Chapter Text
“She’s not signing shit.”
Sweat glistens across the tattooed back bent over the old red truck.
Caitlyn squints through a cloud of dust, sent up where her heeled boot has shifted in the dirt. “Excuse me?” She hadn’t even gotten as far as introducing herself.
The back straightens, a head of short hair emerging from the engine. One gray eye fixes her above a pair of broad shoulders.
“Powder,” the woman calls, and Caitlyn’s attention sharpens. This is a name she recognizes. “How’s that radio looking?”
“Gimme a minute here.” The voice comes from the other vehicle. There’s a good chance it belongs to the pair of long blue braids dangling out of the passenger side window, to the reason Caitlyn’s here at all, miles of long flat Oklahoma wheat in the rearview of the rental before she’d found it, this tiny junkyard she’d been told was the greatest thing to happen to storm chasing in thirty years.
Though, she supposed, it mattered who you asked. Caitlyn shifts the manila envelope under her other arm as she hurries after the woman now striding across the yard.
“She doesn’t need to sign anything, I’m not—”
“Good, because she’s not going to. Glad we’re on the same page.” The woman swings around the back of the van, pops the ancient brown doors. Inside is a mess of dials and screens, and the woman leans in to wipe dust from one of the glass faces with a frown.
Caitlyn leans over, eyes sweeping through the clutter. She spares a glance for the guy with his locs tipped back against one of the monitors before she spots the girl with the blue hair — Powder — sprawled across the front bench, feet propped out the driver’s side door.
Caitlyn’s eyes narrow. “Maybe she’d like to speak for herself?”
The woman is digging through a toolbox beneath the cargo floor. “D’you hear that, Pow? You’ve been served.”
Up front, Powder rolls her eyes, pushing a large set of headphones up over her ears. “Gee, thanks, sis.”
Sisters. Which would make this Violet, Caitlyn guesses, has it all but confirmed when the woman leans back against the bumper and Caitlyn can see, for the first time, the thin black lines of the letters inked across her cheek.
Violet isn’t named in the suit, but Caitlyn wouldn’t have come here without doing her research. Powder may have taken the spotlight for a while there, the kid genius with the crazy device, but every person she’d interviewed so far had told her the same thing: said if you wanted to know anything about storms, you needed to talk to the sister.
“Your sister’s been accused of stealing valuable intellectual property from SIL Co.,” Caitlyn says. “She shouldn’t ignore this.”
As Caitlyn says it, the radio at the head of the van launches into a crackle of sound, Powder’s chipped nails pausing on the knob. A voice is barely audible through the crunch: traveling northeast with winds at a hundred and six miles an hour—
Violet whoops, slamming the doors closed. “You hear that? That’s a hundred miles an hour of something you can’t ignore. What’s she looking like, Ekko?”
He appears in the driver’s seat a second later, Powder’s feet shoved aside with a muffled squawk. Ekko leans out the window and smirks. “Just your type. I’ll get you readings on the way but we should’ve left ten minutes ago.”
Violet’s already running, an argument about who gets to drive fading behind them as Caitlyn follows her back toward the truck idling in the gravel. Is this woman ever not in motion? Something in her seems to hum, like if she stood in place even for a second you’d still be able to see it, the blood moving under her skin.
When Violet wheels around it stops Caitlyn, unbalanced, in her tracks. She’s shorter than Caitlyn realized at the start. Her eyes land just above the scar notched in one of Violet’s eyebrows, the sharp wing they’re cutting down over her nose as she looks into Caitlyn’s face.
A clarity passes through her gaze. “You’re not going to quit, are you?”
Footing regained, Caitlyn lifts her chin.
Violet’s lips fold. Caitlyn’s not sure if it’s a frown or something else. “If you want to keep having this argument, you better hop in,” Violet says, and she swings into the driver’s seat.
Caitlyn makes the decision before she realizes she’s done it, is already pulling the seatbelt down across her chest when her brain catches up and asks her what the hell she’s doing. “You’re going after a tornado? Now?”
Violet doesn’t offer this a response, focused on maneuvering the truck out onto the empty road that intersects the horizon. It’s begun to rain, fat drops the thin windshield wipers strain to clear, and the mass of thick gray clouds brewing ahead of them wasn’t there just ten minutes ago.
“How big is it?” Caitlyn asks. Everything looks bigger out here, especially the sky. Used to cities and the overhang of skyscrapers, it had disoriented her, exposed her. Stepping from the plane that afternoon, the sun had been as heavy on the back of her neck as if she were being watched, and Caitlyn rubs this now, looking uneasily out the window. She doesn’t know enough about storms to know if she can trust the evidence of her eyes, or if the danger is in more than what you can see.
Violet glances in her direction. “Not really the size that counts here,” she says, but then she relents. “EF1, probably. Little baby one.” She tracks Caitlyn’s hand tightening on the door handle as the speedometer ticks past ninety and smiles, bringing the receiver from the stereo up to her lips. “Where are my readings, guys?”
Static. Ekko’s voice comes through, chalky with distance or the electricity in the air. “Meet you — five minutes — won’t — hurry.” Each pause is punctuated by an exhale of garbled feedback, the lines deepening on the side of Violet’s mouth as she listens.
Caitlyn checks her mirror. The van is nowhere to be seen, just more and more empty highway unrolling behind them. “What does that mean?” Caitlyn asks tautly. The rain insisting against the roof turns the windshield opaque.
“Your guess is as good as mine, cupcake.”
“It’s Caitlyn, actually.”
Violet looks at her again, longer this time, fingers stilling where they drum against the steering wheel. “Vi.” She pauses. “I’d say, either they’re five minutes behind us, or in the next five minutes we’re going to make a fun new friend.”
