The Storm Makers

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Ruby held herself absolutely still. She wasn’t sure how to tell him there was nothing amazing about it, that if anything, the word he should be using was terrifying.

  Standing there on the stairs, she could hear the bacon sizzling in the frying pan, and she was suddenly right back in that field, the heat on her face, the crackle of the crops going up in flames, the acres and acres of empty darkness pressing in all around them.

  No matter what he’d said last night, Ruby didn’t trust Rupert London in the least. But how could she explain that to her brother, who had listened so raptly, who had been so eager, who was practically trembling at the memory of it even now? He’d made it rain last night. He’d raised his arms, thrown his head back, and made it rain.

  And there wasn’t much she could say to compete with that.

  After breakfast, Dad drove them into town for their first day of work at Daisy’s garage. His eyes kept sliding over to Simon, who was buckled beside him in the front seat. At breakfast, both of the twins had been unusually quiet—Simon lost in thought, Ruby anxious and worried—and Mom had decided it must be because Simon still wasn’t feeling well.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go this morning,” she’d said, resting her palm against his forehead. “Maybe it’s too soon.”

  But Simon shook his head, forcing her to pull her hand away. “I’m fine,” he said, looking desperately at Ruby, who shrugged and gave him a look that said plainly, You can make it rain, you can handle Mom.

  Simon had ended up doing the dishes in an effort to prove he was in good form, his eyes fixed on the fields beyond the window. Ruby didn’t have to ask what he was thinking about.

  Now, wedged into the back of the truck, she tried to put her own thoughts in order. There was so much she needed to ask Daisy, so many things she wanted to know, and as they neared town Ruby hoped the garage would be empty, that there would be no customers, that all the cars in town would choose today to behave themselves.

  When they pulled up in the driveway, she was relieved to see that this was the case. There was nobody there but Daisy, who was already at work inside the open garage. She was wearing overalls, her long hair tied back in a messy ponytail, and from where she was standing in the middle bay—a wrench in one hand, a rag in the other—she glanced over at them, but didn’t wave.

  “Can you let us out?” Simon was saying as he jiggled the door handle on the passenger side, where the lock had a tendency to stick. But Dad was clearly in no hurry.

  “Your very first day of work,” he said. “I feel like I should’ve brought a camera.”

  “Dad,” Ruby said impatiently from the backseat. “Come on.”

  “Don’t you want any fatherly wisdom?” he asked. “Some sage advice from your old man?”

  Simon lunged across the front seat and hit the unlock button himself. “I think we’re all set,” he said, pushing open the door. “But thanks.”

  “Yeah,” Ruby said, climbing out. “We’ve had twelve whole years with you, which has pretty much prepared us for anything.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dad said with a grin. “I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours. Don’t drive off in anyone’s car or anything, okay?”

  As he pulled away, Ruby trotted after Simon, who was several steps ahead of her. Now that they were there, she was unaccountably nervous. What if this really was just a regular summer job? What if there were no answers, no advice, no acknowledgment of what was happening to Simon? What if they just spent the morning learning about lug nuts and tire jacks? Ruby wasn’t sure she could bear another disappointment like that. Not after what had happened with Otis.

  Up ahead, Daisy had set aside the rag and was watching them approach, tapping the wrench against her hand in a steady rhythm. The twins hurried up the rest of the drive and into the cool of the garage, and without saying anything—without even a hello—Daisy turned to walk over to the far wall, where she flipped a switch.

  With a groan, all three garage doors lurched toward the ground, the gears grinding, the metal clanging. Just before they closed and the sunlight disappeared altogether, Daisy slipped underneath the nearest one, ducking out of the garage and leaving the twins standing there alone in the dark.

  Ruby took a step closer to Simon, who was breathing loudly in the blackness. Her heart was thundering in her chest, but she just stood there, too stunned to move.

  “Do you think this was a trap?” Simon asked. “Maybe she works for Otis or something.”

