I know the storms will come again, on the next day when the clouds start swirling and the conditions are just right. They will come.

But right now, it's too soon to talk of next times. I am too thankful to do anything except stay here with my head on Alex's shoulder, breathing this same air with him, holding on to Risha's hand, and feeling her bracelets, cool against my wrist.

Alex is the first to speak. "Thank God we had the numbers right."

A few minutes later, Risha is the second.

"Look." She points up, out of the shelter. We uncurl ourselves like fern fronds in spring and stretch our necks up, up to the line her finger traces toward the clouds in the east.

A smudge of broken rainbow leans against the storm-bruised sky, faint color in the day's last light. I stare hard at it, willing the colors to brighten.

They don't.

I am thankful anyway. Because hope has to start somewhere. And a glimmer is better than nothing at all.

It is the sound of tires crunching over broken boards and branches that finally brings us up out of the shelter to meet Aunt Linda's blue farm truck. Mom jumps out and looks as if she can't decide whether to hug us or kill us.

"Jaden!" She flies at me and pulls me into a hug that comes dangerously close to accomplishing the latter, but I manage to push away so I don't suffocate.

"You got my messages!"

Her eyes fill with tears. "I'm sorry I didn't come home sooner. I thought you were probably getting used to everything. A new house and Mirielle and-"

"Mirielle! Remi! Are they okay? Were they with you and Dad? Or are they home at Placid Meadows? And where's Dad?"

My stomach tightens. Is he okay? Is he back in his office at Placid Meadows sending down another storm?

Mom presses her hands against her eyes and shakes her head a little. "Mirielle and Remi are fine. They're safe. So is Dad, but . . . there's . . . we have a lot to talk about, Jaden." She moves her hands and smiles a weak, exhausted smile. "And I need to say hello to your friends, too."

"This is Risha. And Alex." I wait while she shakes their hands. "Mom, where is everybody? What's going on?"

"What's going on," she says, "is that we need to get the three of you someplace safe, where we can clean up those cuts, and you can eat something." She looks at my matted hair. "And take a shower. Pile in." She opens the truck door. "We'll talk on the way back to Linda's house."

Chapter 33.

Dear Dad, I hope things are going okay for you. I wish . . .

I stop and stare out the window, where fat raindrops are starting to fall, pelting the red leaves on our sugar maple in the yard. A long time ago, I used to love the way September storms would make Vermont's autumn leaves shine.

Thunder rumbles, and I set the pencil down.

It feels weird writing to him like this instead of talking at my DataSlate for a video-message, but it makes sense that one of Dad's restrictions at the energy farm includes the use of any electronic communication devices.

At first when Dad turned himself in and came clean about the technology he developed with Grandma Athena, it didn't look like he'd be doing time.

After all, it was the government that opened the floodgates on weather manipulation research when it changed the laws and even paid StormSafe to redirect hurricanes in the Gulf when they were headed for populated areas. They wanted Dad's technology, so they pretty much gave him free reign, extended his patent for the Sim Dome, and didn't ask questions about how he made Placid Meadows so safe. It was the National Storm Center that funded Dad's tornado dissipation project when he came back from Russia. Weather manipulation won't be a crime until the new legislation takes effect next year.

But lying under oath has always been against the law, and Dad had testified before Congress about the failure of his dissipation research. He lied about the project he scrapped so he could go on to something bigger, technology that would let him rule the storms instead of simply sending them home to the clouds. The project Grandma Athena had always dreamed of. What she'd given up her life to do. And Dad finally got the attention he never had from her when he was a kid.

It's crazy that after all he did, all the lives he destroyed with his pet storms, that it was the lying that landed him on one of those energy farm bikes, sentenced to pedal for power in the sun for the next five years, paying back in sweat what he stole from society with his crimes.

Only he can never really pay it back. I think of Alex and Tomas whose family farms were ravaged and almost stolen away, of the countless people who lost their homes in Dad's redirected storms. Of Newton.

Thank God for Ms. Walpole, who helped Tomas's family get their farm deed back, along with a settlement so StormSafe will pay for his mother's treatment in New York, and then some. He and Alex have had a chance to talk, too. I was right; Tomas trusted Van and had no idea what he and my father were doing.

