But they’d come this far, and it now seemed there was little other choice.
Once inside, they waited behind a woman looking for her lawyer’s office—which turned out to be at a different address altogether—and when she was finished, the steely-eyed man behind the front desk pointed his face down at them.
“Can I help you?” he asked, looking anything but helpful.
“We’re wondering what floor MOSS is on?”
He raised one eyebrow. “Mouse?”
There was a massive security guard standing at the other end of the desk, and he shifted his eyes in their direction without moving his head.
“No,” Ruby said. “MOSS.”
“M-O-S-S,” Simon said, spelling it out, and the security guard’s shoulders visibly relaxed.
The man behind the desk punched something into his computer, and Ruby glanced at her watch, aware that everything was taking too long; aware that Daisy had probably gone back to her shop and read their note by now, since they hadn’t shown up at the lake; aware that the clock was continuing its march forward toward June 21. Now that they were this close, it seemed urgent that they keep moving—though toward what, she wasn’t exactly sure—and she willed the man to hurry up and figure out where they were supposed to go.
But he took his time, frowning at the computer, hitting a few more keys, scratching his head, and then doing the whole thing all over again. Finally, he looked up.
“I’m not seeing it,” he said. “What does it stand for?”
Ruby and Simon exchanged a look.
“We’re not exactly sure,” she lied.
“Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “Then neither am I.”
Outside, they let the flow of people stream all around them as they studied the card again, looking for missing clues. But it was stubbornly cryptic, nothing but a storm cloud and an address, this address, which apparently did them no good.
“What now?” Simon asked, staring up at the building again. Ruby followed his gaze, and just as her eyes settled on the spire at the very top, she saw it: the briefest flash of light in the otherwise quiet sky. It happened so fast she couldn’t be quite sure it had happened at all.
“Did you see that?” she asked Simon, who looked at her blankly.
“See what?”
“I think it was lightning.”
He narrowed his eyes at the sky. “Looks pretty calm to me.”
“Exactly,” she said, feeling triumphant. “Which means we’re probably in the right place.”
“But they said—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ruby said, cutting him off. She scanned the sidewalk, trying to work out where to go next, and caught sight of a man pushing a cart full of boxes around the corner of the building.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing Simon’s arm and hurrying him along so she wouldn’t lose sight of the man. They weaved through the crowds as they followed, sidestepping businessmen on cell phones and women with strollers, until they saw him disappear into an alley. There, they discovered a separate service driveway for the building, marked with a big green sign that read LOADING DOCK.
They hung back for a moment, ducking behind a wall to watch as a man emerged from the shadows to speak with the delivery guy. He was short and broad, with unruly red hair and a patchy beard, but Ruby could see the bright glint of a silver button on each of his cuffs. After exchanging a few words with the delivery man, he took one of the boxes and turned to wait at the door for a large service elevator. When it arrived, the man swept his eyes from side to side, making sure nobody was watching, and then reached for the grate that served as the door.
As his hand touched the metal there was a spark, and Ruby stepped out from the shadows.
“Hey,” she called out, and the man turned.
“Deliveries only,” he said, but his eyes rested on Simon.
“We’re looking for MOSS,” Ruby said, and the man tilted his head to the side, just barely.
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“Have you heard of Rupert London?” Simon asked, and the man’s face tightened.
“What’s it to you?”
Simon dug in his pocket for the card and held it up. There was a flicker of recognition on the man’s face, a sudden realization, and he jostled the box from one arm to the other, using his foot to hold open the elevator grate.
Without waiting for any further invitation, they hurried over to step on. As Simon passed, the man’s eyes widened a little, and he shook his head as he let the grate fall shut again.
“So you’re the one,” he said gruffly, jabbing at a button on the panel. Simon said nothing; he just gazed at his feet.
Ruby had been expecting to be carried upward, toward the roof, where she’d seen the lightning. It seemed only logical that the offices would be near the very sky they controlled, from where they drew so much of their power. So she was surprised to feel the elevator dropping. Through the bars of the grate, she could see the numbers written on the door of each floor, and her stomach clenched with worry as they passed one after another, lower level and parking garage, basement and sub-basement, moving lower and lower into the depths of the building and away from the safety of people and daylight.
The elevator was the slowest she’d ever been on, and the man said nothing at all the whole time, didn’t even turn around to face them, but instead stood looking at the door with his head slightly bowed. Simon shifted from one foot to the other nervously, and Ruby swallowed hard, wondering how much farther down they could possibly go. But then the elevator came to a stop with a loud wrenching sound, jostling them slightly, and the one dim bulb in the center of the ceiling flickered before brightening again.
“Lower level eight,” the man said without turning around. He closed a beefy hand around the heavy grate and heaved it back. “Makers of Storms Society.”
As the interior door swung open, Ruby blinked in surprise. Whatever she’d been expecting, it was certainly not this. If she’d thought about it at all, she would have assumed it would be a place like the room in Daisy’s garage, dark and guarded and mysterious, like some kind of secret lair.