  “If anyone’s trying to trap us, it would be your pal London.”

  They were silent for another moment, at a loss for what to do next, until a door at the side of the building was thrown open. A wedge of sunlight fell across them, and Daisy appeared as a silhouette.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Forgot to put the Closed sign up on the office door.”

  They blinked at her as she grabbed a flashlight from one of the shelves and clicked it on and off three times to test it.

  “Follow me,” she said, weaving between toolboxes and tires and the great hulking cars in the middle of the garage, until the beam of light fell across the outline of a square in the floor near the back. There was a rope attached to a metal loop at its center, but otherwise, it was easy to miss in all the clutter. Daisy wrapped the string around her hand and leaned back, struggling to open the heavy trapdoor.

  Ruby stepped up to the edge and peered down, but there was only more darkness.

  “Ready?” Daisy asked, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.

  Simon and Ruby exchanged a glance. Ready for what?

  But as her eyes focused, Ruby saw that there was a ladder along one side of the shaft. Daisy handed her the flashlight, swung her leg over, and began to lower herself one rung at a time.

  “Couldn’t we at least leave the lights on for this part?” Simon asked, his eyes following her nervously.

  “No need,” Daisy called up. She was halfway down the chute by now, and it was becoming harder to see her. “There are lights down here. Besides, it’s a waste of energy.” She paused, the tinny sound of her footsteps on the ladder falling silent. “You guys coming?”

  Simon dropped to his knees, looking down. “Are you going to kill us?”

  There was a long silence, and then Daisy began to laugh. “The mechanic in the auto shop with the wrench, huh?” she joked, and Simon frowned.

  “I’m serious,” he called back down as they heard Daisy’s feet hit the ground with a smack. Ruby pointed the flashlight down the chute, but there was nothing to see; Daisy had moved away from the opening. Crouching beside Simon, she turned the light toward his face, which looked eerie in the dark, his forehead creased with worry.

  “Come on,” Daisy’s voice floated up from below. “I promise not to kill you.”

  “That’s what the killers always say,” Simon pointed out, inching closer to the edge. “How do we know for sure?”

  Down below, they could hear a series of beeps and whirs, and then the opening of the tunnel was illuminated by a brief flash of light before falling dark again. Simon leaned forward.

  “Guess you’ll just have to take your chances,” Daisy called up, and with that, Ruby tucked the flashlight under her arm, placed a foot on the ladder, and stepped into the blackness.

  fourteen

  BY THE TIME Ruby was halfway down the ladder, Daisy had switched on a light, so when she hopped off the last rung and spun around she was able to see her surroundings clearly. Even so, she just stood there, taking it all in, until Simon was nearly to the bottom of the ladder himself. He took a swipe at her shoulder with one of his legs, attempting to nudge her out of the way.

  “Wow,” Ruby said, still rooted in place. “Do you do this with all your summer employees?”

  From where she was examining what looked like a radar screen, Daisy smiled. “Just the ones with potential.”

  The room was about the size of Ruby’s bedroom, but it looked more like their basement, the walls made of gray concrete, with exposed pipes and
beams forming a lattice across the ceiling. There were three plush couches in the middle of the room, each a different color—purple, green, and pink—and all arranged to face one wall, which looked like the command station in a newsroom.

  “So this is where they host The Weather Channel,” Simon said with a grin, standing in front of the many screens that were hung on the wall like paintings. One showed a gathering storm over the Atlantic; another glowed with a tangle of brightly colored charts and graphs; and a third displayed the local forecast for their area over the next one hundred days. Simon’s eyes were wide as he walked from one to another, his doubts about Daisy clearly giving way to awe over all the technology. But Ruby was most interested in the other wall.

  Behind the couches were rows of bookshelves wedged shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the room. But other than a row near the bottom, where there were a few ancient-looking almanacs, there were hardly any books at all.

