The Storm Makers

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “Trying to make it snow.”

  Ruby nodded, resisting the temptation to suggest he start with rain. It was about a million degrees in the barn, but of course, it didn’t surprise her at all that Simon would skip right to snow, attempting one impossible thing on top of another.

  “It’s not going very well.”

  “No,” she agreed, holding out a flattened palm. “I guess not.”

  With a sigh, Simon broke his staring contest with the ceiling and walked over to sit on one of the bales of hay. Ruby joined him, resting her elbows on her knees.

  “Just be patient,” she said, watching as he twisted a stick of hay between two fingers. “Daisy said she’d help you.”

  “Yeah, but London said it can’t all be taught.” He threw out his hands again, like some sort of magician, setting loose a few pieces of hay. But there was still no sign of any rain; there was only the stillness of the barn, and the light footfalls of the cats in the loft above them. Simon sighed again. “Maybe it can only happen when he’s around.”

  Ruby frowned. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not any more ridiculous than any of the rest of this,” he said. “You just don’t like him.”

  “Why would I?” Ruby asked, glaring at him. “Why do you?”

  “Because,” Simon explained in a tone that made Ruby grit her teeth. “Because he chose me.”

  “He didn’t choose you.”

  “Then who?”

  Ruby opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn’t have an answer; whatever was happening to Simon was nothing short of a mystery. But the one thing she knew for certain was this: Rupert London was no fairy godmother. She was sure of it.

  “Simon,” she said finally, “he’s just using you. Did you ever think that maybe he was the one who made it rain last night, and not you?”

  Simon narrowed his eyes. “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “To make you think you have potential? To make you believe it’s all real? I have no idea. All I know is that I don’t trust him. Not at all.”

  “It was me,” Simon said under his breath. “I felt it happen.”

  Ruby sighed. She wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. It could have been Simon or it could have been London or it could have just been nature itself, a strange coincidence, a quirk of timing.

  “Fine,” she said. “But I still think he’s using you. You didn’t get to meet Otis. So I guess I can see why—”

  “It has nothing to do with Otis or anyone else,” he said, sliding off the hay bale. “London thinks I’m special. He thinks I have great potential.”

  “So does everyone else,” Ruby insisted. “So does Otis. So does Daisy. So do I.”

  Simon stood with his arms folded across his skinny chest, his eyes bright, and for a moment he was just her brother again, all the smugness stripped away. When he spoke, his voice was very small. “You do?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  “Then why does it feel like you wish all this hadn’t happened?”

  Ruby dropped her eyes, not sure what to say to that. He was right; she did wish this had never happened. The enormity of it all didn’t feel magical or dazzling. At least not to her. These people showing up at the farm, setting fire to the fields, capturing weather in jars like it was something that could be controlled, like it was some kind of weapon—it frightened her.

  They were both silent for a moment, and then Simon began to walk toward the double doors at the other end of the barn.

  “Simon,” she called out, and he paused. “You did it once. You’ll do it again.”

  He squared his shoulders, but didn’t turn around. “Of course I will,” he said, his voice drifting back over his shoulder. “London said so.”

  They didn’t see each other again until dinnertime, though Ruby guessed Simon probably spent the afternoon off in one of the fields, trying to coax a hailstorm out of the sky. When he slid into his seat at the table, he looked pale and tired, and the hint of arrogance she’d seen earlier had disappeared again. Her eyes slid over to the window, where even this late in the day the heat still hung over the cornfields like gauze, making everything wavy and indistinct. It wasn’t hard to guess that he’d been unsuccessful.

  As she walked over with the last of the dishes, Mom grabbed an envelope from the pile of mail on the edge of the kitchen counter and dropped it in front of Simon. “This came for you earlier,” she said. “Who do you know in downtown Chicago?”

  Simon flicked his eyes over to Ruby, who craned her neck to see what was on the envelope. The address was handwritten in elegant cursive, and in the corner where the return address was supposed to be, there was only a small logo of a storm cloud, the same one she’d seen on the back of London’s business card.

  “Can I be excused?” Simon asked, and without waiting for an answer, he shoved the envelope in his back pocket and sprang up from his chair, startling the dogs as he hurried out of the kitchen. Mom stared after him with a baffled look, and Ruby studied her plate intently.

  “I bet I know,” Dad said, leaning back in his chair, and Ruby’s stomach tightened with worry. But he only grinned. “I bet he’s got a girlfriend.”

  “If he does,” Mom said, shaking her head from side to side, “then she deserves some kind of medal. That kid is getting weirder and weirder.”

  Ruby let out a long breath. “You have no idea.”

  When she found him in his room later, Simon was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, which was littered with dirty socks and baseball equipment. The envelope was lying on the rug beside him, jagged at the top where it had been torn, and Simon was busy twirling a finger at the floor, as if drawing circles in the air.

  “Tornado?” Ruby asked, and he smiled sheepishly.

  “No luck.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing,” she said. “Mom doesn’t even allow the kittens in the house. I don’t think she’d be too happy about a tornado.” She bent to hand him a plate covered in tinfoil, then nudged a baseball mitt aside with her toe so that she could sit down beside him. “So what was it?”

