Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“She’s not signing shit.”

Sweat glistens across the tattooed back bent over the old red truck. 

Caitlyn squints through a cloud of dust, sent up where her heeled boot has shifted in the dirt. “Excuse me?” She hadn’t even gotten as far as introducing herself.

The back straightens, a head of short hair emerging from the engine. One gray eye fixes her above a pair of broad shoulders. 

“Powder,” the woman calls, and Caitlyn’s attention sharpens. This is a name she recognizes. “How’s that radio looking?”

“Gimme a minute here.” The voice comes from the other vehicle. There’s a good chance it belongs to the pair of long blue braids dangling out of the passenger side window, to the reason Caitlyn’s here at all, miles of long flat Oklahoma wheat in the rearview of the rental before she’d found it, this tiny junkyard she’d been told was the greatest thing to happen to storm chasing in thirty years.

Though, she supposed, it mattered who you asked. Caitlyn shifts the manila envelope under her other arm as she hurries after the woman now striding across the yard. 

“She doesn’t need to sign anything, I’m not—”

“Good, because she’s not going to. Glad we’re on the same page.” The woman swings around the back of the van, pops the ancient brown doors. Inside is a mess of dials and screens, and the woman leans in to wipe dust from one of the glass faces with a frown. 

Caitlyn leans over, eyes sweeping through the clutter. She spares a glance for the guy with his locs tipped back against one of the monitors before she spots the girl with the blue hair — Powder — sprawled across the front bench, feet propped out the driver’s side door.

Caitlyn’s eyes narrow. “Maybe she’d like to speak for herself?”

The woman is digging through a toolbox beneath the cargo floor. “D’you hear that, Pow? You’ve been served.”

Up front, Powder rolls her eyes, pushing a large set of headphones up over her ears. “Gee, thanks, sis.”

Sisters. Which would make this Violet, Caitlyn guesses, has it all but confirmed when the woman leans back against the bumper and Caitlyn can see, for the first time, the thin black lines of the letters inked across her cheek. 

Violet isn’t named in the suit, but Caitlyn wouldn’t have come here without doing her research. Powder may have taken the spotlight for a while there, the kid genius with the crazy device, but every person she’d interviewed so far had told her the same thing: said if you wanted to know anything about storms, you needed to talk to the sister.

“Your sister’s been accused of stealing valuable intellectual property from SIL Co.,” Caitlyn says. “She shouldn’t ignore this.”

As Caitlyn says it, the radio at the head of the van launches into a crackle of sound, Powder’s chipped nails pausing on the knob. A voice is barely audible through the crunch: traveling northeast with winds at a hundred and six miles an hour—

Violet whoops, slamming the doors closed. “You hear that? That’s a hundred miles an hour of something you can’t ignore. What’s she looking like, Ekko?” 

He appears in the driver’s seat a second later, Powder’s feet shoved aside with a muffled squawk. Ekko leans out the window and smirks. “Just your type. I’ll get you readings on the way but we should’ve left ten minutes ago.”

Violet’s already running, an argument about who gets to drive fading behind them as Caitlyn follows her back toward the truck idling in the gravel. Is this woman ever not in motion? Something in her seems to hum, like if she stood in place even for a second you’d still be able to see it, the blood moving under her skin. 

When Violet wheels around it stops Caitlyn, unbalanced, in her tracks. She’s shorter than Caitlyn realized at the start. Her eyes land just above the scar notched in one of Violet’s eyebrows, the sharp wing they’re cutting down over her nose as she looks into Caitlyn’s face.

A clarity passes through her gaze. “You’re not going to quit, are you?”

Footing regained, Caitlyn lifts her chin.

Violet’s lips fold. Caitlyn’s not sure if it’s a frown or something else. “If you want to keep having this argument, you better hop in,” Violet says, and she swings into the driver’s seat.

Caitlyn makes the decision before she realizes she’s done it, is already pulling the seatbelt down across her chest when her brain catches up and asks her what the hell she’s doing. “You’re going after a tornado? Now?”

Violet doesn’t offer this a response, focused on maneuvering the truck out onto the empty road that intersects the horizon. It’s begun to rain, fat drops the thin windshield wipers strain to clear, and the mass of thick gray clouds brewing ahead of them wasn’t there just ten minutes ago. 

“How big is it?” Caitlyn asks. Everything looks bigger out here, especially the sky. Used to cities and the overhang of skyscrapers, it had disoriented her, exposed her. Stepping from the plane that afternoon, the sun had been as heavy on the back of her neck as if she were being watched, and Caitlyn rubs this now, looking uneasily out the window. She doesn’t know enough about storms to know if she can trust the evidence of her eyes, or if the danger is in more than what you can see.

Violet glances in her direction. “Not really the size that counts here,” she says, but then she relents. “EF1, probably. Little baby one.” She tracks Caitlyn’s hand tightening on the door handle as the speedometer ticks past ninety and smiles, bringing the receiver from the stereo up to her lips. “Where are my readings, guys?”

Static. Ekko’s voice comes through, chalky with distance or the electricity in the air. “Meet you — five minutes — won’t — hurry.” Each pause is punctuated by an exhale of garbled feedback, the lines deepening on the side of Violet’s mouth as she listens.

Caitlyn checks her mirror. The van is nowhere to be seen, just more and more empty highway unrolling behind them. “What does that mean?” Caitlyn asks tautly. The rain insisting against the roof turns the windshield opaque.

“Your guess is as good as mine, cupcake.”

“It’s Caitlyn, actually.”

Violet looks at her again, longer this time, fingers stilling where they drum against the steering wheel. “Vi.” She pauses. “I’d say, either they’re five minutes behind us, or in the next five minutes we’re going to make a fun new friend.”

Five minutes. Caitlyn’s chest tightens, and before she can stop herself she rolls the window down, leans her torso outside just enough to see what they’re headed into. 

It looks mean. Beyond the sting of rain in her eyes are thick, angry lines of black cloud that roil up over one another like something heaving, like smoke pouring from a burning house. Every few seconds light flickers at the base, electricity deep within the body of the storm — downed power lines, maybe, or lightning — and Caitlyn can smell it in the air, the same metallic edge as a bullet casing, right after the shot.

Caitlyn rolls the window back up. “What do we do?” Her voice is steadier, now, having got it in her sights. 

There’s an expression on Vi’s face that Caitlyn can’t read, and then it tilts into a grin. “We’re gonna get that,” her thumb jerks behind them, and then she nods out the windshield, “into that.”

Hitched to the truck is a tall plastic cylinder, strapped in and rattling on an aluminum trailer. Caitlyn’s never seen the device before but as soon as Vi says it, the realization hits her. “That’s the Hexvane.” 

“She knows her stuff.” 

“I recognize allegedly stolen property when I see it.” 

Vi groans in frustration. “Nobody stole anything, would you stop — look, Pow and I, we came up with this way before she ever started at SIL Co. Those leeches acted like they owned her — owned her ideas, anyway, which, isn’t that the same thing? But that was always ours.”

She shakes her head. “They wanted to act like they made her who she was, but me and Powder, we made ourselves.”

It’s a great line. And, looking at Vi’s profile, her mouth twisted with some memory, one she has to reach up and wipe away with the back of her wrist, Caitlyn thinks it might even be true. Her hands go searching through her pockets, brush against her gun in its holster and have just landed on her notebook when the truck lurches toward the side of the road, an enormous gust of wind slamming them sideways into the ditch. 

Caitlyn’s head cracks against the window, outside a smear of grass and mud. They’re not completely horizontal when they slide to a stop, the ditch broad and deep enough that they’re slanted somewhere halfway down the slope. Dazed, Caitlyn can hear the clatter of rain against metal, the left tires revving into nothing as Vi slams the pedal to the floor. Her face is screwed up with effort, bare arms flexed taut as they fight to hold the steering wheel left.

“I need you to lean with me, alright?” she pants. Her eyes find Caitlyn’s. “One, two—”

“Three,” Caitlyn says, heaving her weight left. The truck tilts, a moment of hesitation where Caitlyn’s not sure it was enough, and then they’re back on all four wheels, Vi accelerating them up onto the highway so fast it makes Caitlyn’s stomach drop several stories. They squeal to a sharp stop in the center of the road.

Caitlyn works to still the trembling in her hands, but Vi’s already unbuckling her seatbelt. “You can’t seriously be going out in this.”

All at once, Vi’s in her space, leaning over the gearshift with one arm planted on Caitlyn’s headrest, the other braced against the doorframe. She jerks her chin at the window. “Did you see that?”

In disbelief, Caitlyn looks out at a wall of rain. “I don’t see anything.”

Vi snorts. “But you felt it. The wind changed.” This close, the light in her eyes goes sharp, sun glinting off the edge of a knife. And then she looks at Caitlyn and smiles, and Caitlyn’s breath catches like someone’s holding that knife to her throat. “If we’re lucky, she’s coming right for us.” 

Vi tries the radio one more time — “Ekko, you read me? Powder?” — but when she gets no response, she sinks back into her seat, flipping one of the switches wired into the dashboard. “Usually we’d have more time, but this thing’s sucking moisture out of the air like they haven’t seen each other in years.” Vi frowns, jiggles the switch again. Nothing happens. “Shit.” 

“What?” Caitlyn bites. 

Vi reaches under her seat, scrabbling through the mess on the floor and coming away with a canvas jacket, deep red, stitched through with so many off-color patches that if it had ever seen better days, it likely wouldn’t remember them. “Lid’s not releasing.” Vi muscles the jacket over her shoulders, squinting out the windshield. “Wait here.”

“Wait, Vi, don’t—” But then Vi’s door opens and the storm comes screaming inside. It’s loud, and the word seems pathetic even as Caitlyn thinks it, but what other word is there? The volume on everything, cranked to its highest setting. She flinches away from it instinctively, the rain falling so hard Vi’s soaked through the moment she steps outside. It shatters against the ground like shrapnel, Vi’s hands tugging her jacket up feebly overhead as she runs.

Caitlyn unbuckles her own seatbelt, scrambles to watch through the back window, Vi appearing as a red streak beside the plastic drum. Movement, as she attempts to unscrew the stuck lid — and then the red streak vanishes.

The door rips out of Caitlyn’s hand as soon as she depresses the handle, the ringing in her ears becoming a roar. Her face stings, rain or the debris kicked up into the air, and she runs blindly, slammed against the truck by wind. “Vi!” she shouts, the sound scraped from her mouth. Was she hit by something? Is she hurt? Caitlyn can’t hear anything, can barely see, can only follow her feet to the rear of the trailer where a pair of strong hands catches her, holds her in place.

“Vi,” she says again, though neither of them can hear it. Vi’s nose is bleeding, a trail of it dripping from the underside of her chin. She points at the cab, and Caitlyn shakes her head, points at the trailer. Her fingers, digging into Caitlyn’s upper arms, are the only warm thing for miles. 

A sudden cold as Vi releases her and gestures her over to the barrel. Caitlyn goes to the opposite side, sliding her hands to the spot Vi indicates. She can see it, a metal latch, but the mechanism doesn’t depress under her fingertips.

Across from her, Vi’s arms are shaking, her hands white-knuckled on the lid and her face contorted with effort, but it doesn’t budge. Even with the two of them pulling at it, the lid is engineered to stay closed until that latch pops. It’s no use.

But what if — Caitlyn lays a hand across Vi’s wrist to get her attention. “Stand back,” she yells, waving her away. Vi hesitates, confused. Ahead of them, the sky is corkscrewing in on itself.

“Now,” Caitlyn shouts, and Vi steps away from the trailer as Caitlyn reaches beneath her jacket and her hands close around the cool metal of the gun. 

As her palm settles against it, as she feels the satisfying and familiar way it molds to her shape, she has a fleeting moment to wonder if the impact of her head against the window might have left her slightly concussed.

Then she unholsters the gun, lines up the shot, and fires.

The lid flips back, clanging against the side of the truck, the Hexvane spiraling upward from inside the drum. Vi whoops, loud enough to hear, and leaps onto the trailer, watching the helixed shape of the Hexvane unfurl into the sky. Eyes moving from her drenched boots to the muddy coat to the blood and water mixing down her neck, the halo of power flashes illuminating her from behind, Caitlyn curses herself for not bringing along her camera. Now there’s a shot. 

Vi’s gaze falls to Caitlyn. “They teach you that in law school?” she yells.

“I’m not a lawyer,” Caitlyn yells back.

Vi’s head cocks, and she opens her mouth to say something when the roar around them deepens, somehow, an eerie rumble that rises from the ground. 

Just ahead, eating up highway and light, surrounded by long, spinning arms of gray dust — the funnel connects with the sky.

The stillness is what surprises her. It looks like a painting, the way it hardly seems to be moving at all as it advances, a single, horrible moment captured in space. It’s almost beautiful. 

Almost.

Caitlyn’s shoulder nearly leaves her socket as Vi leaps from the trailer and drags her at a dead run down the highway in the opposite direction. Through the hair plastered in front of her eyes, it’s all empty road and writhing grassland, and they all but trip down into the drainage ditch a hundred yards from the truck. 

“Like this,” Vi yells, lying flat beside her. Her lips are nearly at Caitlyn’s ear, a protective shoulder hunched above her own. “Cover your head, I’ve got you,” and as they bow their foreheads and the world goes dark, the only thing she can feel is Vi’s chest, expanding into her side. 

The scent of wet earth is everywhere, wet earth and iron from the bleeding nose pressed into Caitlyn’s neck, as Caitlyn gasps shallow, muggy exhales into the dirt. Trying to match the rhythm of each of her breaths to Vi’s, she wonders, fleetingly, if this is the rhythm of her fear or if Vi just isn't afraid of this at all. If it’s something else she feels when she sees that black train coming and steps onto the tracks, if that thing in her veins is a little bit like the thing in Caitlyn’s.

The firm weight of Vi’s arm presses them more tightly together, and the thought is like something carried on the wind, there and then gone. Caitlyn concentrates: mud seeping through the fabric at her elbows, her knees. In, out. Grass on her tongue. In, out. Gravity seems to pull their bodies down, to hold them in the center of its hand.

Caitlyn’s so deep inside that dark she almost doesn’t hear it. But there: a sound at the edge of her hearing. One long, flat drone, and then another. It’s not whatever is shaking the ground behind them but something higher, more insistent. 

A horn.

“The van.” The words fall from Vi’s mouth and into Caitlyn’s ear, and when they lift their heads the van is stopped in the middle of the road, headlights cutting into the storm.

The driver lays on the horn again, and Caitlyn and Vi stagger to standing, helping each other toward the sound. The wind rips at their clothes, claws like it’s begging them to stay, and walking is like moving through a flood. A risk in every step that you’ll be swept away, lost to the mouth of what rages behind you. Vi’s hand is tied to her wrist like a rope.

Ekko appears beside the van, side door braced against his back, and he helps Vi hand Caitlyn inside, shoves Vi in after her and is yelling “Go, go, go,” before the door’s even closed behind him. The tires shriek, throwing up fountains of gray water as Powder launches the van around and sends it back down the road, back to where light still lingers above the town in the distance. 

Caitlyn looks from it to the darkness behind them and back again, an eerie unease creeping under her skin even once she can rationally begin to accept that they’ve survived, that she’s safe. The safety doesn't seem real, an illusion, that town a place where if you never looked over your shoulder you wouldn’t even realize what was coming your way.

From the opposite seat, Vi looks at her like she’s seeing her for the first time. “Who the hell are you?”

—

Caitlyn explains as Ekko probes the bruise on the side of her head. “It was just a copy. If you hadn’t seen the summons yet I wanted to make sure you knew before you agreed to talk to me, and records said every server they sent had failed to reach you. Ow,” she winces, and he backs away, palms up.

“Sorry. Eyes up.” He clicks a flashlight on, glancing over each of her pupils. 

Caitlyn continues, “From the way you introduced yourself, I doubt it was for lack of trying.”

Vi is bent over with her elbows on her knees, probing the bridge of her nose. “A journo. Why didn’t you just say so?”

“You didn’t let me get that far,” Caitlyn shoots back as Ekko lets the flashlight fall. “And then we were somewhat occupied.” 

“I think you’ll be fine,” Ekko interjects, “but you should really take it easy the next few days. If the headache gets worse, you should see somebody, a real somebody.” He moves toward Vi but she waves him off, content to sit there blowing her nose loud and wet and red into a tissue.

