“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What happened?”
Simon’s face was red and twisted. “I don’t know,” he said, holding one of his feet and staring at the place where he’d been standing. “He burned me.”
London stood watching them impassively. “Are we ready?”
It wasn’t a question; Ruby knew at least that much. It was a demand, and there was nothing to do but help Simon up, draping his arm over her shoulders to help him walk on his scorched feet. He stepped gingerly across the carpet, and with each step, Ruby’s mind worked frantically to figure out a plan.
She couldn’t let them make it to the compass, couldn’t watch it turn for Simon—whether because he was truly meant to be the next Chairman or because London had somehow rigged it. He was too young, too new, too powerless not to fall under London’s control. And the only thing worse than watching London destroy all these cities and towns would be to watch him force Simon to do so along with him.
As they followed London out the door, Simon leaning on Ruby’s arm and limping, they were greeted by rows of anxious faces, each of them a blur as they walked past one cubicle after another. There were probably close to a hundred in all, and from her conversations with Daisy and Otis, she knew they were a collection of the most esteemed Storm Makers in the country. Directors of Land Movement and Water-Related Disasters, Secretaries of Floods and Volcanic Eruptions.
The look of anger on London’s face seemed to be lifting, replaced by a kind of showman’s smile as they made their way through the crowd. They passed a big-shouldered man who tipped his cap at them, his face bowed reverentially. “Good man, Smalls,” London said, patting him on the shoulder as they passed, then nodding at a woman in a black dress who was beaming up at him. With each step, he seemed to soak up the attention of his audience, waving at his followers like a politician.
“Cheers, sir,” said a skinny man in a bow tie, the words shaped by an accent, and when they passed him, a little rain cloud sprouted over his head, dousing him in a brief drizzle before disappearing entirely. The man simply took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, and resumed studying his shoes.
London glanced down at Ruby and Simon. “Ward’s with us on an exchange program,” he told them, suddenly as friendly as a tour guide. “He has a propensity for rain, which is typical of the BPA, I’m afraid.”
“The BPA?” Simon asked warily.
“The British Precipitation Association,” London explained. “One of our many overseas organizations.”
It was obvious that London was enjoying this, and Ruby could see the way certain Storm Makers gravitated toward him. But there were others who hung back, shuffling their feet nervously and exchanging subtle glances. Ruby had been so busy wondering if they could tell how scared she and Simon were that it only now occurred to her that they looked just as frightened. Otis and Daisy had been right after all: Not everyone here was as convinced of London’s philosophy as it would seem.
When they’d reached an open area of the office, London paused, giving everyone a chance to gather around.
“We’re a few days ahead of schedule,” he said, his voice booming, “but since we’ve been graced with a visit from our newest and youngest Storm Maker, I thought it might be an opportune time to visit the compass.”
A hum seemed to vibrate through the crowd, everyone murmuring to one another. The whole place was tinged with nervousness and confusion, but there was something else, too, an undercurrent that Ruby could just barely detect: hope.
“As dictated by tradition, everyone is welcome to observe,” he said. “And you all may take the opportunity to circulate the compass yourselves.” He paused here, and looked around with a smile. “Sometimes leaders appear in unexpected places.” He placed one hand on Simon’s shoulder and the other on Ruby’s, his fingers digging into her skin, which burned beneath his touch. “But in this case, I think we all suspect the outcome, which would be a truly auspicious beginning for our young prodigy.”
A few people clapped, a small smattering of applause led by three men and a sharp-faced woman who had moved up front, all of them still beaming at London. Their pins glinted in the fluorescent lights of the office, and their smiles looked plastic, stretched wide over too-white teeth. Others began to step out of their offices, too, more tenatively, all of them falling into step behind the little trio as they began to walk again.
