Eye of the Storm (4 page)

“Yeah . . . about ten times.” Alex puts down the kickstand, climbs off his bike, and stands looking out over the field. “Most everybody's selling. Mom keeps telling Dad we should take the money, but he won't. Every time your dad sends somebody with another offer, they fight. Selling this place would kill my dad. I know it would.” He shrugs. “This is what we do.”

“Well, it's not like you
have
to sell. He's just asking,” I say. But I remember the frustration in my father's voice when he talked about the land. I bet he's been pushing hard.

“I know. And she's right, too.” Alex nods reluctantly toward Risha, who's tossing stones into the river with Tomas. “What I said before was dumb. You're not your dad.”

“I don't even know if my dad is my dad anymore.” The words slip out before I can filter what I'm saying to this boy I just met. They hang in the air like dust, and Alex looks at me. I bend down to pluck a blade of grass and arrange it between my thumbs to make a whistle. Amelia used to do it all the time and finally taught me how. I lift my hands to my mouth and blow. It sounds like a crow.

“You have some impressive skills there,” Alex says, smiling a little.

“Thanks.” I try to do it again, but the grass slips from my hands and flutters back to the ground. “Unfortunately, it's not a very useful skill. Do you think they have grass-whistling at Eye on Tomorrow?”

Alex frowns. “Hmm . . . you could study how the force of your breath and the width of the grass affect the rate of vibration. . . .”

“I think I'll stick to meteorology.”

“Yeah?” Alex says. “That's what I studied last summer. What's your focus going to be?”

“Honestly?” I haven't told anyone this yet, not even Dad. “What I've always wanted to do is work on storm dissipation. You know . . . the theory that you can actually stop a tornado from forming if you change the conditions in the storm so—”

“I know what storm dissipation is.” Alex looks at me as if he's seeing me for the first time, as if we just arrived at the fence. “How'd you get interested in that?”

“I don't know.” I lean against the fence next to him, watching Risha and Tomas trying to balance on a log at the edge of the river. They're laughing, and it makes me think of Mom's tree house in the woods from when she was young. She took me there once, on a day when that seemed safe. I climbed up and watched the sun peeking in and out of the leaves. I never wanted to leave. “My mom tells stories about when she was little, before it got like this. I always kind of wish I could have lived back then. Without the storms being part of everybody's lives.”

A gust of wind whips the tree branches back and forth over our heads, and a few leaves fly past. One gets stuck in a diamond in the fence. I reach out for it, just as Alex does the same. But he pulls his hand back and looks up at the swirling gray sky. The dark wall cloud in the west is looming closer.

“Hey, Tomas!” he calls. “We gotta get going.”

“But we just got here.” Risha pouts for a second, but then she's smiling again. “See you in the morning, bright and early!”

“Too early.” Tomas grins. “See ya.”

Alex waves, and they get on their bikes and ride away.

“Risha, we should go, too. It's getting bad.”

We climb back through the fence and head for our bikes. Risha looks back and sighs. “He is so cute.”

For a second, Alex's dark eyes flash in my mind, but I know she's talking about Tomas. I climb on my bike and put up the kickstand. “He seems nice. Kind of quiet, huh?”

“He's usually more fun. His mom's been sick, having all these tests, and they just figured out it's pancreatic cancer.”

“They can get her treatment, can't they?” Pancreatic cancer was one of the last kinds to be totally cured, but there've been treatment centers around for at least five years now.

“Yeah, but not here. Probably New York—Tomas's brother is in college there—but his dad's worried about the farm and where they'll stay and money and everything. They'll figure it out; it's just on his mind is all.”

Wind shakes the trees, and suddenly the weather's on my mind. It's getting darker. “Risha, come on. We need to go.”

She looks at me as if I've suggested she bring an umbrella out on a perfectly sunny day. She's not even on her bike yet. “We're fine, Jaden. It's not like it's coming
here
.”

