Forget freight trains. Forget Greek monsters.

It feels like the atmosphere itself has come to life, furious, ready to whip us all off the face of the earth in revenge.

Alex is shouting something at me, but I can't hear.

"What?" I scream, but it's no use. Our voices are sucked into the sky. Alex grabs my upper arm tight and pulls me away from the door. His fingers dig into my flesh so hard it hurts, and thank God for that. It feels like I'll be carried off if he ever lets go.

"This way!" I scream, but he can't hear, so I point frantically toward the outbuilding, its light flickering through the rain. I push into the wind and pull Alex along.

The closer we get, the more my stomach clenches. Is she in there?

From the second Alex and I made it out the door, I have been waiting, watching for that glimpse of sky blue. Where is she?

Alex suddenly yanks his hand away from me and pushes Risha to the side. A branch flies close to her head. But it misses her, and we press forward through the blinding rain.

I tug Alex's sleeve and point to the cold yellow light flickering through the rain. I pull Alex and Risha in that direction.

The wind blows rain into my face. I raise an arm to wipe my eyes and finally see the squat little building with its shiny steel door.

Is Grandma waiting on the other side?

There's no time to wonder, no time to worry. The solar energy panels on the next building crackle and send up a shower of sparks.

Alex reaches for the door handle, yanks it open, and pulls Risha and me inside so fast we tumble on top of him. The wind screams through the room, celebrating its newly conquered territory.

The steel door swings open and bangs shut wildly in the wind, and every time it flies open, there are great green flashes of lightning outside. Faster and faster, closer together.

The storm is coming for us.

As if it knows our plans.

And desperately wants us to fail.

But at least our voices are back. "It's over here, hurry!" I lead Alex and Risha around the radar screen to the computer desk where I first saw her. The chair I threw is still toppled on its side in a heap of broken glass. The wind's whipping through the broken window in weird whistling-glass noises. And perhaps the most eerie thing of all is the computer.

Still humming quietly against the wall.

Waiting for Grandma to come back. Where is she now?

Alex kneels down in front of it and starts pressing keys. "Here's the program. Got numbers for me?"

I pull out the DataSlate and start reading numbers, leaning over him. "Oh-four-six-dash-two-seven-one."

"Got it."

"Then five-four-zero-"

The wind shifts, and sheets of rain pour in the broken window. It stings our faces, soaks the floor and the desk.

"It's going to short out the equipment!" Risha screams. She tries to use her skinny body to shield the computer. "Hurry up!"

"FIVE-FOUR-ZERO-TWO-SEVEN!" I scream. There's a terrible scraping, crunching sound above us that can only be pieces of roof, giving up to the wind. But Alex keeps punching in numbers. I can see the strain in his eyes, the urgent effort to focus on getting this right.

The wind is blowing in the open window so hard we can barely stand.

"Then ZERO-ZERO-ONE-ZERO-FIVE-Watch out!!" I drop the DataSlate and throw my body against Risha to shove her out of the way of the radar wall, toppling in a great shattering of glass to the concrete floor.

"Jaden, what's next?!" Alex shouts.

I grab the DataSlate. Thank God it didn't break. "NINE-FOUR-THREE-ZERO-TWO!" I force myself to keep my head down, keep reading numbers, no matter what falls around me, no matter how many branches fly past my head. No matter how sure I am that we will fail. I keep going.

"SIX-FOUR-" The wall behind us explodes in a deep rumble and tears away from the rest of the structure. The wind howls in victory. The roar of the storm is louder, the lightning more frequent; it feels like we'll be hit any second. When I look up, I see why.

I stop shouting numbers because it's too late.

It's here.

"Get down!" Alex screams and tries to pull me under the heavy wooden desk, but I can only stare at the great raging whirlwind bearing down on the main building we just left.

The storm pushes forward. A violent cloud of debris swirls around its base, branches and shrubs, shingles and twisted HV parts, bits of people's lives that will never come together again.

When it reaches the main StormSafe building, it pauses.

Just for a split second.

As if whole walls of glass are a delicacy it wants to savor.

Then it plunges into the first wall. The glass crunches like falling icicles, and the shining pieces are sucked into the vortex and become part of the tornado, sharp and fast.

In twenty seconds, the building is gone.

"Get down, it's coming!" Alex pulls my arm so hard I fall to the ground beside him.