Ruby looked around wildly, trying to get her bearings in the maze of box-shaped cubicles, searching desperately for the entrance, or for an escape route of some sort. When at last they reached the hallway that led back out to the receptionist’s desk, Ruby glanced over at Simon. Their eyes met, and in that moment, she knew that they understood each other perfectly.
“This way, this way,” London said, about to steer them in the opposite direction, toward the heavy gray door with the little symbol. It was then that Simon gritted his teeth, planted one of his sore feet, and with the other one kicked the back of London’s heel so that his foot knocked into his other leg, sending him reeling. At the same time, Ruby gave him an extra shove to propel him forward, and then she grabbed Simon’s arm, and the two of them wheeled around, ready to run.
A gasp went up from the assembled crowd, and in the confusion the twins were able to dart around the three burly men who had been trailing London like oversized rats. The rest of the crowd seemed to part at once, leaving a narrow path to the exit, and to Ruby’s surprise, she found that not only were they allowing them to escape, they were actually urging them on.
“Hurry,” yelled the woman who had been smiling so adoringly at London earlier, and two men in skinny ties shouted “Go!” as they ran. Ruby glanced back only once, and it was to see London struggling to his feet, screaming at his followers, his society, his people, most of whom had closed in again, making it difficult for him to get past.
“Stop them!” he yelled, his voice carrying over the noise. But they were already gone, moving fast down the hallway, with nothing ahead of them. Ruby’s heart was bobbling around in her chest as she strained to keep up with Simon, who was quick in spite of his burned feet, and when they were nearly to the exit, both of them glancing desperately at the woman behind the reception desk, she punched a button and the glass doors at the end of the office slid open.
Breathing hard, they charged back through the narrow entrance and over to the elevator. Ruby hadn’t had a chance to think this entirely through, and she realized now that she didn’t know where the stairs were, so if the elevator wasn’t there, they’d be trapped.
But in this, too, they were lucky; just as they rounded the corner, the man with the bright red hair threw open the heavy grate, motioning them on. Without a word, he let go of the handle, turning to punch a button on the panel. Simon leaned against the side of the car and let out a breath, and Ruby put her hands on her knees, the knot of terror loosening inside her.
But then a hand caught the grate in the split second before it slammed shut, heaving it back open again, and suddenly London was inside with them, his hair now disheveled, his face scarlet with anger. He stood facing the front without looking at them. “Rooftop, please,” he said in a low, gravelly voice.
As Ruby felt the elevator come to life with a jolt, she closed her eyes, the world once again wildly unsteady beneath her.
twenty-eight
WHEN HE WAS LITTLE, Simon was afraid of escalators. There was something about the appearance of the steps, each one with its own little set of metal teeth, the whole thing moving around and around like a song on endless loop. Mom and Dad had tried everything—carrying him on their hip, lifting him onto the first step, holding his hand while they counted to three before encouraging him to kick out one tentative foot, like testing the water before jumping into the pool—but none of it worked. Simon would just hang back nervously, refusing to have anything to do with it, his eyes large in his pale face.
But one day, near Christmastime, as Mom and Dad tried to coax him onto the escalator at a depar
tment store, Ruby simply took his hand in hers and began to lead him away. They marched past the makeup counters with their clouds of perfume, past the stiff-looking Christmas tree with its painstakingly placed ornaments, past the menswear section, where the neckties hung like streamers from the walls. Ruby didn’t have to look back to know that Mom and Dad were behind her, following closely, and she led them all around the corner to where she’d glimpsed an elevator earlier.
Simon looked so plainly relieved at the sight of the shiny metal doors that Dad could only laugh, but Mom bent down so that her face was close to Ruby’s.
“It’s nice of you to take care of your brother,” she said softly, so that no one else could hear; Simon was busy jabbing at the up button. “But he’s going to have to do it eventually. If you don’t face your fears, how can you ever get over them?”
The doors to the elevator dinged open, and Ruby pointed. “You just find another way up,” she said as Simon bounded inside, punching the button for the second floor.