At the look that Caitlyn must not be concealing very well, she shrugs. “Half a tree to the face, I’ve been hit worse. You learn to shoot like that for a story?”

“‘Shoot?’” Powder repeats, twisting around in her seat, only to rocket back to smash the horn and yell obscenities at someone attempting to cut them off.

“Eyes on the road, Pow.” Vi’s haven’t left Caitlyn’s face, the tissue forgotten in her hand. “It was an alright shot.”

“It was an excellent shot.” Outside the windows, they’re crossing back into the town Caitlyn had driven through on her way in. Zaun’s concrete shops and sidewalks blur into farmhouses keeping a low profile under the sky, blurring into damp green fields. She frowns. Where are the sirens? “Why are people still outdoors? Shouldn’t they be taking shelter?”

“She’s heading northeast,” Ekko explains. “This one’ll pass us by, probably fall apart soon. Not enough warm air to sustain it.”

That massive, muscular darkness, the violence of it uprooting even the road in front of them — just thinking about it makes her heart beat faster again. It doesn’t seem possible, something like that there and then gone. “Just like that?”

He smiles, an edge in it she can't parse. “Just like that.”

Caitlyn is quiet, belatedly realizing that the junkyard would be miles behind them by now. “Where are we going?”

The truck falls silent. Ekko and Powder look to Vi to answer, but she’s busy studying the monitors lining the inside of the van. “Hey, guys? Where’s the Hexvane data?”

Powder and Ekko exchange a glance. He asks, “You deployed it?” 

“Uh-oh,” Powder sing-songs under her breath.

Ekko swings himself into the seat beside Caitlyn, his fingers sailing over blocky computer keys. “We haven’t been getting any readouts. We thought the storm got you before you could set it up.”

“No, we got it done,” Vi says, their faces lit blue by whatever they’re seeing on the screen. “It was working when you picked us up.”

“There,” Ekko says, pointing. “That’s when it goes live.”

Vi folds a fist in front of her mouth. “And then nothing.”

Ekko grimaces. “And then nothing,” he agrees. “Winds were crazy out there. Maybe if the trailer got flipped, like last April, remember—”

“Fuck.” Vi drops her head. “Fuck,” she says, louder this time, and slams her fist against the roof. It warbles, the only sound in the van. Ekko catches Caitlyn’s eye and shakes his head ever so slightly. When she finds Powder in the rearview, Powder pulls a face.

“You can try again,” Caitlyn starts. “Can’t you? Isn’t that what you do?”

Vi snorts. “You don’t know anything about what we do.” 

“Then show me.”

Vi drops her gaze to stare out the back window, a long, focused look, and Caitlyn wonders what it is she sees. If it’s the road behind them, the one winding back to the truck she’d left on the asphalt with her hopes pinned to the side, or if it’s a road stretching back even farther than that, back to some place none of the rest of them can see.

“We’re going to Vander’s,” Vi says at last. “He’ll know what to do.”

—

When the truck passes a stand of trees and pulls up outside the old barn-turned-bar, Caitlyn’s first thought is that she must have missed a joke, and her second is that, honestly? She could use a drink. Vi pushes open the back doors, watery evening sun pooling in drips beneath every corner of the van, beneath their shoes on the concrete. She looks at Vi and is struck by the strange urge to laugh. They both look drowned and deflated, like they’ve gone swimming fully clothed. Caitlyn’s black with mud from knees to sternum and Vi isn’t much better, brushing a clump of dirt from her front and frowning when she realizes there’s no clean place to wipe her hand.

Vi sees her looking and Caitlyn catches it, a half-smile at the corner of her lips like she’s thinking it, too, but it falters when Vi looks up at the neon sign for The Last Drop. She squares her shoulders.

Caitlyn attempts to rein in each of her thousand questions as she trails the group up the steps. She can hear, faintly, music, can smell smoke. But quiet stretches for miles around them as they bypass the door into the bar, headed for an entrance around the back. Inside, once Caitlyn’s eyes adjust, she’s surprised to find Ekko pulling off his boots on a bench by the door, Powder already flopping onto the couch in the sunken living room beyond the hall.

Curiosity prevails. “Is this… your house?” There are frames on the walls, two girls in overalls and a bearded man grinning into the camera. Two boys, too, young, riding the man’s shoulders or squinting on a pier, the sun turning the scales of the fish in their hands iridescent.

“Nah, we broke in,” Ekko says as he passes, jogging down to Powder.

“He’s messing with you,” Vi’s voice cuts in. She’s in a small bathroom off the entrance, leaning over the sink to examine her nose. Her reflection’s eyes find Caitlyn’s. “Powder and I live here. Ekko might as well.”

Caitlyn looks again at the frame with the girls. From farther in the house, the sound of a door opening — conversations and laughter slipping in through it, loud music and the clink of billiards — muffled again as the door closes. “Van’s seen better days,” a new voice says, and Caitlyn starts, hearing that accent so far from where she’d left it. “You kids okay?” 

“Peachy,” Powder drawls, and the conversation drops below Caitlyn’s hearing. The first voice, a man’s, has the warmth and rasp of a shot of whiskey and Caitlyn likes it immediately, not just the familiarity but what hearing it does to Vi — a lightness across her shoulders, a sense that she’s set something heavy down as she rounds the corner back into the hall just as the man steps into view at the other end.

“Vander,” Vi exhales, and all but falls into him. Caitlyn averts her gaze, focuses on working her boots from her feet. 

She feels abruptly bone-tired, far from home, even if when she searches within her for what that means, exactly, she comes up empty. Not even three hours ago she was getting off the plane at Stillwater, lifting her hand against the glare of the sun.

She feels hours and hours, miles and miles away from that life, from her life before, feels every single one of the minutes she spent on planes to get here beginning to pound in her head. Caitlyn’s not sure she’ll ever look at it the same way again — the physics, the miracle that can keep a plane in the sky same as the one that’ll tear your home apart where it stands. She presses a hand against her temple, wincing over the bruise.

“This is Caitlyn,” she hears Vi say, opening her eyes to an enormous hand extended in her direction. She blinks, allows it to pull her to standing. The hand is callused but gentle and there’s something similar in the face above it, the kind of man who’s had to work hard all his life and worked even harder to keep himself soft.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Caitlyn says, and means it.

His eyes crinkle in the same place her father’s do. “Pleasure’s mine. Always glad to meet a fellow expat. And I see Vi’s taken you hunting.” Caitlyn huffs an awkward laugh, acutely conscious of the circle she’s dripping into the hardwood floor.

Vi says, “Caitlyn’s a journalist,” and Vander makes an interested noise.

“Well, if it’s stories you're after,” he says, “you’re in the right place. Why don’t you two grab a shower and some dry clothes and meet us in the bar when you’re ready? I’ll get the kitchen onto something hot.”

He claps a hand on Vi’s shoulder. “Glad you’re okay,” he says, low. “That counts for more than you know.” 

Vi’s profile, silhouetted by light from the hallway beyond, at war with itself as he goes. Without looking back, she says, “Come on.”

Caitlyn follows her past the living room where Powder and Ekko are perched in front of the television, his head in her lap, past the serviceable kitchen with the big slab of dining room table and up a curving metal staircase. Vi pushes open the first door at the top. A bathroom, small and tiled plainly with white, but Caitlyn sees the shower and feels her knees go watery.

“Towels are in that cupboard,” Vi says, nodding. “Meet me at the last door on the right when you’re done, I’ll get you something to wear.”

Caitlyn’s clothes have hardly hit the floor, her watch and holster unbuckled on the counter before she’s stepping into the shower, turning up the water until it almost hisses where it hits her skin. When she touched down that afternoon, there hadn’t been time to shower. She’d dropped her things at the only motel in town and headed straight in the direction the girl at the desk pointed the moment she mentioned anything about storm-chasing sisters. The residue of grass and twigs and dirt swirls in a gritty parade down her legs to pool around the drain.

Now that she’s alone, she can’t seem to hide it, the trembling in her hands. Like the electricity of the storm isn’t done with her yet. Like it’s trapped there, caught beneath her skin.

Water blazes against her shoulder blades, and when she tips her head back and closes her eyes, the pounding of it against the back of her skull takes her back to the ditch, her face pressed into grass and mud, the runaway train of the storm. Vi’s breathing, her own heartbeat in her ears.

It’s not fear and it isn’t not fear, is the thing. What she’d felt, then, looking back at the storm — that’s not the story, but it’s part of it, a part she hadn’t understood until now. 

She needs them to talk to her, she thinks, wiping water from her eyes. Needs Vi to talk to her.

Caitlyn levers herself to the floor where she sits for a long minute beneath the spray, washed in the rhythm of the racing in her chest.

—

Behind the door at the end of the hall is a bedroom. Vi’s bedroom, by the looks of it, and Caitlyn doesn’t know what she expected — posters of bands she’s never heard of, maybe, women pouting on motorcycles, though she shakes her head at this thought hard enough it gives her a warning throb — but inside it’s comfortable, simple, a worn quilt folded at the foot of the bed and a faded red rug that sinks below her feet.

Rain plinks lightly off the barn’s tin roof as Caitlyn pulls her towel more tightly around herself. “Vi?” When no one answers, she creeps further into the room. 

Brass pipes curve over the walls, bare except for the space above a small desk. The corkboard hanging there at a slant is covered in scratch paper and pages clipped from newspapers, a mess of sketches and equations in faint pencil between headlines like 7 Killed in Costly North OK Twister and Super Outbreak Spawns Deadly Storms in 4 States.

There’s no dresser but there is a bookshelf, titles that send her eyebrows skyward. Vi’s got textbooks about thermodynamics and atmospheric phenomena crammed right up alongside the comics and — Caitlyn’s eyebrows crane higher — trashy romance novels. There’s a photo here, too, a man and a woman with the two young girls from downstairs, but, as Caitlyn reaches out to smooth dust from the surface, the man isn’t Vander. 

“Your options are about five inches too short or five too long.” 

Behind her, Vi dumps a heap of clothes onto the quilt. She’s staring pointedly down at a flannel shirt, her fist knotted in the collar.

Caitlyn coughs. She’s over-aware of her skin, suddenly, every drop of water sliding over her collarbone from the ends of her hair, the itch of terrycloth against the inside of her wrists. How long had Vi been standing there, watching Caitlyn nose through her life? Shit. She never even heard the door. 

“Long is fine,” Caitlyn says, almost drops the towel trying to catch the shirt and pants tossed in her direction. She hesitates. “Would you mind—?”

“Oh,” Vi says, “Right,” and turns around.

Caitlyn pulls the sweats up over her thighs as quickly as she can. “Are these your parents?” she asks, rolling the cuffs up to her ankles. 

“Yeah,” Vi says, and offers nothing more.

These must be Vander’s clothes. The flannel shirt hangs from her shoulders like a robe, almost brushing the backs of her knees. She looks ridiculous, but at least she’s finally warm again. She starts on the sleeves, aware of the stiffness in Vi’s posture, the way the air in the room has changed as palpably as it had before the storm started kicking up dust in front of them. “So Vander is—?”

“He took us in after they died,” Vi says flatly. 

Caitlyn’s hands fumble over the buttons. “I’m sorry,” she says after a pause. “That’s—”

“Yeah,” Vi says again, an edge of finality in it. 

Caitlyn tries a different angle. “Were you always interested in storm chasing?”

“You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

“I’m a reporter, it’s my job.” Caitlyn turns down the collar, pulls her wet hair out of it to fall loose across her back. “You can turn around now.”

Vi does, her eyes flicking up over the new look, considering. “How do you feel about a drink?”

—

Caitlyn politely refrains from continued snooping while Vi showers, lying across the bed, checking her watch and trying not to fall asleep before Vi knocks her knuckles against the doorframe. She has Caitlyn follow her back downstairs and out through the door separating the house from the bar.

It’s busy, for the middle of the week in a town of several thousand and change. Most of the seats at the bar are full, a baseball game in its third inning on the television and smoke rising toward the glasses drying overhead. Vi muscles into a spot near one of the ends just as Vander plants a Budweiser and something amber in a shot glass in front of her.

“My hero,” Vi sighs, and lifts the shot in Caitlyn’s direction before she knocks it back.

Vander turns his attention to Caitlyn. “What’s your poison, love?” 

“Um.” An image, still stubbornly stuck in her head, of Vi’s throat working, shadows moving over thick cords of muscle and black ink in the low yellow light. “I’ll just… take a, uh, a beer, also.” She coughs. “Budweiser’s fine.” She’s definitely concussed.

Vi’s eyes are narrowed, but if Vander has thoughts about her order or her delivery he doesn’t show it, just pops the cap and slides it over. “On us tonight. Thanks for keeping this one safe.”

A blush creeps under Caitlyn’s collar as Vi rolls her eyes and starts in on an argument about how she’s always safe. At a distance from the storm, here in the security of the bar and of a kindness she hadn’t expected or really even earned, the flannel is almost too warm. When she remembers again that it’s his , that she’s sitting here wearing his clothes, drinking on his dime, the flush creeps higher. What kind of man takes in two children after their parents are taken from them, she’d wondered, just for the world to helpfully supply: this one. Caitlyn makes a mental note to talk to him, too.

“Get yourselves a table,” Vander calls over his shoulder, already headed to the other end of the bar. “I’ll see where the kitchen’s at. Sev! Long time, no chat. Darkest we have on tap’s going to be the Dead Aces, from over in—”

Vi indicates a direction with her chin, and Caitlyn slides into a booth along the back wall, Vi sinking in opposite. Her arms fan across the back with a contented sigh.

“Well, cheers,” she says, clinking her bottle into Caitlyn’s. “First tornado. How’s it feel?”

“Who says it’s my first?” 

Vi grins. “You can always tell. But you did pretty good. I still want to know who taught you to shoot like that.”

Caitlyn takes a steady sip of her drink before replying. “My mother.”

Vi’s eyebrow peaks. “Well, you’ll have to tell her you got a clean shot off in the middle of fifty mile an hour winds. Bet she’d be pretty proud of that.”

Caitlyn smiles weakly. “Basic aerodynamics, and it was close range. Less time for anything to go wrong when you’re right up on the target.” Her first job out of school, breaking a story about corruption in the local police force, her mother had written Caitlyn’s boss asking her to be switched to the lifestyle beat. On the rare phone call, now, when her mother asks how her work is going, Caitlyn replies, Good, and switches the subject. “I’m better with a rifle.”

That eyebrow again. “I’d like to see that.” Vi takes a long drink. “You sound pretty far from home, what with the—” She makes a nebulous gesture around her face, Caitlyn’s eyes catching on the flex of Vi’s fingers, and it takes her a second to understand what Vi means. 

“My accent? I grew up in England. My parents still live there, but I,” Caitlyn shrugs, tries to let it roll off her shoulder before she can think about it too hard. “I go where the story is.”

“You don’t have a home base somewhere?” 

“It didn’t make sense to keep paying rent on a place I was never in.” 

Over at the bar, a cheer. Someone must have scored. Caitlyn takes a deep breath. “But you’ve been in Oklahoma all your life.”

Vi’s eyes on her are sharp. “Is that a question?” She doesn’t miss a thing. 

“I know what the records say,” Caitlyn says carefully, “but I’d like to hear it from you.”

The edge of the label on Vi’s bottle is peeling upward, and she worries at it with the tip of a finger. “On the record?”

Caitlyn shrugs. “Not if you don’t want it to be.”

When Vi speaks, it’s down at the table. “What do those records say?”

Breaking and entering, assault, aggravated assault of a police officer — to name a few. Caitlyn leans in, drops her voice. “Were you always interested in storm chasing?”

Vi laughs just as a waitress rounds the corner with two steaming plates. “Aw, sweet,” Vi says, perking up. “Vander special.” Her face softens, and she looks… young, Caitlyn realizes. She catches a glimpse, for a moment, of the girl with her feet swinging from one of Vander’s barstools, the girl with her wrists cuffed in the back of a cruiser. 

Caitlyn swallows and looks down at the plate in front of her. A cup of soup, red and steaming, globs of cheese oozing from the sides of a thick sandwich.

“Stormy nights,” Vi’s saying, dipping a triangle into her bowl, “the really bad ones, Vander would whip this up and we’d light candles and eat it in the basement. Powder always called it Fancy Dinner.” A smile on her face, soft as old leather. She gestures at Caitlyn with her sandwich. “This is not your average grilled cheese, is what I’m saying.” They eat in silence, and even when Vi licks each one of her fingers before stealing the fries lingering on Caitlyn’s plate, Caitlyn has the quiet thought that average would trip over its own feet just trying to catch her.

