"Smart as a whip, just like they said." She cackles, sits, and spins her chair back toward the computer, and pecks at the keyboard so hard her fingers must hurt.

"Grandma Athena." I whisper the words and wonder how they could be true. But there is no mistaking the woman in front of me, no mistaking the intensity of her eyes.

"Shhh! Be quiet." Her voice is like ice. Cold. Sharp. "There's something not quite . . ." She trails off, reaches for a DataSlate, and frowns down at it. Her fingers fly, writing a message to someone, and I hear the chime that means it's sent. She calls up a radar screen, and I try to peer over her shoulder, but all I catch is a flash of green before she slams it down on the counter. "Gah! Weakening like nobody's business. Sloppy." She wheels around to face me again. "I know why you're here."

I shake my head weakly. How could this woman, this stranger, know anything about me? How could she even be alive?

She smiles, a thin, chapped line across her face, as if she's read my mind. "You look like you've seen a ghost." She whirls around in the chair again, dashes off a sequence of something on the keyboard. "Why isn't he answering?" She picks up the DataSlate, tosses it back on the desk, and stands to face me. "You thought I was dead."

"Well, yeah. They said . . . I mean, the car accident . . ."

"Brilliant, wasn't it? They knew I'd never give up. They knew I'd never rest until-"

My head is spinning. "Who knew you'd never rest?"

"Our fine and dedicated government leaders." She spits the words; they drip with sarcasm. "They canceled my project, the fools, but they couldn't take back what I'd already learned. I was this close." She holds up her thumb and forefingers, a hair's width apart. "This close to a breakthrough, when they cut the funding and threatened to throw me in prison if I didn't step back from my research. They didn't care that your grandfather had given his life for his country or that I was about to create a weapon so powerful that no American would have to die in battle ever again." Her eyes drift off somewhere behind me, somewhere a long time ago. "They never understood the possibilities. The power we can have."

Her eyes focus on me again. "That's why I had to die."

"You faked the car crash?"

"Oh, there was nothing fake about the crash. That car exploded at the bottom of the gorge like nothing you've ever seen."

"But you weren't in it."

"The car was rigged. Empty. I was on a plane headed for Russia. Viktor, a colleague I'd met at one of the international symposiums, assured me that his government would be happy to fund my work. It went beautifully, and a few years ago, I sent for your father. He was overjoyed to find me alive. And he was eager to help."

She grabs the DataSlate from the desk again and looks as if she's about to throw it through the lone window. "Though he's proving to be rather worthless tonight."

"I just . . ." I shake my head, trying to loosen the nest of cobwebs sticking my thoughts together. "I can't believe you're here."

"Oh, Jaden. Never trust a death certificate unless you've seen the body for yourself." She grins, a smile so cold it makes me shiver. I take a step backward, toward the door. "But you should know that. You're a smart girl, aren't you?"

It felt like a rhetorical question, but she stares at me, waiting for an answer.

"Well, yeah, I guess."

"How smart?" Her eyes burn into me, and my throat is dry enough to catch fire.

She stands, clutching the DataSlate so tightly the tendons in her hands stick out. She takes a step toward me.

"What do you mean?" I step back. My knees wobble.

"Knock off the big eyes, Jaden. I know why you're here. You stole your father's data, ran a simulation or two with it, and figured out we're in the business of storm creation and enhancement, and not storm dissipation. Now you've come here to save the world. Am I correct?" She steps toward me again. Her eyes keep switching from brown to gray to black, like a river all churned up.

"I . . ." My DataSlate presses against my back. Can she see it under my wet shirt? My head spins with the impossibility of it all. Of her knowing what I did. Of her even being here. Alive.

Another step forward. "I knew you'd be trouble from the minute I walked in on you in your father's office. So stupid of him to leave you alone. I told him so, but he said you were too young, too green and book-smart to be any threat to the program." Another step. "He was wrong, wasn't he?"

A gust of wind rattles the window. I want to fling it open, leap out, and run. This woman, my grandmother, feels like the most dangerous person I have ever met. And yet I stand here rooted to the floor. Is it because I need answers more than safety? "How do you know all this?"

"How do you think?" She turns to the closest monitor, taps the screen once, twice, and an image of the Eye on Tomorrow quad appears. She taps again. It changes to the inside of the library, looking down on the table where Alex and I always sat. Our table, where Ms. Walpole put her finger to her lips to let us know we weren't alone. But there must have been more cameras, more microphones than she knew about.

Another tap, and the inside of the Sim Dome appears. Grandma Athena double-taps, and there is sound. The quiet hum of the fans; otherwise, the empty room is quiet. But I know what she must have heard earlier, and even thinking about it makes me feel like something's pressing on my chest, squeezing out all the air.