Lightning flashes, and my stomach twists, even though the only storms around tonight are small ones. I run my hand over the cover of the poetry book I brought home with me from Dad's, and I breathe in slowly. It will be a long time before my heart remembers that storms aren't all evil. That they can be ordinary rain, with thunder and lightning and a bit of wind.

I pick up the pencil again.

Set it down.

What do you write to someone who is so much like you and yet nothing like you at all? What do you say to a parent who is no one that you want to grow up to be?

And what can I say about this summer that was supposed to be our time to reconnect?

I've only been home-real home with Mom-two months, but Eye on Tomorrow already seems like forever ago. Placid Meadows, the campus, the playground . . . they all feel like memories of some high-definition dream.

That afternoon when the storm was raging, when we crouched clinging to metal bars in the storm cellar, I wanted to wake up like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and find a cold compress on my forehead because it was never real.

Just a dream.

Did Dad ever really want to know me again? Or was I there like all the others-another Eye on Tomorrow kid to watch and shape and ultimately hire to help keep secrets?

Mom unloaded the truth on the way back to Aunt Linda's house that night. When she left for Costa Rica, she hadn't known how Dad's research was evolving, how his interests had taken such a dark turn. When she finally got my message-the video-message of me crying by the side of the road-she called Mirielle, who broke into Dad's office-I still don't know how but it doesn't surprise me that she figured it out-and pieced together what was happening. That's when she learned, all at once, that her dead mother-in-law was alive and that her husband was not doing the work he said he was.

She told Mom everything. And Mom borrowed an HV, drove straight to the airport, and caught the next flight home.

Aunt Linda had picked her up at the airport, and when Dad met them at her house, Mom gave him a raging earful about the promises he'd made to her, to me, about my summer and keeping me safe.

And that's when Grandma Athena's message got through. Her face appeared on Dad's DataSlate, right there in Aunt Linda's kitchen, talking about how the storm wasn't performing as they'd planned, how she locked me in the outbuilding. I was more of a problem than he'd imagined, she said, and so the two of them would need to talk. Dad swore up and down to Mom that she never really would have hurt me. I don't think I believe it.

Dear Dad, I hope things are going okay for you. I wish this summer could have been different. I really wish . . .

I roll the pencil between my fingers, then snap it in half.

Thunder rumbles again, and rain pours down my window in thick rivers. Everything outside looks warped and blurry and wet.

What do I wish? I wish Eye on Tomorrow had been real, a legitimate opportunity for kids like me and Risha, Tomas and Alex, to collaborate and solve this world's problems.

I wish Dad was the father he used to be, or pretended to be anyway, the dad with the strong shoulders and rainbow sprinkles.

I wish that his corporation never existed. That he'd never gone to Russia and found Grandma Athena.

I wish I had a grandmother like Risha's, who stirred curry stews and kissed my head, instead of one who tied me to chairs.

And yet . . . I wish I'd had a chance to talk with her, really talk with her, about her life and her ideas and her choices, before she died.

I pick up a jagged pencil piece and turn it over in my hands.

It's been two months, but we haven't had a funeral yet. Mom and I will have to go make arrangements because with Dad locked up, we're the only ones who can take care of her burial.

Mom's waiting to book plane tickets. The storm was so huge it's taken them weeks to clear the debris. If Grandma had entered the main StormSafe building, or if she were right outside, she'd have been buried under a mountain of glass and steel when the tornado hit.

"Jaden?" Mom knocks at my bedroom door, then walks in with a pile of clean clothes and balances it on my dresser. "Done with the letter?"

I push the paper away. "I don't think I have anything to say."

I run my finger over the end of the pencil piece, then pick up the other one and try to fit them back together, but splintery edges stick out. Breaks are never truly clean.

"Did he really used to love me?" I try to say it as if I don't care, but my shuddery voice gives everything away.

"Yes." Her eyes are sad. "He really did and he still does, Jaden."

I almost laugh.

"Truly." Mom puts a hand on each of my cheeks so I have no choice but to look right at her. "It wasn't until that night you were in danger-you, his little girl-that he could finally see what he had done. Remember what he looked like when he called you on the videophone?"