Vi goes to grab them a second round. The bar’s cleared out, from what it was just an hour ago, the busboy wiping tables behind them and the television switched to the news. A group of three lingers at a table by the door, someone lighting a second cigarette at the bar.

Caitlyn spots Powder and Ekko in their own corner, Powder sitting on a pool table and Ekko squinting down his cue next to her. As Caitlyn watches, Powder pulls the end just as he takes the shot, throws her head back and laughs at whatever he turns to say, his wild gesticulations at the socket now holding the 8-ball. When Powder’s eyes find hers, the smile drops.

“Here.” A glass bottle appears in the air beside her, and Caitlyn blinks, takes it.

“Thank you.” Vi settles back opposite, elbows on the table. She holds her drink loosely by the neck, twisting it back and forth in her hand.

Caitlyn can hear the music now that there’s no conversation to rise above it. From distant speakers, the quiet, thoughtful strum of guitar strings below a hoarse voice, and beyond the windows, the rain in its ceaseless march toward the ground.

“I was ten,” Vi starts haltingly. “Powder was six. Middle of the day and storms are in the forecast but nothing, nothing like what we got. Couple lightning strikes got some fires going in town, and our folks, they were on the volunteer team, it’s where they met, they were there when this tornado just spins up from nothing. Out of nowhere, people said.” Vi’s hands fall to the table, palms open. “Me and Powder, they’d left us at home. ‘Vi, you’re in charge.’ I took it so seriously, whenever they said that.”

Vi huffs, swigs with her head tilted back, but Caitlyn still notices the motion: the shadow of her eyelashes sweeping rapidly against her cheeks. 

“You don’t,” Vi continues, hardly pausing for breath, “you don’t forget it, climbing out of a closet and your whole house, your whole life, the room you’d been in five goddamn minutes ago, all of it just gone . We couldn’t even get out of the closet, at first, half the roof had fallen down in front of the door. First time I ever dislocated my shoulder was trying to get us out.” 

Caitlyn’s breath leaves her at this admission. Vi smiles, there and then gone, one of those smiles you do as a reflex because your mouth isn’t sure what else to do, is so used to faking that shape in the company of anybody else.

“Vander, his kids,” Vi swallows, “we’d grown up together, known each other since we were in diapers, just like our parents had — they didn’t make it, either. They were on a fucking Boy Scout trip. Powder had been so pissed she couldn’t go.” Vi shakes her head. “Shitty the way something like that can matter.”

“It is.” Vi looks up at this, as if surprised to find Caitlyn across from her, to find herself here at the table at all. Caitlyn feels a tenderness in her chest like something crushed. “It’s awful. Vi, I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. People go through worse.” Caitlyn’s brow furrows at this, but Vi’s looking at Vander at the bar. “Both of his kids, you can’t even fucking imagine.”

Chatting with the woman with the cigarette, his laugh carries over the empty chairs. No, Caitlyn thinks, she can’t. But neither can she imagine the small girl standing in the middle of the wreckage of her life, her bare feet in broken glass, looking up through a roof of sky. That same girl reaching to help her sister stand.

“And this happens all the time. Whole families, whole towns. And it’s getting worse.” Vi meets her eyes, their serious gray. “These storms are getting bigger and more unpredictable. We have warning systems in place, but we don’t know enough about why some spawn tornadoes and some don’t, or even where they’re headed once they start — and what’s the use of a warning system if you never turn it on?”

“So you and your sister, you develop the Hexvane.”

“We were kids when we came up with the first prototype,” Vi says. “I’ve got the sketches hanging in my room, I’ll show you, and the blueprints from the first model are downstairs. SIL Co.’s lawsuit is bullshit and they know it.” Vi rubs a hand over her face. “But lawyers are expensive, and equipment’s expensive, too.”

SIL Co. — the Strategic Innovations League, as they were known on paper and almost never referred to otherwise, thanks to the all-caps logo the company had emblazoned anywhere they could purchase the ad space — had a habit of suing former employees into oblivion. You could follow the complaints and countersuits through miles of paper trail, nearly all of them leading to dead ends as people gave up or were forced to. Threatened to. “They know that,” Caitlyn says. “They bet on it.”

Vi’s jaw sets. “They paid her court fees, you know. Powder’s. After I — I’d been gone, then, for a while. She got into some trouble of her own but by then she’d been making headlines for all the science fair stuff. Just local papers, but I guess someone important was paying attention. Bailed her out, made everything go away, next thing she’s throwing away a full fucking ride to Stanford to go straight to R&D.” Vi snorts. “I could have told you how long that was going to last.”

“So she,” Caitlyn hesitates, “uh, leaves the company—”

“You can say ‘fired.’ Super fired.” The voice is Powder’s, coming up from behind Caitlyn. She grabs a chunk of Vi’s cheek and wriggles it. “You spilling all our secrets to the intrepid girl reporter?”

“Cut it out.” Vi bats her hand away, rubs her cheek. “I’ll save some for you.”

“Hmph. We’ll see.” Powder chews on a cuticle, eyes darting to Caitlyn’s hip, concealed by the flannel. “What kind of gun do you have?”

“Powder!”

“What, I was just asking. Can’t ask a lady what she’s packing?”

“It’s a semi-automatic,” Caitlyn interjects. “Glock 19.”

Powder whistles. “Can I try it?”

“No,” Vi and Caitlyn say together. 

Powder sighs and slumps against the back of the booth. “No secrets for you then, toots.” She turns her attention to Vi. “I was thinking about going through the scrap pile tomorrow, seeing what we’ve got to work with.”

“Worth a shot.”

“You could come with?”

Vi meets Caitlyn’s eyes, looks quickly away. “We’ll see.”

Powder shrugs through a disappointment that Caitlyn catches, only briefly, in her eyes. “Your loss.” She smacks a kiss to the top of Vi’s head. “I’m gonna go crush Ekko in Mortal Kombat. Bye!” As she saunters away, she salutes a peace sign in Caitlyn’s direction.

Caitlyn says, mildly, “I don’t think your sister likes me very much.”

“She’s…” Vi thinks. “Protective.”

“You must be close.”

Vi stares through the space that Powder has disappeared into. “Sometimes. You have siblings?”

“None.”

The corner of Vi’s mouth ticks upward. “Sounds peaceful.”

Or lonely. “Sometimes.” They share a smile, it and the alcohol traveling, warming her down along her spine. She clears her throat. “So, Powder’s fired, you get released—”

“And we’re just sitting there wondering what the hell to do with our lives, and all the while that design’s just,” Vi sighs, “staring at us from the wall.”

The curve of her jaw, hair falling across her face, looking into space like she’s seeing that sketch right now — Caitlyn follows her gaze out the window to a low ripple of light, long seconds passing in silence until thunder rumbles through the pane of glass.

“I think we thought, what else do we have to lose?”

—

Before they head back upstairs, Vi offers to show her the basement. “Our workshop,” she calls it, lifting a hand to Vander as they head back into the house and down a different staircase, Caitlyn following the railing and the sound of Vi’s feet thudding into the black. 

“Hope you’re not scared of the dark,” Vi says.

She’s closer than Caitlyn expected her to be. When Caitlyn’s lips part in an exhale, she can sense, in the total dark, the answering rise of Vi’s shoulders just ahead.

“I’m not.”

Light, a string hung from a bare bulb, Caitlyn’s eyes adjusting and Vi moving through the shadows swinging across the space. She pulls rolls of blueprints down for Caitlyn, her fingers gentle on the scale models that line the workbench. 

Caitlyn peers down at the small marvel Vi places in her palm: a version of the device she’d seen in action today, every sleek curve reproduced in miniature.

“So much of the engineering is Ekko,” Vi says, naked admiration in her voice. “He’s got a real eye for this stuff.”

Caitlyn sets the figure down. “What’s his story?”

“You mean how’d he get caught up in all this? Same way as the rest of us, but he didn’t have our kind of luck. Didn’t have a Vander.” Vi’s going through cardboard boxes under the workbench as she speaks, peeling back old flaps to peer inside. “Didn’t stop him from making his own luck, though. He and Pow were competing for all the same whiz kid prizes in school.”

Vi hefts one of the boxes onto the bench with a grunt. “Anyway, he ends up taking on a lot of the relief work in town, leading a bunch of local aid stuff. When he heard what we were doing, he just shows up at the door, says ‘How can I help?’ He’s a good kid. Good for Pow, too.” 

Up on the bench, the box is almost as tall as Vi. Her head and shoulders disappear over the top as she rummages inside.

Caitlyn steps tentatively over one of the discarded boxes. “What are you looking for?”

The answer is muffled. “Trying to see what shape the other Hexvane is in.”

“There’s more than one?”

“There were three. But this one…” Vi allows her head to thunk forward against the side of the box, “is fucked.”

“It sounded like your sister thought she could make a new one? Or, fix this one?”

“She probably can,” Vi agrees. “But that takes money, money and time, neither of which we have. The season’s almost over. Every day that we’re not out there chasing, we’re losing data. And then you get some shit like today.” Vi pushes her hair back from her forehead and rubs her eyes. “That’s thousands of dollars of equipment we lost. Equipment that could have made a real difference, to real people in their real lives. Not to mention, god, the fucking truck.”

When Vi looks at Caitlyn now, Caitlyn can still see the woman she’d met in the scrap yard, defiance on her face and a sharp tongue ready to defend it. There’s a moment where she thinks Vi might turn that on her again now, ask her why she’s even here. Demand to know what the point is of prying into something she could never, will never understand. People have done this to Caitlyn before. She’s never been able to blame them. Could never, she thinks, watching the hands at her sides ball into ragged fists, blame Vi.

Maybe it’s the way the light falls over everything down here, all of it exposed, even the shadows — but the longer she looks the more ridiculous it seems that Caitlyn or anyone could miss it. That behind the anger is pain, that behind the pain—

Every single one of Vi’s edges seems to soften, a pencil sketch slowly erased, and when Vi kicks the workbench, the metal figures rattling and sprawling over the top, Caitlyn doesn’t flinch.

“You’d have it down here?” Caitlyn asks quietly, looking around the rest of the space. A tattered couch up against the wall across from the workbench, a boxy television set with rabbit ears. String lights arc overhead, and there are playing cards still on the table. She can see it, the three of them there, an island made of soft words and kerosene lamps.

“Have what?” Vi asks, her back still turned.

“Fancy Dinner.”

No laugh from Vi, this time. No sound.

“SIL Co.’s investors are all shell corporations for bigger oil and gas companies,” Caitlyn says. “For years they’ve been attracting great scientists just to shut their research down, or paying for results favorable to their funders. I think they say they’re trying to combat these storms with their fingers crossed behind their back, and that if nobody exposes them, if nobody realizes what’s really happening here, you’ve said it yourself — these storms are only going to get worse.”

The intricate tattoos stretched across Vi’s back disappear into valleys of muscle, expanding and contracting with each breath. Same view as when they’d met, the hours between that moment and this one like a different life entirely, a world she had stepped into and could still just as easily step out of. If Vi tells her to leave, she will. But she needs to tell her now.

“What I need is proof. For someone to show me,” Caitlyn says. “Help me tell that story. Help me tell the truth.”

That familiar weight, Vi’s shoulders heavy beneath it as she breathes. Steady in, steady out. Turning to Caitlyn, now, laying it down at her feet.

Chapter Text

When Caitlyn opens her eyes, the sleeping bag beside the bed is empty. She blinks and pushes up onto an elbow.

Vi’s at the desk, askew in the chair, one foot tucked beneath her and the other propped against the table leg. She’s tapping a pencil against her lips, lost deep in thought as she stares into the corkboard on the wall.

Caitlyn takes in this unexpected version of Vi, the mussed hair and the bare feet, the straps of her sleeping tank stretched and loose over her broad shoulders—

“How’d you sleep?”

Shit. Vi’s back is still to her. She’d given no indication she knew Caitlyn was awake, awake and staring. Caitlyn clears her throat. “Fine, thank you.” That’s twice now Vi’s caught her unaware. It’s not a mistake Caitlyn’s eager to make a third time. Sitting up, she frowns down at the sleeping bag. “You really didn’t need to take the floor.”

“‘Thank you, Violet, for offering your warm and comfortable bed.’” Vi’s leg shoves lightly off from the table, spinning her chair around to face Caitlyn. She smiles easily, and Caitlyn has that feeling again, the tight one somewhere at the bottom of her stomach, that she recognizes as a warning. “Twin’s a little small to share. Wouldn’t have pegged you for the cuddling type.”

A flush spreads out over her chest. “That’s not—” she starts, but Vi’s already headed to the door. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says, indicating the stack of washed and dried clothes on the bedside table, Caitlyn’s gun and notebook placed carefully beside them. “Get dressed and meet me downstairs? I’ve got an idea, and,” she cranes her neck out the door and gives an exaggerated sniff. “I think I smell pancakes.”

Downstairs, Vander’s at the stove, Vi measuring coffee grounds into a pot by the time Caitlyn walks into the kitchen. It had felt good to pull her own clothes back on, still warm and pliable from the dryer, had given her back a measure of herself. Splashing water over her face, having to confront her own eyes, though — before she fell asleep, she’d wondered if it would feel different in the morning, if she’d wake up to panic setting in, doubt. Caitlyn had done profiles before, had broken bread with her subjects, followed them into dangers that were, to them, just another part of daily lives unimaginable to anyone else. But there’s been nothing, nothing like this, the image of that tornado still twisting behind her eyelids when they close. The imprint, when she holds it up to the light, of Vi’s hand on her wrist.

She’d expected herself to look different, somehow. It was almost disconcerting that it was just the same face staring back. Tired thumbprints under the eyes, maybe, the bruise livid and purple against her temple, but something else, too. Something she hadn’t seen there for a while.

At the last second Caitlyn had hesitated, thrown the flannel from the night before back over her shoulders before heading downstairs. Vander glances her over with a smile.

“Morning. First batch ready here in just a second.” Something burbles on the stove, a fruit scent, sweet and tart, and Caitlyn leans over the counter to see.

“He makes his own strawberry syrup, if you can believe,” Vi says. The coffee maker burbles and she gives it a thwack. “Some of us were not blessed with such gifts.”

“You’re a fine cook,” Vander chides, “you just don’t have the patience for it.”

Vi squints up at the ceiling. “I think that makes me not a fine cook.”

Caitlyn smiles and keeps her mouth shut. She can hardly heat a box of macaroni these days. When Vander opens the window above the sink, drawings signed in the hand of a much younger Powder flutter where they’re pinned to the refrigerator. “Where are Powder and Ekko?” she asks. 

Vander and Vi snort in unison. “They’d sleep through the end of the world if no one told them it was coming,” Vi replies. “You drink coffee?”

“Please.”

Vi slides a mug down the counter, bumps a small saucer down after it. “Vander’s hogging the sugar if you need it.”

“Milk’s fine, thanks,” Caitlyn says, the dash she’s poured blooming in the center of her cup. 

“Alright, girls,” Vander announces, a plate in each hand, and they help him carry dishes over to the table. Caitlyn passes out silverware while Vi pours orange juice from a plastic pitcher. When she tries the strawberry sauce, her eyes widening, Vander winks.

Caitlyn finds out that Vander followed a job to the States, settled here, why else? “For love,” he says, laughter in his eyes. She doesn’t press, what Vi had shared with her last night tucked carefully into a corner of her memory, but when she asks if he’d be willing to sit for the piece he agrees on the condition she describe him as “confoundingly handsome.”

Between bites, Vander and Vi pick up a conversation from earlier, some trouble a neighbor’s gotten themselves into over in Amarillo, and without meaning to Caitlyn’s mind tiptoes back into the previous night. The broken Hexvanes, the sand running out of Vi’s hourglass. And then this morning, Vi at her desk, all of her motion bottled, a simmer under that surface with all the deceptive calm of a shaken can of soda. What she’d said — I have an idea. Caitlyn worries those words like a loose tooth, a splinter under her skin. Something easy to pick at and impossible to ignore.

Outside the window, pale blue skies are emerging from patches of clouds, not a drop left drying on the panes. The thought that another chase could be ahead of them all the same sets in her mind, like holding anything cold and feeling all your body’s attention, all its focus narrow down to that one point. Feeling the moment when the coolness becomes heat, when the ice begins to burn.