Five minutes. Caitlyn’s chest tightens, and before she can stop herself she rolls the window down, leans her torso outside just enough to see what they’re headed into.
It looks mean. Beyond the sting of rain in her eyes are thick, angry lines of black cloud that roil up over one another like something heaving, like smoke pouring from a burning house. Every few seconds light flickers at the base, electricity deep within the body of the storm — downed power lines, maybe, or lightning — and Caitlyn can smell it in the air, the same metallic edge as a bullet casing, right after the shot.
Caitlyn rolls the window back up. “What do we do?” Her voice is steadier, now, having got it in her sights.
There’s an expression on Vi’s face that Caitlyn can’t read, and then it tilts into a grin. “We’re gonna get that,” her thumb jerks behind them, and then she nods out the windshield, “into that.”
Hitched to the truck is a tall plastic cylinder, strapped in and rattling on an aluminum trailer. Caitlyn’s never seen the device before but as soon as Vi says it, the realization hits her. “That’s the Hexvane.”
“She knows her stuff.”
“I recognize allegedly stolen property when I see it.”
Vi groans in frustration. “Nobody stole anything, would you stop — look, Pow and I, we came up with this way before she ever started at SIL Co. Those leeches acted like they owned her — owned her ideas, anyway, which, isn’t that the same thing? But that was always ours.”
She shakes her head. “They wanted to act like they made her who she was, but me and Powder, we made ourselves.”
It’s a great line. And, looking at Vi’s profile, her mouth twisted with some memory, one she has to reach up and wipe away with the back of her wrist, Caitlyn thinks it might even be true. Her hands go searching through her pockets, brush against her gun in its holster and have just landed on her notebook when the truck lurches toward the side of the road, an enormous gust of wind slamming them sideways into the ditch.
Caitlyn’s head cracks against the window, outside a smear of grass and mud. They’re not completely horizontal when they slide to a stop, the ditch broad and deep enough that they’re slanted somewhere halfway down the slope. Dazed, Caitlyn can hear the clatter of rain against metal, the left tires revving into nothing as Vi slams the pedal to the floor. Her face is screwed up with effort, bare arms flexed taut as they fight to hold the steering wheel left.
“I need you to lean with me, alright?” she pants. Her eyes find Caitlyn’s. “One, two—”
“Three,” Caitlyn says, heaving her weight left. The truck tilts, a moment of hesitation where Caitlyn’s not sure it was enough, and then they’re back on all four wheels, Vi accelerating them up onto the highway so fast it makes Caitlyn’s stomach drop several stories. They squeal to a sharp stop in the center of the road.
Caitlyn works to still the trembling in her hands, but Vi’s already unbuckling her seatbelt. “You can’t seriously be going out in this.”
All at once, Vi’s in her space, leaning over the gearshift with one arm planted on Caitlyn’s headrest, the other braced against the doorframe. She jerks her chin at the window. “Did you see that?”
In disbelief, Caitlyn looks out at a wall of rain. “I don’t see anything.”
Vi snorts. “But you felt it. The wind changed.” This close, the light in her eyes goes sharp, sun glinting off the edge of a knife. And then she looks at Caitlyn and smiles, and Caitlyn’s breath catches like someone’s holding that knife to her throat. “If we’re lucky, she’s coming right for us.”
Vi tries the radio one more time — “Ekko, you read me? Powder?” — but when she gets no response, she sinks back into her seat, flipping one of the switches wired into the dashboard. “Usually we’d have more time, but this thing’s sucking moisture out of the air like they haven’t seen each other in years.” Vi frowns, jiggles the switch again. Nothing happens. “Shit.”
“What?” Caitlyn bites.
Vi reaches under her seat, scrabbling through the mess on the floor and coming away with a canvas jacket, deep red, stitched through with so many off-color patches that if it had ever seen better days, it likely wouldn’t remember them. “Lid’s not releasing.” Vi muscles the jacket over her shoulders, squinting out the windshield. “Wait here.”
“Wait, Vi, don’t—” But then Vi’s door opens and the storm comes screaming inside. It’s loud, and the word seems pathetic even as Caitlyn thinks it, but what other word is there? The volume on everything, cranked to its highest setting. She flinches away from it instinctively, the rain falling so hard Vi’s soaked through the moment she steps outside. It shatters against the ground like shrapnel, Vi’s hands tugging her jacket up feebly overhead as she runs.
Caitlyn unbuckles her own seatbelt, scrambles to watch through the back window, Vi appearing as a red streak beside the plastic drum. Movement, as she attempts to unscrew the stuck lid — and then the red streak vanishes.
The door rips out of Caitlyn’s hand as soon as she depresses the handle, the ringing in her ears becoming a roar. Her face stings, rain or the debris kicked up into the air, and she runs blindly, slammed against the truck by wind. “Vi!” she shouts, the sound scraped from her mouth. Was she hit by something? Is she hurt? Caitlyn can’t hear anything, can barely see, can only follow her feet to the rear of the trailer where a pair of strong hands catches her, holds her in place.
“Vi,” she says again, though neither of them can hear it. Vi’s nose is bleeding, a trail of it dripping from the underside of her chin. She points at the cab, and Caitlyn shakes her head, points at the trailer. Her fingers, digging into Caitlyn’s upper arms, are the only warm thing for miles.
A sudden cold as Vi releases her and gestures her over to the barrel. Caitlyn goes to the opposite side, sliding her hands to the spot Vi indicates. She can see it, a metal latch, but the mechanism doesn’t depress under her fingertips.
