cross contamination or it'll mess everything up.”

Once we're outfitted, she scans her print again, and the door to the actual laboratory slides open. Humming with high-powered computer servers and packed with DNA extraction equipment, this is every bit as impressive as the Sim Dome.

The entire room shines with stainless steel. Every countertop gleams; most are covered with trays of test tubes in perfect lines. There are incubators—some quietly warming genetic stews, some turning in slow rotation.

Risha leads me to a workstation along the wall and nods toward a white petri dish on the counter. Something pinkish gray is floating in it. “We've been trying to grow an ear,” she says. “It seems to be working, but Van says it'll be another couple weeks before we can find out if it has all the parts it'll need to hear.”

“Well, good luck.”

“What?” she says.

“Good luck.”

“What?” She holds her hand up to her ear—her real ear—and I realize she's making a joke. I laugh a little, and it takes away some of the fear racing through me. It's not that we're not allowed to be here. Van gave Risha permission for early work sessions a while ago, and if anyone asks, she'll just say she's giving me a tour. But if anyone here found out what was in my bag—Dad's coffee mug from this morning, with his fingerprints on it—that would be another story.

“All right, let's get moving.” Risha walks down the long counter to a larger, more high-tech workstation and climbs up onto a high stool.

“This is it,” she says, and motions for me to take a seat next to her. In front of us is a device that looks like some combination of an electron microscope, an incubator, and a petri dish. Risha pulls clear goggles down over her eyes, picks up a pair of stainless steel forceps, and bends down over the dish, squinting. She holds her breath and pokes with steady hands at the fleshy something in the fluid.

“This turned out perfectly . . .” Slowly and smoothly, she lifts the tip of the forceps from the petri dish. Hanging from the end is a crumpled, yellowish clear membrane. “Here it is.” She takes a second pair of forceps and uses it to grab the other edge so it hangs in a thin oval strip. “Got the cup?”

I pull the coffee mug from my bag and point to the clearest print.

“Perfect.” Risha carefully maneuvers the tissue into place over
the print and presses down on it with a gloved finger for a few seconds. She peels it back off the mug with the forceps and holds the tissue up to the light. “Beautiful.” She lowers it back into the solution in the petri dish, and it floats delicately on top. “Let's give it the rest of the day for the pattern to grow. But I'd say you can stop back before you leave today to pick it up.” She gestures to the dish with a flourish. “Your brand new fingerprint.”

I spend the whole day in the library, half-hoping I'll look up and see Alex, but I know it's too soon. There's too much cleaning up to be done after the storm, too much debris and sadness to wade through.

Risha comes to get me at the end of the day, and we walk back to the Finger Factory while everyone else is heading for their bikes to go home.

The print is ready. I reach for it, but Risha pulls back the forceps. “Ah, ah, AH!” She shakes her head. “This isn't like a glove you can put on and take off all day. You're going to be able to wear it once for a few hours. That's it.” She pulls out a shallow glass jar filled with fluid. It's shaped like the tiny container where Mom used to keep her contact lenses before she got her eyes fixed. Risha lowers the tissue into it. “Keep it in here until right before you need it.”

She tightens the lid and holds it out to me but then pulls back. “Wait a second. I'm going to start another copy. It'll be easier than starting from scratch if you have a problem with this one.” She takes out the tissue, presses it against some kind of glass plate, then puts it back in the jar and hands it over. “All set.”

The whole bike ride home, the little jar in my pocket pokes into my hip, reminding me of the crazy thing I am about to try. I tell
myself there's time; it may be days, weeks even, before Dad remembers that tour of StormSafe he promised me. There's plenty of time to think about this. Plenty of time to plan.

When I get home, the kitchen door slams closed behind me, and Dad's voice booms out, “Thank goodness!”

He rushes to the entryway, holding a BioWake Cola in one hand and bouncing Remi with the other arm. “Oh.” His face falls. “You're not Mirielle.”

He paces back toward the kitchen with Remi clinging to his shoulder. “She's out shopping, but she knows I need to be up at headquarters this afternoon.” He taps his watch. “I'll have to take the baby with me, I suppose.”

I put my backpack on the counter and take a deep breath. This is the opportunity I thought would take weeks to come. It may be my only chance. “I could come with you and help,” I blurt out before I have time to think about it any more. “And maybe do that tour you promised?” My heart thuds while I wait for him to answer. The tiny jar in my pocket suddenly feels huge. How could he not see it?

“Well, that's a great idea. Thank you!” Before he even finishes the sentence, he's steering me toward the door. I grab my backpack with my DataSlate and head out to the HV.

Once Remi is strapped in her car seat, Dad pulls out of the garage and starts down the street so fast the tires actually squeal. I wonder what the big hurry is, but his brows are knit together so tightly, the line of his mouth so thin right now, that my question settles back inside me.

We're at the Placid Meadows gate when Dad's DataSlate chimes.
He presses the speaker button, and Mirielle's voice pours out in a recorded message.

“Honey, I am so, so sorry I am running late. We are about to have a storm at the mall, of all things, and I must wait until it passes.” Her voice is thinner than usual, like she's scared. But I don't know if that's about the storm or about being late for Dad. “I will see you at home later.”

Dad lets out a sharp sigh and veers to the side of the road.

“What are we doing?”

His face is lit by the blue glow of the DataSlate, and he either doesn't hear me or isn't answering. His eyes are trained on the screen, full of columns and numbers and symbols. Dad highlights two of the cells, types in new numbers, and pokes at the CALCULATE button.

A new page of numbers appears. He takes another deep breath, and I watch his eyes twitching as they move down the columns. He seems satisfied, and pokes at the APPLY button at the bottom of the screen. I catch a split-second look at the box that appears on the screen next, before Dad notices me reading over his arm and angles the screen away from me.

It was only a second, but it was long enough to read two words:

“Satellites responding . . .”

Dad looks down at the DataSlate for another few seconds, then powers it down and puts the car back in drive.

“Did you . . . ?” The words are seared into my mind.
Satellites
.
Satellites responding.
Responding how? Responding to what? Or to whom? “Did you just . . . do something?”

“I checked on the storm path.” He reaches over to turn on the music player. “Don't worry. Mirielle's fine; it took a turn to the east.”

It
took a turn to the east? All on its own?
Satellites responding.
Responding to commands he entered. He knows how to dissipate storms. Is that what he did? The pieces of this puzzle are popping faster and faster in my brain, like raindrops plunking into a puddle. First one, then two and three at a time, and then so many you forget the surface was ever calm at all.