  He molded the foil into a little ball, then tossed it into the garbage can near his desk—a perfect shot. “See for yourself.”

  Ruby pulled the envelope closer, surprised at the weight of it. When she turned it upside down, a small silver pin in the shape of a storm cloud fell into her palm.

  “It’s from London,” Simon said, a defensive note to his voice. He held up a small card lined with neat handwriting, the same emblem at the very top of the page. “This is what you’re supposed to wear,” he said, then added, “if you’re a Storm Maker.”

  Ruby put the pin gently back into the envelope, then handed it over to Simon. Something about the gift unnerved her. “Lucky you,” she said, trying to keep her voice neutral.

  But if Simon noticed the edge to her words, he said nothing. He just turned back to the plate of cold chicken in front of him. And so after a moment, Ruby stood to go, leaving him there on his own, attempting to conjure tornadoes out of thin air.

  sixteen

  AT DAISY’S THE NEXT MORNING, Ruby was unable to sit still. She wandered around the edges of the room, poking through the boxes of rusted equipment, while Simon lay back on the purple couch, droning on about his weather-making difficulties like a patient in a therapist’s office. From the green couch, Daisy was frowning.

  “Not even a few drops?” she asked. “Maybe some wind?”

  Simon shook his head, and Ruby rolled her eyes.

  “We’re in the middle of a drought,” she said. “Can’t we just blame him for that?”

  Daisy rose from the couch and picked up a teapot, which had been boiling on top of what looked like a regular coaster.

  Ruby took the opportunity to peek at the barometer, keeping one hand cupped around it as she drew it from her pocket. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t shared it with Simon yet, but it reminded her of
Otis, and there was something reassuring in that. For once, Ruby wanted something for herself. Simon could have his pin from London; this was better.

  Most of the time, there was nothing to see, anyway. Pretty much whenever Ruby examined it, the needle pointed to very dry, which was hardly a surprise. But right now, she saw that it was angled toward unstable. She glanced around the room, then rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, as if testing the floor. But it was the same as the ground was anywhere: steady and unchanging.

  She slipped the barometer back into her pocket.

  “I’m afraid the drought isn’t you,” Daisy was saying as she poured a cup of tea. “I’m pretty sure that it’s…”

  “What?” Simon asked.

  Daisy bit her lip. “I just heard they’re working on it down at headquarters.”

  Ruby made a face. “Yeah, well, maybe if they knew what they were doing down there, all these farmers wouldn’t be losing their crops.”

  “Ruby,” Simon warned, but Daisy just waved a hand as she emptied the pot of tea into the last mug.

  “I don’t disagree,” she said. “It’s not the most well-run place at the moment.”

  “Because London’s in charge?” Ruby suggested, ignoring the dark look Simon shot her way.

  Daisy just sat back down with her mug in her hand and didn’t answer. After a moment, she turned back to Simon, leaning forward as if she was about to say something. But just as suddenly, she froze, her mouth falling open and her face going abruptly pale.

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked quietly, and Simon followed her eyes down to his shirt, where the little storm cloud glinted under the lights strung from the ceiling.

  “London sent it to me,” he said proudly, puffing out his chest to show it off. “It came in the mail yesterday. It’s a Storm Maker thing, I guess.” He paused, his brow furrowed. “Hey, shouldn’t you have one, too?”

  For a long moment, Daisy said nothing, though her eyes were still caught on the pin. The color had risen to her cheeks, and she looked so feverish, so completely stricken, that Ruby sat forward to ask whether she was okay. But before she had a chance to say the words, there came a rattling sound from above.

  It started out quietly, like a tinkling of bells, and then grew more insistent, until Ruby could feel it beneath her feet as well: The earth was moving.

  All at once, everything seemed to be happening both very fast and very slow. Ruby’s eyes met Simon’s from across the room, and she saw the same panic that must have been evident in her own wild glance. But it took another few fleeting seconds for it to really register, the word flashing through her head like an alarm—earthquake! earthquake!—before she slid off the couch and onto the ground, scraping her knees as she was jolted sideways by the force of it.

  Above her, Daisy was still sitting absolutely still, her face frighteningly blank, but Simon had dropped down as well, both of them trying to hold on to something as the floor shifted this way and that. The jars lining the shelves were providing a kind of manic background music, clanging and singing, until finally they began to fall. As each one shattered, the tiny bits of weather inside disappeared in puffs of mist.

  The world tilted, the radar screens went dark, and the refrigerator shimmied across the floor. Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty. It felt like a lifetime and no time at all. Ruby was thrown sideways into the table, and her fingers scrabbled uselessly against the smooth concrete floor as she tried to steady herself. One of the TV screens was wrenched from the wall with an awful ripping sound, and it crashed to the ground near Simon’s leg, the metal frame splintering.

  The lights went out and the thick walls of the basement room seemed to groan and heave. Ruby closed her eyes and ducked her head against the debris that rained down around her, the weather vanes and the compasses, the barometers and the funnels, each of them turned into tiny weapons. The floor was still rolling beneath her, and she tucked herself against the couch, which had slid toward her despite its bulk. Then she closed her eyes, held her breath, and waited.

