Eye of the Storm (27 page)

Finally, Alex turns away from the window. “It goes against everything we know. Running untested code to drive a real satellite? Testing an unproven theory on an event that's already in progress? Jaden, it's just—”

“It's our only chance! Look!” I fling a hand at the radar screen. The storm hasn't weakened; if anything, it's feeding off the chaos of being directed and redirected in a way nature never intended. “We can't keep recoding it over and over again. There's always going to be somebody in the way, and I can't—” I choke on the words, but I force them out. “I can't be responsible for this anymore.”

Risha steps to my side, so we're both facing Alex. “She's right. How close were you to figuring this out?”

“More than close.” Alex taps his fingers against the glass. “We . . . I'm sure we have it. But we haven't run a simulation, and—”

“We have it right, Alex. You know we do.”

“I know. I'm just afraid that—” He whirls around to face me. “There's another Sim Dome here, right? We could run the code there first and then as long as—”

A gust of wind shakes the building and interrupts him before I have a chance to do it myself. There is no time.

“Where's the code?” Risha asks.

The windows shudder and rattle.

Windows.
The windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling . . .

I call up the file and stare hard at the numbers, and somehow, they whisper back to me.

Yes. This. Yes.

Almost like a poem.

The ceiling floats away with a sigh.

This is what we need to do. It will work. It
has
to work.

I hand Risha my DataSlate and watch her dark eyes flicking up and down the rows of numbers. She gives one quick, sharp nod when they add up. “This looks perfect. I say we do it.”

But Alex doesn't move from the window. I walk over to him and slowly, tentatively, put a hand on his arm.

Still gazing out at the storm, he nods. “You're right.” He turns and heads for the computer, but just as I'm about to follow him, a flash of sky blue catches my eye through the rain and I stare out the window.

The rain pours down in sheets, and the wind has picked up enough to send branches whipping down from the treetops and roofing shingles flying like playing cards. The sky is even darker off to the north. The storm is coming. We need to move, to act now if we're even going to try to disperse it, but I can't take my eyes off the figure in blue, making her way through the torrents, toward the main door of the building.

“Hurry. She's coming,” I whisper, even though Risha and Alex don't know who she is, and there's no time to explain. I shake my head to clear my thoughts, push off from the window, and rush to join them at the computer. Alex has already keyed in half of the long string of numbers. He hands me the DataSlate.

“Read me the next line, starting at oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one,” he says.

“Oh-four-six . . .” My eyes focus on the numbers, but in my mind, I'm picturing Grandma Athena pushing her way through the wind to the front door. Does she know the bio-scan override code by memory? She's probably in by now, probably through the door with her Shock Wand.

“Jaden!” Alex's sharp voice brings me back to the numbers. He's almost shouting now to be heard over the wind's steady, whooshing roar.

“Sorry. It was oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one . . .”

A
thunk
against the window makes me jump. I almost drop the DataSlate but manage to fumble it in my hands and get hold of it again. “What
was
that?”

“Piece of the roof came off, it looked like.” Risha takes the
DataSlate from my shaking hands and reads Alex another line of numbers. She's about to start the next line when the lights flicker and go out.

The computer's hum dies, and all we can hear is the growing roar from outside.

The windows shake.

There are more clunks and scrapes from the roof, as if pieces of it are breaking free to escape from the cruel winds.

Risha's free hand finds mine, and I hold on.

“The generator will kick in any second.” Alex waits. “There has to be a generator. There must be, right?”

My heart sinks. There doesn't have to be a generator because there wasn't supposed to be a need for one. The storms were never supposed to come here.

Dad didn't count on this.

There is no generator. Only the faint glow of the DataSlate.

I let go of Risha's sweaty hand and go to the window. There, eight stories down and off into the trees, is the only other light in the compound. It is the building where I found Grandma Athena.

It must have a generator. And it has a computer.

“There's a light on down there; it's the only building with power!”