“Caitlyn?”

“Hm?” Caitlyn snaps back to the moment, Vander and Vi looking at her with the same expression, heads tilted. A fleeting thought — do they realize that they’re each other’s mirror? It must have been this way from the start, Caitlyn thinks. Vander doing anything, and there in the background, Vi listening, watching. She realizes they’re still waiting on her and clears her throat. “Sorry, I was — elsewhere.”

A half-smile tugging at Vi’s lips. “Take me with you?”

She tries not to stammer. “Y-you said there were three,” she says. “The Hexvanes. But I’ve only seen two.”

Vander stands from the table. “Back to the grindstone, then. Keep talking, I’m going to start the next batch.”

He ruffles Vi’s hair as he goes, and she blows it out of her face, squinting one-eyed at Caitlyn across the table. “You must be pretty good at your job, huh.”

Caitlyn shrugs, and Vi drops her voice. “The third isn’t here right now. It’s—” her eyes lift to the staircase, “—a bit of a touchy subject.”

Caitlyn folds her arms over the table, narrows her eyes. “Where is it?”

Vi grins. “How do you feel about a daytrip?”

—

Caitlyn exits the motel with her backpack hanging from one shoulder, camera bag over the other, a bottle of water from the vending machine sweating in each hand.

Across the parking lot, Vi rests a hip against the hood of Vander’s pickup. Dark glasses, a flash of sun as she looks Caitlyn’s way. Easily, she catches in one hand the water bottle Caitlyn slings in her direction. A half-circle of gray eye tilts over the rim of her glasses as she approaches.

“Got what you need?”

At the last second, her hand on the doorknob, Caitlyn had looked out over the room, at the air conditioner cranking and the untouched sheets, had thrown the rest of her things into her bag and checked out at the desk. She doesn't expect she’ll be back. “I think so,” she confirms.

Back in the driver’s seat, Vi throws her chin at the glove compartment. Caitlyn opens it to a sprawl of cassettes, stretching for the one that goes tumbling to the floor. “Has anyone told Vander that nobody listens to these anymore?”

“And to think I’d just started to like you. Give it,” Vi accepting the tape and feeding it into the deck.

A beat thuds from the stereo, so heavy it rattles the coins in the well of the passenger door. The crease deepens in Vi’s cheek until the smile breaks through, and when they’re back on the highway with the wind thundering through the open windows, sun on her skin and her hair cutting across her vision so that Vi comes to her in flashes of white teeth and black glasses, in arms shifting to the sixth gear, her voice full and loose as she sings, Caitlyn stops herself from closing her eyes around the moment because she can already see herself years from now running her thumb over this one like a worn photo from a wallet and she doesn’t want to be there yet, in the future where all of this is behind her — she wants to be here, now and in it, in the possibility that it could go on forever. Like asphalt, like sun.

Earlier, as they’d finished packing up the truck, Powder had flung her forearms over the porch railing.

“Not the JV team,” she all but wailed, Vi sighing as she mounted the steps.

“We’re just going to see how it’s going.”

“Slowly,” Powder grumbled. “You gave it to them a year ago, if they’d been able to do anything by now—”

“So maybe I’ll bring it back.” Powder was picking at a paint chip on the railing when Vi laid a hand on her wrist. Caitlyn tracked the motion of Powder’s eyes, how they lingered on the touch, moved away. “You still going to check on the scrap?”

There was a grudging second before she responded. “Yeah.” A beat. “And Ekko wants to see if the truck made it, even though I told him that thing’s probably halfway to Emerald City.”

“Good to check. You never know.” Vi pulled her into a hug. Powder’s arms, hanging stiffly at her sides, slowly lifted to clasp behind Vi’s back. “The Hexvane’s ours. Nothing’s ever going to change that, alright?”

Now, Caitlyn’s notebook is open on her lap, pages whiffling in the breeze through the open windows. She recalls how Powder’s eyes had met her own over Vi’s shoulder, the uncertainty reflected there. “Why did you give up one of the Hexvanes?”

Vi glances over, reaching to halve the volume. “No softballs to start?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

Vi laughs. “I didn’t give up the Hexvane. Powder and Ekko and I, we’re damn good at what we do, but there’s so much we don’t have.” At Caitlyn’s questioning expression, she counts them off on her fingers. “Money, time, tech — at a certain point we had three prototypes when we can only use one at a time, and you have to look at what you’re doing and be honest about how far doing it over and over again can get you.”

“Powder and Ekko didn’t agree?”

“Oh, Ekko agreed,” Vi says. “He got it, that if you can get people on your side, get more people looking at a problem, that’s the fastest way to get your fix. We do this to help people. We needed to remember that.”

“And Powder?”

Vi sighs. “She got there, too, but it’s — the SIL Co. stuff was still so raw. Once your idea’s in somebody else’s hands,” Vi shakes her head, doesn’t need to finish the thought. “There are also just… philosophical disagreements, in terms of how to do the work. The guys are very by-the-book, big on the literature and repeated trials and whatever, and Powder’s approach is more…”

“Anarchist?” Caitlyn supplies, and Vi laughs again. 

“Yeah, you could say that. Jayce and Viktor have this benefactor who took an interest in their research, so yeah, they’ve got some restrictions on what they can do, but they’ve also got way more money to throw around. That’s a real advantage. I wasn’t going to sneeze at that just because I got good at using spit and prayers to keep all our shit together.”

Vi rubs a knuckle over her mouth, back and forth as she stares out at the road. “And we needed to eat. I try to make sure Powder doesn’t have to think about that.”

This draws Caitlyn’s eyebrows down toward her nose — but then a gear in her mind slots into place, begins to whir. “What’s his last name? The first one you mentioned, Jayce?”

“Something with a T? Talbot, Talon?”

“It’s not Tallis.”

Vi gives the steering wheel a little smack. “That’s it,” she confirms. “You heard of him?”

Caitlyn laughs, half-disbelief. “He lived with me. Not long, he spent a semester abroad for university. My parents were his sponsors.”

Vi gives a low whistle. “Small fucking world. You didn’t know?”

Caitlyn shakes her head. “We tried to stay in touch, but—”

Water bottle between her legs, Vi unscrews the top and lifts it carefully to her lips. “By the sound of it, you’re pretty hard to pin down.”

“Last I heard was something about a startup.” She frowns. “I think my parents might have even invested.”

Another whistle. “Speaking of money to throw around.”

“Too much,” Caitlyn agrees grimly. “Though I’m glad they seem to have put it to good use here.”

Vi’s look lingers, but any thoughts she has she doesn’t share. Caitlyn’s life, in the context of Vi’s, is plated in gold. Scratch at it long enough, the way Caitlyn had, and what you uncover might be dissatisfying enough to send you halfway around the globe. But it was still gold. We needed to eat, Vi said. Her silence is too generous.

By her own admission, Vi’s taking them the scenic route, says you could do the drive in an hour and make only one turn if you wanted, but Caitlyn’s grateful for it. Up ahead, long arms of wind turbines sweep toward the ground outside the passenger window. They’re the only thing between Caitlyn and a sky so blue it feels like a curtain, one you could reach up and pull aside if you wanted to, stare straight out into space.

“It must be gorgeous out here at night.” Her face goes hot the moment she says it, but Vi nods.

“It is.” Vi leans forward, peering out the windshield and up into the expanse. “Blue, for the record.”

“Hm?”

The smile Vi turns on her is angelic and all trouble. “My favorite color.” 

Caitlyn dutifully jots this down. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Make sure that makes it into the article. Something about my endless capacity to surprise.” Vi pauses. “Do you mean to tell me that in all your years chasing stories across this magnificent continent, you’ve never seen a night sky from the heartland?”

“I haven’t.” Caitlyn hesitates. “The stories I usually break don’t give me a lot of opportunity to look up.”

“Kind of a left turn for you, considering that’s, you know. Our whole thing.” She pauses. “So, what is it you usually—?”

“White-collar crime, mostly. Corruption, fraud, workers’ rights violations,” Caitlyn shrugs. “Your case has all of that. Same elements, different venue.”

Often, it’s places like this that are hit hardest by what Caitlyn tries to uncover, even if she’s spent more time in offices in New York and Chicago than she’s ever spent here. Misled and misrepresented by politicians, bartered and sold in boardrooms halfway across the country in the name of fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, profit. This is where they live, the invisible victims, their living and dying made invisible by greed and indifference. 

It’s the indifference she’s never been able to stand. You couldn't meet someone like Vi, someone with nothing willing to risk everything to keep people safe, and not want to do something. Not want to help. 

She’s halfway through her usual diatribe when she realizes Vi is looking at her oddly. “What?” she asks, flushing again. An evaluation, back when she was still full-time with The Piltovan: Kiramman has a tendency to get carried away that can be off-putting to colleagues and supervisors. But Vi hadn't said anything. Had just let her, and listened.

“Nothing, just.” Vi looks a little hunted. “I don’t know, it’s nice that you actually give a shit.”

“It makes the work better when you care.” 

“Makes it harder, too. I get it, only I don’t have to leave at the end.”

Caitlyn looks out the window. Hiding behind distance is every city she’s been to, all of them disappearing in the rearview. Soon Zaun will join them, just another dot on her map. “You get used to it.”

“It took me a while,” Vi tells her later, as the two of them unwrap gas station sandwiches on the back of the pickup, legs dangling above the ground off the side of the road. “To take my anger and do something with it other than spend all my time being angry.”

Caitlyn’s tape recorder spins quietly, flat on the truck bed between them. 

“They transferred you to an adult prison when you turned 18.”

“Yeah,” Vi says, and behind her sunglasses she seems to struggle with what to say next. “Yeah.”

“That must have been difficult.”

Vi snorts. “Fucking obviously.”

“What do you wish people knew about that time in your life?” Caitlyn asks, undeterred. “Or about incarceration in general?”

Vi squints through a long silence. “Honestly, until you’ve been there, you don’t even get — look around us, right now.”

Caitlyn does. Other than the occasional car whizzing past, they’re the only people for miles. Yellow-green grass fans out under the sky, hip-high, invisible shivers of wind that move through it as inscrutably as currents in a sea. Her bare arms are hot to the touch, sweat starting to bead on the back of her neck beneath her camera strap, and the air here is clean, makes her think of lawn mowers and skin and sun-warmed clay. 

“Crazy beautiful, yeah? And how’d you get here?”

“We,” Caitlyn searches for the right answer, not quite understanding where she’s supposed to be headed. “We got into a car and drove.”

Vi nods. “Inside, I spent half my time getting into fights and the other half trying not to think about how I was letting everybody down, how my sister was going to think I abandoned her, and everything else, every other goddamn second was people telling me what to do, where to go, when to eat and sleep and piss and breathe. Out here, you get to wake up, and—” she inhales, extending an arm to the horizon, “—it’s just like this. Every day as wide and yours as this.”

Vi reaches over, clicks Stop on the recorder. Her hand lingers, a pause while she stares at the ground between her feet. “I don’t regret what I did. I would have done worse than kick that guy’s face in if his partner hadn’t pulled me off him. Powder, sure, she was there, but she was twelve. The gang and I, we were the ones who broke into that place, and we were all kids and stupid but she was twelve. He should never have put his hands on her and he broke her fucking arm.”

“Good. You shouldn’t regret it,” Caitlyn says, because she’s read the facts of the case and it’s true, but Vi’s head still shoots up in surprise. “How’d it feel?” Caitlyn asks, and the grin Vi turns on her zips straight through her bloodstream. 

“Fantastic.”

“You knew how to fight, before you got to prison.”

Vi leans on the arms propped behind her, head rolling against one shoulder to look at Caitlyn. “You’re good at not asking questions.”

“And you’re good at not answering.” Caitlyn clicks the button to resume the recording. “So you chose to spend your freedom storm chasing. You’ve told me about your family, how you got involved at the start, but,” Caitlyn falters, paging through her notes, “I mean, people say you’re the best at what you do—”

“Aw, shucks, really?”

“—so what is it you do, exactly?”

Vi considers this for a moment, then she’s hopping off the truck, a cloud of red dust where her boots hit the dirt. She folds her sunglasses into her shirt and extends a hand to Caitlyn. When Caitlyn hesitates, Vi’s hand moves closer. “Come on,” she says, and her eyes reflect the openness of the sky above their heads. 

Caitlyn closes her fingers across Vi’s palm, and this is how, several minutes later, she finds herself standing beside Vi in the middle of the empty field, around them the grass pulling at their clothes. Skimmed with the flat of her hand, it’s coarse, alive. Every change in the wind runs through it with the hush of some new secret, dispersed between the stalks.

“Good, just like that,” Vi murmurs. Her own palm rotates, earth to atmosphere, and slowly Vi teaches Caitlyn how she reads the skies. How to track the movement of the clouds, throw a fistful of grass into the air, turn your face to it to find where the wind begins. What that wind can tell you about pressure, and how pressure shepherds the movement of the air.

Pointing out the faint white etching in the distance, she tells Caitlyn what she knows about clouds: their names and types, the meaning you can glean from their shapes and colors, what their height can tell you about the time you have before the thunder’s on your doorstep.

“There’s so much we don’t know about how or why some storms give us tornadoes and others don’t,” Vi says. “But we’re learning to recognize the signs.”

She tells Caitlyn that the ingredients she looks for, put simply, are these: moisture, lift, instability and wind shear. “Basically, you need the temperature of the air and the speed or direction of the wind to be different depending on your altitude. That gives you horizontal rotation,” she explains, circling a flat hand out away from and back toward her torso. “And if that gets kicked vertical,” the hand tips upward until her fingertips point toward the sky as they rotate, and Vi grins. “Showtime.”

She kicks her arm out above her in lazy loops, mimes throwing a lasso and hauling on an invisible rope, and it’s funny how easily Caitlyn can picture it: the tail of the storm caught in Vi’s fists.

And then she tells Caitlyn about everything else: that a ring around the moon means rain, that cricket song can tell you the temperature. How plants diffuse, become fragrant in anticipation of a storm. All of it, she says, has something to tell you about the world if you’re willing to listen, to recognize the signs.

“Tech can tell us a lot. Radars and satellites, the Hexvane…” Vi has ended up with her back to Caitlyn, just ahead, her eyes closed in the middle of the compass she’d drawn in the dirt, hands planted on her hips and her face lifted to the wind. She smiles when it combs through the hair brushing against her cheek, leans against it. Like being held, Caitlyn thinks, in the palm of a loving hand. “But simple things can tell us a lot, too. We can’t forget to look at what’s right in front of us.”

The sun, set above Vi’s right shoulder, a mosaic of clouds between her and the blue. Caitlyn lifts her camera to her eye, pausing over the shutter. “What do you see?”

Through the viewfinder, Vi’s head tilts to one side. Her gaze is fixed ahead of them, to the west, the clouds lying low in the distance. 

“Rain’s coming,” she says.

—

They pull onto the gravel drive late in the afternoon, the green sign for Academy Lane blurring past Caitlyn’s window. A cream-colored farmhouse up ahead, slanted under a dark roof and half-hidden in the shadows of a cluster of magnolia trees, in the tall sprays of sedge and bright wisps of flowers in the surrounding yard. Caitlyn can just see, on the wraparound porch, a comfortable set of wicker furniture, a fan tolling lazily overhead and a pitcher of tea covered in beads of condensation. 

“That’ll be Mel.” A shake of Vi’s head as she cuts the ignition. The windows, even the wide bay one curving just off the door, are reflective and impossible to see through. Their own faces stare back as they exit the truck, Caitlyn stepping out into the elegant scent of jasmine, of the pink roses ascending a trellis to her right.

“You told them we were coming?”

“Nope,” Vi lets the final sound pop on their way up the steps, just as the screen door opens. A woman in a crisp linen shift, her curls loose and studded with gold where they hang down behind her shoulders, glides barefoot onto the porch and immediately puts a warm hand on Vi’s shoulder.

“Vi, it’s been too long. You should have come to see us months ago.”

Vi shrugs off the hand. “Did Vander call you?”

“He might have thought to give us the courtesy,” the woman says, already turning to offer her hand to Caitlyn. “Mel Medarda, a pleasure.”