  Instead, the shelves were lined with some of the most curious instruments Ruby had ever seen, strange and incredible tools: glass baubles and wind chimes, cracked timepieces and whistles, and more thermometers than Ruby had ever seen before, the mercury in each reading something entirely different from all the others.

  There were two glass jars stacked on top of each other—one with a dandelion inside, the other with a puffball—and as she watched, the dandelion began to wilt, and the seeds of the puffball started falling to the bottom of the jar. Ruby blinked, surprised, before moving on to what looked like a model of a waterfall, though it had slowed to a mere trickle, the few drops of water pooling in a metal pan at its base. She craned her neck to peer at the back of it, to see what the trick was; there must be a switch, or a tube, or something. But it was as if the water came from nowhere at all.

  “What is all this stuff?” she asked, peeking into a box filled with compasses of various shapes and sizes. Beside that, there was an odd-looking machine with a pressurized spout, which blew a little puff of steam as she watched, the miniature cloud drifting halfway across the room before evaporating. Ruby stared at the spot where it had been, her mouth open.

  “Is it all yours?” Simon asked, and Daisy shook her head.

  “Some of it is,” she said. “And some of it is just old junk that used to be my dad’s. I haven’t had the heart to throw it away.”

  The far wall was decorated with maps of all kinds, many of them yellowed and curling, and above that, the pipes on the ceiling were strung with globes that bobbed and dangled like Chinese lanterns. As she walked over, Ruby nearly tripped over a box filled with weather vanes, most of them rusty, the figures at the top—pigs and chickens, whales, and even one very lost-looking giraffe—pointing in all sorts of directions.

  “So, you don’t just fix cars, then,” Ruby said, and Daisy smiled.

  “This stuff is really more of a hobby,” she said. “I haven’t had any real use for it in years.”

  Simon frowned. “How come?”

  Daisy didn’t answer. She crossed the room, then stooped beside a black box in the corner. On top of it sat three little jars, all of which had—to Ruby’s astonishment—tiny bolts of lightning inside, the lines of electricity flickering like captured fireflies.

  As Daisy tugged on the handle to the box, Simon took a step closer. “What’s that do?”

  “It’s a pretty amazing piece of technology, actually,” Daisy said, turning around with a can of soda in each hand. “It keeps drinks cold.”

  Simon’s cheeks reddened, and he accepted the Coke with a sheepish grin. Daisy grabbed a third, then led them over to the couches, sitting down on the green one and folding her legs beneath her. Ruby was eager to keep looking around, but she took a seat on the pink couch anyway, leaving Simon the purple one.

  “So,” Daisy said, pulling back the tab on her soda. “Anything you two want to tell me?”

  Simon looked at her levelly. “You first.”

  Ruby frowned at her brother, astounded by his boldness, but Daisy just nodded, as if she’d expected as much. “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

  “You’re a Storm Maker?”

  She nodded again, though Ruby noticed the way she gripped her soda can a bit tighter, her knuckles whitening. “Yup,” she said. “Flared up when I was twenty-four.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Simon,” Ruby muttered, but Daisy only smiled.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m thirty.”

  “So you must be really good,” Simon said. “You get better as you get older, right?”

  “I’m not that old,” Daisy said. “But that’s true, up to a point, and I used to be good. I suppose I’m a little bit out of practice these days.”

  Simon sat forward. “So what can you do?”

  “What can you do?” Daisy asked in return, and Simon—who had clearly been waiting for this question—sat up a bit straighter.

  “I made it rain last night.”

  Daisy’s face didn’t change, though her eyes registered a brief flicker of surprise. On one of the screens, a monitor began to beep, and one of the blue lines spiked before falling flat again. “That’s impressive,” she said with a little nod. “Was it proactive or reactive weather?”

  Simon frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Did you make it yourself, or was it in response to something—illness or emotion, something like that?” When Simon only stared at her in confusion, Daisy tilted her head. “Someone has explained all this to you, right?”

