The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  The job was finally settling in, though the work itself was more backbreaking than he'd expected. While he had racked up plenty of experience in school doing fieldwork internships, the hands-on part of his education had been spotty at best. He’d had fun and, at the end of the two weeks, he went home, ate all the pasta, and slept it off for a few days.

  Now he was on his fourth straight week and he’d been working a minimum of forty hours each week. Radnor was hard-pressed to get his project back on the original schedule, and that pressure was falling to the team. Cage didn’t mind. He knew what he’d signed up for.

  Though they spent Thursdays in the lab, they were still on their feet all day. And the meetings on Fridays, when they got to sit down, were actually the most effort. The meetings got crazy as Radnor pushed them all for “more ideas!”

  Though Cage had come here believing he was prepared, he hadn’t quite been. Still, he was finally settling in, and his muscle memory was catching up. So was his stamina. He didn't fall into bed quite as hard anymore. And his career choice was feeling more like a choice, and less like a trial period.

  He'd been worried for the last semester of school, wondering if this was going to be the time that he and Joule finally went their separate ways. She was his only remaining family—aside from their grandfather, who insisted the twins live their own lives rather than move in with him. They'd lost both parents—dramatically, and in short order—about five years earlier.

  Their first year at school hadn't been any easier. While normal twins might have happily gone their separate ways for college, and certainly for work afterwards, he and Joule had made the effort to stay together.

  At first, he’d thought himself happy with the arrangement with Helio Systems Technologies but now he wondered if he actually liked the work, or if he just liked that it kept him close to Joule. Now, marching across the too-hot and too-humid field, with four plastic containers barely tucked under his arm, he felt that he’d made the right decision for him, too.

  The field mice scrambled for purchase in the plastic boxes. His own crappy writing labeled three of the stickers on the containers. Though Alabama wasn't home, the job was becoming where he belonged.

  “Hey Cage,” Leah called out as he almost stepped on her. She’d been down in a particularly tall patch of grass, nearly hidden. “Want to take two more?”

  Checking his location, he shifted the boxes. Balancing six wasn't easy, but they weren’t heavy, just awkward, and the animals tended to shift their weight suddenly. His job was to not drop them. He’d done that once before and felt like such a shit. So he double-checked this time. “Two more mice?”

  “Yup. Tiny little guys,” she replied, holding her containers aloft so he could see inside.

  It wasn’t far to the tent now. “I can make it.” He shifted his own containers, letting her stack another two on top. Steadying them with his chin, he continued carefully picking his way to the main lab tent.

  “That's quite a haul you've got there,” Melinda greeted him, back to her usual cheerful self after going full badass bitch at the protesters this morning.

  “Not all mine.”

  “Everything's initialed?” Melinda asked, as though that wasn't the standard protocol, and as though she wouldn't murder them all if everything wasn’t filled out properly and double-checked.

  “Of course.” He’d checked each of his own stickers before stacking the boxes. And while he hadn’t made a big show of it, he’d checked Sarah’s and Leah’s work, too, before agreeing to bring their samples in. He’d seen Melinda go off on one of the newbies with improperly labeled catches, and while these weren’t his boxes, he was the one delivering them. That made him equally responsible—and he wouldn’t want Melinda to turn on him the way they’d witnessed that morning.

  “We're getting behind,” Izzy called out from the other side of the tent, her gloved hands wrapped around a lizard as she removed him from his box for initial weights and measures. Then she looked up at Cage with a gleam in her eye. “Want to stay in the main tent? Help with data? You know you want to.”

  “Sure!” he laughed. He held up one finger, grabbed his walkie, and asked Sarah and Mitch if they needed him more in the field than the tent needed him.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when they said they could spare him. As much fun as trapping was, it was in the broad sun. The tent was in the shade. Staying here through the midday inferno would be a blessing.

  Within a few minutes, he was elbows-deep in tiny animals, measuring them, weighing them, tagging them. Though Cage found the work interesting, the animals were not fans. He felt for them, and it diminished his joy in the data. He next transferred every number from his notebook into the one of the two laptops set up for statistical analysis.

  “Be sure to do a body check for ticks,” Melinda called out.

  Shit!

  There wasn’t a column for that, and he’d forgotten. But luckily, none of his boxes had been sent back out into the field yet. So three minutes later, he was giving a particularly irritated field mouse a full parasite check when Izzy yelped from the other side of the tent.

  8

  Cage laughed as Izzy scrambled to catch the mouse that had made a break for it. Her words rang clear through the heavy air. “Little suckers are jumpy today!”

  She called out, “Gotcha!” and Cage watched as she covered the little mouse with both cupped hands. Then he laughed again when she jumped as he got away.

  “No, no, no!” she yelled, chasing her tiny escapee around the table and down one of the legs.

  “Did you get him? Do you need help?” Melinda called out. She and Cage would have both rushed to help, but each had their own tiny animal in their hands.

  “Got him!” Izzy hollered out and held the mouse aloft in her victory. But the comedy only lasted a moment before they all turned back to their own work.

