Storm (Swipe Series)

found.
    2
    It wasn’t a long list, the things Connor needed to pack. He had his tablet, two shirts, an extra pair of jeans, three pairs each of underwear and socks . . .
    He zipped his blue high school backpack in two quick tugs, and he looked sadly once more around the room that had always beenhis. The action figures from childhood that still lined his dresser, the stuffed animals shoved in embarrassment into the corner behind the door, the powder blue wallpaper he always hated so much . . . seeing it all now, one last time, through the eyes of a soon-to-be fugitive, he couldn’t help but lose himself in the undertow of nostalgia.
    The Goodmans’ home. He’d been born and raised within these wooden walls. The floorboards that creaked and sagged in certain spots; the shower that took way too long to get hot; the hallway closet that trapped him once, the last time he played hide-and-seek with his mom and dad, many years ago . . .
    He’d miss all of it, good and bad. The very package of the Goodman life itself. It was gone now. And what he was about to do would bury it for good.
    Connor lifted his pack from his old, creaky bed—the same one off which his feet had dangled these last few years, the same one that the light hit in that awful way each morning if he slept too late—and he prepared to leave home for the last time in his life.
    No great loss , Connor told himself, walking through the foyer to that old front door. Most of the stuff in these rooms had been auctioned off by now anyway. Already it was a shell of the house it once was. Leaving now put the bow on it, sure. But it didn’t do more than that.
    When he stepped outside, Connor could hear the happy sounds of Sally and Steve’s “rain celebration” raging down a ways on Main Street. He smiled. It really had been thoughtful of them, he knew, to go through all that trouble on his account.
    Invaluable too. Instrumental, even, in what he was about to do next. Though Sally and Steve would never know it.
    They’d been great friends, he thought. He’d miss them as much as anything.
    Connor leaned down now at the row of flowers lining the front of his old house, and he plucked a tulip from the dirt in the ground. He bounced his backpack nervously against his shoulders. He pulled his baseball cap down low over his face.
    And he walked east. To Lahoma’s weather mill, just outside of town.
    3
    Logan and Hailey had waited by the mill all morning long. In the earliest hours, the place was buzzing as workers finished to-do lists, crossed the t’s, dotted the i’s, and in every way prepared for the now–world famous reopening and the inaugural, nationwide cloud seeding that would take place later that day.
    But come noon, as the mill’s technicians and mechanics and myriad employees wrapped up the last of their duties one by one, each of them began leaving for the town just a short walk or rollerstick ride away.
    At first, Logan and Hailey couldn’t for the life of them figure out why everyone would be headed out so soon before the ribbon cutting. But as the noise from Lahoma’s Main Street steadily grew, they realized the town was celebrating. And nobody wanted to miss it.
    With the scene by the mill much quieter ever since, Logan and Hailey decided to check up on the goings-on a bit closer to town. They circled the side streets now, kicking rocks at one another from the dirt in the roads, waiting for something to happen.
    “Looks like a fun picnic,” Logan said, peeking in on Main Street from an alley between two storefronts.
    Hailey shook her head. “It’s too small a town for us to blend in with the crowd. Look at that—everyone knows everyone. No way we go unnoticed.”
    “I don’t know, might be worth it . . . ,” Logan joked in a sing-songy voice. “They’ve got soy dogs.”
    “No picnic!” Hailey scolded. “No soy dogs!”
    “Hey, I bet you and I would destroy the competition over at that hover-dodge game,” Logan said, pointing out to the Lahoma park.
    “Yeah? Those kids are seven .”
    “Just saying,” Logan said.
    And so it was that Logan and Hailey had their own little picnic, right there in the shadows, as they kept their eyes peeled for anything suspicious.
    4
    Connor Goodman arrived at the weather mill with his shirt tucked in and the tulip in his hand and his head held high. He didn’t slink around back. He didn’t walk quickly. He didn’t look nervous. Not one thing about him was suspicious.
    But as Connor