Eye of the Storm (3 page)

I stand next to Mirielle and watch the images change.

Mirielle and Dad at their wedding in Russia two years ago.

Eating cake.

Dancing.

Photos of Remi as a newborn.

Then pictures of me.

There are a bunch of photos taken in the first house Mom and Dad owned. I'm three years old, pushing a toy lawn mower in the yard. It's the old-fashioned kind that needed a person to steer it. There's me in a high chair with jam smeared all over my face.

Then I am four. Dressed for my first day of school. The tornadoes were spreading north then. I'd been so excited for school but so scared that a storm would sweep away the house while I was gone.

There are school photos for the next three years. I am five, then six, then seven. My backpack goes from purple, to pink, to red with blue stripes, to bright orange.

When the picture changes again, I am eight. The counter is torn up behind me—they must have been installing the SmartKitchen—and books are spread out on the table. That was the year before they built the StormSafe schools and shelters, and we all home-schooled with classes streamed to our computers. Mom created most of her own lessons, though, and I loved staying home. It was just before Dad left for Russia, too, the last year we were whole.

The frame flashes again, and suddenly, my face looks older—last year's school picture. Mom must have beamed it here.

“We need a new photograph of you,” Mirielle says. “Your hair is longer now.”

“Yeah, a little.”

I step closer to the shelves to look at the other frame with family
photos, the smaller one. One of the pictures looks like an old-fashioned portrait of my father.

“Is that Dad?”

Mirielle has been humming softly to Remi. “Hmm?” She stops and leans toward the frame. “Oh, no, that's your
grand-père
; these are your father's parents, Enam and Athena, when they were young. You have seen photos of them before, yes?”

I have, but never one that looks so real. There is something fierce in my grandmother's eyes. An intensity that looks like it should have burned out the camera's lens. “She reminds me a little of Dad,” I say, and wonder how much Mirielle knows about the woman who would have been her mother-in-law.

I never met Grandma Athena. She died way before I was born, and it was Mom, not Dad, who told me about her. Like Dad, she had an amazing mind. She studied with a ferocity that made people afraid of her. She met Grandpa in graduate school, married him four months later, and had Dad right after they graduated. When the September 11th terrorist attacks happened in 2001 and the United States went to war with Afghanistan, Grandpa enlisted in the military and Grandma went to work for some secret government science program. It was all classified—like the scientists who developed the atomic bomb during World War II—so nobody knew exactly what she was doing.

When Dad was twelve, Grandpa was killed in Afghanistan, Grandma died in a car accident, and Dad had to go live with Aunt Linda, all within a few weeks. Mom says that's everything she
knows; Dad never talked about it and still doesn't. I've always known not to ask.

Before today, I'd only seen one picture of Grandma Athena, faded on paper. It made her look old and brittle, too. But this photo feels alive, as if I might catch her blinking, and I have trouble looking away until Mirielle breaks the spell. “You must be hungry.”

“Kind of.” I follow her back to the kitchen. “Want me to hold the baby?”

Mirielle unsnuggles Remi from the scarf. She fusses for a minute but then gets a handful of my brown hair wrapped around her fist and curls up against me.

I turn back to the living room for one more look at Grandma Athena, but the picture has already changed.

“Did you try the broccoli?” Dad raises his eyebrows at the perfectly formed trees piled on one side of my plate. “It's DNA-ture's bestselling vegetable for a reason, you know.”

“I know.” I've seen the pop-up ad on my DataSlate so many times I can quote it.
“DNA-ture: Vegetables Even Kids Will Love. Our foods have the undesirable qualities bioengineered right out of them.”

“It's true.” Dad picks up a stalk from my plate. “No bitterness. No mushiness.”

“Still the same old broccoli.” I stand to take my plate to the auto-clean bin.

“Still the same old Jaden. Stubborn as usual.” He frowns and pops the broccoli into his mouth.

I should have known better than to knock DNA-ture, the bio-botanicals company he runs along with StormSafe—but as I open my mouth to apologize, I see him smiling. “I'm going back to my office. There are still some storms around to deal with.” I'm about to ask Dad how he'll “deal with” them when the doorbell rings.