  Even when it was over, even when the world had righted itself again, Ruby stayed curled up beside the couch. When you get off a boat, you can still feel the waves beneath your feet, and it was like that now in the darkened basement. It was an odd sensation, not to trust the very floor on which she stood, but there it was.

  Simon’s footsteps near her head sent shock waves through her; she felt like a tuning fork, hyperaware of motion and noise. She lifted her head to see his outstretched hand, and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet again. A generator must have kicked in, because the lights flickered back to life, so she was able to survey the damage; broken glass and fallen objects and cracks in the walls, some as fine as spiderwebs, others big enough to reach inside.

  When her gaze finally fell on Daisy, it was to find her sitting with the same stunned expression she’d worn before the earthquake.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, her face ghostly pale. “I’m really sorry.”

  “We should get outside,” Simon said. “In case there’s an aftershock.”

  Daisy rose to her feet, but she was shaking her head. “There won’t be,” she said. “That was my fault. But we should still get out of here, in case anything’s unstable.”

  Ruby stared at her. No matter what rules had changed in the past days, no matter what she’d already seen, it was impossible to believe that this tiny blond woman could have just made the earth move so violently.

  “That was you?” Simon asked, his mouth open, and despite the scrapes on his hands and the bruise blooming on his knee, Ruby could detect a note of admiration in his voice.

  But Daisy didn’t respond. She stood beside the ladder and waited for them to climb up first, and when they were all at the top she paused, gazing down at the broken room below before closing the hatch. Simon flipped the light switch in the garage, and they could see that there were some overturned oil cans and a few fallen tools, but the damage was mostly confined to the basement.

  Daisy looked visibly relieved. “I’m glad we were underground,” she said, walking over to the side door. “It would’ve been much worse if I’d been up here.”

  Ruby followed closely behind, eager to get outside and away from anything that could fall on her. Despite what Daisy had said, she still didn’t quite trust that these moments of calm wouldn’t give way to more shaking.

  “What happened?” she asked when they were all three standing in the daylight again, the sky a blue so bright that it made them squint. Daisy dropped down heavily on the grass that bordered the driveway, and Ruby and Simon joined her. The three of them sat cross-legged, as if ready for a picnic, their hands still trembling and their chins tilted skyward to soak up the blinding sun.

  “I’m sorry,” Daisy said again. “That shouldn’t have happened. It’s just—”

  “Reactionary weather,” Simon supplied.

  “Right,” she said. “My specialty is earthquakes.”

  Ruby couldn’t help laughing as she pictured the needle on the barometer: unstable. “You don’t say.”

  “When that kind of thing happens, when the weather is a result of something else—emotions or illness, stuff like that—it goes right to your default mode,” she said. “So for me, if I don’t keep a lid on what I’m feeling—boom. The ground moves.”

  Simon shook his head. “Wow.”

  “But I’m supposed to know how to keep it under control,” she said. “You’re not supposed to perform any kind of major weather movements at all, unless it’s sanctioned by MOSS or it’s some kind of emergency, or else you can get in trouble. It’s just that I’m out of practice, and when I saw that pin…”

  Ruby glanced over at Simon’s shirt, but he’d clapped a hand over the little storm cloud. Daisy rubbed her forehead. The color had returned to her cheeks, but her eyes were too bright and somehow very far away.

  “I stopped wearing mine a long time ago,” she said. “After my dad died.”

  “
How come?” Simon asked.

  “It’s the official emblem of the Society, but it just didn’t mean the same thing once he was gone. And after a while, I guess I couldn’t bear it.”

  Ruby sat forward, waiting for her to continue.

  “My dad was a Storm Maker, too,” Daisy said quietly. “It’s extremely rare to have two in one family; there’ve only ever been a few instances of it. He’s the one who taught me all this.” She waved a hand at the garage, indicating the cars and tools beyond. “And most of those gadgets downstairs were his. He always loved working with metal, and when he first flared up and discovered he had a gift for conjuring storm clouds, he made himself a pin like that.”

  Simon moved his hand and held the pin away from his shirt, examining the contours of the metal, the rounded edges of the cloud and the little bolt of lightning that stretched beneath it.

  “When he was chosen as Chairman—”

  “What?” Simon asked, looking up. “Your dad was Chairman?”

  Daisy nodded.

  “Before London?” Ruby asked.

  “Yes, right before,” she said. “He made that pin the official emblem of the Society. Every new Storm Maker gets one in a ceremony.”

  “How come I didn’t get a ceremony?” Simon asked, but Ruby was far more interested in hearing about Daisy’s dad.

  “What happened to him?” Ruby asked.

  Daisy brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, suddenly looking very young. “He died,” she said simply. “Four years ago, he had a heart attack. It was right after one of the big storms down on the coast. Hurricane season is always really stressful, and we took a lot of hits that year.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ruby said. “About your dad, I mean.”

  Daisy gave her a watery smile. “Thank you,” she said. “I was working at headquarters at the time. I’d worked my way up to Associate Director of Land Movement, but I left after that. I had to get away from it all. So I came up here to take over the garage, which is what my dad had always wanted to do when he retired.”