I nod. I remember. I could never forget the first time I ever saw my father cry.

"He loves you. Nothing excuses what he's done, but he's damaged, Jaden. His thinking. Athena is-was-I can't get used to the idea of having her alive and now gone again-she was larger than life somehow. It's like . . . I don't know . . . like she had some spell cast over him."

"Yeah," I whisper. And I almost understand. I know that feeling of wanting a parent back so badly. Wanting to be celebrated and loved. It's a feeling he never really knew. Mom pushes my hair behind my ear, and all at once, I'm filled up with tears at how lucky I am that I do know.

The house videophone buzzes in the hallway, and as Mom leaves to answer it, my DataSlate dings with a video-message from Alex.

"Hey, Jaden! I gotta show you what came in the mail today."

Video-Alex holds up a fat off-white envelope, and I cheer, even though I know he can't hear me. "All right!" Risha and I both got similar envelopes two days ago, invitations to spend three weeks interning at the National Storm Center's new weather modification research facility this winter, and permission documents for Mom to sign. According to the paperwork, Ms. Walpole recommended all three of us, based on our "outstanding commitment to research." Everything in the NSC envelope makes me hope this is the program that Eye on Tomorrow was supposed to be.

"So I guess I'll be seeing you in a couple months!" Video-Alex winks, and the screen goes black.

I stare out the window and smile at the rain, just thin trickles down the glass now, and the clouds are thinning. It really was a small storm this time. Nothing more.

I pick up the longer of the two pencil pieces and go back to Dad's letter.

I ask him about Mirielle and Remi. They've been to visit him, Mom says, even though Mirielle isn't sure if she'll stay or take Remi back to France. I write a few lines about school, about the new schedule I'm on this fall with home connection three days a week and morning classes in person the other two. I ask how things are at the energy farm, then erase that because they're probably not great.

I'm about to sign it when Mom comes back through the door. The lines in her face are tight.

"Who was on the videophone?" I ask.

"Logan County Sheriff's office. They finished clearing all the debris from StormSafe, and Grandma . . ." Mom pauses.

They must have found the body.

Mom bites her lip. "I'm . . . not sure how to tell you this."

I stare at her for a second. Does she think I'm going to be that upset over losing a grandmother I never knew, until the night she almost killed me? "Mom, it's okay. I was there when the building went down. I know she never could have survived. Is the funeral going to be soon?"

"We'll go down for a service on Monday," Mom says. "Closed casket."

I nod, remembering the flying debris, the minefield of broken glass and twisted metal that night. "Her body was in pretty bad shape, huh?"

Mom shakes her head. "They didn't find her body."

A million thoughts swim through my head. The storm was huge; it could have picked her up and dropped her anywhere. But one thought rises to the surface-not so much a thought in words as a mental movie of Grandma Athena, standing in the outbuilding, her mouth a straight line, her hands on her hips.

Her laugh.

Never trust a death certificate.

Could she possibly have survived that monster?

My stomach twists.

Could she still be out there somewhere?

Mom goes on. "We can still have the service. But closed casket. It's not a problem."

Not a problem. I let Mom go on thinking that. She's probably right.

"When will we leave?"

"Sunday. You should call your friends. You'll have some time to see them, too." Mom leaves and closes the door behind her.

An image of Grandma's face floats through my mind, but I imagine the wind blowing it away like Risha's dandelion fluff. Like the magical numbers on her bracelet, zeros and ones, swirling through the air until the ceiling lifts away, and they arrange themselves into something that makes sense, into a world mended and whole again.

But it took decades to make this mess. It will take time for us to go back.

No. To move forward.

It'll take time and research and work. And hope. Failing and trying again and probably wanting to scream because it can't happen fast enough. It won't be impossible, but it will feel that way sometimes; I already know that. And I know I want to be part of it. I need to be.

I reach for my DataSlate to call Alex and Risha. Outside, the sun streams through a gap in the clouds. Puddles glimmer on the sidewalk, and half a rainbow arcs over the woods. This one is brighter than before.

And today feels like a good day to start.