Risha drops and flattens herself next to us. "Ow!" she cries, rubbing her side. She must have landed on something. Broken glass? "You guys, look!" She bends over and pulls with all her weight on a latch screwed into one of the floorboards. "Storm shelter!" The door swings open, and we pile down a steep set of steps behind her.

It is nothing like the storm cellar at Alex's barn. No daybed. No food. But it has metal bars poured into the concrete, for holding on. And on a heavy desk in the corner, it has the one thing we need most right now.

A computer.

I race to it, wait for a home screen to load, and squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can, as if refusing to watch will keep the tornado from jumping the last stretch of lawn, keep it from coming here where I've brought Alex and Risha.

The wind screams overhead, and I scream back. "No!!"

Because I know now what is about to happen if we cannot destroy this storm.

It is going to kill us.

Storm cellar or not. It's too big. Too strong.

It will devour us. Me, and the two people who are here with me. Because of me.

I squeeze my eyes shut tighter.

Please, please, please, don't let them die because of me.

When I open my eyes, the computer has booted up, and I find the file Alex was working on upstairs. "It auto-saved!" For once, it feels like someone might be on our side. "Get the last line of numbers, quick!"

Alex pages through DataSlate screens, one after another.

"Hurry up!"

The wind and rain, already impossibly loud, scream louder, and there's clunking, clanking coming from over our heads. Something-lots of somethings-being flung around like play toys, until finally, in an almighty howl of wind, the whole of the little building-everything above us, is ripped from the foundation and sucked into the sky.

I fall to the floor, grab on to one of the metal bars, and hold on. But impossibly, the wind lets up, and when I dare to peek into the screaming, high-whistling swirl above me, all I can do is stare.

The storm has lifted up; the tornado is no longer touching down, though it's close, and it is absolutely, directly on top of us.

The air feels heavy, like every last molecule of oxygen has been sucked into the sky, and this gray cloud has us encircled like a tomb.

Blue lightning flashes from the sides of the tornado. We are surrounded by a circular wall of clouds and electricity.

"We're inside," I whisper, and only then do I become aware of Alex and Risha on the ground next to me, staring into the sky, too.

"It's . . . it's beautiful," Risha says. But she is also the first to get her wits back. "But it's still moving. It could touch back down any second, and we'll have the other side to deal with. Finish! While we still have the computer!"

It's a miracle it still works; if the winds had raged on the ground a half-second more, it would be up there, swirling over our heads. But it's here, and I crawl to it. There are two lines left to copy from the DataSlate. Alex reads, and I enter them with shaking, bloodstained hands.

"SEVEN-THREE-ONE," he finishes.

I stare at the columns of numbers and let my finger hover over the words EXECUTE COMMAND.

What if?

What if we are wrong?

This storm over our heads will go . . . where? And will we strengthen it along the way?

Alex's hand presses down gently on my shoulder.

"It will work." I tap the button.

Drop to my knees.

And wait.

The wind starts to blow again as the second wall of the storm moves over us.

Let it work. Please let it work.

I keep my head down and listen. I send all my hopes up into the sky.

Wind howls. Rain pelts down. The computer flies off the desk-"Look out!"-and Risha yanks Alex out of the way the instant before it explodes in a shower of sparks on the concrete floor.

We huddle close and hold on, waiting for the wind to rip us apart.

But it doesn't happen. The monster never quite comes back.

There are more distant pops from electrical explosions in blown circuits and transmitters. Branches and bits of ceiling and roofing and God knows what else bang and scrape against the one wall that remains.

But the sounds start to fade.

And we are still here.

We lift our heads and watch the storm sweep away from us, back toward Placid Meadows.

"No, no!" Risha says, and starts to lunge for the computer, in pieces on the floor now.

"No, wait." Alex's eyes are trained on the top of the storm cloud. "It's going to be okay. Watch."

And yes. The churning gray monster is tired. It slugs away from us another quarter of a mile, stirring up dust and last year's leaves.

And finally, it lifts its tail up from the ground and snakes back up into its cloud.

And is gone.

Chapter 32.

There are no words to describe this sound.

The quiet after a storm has gone.

The absence of everything-birds chirping, HV motors idling, air conditioners humming.

Here in this broken shelter full of leaves and branches, shattered glass, and bits of buildings the tornado threw at us as it passed, there is almost total quiet.

Only the sound of our breathing-Alex and Risha and me, huddling together.

It feels like time should have stopped when the storm rose back into the sky, like this problem should be solved forever now that it's gone.

But I know it's not.