The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  This time the image was not a photo, but a drawing. Cage tilted his head to examine it.

  “This is the new plan. We've expanded. So we've moved to a new location. Also, the hope is that the new location won't take quite the hit that this last one did.” Radnor looked around the room again as though searching for a team of superheroes that he just knew wasn’t there. “We need a redesign. Old guard, hands up again. Newbies, I want you to look at them. When they tell you something won’t work, ask them why. And listen.”

  He paused for only a moment. “Now newbies, hands up again. Old guard, I want you to listen when they give you new ideas. We can't dismiss stuff just because we don't think it will work. We need ideas.” He emphasized each word in the last sentence.

  There was nothing like coming into a project in crisis, Cage thought. He could have gotten a job where he wore a suit and showed up at an office building every day. But he wouldn’t have been with his sister, and honestly, what good biology jobs existed in office buildings? At best, he would have been wearing a lab coat.

  He and Joule had opted for this. No office buildings, just temp trailers like this, field work that was plausibly backbreaking. He didn't really know what to expect.

  Radnor was still waving his hands around. “We need to think outside of the box!”

  Cage watched as Joule’s glance flicked toward him. She managed not to roll her eyes, but he could still see the thoughts in her head. Did he really just say “outside of the box”?

  Cage nodded that yes, Radnor had. But the man was speaking—or booming—again, and they needed to pay attention.

  “The goal is to take today to examine the old site.” Radnor gestured for emphasis, and Cage once again sipped the coffee in front of him. His had cream and sugar. Next to him, he could smell that Joule’s version was black. Seemed fitting.

  “I want us to get as much as we can out of today, though you will be able to come back and re-examine this site later if you need to. This building—” He pointed up over his head, “—will remain here and we'll be erecting another like it, but larger—” He smirked as though he understood that he’d been whacking his new employees with his elbows as he paced around. “For today, I want all hands on deck and everyone talking. Out we go!”

  As Radnor marched down the short aisle, he blocked the light again. Setting his clicker on the last table and carrying nothing in his hands, he hollered to them all. “Leave your laptops but bring your phones. Take pictures and make copious notes.”

  He threw the door open, letting in the sunlight as he led the way outside. As Cage pushed past him with the growing crowd, he heard the man mutter, “We’re going to need them.”

  3

  Joule stood in the field simply surveying both the work and the damage in front of her. She was a newbie—as it had been clearly declared—and she didn’t have anything of value to add yet.

  She'd have sweat dripping down her spine in another hour or two. It wasn’t just hot in Alabama, the air was heavy and thick. She’d had three days to learn to dress better, but she’d opted for “first day at the new job” clothes: new khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, and her boots.

  Sarah, in her overalls, clearly had no such compunction. Though Sarah was a recent grad from another school where Helio Systems recruited heavily, she’d grown up nearby. Joule should have listened when her roomie had looked at the nicely pressed shirt and said, “That might melt before noon.”

  Radnor had sent them all emails requesting they be here at eight a.m.. And while, right now, the sun was not fully overhead yet, the day was already far more humid than Joule was used to. Each time she inhaled, she felt the extra weight of the air and resented the extra energy just to breathe. Tonight she would shower in cold water, she told herself. Tomorrow, she would dress smarter.

  The group trekked out into the middle of the open field, a not-short distance from the tiny, temporary building with its window-unit air conditioning chugging along in the background. As she high stepped forward, she missed the AC already.

  Looking around, she noticed Radnor's newbies were sticking together, many of them wearing boots as clearly un-broken-in as hers were. She and Sarah and Cage and Deveron were still clustered tightly together and Joule wondered if some of the other little gatherings that had formed might also be roommates.

  As they approached the edge of the lot, Joule’s eyes flicked back and forth. The pale blue footers jutted from the ground as if escaping their graves. Though some of them were still straight, most had been grotesquely bent and twisted.

  What did this? Was it the same thing that had collapsed just half the store she’d seen the on the way back from getting groceries? The site had been cleared since the tornado, and the permanent damage was the only thing that still showed.

  She raised her hand, though she hated being the center of attention. Radnor instantly hit her with, “You don’t have to raise your hand, Mazur.”

  She nodded, wondering how he was going to distinguish her from her brother if he was using last names, but now wasn’t the time to ask.

  “What was the rating on the tornado that went through here? The one just outside Montgomery was F6.”

  “There’s no such thing as F6,” one of the newbies corrected from the other side of the gathering, as if she were ill-informed.

  Joule raised one eyebrow at him, but didn’t get any further as Sarah jumped in. “The Montgomery tornado was the first one the experts are dubbing F6 officially, though they aren’t sure the new rating will take. They’ve discussed extending the scale for going on ten years.”

  “Thank you, Carter,” Radnor bellowed. His voice didn’t seem to have a setting other than “booming.” “The one here was an F3.”

  “And it still did this?” Cage asked from right beside her. Thank God for a good twin brother, she thought as he pulled the focus to himself.