But then thunder rumbles, and I don't wait to find out. I start pedaling, and once we're back on the main road, I see the storm
is
closer—way closer. The sky has turned a gray-green color that makes my stomach churn. I don't know if Risha's following, and I don't look up. I remember the turns, back over the bridge, past Risha's house, and back to Dad and Mirielle's place.

I stop in the driveway, gasping for breath.

Risha skids up next to me. “Now what?”

I turn to her, ready to tell her how crazy she is, but over her shoulder, I see the wall cloud, the heart of the storm, moving away from us.

I can only stare.

“It's going the other way,” I say finally.

“They always do.” Risha tips her head and looks at me. “Let me get this right, Jay-girl. Your father runs the company that built this place. And he didn't bother to let you know you're safe from the tornadoes here?”

“Well, he did, but . . .” I remember his words in the car. His promise to Mom. To me.

Inside the gate, you are completely, one hundred percent safe.

“I figured it just had safer . . . safe rooms or something.” I can't stop staring at the cloud that seemed to bounce off our neighborhood as if the chain-link fence extended all the way to the heavens. As if steel wires could keep out the weather.

Risha rolls her eyes. “It's not only the houses. It's
all
of Placid Meadows. That's the whole deal with a StormSafe community; technology keeps the entire property safe.”

“How?”

“Well, I don't know exactly.” Risha frowns a little. “I always assumed the storms got . . . like . . . zapped at the perimeter somehow. But whatever it is, it works. They
never
hit us. It's even in the contracts.”

“In the contracts?” Since when did nature make contracts with anybody?

“When you buy a house. Right there with the number of bedrooms and deeded rights to the playground and whatever. That's why people are willing to pay so much to live in such ugly houses, I guess.” She laughs a little and looks at her watch. “I'm going to head home. Grandma's making chicken tandoori.” She rides off in the direction of the storm clouds that are barreling off toward someone else's home.

Not ours.

Never ours.

It's in the contract.

“You won't need that,” Dad says as I'm sliding my DataSlate into my backpack Monday morning. “Eye on Tomorrow supplies everything except the brainpower.”

“Seriously?” Back home, nobody leaves the house without a DataSlate; how else would you get an alert when a storm's coming? But Dad reminds me.

“You're in Placid Meadows now. You don't need the storm alert.” He smiles. “We don't allow DataSlates at camp anyway, until everyone's settled and understands the rules about keeping research confidential.”

“Okay.” I pull my DataSlate out of my backpack and run my finger around the cool, smooth edge.

“See you this afternoon.” Dad goes to his office. A few notes of Mozart drift out before the door slides shut behind him.

I put my DataSlate back in my bag—I'll feel too weird without it—toss the whole thing over my shoulder on the way to the garage, and take off on my bike.

When I get to camp, the wrought-iron gate is wide open, and
Risha's inside, riding her bike around the drop-off driveway with some other kids. There's a boy with a brush cut pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. Maybe he's new, like me. Tess and Ava Beekman, those twins from Britain, are sitting on the grass talking with a couple of boys.

“Hey, Jaden!” Risha waves and almost swerves into a dented green pickup idling by the reception building.

I gasp, first because I think Risha's going to crash, and second, because somebody's driving a gas-powered vehicle. They've been illegal for ten years. How could somebody still be driving one around? Are the rules here that different?

“Easy, genius!” Alex climbs out of the truck, waves to the woman driving, and brushes dried grass from his faded jeans. “Don't run me over on the first day.”

Risha doesn't let a second go by. “Where's Tomas?”

“He had to help his mom; I guess she's been feeling pretty crummy. He'll be here later.” Alex turns to me and smiles. “You up for this?”

“Of course.” But looking up at the tower beyond the reception building, the billowing white dome next to it, the sprawling campus, I wonder if I really am.

Alex turns to say hi to another boy getting dropped off, and Risha and I start toward the reception building. I lean close to her as we walk. “What's up with the truck?”

She makes a scared face. “Oh my gosh, you're not a spy with the International Climate Commission, are you?”

