The Storm Makers

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Just before she died, actually.”

  “In the fire,” Ruby said quietly, and there was a flicker of surprise on Otis’s face.

  “So Rupert told you, did he?”

  Ruby nodded.

  “I suppose he must have given you quite an earful,” Otis said with a sigh. He pulled the cap from his pocket and ran a finger along the brim. “We used to be best friends, you know.”

  “He said that, too.”

  “Did he?” Otis looked thoughtful. “We were college roommates. Completely inseparable. And Sophie was always tagging along.” A shadow passed over his face at this. “Till the very end, I guess.”

  “You didn’t bring her that day?”

  He shook his head. “To a wildfire? Never. Those things are impossible to control, even for a Storm Maker with the ability to blow it back,” he said. “Rupert was working at headquarters at the time. I’d been offered a directorship there myself, but I was never much for offices, so I took an outpost in California instead. I’d always been good with wind—perfect for blowing back all the fires out there—and Sophie had always had her heart set on living out west. Rupert took it personally, though.”

  “How come?” Ruby asked, glancing over at the line for tickets, relieved to see that Daisy and Simon were only about halfway through—she suddenly had about a thousand questions.

  “When Rupert and I first met, neither of us had flared up. Do you know what the odds are that two people who know each other will both become Storm Makers?”

  Ruby shook her head.

  “Very small,” he told her. “It was such a strange coincidence. I started about a month after him. We were both really young.” One side of his mouth crept up in a half smile. “Not as young as Simon, of course, but young enough. Sophie wasn’t supposed to know, but she figured it out. She was way too smart to hide anything from.” Otis’s eyes were glistening. “You remind me a little bit of her, actually.”

  Ruby smiled.

  “She hated being left out.”

  “So she went to the fire herself that day.”

  Otis nodded. “She was always doing things like that, trying to be a part of it. I don’t think she thought it’d be that bad,” he said, his voice breaking. “She figured she’d see me in action, maybe help out if she could.” His eyes were rimmed with red now, and he was blinking fast. “But it just got out of control so fast.”

  Ruby imagined the leaping flames, the popping of the brush going up in smoke. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again when Otis went on.

  “I did everything I could to save her,” he said, looking at Ruby hard, as if there were words beneath his words, as if there was more he wanted her to hear. “Everything. But it wasn’t enough.”

  They were both silent for a moment, and then Otis shoved the hat back in his pocket and put a hand on the store window.

  “Is that why you didn’t fight back?” Ruby asked, her voice very small. “Up there on the roof? Is that why you didn’t put out the fire?”

  There was something mournful in Otis’s expression when he turned back to her. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said. “But yes, I suppose there’s a part of me that thinks maybe I deserved it.”

  Ruby began to protest, but Otis shook his head.

  “Rupert still blames me,” he said. “He always has. And he’s not entirely wrong.”

  “Well, maybe he could find some less destructive ways of expressing his feelings,” Ruby said, and was rewarded with a small smile from Otis.

  “It used to be that if he was behaving badly, Sophie would just threaten to stop speaking to him, and he’d shape right up,” Otis said. “She was the one person he truly cared about, and he’d do anything for her.”

  “And now?”

  His face turned grim again. “Now I’m not sure there’s anything left that he cares about. I don’t know if he even remembers how.”

  The other two were approaching now, hurrying across the cavernous train station with the tickets in hand. Ruby looked back at Otis, who was once again gazing at the hats in the window.

  “Your old one is better, anyway,” she said, and he smiled.

  “I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”

  thirty-two

  RUBY YAWNED as she looked out the window of the train. As soon as she’d found her seat a wave of exhaustion had come over her, and now she was struggling to keep her eyes from closing as they crawled out of the city.

  They’d managed to get two seats facing each other, and on the opposite bench Daisy was also slumped against the window. Otis sat beside her, leaning forward to watch the darkening sky through the webs of phone lines and the shadows of buildings. Next to Ruby, Simon was playing with a loose thread on his T-shirt, his head drooping.