“Would you answer that for me?” Mirielle asks, leaning down to pick up Remi.

The air-drumming girl with the green-streaked hair, Risha, is about to push the doorbell again when I answer. “Oh!” she says, jumping back a little. She brushes hair from her eyes, and two gold bangles, patterned with zeros and ones, clang together on her wrist. “You're here! Yay! I mean, hi!”

“Hi to you, too! I'm Jaden.”

“I know.” She bounces on the toes of her pink high tops. “. . . and my mom told me you're almost thirteen like me and you're going to Eye on Tomorrow, too. I'm Risha. Want to go for a bike ride?”

“What a good idea!” Mirielle joins us at the door. “Risha can show you around.”

“Okay.” The clouds are dark, but they're still a ways off, and Mirielle doesn't seem worried. “Let me get my bike.”

I head for the garage, thinking how weird it feels to say that again.

My bike.

Riding a bicycle was something I thought was gone forever. Something future kids would hear about in stories from the old times, before the earth's average temperature grew so warm, before the atmosphere became so unstable, so friendly to huge storms. I thought bikes were gone, like hikes in the woods and picnics that aren't in the backyard. Somehow, Dad's company has found a way to give those things back to people.

“Come on!” Risha coasts by me, pedaling backward as fast as
she can, her sneakers a hot-pink blur. “We'll go by my house and then campus.”

We ride around a corner, and Risha waves to two girls jogging on the sidewalk. “Hey, Tess! Ava!”

They wave back as we zip past them.

“Will they be at camp?” I ask, pumping harder to catch up with Risha.

“The Beekman twins? Of course.” She lets out a snort that sounds more like a rhinoceros than a skinny girl with a delicate nose. “They moved into Placid Meadows a couple years ago, so they were in all my classes at school. Their father owns the British company that produced the first successful HV model. The storms in Britain have gotten bad, too, so he brought the family here and
paid
their way in.”

Her tone of voice makes me glad I insisted on taking the test, even though Dad was ready to enroll me without it. “Is the camp mostly Placid Meadows kids?” I ask.

“It depends.” Risha pedals up a small hill. “A few really high scorers moved here with their families, all expenses paid. Some guys who live around here like Alex and Tomas—I'll introduce you, but I have dibs on Tomas—come for free, too. My mom says it was part of the tax deal your dad's company got. They have to provide opportunities for local kids.” She crests the top of the hill and starts coasting. I follow her down and over a bridge that crosses a little creek. Just on the other side, she squeezes her hand brakes and stops so abruptly I almost bump her rear tire.

“Here's my house,” she says.

It looks like Dad's, right down to the gobble-up-your-car garage door, only this one is pale blue instead of adobe colored. “It's pretty,” I say.

“Not really.” She laughs. “But it's bigger than our apartment in New York, and safer. Plus it's close to school.” She points to a concrete and steel building halfway down the block. It looks brand new. “And not far from the Entertainment Dome.”

“Do you go there a lot?”

Risha shrugs. “Not really. Once you know when the T-Rex is going to pop out, it's not that exciting. And the American History show just makes me mad. Can you believe they spent so long arguing before the courts decided that people can marry whoever they want? Maybe if they'd worried more about carbon emissions back then and less about bossing everybody around, we'd still have real museums with real stuff in them, you know?”

Risha lets out a huff and starts pedaling straight ahead, but the clouds off to our left catch my attention. They're closer. And darker.

“Hey, Risha, do you want to head home?”

“Why? Don't you want to see the campus?” She keeps riding.

The wind whips up dirt from the empty lot, and it stings my cheeks. “Risha, shouldn't we go? It looks bad over there.”

She hollers something over her shoulder but I can't hear what, and then she turns—an abrupt right down a driveway I would have missed—and stops. Looming ahead of us is a building twenty times the size of the houses. It's behind a fancy, locked wrought-iron gate.

“Whoa!” I pull my bike up next to her. “What's this?”

