Eye of the Storm.

Kate Messner.

For my aunt, Maureen Lahue, and for all librarians fighting the good fight for books and knowledge.

Chapter 1.

There are no words to describe this sound.

In the old days, they said tornadoes sounded like freight trains. I've seen video archives of survivors being interviewed, all out of breath. They describe an approaching rumble and then a roar. Wind pouring out of the sky. Buildings shaking. And finally, the train rumbling off, fading away as the storm lumbers on.

But that was then.

There are no words for the sound of what is happening now.

A thick, dark shadow is snaking down from the cloud that followed us from the airport. It's wider and stronger than anything those people in the video archives had ever seen. Bigger than anything they could have imagined.

It is headed straight for us.

"No worries, Jaden," Dad says, but both our DataSlates are wailing with high-pitched storm alerts. His eyes dart to the rearview mirror as he pulls the HV into a safety lot.

I've heard about these huge roadside shelters, but we don't have them at home in Vermont. The one time Mom and I got caught out with a storm coming, we just knocked on somebody's door. It goes without saying in New England: on storm days, you let anybody who needs help into your safe room.

But in this part of Oklahoma, there are fewer houses now, hardly any doors to knock on. This huge concrete structure is the first building we've seen for miles. It's almost full, but Dad maneuvers into one of the last spaces. "We'll be fine here."

"Good timing, I guess." My voice shakes, even though I try to pretend it's no big deal; Mom warned me the storms would be more frequent here, but I never thought I'd see one before we even got to Dad's house.

"That good timing's no accident." Dad leans back in his seat and picks up his DataSlate. The glow of the screen lights his face an eerie blue, even as the sky outside grows darker. "When StormSafe got the government contract to build these lots, we put one every fifteen miles on major roads so you'd never be more than a few minutes from safety."

"That's how much warning you get when a storm's coming?"

"Give or take."

They're like the Revolutionary Warera taverns I learned about in my online history course, spaced fifteen miles apart because that's how far a traveler could ride in a day. Here we are, 275 years later, driving hydrogen vehicles instead of horses, and we're back to needing shelter every fifteen miles.

Lightning flashes outside. I tug my backpack from the floor into my lap and run the strap between my fingers, over and over, so I can concentrate on that instead of the pounding in my chest. I can't freak out. Not on my first day with Dad in four years. He lives for storms like this.

A plastic chair tumbles, legs over arms over legs, past the entrance we came in.

"This is turning into a good one." Dad cranks the volume on his DataSlate so we can hear the regional news feed over the screaming wind. If they mention the storm, we'll know it's big. Normally, they send out the DataSlate alerts that replaced the old tornado sirens and leave it at that. Mom said when she was growing up, her town got on national news once when a tornado wiped out half a mobile home park. National news!

Now the news feeds only report the biggest of the big, the true monsters. It sounds like this could be one of them.

"The National Storm Center confirms a tornado warning for all of eastern Logan County," the voice on the DataSlate says. "NSC meteorologists say the system that developed this afternoon has spawned three separate tornadoes-the latest, a possible NF-6. Residents are advised to get to safe rooms immediately."

"NF-6?" I swallow hard. We have our share of storms back home-who doesn't?-but the worst I've seen was the NF-4 that ripped the roof off Mom's environmental science lab at the University of Vermont.

"Could be." Dad leans to see past me, out the shelter door. The tornado doesn't even have its funnel shape anymore; the thick, jerking rope has swelled into a churning blur of brown-black wind.

"It's rain-wrapped!" Dad shouts over the roaring. "Tough to see how big it's grown. But at least it's not a Niner!" That's weather-geek slang for an NF-9, the second highest rating on the new scale they developed a decade ago when it became clear the storms had outgrown the old Enhanced Fujita Scale that went from one to five. When I was a baby, EF-5 was the worst a tornado could be. The New Fujita Scale goes up to ten, though nobody's ever seen a ten touch down. What would they call it? A Tenner?

The lights flicker, and I grip the door handle.

"Relax, Jaden." Dad punches me lightly on the arm, and it sets something off inside me. All the swallowed-up storm jitters rise in my throat, and I want to scream. Instead, I swallow that, too, and my eyes fill with tears.

I've been on the ground all of two hours, and I'm not used to it here. None of it feels like home.

Not the desolate brown flatness of the land.

Not the stark concrete gray of the shelters.

And not the storms. Especially not storms like this.

Dad should know that.

Maybe he'd understand how I feel, understand me, if he hadn't spent the past four years in Russia, doing weather experiments that weren't allowed in the United States. Maybe he'd ask how I'm doing now that- "Jaden, look!" He holds up his DataSlate and turns the radar screen my way. "This hook echo is incredible!"

He points to the blob on the screen. It's churning, growing, hungry enough to swallow half of Oklahoma. A curled-up green extension sticks out one side of the storm, like a witch's finger calling us in.