  The day behind them felt like it should have been more than that—a week, at the very least—and Ruby realized she was happy to be going home. Even as the train moved into the suburbs, she was thinking of the farm in Wisconsin, the way it smelled in the morning—the crops wet with dew—and the now-familiar creaking of the house at night, as it seemed to settle itself all around them. She thought of Mom, paintbrush in hand, and Dad, out in the barn, and how they’d spent this day—this astonishing, terrifying day—assuming that Ruby and Simon were tossing a baseball around at Ben’s house. They hadn’t even known to be worried about them.

  Out the window, the sun was slipping lower in the sky, and the clouds were nothing more than wisps. Ruby thought of the drought back home and wondered how quickly Otis would be able to fix it. She thought maybe Simon could help—after all, even though he wasn’t Chairman, he was still a Storm Maker—and then she remembered something Otis had said earlier, the words scissoring through her with a suddenness that made her sit up in her seat.

  “Why’d you say ‘two Storm Makers’ before?” she asked, and all three of them looked over at her. “Back at headquarters…”

  “What’re you talking about?” Simon asked.

  “He said he had to take two Storm Makers home.”

  Simon frowned. “He was talking about Daisy.”

  But Ruby wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at Otis, who shook his head and smiled at her.

  “I was talking about you.”

  Daisy turned to him in surprise, and Simon’s mouth fell open. Nobody seemed quite sure what to say, least of all Ruby. Her first thought, surprisingly, was of Simon, and how he must have felt that first day when he realized everything was different. She understood now that it wasn’t just nerves, and it wasn’t just excitement; it was like the world itself had gone wobbly beneath her feet.

  How could that be true? Ruby wanted to ask, but the words seemed to melt before she could give voice to them. Across the aisle, a man’s phone began to ring, and the conductor was approaching to take their tickets. He stood above them for several seconds before Daisy emerged from her thoughts long enough to pull them from her pocket and hand them over.

  “Both of them?” she asked, once the conductor had moved on. She was talking to Otis, but her eyes were on Ruby, staring at her in wonder. It was the same look she’d had when she first met Simon. “How?”

  “Did you notice what happened on the roof?” Otis asked Simon, leaning forward. “When you used the wind to knock over Rupert?”

  “He couldn’t do it,” Ruby said, giving her brother a sideways glance. “And then, all of sudden, he could.”

  Otis nodded. “Has it ever happened like that before?”

  “That night we saw London on the road,” Simon said. “But it’s not because I was scared….”

  “No, that’s true,” Otis said. “Although fear can help, same as any other emotion. But in this case, I think it was something else that put you over the edge.” He paused, then shook his head with a little grin. “So to speak.”

  They were starting to emerge from the suburbs now, the houses and buildings falling away so all that was left was t
he land itself, acres and acres of it, blue-gray beneath the deepening sky. The trees were all leaning in the wind, and Ruby saw a plastic bag blown up and away from them, set aloft by the wind or the train or both. Otis’s eyes traveled over to the window, to the scudding clouds and unsettled sky.

  “What were you thinking about up there?” he asked, turning abruptly to Ruby.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Otis. “When Simon was trying to make the wind blow, and Rupert was laughing at him, what went through your mind?”

  A gust of wind buffeted the train car, making it rock just slightly on the rails, and Ruby inched closer to Simon. “I don’t know,” she said again. “I was scared, too. I guess I was just thinking about how much I hated him.”

  “And?”

  Ruby tried to remember. She closed her eyes and was back there again, on the rooftop, surrounded by London’s wild laughter and Simon’s anger, the dizzying height of the building and the wind that swept across all of it, loud as waves in her ears.

  Her eyes flew open.

  “I was thinking about the mechanics of it,” she said, sitting forward. “How even if Simon could make something happen, it would need to be a certain speed of wind to knock over someone London’s size, and—”

  “Exactly,” Otis said, his eyes shining. “You were thinking about the science behind it.”