Across from her, Vi’s arms are shaking, her hands white-knuckled on the lid and her face contorted with effort, but it doesn’t budge. Even with the two of them pulling at it, the lid is engineered to stay closed until that latch pops. It’s no use.
But what if — Caitlyn lays a hand across Vi’s wrist to get her attention. “Stand back,” she yells, waving her away. Vi hesitates, confused. Ahead of them, the sky is corkscrewing in on itself.
“Now,” Caitlyn shouts, and Vi steps away from the trailer as Caitlyn reaches beneath her jacket and her hands close around the cool metal of the gun.
As her palm settles against it, as she feels the satisfying and familiar way it molds to her shape, she has a fleeting moment to wonder if the impact of her head against the window might have left her slightly concussed.
Then she unholsters the gun, lines up the shot, and fires.
The lid flips back, clanging against the side of the truck, the Hexvane spiraling upward from inside the drum. Vi whoops, loud enough to hear, and leaps onto the trailer, watching the helixed shape of the Hexvane unfurl into the sky. Eyes moving from her drenched boots to the muddy coat to the blood and water mixing down her neck, the halo of power flashes illuminating her from behind, Caitlyn curses herself for not bringing along her camera. Now there’s a shot.
Vi’s gaze falls to Caitlyn. “They teach you that in law school?” she yells.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Caitlyn yells back.
Vi’s head cocks, and she opens her mouth to say something when the roar around them deepens, somehow, an eerie rumble that rises from the ground.
Just ahead, eating up highway and light, surrounded by long, spinning arms of gray dust — the funnel connects with the sky.
The stillness is what surprises her. It looks like a painting, the way it hardly seems to be moving at all as it advances, a single, horrible moment captured in space. It’s almost beautiful.
Almost.
Caitlyn’s shoulder nearly leaves her socket as Vi leaps from the trailer and drags her at a dead run down the highway in the opposite direction. Through the hair plastered in front of her eyes, it’s all empty road and writhing grassland, and they all but trip down into the drainage ditch a hundred yards from the truck.
“Like this,” Vi yells, lying flat beside her. Her lips are nearly at Caitlyn’s ear, a protective shoulder hunched above her own. “Cover your head, I’ve got you,” and as they bow their foreheads and the world goes dark, the only thing she can feel is Vi’s chest, expanding into her side.
The scent of wet earth is everywhere, wet earth and iron from the bleeding nose pressed into Caitlyn’s neck, as Caitlyn gasps shallow, muggy exhales into the dirt. Trying to match the rhythm of each of her breaths to Vi’s, she wonders, fleetingly, if this is the rhythm of her fear or if Vi just isn't afraid of this at all. If it’s something else she feels when she sees that black train coming and steps onto the tracks, if that thing in her veins is a little bit like the thing in Caitlyn’s.
The firm weight of Vi’s arm presses them more tightly together, and the thought is like something carried on the wind, there and then gone. Caitlyn concentrates: mud seeping through the fabric at her elbows, her knees. In, out. Grass on her tongue. In, out. Gravity seems to pull their bodies down, to hold them in the center of its hand.
Caitlyn’s so deep inside that dark she almost doesn’t hear it. But there: a sound at the edge of her hearing. One long, flat drone, and then another. It’s not whatever is shaking the ground behind them but something higher, more insistent.
A horn.
“The van.” The words fall from Vi’s mouth and into Caitlyn’s ear, and when they lift their heads the van is stopped in the middle of the road, headlights cutting into the storm.
The driver lays on the horn again, and Caitlyn and Vi stagger to standing, helping each other toward the sound. The wind rips at their clothes, claws like it’s begging them to stay, and walking is like moving through a flood. A risk in every step that you’ll be swept away, lost to the mouth of what rages behind you. Vi’s hand is tied to her wrist like a rope.
Ekko appears beside the van, side door braced against his back, and he helps Vi hand Caitlyn inside, shoves Vi in after her and is yelling “Go, go, go,” before the door’s even closed behind him. The tires shriek, throwing up fountains of gray water as Powder launches the van around and sends it back down the road, back to where light still lingers above the town in the distance.
Caitlyn looks from it to the darkness behind them and back again, an eerie unease creeping under her skin even once she can rationally begin to accept that they’ve survived, that she’s safe. The safety doesn't seem real, an illusion, that town a place where if you never looked over your shoulder you wouldn’t even realize what was coming your way.
From the opposite seat, Vi looks at her like she’s seeing her for the first time. “Who the hell are you?”
—
Caitlyn explains as Ekko probes the bruise on the side of her head. “It was just a copy. If you hadn’t seen the summons yet I wanted to make sure you knew before you agreed to talk to me, and records said every server they sent had failed to reach you. Ow,” she winces, and he backs away, palms up.
“Sorry. Eyes up.” He clicks a flashlight on, glancing over each of her pupils.
Caitlyn continues, “From the way you introduced yourself, I doubt it was for lack of trying.”
Vi is bent over with her elbows on her knees, probing the bridge of her nose. “A journo. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“You didn’t let me get that far,” Caitlyn shoots back as Ekko lets the flashlight fall. “And then we were somewhat occupied.”
“I think you’ll be fine,” Ekko interjects, “but you should really take it easy the next few days. If the headache gets worse, you should see somebody, a real somebody.” He moves toward Vi but she waves him off, content to sit there blowing her nose loud and wet and red into a tissue.
At the look that Caitlyn must not be concealing very well, she shrugs. “Half a tree to the face, I’ve been hit worse. You learn to shoot like that for a story?”
“‘Shoot?’” Powder repeats, twisting around in her seat, only to rocket back to smash the horn and yell obscenities at someone attempting to cut them off.
