The Storm Makers

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Where the train had stopped, the track was slightly curved, so when she swept her gaze left and then right, she could make out both ends of it. Her eyes strained in the darkness to search for Otis; she knew somehow that he would be outside rather than in.

  But he was nowhere in sight. The sky flared with lightning again, reflecting brightly off the metal cars of the train, and in that brief moment of illumination, Ruby saw something. All the way down, hanging off the last car of the train, was a silhouette that she would have known anywhere.

  She stepped back, half falling into Daisy, gasping and sputtering.

  “What?” Simon asked, his eyes filled with worry. “Did you see him?”

  Ruby managed to nod, and Daisy looked relieved. “Where is he?”

  “Not Otis,” she said. “London.”

  They were all soaking wet now, and Simon’s hair was in his eyes, beads of rain running down his face. But he was squinting out into the darkness, his eyes narrow. After a moment, he froze, his whole body going still.

  “There,” he said, raising a hand to point. “There he is.”

  Ruby saw him then, a tiny figure against the yawning landscape, bent against the wind and rain, swallowed up by the blackness as he made a slow trek away from the train. It was Otis.

  Simon’s eyes were wide. “Is he leaving us?”

  “No,” Ruby whispered, the word nearly swallowed up by the wind. Because in all the confusion, she was certain of only one thing: that Otis would never leave them. Not now. Not like this. There had to be another reason he was out there, alone and unprotected, forging ahead through the gathering winds.

  “Then what?” Simon yelled. “What do we do?”

  “We have to stop him,” she said, casting about for something to help, some kind of answer. But her mind felt as blurry as the rain-soaked windows, slow and fumbling and scared.

  “He’ll be fine,” Daisy was saying behind her. “We should get you two back inside. Otis can protect himself.”

  Ruby whipped around. “No, he can’t,” she said, and Daisy stared back at her in confusion. “He can’t make any weather. Not anymore.”

  A crash of thunder shook the ground, and lightning whitened the sky again. Daisy was shaking her head, unable to process this, or not wanting to. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, and Ruby turned back to the thickness of the night before them.

  “We have to do something,” she said again. “We have to stop him.”

  “I don’t think we can,” Daisy said, her voice panicky. “I don’t think he’d stop for anything. Not unless something he cared about got in the way.”

  Ruby spun around again, stricken by the words, and Daisy’s face went white as she realized what she said. Because they knew; they both knew.

  There were only two things Rupert London had ever cared about.

  And one of them was out there in the storm.

  thirty-three

  RUBY HAD NO IDEA how long she’d been standing there—struck motionless at the sight of Otis—when the door behind them was heaved open, a sound as deep as the thunder, but startlingly close. A man in a leather jacket poked his head out, the wind turning his long hair wild.

  “Conductor’s saying the tornado is almost here,” he yelled over the noise of the storm. “Some people in the last car spotted the funnel. Everyone’s supposed to get inside and stay down.”

  His eyes raked the horizon, but there was nothing out there, no safe place, no hiding spots. There was only the train, and the storm, and the land all around it.

  And Otis, a lone figure hidden in the dark.

  “Come on,” the man said, jerking his head toward the inside of the train. But not one of them moved, not Daisy or Simon or Ruby, and after a moment the man shook his head at them, as if to say there wasn’t much more he could do, and then withdrew back into the light of the car.

  Out in the blackness, Otis was still pushing forward. Ruby watched numbly, helpless to do anything. She was almost afraid to pull her eyes away, not wanting to lose sight of him, as if it were that simple to keep him safe. He had one hand on his head, and she realized it was to pin down his hat. Something about this smallest of gestures cracked at her heart, and she swallowed the sob that rose in her throat. Leaning out again, she faced toward the end of the train where London was perched, and it was then that she saw the man had been right.

  There, not a hundred yards away, was a tornado. Even in the dark, its shape was clear, a roiling funnel of wind and air and debris, narrow as a column of smoke moving fast across the land. Ruby felt as if she were watching it from very far away, and there was something almost beautiful about it, the way it danced across the fields like a puppet on a string.

  They watched, spellbound, as it began to swallow everything in its path, snapping a tree in half like a twig, pulling up road signs and spitting out crops. And all this time, Otis continued to move toward it with a sort of gritty determination, bowed against the powerful winds, blown back again and again.

  The door to the train flew open just for a moment before slamming shut again, and in that split second, they could hear screams from inside. Beside her, Simon cupped his hands around his mouth in a wordless shout, but this had no bearing on Otis, who continued to press on toward the heart of the storm.

  It was like something out of The Wizard of Oz, Ruby thought as she watched. She’d always skipped the parts in black-and-white, moving straight on to the scenes in color, but here it was now before them: a twister in shades of gray. Only here, there was no Oz. Here, if a tornado took you, there was no second act to the story.

  When Ruby turned around again, Daisy was no longer there, and she started to cry out, but Simon jerked his head toward the end of the train. Daisy had gone to find London.

