Some Fine Day (20 page)

“Forty-five says she gets passed by Alecto,” someone calls out, to a round of hoots and jeers. “Wild Child’s pouring on the steam. Laugh now, cherries, you’ll be cryin’ Friday when I take your money.”

Seen from orbit, the cane is a majestic thing, soft and white like a mound of whipped cream. The swirly pattern and hole at the center make me think of water circling the drain of a bathtub. If the tub was a few thousand miles wide.

The view from ground level is different. And with the latest generation four-D screen, you feel as if you’re in the middle of it. The sea is whipped into a raging froth, and waterspouts twist and sway like cobras on the horizon. The storm makes a noise that is indescribable. Put it this way: If pure chaos had a sound, what I am hearing would be it. And I have to admit, it’s hypnotic.

Nothing we know how to build could survive a direct hit from a monster like that. Nothing. It’s like a giant broom, sweeping clean everything in its path. But Will had faith. That there’s someplace safe up there.

We were lying on the shore, watching the stars come out.

I wanted to believe it, but there was a ring of truth
.
The details were so vivid
. . .

I wish I had asked him more about the details. Now I’ll never know what they were. It was a nice story though.

I half-listen to the other cadets bicker and boast about hot tips on the hypercanes, which they refer to by their nicknames: Alecto, the youngest, is Wild Child. Megaera, the first to appear, is Mother Dearest, or simply Mother. Kelaeno is Roadrunner, and Aeolus is Lucky Day, as in it’s your lucky day if you can manage to predict where she’ll go next. The four of them roam their respective territories like unleashed hellhounds, and there’s not a square mile they haven’t chewed up at some point in the last fifty years.

Only Tisiphone has no nickname. She doesn’t need one, since no one bets on her. What would be the point? She’s an enigma, visible only on LIDAR, and therefore boring to all except a handful of meteorologists.

My mother used to tell me stories when I was little. . . About an island that’s hundreds of miles across and sheltered from the storms somehow. . .

In Greek mythology, Tisiphone was one of the Erinyes, a sister of Alecto and Megaera. The ancient Romans knew them as the three Furies. Born from drops of blood in a story too gross to relate here, they specialized in vengeance. This is a concept I can relate to.

The thing is, Jansin, I’ve heard the same story from other people we trade with. . .

Tisiphone. Locked in place by opposing jet streams.

Locked in place.

A crazy idea starts forming in my mind. It makes my heart beat hard against my ribs. I wander across the room to one of the quiet reading nooks and sit down, but I feel restless and bounce right back up again. There’s only a few people left in the rec room now, the diehards for whom every new piece of data on the crawl means money won or lost. Mostly lost, if their faces are any indication.

I pace over to the billiards table and start pushing the balls around, knocking one against the other. It’s a game of pure physics. Cause and effect.

Tisiphone is the smallest cane, but her eye would still be several hundred miles across. All the government scientists say she’s over water, open ocean, but they’re military. And the military likes to keep secrets.

If there is some kind of land mass out there, if the rumors are true, there’s only one place on Earth it could be. Only one place that’s protected from the other storms.

What if there’s something in the eye?

I wish Will was here. I need his actuarial brain to help me untangle the truth. There’s not a shred of evidence to support my theory, but if there’s anything to it, someone has to know. There has to be a record somewhere. It’s too big of a secret to bury completely.

I get back to the dorms five minutes before curfew. I lie on my bunk for a while but I’m way too keyed up to sleep, so I wander over to my computer. The main menu shimmers in the air before me for a full five minutes before I start typing. Then I start searching for every scrap of data I can find on Tisiphone.

I start with the public record: storm tracker sites, scientific journals. I learn that her sustained winds are a mere three hundred mph, although at the eyewall, they reach four hundred mph and beyond. There used to be an observation platform fifty miles from the outermost ring of thunderstorms, but it was shut down during a round of budget cuts a few years ago. Apparently, the bureaucrats felt we had discovered all there was to discover about the hypercane. And the installation was especially costly to maintain because it’s in the northwestern hemisphere, which has one other notable feature besides Tisiphone.

It’s where the toads live.

That meant the scientists had to be guarded by a rotating detachment of several dozen soldiers at all times. So they finally pulled the plug.

I wonder about the toads. How they changed so
fast
. In just a couple of generations. It doesn’t make sense. I wonder why the army hasn’t rooted them out of their islands and eradicated them. Or ever even captured one alive. I wonder whether the people at the station were really studying Tisiphone.

When I exhaust the usual channels, I decide to go deeper. It’s risky on an Academy computer traceable to me, but I’m reasonably proficient at covering my tracks. I hack into the main prefectural records department and make a list of the divisions likely to finance projects related to the toads or Tisiphone or both. Biosciences and meteorology top the list. I also tag the Novarctic Research Commission, the Genetically Modified Agriculture Research Service, and a few with cryptic names I’ve never heard of before, like the Bureau for Adaptation, Innovation and Resettlement.

By the time I finish, it’s past midnight. My eyes are burning and my back aches, and I’m still not entirely sure why I’m doing this. It’s probably a wild goose chase. But I think I’ll keep going until I know one way or another. It’s the last thing I can do for Will.

When I sleep, I dream that we’re in a tiny boat, drifting on the ocean. The seas are calm and we’re lying on the bottom, looking up at the wide blue sky. I feel so peaceful, like I could stay this way forever.

“See, I told you there aren’t any storms,” he says, stroking my hair like he did that day at the waterfall. His eyes are serious and beautiful. “They made it all up.”