“Eyes on the road, Pow.” Vi’s haven’t left Caitlyn’s face, the tissue forgotten in her hand. “It was an alright shot.”
“It was an excellent shot.” Outside the windows, they’re crossing back into the town Caitlyn had driven through on her way in. Zaun’s concrete shops and sidewalks blur into farmhouses keeping a low profile under the sky, blurring into damp green fields. She frowns. Where are the sirens? “Why are people still outdoors? Shouldn’t they be taking shelter?”
“She’s heading northeast,” Ekko explains. “This one’ll pass us by, probably fall apart soon. Not enough warm air to sustain it.”
That massive, muscular darkness, the violence of it uprooting even the road in front of them — just thinking about it makes her heart beat faster again. It doesn’t seem possible, something like that there and then gone. “Just like that?”
He smiles, an edge in it she can't parse. “Just like that.”
Caitlyn is quiet, belatedly realizing that the junkyard would be miles behind them by now. “Where are we going?”
The truck falls silent. Ekko and Powder look to Vi to answer, but she’s busy studying the monitors lining the inside of the van. “Hey, guys? Where’s the Hexvane data?”
Powder and Ekko exchange a glance. He asks, “You deployed it?”
“Uh-oh,” Powder sing-songs under her breath.
Ekko swings himself into the seat beside Caitlyn, his fingers sailing over blocky computer keys. “We haven’t been getting any readouts. We thought the storm got you before you could set it up.”
“No, we got it done,” Vi says, their faces lit blue by whatever they’re seeing on the screen. “It was working when you picked us up.”
“There,” Ekko says, pointing. “That’s when it goes live.”
Vi folds a fist in front of her mouth. “And then nothing.”
Ekko grimaces. “And then nothing,” he agrees. “Winds were crazy out there. Maybe if the trailer got flipped, like last April, remember—”
“Fuck.” Vi drops her head. “Fuck,” she says, louder this time, and slams her fist against the roof. It warbles, the only sound in the van. Ekko catches Caitlyn’s eye and shakes his head ever so slightly. When she finds Powder in the rearview, Powder pulls a face.
“You can try again,” Caitlyn starts. “Can’t you? Isn’t that what you do?”
Vi snorts. “You don’t know anything about what we do.”
“Then show me.”
Vi drops her gaze to stare out the back window, a long, focused look, and Caitlyn wonders what it is she sees. If it’s the road behind them, the one winding back to the truck she’d left on the asphalt with her hopes pinned to the side, or if it’s a road stretching back even farther than that, back to some place none of the rest of them can see.
“We’re going to Vander’s,” Vi says at last. “He’ll know what to do.”
—
When the truck passes a stand of trees and pulls up outside the old barn-turned-bar, Caitlyn’s first thought is that she must have missed a joke, and her second is that, honestly? She could use a drink. Vi pushes open the back doors, watery evening sun pooling in drips beneath every corner of the van, beneath their shoes on the concrete. She looks at Vi and is struck by the strange urge to laugh. They both look drowned and deflated, like they’ve gone swimming fully clothed. Caitlyn’s black with mud from knees to sternum and Vi isn’t much better, brushing a clump of dirt from her front and frowning when she realizes there’s no clean place to wipe her hand.
Vi sees her looking and Caitlyn catches it, a half-smile at the corner of her lips like she’s thinking it, too, but it falters when Vi looks up at the neon sign for The Last Drop. She squares her shoulders.
Caitlyn attempts to rein in each of her thousand questions as she trails the group up the steps. She can hear, faintly, music, can smell smoke. But quiet stretches for miles around them as they bypass the door into the bar, headed for an entrance around the back. Inside, once Caitlyn’s eyes adjust, she’s surprised to find Ekko pulling off his boots on a bench by the door, Powder already flopping onto the couch in the sunken living room beyond the hall.
Curiosity prevails. “Is this… your house?” There are frames on the walls, two girls in overalls and a bearded man grinning into the camera. Two boys, too, young, riding the man’s shoulders or squinting on a pier, the sun turning the scales of the fish in their hands iridescent.
“Nah, we broke in,” Ekko says as he passes, jogging down to Powder.
“He’s messing with you,” Vi’s voice cuts in. She’s in a small bathroom off the entrance, leaning over the sink to examine her nose. Her reflection’s eyes find Caitlyn’s. “Powder and I live here. Ekko might as well.”
Caitlyn looks again at the frame with the girls. From farther in the house, the sound of a door opening — conversations and laughter slipping in through it, loud music and the clink of billiards — muffled again as the door closes. “Van’s seen better days,” a new voice says, and Caitlyn starts, hearing that accent so far from where she’d left it. “You kids okay?”
“Peachy,” Powder drawls, and the conversation drops below Caitlyn’s hearing. The first voice, a man’s, has the warmth and rasp of a shot of whiskey and Caitlyn likes it immediately, not just the familiarity but what hearing it does to Vi — a lightness across her shoulders, a sense that she’s set something heavy down as she rounds the corner back into the hall just as the man steps into view at the other end.
“Vander,” Vi exhales, and all but falls into him. Caitlyn averts her gaze, focuses on working her boots from her feet.
She feels abruptly bone-tired, far from home, even if when she searches within her for what that means, exactly, she comes up empty. Not even three hours ago she was getting off the plane at Stillwater, lifting her hand against the glare of the sun.
She feels hours and hours, miles and miles away from that life, from her life before, feels every single one of the minutes she spent on planes to get here beginning to pound in her head. Caitlyn’s not sure she’ll ever look at it the same way again — the physics, the miracle that can keep a plane in the sky same as the one that’ll tear your home apart where it stands. She presses a hand against her temple, wincing over the bruise.
“This is Caitlyn,” she hears Vi say, opening her eyes to an enormous hand extended in her direction. She blinks, allows it to pull her to standing. The hand is callused but gentle and there’s something similar in the face above it, the kind of man who’s had to work hard all his life and worked even harder to keep himself soft.
“Pleasure to meet you,” Caitlyn says, and means it.
His eyes crinkle in the same place her father’s do. “Pleasure’s mine. Always glad to meet a fellow expat. And I see Vi’s taken you hunting.” Caitlyn huffs an awkward laugh, acutely conscious of the circle she’s dripping into the hardwood floor.
Vi says, “Caitlyn’s a journalist,” and Vander makes an interested noise.
“Well, if it’s stories you're after,” he says, “you’re in the right place. Why don’t you two grab a shower and some dry clothes and meet us in the bar when you’re ready? I’ll get the kitchen onto something hot.”
He claps a hand on Vi’s shoulder. “Glad you’re okay,” he says, low. “That counts for more than you know.”
Vi’s profile, silhouetted by light from the hallway beyond, at war with itself as he goes. Without looking back, she says, “Come on.”
Caitlyn follows her past the living room where Powder and Ekko are perched in front of the television, his head in her lap, past the serviceable kitchen with the big slab of dining room table and up a curving metal staircase. Vi pushes open the first door at the top. A bathroom, small and tiled plainly with white, but Caitlyn sees the shower and feels her knees go watery.
“Towels are in that cupboard,” Vi says, nodding. “Meet me at the last door on the right when you’re done, I’ll get you something to wear.”
Caitlyn’s clothes have hardly hit the floor, her watch and holster unbuckled on the counter before she’s stepping into the shower, turning up the water until it almost hisses where it hits her skin. When she touched down that afternoon, there hadn’t been time to shower. She’d dropped her things at the only motel in town and headed straight in the direction the girl at the desk pointed the moment she mentioned anything about storm-chasing sisters. The residue of grass and twigs and dirt swirls in a gritty parade down her legs to pool around the drain.
Now that she’s alone, she can’t seem to hide it, the trembling in her hands. Like the electricity of the storm isn’t done with her yet. Like it’s trapped there, caught beneath her skin.
Water blazes against her shoulder blades, and when she tips her head back and closes her eyes, the pounding of it against the back of her skull takes her back to the ditch, her face pressed into grass and mud, the runaway train of the storm. Vi’s breathing, her own heartbeat in her ears.
It’s not fear and it isn’t not fear, is the thing. What she’d felt, then, looking back at the storm — that’s not the story, but it’s part of it, a part she hadn’t understood until now.
She needs them to talk to her, she thinks, wiping water from her eyes. Needs Vi to talk to her.
Caitlyn levers herself to the floor where she sits for a long minute beneath the spray, washed in the rhythm of the racing in her chest.
—
Behind the door at the end of the hall is a bedroom. Vi’s bedroom, by the looks of it, and Caitlyn doesn’t know what she expected — posters of bands she’s never heard of, maybe, women pouting on motorcycles, though she shakes her head at this thought hard enough it gives her a warning throb — but inside it’s comfortable, simple, a worn quilt folded at the foot of the bed and a faded red rug that sinks below her feet.
Rain plinks lightly off the barn’s tin roof as Caitlyn pulls her towel more tightly around herself. “Vi?” When no one answers, she creeps further into the room.
Brass pipes curve over the walls, bare except for the space above a small desk. The corkboard hanging there at a slant is covered in scratch paper and pages clipped from newspapers, a mess of sketches and equations in faint pencil between headlines like 7 Killed in Costly North OK Twister and Super Outbreak Spawns Deadly Storms in 4 States.
There’s no dresser but there is a bookshelf, titles that send her eyebrows skyward. Vi’s got textbooks about thermodynamics and atmospheric phenomena crammed right up alongside the comics and — Caitlyn’s eyebrows crane higher — trashy romance novels. There’s a photo here, too, a man and a woman with the two young girls from downstairs, but, as Caitlyn reaches out to smooth dust from the surface, the man isn’t Vander.
“Your options are about five inches too short or five too long.”
Behind her, Vi dumps a heap of clothes onto the quilt. She’s staring pointedly down at a flannel shirt, her fist knotted in the collar.
Caitlyn coughs. She’s over-aware of her skin, suddenly, every drop of water sliding over her collarbone from the ends of her hair, the itch of terrycloth against the inside of her wrists. How long had Vi been standing there, watching Caitlyn nose through her life? Shit. She never even heard the door.
“Long is fine,” Caitlyn says, almost drops the towel trying to catch the shirt and pants tossed in her direction. She hesitates. “Would you mind—?”
“Oh,” Vi says, “Right,” and turns around.
Caitlyn pulls the sweats up over her thighs as quickly as she can. “Are these your parents?” she asks, rolling the cuffs up to her ankles.
“Yeah,” Vi says, and offers nothing more.
These must be Vander’s clothes. The flannel shirt hangs from her shoulders like a robe, almost brushing the backs of her knees. She looks ridiculous, but at least she’s finally warm again. She starts on the sleeves, aware of the stiffness in Vi’s posture, the way the air in the room has changed as palpably as it had before the storm started kicking up dust in front of them. “So Vander is—?”
“He took us in after they died,” Vi says flatly.
Caitlyn’s hands fumble over the buttons. “I’m sorry,” she says after a pause. “That’s—”
“Yeah,” Vi says again, an edge of finality in it.
Caitlyn tries a different angle. “Were you always interested in storm chasing?”
“You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”
“I’m a reporter, it’s my job.” Caitlyn turns down the collar, pulls her wet hair out of it to fall loose across her back. “You can turn around now.”
Vi does, her eyes flicking up over the new look, considering. “How do you feel about a drink?”
—
Caitlyn politely refrains from continued snooping while Vi showers, lying across the bed, checking her watch and trying not to fall asleep before Vi knocks her knuckles against the doorframe. She has Caitlyn follow her back downstairs and out through the door separating the house from the bar.
It’s busy, for the middle of the week in a town of several thousand and change. Most of the seats at the bar are full, a baseball game in its third inning on the television and smoke rising toward the glasses drying overhead. Vi muscles into a spot near one of the ends just as Vander plants a Budweiser and something amber in a shot glass in front of her.
“My hero,” Vi sighs, and lifts the shot in Caitlyn’s direction before she knocks it back.
Vander turns his attention to Caitlyn. “What’s your poison, love?”
“Um.” An image, still stubbornly stuck in her head, of Vi’s throat working, shadows moving over thick cords of muscle and black ink in the low yellow light. “I’ll just… take a, uh, a beer, also.” She coughs. “Budweiser’s fine.” She’s definitely concussed.
Vi’s eyes are narrowed, but if Vander has thoughts about her order or her delivery he doesn’t show it, just pops the cap and slides it over. “On us tonight. Thanks for keeping this one safe.”
A blush creeps under Caitlyn’s collar as Vi rolls her eyes and starts in on an argument about how she’s always safe. At a distance from the storm, here in the security of the bar and of a kindness she hadn’t expected or really even earned, the flannel is almost too warm. When she remembers again that it’s his , that she’s sitting here wearing his clothes, drinking on his dime, the flush creeps higher. What kind of man takes in two children after their parents are taken from them, she’d wondered, just for the world to helpfully supply: this one. Caitlyn makes a mental note to talk to him, too.
“Get yourselves a table,” Vander calls over his shoulder, already headed to the other end of the bar. “I’ll see where the kitchen’s at. Sev! Long time, no chat. Darkest we have on tap’s going to be the Dead Aces, from over in—”
Vi indicates a direction with her chin, and Caitlyn slides into a booth along the back wall, Vi sinking in opposite. Her arms fan across the back with a contented sigh.
“Well, cheers,” she says, clinking her bottle into Caitlyn’s. “First tornado. How’s it feel?”
“Who says it’s my first?”
Vi grins. “You can always tell. But you did pretty good. I still want to know who taught you to shoot like that.”
Caitlyn takes a steady sip of her drink before replying. “My mother.”
Vi’s eyebrow peaks. “Well, you’ll have to tell her you got a clean shot off in the middle of fifty mile an hour winds. Bet she’d be pretty proud of that.”
Caitlyn smiles weakly. “Basic aerodynamics, and it was close range. Less time for anything to go wrong when you’re right up on the target.” Her first job out of school, breaking a story about corruption in the local police force, her mother had written Caitlyn’s boss asking her to be switched to the lifestyle beat. On the rare phone call, now, when her mother asks how her work is going, Caitlyn replies, Good, and switches the subject. “I’m better with a rifle.”
That eyebrow again. “I’d like to see that.” Vi takes a long drink. “You sound pretty far from home, what with the—” She makes a nebulous gesture around her face, Caitlyn’s eyes catching on the flex of Vi’s fingers, and it takes her a second to understand what Vi means.
“My accent? I grew up in England. My parents still live there, but I,” Caitlyn shrugs, tries to let it roll off her shoulder before she can think about it too hard. “I go where the story is.”
“You don’t have a home base somewhere?”
“It didn’t make sense to keep paying rent on a place I was never in.”
Over at the bar, a cheer. Someone must have scored. Caitlyn takes a deep breath. “But you’ve been in Oklahoma all your life.”
Vi’s eyes on her are sharp. “Is that a question?” She doesn’t miss a thing.
“I know what the records say,” Caitlyn says carefully, “but I’d like to hear it from you.”
The edge of the label on Vi’s bottle is peeling upward, and she worries at it with the tip of a finger. “On the record?”
Caitlyn shrugs. “Not if you don’t want it to be.”
When Vi speaks, it’s down at the table. “What do those records say?”
Breaking and entering, assault, aggravated assault of a police officer — to name a few. Caitlyn leans in, drops her voice. “Were you always interested in storm chasing?”
Vi laughs just as a waitress rounds the corner with two steaming plates. “Aw, sweet,” Vi says, perking up. “Vander special.” Her face softens, and she looks… young, Caitlyn realizes. She catches a glimpse, for a moment, of the girl with her feet swinging from one of Vander’s barstools, the girl with her wrists cuffed in the back of a cruiser.
Caitlyn swallows and looks down at the plate in front of her. A cup of soup, red and steaming, globs of cheese oozing from the sides of a thick sandwich.
“Stormy nights,” Vi’s saying, dipping a triangle into her bowl, “the really bad ones, Vander would whip this up and we’d light candles and eat it in the basement. Powder always called it Fancy Dinner.” A smile on her face, soft as old leather. She gestures at Caitlyn with her sandwich. “This is not your average grilled cheese, is what I’m saying.” They eat in silence, and even when Vi licks each one of her fingers before stealing the fries lingering on Caitlyn’s plate, Caitlyn has the quiet thought that average would trip over its own feet just trying to catch her.
Vi goes to grab them a second round. The bar’s cleared out, from what it was just an hour ago, the busboy wiping tables behind them and the television switched to the news. A group of three lingers at a table by the door, someone lighting a second cigarette at the bar.