“Caitlyn,” she replies. “Caitlyn Kiramman.” The handshake is smooth but steely, same as the look in her eyes. These are a penetrating amber green, a flash of heat where Caitlyn had expected coolness, like glass still hot from the furnace. They widen as Caitlyn says her name.

“I’ve read your work,” Mel says approvingly. “Your piece about investment standards in The Piltovan was excellent, it gave me a great deal to think about.” She pauses. “And forgive me if I’m mistaken, but I think your mother and I may have served on the same ethics board at Oxford, does that sound right?”

“Yes,” Caitlyn says, surprised. Her eyes dart to Vi, who looks away. “She — she’s still at the university. And thank you.”

Mel smiles with satisfaction. “I thought so. I never forget a name. Or a face, and you're her spitting image. How is she doing?”

Mel leads them through the front door as they talk, the rooms beyond as tasteful as Caitlyn would have guessed from the outside, but there’s a lived-in quality to them, too: stacks of books on the floor and on the lid of the piano, sheets of scratch paper on the coffee table and, in one corner, tacked directly into the wall. Sunlight floods every window, suffuses the rugs and old couches with warmth, and Caitlyn can see beyond them to the yard outside, a golden hill behind the house. 

It reminds her, a pang at one familiar and distant, of her childhood home. But brighter, more intimate. More real. 

There’s no sign of the men they’re there to see, not in the parlor or in the kitchen beyond. 

“Mel,” Vi interrupts, quiet, her shoulders by her ears. “We’re here about the Hexvane.”

“I know what you’re here for.” Mel is assembling small bowls onto a wooden board, nuts beside soft cheeses and prosciutto, a heavy bunch of grapes spilling over onto the counter before Mel steers them back into place. “I don’t think I have to remind you that the contract term is three years.”

Vi leans over with her elbows on the counter, pops a wayward grape into her mouth. “Terms can change.”

Mel’s eyebrow bends into a graceful arch, just as there’s a rumble through the foundations of the house. Vi’s forearm flies out in front of Caitlyn’s shoulder, her face alert, eyes sweeping from the ceiling to the windows. 

Mel wrinkles her nose at the dust drifting down from the rafters. “That’ll be the boys.”

She leads them out across the back porch, down to where, in the distance, Caitlyn lifting a hand to shield her eyes, she can see at the base of a radio tower two men bent over some kind of device. It’s not the Hexvane, and she can almost feel Vi’s relief beside her, because whatever it is is smoking, thick blue smoke pulled toward the sky by wind. It carries voices down to them, urgent shouting as one figure heaves an industrial-sized fire extinguisher under his arm and sprints toward the device, thin white curls of powder beginning to join the column rising into the air. 

The other rubs his forehead, looking down at a clipboard and sagging into the support of his cane.

“They might need a minute,” Mel says evenly.

—

It’s another half an hour before Jayce and Viktor have joined them on the porch, their hair still damp and a stubborn spot of chemical residue clinging to Jayce’s left cheek. Mel dips a napkin into her water glass and thumbs it clean.

Viktor steps forward and extends a hand. It’s dry and warm, like paper, and for all the sharp angles of his face his smile is gentle, genuine. “How do you do,” he says, lowering carefully onto the couch beside Mel.

Jayce recognizes Caitlyn immediately, folding her into a hug so tight it squeezes the air from her lungs. “Look at you!” he crows, and she says it back, the kind lines of his face deeper than they used to be, a brush of stubble over his chin. 

It’s surreal, finding each other here, of all places. She’s surprised by how good it is to see him. The summer they’d spent together was so long ago, now, so brief that she could never be sure if their closeness had been real or the kind of thing you make up in your head when you’re sixteen and lonely. But no: staying up late while he studied and she read, kicking his legs under the dinner table when he was still too new and polite to kick her back, all the days she dragged him into trouble because she knew he’d get her right back out of it — it comes back to her now, as real as it ever was. 

For that summer and for all the years they stayed in touch after, she’d thought of him privately, shyly, as almost an older brother. Someone who, without being required to do so, had taken it upon himself to look after her. It means something when you’re young and ridiculous and the adults around you choose to take you seriously; it forces you to take yourself seriously, too. Caitlyn had spent her entire childhood being flattered by adults whose eyes glazed over the minute she started talking about anything of actual interest to her, and she still remembers nervously handing him the pages of a story she’d written, his expression as he read the same one she was used to seeing in the middle of the night, bent over his textbooks. 

And then, as he handed the pages back: “This is good, I mean it. If writing’s what you want to do, then you should keep doing it.” And the questions he’d asked, after, and the way that, when she answered, he listened.

She gives all the same responses she’d given to Mel when he asks, how things are back home, where she’s been, slowly more aware of Viktor politely nursing a cracker from the board and Vi watching all of this with an expression that seems to retreat farther and farther within her. Clearing her throat, Caitlyn attempts to steer the conversation toward the Hexvane.

“The device Vi and her sister developed is at the center of my current investigation,” she says at last. “Vi’s been my guide. What she can do is just…” 

There’s trepidation in Vi’s gaze, searching her own, and Caitlyn loses track of what she’s about to say in the face of it, can’t believe Vi could doubt even for a moment that her work, that she, is— 

But Jayce finishes the thought for her. “The Hexvane is remarkable. It was before we got to it, and I think with a few more months of tweaks—”

“We don’t have months.” Vi speaks for the first time, her fists laced tightly together where they hang between her thighs. “We only have a few good weeks of the season left. I need to be out there chasing, and I need the Hexvane to do it.”

Viktor’s eyebrows knit together. “What happened to your other prototypes?”

“A tornado happened, what do you think?” Vi bites back, and Caitlyn lays a steadying hand on her knee.

“It wasn’t just broken,” Caitlyn says. 

Earlier, at the gas station: Vi’s forearm braced against a payphone box, Powder on the other end of the line. When Vi slumped back to the truck with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, got in without saying a word, Caitlyn hadn’t needed to ask. “It was taken, along with their transport,” Caitlyn continues. “If we could even find it again it’d be totally destroyed.”

Jayce and Viktor’s eyes meet across the table, an imperceptible nod from Jayce. “Forgive me,” Viktor says, “I didn’t mean to offend. If Jayce and I seem reluctant to part with it, it’s because we are. We think we’ve introduced some improvements to the device that will enable faster and more complete data collection, and this is one of the things we’ve been focused on, some of the inherent… vulnerabilities, of the initial design.”

Caitlyn can feel Vi beginning to bristle all over again next to her, but Jayce is standing up from his chair. “It might be better if we show you.”

What they call their lab is little more than a shed in the back garden, but when Viktor throws the switch and the lights come on, it’s more advanced than she would have given it credit for from the outside. The equipment stationed at each counter rivals what she’s seen in universities or government research facilities, but it has none of their sterility. Instead, what she’d seen inside the house is true here, too: bookshelves line the walls, which are a warm, rich blue, and for each of the uncomfortable stools in front of the fume hoods there’s an armchair elsewhere in which she can imagine them lingering, discussing results or working through complex questions, there at the long end of each late night. Her mother would throw a fit if she saw it.

Caitlyn follows Viktor down the aisle, stopping to look at the diagrams hung by some of the stations. “How many ongoing research projects do you have?”

“Officially? Three. Unofficially?” He shrugs. “This is the benefit of being largely unaffiliated, we get to pursue whatever interests us.”

“Vi said you have a benefactor.”

“Yes. Mel,” he says, and this slots easily into what Caitlyn had guessed. Mel, who had waved them off to the lab, content to stay behind on the porch with a folder of papers and a red pen. Mel, who had been the one to defend their contract to Vi. Mel, greeting them at the door, calculated and charming all at once, inviting the way a cold lake is on a hot day — just what you needed, dangerous if you weren’t careful. 

“She invested in us early and helped secure several other lucrative funders,” Viktor is continuing. “Now, Mel is our partner. She handles the business end of our work, for which I am endlessly grateful.”

“Politicking not your cup of tea?”

Viktor’s mouth quirks. “My talents are better suited for less subtle arts.”

Jayce strides down the other side of the long lab bench, a binder open in his hands and Vi attempting to peer over his shoulder as he talks. She’s still a collection of sharp edges, walking around like she’s ready to throw an elbow and run if she needs to, but there’s curiosity on her face now, too, her eyes drinking in what Jayce is flipping through the pages to show her. 

He sets down the binder across from Caitlyn and Viktor. On the table between them is a tall spire covered in a sheet. Vi’s arms are crossed as they carefully remove and fold the tarp, but Caitlyn doesn’t miss the small give in her shoulders — the Hexvane looks just like the previous one did, nothing amiss that Caitlyn can see, and Vi reaches out to run a palm down across the device’s flank.

“Hey, old girl,” she murmurs, a lopsided grin when she realizes Caitlyn is watching.

“The Hexvane can record multiple data points at once.” Jayce’s hands identify the different probes for Caitlyn’s benefit. “It’s basically twenty different sensors wrapped up in one. But—”

“If it goes down, everything does.” It’s Vi who admits it. She had, after all, been the one to put her life’s work in someone else’s hands. Surely she knows it better than anyone else, its advantages as well as its flaws.

Caitlyn hums. “So you only get one shot.”

“That means your choices are redistributing your sensors,” Jayce nods, “which defeats the purpose of the device, or finding a way to get yourself more attempts. We knew that setting up multiple Hexvanes wouldn’t work. For one, they’re costly and difficult to transport, and isn’t that also the definition of insanity? If one Hexvane gets taken out, the odds are slim that the one next to it survives.”

Jayce has walked them further down the lab bench. At this station, metallic spheres less than half the size of Caitlyn’s closed fist rest over a grate. Small tools, hardly visible, and thin, nearly transparent strands of wires are strewn over the tabletop below, magnifying lenses dangling from a metal arm overhead.

“Jayce and I wondered if we could solve for the portability issue at the same time as we were increasing safeguards against catastrophic failure.” Viktor plucks one of the spheres from the grate and places it in Caitlyn’s palm. Across the table, Jayce offers a different sphere to Vi.

“What is this?” Vi asks, voice hushed, rotating it back and forth in her hands. Light slides easily over the silver-blue surface, small notches and grooves almost imperceptible within the plating.

“It’s the Hexvane. Just,” Viktor smiles. “A little smaller.”

“One hundred and twenty eight times smaller than the original, more accurately,” Jayce says. “We’ve been calling them the Hexdrones.”

Caitlyn doesn’t miss the small roll of Vi’s eyes. “They have all the same functionality?” Caitlyn asks.

Jayce nods. “Yes. Every measurement you can get from the original, you can get here.”

Vi tosses the sphere into the air, snatches it easily as Jayce and Viktor wince. “What’s one of these cost?”

The men exchange a glance. “Well,” Jayce draws the word out as Viktor sighs.

“With the materials we’re using now,” Viktor explains, “it’s not cheap, and it’s also one-time use. They’re not indestructible. You saw us running some tests on the durability earlier.”

Jayce adds, “Ideally you want to deploy these in larger numbers to increase the accuracy of your data. We also envision them being flight-capable, something you could pilot as a group, maybe even individually, and outfitted with tracking functionality so you can pick them up after the storm. All to say you need them to be both cost-effective and resistant to damage.”

“I imagine that’s a tough combination to find,” Caitlyn says, and Vi snorts. 

“We’ll find it,” Jayce says firmly, “but there’s a process. It takes time.”

As he says it, a roll of thunder ripples along the horizon, still visible through the open door. Rain has already begun to fall, the checkered pattern across the pavement blending into a flat slate gray. Vi sets the sphere back down atop the rack and stands gazing up at the Hexvane. “Seems like we never have as much of that as we need.”

—

They race back to the house, arms thrown up against the rain. The cheeseboard has vanished, the pillows already tucked out of sight as Mel waves them inside, their eyes adjusting to the sudden dimness through the windows. 

Vi shakes her head when Caitlyn asks if she thinks tornadoes are possible. “More likely it’s just going to be really, really wet.”

“Regardless,” Mel says, as if it’s already been decided, “you shouldn’t be driving. You’ll stay here tonight.”

Caitlyn and Vi exchange a glance, and she can hardly believe it when Vi, rolling her shoulders back with a crack, nods. “Sure. Why not.”

They leave Mel and Viktor in the living room, following Jayce up the stairs. “Small house,” he says apologetically, pushing open the door and standing aside. “We’ve only got the one spare room, but it’s an en suite, at least. Get settled and then we’ll talk dinner.”

When he’s disappeared back down the stairs, Caitlyn locks the door and faces the room, standing with her palms on the wood behind her. Vi sinks into the mattress, pressing a hand into it with a frown. 

“What are we doing?” Caitlyn whispers.

“Whispering, for some reason,” Vi whispers back. 

Caitlyn scowls. “I just mean,” she says, dropping the whisper as she crosses the room, pulling one of the curtains back to look out over the yard. The window is a wash of blurry grays and greens, the square white of the pickup visible down below. “Why are we staying? It’s not so dangerous we can’t drive back, surely.”

Vi leans back on the bed and closes her eyes. “You never know.” 

“You’d be out there if it was.”

Unable to help herself, Vi grins, but it quickly pulls into a sigh. “Look,” she says, propping herself up on her arms, “I’m not leaving without that Hexvane. If Mel wants to play games and if one of those games is hostess, that’s fine by me.”

“We could steal it,” Caitlyn says, and enjoys watching Vi take several seconds to realize she’s joking. 

Vi offers to grab their bags from the truck, and Caitlyn watches the watery figure move across the yard, the faint sound of the door opening and slamming closed again, before pulling the curtains back across the frame. She lowers her camera by the strap to the bedside table, eyeing the bed as she sets her notebook down beside it.

It’s been a while since she shared a bed with anyone. Lying on her side, tracing someone else’s back with her eyes — hand withdrawing to her chest within the boundaries of a carefully negotiated space. 

It’s never been her strong suit. Always a call to make or a plane to catch, Caitlyn slipping her underwear back over her thighs with an apologetic smile, snagging her wallet on the way out the door. It was just easier that way.

But then, she’s not sleeping with Vi. In another life, Caitlyn admits a little wistfully to herself, thinking again of the plateau of her spine against the engine, her shirt near-transparent, of her palm hovered above Caitlyn’s in the field, in a different life—

The door creaks open and Caitlyn scrambles onto the edge of the bed, is convincingly pulling off her boots with her back to the door when Vi enters.

Caitlyn’s pack lands beside her on the pillow with a thud. “Thanks,” she says over her shoulder.

“Don’t mention it.” Crossing to the bathroom, Vi pauses with her hands on the doorframe, cranes back around. “Word on the street is we’re going out tonight.”

“Out where?” Caitlyn asks, a roll of thunder underscoring the question.

Vi winks. “Wear something nice.”

—

Caitlyn is an efficient traveler. This makes ‘nice’ something of a challenge.

Caitlyn adjusts the slip over her hips. It’s too much, she thinks for the third time, swiveling to see her backside in the mirror. And Vi could very well have been joking. But with the boots and her hair down — she turns back around grimly. She looks fantastic. 

With Vander’s flannel unbuttoned down the front, there’s at least a casual layer of plausible deniability. She glares at herself in the mirror as she adjusts the cuffs. You’re on a job, she tells herself sternly. You’re not here to turn heads. Though even as she thinks it, another part of her is quietly submerging the idea in the waters of the dark room, waiting for the fog of the image to develop: gray eyes in low light, dipping past her neck. The thought sparks at the base of her spine, an ember so sudden and hot it makes her mouth go dry.

Enough, she thinks. Recognizing, objectively, that Vi is attractive is one thing. Straying to Vi’s profile in the car, her eyes kept finding themselves caught on some new observation — the soft scatter of freckles, for instance, which Caitlyn only noticed after the sun fell across her nose, or how one side of her upper lip pulls a little higher than the other. Discovering calluses at the base of her fingers when Vi’s hand tilted her face toward the wind, breathing in and smelling the leather of the steering wheel on her skin. Vi is handsome, the kind of beautiful that knocks you out in one swing. She’d be stupid not to see it.

Grab a knife by the sharp end, if you want, but that’s what your line’s made of. Cross it and whatever you touch comes away red. That’s one of the rules, whether you’re a journalist who fucks their sources or a woman who fucks other women or both, and the other applies to any fire: look, but don’t touch. Caitlyn turns on the tap, presses a cold, wet wrist to the underside of her neck.

Jayce is helping Viktor into his coat in the foyer, and he whistles when Caitlyn appears on the stairs. He accepts a gentle sock to the arm.