"You've been spying on us?" I glare at her.

"Spying?" She laughs again, a cackle that chills my blood. "It's not spying, my dear, when you install cameras in facilities that you own. Why on earth do you think we've poured so much money into Eye on Tomorrow if not to know where our brightest young minds are leading one another?"

Eye on Tomorrow. The multimillion dollar campus. The hightech equipment. It's never been about encouraging problem solving and exceptional thinking. It's about controlling it.

I stare at the screen. The safety-glass cube where I sat, so close to Alex, working together, figuring all this out with our carefully designed scientific experiments.

Grandma Athena was the variable we never could have imagined.

"It's almost charming, really." She stands and walks to the big screen. "How you put your brainy little heads together and thought you'd found the magic formula." She taps it twice, and there's video of the Placid Meadows gate. She zooms in then, to a shadowy but perfectly clear image of Alex and me in the woods near the entrance.

Grandma Athena smiles a bitter smile as Alex steps closer to me. "Just like Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers caught in a storm." She crosses her arms over her DataSlate as Alex leans into me on the video and kisses me, and at that moment, anger fills me like wind.

"No!" I scream and fly at the monitor with my hands outstretched. It barely moves half an inch.

Grandma Athena's laugh is like dry sandpaper, and I can't control myself. I lunge toward her, but her wiry body is livelier than it looks. She leaps to the side, and I stumble into the desk.

The DataSlate lets out a high warning tone in her hands. Hers is set so loud she doesn't hear mine, muffled under my clothes. Grandma Athena stares at the screen, completely unconcerned about where I am or what I might do.

I hate her.

I hate that this stranger with my father's eyes knows me well enough to know I will not come at her again.

Instead, I peer over her shoulder at the radar alert that fills the screen, and what I see makes me want to explode.

The three tornadoes have merged into one. One churning, raging, chewing-up, spitting-out monster.

"Finally." Grandma Athena taps the DataSlate screen, hard and fast, then harder and faster when it doesn't seem to do what she wants the first time. "Why isn't it tracking? And where the devil is Stephen?"

She punches out a message, then stares at it with eyes so intense I'm surprised it doesn't burst into flames. Her fingers grow white, tightening around the DataSlate as if that will make it respond, and a whole minute ticks by.

Finally, she grunts, a sharp, irritated sound, and pulls open a desk drawer. From inside, she takes a slender metal rod, no longer than my forearm. She presses a button on the side, and the tip glows ice blue. "Do you know what this is?"

My blank stare answers, and she goes on. "A company in Russia makes them. It's a Shock Wand, capable of delivering a high-powered, deeply debilitating electrical charge. A fatal one, if it's turned up a bit. I'm going to find your father." She levels it straight at me. "You will stay here." She nods toward a painted green chair in the corner of the room. "Sit down."

I hesitate a second too long. She jerks the wand, and a sharp current of pain runs through my shoulder where the tip grazes me.

"Now!" she says. I move away from the door and sit.

She lowers the wand long enough to reach under the desk and pull out a length of thick rope-the kind you use to tie a boat to a mooring-and flits around the chair like some tiny evil bird, pulling the rope tighter and tighter, lashing me to it, pinning my arms to my sides. She leans in, tugs the rope into a tighter knot. It scratches against my rib cage, right through my shirt.

I glare at her, and for the first time, she smiles. "You know, your father showed me video files of you when he came to Russia."

She's tied me to a chair, and now she wants to reminisce? "What videos?"

"Just some footage of the two of you, reading stories, playing on the porch. But I could tell you were a spirited child. I'd wondered about you, and then I felt like I was finally able to know you a bit."

You don't know me at all, I think. But what I say is, "I wish I had known you were alive."

For a second, her face softens, and it feels like my only chance.

"Grandma, please let me go," I say. "You can't do this. You can't just-"

She slaps me across the cheek, hard and sharp. "Don't even think of telling me what I can and can't do," she whispers, her coffeescented breath hot on my face. "I lost my husband in battle because America's weapons weren't strong enough to end the war. I have worked my whole life to change that, to build what we've created here. Nothing else matters now. Nothing."

She fumbles with a set of old-fashioned metal keys and heads for the door. I need to keep her here, keep her talking. "How come there's no bio-scan here?" I blurt out.

"Because you need fingerprints to make them work." She holds up one hand. Her fingertips are all scar tissue. "I burned them off when I moved away-too hard to disappear otherwise." She fiddles with the keys again, laughing under her breath.

She is insane. Absolutely insane.

Still . . . she's my grandmother. How could I not matter? Not at all?

My cheek still burns, but I squeeze my eyes shut. "You don't want to do this."

"Oh, I do," she says quietly.

"Grandma, please!"

The words seem to press a button inside her-the wrong one-and her face hardens, though her voice stays quiet. "Stay where you are, or you'll be sorry." She raises the Shock Wand to remind me how sorry. "I'll be back." She grabs her DataSlate and takes one last look at the screen on the desktop computer, still swirling with green-and-red radar images. "Here." She turns it so it's facing my chair. "You can watch the radar while you wait for me to come back."

Chapter 27.

She leaves and pulls the door closed with a heavy thunk. I hear the snick of her key in the lock, and I am trapped in what must be the only room Dad's fingerprint can't open.

My legs aren't tied, so I straddle the chair and try to wiggle free. If I can get even a little slack, I might be able to get out.

But Grandma is as good at knots as she is at meteorology. The only way I can even stand is if the chair comes with me. I throw my weight forward so the back legs come up off the floor. I do it again. And again, rocking back and forth until the chair tips forward, and I'm standing with it lashed to my back.

I turn and twist, but the sharp fibers of the rope cut into my wrists, and the knots only get tighter as sweat drips into my eyes.

I let the chair clunk back to the floor and sit again, facing away from the table. If I curl my fingers in and stretch, I can feel the knot that binds my hands. I finger the rough edges of rope-is there anything here that might unravel? I tug my hands apart, but again, the ropes dig into my skin, and I feel the stickiness of blood between my wrists.

There has to be something in this awful room that can set me free. A pair of scissors. A box cutter. Anything.

I rock forward to stand again and make a slow turn with the chair on my back. There's not much here. The desk. The chair. The monitors. And a single frame on the wall, a photograph of a storm at night. Lightning blazes out in crazy jags from the bottom of a dark cloud, and the sky below it glows yellow-blue. At the bottom of the photograph in silver letters against the black silhouette of the mountains is a quote.

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.

-Joseph Stalin The photograph, the lightning, the words, are so full of my grandmother's terrifying spirit, I have to look away.

I have to get away. How?

I turn full circle, back to the desk. There's only one drawer across the top. I wiggle around until my fingers, stretched out as far as they can behind my back, close around the knob.

I pull it open and turn to look. Empty, except for a few pens and a slip of paper the size of a credit card that reads "Bio-scan override code: 4687291." This must be how Grandma gets into areas like Dad's office without a fingerprint scan. It's nothing that can help me now, not in this room with Grandma's olden-days lock, but I wiggle the paper scrap into my back pocket before I let the chair thump to the floor again.

Out of breath, I sit, helpless, and stare at the computer screen's radar swirls. My eyes burn with tears, and the colors blur together, but then I see something that nearly makes my heart stop. I blink-hard, over and over-until the tears spill out so I can see.

The storm is moving again.

No. No. No.

Let me be reading it wrong. Please. Please let me be wrong.

I throw all my weight forward, too fast this time. The chair's legs fly out from under me, and I fall. My temple cracks against the corner of the desk before I hit the floor on my side.

Lying there, my head throbbing, my arm radiating pain underneath me, all I can see is the hook of that storm. It is still growing.

I ignore the pain in my shoulder, throw all my weight forward, and roll onto my knees with the chair on my back. My forehead presses against the cold concrete floor, and I summon every bit of strength I have to push up with my legs. Up, up, until I'm standing before the desk again, facing the screen.

The storm is moving again, headed straight toward Alex's farm.

I want to scream, but instead I spin around and smash the chair into the edge of the desk. Some way, some how, I have to get loose. Without any idea what I'll do or where I'll go or how I could possibly fix this, I throw my weight at the desk again.

The chair smashes into it, over and over and over, until my wrists feel broken and I have to stop. The splintering noises I pray for never come; there's only the hard, cold thunk of solid wood on wood, over and over and over.

My DataSlate has worked its way out of my jeans. It clunks off the edge of the desk to the floor. The jolt turns it on, and the screen blinks up at me.

Dad's files.

Dad's files are here.

If this little rectangle of titanium and wires holds the power to turn this storm toward the farms, it must also hold the power to turn it back.

If I can get to the computer in Dad's office, I can try to reverse what they've done.

The lightning in Grandma's picture blurs and dances through my tears, and it makes me want to smash the photo, smash everything Grandma's ever done, onto this polished concrete floor.

Suddenly, the power of my will feels strong enough to shatter glass.

Glass.

I stare at the reflection of the radar in the glass that covers Grandma's storm.