  “It was a new design,” Radnor reminded them. He had told them that before they moved out here, even before they graduated. She assumed all the other newbies had heard much the same thing.

  “New designs are always amazing until they’re tested,” he sighed and went on to add that he was grateful the design had been tested before they fully built the site. “But if it was going to fail, we want it to fail early and hard. Before too much could be lost. ”

  “Then it was a success,” Deveron whispered wryly next to her, and Joule fought the grin that pressed at her face.

  That was an interesting way of looking at it. She pushed her expression back to neutral and saw that only Sarah remained stone-faced, giving nothing away.

  “All right, we need another division!” Radnor announced, his pink Helio Systems Technologies polo shirt now shining even brighter in the sunlight. His jeans had splotches of white, as though he had painted his home in them at some point previously and his stained boots had shoelaces that showed their age.

  “Environmental team over here!” He pointed, and Joule watched as both Cage and Sarah slowly stepped away.

  “Engineering over here!”

  She high-stepped through the grass to join the second cluster and noticed that, within each group, the old guard and new guard were fairly well mixed.

  “Project managers to the back,” he boomed. “Y'all are going to fan out. I want you walking back and forth between the Enviro and Enge teams. Listen in on everything! Record whatever you need to. Each manager needs to talk to each team member at some point today. Everybody's job is to solve what went wrong. We meet again tomorrow morning at the new site to discuss what new ideas we have.”

  And with that, he dropped his hands to his side and looked at them as if to say “Get to it!”

  Joule and Deveron headed toward one end of the field and, as they got closer to the last of the pale blue metal pieces, she noticed several of the old guard were moving in.

  “Brad Barker.” One of the guys held out his hand, and Joule took that moment to look at his feet. Yes, old boots. Radnor's old guard.r />
  “Joule Mazur.” She held out her hand in return and she let Deveron introduce himself as two more of the old guard came up behind Brad.

  “Saskia Kaczmarek,” the woman said, her fine features looking as old-school European as her name.

  The other woman was clearly Indian. “Chithra Murasawa.”

  Radnor hadn’t subjected them to the dreaded ice-breaker games and, while Joule had appreciated not having to “stand up and tell us a little bit about yourself,” she now thought it would have been nice to recognize faces. She filed the ones she had.

  It was Chithra who led the way. “I want to stand to the end and look down the line. Let’s see what we all see.”

  Joule followed along. Helio had promised her on-the-job training, but Radnor had basically just thrown them all out into the field as though he were rolling a big bag of dice.

  “You can see the path the tornado took. Look,” Saskia added. Joule nodded along, tipping her head first one way then the other.

  Before Chithra asked, What are you looking at? she filled in, “The beams are not all bent the same way, which makes sense, because a tornado has varying wind speeds and directions. But it's interesting to me that there doesn't seem to be a real pattern. Some of the structure is still standing, even in the middle of the path.”

  She held one hand up along her sight line. The damage provided an odd picture. “What was different about those beams?”

  “Let's go find out,” Chithra suggested, and she began marching through the field, seeming to know the others in their new little group would fall in behind her.

  Joule followed along, aware that she was the newest of the new kids. Sarah had the advantage of having grown up around here and being smart enough not to wear clothing that would stick to her. Joule plucked at her shirt, letting air under the fabric. Her only consolation was that a handful of others were also marked by their shiny new boots and too-warm clothing.

  They trekked the tornado’s path, passing other small clusters of their teammates. Joule saw Cage in the distance, not looking at pylons but taking pictures of the space between. His “Enviro Team” was likely getting pictures of endangered flowers or lizards or something.

  When her little group arrived at the one beam that was most upright in the middle of the path, they instantly quieted and took a moment to examine it. But there were no obvious answers.

  Damn, if it didn't feel like Day One. She looked behind her at the horizon and the wispy white clouds that danced in the sky. Good. Nothing was bearing down on her.

  Yet.

  4

  “Did you get yours?” Joule held her phone up, tipping it back and forth to catch her brother's attention.

  Her first paycheck from Helio Systems Tech had been deposited into her account. She’d had paychecks before, but nothing like this—nothing that wasn't accompanied by pulling wadded bills out of her apron pockets at the end of a shift waiting tables.

  “I want Italian,” she said. “Good Italian.”

  Cage wasn’t paying attention as he tapped hurriedly at his phone, pulling up his own bank account. “Got it.”

  It had taken three weeks to see their first paycheck. Between doing the first rounds of work and then waiting for the paycheck cycle to finish, she didn't feel quite so new anymore. Some of the shine had rubbed off, surely.

  They'd spent a week in small teams, designing new pylons. The second assignment was testing what they’d designed. When their work made it through initial testing, the other teams were brought in to try to squash their victory.

  Cage and the environmental teams had completed new surveys of both the old site and the new one. He’d complained that some of the work was a direct repeat, but Sarah had pointed out that it had to be redone. Getting it wrong again would mean starting all over. Mostly, it seemed the Enviro teams trashed the new designs for violating all kinds of environmental norms. There was nothing quite like her own brother questioning all her work.

  He’d asked her in jest, at one point, “How much paint does a woodland creature have to ingest before we have feral mutant hamsters on our hands?”

  She’d stared at him then, not caring that both teams were watching them. “That’s not funny.”

  It was Sarah who chimed in, “I heard there a was a place outside Chicago that had mutant dogs a while back… that actually killed some people—”

  Joule and Cage stared only at each other. They stayed silent in the eye of the conversation that swirled around them.

  “They got rid of them. Didn’t someone make a video about how to kill them?” Mitch had asked. He was old guard and definitely not the person Joule would have guessed would be up to speed on that story. He was also smarter that the next four of them put together. She waited for him to make a comment she couldn’t quite wriggle out of.

  “Yeah,” Sarah said, magically hauling the conversation back around without realizing it. “Your sister’s right. We could get dangerous feral hamsters, and it’s not funny.” But then she’d turned her gaze to Mitch. “So how much paint would it take?”

  Now Cage pocketed his phone, looking at his sister with a warning in his eyes. “Around here, Italian only means pizza. And even that is only so-so.”

  He was right, the others agreed. The pizza was barely passable.

  “But I really want pasta,” Joule moaned. “I want Chicken Piccata. And green beans sauteed in garlic.”

  She felt the need for green veggies in her whole body, and if she had Mexican or barbecue one more time, she was going to lose her mind. Though both seemed to be specialties of the area, Joule was already burning out on them.

  “What we need is to start cooking for ourselves more,” her brother said, as though they needed to hone kitchen skills.

  But the twins knew enough. Their parents had made sure that they each knew how to make a variety of basic meals. They’d shared an apartment over the summers, and they'd stayed with their grandfather for a while during a long break and cooked for him. But now Joule was realizing it had never become an everyday skill for them.

  “Yes, we do,” she agreed as she stepped beside their nearly-empty fridge and opened it as if to present evidence. “But today is not that day.”

  “We're taking Sarah and Deveron with us?” her brother asked as she pushed the fridge door shut to an unsatisfying thwack.

  “Well, first we have to find an Italian place. And then, yes. We should also invite Mitch and Chithra and Brad.” She rattled off the others that she knew who hadn't moved their families down to Alabama, like Saskia had.

  “Now you're talking about reservations,” her brother warned as he retrieved his phone again to find a restaurant.

  “Any place that has the chicken piccata I want will take a reservation.” Joule pulled her own phone out to join the hunt. “And it will also be far enough away that we'll have time to make it happen.”

  An hour and forty-five minutes later, they were two towns away, having finally found the Italian restaurant that agreed to their nine-person reservation at the last minute.

  “I don't know.” As Sarah looked skeptically at the storefront, she shoved her fists down into the pockets of her sweater. Tonight, her leggings neatly matched her boots, meaning Sarah was at her dressed-up finest.

  Not that any of them needed to look nice. Greco’s occupied a brick storefront in a strip mall. The Papyrus font in red, white, and green lettering wasn’t out of place between the pet supplies store and the nail salon.

  “Well, we're here now,” Joule said, and heard her own mother as the words tumbled out. “I don't know what it will be, but it will be an adventure.”

  She strode inside to the small hostess stand that looked like a lectern stolen from a community college. The hostess herself appeared to be about twelve. But by the time she held the menu, Joule was sniffing the air and saying, “It doesn't look like much, but it sure smells good.”

  Even Sarah was agreeing.

  An hour and a half later, they all had b
ags of bread and leftovers folded in tin foil swans—because the waiter thought he was special. The jury was still out on that, but the food had been wonderful.

  “Okay,” Sarah conceded. “We can go there again.”

  “But first,” Cage replied, “we need to start cooking for ourselves.”

  “Do you mean me?” Deveron pointed to his own chest. “That’s a skill I do not possess.”

  The others were waving goodbye and climbing into their own cars. Though they were all headed the same direction and would follow each other down the road for a bit, the four roommates had all come in Sarah's car. It had taken a deep breath for Joule to finally relinquish her burning desire to be in charge of the car, but Sarah knew her way around much better than Joule did. Maybe she could let it go, only for tonight. It was difficult to sit in the backseat and not have a method of escape. It was simply one of the leftover pieces of her past, but it was one that was worth leaving behind.

  So she sat in the backseat with Deveron and looked out the window.

  “You okay?” He seemed to have guessed something was off.

  “Yeah.” But the word gave away that she was tired now, loaded up on carbs, and definitely ready to tap out for the evening. She changed the subject and hoped no one noticed. “Last night was the first night that I remember not waking up for the train.”

  “I told you you’d get used to it,” Sarah’s announced, her cheer at being right emerging in the sing-song tone.

  “And I believed you,” Joule said. “How could I not? I woke up every night and saw you on the other side of the room, eyes closed, snoring like a baby. So I knew it could be done. But last night was the first night I did it. And now I can’t wait to get home and try for a repeat performance tonight.”