I know what he wants me to say. He wants me to ooh and ahh and talk about the rotation like we used to when I was little and I'd sit on his lap, and he'd laugh because I knew how to read a satellite map before I was five. He wants me to be WeatherGirl, the nickname he gave me before he left, before he and Mom split up, before the storms got this bad, before everything. He wants me to say how awesome it is, how fantastic and powerful. How amazing.

But it's not. It is terrifying and loud, pounding the concrete shelter we're hiding in with uprooted hackberry shrubs and tree trunks and God knows what else. I grab the door and hold on.

"Relax, Jaden. This is no big deal around here. You're safe. I designed this shelter model myself. StormSafe tested these things under conditions that were far more-"

He's trying to comfort me, but he is screaming, screaming over the storm he says is no big deal. So I scream back.

"Dad, stop!" I put my head down on the dashboard and press my hands into my eyes, but I still can't escape from the sound. Forget the passing freight train. This is like being inside the engine of the train, inside the throat of some ancient Greek monster that's roared down out of the sky. It's throwing recycling bins and branches, torn-off roof tiles so frantic and flapping they look like huge tortured birds, all flying past the entrance to the lot. I scream again, "Just stop! Stop!" And I don't know if I'm screaming at Dad or the storm or both. But neither responds.

Finally, I sit up and open my eyes. Dad is ignoring the weather outside, staring at me. He closes the radar image-the storm looks even bigger in the glimpse I catch before it's sucked into a folder on his screen-and pulls up his StormSafe corporate log-in page. He turns the slate away from me as if I'd be able to see or remember his stupid password in the middle of this and pokes at the onscreen keys. "Relax," he says. "It's weakening now."

I squeeze my eyes closed against the pounding, against the attack from the wind and debris, and I don't answer him. But as if by magic, the roar of that monster-from-the-sky fades back into something more like an old-fashioned freight train and then dissolves altogether.

I don't open my eyes.

I sit, listening to the train rumble off. I squeeze my eyes shut tighter and think.

This was not a storm. It was a monster.

This is not home.

And this is not the same father I used to have, the one who tucked me into bed, singing songs about the wind.

That father took me out for ice cream on a summer night four years ago. He ordered rainbow sprinkles on his cone, right along with me, and he told me why he had to go on another trip. Why he wasn't coming home anytime soon. Why he needed to open a new StormSafe headquarters in a country that would allow him to do his research. And he left.

This father who has come back to me . . . I open one eye a crack. His fingers fly over the DataSlate. His eyes focus on the scrolling columns of numbers, laser-intense. Fierce.

He feels like someone I don't even know.

Chapter 2.

No matter how bad things get in Logan County, no matter how the clouds swirl, how the radar screens light up, I'll be safe in Placid Meadows.

Perfectly, one hundred percent safe.

That's what Dad promised Mom, how he convinced her to send me here, to the heart of the storm belt, for the summer. And his new, self-sufficient StormSafe community does sound impressive. Safety. Higher water and kilowatt allowances, thanks to Placid Meadows' private solar and wind energy reserves. Eye on Tomorrow Science Camp, the state-of-the-art program Dad's corporation runs for "the best and brightest young minds" in the world. Dad said it went without saying that I was one of them and sent me admissions papers, but I still wanted to take the official entrance exam. When I answered the last question on my DataSlate and pressed the SUBMIT button, the score that appeared on the screen put me in the top five percent of applicants. I couldn't argue that I didn't belong there.

Plus Mom had her own research project waiting in the shadow of an active Costa Rican volcano. Not to be outdone by my father's adoration of storms, Mom's had her own love affair . . . with frogs. While Dad's been studying the effects of global warming on storm formation, she's been researching its impact on wildlife in sensitive ecosystems, particularly rain forest amphibians like the poison dart frog. Mom's wanted to take this trip for years but had nobody I could stay with until now.

"This must be WeatherGirl!" As we pull up to the Placid Meadows gate, a beanpole of a man leans down into the HV window.

Dad nods in my direction. "This is indeed my daughter Jaden, the infamous WeatherGirl." My stomach's still tangled from the storm, but I smile; nobody's called me that in four years, and even though I'm a total science geek, I'm surprised Dad still thinks about me that way. Surprised, and I guess a little pleased.

"Hi, Jaden. I'm Lou." He points to the shiny silver name tag on his navy blue uniform. There's a StormSafe emblem above his name. Does everybody here work for Dad? "Any update on the expansion, Dr. Meggs?"

"Unfortunately, no," Dad says. "Looks like Phase Two is going to be delayed a bit."

"What's Phase Two?" I ask.

"Phase One of Placid Meadows is full, and we have two dozen families waitlisted, so we're going to expand the development. If we can get the land we need."

Lou chuckles. "Those farmers getting you down?"

Dad isn't smiling anymore. "Honestly, why someone would be crazy enough to stay here to run a dying farm is beyond me. And why anybody would turn down an offer that's five times what the property is worth . . ." Dad shakes his head, then looks at the dashboard clock. "I'd better get Jaden home." He lifts two fingers from the steering wheel in a wave.

When he drives through the Placid Meadows gate, it's like driving from Kansas into the Land of Oz.