  Still, the interruption seemed to provide the break Cage had been looking for. Trying to sound casual, he asked Melinda, “So why did the protesters think that the solar array is going to cause water pollution?”

  Too much of the protest didn’t make sense to him, but this was maybe the easiest, most straight-forward question to ask. He not only wanted the answer but wanted to see if he got shut down just for asking…

  He and Joule had researched Helio Systems before they joined. Staying together was a priority, and Helio offered that, but they hadn’t been willing to join any company that was adding to environmental changes in the wrong direction. He’d seen the damage some corporations were doing, and there was no salary he could fathom that would make it worth his while to be part of that.

  Melinda took a moment to answer, and it made him wonder if she knew. She seemed to be hunting for the right thing to say, but even so it came out a little half-assed. “Everything causes pollution. Everything that changes the environment, that is. And this is no exception.”

  Though she still held a lizard in her hand, she seemed to have forgotten as she gestured with it toward the open field. The tiny, blue-striped reptile didn't appreciate being waved around, so he wrapped his little claws tighter around her glove. She didn’t notice.

  “Is that really it?” Cage asked before thinking. “I was assuming it’s the paint from the pylons leaching into the fields. Or something like that.”

  From the other side of the tent, Izzy joined the conversation, seeming to have gotten her mouse in line now. “There's also a lot of concern about what's inside the panels. Specifically, most solar panel designs contain cadmium, lead, and antimony. Those are the ones that get protested.”

  Izzy was probably only a few years older than him and his sister, but this wasn't her first project with Helio. Her answer was solid and informed, and he found he was willing to learn the ropes from her.

  “But the panels don't break open,” Cage said. “I mean, they aren’t supposed to. We don’t break them open each day to make them work.”

  “True, but the breakage problem is twofo
ld,” Izzy replied, placing the mouse she’d just tagged back into his container and making her notes on the corresponding sticker as she talked.

  It was all second nature to her. And Cage, who’d almost let a small batch back into the field without recorded tick-checks, hoped he would grow as confident as she was, and soon. He turned back to his lab notebook, double-checking everything and making sure that his conversation wasn’t degrading his work quality. Melinda wouldn’t stand for that.

  As he opened another lid and placed the proper marks on that sticker, he listened to Izzy. “And the F6 tornado that just came through Alabama would have likely cracked open some panels on a field like ours.”

  “But that didn’t happen here,” Cage replied.

  “Right, and that’s part of why we're building here. But F6 tornadoes do now exist.” She turned to Melinda. “Do you know if that one hit any solar arrays?”

  “There aren't many solar arrays in Alabama to begin with,” Melinda lamented as she tapped on the computer, entering her own latest round of data.

  “Anyway,” Izzy went on, “tornado or not, what's inside is dangerous. The second issue is what happens once a panel’s life is over. The older solar panels—dating back to the ‘70s—aren’t in use anymore. And they're so toxic, it’s horrifying! In general, the panels do last a long time, but we still don’t know what to do with them when they’re spent. And the protesters don’t seem to understand that the pollution from what we're doing is far, far less than the environmental damage caused by things like coal and fracking.”

  She paused just long enough to take a breath and Cage found himself smiling at her happily delivered lesson.

  “Right now I, personally, think water is the cleanest energy source. But it's not going to be enough, so here we are with solar.”

  “So what about our panels? Are they dangerous when broken?” Cage asked.

  “That’s exactly the point of all this research,” Melinda chimed in. “Specifically, that’s on us as the environmental team.” Melinda smiled at him. “Once we're finished cataloging the wildlife, we get to crack open a few of these bad boys and see what damage the inside causes.”

  Cage raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t known that.

  “The trick is to make the most solar energy with the least amount of environmental damage,” Izzy said. She went on about cadmium and landfills and drainage problems.

  It made sense and, while it was more than what he’d asked, he loved a good, nerdy conversation. Putting the lizard he held back into his container, he double-checked the sticker against his notes … again. Though he'd finished the six that he’d brought into the tent with him, field workers had arrived with fifteen more animals while they'd been talking.

  Melinda didn’t tell him to leave, so he picked up another specimen as Melinda countered Izzy. “But none of that is happening here. So yes, the solar array is going to cover part of the field and it is going to change the environment a bit. And it is an eyesore. But barring a massive accident, the protests don’t make sense.”

  She offered a heavy sigh. Maybe because she’d had to face down one of the most intimidating of the protesters this morning. “All this work we are doing is to keep the array going—producing power for them—even in the event of harsh weather or other heavy damage. So all the things you’re talking about, that’s still not happening here.”

  Izzy seemed increasingly frustrated. Cage grasped his field mouse tightly so that he wouldn’t have to watch it as he looked up to see her expression. Her tight, dark curls were scraped back into a ponytail and her T-shirt proclaimed that “Penguins don’t smoke weed.” It made Cage question the snarky shirt he’d thought about wearing today. He’d rejected it for being even more unprofessional than his national park T. Maybe he could have gotten away with it.

  Izzy waved her hands—luckily without a creature in her grasp—and seemed not to notice that Cage was watching her more closely now. But her tone matched her face in aggravation.

  “Those protesters weren’t protesting general pollution in the future! It wasn’t a ‘save the environment from the evil corporation’ thing. They were acting like our very presence here is tainting their water, their Earth, and their sky.”

  “Well,” Melinda sighed, “there's enough truth in it and enough questions that, when they look stuff up, it seems reasonable. A good Google search will support that. There is antimony and cadmium in most solar panel glass, so I get that. However, the real problem with the protest here isn’t any of that. It’s that it's personal.”

  9

  The knock at the door was hard and heavy, so Joule took extra caution as she pushed herself out of the deep leather couch and headed toward the front of the house.

  The night had grown so dark, she wasn’t able to see who was on the porch, other than that it was someone relatively large. The only way to find out was to open the door.

  She threw the bolt as the pounding continued. She was speaking even as she pulled the thick, wooden door back. “Hello?”

  “Where is she?” the man demanded, his head craning one way and then the next, trying to see past Joule. He looked vaguely familiar, but the threat in his voice was more concerning than her recognizing him.

  Joule frowned hard, trying to get his attention. When that didn’t work, she moved into his path, blocking him from coming fully inside. He had to mean Sarah, but she wasn’t going to volunteer her roommate’s name. And maybe he had the wrong house? “I'm sorry. I don't know who you're talking about.”

  He looked at her as though she must be stupid or deliberately holding back on him. Well, he had the second part right.

  Still, he wasn't the first person Joule had faced down. For a moment, her mind raced to the fact that she had her bow and arrows stashed in her closet. If she could just make it to her room, she could defend herself, if need be. The thought solidified as the asshole on her porch growled and shoved her aside and stormed into the house.

  “Hey!” Joule shoved back at him but he was already past her. Also, he was so physically dense that her move had little effect. He yelled out, “Sarah! Sarah, get out here!”

  Luckily, his harsh tone brought not only Sarah, but Cage and Deveron, too.

  The man seemed a bit surprised by the small army that had formed in response to his entrance. Sarah had been in their room. Deveron had been in his as well, and Cage had been out of sight, around the corner at the dining room table working on some collection of data he'd gathered during the day. None of them were taking shit from the intruder.

  But then Sarah surprised her, stepping up and getting in his face. “What is it that you want, Jerry?”

  She knew him well enough to do that?

  “I saw you in that car,” he accused.

  “Of course, you did.” Sarah crossed her arms over yet another pair of her ever-present overalls. “I work there. You’ll see me going there five days a week.”

  He stared hard for a moment as though to make her back down; Joule was glad that her roommate wasn’t taking any of it. Sarah was hard to read sometimes, but tonight that was probably a good thing.

  When Jerry didn’t say anything else, Sarah added, “I saw you on private property, staging a protest.”

  “Of course, I'm protesting.” He was moving ever closer, his finger pointed and jabbing at her chest.

  Joule walked forward. She'd faced worse creatures in her life and knew when an animal was about to pounce. With a lightning-quick move, she smacked his hand away like he was a toddler, but harder.

  Clearly, she’d surprised the shit out of him. It seemed he’d not expected the now-quiet blonde observer to actually strike out.

  But Joule wasn’t done. Responding in kind tended to make things escalate. Animals on the hunt had to be forced to concede Fueled by her anger at having her home invaded and hearing a threat issued in her own living room, she issued one of her own in return. “Get the fuck back!”

  She stepped into his personal space now, next to Sarah, an
d hoped that the fire in her eyes looked like she was willing to rip his face off with her teeth if she had to. As long as she kept moving forward, as long as she kept up the threat, she would have an advantage.

  He stared at her hard for a moment, finally ignoring Sarah. But though his voice was harsh and aimed at her, his words were those of an offhand dismissal. “This is between me and her.”

  Not willing to be dismissed, Joule crossed her own arms and planted her feet, now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Sarah. Or close, as Sarah was a little shorter.

  “No, it's not,” she countered him with confidence. “And don't treat me like I'm stupid. I'm not. None of us are. You barged into our home and threatened someone I live with. Don't act like it's not between you and me. I’ve already had enough of your shit. You can be decent, or you can take your monkey ballsack of a face and get the hell out of my house.”

  Beside her, though Sarah's lips stayed pressed in a straight line, Joule could feel her shoulder moving. Sarah was trying desperately not to laugh. Joule had a feeling Cage and Deveron were doing the same behind her, but she was keeping her own face straight, as though “monkey ballsack of a face” was merely so apt a description that it wasn’t even humorous.

  Jerry's mouth dropped open with the insult, but Joule was still riding her forward momentum. Ignoring the man for a moment, hoping he caught the insult that he wasn’t even worth her attention now, she asked, “Do you want to talk to him, Sarah?”

  Sarah tipped her head one way as if shrugging, as if saying maybe she had time for this, maybe not. But she addressed the man in front of her. “Only if you're decent about it, Jerry.”

  “You shouldn't be doing this!” he accused again, his eyes once more focused on Sarah, who apparently wasn't going to call him out—at least not quite as harshly as Joule did. But Sarah wasn't taking any of his shit either.