  “She’s always thinking about science,” Simon chipped in. Outside it started to rain, the drops slapping at the glass before streaming away, and it had become too dark for them to see anything but their own reflections in the window.

  “I’ve had this theory for a little while now,” Otis went on, “but I wasn’t completely sure until today. Being a Storm Maker isn’t just magic, and it’s not just science. It’s both.”

  Ruby nodded, but her eyes strayed to where a flash of lightning lit the sky.

  “Maybe,” Otis continued, “the key to this whole thing is that you’re twins.”

  Daisy’s face shifted as she began to understand. “You’re thinking their abilities were split between them. So they’re more powerful when they’re together.”

  “They’re two parts of a whole,” Otis said with a nod. “The perfect blend of science and magic.”

  Neither of them was really talking to Ruby or Simon anymore. They were facing each other, their eyes bright as they exchanged theories, the answer to the mystery of Simon unfolding between them.

  “But what about…?” Daisy asked.

  “The storm?” Otis asked. “I think that was purely a reaction. But if he wants to actually channel any weather, it’s got to be the two of them together.”

  “Which is probably why they’re so young,” Daisy suggested. “Between them, they’re more like twenty-four, which makes a lot more sense. Have there never been twins before?”

  Otis shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard about. This has to be a first.”

  The rain was coming down harder now, drumming the sides of the train. The winds howled as they rolled past the many farmhouses with their windows burning orange through the dark.

  “So what does this mean?” Ruby asked, and Otis and Daisy both looked over as if they’d forgotten anyone else was there. “I mean, how does it work, exactly?”

  Daisy sat forward. “It’s kind of amazing, actually,” she said. “I’m guessing that if Simon focuses his thoughts on the physical result of the weather he wants—wind or rain, for example—and you think about the mechanics behind that particular phenomenon, and you both have the same goal in mind at the same time, then… voilà! Weather!”

  Otis smiled. “Exactly,” he said. “You could think of it like a bicycle. Simon’s powers are like a bike without a rider. It can still roll if it’s propelled by something like gravity—so, it can go flying down a hill, for example—but there’s nobody to direct it, nobody to keep it focused and controlled. Nobody to make it go.”

  Simon made a face, but Ruby sat forward. “So what am I, then?”

  “You,” Otis said, “are the one pedaling.”

  There was a long rumble of thunder outside, followed by another spark of lightning. Around them, the other passengers had their noses to the windows to watch the worsening storm, their hands cupped around their faces to see. The train continued to sway from side to side in the wind, and Daisy’s eyes sought Otis’s.

  “You don’t think…?”

  Otis shook his head, but he didn’t look certain.

  “What?” Simon asked. “London?”

  The train’s PA system crackled to life with a few coughs of static as the lightning continued outside. “Well, folks,” came the voice of the conductor, “we’ve been trying to outrun this storm, but it seems to be coming right along with us.”

  Simon and Ruby exchanged a look. If the storm was following them, that could mean only one thing: London was on the train, too. When Ruby turned to Otis, she could tell by his face that this must be true. Her heart thumped in time with the rain on the windows, and the sky was ripped open by another jag of lightning.

  “He’s here, isn’t he?” Simon asked, but nobody answered. He rubbed his hands together and stared out the window, his leg bobbing nervously. When a few seconds more had passed and still nobody said anything, he looked over at Otis. “So why don’t you go stop him?”

  “Even if I were powerful enough,” he said, his face grim, “the only chance would be to try to deflect it with some other kind of weather, and that’s way too dangerous with so many people around.”

  Beneath her feet, Ruby could feel the train’s gears shifting and slowing. But there was no train station here, no platform, and no town. In fact, there was nothing around them at all. She pulled the barometer from her pocket and saw that it was still pointing to warning. When she looked up again and her eyes met Otis’s, she understood that this was something she didn’t have to tell him. He already knew.