  Simon’s eyes traveled over to meet Ruby’s, and then they both turned back to Daisy, who stood up and began pacing around the little table at the center of the couches. “Unbelievable,” she said. “I mean, if it’s true what they’re saying, and nobody’s even bothered to properly explain—”

  “What are they saying?” Ruby asked, and Daisy paused to look at her.

  “That he’s the youngest one ever. Which means he has the potential to become the most powerful ever. Most Storm Makers don’t flare up till their early twenties. The handful who started earlier—eighteen or nineteen—have turned into the most formidable Storm Makers in history. And if Simon has such a huge jump on them, who knows what he could do one day.”

  “When did Rupert London flare up?” Simon asked, and Daisy froze. Her whole body stiffened, and she swiveled to face him slowly.

  “You know about Rupert London?”

  “He came to see us last night.”

  “London himself?” Daisy asked, frowning. “Are you sure it wasn’t someone on his behalf? There are representatives for this sort of thing, you know, Trackers to bring in rookies. Ryan Doherty heads up this region, so it could’ve been him. Or maybe you’re thinking of Brian Ascher? He’s the Director of Storms, so maybe he was up because of the—”

  “No,” Simon said firmly. “It was London.”

  Daisy sank back down onto the couch.

  “He showed us what he can do,” Simon continued. “He made a fire out in the fields, and a tornado, too. It was kind of awesome.”

  Ruby shook her head. “It was kind of awful,” she said, angry. “He burned down people’s crops in the middle of a drought. We were standing right there, and he wrecked them. Just like that. Isn’t the whole point of this thing to help protect people? That’s what Otis said, anyway.”

  Daisy was watching her now with interest. “What else did Otis say?”

  Ruby told her the whole story, how she’d first noticed him in the barn, how he’d appeared in the fields. She told her about the start of the storm and his warning about Simon, and about how he’d shown up again at the hospital and then disappeared just as quickly when London had arrived.

  “He promised to meet us the next night,” she said, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice. “He said he’d be back.”

  Daisy nodded. “But he wasn’t.”

  “Right,” Simon said. “But London was.”

  Ruby glared at him openly, her arms folded across her chest.


  “Did he say where he was going?” Daisy asked after a moment. “Or what he was planning to do?”

  “Otis?” Ruby asked, then shook her head. “No.”

  “What about London?”

  Simon nodded. “He was going back to headquarters in Chicago. And he wanted me to go down there, too.” He cut his eyes over to Ruby, who was holding her breath. A part of her had been hoping Simon would have forgotten this particular detail, but she could see now that the idea had taken root inside his head. “He said there’s a lot he could teach me. That he’d take me under his wing.”

  Ruby wanted Daisy to tell him that the idea of going down to the Society’s headquarters in Chicago was completely ridiculous, not to mention dangerous, but Daisy only leaned forward, her face serious. “Did he say if he’d be back up here at all?”

  “Yeah,” Simon said. “Sometime before the twenty-first.”

  Daisy’s head snapped up, her face suddenly ashen. “The twenty-first?” she said quietly. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  Both Simon and Ruby nodded. Across the room on the bookshelves, the dandelion was now just a bud, and the puffball was nothing but a stem. On top of the refrigerator, the lightning flashed in the jars.

  “Why?” Simon asked. “What’s the twenty-first?”

  Daisy’s eyes were very far away, and the room was quiet but for the hum of the radar screens and the soft sound of rain falling inside the various bottles. Ruby waited for an answer, but as the minutes ticked by, she realized there wouldn’t be one. Just like when Simon had asked London the very same question the night before, there was only silence.

  fifteen

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Ruby wandered into the barn to find Simon glowering at the ceiling. She crept up to stand beside him, following his gaze, but there was nothing except beams and rafters and a bird’s nest.

  “What are we doing?” she asked after a minute, her chin still angled.