Storm (Swipe Series)

the SSC’s tables because she was looming over the camera now, using both hands to fiddle with her dreadlocks as she let Mr. Arbitor stare up her nose. “You,” she said, “are a DOME agent. Doesn’t matter what else you are—father, husband, friend—to me, you’re just the face of DOME.” She shrugged. “This is my official report, Agent Arbitor. If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to file a complaint.”
    “But I can help!” Mr. Arbitor pleaded. “I’m trying to help my daughter!”
    “Sorry,” Arianna said sarcastically. “Connection must be bad. You keep talking, but all I hear is the crackle of DOME’s endless red tape.”
    “I’m not calling on behalf of DOME—” Mr. Arbitor insisted.
    But Arianna had already ended the call.
    For a moment, Charles and Olivia just sat, speechless, on the couch.
    And so it was that the Arbitors finally realized—if they really were serious about seeing their daughter Erin again, there was only one place left for them to turn.
    7
    The walk to the weather mill took nearly twenty minutes. Lahoma’s all-school principal led the way as quickly as he could, stopping just shy of breaking into an actual jog. He didn’t make chitchat. He didn’t talk at all. He kept his eyes down, and he stretched his strides far with each step.
    But it wasn’t until about halfway to the mill, as Connor andthe principal passed the sheriff’s office at the edge of town, that things really started getting strange. Beside them the screen door opened and slammed shut against the quiet building’s front, and in between, the sheriff himself walked out and onto the dirt of the road.
    He didn’t say anything. He didn’t smile at Connor.
    He kept his eyes down, and he stretched his strides far with each step.
    At this point, Connor thought, it might be appropriate to worry.

    Outside, Lahoma’s weather mill was surrounded by thirty acres of well-guarded ground-to-air missile launchers. By the time Connor came upon them, no less than a dozen Lahoma officials were flanking him. The principal and sheriff, of course, but also the deputy, the judge, the head of the mill, even the mayor himself. What was going on? Connor was beginning to have some ideas, but as the men and women all around him solemnly led the way through the mill’s entrance and onto the main factory floor, one single phrase began running through his head:
    The sky is falling .
    The world as Connor knew it had left him behind.

    Inside, Connor and his chaperones were greeted by the weather mill’s head of security, Mr. Larkin. Connor knew him well as the happy father of Steve Larkin, his good friend of many years. But nothing about Mr. Larkin seemed happy today. Behind him, thewide-open, industrial weather mill was silent and dead, filled with the haze of an ominous black smoke. Its ceiling stretched fifty feet into the air, and a crosshatched series of steel I beams and corrugated sheet metal lined its surface without any movement underneath. The concrete floor was vacant. The grated metal walkway that lined it twenty feet up, that made a path to the cubical office spaces jutting out from the high walls . . . there was no one on it. The office lights were off. Each one had a little frosted window looking out onto the mill’s floor below, but today those frosted windows shed no light. The floor itself had chemical vats and processors of all types, many of them with vents leading up into the ceiling and out into the air through long, aluminum tubes. But none of them churned, none of them whirred . . .
    At the floor’s edge, looking out onto the missile-launcher field and sectioned off by high walls and even more frosted glass, was the weather mill’s control center—a tablescreen that stretched nearly twenty feet across and curved in a giant “C” semicircle around whomever it was who might have stood at its helm. For the last six years, that whomever-it-was had been Connor’s parents, the Goodmans.
    But right now that control center was empty. And its tablescreen was dark.
    Mr. Larkin led Connor past it, through the cavernous space, and over to the mill’s supercomputer off in the corner. It was a series of computer racks—tall, refrigerator-sized stacks of hard drives on shelves—and they were laid out all over a wide area across the floor like a high-tech hedge maze.
    “All right, Connor,” Mr. Larkin said. “Follow me, please.”
    So Connor wove with him through the mazelike walkwaysbetween the