  “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning,” the conductor continued, “so we’re going to make a brief stop here and give this thing a chance to move on. We’re between stations, but there’s a lot of debris on the tracks, so we think it’s probably the best course of action. If everyone could just stay put for now, we’ll try to keep you updated as best we can.”

  Otis was out of his seat even before the train had finished grinding to a halt, and now Ruby shot up, too.

  “What’re you doing?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, scanning the length of the train car.

  “Otis,” Daisy said, her voice low. “Don’t.”

  But he ignored her. “Stay here,” he said, moving out into the aisle. Ruby watched the back of his gray jacket as he walked away. She was vaguely aware that Daisy was speaking to her, but she was no longer listening. Her only focus was Otis, who was almost to the end of the car, about to disappear into the next one.

  Before she could think better of it, Ruby ran after him, bumping into the edges of seats as she hurried down the narrow aisle. She nearly tripped over a stray newspaper, and an old woman gasped as she righted herself. Behind her she heard Simon shout, but she didn’t stop until she’d reached Otis, whose hand was hovering over the emergency exit button on the door that led to the gap between cars.

  “You said ‘even if I were powerful enough’ before. What did you mean by that?”

  Otis’s face sagged, and he cast a desperate glance out the window, where the storm was intensifying. Quickly, almost angrily, he lowered his face so that it was close to Ruby’s. “Ever since…” he began, then stopped and shook his head, as if trying to rid his ear of water. “Ever since the day Sophie died, I can’t make weather anymore.”

  Ruby stared at him, her throat tight. “Why not?”

  “I did everything I could to try to save her,” he said. “I used everything. Do you understand? Everything.”

  “But when we first met…” she said, her mind thick with confusion. “You made it rain.”<
br />
  He shook his head again. “It was Simon’s fever.”

  “But it can’t be,” Ruby insisted, though even as she did, she was remembering London’s threat up on the roof, the way Otis had only smiled at the idea of the Vacuum, a device that would have made any other Storm Maker tremble. She squeezed her eyes shut. “You couldn’t have…”

  “Lost it all?” he asked, a bit more gently.

  “What about the compass?”

  “I don’t know why it chose me,” Otis said. “I never could’ve imagined it would.”

  There was more thunder outside, and the wind sounded like someone banging on the door to the train. People were starting to panic now, pulling out their phones to reach loved ones or to call for help. Some were still glued to the windows, unable to look away, but others hunched low in their seats, as if that might somehow protect them.

  “It’ll pass, it’ll pass,” a man just beside her was murmuring.

  But Ruby knew it wouldn’t pass. Somewhere on this train, somewhere in the night, Rupert London was designing this storm just for them, all of it: the rocking of the wheels on the tracks and the pummeling winds, the rain and the thunder and the lightning. And for the grand finale, a tornado powerful enough to toss the train cars around like they were nothing more than toys.

  Standing there beside Otis, the one person who’d always made her feel safest, who’d always seemed so powerful and sure of himself, Ruby felt hopeless. Because now she understood that he couldn’t stop this, either, that there was nothing that could. She turned to look down the length of the train at Simon, who was twisted in his seat. He must have seen something in her face, because suddenly he was up, too, and Daisy followed, the two of them hurrying down the aisle.

  “Where was he going?” Daisy called when she was halfway there, and Ruby shook her head, confused. But when she whirled around again, she saw that Otis was gone, that he’d slipped through the metal door leading outside. Without thinking, without waiting, she jammed her fist against the red button, and the doors opened with a hiss.

  Outside there was nothing but a narrow metal platform that linked the cars together, unprotected and completely exposed to the storm. As Ruby stepped out onto it, the rain stung her eyes, and she had to hang on to one of the heavy handles to keep from being pushed off by the wind. There was a tang in the air, coppery and metallic, and Ruby pressed her lips together as she braced herself against the railing, leaning off the side of the train to get a better look. As she did, Daisy and Simon came crashing through the door, and Daisy grabbed her around the waist, anchoring her there.