“We can't go out there!” Alex shouts.

“It's moving faster!” Risha holds up her DataSlate with a radar image. The storm is coming.

“We
have
to leave! Otherwise, we're trapped on the eighth floor of a glass building!” I scream. “Come on!”

We run, dodging desks and radar screens, past the elevators—there's no hope of them working now—and to the fire exit door that leads to the stairs.

“This way!” I tug it open. “Here!”

Behind us, there's a tremendous crash of glass on glass, and even though I can't see it, I know that one of the windows we'd been looking through is gone, shattered.

When the stairway door closes behind us, everything goes dark.

I've been clinging to Alex's hand but I let go so I can turn on my DataSlate and give us at least a little light.

Risha stumbles behind me. I feel her hands on my back, catching herself, and I grab the railing and hold on. I stumble down a few steps, but Alex reaches back to steady me, and we go down, down, down, until finally, there are no more stairs to descend.

“Ready?” I turn off the DataSlate, tuck it into the back of my jeans, and reach for the door handle.

“Wait!” Alex shouts into the darkness. “That's going to lead straight outside. Do you know where we're going?”

“The building's to the left—maybe thirty yards. We'll have to run!”

“And hold on to each other!” Risha screams.

“I've got my shoulder against the door!” Alex shouts. “On the count of three, you turn the handle, and I'll push it open, and then we need to grab on to one another and go!”

“I'm ready!” I try to ignore the noise from beyond the door, the wind that sounds ever more like that legendary freight train, ever
more like a monster from mythology, ready to swallow us up. “All set?”

“Do it!” Alex shouts.

I turn the handle and we push, but nothing happens. Even when I hear Alex grunt from the effort of pushing, pushing his whole body against the door, it doesn't move except to pop open for a split second to mock us and then slam shut.

“Again! Together!” Alex cries. “One!”

The door is cold against my shoulder.

“Two!”

I think about three. Think that
if
we are successful,
if
this goes the right way, we'll fly out of here into a monster storm, and then what?

“Three!”

The door pops open like before, but this time, we are pushing, all of us, and we keep it from slamming shut. Then a swirl of wind comes, and the door that we could barely push open all together flies off its hinges as if it's nothing more than the lid of a shoe box.

And we are out.

Thrown into the wildest storm I have ever seen.

Forget freight trains. Forget Greek monsters.

It feels like the atmosphere itself has come to life, furious, ready to whip us all off the face of the earth in revenge.

Alex is shouting something at me, but I can't hear.

“What?” I scream, but it's no use. Our voices are sucked into the sky. Alex grabs my upper arm tight and pulls me away from the
door. His fingers dig into my flesh so hard it hurts, and thank God for that. It feels like I'll be carried off if he ever lets go.

“This way!” I scream, but he can't hear, so I point frantically toward the outbuilding, its light flickering through the rain. I push into the wind and pull Alex along.

The closer we get, the more my stomach clenches. Is she in there?

From the second Alex and I made it out the door, I have been waiting, watching for that glimpse of sky blue. Where is she?

Alex suddenly yanks his hand away from me and pushes Risha to the side. A branch flies close to her head. But it misses her, and we press forward through the blinding rain.

I tug Alex's sleeve and point to the cold yellow light flickering through the rain. I pull Alex and Risha in that direction.

The wind blows rain into my face. I raise an arm to wipe my eyes and finally see the squat little building with its shiny steel door.

Is Grandma waiting on the other side?

There's no time to wonder, no time to worry. The solar energy panels on the next building crackle and send up a shower of sparks.

Alex reaches for the door handle, yanks it open, and pulls Risha and me inside so fast we tumble on top of him. The wind screams through the room, celebrating its newly conquered territory.

The steel door swings open and bangs shut wildly in the wind, and every time it flies open, there are great green flashes of lightning outside. Faster and faster, closer together.

The storm is coming for us.

As if it knows our plans.