“That’s a lovely blue,” Viktor says kindly, adding, when he notices her peering past him and failing to find Mel or Vi in the dark rooms beyond, “They went on ahead.” 

“It’s a quick walk,” Jayce reassures her, and stepping out onto the porch, he opens an umbrella against the rain.

On the way, huddled together and dodging puddles along the side of the highway, she asks how they came to work together. When Jayce starts with the academic probation, the accusations and expulsion that ended his tenure with the university and with her family, anger tightens her shared grip on the umbrella.

“No one would tell me anything,” she says, thinking of the day they’d waved goodbye to his taxi. The rigid line of her mother’s back, turned before the tires left the drive, and Caitlyn, her bare feet on the pavement, waiting on the steps long after Jayce was gone. She’d dug through her parents’ study to find his new address; had found there instead the file folders, reports signed and dated in her mother’s assured hand. “You never got a fair hearing.”

He smiles grimly. “No. But Viktor wouldn't have found me otherwise.” Their eyes meet, and Caitlyn watches the lines around Viktor’s mouth soften.

They’re crossing the parking lot toward a low, one-story building as Viktor and Jayce finish trading stories about the company’s early days. “They were lean years,” Viktor admits, his voice quiet beneath the sounds of music and conversation reaching them through the walls. There are no windows, Caitlyn notices, but through the door’s frosted glass is a warm, yellow light.

“Lots of canned soup to get us to nights like this,” Jayce winks as he pulls it open, gesturing Caitlyn and Viktor inside. 

The moment she steps through the door, the noise rises up over her head and pulls her down inside it like a wave: there’s laughter, voices overlaid by music. A band at the far end of the bar is playing an edgy sort of bluegrass, country music with teeth. Under the brim of his cattleman the fiddler’s forehead beads with sweat, sawing along to a beat that rattles in Caitlyn’s ribs.

Caitlyn lifts her eyes through bodies and smoke. She would’ve thought the hair would be easy to spot, even here in the dim blue light, but there’s no sign of Vi and plenty of other women here with their hair cropped short or colored or both, tattoos and metal gleaming against their skin. A handsome older woman with a shaggy blonde cut slips by Caitlyn with a hand braced over her hip, mouth curving into a smile as she catches Caitlyn’s eye. Up at the bar, Caitlyn notices where hands casually rest on waists or in the pockets of old blue jeans — who these hands belong to, which people they touch. 

Her heart stumbles with something like surprise. Oh. Something like—

“Our corner’s over there,” Jayce says into her ear. His broad shoulders cut a path toward the booths ringing the open space in front of the stage, and alone on one of the benches, Mel lifts a hand. 

She folds her fingers together beneath her chin as Caitlyn sits down opposite, eyes dark and smiling. “You look gorgeous,” she says, and Caitlyn thanks her and returns the compliment. Mel has herself opted for a dress, her collarbone dipping between soft leather lapels. The sight is as oddly reassuring as it is perplexing. Whatever magazine she’d stepped from, how had she found herself here?

Surely someone like Mel could have made a life anywhere. Caitlyn watches Mel’s knuckles brush away the rain that lingers on Viktor’s cheek, the look that passes between them, and considers the things that might compel a woman like that to stay.

Caitlyn leans across the table and raises her voice. “Where’s Vi?”

Mel inclines her head back toward the bar. “Getting drinks, last I heard, but,” she checks the watch on Caitlyn’s wrist, “I fear she may have been waylaid. Why don’t you go make sure she hasn’t gotten herself into any trouble?”

Only, when Caitlyn squeezes into the only open space at the bar, there’s still no Vi. Her eyes scan the crowd gathered beneath a television playing a silent, grainy horse race, and she’s almost given up when she walks past a couple pressed together under the crooked sign pointing to the toilet. She scans them briefly — notes, impassive, that neither person is Vi — then notices the door hidden at the back of the hall. Caitlyn squeezes past the couple with a murmured apology and pushes through the door. 

It’d be generous, calling what she steps into anything other than a tent. A makeshift addition to the bar, the room has a dirt floor and clear vinyl sheeting nailed to a tin roof in place of windows. Caitlyn has the sense, as the music and the din of conversation fall away beneath the rain, of stepping inside a drum. 

Vi hasn’t noticed her enter, her back to Caitlyn as she plants her feet, aims a dart at the board hung lopsidedly on the far wall. They’re alone in the space, and Caitlyn watches as Vi’s throw sinks into the soft wood beside the board. “You let go too soon,” she observes.

For a moment, Vi’s the stranger Caitlyn had met yesterday — eyes up, ready for a fight, Caitlyn thinks — and then recognition softens her face. 

“Shouldn’t sneak up on me when I’m holding sharp objects,” Vi says. Her gaze drags from Caitlyn’s boots to her neck. “Miss me?” 

Careful. The voice in Caitlyn’s head is her mother’s, warning her away from something expensive, made of glass. 

“I think Mel mostly missed the drink she was promised,” Caitlyn says, and hates the way it makes Vi’s eyes drop to the ground. 

I just wanted to see, Caitlyn had protested, a hundred small Caitlyns accusing her from every shiny piece. 

Her mother replying, exasperated: Then why did you touch?

Caitlyn squares her shoulders and extends a hand that’s steadier than she feels. “May I?”

Vi drops the darts into Caitlyn’s palm. “Be my guest.” She watches as Caitlyn lines up her first shot. Angled slightly lower than she intended, it bites into the cork just within the outer bullseye. Caitlyn frowns, even as Vi offers an appreciative whistle.

“So,” Caitlyn says, adjusting the angle of her elbow. “Are you just keeping an eye on the rain?”

She exhales. The dart flies from her fingers and lands neatly in the center of the board.

“Something like that,” Vi replies. “You’re terrifying, you know that?”

Caitlyn pulls all three darts loose and hands them back to Vi. “I suppose I’ve been called worse.”

A tug at the corner of Vi’s mouth. Her arm cycles through several practice arcs. In the thin light, Caitlyn can see the faint dust of hair across her forearms as she moves, the deep line that appears between her eyebrows as she concentrates. “I used to be better with crowds,” Vi says at last. She throws, a little off-center. “Especially crowds like this.”

Caitlyn wouldn’t learn for years that the answer to her mother’s question was this: that sometimes that’s the only way to get close enough to anything to actually see it.

Caitlyn waits until Vi’s taken her next shot to ask, deliberately, “And is this your usual crowd?”

Vi tenses. She shifts her weight more fully into both feet, and the air between them shifts, too. “Yeah,” she says, and her eyes rove to Caitlyn, flick quickly back to the board. “You too?”

“Yes,” Caitlyn confirms, and though she keeps her gaze trained on the far wall, she can see, from the corner of her vision, the way Vi’s shoulders go the slightest bit slack. Vi’s next dart spirals through the air and nets her a respectable thirty-three points. “Nicely done.”

“Thanks.”

The problem Caitlyn had not anticipated, though, is that sometimes whatever you’re looking at decides to look back. She’d wanted the air cleared, that was all, had recited her lines just to show Vi they were reading from the same page. When their eyes meet again that’s what Caitlyn is thinking, that you need to know where you stand — but where Caitlyn finds herself in that moment is back in her family’s estate, kneeling, each winter, beside her father before the fireplace. Watching him bring a match to newspaper, knowing what would happen when they touched.

Caitlyn keeps her tone light. “I wouldn’t have guessed there was a place like this out here.”

“We’re out here,” Vi says coolly, “same as anywhere else.” But before Caitlyn can apologize for implying otherwise Vi screws up her nose and sighs. “I know what you mean, though. When you’re young, the fact that a place like this even exists is…” she trails off, watching as Caitlyn hits the bullseye dead in the center. “But I don’t know, I guess I just got used to being on my own.”

In silence, Caitlyn hits another bullseye, then another, and when she turns around from collecting the darts Vi doesn’t pretend she wasn’t watching. 

“You could get used to something else,” Caitlyn says, and what she means is that Vi has survived what she’s survived because of qualities that have been evident from the moment Caitlyn first started asking questions. Vi is stubborn and adaptable, a quick thinker with a quick mouth and, if Caitlyn is right about anything, an even quicker heart. She could have her pick of women in the next room. She could have whatever life she wanted. 

But she’s chosen this one.

It’s never happened to Caitlyn before, that every time she tries to write about Vi, it’s Caitlyn who ends up spread open on the page. Earlier, she’d written not just that she runs toward danger, but that she chooses to live inside it, and after staring for a moment at the words, she’d scratched them through with one long dark line. 

When Caitlyn was young her teachers would scold her for the way her pen dragged when she wrote, the way the side of her arm would end up smeared with black. The way all her lines would blur. It’s a habit she’s never quite managed to shake. Crossing anything out, she ends up with her mistakes all over her hands, ink indistinguishable from ash.

As Vi’s fist closes over the darts in Caitlyn’s palm, she sees it, the fingerprint she’s left on the side of Vi’s wrist. 

Caitlyn thinks: flashover. Everything going up at once. 

A group enters and takes their seats at a table near the tent’s door, metal chair legs scraping through the dirt.

“We should get back to the others,” Vi says. “Winner’s buying, by the way.”

—

It’s after the baskets of fries have been picked through, Jayce collecting empty bottles and aluminum cans from the table, that Viktor leans back, produces a lighter from his pocket and cups his hands around the cigarette dangling from Mel’s long fingers.

“Terrible habit,” she says, her voice tight around a lungful of smoke. She exhales a long, slow smile, a haze rising from her lips to the ceiling. Colored lights cut through the air above their heads, the edges soft and muted by the smoke, by whatever has begun to transmute in Caitlyn’s bloodstream.

Mel tips the pack toward Vi, who waves her off, but Caitlyn shrugs. As Viktor extends the lighter across the table and Caitlyn levers herself forward on an elbow, she can sense Vi’s eyes on her, tracking from her mouth to the flame.

She’s never liked smoking as much as she’s liked smelling it on her fingers, after, that wood-sweet scent better on skin than anywhere else. Like the whiskey Vi let her try ten minutes ago, their hands brushing over the glass, the burn of it better than the taste. 

Caitlyn closes her eyes. She feels good.

She doesn’t remember how they got here — sharing another round at the bar, eyes on the dancers on the floor in front of them. The whole night comes to her now in sensations: the hot rain pinging in her veins, voices sparkling behind the black gloss across her vision. Caitlyn watches as, back in the booth, Mel curves her fingers over Jayce’s jaw, watches him whisper something in her ear. To Mel’s left, Viktor lifts her arm and presses his lips to the inside of her wrist.

Vi’s watching her watch them. “Did you not realize?”

Finding her glass empty, Caitlyn reaches for Vi’s. “It was obvious.” She tilts her head back, has to drag her thumb against the whiskey that lingers at the corner of her mouth. And it was — especially in hindsight, the way most things are. Some part of Caitlyn far enough away to ignore says careful, says danger, warnings posted on a barbed wire fence. Sometimes the signs are so clear, Caitlyn thinks, standing back from the bar, you ignore them until it’s too late.

“We could dance,” she says, and Vi’s eyes are heavy, dipping down past the line of her collarbones. 

“We could,” Vi says.

A carousel of faces through the deep blue mist in the air. The world spins through the echoes of some slow crooner in the bar they’ve left behind for the alcove just past the entrance, water dripping from the narrow overhang. They don’t dance, but there’s something like dancing about it: the way Vi leans back against the doorframe to take a drag from her cigarette. Caitlyn leaning in, when she offers. The lit end burns like the dot beneath a question mark.

Vi’s breath is warm, alcohol-sweet and slow when she breathes out, a torso of smoke. Their fingers, side by side along the seam. 

Vi’s going to touch you, she realizes, right before Vi does. Her other hand palms Caitlyn’s hip to steady her as Caitlyn puts the cigarette to her own lips, tilts her head back. Lightning, at the edge of her vision, as she exhales toward stars she’s never seen.

A car passes on the wet street out front and continues on into the night. Caitlyn thinks, yes. Something rain-slick in her gut, Vi’s smile slicing like headlights through the dark.

Chapter Text

Early afternoon light, white gold through the study. A low summer breeze drifts through the curtains, through squares of pale sun on the floor. 

Caitlyn stretches her arms above her head, notebook propped open on her thighs. From her spot on the window seat, if she pulls the curtain back, she can see Jayce and Vi in the front yard, hear the low murmur of their voices as they pass tools back and forth over the engine. 

Caitlyn closes her eyes, inhales magnolia and exhaust and clean paper. The hollow call of a mourning dove hangs somewhere in the tree outside, same as she’d heard when she woke this morning — a hush filling the room like a held breath, only the faint whisper of the sheets and old rain dripping from the pane to the sill. 

The rise and fall of the chest beside her. In like the tide, and out.

—

Walking through the door late that morning, Vi had dropped a dirty rag on the table between greasy plates and half-drunk cups of coffee. 

“I need someone to drive me into town,” she said, rubbing at a black smear above her eyebrow. She grabbed Caitlyn’s mug and slurped, grimaced. “This is cold.”

Caitlyn snorted. “My coffee, you mean?” Gesturing for the carafe by Viktor’s elbow, she poured a fresh cup and nudged it down the table.

Vi winked. A withering look from Mel stopped her just short of propping her boots up between stacks of dishes. “Truck’s leaking oil,” she sighed, stretching her feet out in front of her instead. “I can fix it, but I’ll need to get a few parts from your local guy.”

Cramming a final forkful of potatoes into his mouth, Jayce stood. “I’ll take you.”

Vi rose, too. Her next words were directed at Caitlyn. “You’ll be good here?” 

Her eyes showed no trace of the night before. Whatever had happened the night before, not the ache that was humming between Caitlyn’s temples and nothing that indicated she might still feel it, too: the imprint of each one of her fingers, seared over Caitlyn’s hip. 

Though there, for a moment — a flash of something. A look Caitlyn recognized not from the night before but from earlier that morning: her hand reaching across a white expanse of bedsheets, Vi’s eyelashes dipping down to graze the knuckles against her cheek.

Caitlyn nodded, ignoring the weight of Mel’s gaze on the side of her face.

The repair would ground them here for another day at least if they didn’t want to be driving in the dark, and in any case there was no sign that progress had been made on the Hexvane conversation. At dinner last night Mel had deftly parried each time Vi tried to bring it up, Vi getting increasingly testy and Mel increasingly smug. 

It had, perhaps, been a factor in everyone’s decision to get increasingly inebriated.

As the door closed behind Jayce and Vi, Mel popped a peach slice into her mouth. “And what will you get up to?”

Oh, would have been the honest response, just some light existential panic. 

She asked, instead, if Mel had a desk.

That’s where Caitlyn had started: a no-nonsense, straight-backed chair, Mel’s new computer flanked by a selection of pens that all wrote like oil. A cabinet next to the desk revealed an electric kettle and wooden box full of satchels of tea. Caitlyn had brewed herself a cup and, sinking her chin into her hands, she’d listened to her pulse as it grew to the size of the silence. 

Tentatively, she’d struck one of the keys of the computer. Password protected. For the best, she reasoned — no line blinking at her insultingly from the blank page. She’d opened her notebook instead, written a line and scratched it out. Wrote a line, scratched it. 

For god’s sake. Caitlyn liked to move when she wrote anyway, found the ideas got stagnant when you sat in one place for too long. She’d abandoned the desk to browse the bookshelves and peer at the notes tacked to the wall. Equations and squiggly symbols, math a brain that had once excelled at calculus and chemistry couldn’t even wrap itself around. On top of a file cabinet were medical records from a nearby hospital. Caitlyn’s eyes swept over the page — the blocky printed name at the top, an x-ray copy of a heart clouded with black and gray — before, feeling guilty, she forced her eyes away. She sank onto the window seat with her notebook, sipped at the lukewarm tea. Wrote a line and let it linger there on the page.

The thing was that Caitlyn liked alone. She was good at alone. But after so long in the company of others the fit was off. Shrunk in the wash, maybe, something too tight around her neck. It made her too aware of everything, part of her craning its head around, patting its pockets. Searching and searching for something it had only just realized was missing.

Beneath the window, the sound of wheels on gravel, doors slamming. Familiar voices down below. 

Her eyes closed, hearing that voice. The world ebbed. Standing there alone on that shore, Caitlyn sighed and allowed herself to reach down for what had been left unburied in the sand. To pick it up and examine it, finally, the weight and shape of her longing. 