  The sky had turned a greenish black, and the air was full of wreckage. As Ruby looked on, her hands braced on the railing, she saw a bicycle go pinwheeling through the air. End over end it spun, carried on the edges of the funnel, and a tiny kernel of thought worked its way through her as it flew toward Otis.

  You, he’d said, are the one pedaling.

  There was no time to do anything but stir her muddled mind into action, and in the moment that the bike was aloft, she stared it down. She thought about velocity and she thought about torque. She thought about distance and weight and time. She could only hope Simon was thinking, too, his mind turned to whatever thoughts had propelled London back on the roof, or whatever had made it rain that night in the field.

  In the space of an instant, she channeled all her energy in the direction of the bike, and just as she was convinced it was going to hit Otis, a force of metal and wind that she didn’t want to imagine, it was blown off course, cast sharply to the left, missing him by mere feet.

  Ruby turned to Simon, and his expression echoed hers: It was somewhere between surprise and relief. Their thoughts had matched exactly, and together they’d managed to steer a bicycle as deadly as a weapon.

  It had worked.

  Out in the field, Ruby saw Otis hesitate—just briefly—and pivot in their direction. Even with everything spiraling around him, even in spite of the danger, Ruby had a feeling he knew what had happened. She jumped up and down, waving her arms frantically, trying to tell him to come back. But he was already in motion again, taking one heavy step at a time, looking frail against the might of the twister.

  Ruby knew what he was trying to do. If Otis were to sacrifice himself, London might stop. It might prove to him that even if he no longer cared about people in general, there was still a part of him that cared for his old friend. Especially if his old friend was trying to make up for something that happened years ago, losing himself in the way that London’s sister had been lost.

  But it wasn’t working—clearly it wasn’t working—so why didn’t he come back? Was he really planning to walk straight into the tornado for nothing? Ruby fought back tears, and before she had a chance to think it through, she was ducking beneath the r
ailing on the platform.

  Her feet hit the ground hard, sending a jolt up her spine, but she began to run anyway. On the train they’d been standing between two cars, which had given them more protection than she’d realized, because here in the open she felt powerless against the pull of the wind, which tugged at her like taffy, boxed at her as she stumbled, sent her skidding to her knees.

  Her ears were filled with a rush of noise and something hit her arm, leaving a gash the length of a pencil. She staggered to her feet, only to get knocked back down again, and she realized—too late—that this had been a mistake. With great effort, she pulled herself forward, shouting for Otis, though she knew he couldn’t hear. It was hard to see with all the debris in the air, but through slitted eyes she watched as his hat was carried away, disappearing into the storm.

  Ruby tried to stand, wanted to go after it, but the thrashing wind hammered her down into the ground again, harder this time, and she felt the air go rushing out of her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling for breath, wishing she’d stayed on the train, wishing Otis had stayed on the train, wishing they were anywhere but here, wishing and wishing and wishing until it all fell away, and the world faded from gray to black.

  When she opened her eyes again, she wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but Simon was beside her. He put a hand on her arm, his face etched with worry, and she let out a ragged breath, trying to focus her eyes, to slow the dizzying spin of her head.

  Her first thought, strangely, was of the barometer. She propped herself up on her elbows, ignoring the pain in her arm as she fished through her pocket for the little instrument. Simon peered down as well, the two of them squinting through the stinging wind to read what it said. And as they looked on together, the arrow whirled beneath the glass, breaking its hold on the word warning and making three frantic circles before stopping solidly on change.

  Ruby sucked in a breath, her heart thumping, and Simon shielded his eyes to look back toward the train, scanning the swirling darkness for answers.

  They were still frozen there like that when, all at once, everything went still.

  There was confusion on Simon’s face as the winds died around them with unnatural speed. The twister slowed, like the deflating of a balloon, before falling entirely flat, the world abruptly going silent again.

  The absence of the wind was loud in their ears as Simon helped Ruby sit up. Her head was still spinning and the cut on her arm had a heartbeat of its own, but she was too preoccupied to notice, her eyes searching the place where the tornado had come and gone with dizzying speed.

  “What do you think happened?” Simon asked, glancing back at the train.

  But she didn’t answer.

  Because there, limping toward them, was Otis. His head was now bare, and his jacket hung from his thin frame in tatters. There was a cut above his left eye and no sign of his glasses, and there was a bloodstain just below the torn knee of his pants. But he was smiling at them, his face marked by that familiar grin of his, and once Simon helped her to her feet, Ruby stumbled over and threw her arms around him.

  “That was a really stupid thing you did,” Otis said, but she could hear the smile in his voice. “You could have been killed. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You shouldn’t have, either,” Daisy said as she came up behind them, and Ruby stepped aside, relieved to see her, too. “You, of all people, should know what it’s like to watch someone you…”

  Otis tilted his head to one side. “Someone you…?”