He sits up and trails his fingers in the water. I want to tell him not to, that he’s made a terrible mistake, but I can’t speak or move. And then a scaly hand reaches out of the sea and drags him over the edge.

I wake with a scream trapped in my throat like a knife in a clenched fist.

The first expedition to the Moho failed to return, as did the second and third. A decision was made to seek out the other colonies.

The next five days are so bad I can’t summon the energy to anything more than faceplant onto my cot at lights-out. But muscle memory is an amazing thing. It took months to get out of shape, and by day six I’m already bouncing back into fighting form. Of course, it helps that I’m eating like a bulimic without the purges, and punishing myself in the gym every chance I get.

By the weekend, I’m near the head of the pack for our morning run. It starts in the exercise yard, winds through a dirt path on the Academy grounds, and then enters a warren of tunnels that used to be part of a mining operation. The ceilings are low and craggy, and I can see my breath pluming in the cold air. We follow glowlights embedded in the ground at ten-yard intervals. The route is crossed by dozens of smaller, pitch-black passages.

Once, a couple of years ago, they sent a bunch of us into the deepest parts where the mines connect to a labyrinth of caves. We spent two days in there, squeezing through cracks and rappelling into lightless pits. The chimneys were the worst, tight vertical passages you ascend without ropes just by bracing your feet and hands. Jake got stuck in one, and I crawled back down and pried him out. He asked me out the next day. I still find it hard to believe people used to do that for fun.

I finish the route in 1:09, and Libby slaps my butt.

“Nice going, Cadet Nordqvist. Glad to see you’re out of the geriatric ward.”

“Thanks, Cadet O’Conor. Your faith in me is truly heartwarming. Now give me that water bottle before I puke on your boots.”

The next week represents the culmination of nearly a decade of training. They’re very secretive about the final exam. All I know is that it goes down in a structure known as the Dome, which is in a restricted area of the academy grounds. I’ve never even seen it. None of us has. As you might imagine, the Dome enjoys near-mythical status among the student body.

Those who fail are permitted one more year of training, and one more chance to take the test. After that you’re out. So things have been getting weird: sudden shrieks of too-loud laughter; more fistfights over nothing; the stifled sobs of nightmares in the darkened dorms.

Either way, I’ll be out of here in a matter of days. The thought scares me. Not because of the final. I’m OK with it. Whatever happens, happens. I’m much more worried about what will come after. I’ve decided that my plan is to get to the surface one way or another and then run. I have to make time to keep studying Tisiphone. If there’s a safe place up there, I need to find it.

Our instructor in Unconventional Warfare is a lieutenant colonel named Sherwood. Officers have looser rules governing their appearance than us lowly cadets, and Sherwood has long black hair that she keeps in a fancy knot at the back of her neck. She also has a clique of seniors who do her bidding, and if you surmised that they were among the most sociopathic and vicious at the Academy, you would be correct.

On the first day of class, she looked me up and down and shook her head sadly, as if to say standards were really starting to slip if they let in individuals like me. I knew at that point there was no hope of getting on her good side, so we settled into a simmering animosity that flared to life on the rare occasions I raise my hand.

Sample exchange:

“Yes, Cadet Nordqvist?”

“I’m a little confused. If the goal is to force the enemy to their knees through sabotage, assassination, and other clandestine operations, would you say that any target is fair game?”

“Targets are fluid according to the situation and immediate goal, yes.”

“Including civilians? And civilian infrastructure?”

“There are aspects of asymmetric or fourth-generation warfare that address undermining the morale of civilian populations through economic and political hardship, and curtailment of civil liberties to induce war-weariness. It’s all part and parcel of destabilizing the enemy to the point of capitulation, even if they have the capacity to continue fighting. That is the essence of the strategy.”

“But when the other side does it, don’t we call that terrorism?”

After a while, she just stopped calling on me. She knows her pets can retaliate once the bell rings.

Today, however, I’m in a dark mood and itching for a fight. I decide to make a pest of myself until Sherwood is forced to acknowledge my existence.

There’s about thirty of us in the classroom. It’s just a few minutes before the end of class, and most have mentally checked out. There’s no written test. Everything is incorporated into the final. If you haven’t learned what you need to learn by now, it’s too late anyway.

Sherwood’s at the big screen reviewing strategies for the recruitment of indigenous subversive forces. I raise my hand and keep it up there. She ignores me for as long as possible, then sighs wearily and nods.

“Cadet Nordqvist?”

“So the enemy of our enemy is our friend?”

“That’s right.”

“What if they recruit children? Or practice torture? In the unrest of 2057–”

Sherwood cuts me off. “You know where to go, cadet.”

On my way to the commandant’s office, I think about the day Will asked me what my tattoo meant.
The weak capitulate before the strong
. I used to believe it. That’s just the way of things. When the world flooded, we were the chosen few who kept civilization going. The best minds humanity had to offer built huge bunkers and hydro-farms that slowly expanded into the cities we live in now. Half a century later, we take it all for granted, but it was a staggering achievement if you think about it.

Things were supposed to be better. Starting from scratch. An opportunity to build societies that were more altruistic, not constantly at war with each other. And look what we did with it.

Will was a healer. What would he think of us? Of me? And what I could become, but haven’t yet.

Harold Chu arches an eyebrow at me when I walk through the door. Somehow, he makes his drab grey uniform look like haute couture.

“To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure, cadet? Or should I say, to whom?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Sherwood sent me, sir.”

“Back-talking again, are you? I’ve heard you two have very lively Socratic dialogues.”

“That’s one way to put it, sir.”