“Eye on Tomorrow.” Risha leans on her handlebars and rests
her chin on her hands, grinning at the building. “Where the brightest minds of today prepare to lead us into the future. And that's just the reception building. You'll see the rest in the morning.”

The reception building gleams, all steel and windows. There are another half dozen shining buildings behind it, built around a grassy quad. The largest has a huge white dome—five times the size of the Entertainment Dome—growing out of the center. Dad told me this place was impressive, but I thought he was exaggerating. This summer camp for schoolkids looks more high-tech than Mom's university.

It makes sense, though. StormSafe created Eye on Tomorrow four years ago as a model for the government's new Surge Ahead program to create leaders in math and science. The United States had been behind other countries in those areas when the storms intensified. Now, it's like everybody suddenly figured out science is important, so they're building facilities for gifted students around the country. Eye on Tomorrow was the first—and is apparently still the best.

“Were you here last summer?” I ask Risha.

She nods. “Once you test in, you get to come every summer. The idea is for campers to keep coming back and then work for StormSafe and its sister companies once they get out of school. Doesn't your dad tell you anything?” She looks at her watch. “Come on, it's almost eight o'clock, and I want to show you one more thing if you can keep a secret because my parents would kill me if they found out, and yours probably would, too. You can keep a secret, right?” She looks at me over her shoulder.

“Sure, I guess.”

She leads the way down another hidden path through some brush. A branch tugs at my hair, and I have a pang of missing Amelia. She'd love this bike ride, with real trees and trails that aren't just in her imagination.

“Well, look who made it,” a deep, older-than-us boy voice calls out, and again, I almost bump Risha's back tire because she stops so fast. In front of her, a chain-link fence rises up from the dusty ground to way over our heads. This must be the edge of Placid Meadows; the fence stretches out in both directions. The only opening is where the barrier is interrupted by a big old oak tree whose trunk and branches apparently ignored the fence and kept right on growing, twisting the wires and pulling open a gap that looks just big enough to squeeze through.

On the other side of the fence, two boys stand back a few steps, straddling bicycles of their own. Theirs are older and rusted, like they've been out in a storm or two.

“Sorry I'm late.” Risha shrugs at the taller of the two boys. She jumps off her bike, climbs through the gap in the fence, and motions for me to come, too.

“We thought you stood us up.”

“Never.” She gestures toward me as I'm pulling a twig out of my hair. “This is my friend Jaden.”

“Hey.” The tall boy smiles one of those lazy, movie-star smiles with his eyes half closed. He must be the one she has dibs on.

“Jaden Meggs, meet Tomas Hazen and Alex Carillo.”

“Hi.” I nod to Tomas and wave past him to Alex, who's shorter,
about my height, with dark skin like Risha's and black hair that curls around his ears.

“Hey.” His brown eyes are asking questions, and he tips his head. “Meggs?”

“Jaden,” I say. “I just moved in—”

“With your dad?
The
Stephen Meggs?” He looks at Risha and raises his eyebrows.

“Yes, her dad is Dr. Meggs, Alex. Get over it.” Risha glares at him. “She's visiting for the summer because she qualified for Eye on Tomorrow.” She turns to me. “
Somebody
's a little touchy about DNA-ture because his parents don't believe in factory-made foods. They're part of the organic farming collective that still grows stuff in fields.”

“Yeah, well, somebody else can't seem to take no for an answer when a piece of property's
not
for sale.” Alex folds his arms in front of him.

“Well, maybe
somebody
shouldn't have accepted the camp scholarship if he thought Jaden's dad was so horrible. But I bet you'll be there tomorrow.” Risha walks off toward the riverbank with Tomas.

I'm left here with Alex. “I don't know much about my dad's work,” I squeak out.

“Sorry,” Alex says, looking down. Risha's argument seems to have taken the wind out of him. “I'm kind of defensive about the farm.” He scuffs his work boots in the dust. “You must know your dad wants to build more houses, right?”

I wish I didn't. But I remember his conversation with Lou about Phase Two. “I kind of heard about it. He's offered to buy your farm?”