Caitlyn spots Powder and Ekko in their own corner, Powder sitting on a pool table and Ekko squinting down his cue next to her. As Caitlyn watches, Powder pulls the end just as he takes the shot, throws her head back and laughs at whatever he turns to say, his wild gesticulations at the socket now holding the 8-ball. When Powder’s eyes find hers, the smile drops.
“Here.” A glass bottle appears in the air beside her, and Caitlyn blinks, takes it.
“Thank you.” Vi settles back opposite, elbows on the table. She holds her drink loosely by the neck, twisting it back and forth in her hand.
Caitlyn can hear the music now that there’s no conversation to rise above it. From distant speakers, the quiet, thoughtful strum of guitar strings below a hoarse voice, and beyond the windows, the rain in its ceaseless march toward the ground.
“I was ten,” Vi starts haltingly. “Powder was six. Middle of the day and storms are in the forecast but nothing, nothing like what we got. Couple lightning strikes got some fires going in town, and our folks, they were on the volunteer team, it’s where they met, they were there when this tornado just spins up from nothing. Out of nowhere, people said.” Vi’s hands fall to the table, palms open. “Me and Powder, they’d left us at home. ‘Vi, you’re in charge.’ I took it so seriously, whenever they said that.”
Vi huffs, swigs with her head tilted back, but Caitlyn still notices the motion: the shadow of her eyelashes sweeping rapidly against her cheeks.
“You don’t,” Vi continues, hardly pausing for breath, “you don’t forget it, climbing out of a closet and your whole house, your whole life, the room you’d been in five goddamn minutes ago, all of it just gone . We couldn’t even get out of the closet, at first, half the roof had fallen down in front of the door. First time I ever dislocated my shoulder was trying to get us out.”
Caitlyn’s breath leaves her at this admission. Vi smiles, there and then gone, one of those smiles you do as a reflex because your mouth isn’t sure what else to do, is so used to faking that shape in the company of anybody else.
“Vander, his kids,” Vi swallows, “we’d grown up together, known each other since we were in diapers, just like our parents had — they didn’t make it, either. They were on a fucking Boy Scout trip. Powder had been so pissed she couldn’t go.” Vi shakes her head. “Shitty the way something like that can matter.”
“It is.” Vi looks up at this, as if surprised to find Caitlyn across from her, to find herself here at the table at all. Caitlyn feels a tenderness in her chest like something crushed. “It’s awful. Vi, I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. People go through worse.” Caitlyn’s brow furrows at this, but Vi’s looking at Vander at the bar. “Both of his kids, you can’t even fucking imagine.”
Chatting with the woman with the cigarette, his laugh carries over the empty chairs. No, Caitlyn thinks, she can’t. But neither can she imagine the small girl standing in the middle of the wreckage of her life, her bare feet in broken glass, looking up through a roof of sky. That same girl reaching to help her sister stand.
“And this happens all the time. Whole families, whole towns. And it’s getting worse.” Vi meets her eyes, their serious gray. “These storms are getting bigger and more unpredictable. We have warning systems in place, but we don’t know enough about why some spawn tornadoes and some don’t, or even where they’re headed once they start — and what’s the use of a warning system if you never turn it on?”
“So you and your sister, you develop the Hexvane.”
“We were kids when we came up with the first prototype,” Vi says. “I’ve got the sketches hanging in my room, I’ll show you, and the blueprints from the first model are downstairs. SIL Co.’s lawsuit is bullshit and they know it.” Vi rubs a hand over her face. “But lawyers are expensive, and equipment’s expensive, too.”
SIL Co. — the Strategic Innovations League, as they were known on paper and almost never referred to otherwise, thanks to the all-caps logo the company had emblazoned anywhere they could purchase the ad space — had a habit of suing former employees into oblivion. You could follow the complaints and countersuits through miles of paper trail, nearly all of them leading to dead ends as people gave up or were forced to. Threatened to. “They know that,” Caitlyn says. “They bet on it.”
Vi’s jaw sets. “They paid her court fees, you know. Powder’s. After I — I’d been gone, then, for a while. She got into some trouble of her own but by then she’d been making headlines for all the science fair stuff. Just local papers, but I guess someone important was paying attention. Bailed her out, made everything go away, next thing she’s throwing away a full fucking ride to Stanford to go straight to R&D.” Vi snorts. “I could have told you how long that was going to last.”
“So she,” Caitlyn hesitates, “uh, leaves the company—”
“You can say ‘fired.’ Super fired.” The voice is Powder’s, coming up from behind Caitlyn. She grabs a chunk of Vi’s cheek and wriggles it. “You spilling all our secrets to the intrepid girl reporter?”
“Cut it out.” Vi bats her hand away, rubs her cheek. “I’ll save some for you.”
“Hmph. We’ll see.” Powder chews on a cuticle, eyes darting to Caitlyn’s hip, concealed by the flannel. “What kind of gun do you have?”
“Powder!”
“What, I was just asking. Can’t ask a lady what she’s packing?”
“It’s a semi-automatic,” Caitlyn interjects. “Glock 19.”
Powder whistles. “Can I try it?”
“No,” Vi and Caitlyn say together.
Powder sighs and slumps against the back of the booth. “No secrets for you then, toots.” She turns her attention to Vi. “I was thinking about going through the scrap pile tomorrow, seeing what we’ve got to work with.”
“Worth a shot.”
“You could come with?”
Vi meets Caitlyn’s eyes, looks quickly away. “We’ll see.”
Powder shrugs through a disappointment that Caitlyn catches, only briefly, in her eyes. “Your loss.” She smacks a kiss to the top of Vi’s head. “I’m gonna go crush Ekko in Mortal Kombat. Bye!” As she saunters away, she salutes a peace sign in Caitlyn’s direction.