From the minute I stepped off the plane, Oklahoma has been a place of charcoal skies and yellow-gray clouds. It's like Florida when the hurricanes started getting bigger; no one lives here anymore unless they're too attached to family farms or they can't afford to leave. The oil wells were abandoned a decade ago when the international fossil fuels ban took effect. The sprawling cattle ranches are ghost towns. It's a state abandoned, except for a few farms, storm-torn mobile home parks, and corrections department energy farms, where convicted criminals ride generator-cycles outside in the daytime and sleep in StormSafe bunkers at night. It's a black-and-white world, with shades of brown.

But Placid Meadows blooms in full, all-of-a-sudden color.

A billowing garden of bright flowers divides the street. In the middle is a fat boulder with a bronze plaque affixed to it. WELCOME TO PLACID MEADOWS, A STORMSAFE COMMUNITY, it says in calm, loopy cursive. All around, the garden bursts with reds and pinks and fuchsias. Tall purples tip their heads, and spreading silver-blues creep along the curb.

"It's beautiful." I lower my window to breathe in all that brightness, and for the first time since I said good-bye to Mom at the airport in Burlington, I almost feel calm.

Dad pulls over and smiles, and his face relaxes into something I almost recognize from the Dad I had before. "Isn't it the most gorgeous garden you've ever seen?"

I nod, but this new glimpse of Dad is more interesting than the plants now. The DataSlate man from the car seems to have been sucked into a folder deep inside him. Now he looks like someone who might order rainbow sprinkles on an ice cream cone again someday. Between that and the flowers, I feel my heart lift. Maybe this summer will be all right.

"The flowers are so perfect." I lean out my window.

"Of course they are. Everything we plant is DNA-ture; it's the best." He puts the HV back in gear. "We better go. Mirielle's making an early dinner."

Mirielle. The stepmom I've only seen on my DataSlate videophone, and always with my new half sister, Remi, in her arms.

Dad pulls away from the garden, farther into the development.

The street is lined with StormSafe houses, concrete structures tinted mauve, slate blue, and sea green. They have windows, which surprises me a little; they must be made of glass that's engineered not to shatter under pressure. And there are bigger buildings, without windows.

"Are those houses, too?" I ask.

"Nope-that one's the community warehouse." Dad nods toward a big brick-colored structure as we pass. "DNA-ture delivers food orders once a week so we don't need to go out to the regional grocery store."

No wonder the farms Dad mentioned to Lou aren't doing so well.

Dad points out my window. "Here's the entertainment dome."

He slows down as we pass a building that looks like the big skating rink at home. The electronic sign outside has a schedule of showings. Movies. Sporting events. Ballet and theater streamed in live from the National Arts Center in New York. And something called Museum Night, with Natural History: Jurassic Period on Tuesday and American History 19002050 on Thursday.

"What's Museum Night?" I ask as Dad pulls away.

He smiles a little. "Do you remember when you were really small-I think you were three-when we took you to closing ceremonies for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City?"

"Kind of." I remember walking through a room with huge dinosaurs and another one with all kinds of rocks and gems. And Mom was crying. "Mostly, I remember Mom being sad."

Dad nods. "It broke her heart when the government decided most of the major museums needed to close so artifacts could be protected in underground bunkers until the storm crisis is resolved. But this place"-he looks in the rearview mirror-"is the museum of the future. It's all holograms, so it changes every night. What did it say for this week?"

"Jurassic and American History."

"Great shows; you should go," Dad says. "You walk a path through the dome, and you'll see dinosaurs approaching. The T-Rex looks like it's about to eat you for dinner." He chuckles. "They're just holograms, so they don't bite, but they're realistic. American History is fascinating, too. You meet history makers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries-Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Al Gore-and former presidents, too. I think they have Barack Obama and Grace Farley in this show."

"Interesting," I say, and it is. But then I have another flash of memory from the museum's closing night-the feel of a cool, rough dinosaur tail under my hand when I ducked under the velvet rope to touch it, even though the signs said not to. It felt real, like it might come alive and roar any second. A hologram could never feel like that.

We turn a corner, and Dad slows down. "That's Risha Patel, the girl I told you about on our video-call last week."

The girl looks about my age. Her long black hair has a bright green streak along one side. She must have a BeatBud in her ear because she's bobbing her head back and forth to something fast and playing imaginary drums in the air, right above the handlebars of her bicycle as she rides along, hands-free.

Dad speeds up again, but I turn in my seat and stare.

She is riding a bike.

Nobody rides bikes anymore at home. The storms churn up so fast, there's not a kid in our neighborhood who's allowed to ride more than halfway down the block, so why bother? Amelia was the last of my friends to give hers up. She held out right through last summer and never cared how ridiculous she looked riding up and down the street, back and forth, alone. When we laughed, she told us that in her mind, she was going all over town, through the woods past the big tree house where our moms used to camp out when they were little, branches brushing her cheeks as she flew down the trails. But at the end of the summer, we got our StormSafe Mall and Teen Center, and even Amelia figured that was better than imaginary trails. The recycling crew picked up her bike at the beginning of October.