So Caitlyn brewed another cup of tea. Opened the window to let the breeze and sun through. And this is where she finds herself now, cross-legged on the window seat as she gazes out over the garden and asks herself what the hell she’s going to do about Vi.

The part of this she’s finding difficult to accept is that it’s a distraction. Every time she puts pen to paper it’s Vi’s face she sees, not the way it had looked at her last night or even this morning but the way it had looked in Vander’s basement, the deep shadows painted there by the lone bulb and exhaustion. When she closes her eyes it’s Vander and the boys in the photograph, it’s Ekko and it’s Powder. It’s a young Vi digging her sister free of everything the sky had brought down around their heads, her shoulder dislodging under the weight of it.

The need to tell this story, to make people listen, is sharper than Caitlyn’s ever felt before. A story like that is clarifying in the same way a knife is, lodged in your side. It makes the world go focused, clear-edged. When something hurts like that, you pay attention.

But that need, objective — true — sits next to the quiet understanding that she has gotten too close. And this is the part that’s easy to accept, because in an accounting of her own mistakes Caitlyn can be ruthless, knows how to wield honesty against her own weaknesses, and if she’s honest now it’s that she wants to get close to this. Wants to get close to Vi, and the thought makes the knife sink deeper, makes Caitlyn curve a reflexive palm around her own ribs.

She can’t leave it there. But neither can she take hold of the handle and cut herself loose.

When she closes her eyes, this time: the flex of Vi’s back, her bare shoulders as she’d shifted, stretched. 

Seeing it that morning, Caitlyn’s breath had caught painfully in her chest. Not just because something about Vi leaves her bruised in every tender place — especially like that, her sharp edges softened, mouth parted with sleep. 

It was that Vi was going to roll over and look at Caitlyn, and Caitlyn knew that when she did, that moment, thin as glass, would break. There would be no going back, no way to know what would happen when Vi finally faced her, when her eyes began to move beneath their lids. When, slowly, they opened.

—

It takes a long, slow second for the dream to clear from Vi’s eyes. When it does, she stills. “Hey.”

Caitlyn swallows. “Hi,” she says back.

“Time’s it?” Her voice has a pleasant rasp, so close to sleep, like waves over sand or old pages, turning.

“Early.” They listen, for a moment: no one awake in the house that they can hear. Only a low whistle outside, a bird, like wind through the reeds. 

It was nothing they couldn’t come back from, Caitlyn reasons. Call it alcohol, blame it on the strange things that can happen when you get drunk with your friends. Though: are they even friends? Caitlyn doesn’t have enough of those to know, but whatever Vi is to her — Caitlyn winces. Touching the thought is like pressing two fingers to the center of a bruise. Vi has, without her noticing, become someone she’d find hard to lose.

But they hadn’t, they hadn’t even done anything, had they? Hadn’t danced, hadn’t kissed. Not anything that would—

A memory, vaguely: Caitlyn drying her face at the sink, their reflections saying something, laughing. Falling into the wall, into each other. That steadying hand at her waist again, Vi’s eyes hooded on her lips. How they’d teetered there at the edge of something, the edge of all those hadn’ts, and watching Vi breathe in that morning light Caitlyn had quietly faced the fact that if Vi had reached across it, Caitlyn would have let her.

Blood pounds in Caitlyn’s temples, in the fading bruise above her ear. “Aspirin’s on your nightstand,” she says, and Vi rolls over and groans. 

“You’re an angel.” Vi shakes the bottle into her palm and swallows the pills dry, collapsing back onto the mattress. “Used to be I could go twice as hard as that and feel half as shitty.”

Caitlyn smiles. “We must be getting old,” she agrees.

“Yeah, and get off my lawn,” Vi smiles back. She pillows her head in the bend of her elbow, the smile fading into something else. “You, uh. You’re doing okay?”

“I took some earlier,” Caitlyn says, but Vi shakes her head.

“No, I mean,” she gestures vaguely out at the room, and Caitlyn tenses. Are they going to talk about it? But Vi just says, “With all of this, I guess. When you came along for the ride I doubt this is what you were expecting.”

Half-talking about it, then. Following the edges of it with their feet like a hole in the floor, a line chalked down the middle of the bed.

No, Caitlyn could say. No, I didn’t expect you. “I’ve stayed in worse places,” she says instead. “With worse company.” They share another smile, and Caitlyn’s shoulders lift. “I asked you to show me. You have.” 

There’s a line above Vi’s nose that doesn’t smooth when Caitlyn says it. The hand not balled under Vi’s head is curled between their bodies, a finger tracing loose patterns across the sheet.

“You think lots of people will read this?” she murmurs.

Caitlyn nods. “I do.”

“You think they’ll care?”

She hesitates. “I hope so.” 

Vi is quiet. “When we first started chasing,” she starts, “I didn’t want Powder and Ekko out there with me at all. Too dangerous, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. They always ride behind, that’s our compromise. But there aren’t any guarantees.”

She pauses. “We had a few close calls all in a row, right before I decided to give up the Hexvane. I mean, you saw it. Big fancy lab in the middle of nowhere, right, how could I not? They’re just… better than I am. Than I can be.”

Caitlyn can feel the confusion on her face, but Vi doesn’t seem to notice, staring miles into the bed. Like she’s still there under that blue sky above the prairie, searching for rain. “I’m just not good enough to keep doing this on my own.”

Caitlyn’s chest constricts, the ache traveling down to her fingers — a need to touch Vi, to take her face in her hands. The expression there is so raw Caitlyn thinks it might hurt if she did. She’d have to hold her so gently it would hardly be touch at all.

“You’re the best at this,” Caitlyn says quietly. “That’s what every person I ever asked about storms has said.” 

Before she can lose her nerve, she reaches over to brush her fingers down Vi’s cheek. “And now I’ve seen it for myself.”

Vi catches her by the wrist before she can pull away. Keeps Caitlyn’s hand there, in the fold of her own.

They drift back toward sleep, falling somewhere halfway in and halfway out. Caitlyn allows herself to curl into the warmth between their bodies, anchored by the soft hand on her wrist, the puff of air against her cheek. 

When she opens her eyes again, Vi is gone.

—

As Caitlyn watches Mel walk out into the yard with her arms folded, say something to Jayce and Vi down below, the lock to the study clicks. Viktor’s head peers around the door.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude,” he says, moving to close it again, but Caitlyn shakes her head.

“Please,” she says, her arm fanning out to the rest of the room. “Plenty of space, and it is yours. How are you feeling?”

After breakfast, Viktor had excused himself to lie down, and as Mel and Caitlyn climbed the stairs to the study she heard him retching behind the powder room door. She assumed hangover at the time, but now she thinks of the x-rays.

Viktor offers a wan smile. “I’ve had worse days. It’s better when they follow a good night. Thank you for asking.” He folds himself gingerly onto the sofa on the opposite wall, a book in his hand. But he doesn’t open it. “How is it going?”

“The article?” Caitlyn hesitates. “Not great,” she admits. “It’s… complicated.”

He hums. “I find your work fascinating. Just,” he elaborates, as her head tilts, “how the need for structure can coexist with this much freer space. That a writer must get inside the rules, play with them, break them. I don’t know about you, we only write papers, but I’ve always found it a little bit like science and a little bit like magic.”

Caitlyn smiles. “That’s not a bad way of describing it. Maybe you should branch out.”

Viktor shakes his head, but he’s smiling, too. “Jayce tells me you’re very talented. You always wanted to write?”

Caitlyn reaches for her mug and, finding it empty, sets it down again. “For a long time I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says honestly. “I knew I liked figuring out how things worked, and I liked helping people. My parents always wanted me to follow their path — be a doctor, a scientist, maybe. Like you. But it just wasn’t for me.”

“Not exciting enough for you?”

She smiles apologetically. “I thought maybe a detective, maybe a lawyer — nothing seemed to fit. But with writing, I get to try on so many different lives. Make them all fit, for a while.”

A little embarrassed to have offered up so much, Caitlyn expects to see polite boredom on his face. But instead, hands folded beneath his chin, he nods vigorously. 

“Yes. Sometimes we’re not meant for just one thing.” Outside, the voices disappear beneath the rumble of the engine starting.

“You and Jayce,” Caitlyn says quietly, “Vi, you all seem meant for this, somehow.”

He shrugs. “Sometimes your life leaves you very little choice about what to do with it.” There’s a flicker of a hesitation before he adds, “I don’t know her as well as you do, but—”

Caitlyn nods into the silence left at the end of his sentence. Vi, running toward the thing that had torn her life apart so no one else would ever have to live her life again. “She cares so much about this.”

“That’s perhaps a kinder word than ‘obsession.’ I’ve been there before,” he says by way of explanation. “Not about this project, but, well.” His hand squeezes over his thigh. “You get the idea.”

Caitlyn thinks she might. “How do you… how do you step away from it, when it’s that important?”

“Please let me know when you find out,” he says, and Caitlyn laughs. His face goes serious as he considers the question. “It’s less about stepping away than learning how to come back to it the right way, I think.” He pauses. “It helps, having someone who knows where that edge is. Someone who will join you there, if only to pull you back from it.”

“I don’t know if Vi has anyone like that,” Caitlyn says. It’s not the kind of relationship Vi had implied she shares with either Powder or Ekko, not if she won’t even let them ride shotgun. She’s hesitant to believe that the things Vi said to her this morning were things she’d said even to Vander. The ones you’re trying to protect can’t share the burden of their protection. Biting her lip, Caitlyn shakes her head out the window. “I have to do this right.” Whatever Vi says, she is good enough to do this on her own. But she shouldn’t have to. 

It’s just that the only way Caitlyn can help her requires her to do it from a distance. 

Caitlyn looks down at her hands, feeling that line again, tearing her straight down the middle.

Viktor is staring at her oddly. “You will,” he says at last. He flips through the pages of his book, settles it open against one propped thigh. “Figuring things out, helping people. It seems to me that’s exactly where you ended up.”

They lapse back into silence. Trying not to call attention to herself, Caitlyn thumbs away the wet dot that escapes her eye and lands on the page below her face.

The room fills with the sound of pages turning in Viktor’s hands and Caitlyn’s pen moving across the paper until there’s a sudden patter against the window. Caitlyn misses it the first time, finally too absorbed in a sentence to notice, but when it happens again she looks up in time to see small stones falling away from the pane.

She kneels to push the window the rest of the way open, finds Vi grinning up at her from the yard. Her heart stutters in her chest, a sad, stupid smile overtaking her face before she can stop it.

“What light breaks your window, or whatever,” Vi calls.

Caitlyn rolls her eyes, despite herself. “How’s it going?”

“Just finished.” This voice is Jayce’s, shutting the hood and coming around the other side of the truck. “Still a few hours of daylight, if we want to do the lake.”

Vi swivels back to Caitlyn. “Want to do the lake?”

Caitlyn looks over her shoulder to Viktor. “You have a lake?”

Without looking up from his book, Viktor wavers a hand. “Technically.”

Caitlyn looks at her pages, the spread covered in her scribbled notes and crossed-out lines. The sun is still bright through the trees, blooming through ivory petals the way light can reach you through paper or the thin places of your skin, like laughter through white teeth. It’s the kind of afternoon that seems like it will last longer than it does, the kind of afternoon that summers are made of. 

None of this will last forever. So many of these hours have already disappeared behind her. One day she’ll pick up these pages, remember, maybe, this desk, this room. But so much else: the give of the cushions beneath her, the weight of the pen balanced against her thumb, Viktor’s cologne and the tea drying in a ring at the base of her cup — she’ll forget it all. 

And soon it will end: Caitlyn boarding a plane at Stillwater, maybe turning to look down from the ramp, Vi looking up at her the way she is now, hand lifted to shield her eyes. Maybe by then her decision will be distant, too, gone as a town in her rearview. One of Caitlyn’s hands curls into a fist at her side. 

Might as well grab it now, hold onto this while she still can. 

And then maybe, finally: she’ll be able to let it all go.

“Let’s do it,” Caitlyn calls.

Below the window, Vi whoops and races Jayce back into the house, as Caitlyn, shaking her head with a smile, pulls the window shut.

—

The lake is set just beyond the fields behind the house, close enough that they can swing their chairs and towels across their backs and walk. 

When Caitlyn readjusts her bag for the second time, Vi takes it by the strap and slings it over her own shoulder. Her dark glasses flash, the lines around her mouth ticking upward. Wind licks through the hair across her forehead, disappears into the grass between their group and the sliver of blue in the distance.

Up ahead, the sound of Viktor saying something to Mel and Jayce is drowned out by their laughter. In all this wide open space, it carries, doesn’t stop until it hits highway or sky. The path is too uneven for his cane to be of any use here, and Viktor’s arms bracket each of their shoulders, their bodies linked in a chain.

Caitlyn watches the sun catch against the muscles of Vi’s neck, twisted to follow a line of birds passing over their heads. She looks away.

The beach is thin, a gentle, sandy slope down to bright blue water, and mostly deserted, a single kayaker paddling steadily near the opposite shore. They dump their chairs and bags in the sand, and Vi snags the soft cooler off Jayce’s shoulder and goes digging through the pockets until she finds the right zipper. Jayce opens the can she tosses his way with a happy sigh.

“Cait?” Jayce prompts. 

Caitlyn shakes her head, last night still turning in her stomach.

“Come on, hair of the dog,” Vi wheedles, and, hand up to shade her eyes, it’s seeing that Vi has stripped out of her shirt, is kneeling there all bare stomach and trunks hung low over her hips, that causes Caitlyn to change her mind.

Caitlyn’s wearing a suit that Mel insisted she borrow, a navy so dark it’s almost black. As she shrugs out of the flannel and folds it neatly into her bag, she catches Vi laughing to herself. “I’ll have to tell Vander he’s not getting that one back,” Vi says, twisting her can into the sand beside her chair.

“It’s been surprisingly useful,” Caitlyn agrees. “I will return it, though. I promise.”

“I don’t think he’ll miss it,” Vi says. Her mouth hangs crooked on her face, and she stands, planting her hands on her hips. “Who’s going in the water?”

Vi and Jayce race each other down the beach, at the shoreline Vi giving him a shove that tumbles him face-first into the water. Spluttering, he pushes up onto his knees and drags her down by the elbow.

Safely several yards behind, Caitlyn smiles down at the water playing up over her toes. It’s cold, a pleasant sharpness spreading up from the soles of her feet. When was the last time she was near any body of water? Texas, maybe, that story about the oil rig workers. But then, Caitlyn thinks, striding in up to her waist, it had been too late in the year to swim.

She dives, and a veil drops between her and the world. The only sound is her own heartbeat keeping steady time inside her head, the bubbles that rise as she exhales. The lake is shallow this close to shore — her fingers sift through plants and mud at the lakebottom as she pushes herself back toward the surface — and though her eyes are closed she can feel the sunlight, reaching her through water and time.

That’s what the room had felt like this morning. A quiet world, blue and far from this one.

Surfacing, she strokes toward a swimming platform anchored just off-shore and pulls herself up the ladder. Beads of water drip from her knees, her upper arms as she plants them behind her and turns her face into the sun.

She’s not there long before the platform shifts, slanting down to the right. Her eyes fly open. 

Vi’s got her arms propped over a corner, her feet kicking lazily through the water beneath her. 

“Care for some company?”

Caitlyn waves a hand at the spot next to her. “All yours.”

Forgoing the ladder, Vi plants her hands and hauls herself onto the deck. Her forearms go taut, red with the cold and sun, long tracks of water following the veins down toward her wrists. 

Caitlyn feigns an intense interest in a divot in the wood to her left, feeling every movement as Vi swings into place and settles next to her. Their shoulders brush as Vi, heaving a contented sigh, leans back to mirror her posture. Beneath her, water seeps across the platform and darkens the wood.

“I could get used to this,” Vi says. “Though I’m sorry we haven’t gotten to do much chasing.”

“You don’t need to keep apologizing. No need to go wishing up tornadoes.” 

“No,” Vi grins. “Still. Don’t want your readers to think I’m boring,” she says, and Caitlyn barks a laugh. She ought to show Vi some of what she’d scratched today. 

“I don’t think that’s likely.” 

Vi lies down with her back flat to the platform, one knee propped. She throws a tattooed arm across her face to block the sun. “I’m just saying that if Vander gets to be handsome, I should at least get to be cool.”