From inside the elevator, Dad had his foot wedged against the door to hold it open. But Mom was still watching Ruby with an odd expression, a look of amusement in her eyes.
“Find another way up,” Mom murmured after a moment, placing a hand on Ruby’s back to guide her onto the elevator. “I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
But that had always been how Ruby’s mind seemed to work; if there were two possible answers to a problem, either A or B, then Ruby was always on the lookout for C. If the escalator wasn’t going to work, there must always be an elevator somewhere.
There was always another way up.
And now, standing grimly beside her brother in a different elevator—this one far less festive, far less inviting—Ruby found herself thinking again of that moment.
Nobody had said a word since the elevator had begun its slow climb, and this was more unnerving than anything else. London remained at the very front, standing absolutely still, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched each floor slip by through the slats in the grate. The red-haired man leaned into the corner, his considerable weight cushioning him, and he had one hand resting on the emergency lever. Ruby kept cutting her eyes in his direction, willing him to pull it, but his gaze was fixed on the floor, his eyebrows lifting anxiously now and then.
Beside her, Simon had gone as jittery as a mouse. Whatever defiance he’d shown to London’s face seemed to disappear as soon as the man turned his back, and now one of his eyelids was twitching. Ruby let out a deep breath as they passed the twelfth floor. It felt a bit like they were on a roller coaster, those moments of churning anticipation, her insides like something coiled and ready to spring, though she was pretty sure there was nothing good at the end of this ride, no free-falling, cartwheeling glee.
Even so, with each passing minute, she felt a great calm begin to overtake her. Somewhere around the eighteenth floor, Simon’s breathing started to become raspy, a choked wheeze that nobody else seemed to notice. But at the same time, Ruby could sense a kind of steadiness of her own, and the clanging of the elevator as it rose seemed to tap into something deep inside her, a calming rhythm as clear as Morse code, constant as a drum and true as a heartbeat. Up they climbed, the numbers painted on each floor moving into the twenties, and then the thirties, and finally the forties.
Beyond this, at the very top, the elevator slowed and then jerked to a stop. It was enough to unbalance Simon, who half fell into Ruby. The elevator operator clearly wasn’t sure what to do now that they’d arrived, and so he continued to hover near the emergency brake, despite the fact that they were already stopped. When the metal had quit shuddering and the elevator car had gone still, London spun around.
“Come with me,” he said, as if they had another choice, and then he flung open the grate, turning around only once to give the red-haired man a hard look, in case he had any notion of following them, too. He didn’t; the moment Ruby and Simon had stepped out of the elevator to where London was waiting in an area the size of a closet, the gate banged shut behind them and the man wrenched at the down lever.
The three of them stood and watched as he was lowered back into the building, disappearing from view a slice at a time, first his feet, then his knees, and so on until all they could see were his eyes, watery and nervous. And then they were gone, too.
Simon seemed to have regained some of his courage, and he was now glowering at London, his face dark. Ruby had only a moment to glance around at the concrete walls of the vestibule before London yanked open a heavy gray door marked NO ADMITTANCE and a blast of wind rushed in, forcing them to shield their eyes.
London waited, holding it open, and after exchanging a glance with Ruby, Simon went first, moving tentatively out onto the blackened surface of the roof, hundreds of feet in the air, where only the very tops of the other skyscrapers interrupted the cloudless sky.
The wind continued to whip at them, stinging Ruby’s eyes, and she squinted at London as he began to walk over to the ledge, his dark jacket flapping wildly behind him. When he was near the wall, he turned around and crooked a finger at them, and Ruby and Simon—still rooted in place near the door—reluctantly picked their way across the uneven surface of the roof, hovering a few feet back from the edge.
“Do you know why I brought you up here?” he asked, his voice raised against the wind.
“To toss us over the side of the building?” Simon suggested.
London smiled. “So that you could see all this.”