But as the door slammed shut behind them and the elevator lurched upward again, she saw that the place spread out before them looked like nothing more than an ordinary office. It could just as easily have been a law firm or a bank. There were rows upon rows of cubicles in neat lines, harsh fluorescent lighting that gave the whole thing a yellowish tinge, and the sound of telephones going off at regular intervals.
The two of them stood there, stunned. Ruby shook her head, about to say aloud the thought that was running through her mind—that they must be in the wrong place—when a voice startled her. She whirled around to see what was clearly the receptionist, leaning across an unusually tall desk and motioning them over.
“Can I help you?” she asked when they were standing before her.
Without warning, Simon let out a little cry of surprise, moving toward Ruby so fast he nearly knocked her over.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, but he was staring wide-eyed at the empty spot where he’d just been standing.
“It’s freezing there,” he said, rubbing his arms.
“Cold pocket,” the receptionist said sweetly. “There’s a warm one just to your right, so be careful. What can I do for you?”
Caught off guard, Ruby was unsure what to say. This wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined they’d be confronting London, by making an appointment with the receptionist, and there was something about the sense of order to this place that was unsettling, the sheer and startling normalcy of it all. She shivered slightly, despite being several feet from the mysterious pocket of cold air.
“Um, we’re looking for Rupert London,” Simon said. He’d taken a step closer to the desk, though he could barely manage to see over it, his chin coming up to the top. “We have some, uh, business to discuss with him.”
With a crisp nod, the woman picked up her phone and hit a single button
, then hummed while she waited. Ruby and Simon each took a small step backward until they were standing beside a watercooler, which seemed to contain some kind of funnel, an internal whirlpool that was whipping the drinking water into a frenzy. From around the doorways of offices and over the tops of cubicles, people were starting to peek out at them, their faces anxious and drawn. Ruby lowered her voice to whisper to Simon.
“There’s something creepy about this,” she said. “Maybe we should—”
“What?” he said. “What can we do at this point?”
Ruby had no answer for this. She looked up at the woman, who murmured something, then put her palm over the phone.
“Name?” she asked, and Simon stepped forward again.
“McDuff,” he said. “Ruby and Simon.”
Her whole face changed then, the businesslike demeanor dissolving into a look of pure shock. She stared at them openly, the color rising to her cheeks, until a staticky sound from the other end of the phone jolted her back and she lifted the handset back to her ear and nodded into it, as if she’d lost her words entirely. After a moment, she let it slip from her hand, cradling it into the receiver, and then raised her eyes again.
“Mr. London will see you now,” she said in a wavery voice, pointing down the longest corridor, which stretched back between a wall of offices and a row of cubicles. “Last one to the right.”
The woman continued to watch as they turned to go, though it took Ruby a moment to begin walking. She felt as if she were in some kind of dream, where everything was just sideways of normal, where an ordinary-seeming hallway might very well lead to a trap.
On the door to every office they passed, there were little weather symbols rather than nameplates: raindrops and snowflakes, tornadoes and plumes of fire. Inside they could see charts and graphs and radar screens, much like the ones in Daisy’s basement. But there were also things that made Ruby and Simon pause every so often, eyes wide. In one office, there were shelves and shelves of jars, each one filled with a different kind of miniature weather phenomenon: tiny lightning bolts and puffy rain clouds, a perfectly unmelted snowball, and even a little twister. There were no clocks on the walls, only weather vanes, and in the place where a normal office might have had a photocopier or a fax machine, there were a telescope and a small weather balloon that bobbed up and then sank down again and again like a sluggish yo-yo.
But the strangest thing of all was the people. In spite of all the professional trappings, there was an air of great nervousness about the place. Everyone seemed to scuttle rather than stroll, to lurk rather than look. And every eye in the place was focused on Simon and Ruby as they made the seemingly endless trek to London’s office.
Midway down the hall, there was a solid gray door marked with a NO ADMITTANCE sign, and below it a symbol they hadn’t seen before: a small circle with a single dash at the top. When Ruby paused before it, she could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on her back, and a collective intake of breath. But before she had a chance to say anything, a voice rose up from the far end of the hallway and a dark figure stepped out into the corridor.
“Well,” said London with a smile so broad it whipped the breath right out of Ruby, set her heart hammering and her hands trembling. He gazed down the length of the hallway at them, his head tilted to one side, his eyes bright with interest. “So glad you could finally make it.”
twenty-five
RUBY’S FIRST THOUGHT when London gestured to a seat in his office was This is more like it. Because as professional as the rest of the place looked, as average and ordinary and normal, Rupert London’s office was exactly what she’d been expecting. And something about this seemed to help her regain her balance.
As she sank into one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs in front of his desk, Simon sliding into the other, Ruby let her eyes wander. It was a huge room, roughly the size of the whole first floor of the farmhouse, and sparsely decorated. As opposed to the whiteness of the rest of the office, which had about it a sort of polished gleam of productivity, everything here was covered in dark wood and burgundy wallpaper, the carpet an even deeper brown.
