Storm (Swipe Series)

Connor. You can’t look away. You’re making a choice, right now , one way or another. Are you a killer or aren’t you?”
    “No!”
    “ Are you a killer or aren’t you!”
    “I’m not!” Connor yelled. “I’m not!” He stumbled back now, away from the panel. His face was sweaty and hot, and he put it in his trembling hands. “Why?” he asked softly. “Why are you doing this to me?”
    “Not to you,” Logan said. “ For you. You have a long life to live. I don’t blame your parents for doing what they did. They had good reasons. And I’m sure they were good people. But you don’t have to throw everything away just to prove they were right. It isn’t worth it, Connor. General Lamson isn’t worth it either.”
    Connor fell to the ground, as though unable, any longer, to bear the weight of what he’d started.
    “You don’t understand,” he said weakly. “It’s already done. I activated the launch process before you’d even arrived. There is no abort. We have four minutes to evacuate.” He looked at Logan as though hoping for forgiveness. For absolution.
    “Hey,” Logan said. “Listen. That’s okay. All of this is still okay. You have to—look, all you have to do is reprogram the launch angles. You do that, and these canisters go right to where they’re supposed to go, all over the country. No collision with thismill. No destruction. No drought. No famine. This is salvageable , Connor. But you have to take a deep breath—and you have to begin right now.”
    Connor frowned so hard now that it looked like he might fall apart. “I aimed the launchers manually,” he said. “I never learned how to work the console itself. I can’t reprogram them. I don’t know how.”
    “Well, I do,” Logan said. “And I think I can fix this, if you’ll agree to let me near it.” Logan took a tentative step forward. “Will you?”
    Connor exhaled sharply and pulled himself up off the ground. He walked over to the control panel. He looked at it, defeated. “Okay,” he said. “Work fast.”
    6
    It took three minutes and thirty-three seconds.
    But Logan did it. He reprogrammed the launch angles. And Lahoma’s weather mill reopened without a hitch. Ahead of schedule.
    The rumble of rockets filled the cavernous mill, shaking the ground and flooding the field with a tangle of smoky trails. Overhead, twenty-five cloud-seeding smart-canisters soared off in all directions, leaving behind nothing else but the bursts of their sonic booms, which thudded against Logan like hard punches to the chest.
    They were gone. Flying out to every corner of the American State.
    There was no stopping it now.
    A great storm was coming.

    The sky quieted. And for a moment, Connor stood paralyzed.
    Hailey reentered the mill and walked over to them both, dropping the magnecuffs into Connor’s open hands.
    “Well, that was one way to solve the problem,” she said, pointing up to the sky and the already-spent missile launchers down on the ground. “’Course, being as close as I was to the canisters at the time, I myself might have gone with the ‘don’t launch quite yet’ option, but, you know . . . reangling them worked too.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Logan said, raising an eyebrow at her sarcasm. “Duly noted.”
    “You all right?” Hailey asked Connor. “’Cause you don’t look all right.”
    “We’ve betrayed him,” Connor said, shell-shocked by the whole ordeal. “The leader to whom I Pledged everything . . . He made his request. He had his reasons. And I’ve directly betrayed him . . .”
    “That’s right,” Logan said comfortingly. “And you should be proud of yourself. It was the right thing to do.”
    Seconds passed. Connor shook with guilt and fear. “What if we’re wrong? What if we’ve just ruined this great State?”
    “I’m not wrong, Connor. You’re a hero today. It was a close call.” Logan smiled. “But you are a hero.”
    Already, the first drops of rain fell lightly onto the weather mill’s sheet metal ceiling.
    In the distance, Logan could hear Lahoma’s workers running furiously toward the mill.
    “We’re about to have company,” Hailey said. “Time to go, Logan, you think?”
    “In a second,” Logan said.
    He put out his hand.
    He waited for Connor to shake it.
    7
    Escape from Lahoma was easy, thanks to the River horses, which weaved and tossed their heads upon Logan and Hailey’s return.
    “No apple,” Logan said to his horse. “Sorry.”
    “Treats when we get