“We’ve already seen it,” Ruby said. “Nobody’s in the mood for sightseeing.”
“Come,” London said, laying a spindly hand on the wall, and it seemed they had no other choice but to inch over to the edge, where a concrete barrier that came up to their necks surrounded the periphery of the roof.
Taking a deep breath, Ruby looked out across the city, the dazzling height of the buildings, the shining surfaces turning the sunlight to splinters. When she glanced over at Simon, she could see that his eyes were busy at the horizon, and Ruby followed his gaze to the great expanse of Lake Michigan, vast as an ocean and silvery as a coin.
The wind whistled and the building moaned, but otherwise there was nothing; Ruby couldn’t even hear herself breathe, and so she was surprised when a sound drifted up from below, faint and thin. She rose onto her tiptoes to see what it was.
At first there was only the dizzying drop and the steep angle of the building, forty-seven floors of sheer distance. But when she looked again, craning her neck to the left, she saw two men balanced on a narrow platform with railings on all sides, washing the windows just a few floors down. The whole thing was rigged up to a series of cables with a pulley to send them up and down the building, and they were laughing as they scrubbed at the windows, as if they were hundreds of feet below, their feet firmly on the ground. Ruby stepped away from the ledge, feeling light-headed, and she saw that Simon had done the same.
“You see that?” London said, pointing at a few thin columns of smoke in the distance, off to the south of the city. “That’s why I brought you up here.”
“What is it?” Simon asked.
“It’s just one example,” he explained, pacing near the edge of the building. “Just one of the many examples of how people are destroying this planet. They cut down the forests, and then act surprised when there’s erosion. They pump smoke and chemicals into the atmosphere, and then can’t believe that the climate is changing.” He paused to look at them, his eyes glinting. “When Sophie died, it was Otis’s fault for taking her there, and then for not getting her out. But it was also the idiot who threw a cigarette into the woods,” he said. “And this is why they need to be taught a lesson.”
Simon looked impatient. “If you care so much about the Earth, why not show people how to take care of it, instead of making it worse?”
“Why should I help them?” London said, spinning around to face the city, so that his words were whipped behind them. “Nobody has helped me.” He stood there
for a moment, his hands on the ledge, his shoulders rounded. And when he turned around again, he was smiling. “Except you.”
Ruby took a small step backward. “We’re not helping you.”
“No,” he agreed. “You’re not. But Simon will. As soon as that compass spins, we’ll begin our work together.”
“No,” Simon said, the word landing heavily between them. He stepped forward until he was only a few feet from London, and he stood there glaring at him, his feet braced and his T-shirt blowing around his skinny frame. His eyes blazed, and he looked so angry that for a moment, Ruby could almost see what everyone was talking about, the potential in Simon, the possibility of greatness, the magic of it all. But then the wind fell abruptly all around them, the world going still, and he was just a boy again, his hands clenched into fists, his chin jutted angrily.
“I’m sorry,” London said, waving a hand around him, and Ruby realized that he was the one who’d stopped the wind, and the magnitude of that—of that one impossible act—settled heavily over her. He tilted his head at Simon. “I couldn’t quite hear you with all that noise.”
But Simon didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his hands the way he had that night on the road, and with his eyes squeezed shut, he snapped them in London’s direction, a movement so purposeful, so powerful and full of intent, that Ruby was almost more stunned that nothing happened than she might have been if something had.
But it was indeed nothing, and Simon dropped his hands again in defeat.
London began to laugh. “And what was that supposed to be?” he asked. “Rain? Snow? Lightning? Wind?” At this last word, right on cue, the wind picked up again, so suddenly that Ruby stumbled forward as the pressure built at her back. London’s smile remained frozen as he watched. “You should be thanking me,” he said to Simon. “You’ve got hardly an ounce of natural skill, and here I’m trying to make you the youngest ever Chairman of the Makers of Storms Society. Who wouldn’t want that?”
The Storm Makers Page 16