And desperately wants us to fail.

But at least our voices are back. “It's over here, hurry!” I lead Alex and Risha around the radar screen to the computer desk where I first saw her. The chair I threw is still toppled on its side in a heap of broken glass. The wind's whipping through the broken window in weird whistling-glass noises. And perhaps the most eerie thing of all is the computer.

Still humming quietly against the wall.

Waiting for Grandma to come back. Where is she now?

Alex kneels down in front of it and starts pressing keys. “Here's the program. Got numbers for me?”

I pull out the DataSlate and start reading numbers, leaning over him. “Oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one.”

“Got it.”

“Then five-four-zero—”

The wind shifts, and sheets of rain pour in the broken window. It stings our faces, soaks the floor and the desk.

“It's going to short out the equipment!” Risha screams. She tries to use her skinny body to shield the computer. “Hurry up!”

“FIVE-FOUR-ZERO-TWO-SEVEN!” I scream. There's a terrible scraping, crunching sound above us that can only be pieces of roof, giving up to the wind. But Alex keeps punching in numbers. I can see the strain in his eyes, the urgent effort to focus on getting this right.

The wind is blowing in the open window so hard we can barely stand.

“Then ZERO-ZERO-ONE-ZERO-FIVE—Watch out!!” I drop the DataSlate and throw my body against Risha to shove her out of
the way of the radar wall, toppling in a great shattering of glass to the concrete floor.

“Jaden, what's next?!” Alex shouts.

I grab the DataSlate. Thank God it didn't break. “NINE-FOUR-THREE-ZERO-TWO!” I force myself to keep my head down, keep reading numbers, no matter what falls around me, no matter how many branches fly past my head. No matter how sure I am that we will fail. I keep going.

“SIX-FOUR—” The wall behind us explodes in a deep rumble and tears away from the rest of the structure. The wind howls in victory. The roar of the storm is louder, the lightning more frequent; it feels like we'll be hit any second. When I look up, I see why.

I stop shouting numbers because it's too late.

It's here.

“Get down!” Alex screams and tries to pull me under the heavy wooden desk, but I can only stare at the great raging whirlwind bearing down on the main building we just left.

The storm pushes forward. A violent cloud of debris swirls around its base, branches and shrubs, shingles and twisted HV parts, bits of people's lives that will never come together again.

When it reaches the main StormSafe building, it pauses.

Just for a split second.

As if whole walls of glass are a delicacy it wants to savor.

Then it plunges into the first wall. The glass crunches like falling icicles, and the shining pieces are sucked into the vortex and become part of the tornado, sharp and fast.

In twenty seconds, the building is gone.

“Get down, it's coming!” Alex pulls my arm so hard I fall to the ground beside him.

Risha drops and flattens herself next to us. “Ow!” she cries, rubbing her side. She must have landed on something. Broken glass? “You guys, look!” She bends over and pulls with all her weight on a latch screwed into one of the floorboards. “Storm shelter!” The door swings open, and we pile down a steep set of steps behind her.

It is nothing like the storm cellar at Alex's barn. No daybed. No food. But it has metal bars poured into the concrete, for holding on. And on a heavy desk in the corner, it has the one thing we need most right now.

A computer.

I race to it, wait for a home screen to load, and squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can, as if refusing to watch will keep the tornado from jumping the last stretch of lawn, keep it from coming here where I've brought Alex and Risha.

The wind screams overhead, and I scream back. “No!!”

Because I know now what is about to happen if we cannot destroy this storm.

It is going to kill us.

Storm cellar or not. It's too big. Too strong.

It will devour us. Me, and the two people who are here with me.
Because
of me.

I squeeze my eyes shut tighter.

Please, please, please, don't let them die because of me.

When I open my eyes, the computer has booted up, and I find the file Alex was working on upstairs. “It auto-saved!” For once, it
feels like someone might be on our side. “Get the last line of numbers, quick!”