“Any other requests?” Caitlyn asks. Her eyes stray to the trails of water down Vi’s stomach. The swim trunks fall away from her bent leg, exposing a hard, pale thigh, and it’s like a trapdoor falling away from Caitlyn’s feet, the way the sight makes her stomach drop. 

An image of herself bent over Vi, here in this sticky heat, mouthing up toward the meet of her legs—

Caitlyn plunges her hand into the water to squash the image. It’s blazing out, this late in the day, a shocking contrast to the coolness of the lake, the coolness of the storm that had dogged them all last night. She presses her palm against her neck to slow the runaway gallop in her pulse.

“I don’t know,” Vi says at last. “What do you think they should know about me?”

Caitlyn snorts, directed at herself and every indecent answer that immediately springs to mind, but Vi’s arm drops away from her eyes and her head tilts, something uncertain moving in over her face.

“No, sorry,” Caitlyn says in a rush, “I just—” 

There is, she realizes grimly, no possible way to explain this that doesn’t involve an abysmal lie — never Caitlyn’s strong suit — or gutting herself right there on the deck, making a mess of them both. 

Honestly. Closing her eyes, Caitlyn grabs hold of that invisible knife.

“That you have a good heart,” she says. She’s watching, in the distance, the wake made by the long-gone kayaker distort the mirror of the surface. “No one who didn’t would do this.”

Behind her, Vi is quiet. Caitlyn levers herself down to lie flat beside her. The day has yellowed at the edges, and the blue above their heads seems see-through now, thin, the beginning of a slow dissolve into evening.

“You jumped into my truck,” Vi says to the sky. “Never looked back. All so you could tell our story. That takes guts.” Caitlyn hears the soft working of her jaw. “And what you said, heart.”

Caitlyn doesn’t know what to say to this, so she doesn’t say anything. They lie there, watching the light change above their heads, and then Vi’s arm, the one closest to Caitlyn, lifts. It points straight overhead.

“Hey, there you go,” she says, nudging Caitlyn’s shoulder, and Caitlyn follows the line of her hand to where a small pen-nib of light hangs in the middle of the sky. A star, several others hazy, just visible at the edges of the evening. “Finally got you your sky.”

It’s suddenly hard to breathe. Caitlyn’s chest has gone tight, like her ribs are closing around her lungs, her heart. Only three things in the world close like that, she thinks, her brain trying to slow itself down with a list:

Doors, she thinks. Books. Fists.

Her eyes fall to Vi, the sharp, familiar lines of her profile. The ridged nose with the bright hoop of her piercing, her scars, the way her chin curves back toward her ear — she’d memorized her so quickly, without even realizing that’s what she’d been doing. With only her hands to go on, Caitlyn is certain she could feel her way around that face and know Vi for who she was. 

It’s going to take her so much longer to forget.

Vi pushes herself back to her feet, extending an open hand down to Caitlyn. “Come on, my beer’s getting lonely.” The platform wobbles as Vi pulls her to stand, Vi’s other hand flattening against Caitlyn’s spine.

“Easy,” Vi murmurs. This close, Caitlyn can see water drying in the gap between her nose and lips, and a wild part of her wonders what Vi would do if Caitlyn said fuck it to all those reservations, to journalistic integrity. Wonders if her mouth would open under Caitlyn’s, if that hand at her back would pull her closer—

As she thinks it, the platform wavers again. Vi’s hand fists against her hip, grasping for balance, but she pulls too hard — Caitlyn hinges forward, flails, and then the two of them are tumbling backwards into the lake.

All around her in that water: a sound, golden, Vi’s laughter as she surfaces.

—

After she showers, Caitlyn takes the swimsuit from the railing of the porch where she’d left it. It’s dried nearly to the touch in the hot evening air.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worn it, honestly,” Mel says when Caitlyn knocks on her bedroom door to return it. Mel is freshly showered, too, invites Caitlyn to sit on the bed while Mel dabs moisturizer under her own eyes in front of the mirror. “A gift from my mother, if that tells you anything. You can keep it.”

Caitlyn huffs a laugh. “I have one of those.” 

“Then you understand why you’d be doing me a favor, taking it off my hands.” Mel joins Caitlyn on the bed, smoothing the duvet under her dress. “We’ve enjoyed having you stay.” 

The words land just this side of sad, and Caitlyn knows it would be a mistake to assume there aren’t about thirty different things happening in Mel’s head at once, always several chess moves ahead of anybody else. Whatever power struggle is happening over the Hexvane, it can be as simple, as true, that it would be easy to feel lonely out here. 

As beautiful as it might be, she thinks, the two of them watching the shadows lengthen outside the window, the last of the sun turning the distant trees to gold. Caitlyn’s always liked this time of the day, when the divide between blues and yellows seems starkest, and the effect is even stronger out here, all that drying grass beneath the flat endlessness of the sky. You could feel every single one of them here, the long miles between you and everything else.

Caitlyn asks, “Why here?” 

Mel doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t understand what Caitlyn means. “I saw an opportunity,” she says. “To make a name for myself. To do something that mattered.” And then her mouth curves into a smile. “All those things you tell yourself to justify the real reasons.” 

When Caitlyn shakes her head, not understanding, Mel rolls her eyes and bumps Caitlyn’s shoulder with her own. “For love, why else?”

Caitlyn starts. Hadn’t Vander said those exact words to her just yesterday? But Mel is laughing smoothly at the expression Caitlyn must not have hidden in time. “That’s not the sin everyone makes it out to be,” she says. “If I was bored, I’d leave. My work, it keeps me occupied. I’m gone half the month as it is. But when I’m here, I’m never bored. And when I’m gone, well,” she sighs. “I like having something to come home to.”

“I can’t imagine that was as easy a choice as you’re making it sound.”

“It wasn’t,” Mel agrees. “It isn’t, for people like us especially. For me. But everywhere is hard, isn’t it? It’s just the scenery that changes.” She fixes Caitlyn with a sharp eye. “You’re not asking for your story.”

Caitlyn looks down at her hands, twisted together in the fabric of the swimsuit. “No.”

Mel looks at her very seriously and very kindly. “It can work,” she says, just as Jayce strides through the open door.

“Have you seen my keys?” he says to Mel, crossing to the bedside table and rifling through the drawers. “I didn’t find them in the lake bag, and I thought for sure I—”

“They’re not on the hook?” Mel pushes herself off the bed, placing an apologetic hand on Caitlyn’s shoulder. “I’ll see you downstairs?”

Mel’s words bang around in her skull the entire distance back to the guest room. Vi is nowhere to be seen as Caitlyn folds the swimsuit into her bag, and it’s not until Caitlyn’s in the parlor flicking through a newspaper someone left on the coffee table that the screen door whines open. “Psst.” When Caitlyn looks up, Vi is standing there, faintly silhouetted by the evening light. 

She beckons Caitlyn outside. Vi ducks around to the other side of the wraparound porch, leaning over the railing. “Come look at this,” she calls. Her eyes are wide with excitement.

Caitlyn half-expects some weather phenomenon, wind whipping up into a storm right there in the next lot, but that’s not it at all. The old barn across the field next door is abandoned, looks like it has been for years, but cars have started to pull in and park on the grass. They all face the tall white side of the barn, a man in blue coveralls adjusting a rectangular frame of light projected on the wall.

“Is it—?”

“A drive-in,” says Vi, and it’s almost breathless. “Oh, I wish Pow was here, she’d love this.” She looks young, as she says it, pushing her hair back from her face with an impatient gesture that could have come from someone half her age. “I wonder what they’re playing.”

“We could find out,” Caitlyn says, warmed by the smile that overtakes Vi’s face.

Inside, Viktor doesn’t glance up from what he’s sauteing on the stove. “I thought they had a showing last weekend. It’s usually every other week.”

“There’s a pretty good view from the roof,” Jayce says on his way down the stairs, and when Vi’s eyes get even bigger, Mel, behind him, smiles generously.

“Let’s eat before we head up,” she says.

Jayce was right: the view is nearly perfect, the field below framed by the magnolias skirting the house. The small door at the very top of the staircase leads out onto a part of the roof so lightly slanted it’s almost flat, and it’s wide enough for them all to sit side-by-side facing the screen. 

Beneath Caitlyn’s palm, the shingles radiate the day’s heat, even as the last edges of the sun begin to dip beneath the horizon, a cold breeze against the back of their necks that makes Vi look west with a frown. Viktor’s brought up a handheld radio, and as the opening credits begin to play across the screen he twists the knob until music parts the crackle of static. 

“Oh, I love this one,” sighs Mel as the title fades in, twisting the cork from a bottle of wine.

Vi’s eyes dart apprehensively from the screen to Caitlyn’s face. “You ever see this?”

Caitlyn shakes her head. “You?”

“I think they screened it once for gen pop, but they must have had me otherwise occupied,” Vi says. “Wasn’t really a fan of the popcorn inside anyway. Not enough butter.”

“Criminal,” Caitlyn agrees, and Vi snorts, their laughter rising over the title card until Jayce shushes them.

Films were never a big part of Caitlyn’s childhood, and as an adult she’s rarely made time for them outside of her research, loading up old documentary reels in dusty library basements or poring over typewritten transcripts. Anytime she finds herself in front of a television set her hands always start itching for something to do about twenty minutes in. 

But she loves a good story, is endeared immediately by When I was your age, television was called books, and this one goes down like a cheap champagne: it fizzes, sweet and surprising and funny, and maybe it’s that or the fact that they are passing Mel’s bottle back and forth across the roof, but Caitlyn feels a lightness expanding in her chest, could float straight up to the stars on this feeling alone. 

When she tips her head back to see them, she has to stifle a gasp. Without her noticing, in unselfconscious silence, the sky has revealed itself, the zipper of the Milky Way undone straight down the middle. Caitlyn has seen stars before, little smudges up in the ozone like a thumbprint in the middle of your glasses, wiped away easily enough. But she’s never seen them like this. These stars are so crisp and clear she could reach out and prick her finger against them, and the longer she looks the more of them appear: even in the few empty pockets of sky she can sense them there, receding back toward their origins, places farther away than their light can travel.

It’s immense. It’s so beautiful it’s terrifying, or the other way around, and as Caitlyn thinks it she feels herself getting turned in circles, dizzy enough that she sways and flings a hand out to catch herself against the shingles.

Purple spotlights filter across her vision — afterimages, all that light against the dark, even when she closes her eyes.

Caitlyn’s not afraid of heights, exactly, but she had chosen to lower herself to her rear before scooching toward the far end of the roof. (Behind her, Vi had raised an eyebrow, sauntered over and plopped herself down to Caitlyn’s right.) Now, as the night gets blacker, as the world seems to drop away beneath them, Caitlyn can feel the atmosphere thinning, like the oxygen is drying up in her blood. 

A pressure over her wrist. Caitlyn’s eyes open. Vi’s knuckles brush against the edge of Caitlyn’s hand, a question written on her face.

Caitlyn takes a deep breath, then slowly accepts the offered hand. Just for now, she tells herself. Just — just for this. Vi’s fingers are warm and callused. Wrapped around her own, they ground her, an anchor tying her to the earth.

She brings her attention back to the movie, and when it ends, the screen going dark, Vi’s hand is still in her own. Caitlyn squeezes it lightly, then extricates herself. Tells herself she’s imagining it, the flex of Vi’s fingers in the dark.

The five of them pass the last of the wine back and forth until Mel stretches her arms above her head and announces she’s heading to bed. Jayce and Viktor follow, Viktor turning back with his hand on the doorknob.

“I think I’ll hang out here for a bit,” Vi says. She lifts the bottle. “Someone should finish this off.”

Viktor’s eyes meet Caitlyn’s over Vi’s head. “I…” she starts.

“Clear nights must be rare for you,” Viktor interrupts. His head tips back, silver highlights against his cheekbones and in his eyes, and smiles at the sky. “For most people, this is rare. You should stay, enjoy this.” Then he waves, the door swinging closed behind him.

Silence. “Do you… want company?” Caitlyn asks, and Vi’s chin drops to her chest. It takes a few seconds for Caitlyn to realize she’s hiding a smile, that Caitlyn seems to have missed some joke.

“What?” Caitlyn asks.

“You know, it’s strange,” Vi says. Her arms rest atop her bent knees, the bottle dangling between them, and she stares into it as she speaks. “Felt like I was looking over my shoulder for you all day. I kept seeing things I wanted to tell you about.”

Crickets are tuning in the field below, whispers parting the blue grass. Vi had taught her the formula, how to find the temperature in their song, but she doesn’t use it. It wouldn’t make the world any less mysterious, would it? That this is a place where something like that can be true is enough. That it’s a place where, sometimes, things happen that are beautiful and unexpected and strange for no other reason than that they do.

Caitlyn looks up, a diver poised above a pool of stars. 

She says, “You could tell me now.”

Vi shakes her head, just slightly. Her head tips back as she takes in the view. “Bet your assignments aren’t always this glamorous.” 

“Bottom-shelf wine included?” Caitlyn asks, gesturing for the bottle.

“I was expecting Mel to break out her finest for the grainy movie screening.”

“You didn’t like it?” Caitlyn knows Vi had, in fact, liked it, or at least been invested enough that she’d nearly cut off the blood to Caitlyn’s hand when the man in black was revealed to be the long-lost farm boy, had punched the air when the swordsman got his revenge. At the very end, as Peter Falk agreed to come back and read to his grandson the next day, she’d stolen a glance to her right, wouldn’t tell a soul about what she’d seen glistening in Vi’s eyes when he said, As you wish.

Vi says evenly, “The fights were alright.”

Caitlyn smiles as she takes a long pull from the bottle. Mouth still dry, she says, “I did almost get kidnapped once.” 

Vi’s head whips in her direction. “What?”

Collusion in the pharmaceutical industry, she explains; she’d been digging into price-fixing schemes for a new anticoagulant. Lots of powerful players with lots to lose, and that early in her career, her alarm bells weren’t as honed as they should have been. “It took me six blocks to even realize I was being followed,” she sighs, still not having quite forgiven herself for the carelessness. She’d lost her tail only by ducking into a hairdresser’s, sneaking out the back in a sleek blonde wig. 

“That is pretty glamorous,” Vi says slowly when Caitlyn’s finished, though her voice is measured, a little pinched.

“Not my color, though,” Caitlyn says, and this gets Vi’s hand to relax around the neck of the bottle. “They just wanted to intimidate me.”

This doesn’t seem to reassure her. “I don’t know. People like that feel more dangerous than, you know,” Vi gestures to the sky. “What I deal with.” A devilish grin lights up her face. “Though, there was one time—”

They lob stories back and forth across the roof, more and more stars filing into the silent audience overhead. That time Vi weathered a hailstorm with a herd of wild horses, those two months Caitlyn spent on a commercial trawler, couldn’t get the smell of fish out of her hair for weeks after. What Caitlyn had said about alarm bells rings true for Vi, too, Vi telling a story about a time she relied on what some Arkansas hotshot on the radio was saying about where a storm was headed instead of trusting her gut, ended up with an EF3 barreling toward her on a pitted back road somewhere east of the city. 

“And then,” she says, an exaggerated pause, “I realized I was out of gas.” When Caitlyn laughs, Vi’s surprised into laughing, too, like it’s the first time that joke’s landed the way she wanted it to. There are stories that can be funny only when they end well — if the story is all you get for surviving, Caitlyn thinks, the sound of it echoing over the field, you might as well laugh.

They’ve ended up on their backs, Vi gesturing above their heads as she explains something about rear-flank downdrafts, the thermodynamics that dump air over air, spin it up into a vortex like the one that had pursued her down that country road.

“Anyway, all to say,” Vi finishes. “I don’t know. Being reckless never got me in half as much trouble as the times I let fear tell me what to do.”

They lapse into silence. With her spine flat against the roof, it’s easier to feel grounded, the sky like an open book with its pages spreading toward the horizon. Caitlyn can lift a finger, trace the stories there.

Vi asks, “How’s your sky?”

Caitlyn shifts away from the shingle digging into her back. “You were right,” she says. Wisps of clouds have seeped through to thread beneath the stars, a play of dust and light everywhere they look. “I should have gone looking for it sooner.”

Vi hums. They watch a blinking red light cross soundlessly overhead, satellite or plane. “Where do you think you’ll go next?” She doesn’t look at Caitlyn as she says it. 

Caitlyn considers. She’s never short on ideas. