But where are they? I rewind the video-message and zoom in to see the background more clearly.

A wooden shelf.

Faded red apples on the wallpaper.

I suck in my breath. Not there. No.

Then I see the coffee mug with Emily Dickinson's face and know it's real.

Dad is at Aunt Linda's house.

And Mom is on her way. Or was . . . I check the time-stamp on the video. 7:22 PM. It's 7:45 now. Plenty of time for Mom to have arrived, sat down at Linda's big, wooden kitchen table with a cup of tea. Time for her to be devoured by a giant storm.

I lunge toward the radar screen. The storm is racing forward, showing no signs of weakening.

Alex points to the DataSlate in my hands. "Try calling again." His voice is so steady and calm I could scream.

I pull up Aunt Linda's contact page again.

No response.

I call up Mom's.

Nothing.

And Dad's.

Nothing.

I slam the DataSlate down on the desk and start typing blindly at the computer keyboard.

"Jaden, what are you doing?! You can't just-"

"Yes, I can!" I swipe at the tears filling my eyes, blurring my vision, and pull up the last sequence of numbers we entered, the code to turn the storm. I feed it back to the machine in reverse order. If we sent this storm to Aunt Linda's, then we can take it away, erase its path as if it never planned to flatten the white farmhouse at all. As if it never found this course toward the building with everyone I love inside.

That is the story I tell myself, and I am willing it to be true.

I finish the code, press the command button before Alex can protest again, and turn to watch the radar screen.

Like before, the storm inches forward a few more seconds before it slows and then stops, and then changes direction. And only then do I realize I was holding my breath. Aunt Linda is safe. My mother is safe. My father is . . . safe.

"Are you insane?!" Alex pushes me from the computer and starts entering code. "You have it coming right back at us!"

I stare at the radar image.

The storm had been so real when it was chasing us down the road, but between then and now, it's started to feel like something artificial. Something that lives in the colors of a map instead of in the real world.

My eyes trace its new path, back through the woods, along the road, around a curve, and up the driveway to the compound where we sit watching. It is headed straight for StormSafe. Straight for us.

It feels real again.

"What have you done?" Alex is tapping the computer screen but can't get back to the page that will let him redirect the storm.

"I had to do something!" My throat closes tight. I slump against the window and watch the clouds swirling above us. Then I whirl back to Alex. "Wait! Stop the redirection codes-what we need to do here-it's what we've needed to do all along! We have to run the dissipation code instead."

Risha shakes her head. "But that's not-"

"Not tested, I know! But it's all we have. Otherwise we can keep turning this storm around and redirecting it every two minutes, and we're going to end up with more people in danger. We have to-" I'm so certain of what I'm about to say that it surprises even me. "We have to take it out."

Chapter 31.

Alex doesn't say a word. He walks to the window, presses his forehead to the glass, and closes his eyes.

Risha stares at the computer screen with big eyes, as if she expects it to make the decision all by itself.

"We have to do this." I say it again and look at my watch. For another six minutes, the storm will be swallowing up nothing but forest and fields before it gets back to the populated area. We have six minutes. "There is no. Other. Choice."

Finally, Alex turns away from the window. "It goes against everything we know. Running untested code to drive a real satellite? Testing an unproven theory on an event that's already in progress? Jaden, it's just-"

"It's our only chance! Look!" I fling a hand at the radar screen. The storm hasn't weakened; if anything, it's feeding off the chaos of being directed and redirected in a way nature never intended. "We can't keep recoding it over and over again. There's always going to be somebody in the way, and I can't-" I choke on the words, but I force them out. "I can't be responsible for this anymore."

Risha steps to my side, so we're both facing Alex. "She's right. How close were you to figuring this out?"

"More than close." Alex taps his fingers against the glass. "We . . . I'm sure we have it. But we haven't run a simulation, and-"

"We have it right, Alex. You know we do."

"I know. I'm just afraid that-" He whirls around to face me. "There's another Sim Dome here, right? We could run the code there first and then as long as-"

A gust of wind shakes the building and interrupts him before I have a chance to do it myself. There is no time.

"Where's the code?" Risha asks.

The windows shudder and rattle.

Windows. The windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling . . .

I call up the file and stare hard at the numbers, and somehow, they whisper back to me.

Yes. This. Yes.

Almost like a poem.

The ceiling floats away with a sigh.

This is what we need to do. It will work. It has to work.

I hand Risha my DataSlate and watch her dark eyes flicking up and down the rows of numbers. She gives one quick, sharp nod when they add up. "This looks perfect. I say we do it."

But Alex doesn't move from the window. I walk over to him and slowly, tentatively, put a hand on his arm.

Still gazing out at the storm, he nods. "You're right." He turns and heads for the computer, but just as I'm about to follow him, a flash of sky blue catches my eye through the rain and I stare out the window.

The rain pours down in sheets, and the wind has picked up enough to send branches whipping down from the treetops and roofing shingles flying like playing cards. The sky is even darker off to the north. The storm is coming. We need to move, to act now if we're even going to try to disperse it, but I can't take my eyes off the figure in blue, making her way through the torrents, toward the main door of the building.

"Hurry. She's coming," I whisper, even though Risha and Alex don't know who she is, and there's no time to explain. I shake my head to clear my thoughts, push off from the window, and rush to join them at the computer. Alex has already keyed in half of the long string of numbers. He hands me the DataSlate.

"Read me the next line, starting at oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one," he says.

"Oh-four-six . . ." My eyes focus on the numbers, but in my mind, I'm picturing Grandma Athena pushing her way through the wind to the front door. Does she know the bio-scan override code by memory? She's probably in by now, probably through the door with her Shock Wand.

"Jaden!" Alex's sharp voice brings me back to the numbers. He's almost shouting now to be heard over the wind's steady, whooshing roar.

"Sorry. It was oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one . . ."

A thunk against the window makes me jump. I almost drop the DataSlate but manage to fumble it in my hands and get hold of it again. "What was that?"

"Piece of the roof came off, it looked like." Risha takes the DataSlate from my shaking hands and reads Alex another line of numbers. She's about to start the next line when the lights flicker and go out.

The computer's hum dies, and all we can hear is the growing roar from outside.

The windows shake.

There are more clunks and scrapes from the roof, as if pieces of it are breaking free to escape from the cruel winds.

Risha's free hand finds mine, and I hold on.

"The generator will kick in any second." Alex waits. "There has to be a generator. There must be, right?"

My heart sinks. There doesn't have to be a generator because there wasn't supposed to be a need for one. The storms were never supposed to come here.

Dad didn't count on this.

There is no generator. Only the faint glow of the DataSlate.

I let go of Risha's sweaty hand and go to the window. There, eight stories down and off into the trees, is the only other light in the compound. It is the building where I found Grandma Athena.

It must have a generator. And it has a computer.

"There's a light on down there; it's the only building with power!"

"We can't go out there!" Alex shouts.

"It's moving faster!" Risha holds up her DataSlate with a radar image. The storm is coming.

"We have to leave! Otherwise, we're trapped on the eighth floor of a glass building!" I scream. "Come on!"

We run, dodging desks and radar screens, past the elevators-there's no hope of them working now-and to the fire exit door that leads to the stairs.

"This way!" I tug it open. "Here!"

Behind us, there's a tremendous crash of glass on glass, and even though I can't see it, I know that one of the windows we'd been looking through is gone, shattered.

When the stairway door closes behind us, everything goes dark.

I've been clinging to Alex's hand but I let go so I can turn on my DataSlate and give us at least a little light.

Risha stumbles behind me. I feel her hands on my back, catching herself, and I grab the railing and hold on. I stumble down a few steps, but Alex reaches back to steady me, and we go down, down, down, until finally, there are no more stairs to descend.

"Ready?" I turn off the DataSlate, tuck it into the back of my jeans, and reach for the door handle.

"Wait!" Alex shouts into the darkness. "That's going to lead straight outside. Do you know where we're going?"

"The building's to the left-maybe thirty yards. We'll have to run!"

"And hold on to each other!" Risha screams.

"I've got my shoulder against the door!" Alex shouts. "On the count of three, you turn the handle, and I'll push it open, and then we need to grab on to one another and go!"

"I'm ready!" I try to ignore the noise from beyond the door, the wind that sounds ever more like that legendary freight train, ever more like a monster from mythology, ready to swallow us up. "All set?"

"Do it!" Alex shouts.

I turn the handle and we push, but nothing happens. Even when I hear Alex grunt from the effort of pushing, pushing his whole body against the door, it doesn't move except to pop open for a split second to mock us and then slam shut.

"Again! Together!" Alex cries. "One!"

The door is cold against my shoulder.

"Two!"

I think about three. Think that if we are successful, if this goes the right way, we'll fly out of here into a monster storm, and then what?

"Three!"

The door pops open like before, but this time, we are pushing, all of us, and we keep it from slamming shut. Then a swirl of wind comes, and the door that we could barely push open all together flies off its hinges as if it's nothing more than the lid of a shoe box.

And we are out.

Thrown into the wildest storm I have ever seen.