  “Care about,” Daisy said angrily. “You should know how scary it is to watch someone you care about walk into a storm.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his face softening. He walked over and put an arm around her thin shoulders, and to Ruby’s surprise, Daisy—the woman who refused to cry—buried her face in his shirt. Otis simply stood there like that, his long arm encircling her tiny frame, and for a moment, it was as if the twins weren’t there at all.

  But then Daisy coughed and backed away, rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Just promise me one thing.”

  “That I won’t do it again?” he said, and she scowled at him.

  “No, that you’ll let me come along next time,” she said, then turned to Simon and Ruby. “And you guys, too. I hate that everyone’s running into tornadoes without me.”

  Otis dabbed at the cut above his eye. “Where were you?”

  “On my way to stop London,” she said, gesturing at the train behind her. “But Ruby beat me to it.”

  Ruby stared at her. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did,” Daisy said. “Both of you did.”

  “How?” Simon asked.

  “By the time I got down there, he’d stopped it,” she said. “He was just standing there, staring out at where Ruby had been knocked down, watching you trying to wake her up.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Otis bowed his head. “It was still Sophie, in the end,” he said quietly. “The thing he cared about most.”

  “I think it was more than that,” Daisy said, reaching out to take Otis’s hand, holding it between her two smaller ones. “I think it was you, too.”

  Otis said nothing in return, though his eyes were damp. He only lifted his chin to look out beyond the train, where the tracks unfurled behind it like a ribbon. When the rest of them turned to follow his gaze, they saw a figure picking his way along the edge. As they watched, it grew smaller and smaller, until it was nothing but a dark speck on the horizon.

  thirty-four

  THE STARS WERE OUT by the time they neared the farm. Other than the sweep of their headlights, the world was wrapped in navy darkness, the acres of farmland quiet in the night. They were all silent as Daisy turned into the long gravel drive leading up to the house.

  Earlier, after the storm had passed and the paramedics had arrived to attend to the passengers—bandaging Ruby’s arm and patching the cut above Otis’s eye—Simon had been the one to refuse to get back on the train.

  “There’s no way,” he’d said, his arms folded. The train itself had actually weathered the storm fairly well, though Ruby knew that wouldn’t have been the case if they’d stayed on board. Still, other than a few broken windows and dents in the metal siding, it was upright and intact, and what more could you ask for after such a close brush with a tornado?

  But a policeman had offered to give them a lift into the nearest town, where they’d rented an old car. Daisy insisted on driving, muttering about the mileage and horsepower the whole way. She couldn’t resist testing the limits of the little sedan, gunning the engine and then slamming on the brakes, jerking them around so much that Ruby started to think the train might have been the better option after all. But once they’d hit the miles of pin-straight roads near the farm, she’d eased up, coasting on the long stretches of asphalt between fields.

  Now they could see that the lights were on in the kitchen, which seemed to Ruby like the beacon of a lighthouse, calling them home after a day spent lost at sea. Daisy slowed the car near the barn, far enough away from the house that if Mom or Dad looked out the window, they would think it was Ben’s mom dropping the twins off early.

  “Well,” Daisy said, leaning back against her seat. When she turned off the car, the ticking of the engine was loud in the silence. Neither Simon nor Ruby moved to unfasten their seat belts. They all just sat there, watching the minutes pass on the dashboard clock.

  Eventually, Otis reached over and opened his door. Ruby blinked as the interior lights went on. Daisy stepped outside, too, and after a moment so did the twins, pressing their doors shut quietly behind them. They all moved around to the hood of the car.

  “Cheer up,” Otis said, smiling at their long faces. “This isn’t good-bye. Daisy will be coming down to headquarters a lot—”

  “A lot,” she agreed with a grin.

  “And she’ll bring you along as often as you’d like,” Otis continued. “And we’ll figure out some new things to show y
ou, since you seem to have that wind gust down pretty well at this point.”

  Ruby nodded, though somehow, this didn’t seem like enough. As if she’d read her mind, Daisy cleared her throat. “And in between visits, we’ll keep working over at the garage,” she offered. “You never know when you might need to whip up a decent snowstorm.”

  Ruby glanced over at Simon, expecting him to be thrilled at this, but his face was solemn as he ducked his head, toeing at the gravel on the ground. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “I mean, this was all kind of a lot.”

  “What was?” Daisy asked.

  “Being a Storm Maker.”

  Otis smiled. “You’re always going to be a Storm Maker,” he said. “Both of you. Storm Makers with a gift for wind-making, from the looks of it. And I’m afraid there’s not much we can do to change that. But hopefully it won’t always be like today.”

  “Hopefully?” Ruby asked, looking up.

  “Rupert’s gone for the moment,” Otis said. “And we’ll get the Society back in order, fix what we can, reverse some of the damage that he’s done. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over. Or that he won’t come back.”

  Ruby swallowed hard. “What happens if he does?”

  “Then we’ll just have to be ready again, won’t we?” Otis said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “All of us.”

  Daisy looked from one to the other. “But he’s gone for now,” she said, her voice light. “Which means we can get back to normal.”

  Simon seemed relieved at this. “Like baseball.”