“No, but—”

Risha laughs. “I'm kidding. You didn't really think it was gas-powered, did you? Nobody's that dumb. A bunch of the farmers around here have rigged up old trucks to run on vegetable oil. Kind of messy, but it's cheaper than a new HV.” She pulls open the door to the lobby.

“Welcome, welcome.” The man waving us inside has a reddish-brown ponytail and a face full of freckles that run together in splotches over his nose. He looks young enough to be a camper, but his badge says VAN GARDNER, EYE ON TOMORROW STAFF.

He steps up to me and smiles. “First summer here?”

I nod.

“I'm Van, camp director.” He shakes my hand, then turns to Alex. “Good to have you back, my man.” He nods at Risha. “Planning more work in bio-botanicals?”

She shakes her head. “I'd rather be in the cloning lab this summer if I can. Tomas was telling me about it, and it sounds interesting.”

While Risha talks with Van, I reach over my shoulder to get my DataSlate from my backpack. I want to see if Mom answered the message I sent after dinner last night. Reception in the jungle's probably too spotty for videophone to work, but she should at least have text messaging.

“They're going to take that,” Alex says. “No outside technology in the beginning.”

“Really?” I pretend to be surprised.

“Got a drive you can put your stuff on so you don't lose too much when they destroy it?”

“Destroy it?”

Alex raises his eyebrows. “Last kid who brought a DataSlate had to watch while they took it out back and ran over it with the Eye on Tomorrow field trip vehicle. They tried to run him over, too, but he was fast.” A smile creeps onto his face.

“Very funny.”

“I'm just messing with you. They
will
take it for now, though. You can get it at the end of the day.”

Sure enough, Van steps up and holds out his hand. “Sorry, Alex speaks the truth.”

I give it to him, and he points us toward the auditorium. “Let's head into orientation and get this show on the road.”

I end up sitting between Alex and Risha, but all her attention turns toward Tomas when he arrives. “You're doing cloning again, right? Because that's what I'm requesting.”

“So, Jaden,” Alex says. “You and I kind of have the same area of interest.”

“Yeah, I've always liked weather,” is all I can think to say. My fingers are itching for the DataSlate Van took away. Even if I can't connect with Mom, having it makes me feel like she's not so far away.

“All right, campers! Good morning!” Van bounds down the wide steps to the podium at the front of the auditorium. “I'm going to help you get your bearings. These first few days, we'll walk through the facilities and review rules and regulations.”

Van presses a button on the podium, and legs grow up from out of the floor in front of us, materializing from the shiny black shoes
on up. I know it's only a holo-sim, but it still startles me. Within a few seconds, the figure has a torso, arms, a neck. And finally, a face.

My father's face.

And my father's voice.

“Good morning, Eye on Tomorrow campers.”

Dad's American StormSafe employees opened Eye on Tomorrow four years ago, right after he left for Russia, but it doesn't surprise me that it's his face and voice greeting the campers. Even from overseas, Dad would have made sure his vision played out the way he wanted.

“We are so very glad that you're here,” the holo-sim says.

It's just a computer-generated projection, but it makes my hands go cold, as if this picture made of light has Dad's real eyes and mind. Does it know I brought my DataSlate even though he said not to? That it was confiscated?

I look up, but the eyes on the holo-sim look like they're focused on something in the back of the auditorium. No one else seems fazed by Dad's appearance. Tomas is watching Risha doodle on her notebook, zeros and ones like those on her bracelets. I watch, too, for a second, until Dad's voice starts up again.

“As you know, Eye on Tomorrow is a special place. Here, you'll be provided with the most exclusive data sets, the most advanced technology, the most elite instructors . . .”

I glance over at Van and catch him mouthing the words that holo-Dad must deliver to every new summer crew.

“Along with that privilege comes responsibility. Here at Eye on Tomorrow, we expect campers to arrive on time each morning. Bring nothing but yourselves for now; we supply everything except
the brainpower. And leave with nothing. No equipment, data files, or documents may be taken from the campus at the end of the day, and photography is prohibited, to protect the unique learning environment we've worked so hard to build.”