They were too far underground for windows, and there was only one lamp, which gave off an orangey glow that didn’t quite reach all the way into the corners. While the rest of the offices seemed to be filled with the building blocks of the trade—radar screens and weather samples, various gadgets and instruments—London’s shelves were mainly lined with old books.
“I’ve been hoping you’d visit,” he said to Simon as he pressed the door shut with a click. His dark hair was immaculately combed, his suit pressed and neat. If he were to walk through the lobby of the building above, nobody would suspect he was anything but some slick lawyer or banker, a businessman with a busy day of meetings and an agenda that did not include things like implementing natural disasters.
“I take it your lessons with Otis have been somewhat less than thrilling.” He looked pleased at the thought, smiling as he crossed the room. “Come to learn from the master, then?”
“Yes, sir,” Simon said, avoiding Ruby’s eyes.
London crooked a finger at one of the bookshelves and a wall of fog appeared, making everything behind it fuzzy and indistinct. Then he snapped his fingers and it was gone. “You’ve made a wise choice,” he said. “There’s a lot I can teach you.”
As he pulled out the armchair behind the cherry desk, Ruby noticed a set of framed photographs behind him, and she felt weak at the sight of them, lined up so neatly in a row. “Like that?” she asked, pointing.
“Ah, yes,” London said, spinning the chair halfway around so that he could look up at them, too. The first showed an aerial shot of the city of New Orleans in the wake of a hurricane, the waterlogged streets turned to rivers. The second was starkly different, with white snow filling the frame, the great Northeast blizzard from two years ago, one of the worst in history. And the third, which would have been beautiful had it not been so horrible, had it not killed so many people, showed an avalanche in motion, the snow tumbling down the bald face of a mountain in the Northwest, the result of the earth beneath it quaking, a jolt that turned deadly for dozens of people.
Beside these was an empty frame, just waiting for something to fill it, waiting for June 21, for the next disaster in the next city that would claim the next however many lives.
“It’s somewhat of a hobby for me,” London explained, like the curator of an art exhibit.
“Destroying cities?” Ruby asked in an acid tone, sounding braver than she felt. “You must be so proud.”
He swiveled to face them again. “I am, actually,” London said. “Not a bad collection, don’t you think?”
Ruby glanced over at Simon, whose face had drained of color. Even though Otis and Daisy had told them about these, it wasn’t the same as seeing the evidence displayed with pride across the wall of an office. Ruby understood how badly Simon had been wanting to cling to the idea of the wizard they’d met on the road that night, the one who promised to share all his secrets. But there was no longer any way to deny that the man before them was cruelly calculating, and when Simon’s eyes met hers, they were full of panic.
Now, finally—perhaps too late—he was realizing just how wrong he’d been.
Ruby turned back to London, blazing with a sudden anger. “So a few people forget to recycle, and you go ahead and wipe out their whole town?” she asked, her voice louder than intended. “Just like that? Just for sport? How is that fair? The whole point of the Society is not to do any harm. You’re the Chairman. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Beside her, Ruby could feel Simon bracing himself for the response, but London looked nothing if not amused by her outburst.
“It’s just as well that you didn’t end up with your brother’s powers,” he said with a little smile. “You’d be a chore to control.”
Ruby glared at him, but said nothing.
“As for the rest of it, I have my reasons,” he continued, rising from his chair
. He rested both palms on the desk and leaned across it. “The only thing reliable about weather is that there’s always a cause, and there’s always an effect. Let’s just say I prefer being the cause.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Simon asked, and London smiled thinly.
“It means that we can either be a tool or a shield,” he said. “We can either get behind a storm and help it to hammer a city, or we can try to stand in its way, to lessen the winds and mute the rains. Which is what Storm Makers have always done in the past.”
“So why not now?” Ruby asked, and London frowned.
“Because shields don’t always work,” he said. “And hammers always do.”
“But that’s not the point,” Simon said. “You’re supposed to help people. You’re supposed to use your power to stop them from getting hurt, not to hurt them even worse. Why would you—”
London cut him off. “No use explaining to you, I suppose,” he said, turning back to the photographs on the wall, evidence of his handiwork. “From what I’ve heard, you haven’t been making much weather at all. Which doesn’t make you a particularly effective hammer or a shield. But that’s not important. All that matters now is that you have done it, and so theoretically you can do it. And most important, that you’re incredibly, impossibly young.”
“I’m not going to help you,” Simon said as London lowered himself back into the chair. “I’m not.”
“That makes no difference at this point,” he said lightly, as if they were discussing something far more mundane, a change in scheduling or a food preference. There was a calmness to him now that made him seem far more crazy than he had even when he’d been conjuring flames out in the fields. “Everything’s already in motion.”
The Storm Makers Page 14