Caitlyn says, mildly, “I don’t think your sister likes me very much.”
“She’s…” Vi thinks. “Protective.”
“You must be close.”
Vi stares through the space that Powder has disappeared into. “Sometimes. You have siblings?”
“None.”
The corner of Vi’s mouth ticks upward. “Sounds peaceful.”
Or lonely. “Sometimes.” They share a smile, it and the alcohol traveling, warming her down along her spine. She clears her throat. “So, Powder’s fired, you get released—”
“And we’re just sitting there wondering what the hell to do with our lives, and all the while that design’s just,” Vi sighs, “staring at us from the wall.”
The curve of her jaw, hair falling across her face, looking into space like she’s seeing that sketch right now — Caitlyn follows her gaze out the window to a low ripple of light, long seconds passing in silence until thunder rumbles through the pane of glass.
“I think we thought, what else do we have to lose?”
—
Before they head back upstairs, Vi offers to show her the basement. “Our workshop,” she calls it, lifting a hand to Vander as they head back into the house and down a different staircase, Caitlyn following the railing and the sound of Vi’s feet thudding into the black.
“Hope you’re not scared of the dark,” Vi says.
She’s closer than Caitlyn expected her to be. When Caitlyn’s lips part in an exhale, she can sense, in the total dark, the answering rise of Vi’s shoulders just ahead.
“I’m not.”
Light, a string hung from a bare bulb, Caitlyn’s eyes adjusting and Vi moving through the shadows swinging across the space. She pulls rolls of blueprints down for Caitlyn, her fingers gentle on the scale models that line the workbench.
Caitlyn peers down at the small marvel Vi places in her palm: a version of the device she’d seen in action today, every sleek curve reproduced in miniature.
“So much of the engineering is Ekko,” Vi says, naked admiration in her voice. “He’s got a real eye for this stuff.”
Caitlyn sets the figure down. “What’s his story?”
“You mean how’d he get caught up in all this? Same way as the rest of us, but he didn’t have our kind of luck. Didn’t have a Vander.” Vi’s going through cardboard boxes under the workbench as she speaks, peeling back old flaps to peer inside. “Didn’t stop him from making his own luck, though. He and Pow were competing for all the same whiz kid prizes in school.”
Vi hefts one of the boxes onto the bench with a grunt. “Anyway, he ends up taking on a lot of the relief work in town, leading a bunch of local aid stuff. When he heard what we were doing, he just shows up at the door, says ‘How can I help?’ He’s a good kid. Good for Pow, too.”
Up on the bench, the box is almost as tall as Vi. Her head and shoulders disappear over the top as she rummages inside.
Caitlyn steps tentatively over one of the discarded boxes. “What are you looking for?”
The answer is muffled. “Trying to see what shape the other Hexvane is in.”
“There’s more than one?”
“There were three. But this one…” Vi allows her head to thunk forward against the side of the box, “is fucked.”
“It sounded like your sister thought she could make a new one? Or, fix this one?”
“She probably can,” Vi agrees. “But that takes money, money and time, neither of which we have. The season’s almost over. Every day that we’re not out there chasing, we’re losing data. And then you get some shit like today.” Vi pushes her hair back from her forehead and rubs her eyes. “That’s thousands of dollars of equipment we lost. Equipment that could have made a real difference, to real people in their real lives. Not to mention, god, the fucking truck.”
When Vi looks at Caitlyn now, Caitlyn can still see the woman she’d met in the scrap yard, defiance on her face and a sharp tongue ready to defend it. There’s a moment where she thinks Vi might turn that on her again now, ask her why she’s even here. Demand to know what the point is of prying into something she could never, will never understand. People have done this to Caitlyn before. She’s never been able to blame them. Could never, she thinks, watching the hands at her sides ball into ragged fists, blame Vi.
Maybe it’s the way the light falls over everything down here, all of it exposed, even the shadows — but the longer she looks the more ridiculous it seems that Caitlyn or anyone could miss it. That behind the anger is pain, that behind the pain—
Every single one of Vi’s edges seems to soften, a pencil sketch slowly erased, and when Vi kicks the workbench, the metal figures rattling and sprawling over the top, Caitlyn doesn’t flinch.
“You’d have it down here?” Caitlyn asks quietly, looking around the rest of the space. A tattered couch up against the wall across from the workbench, a boxy television set with rabbit ears. String lights arc overhead, and there are playing cards still on the table. She can see it, the three of them there, an island made of soft words and kerosene lamps.
“Have what?” Vi asks, her back still turned.
“Fancy Dinner.”
No laugh from Vi, this time. No sound.
“SIL Co.’s investors are all shell corporations for bigger oil and gas companies,” Caitlyn says. “For years they’ve been attracting great scientists just to shut their research down, or paying for results favorable to their funders. I think they say they’re trying to combat these storms with their fingers crossed behind their back, and that if nobody exposes them, if nobody realizes what’s really happening here, you’ve said it yourself — these storms are only going to get worse.”
The intricate tattoos stretched across Vi’s back disappear into valleys of muscle, expanding and contracting with each breath. Same view as when they’d met, the hours between that moment and this one like a different life entirely, a world she had stepped into and could still just as easily step out of. If Vi tells her to leave, she will. But she needs to tell her now.
“What I need is proof. For someone to show me,” Caitlyn says. “Help me tell that story. Help me tell the truth.”
That familiar weight, Vi’s shoulders heavy beneath it as she breathes. Steady in, steady out. Turning to Caitlyn, now, laying it down at her feet.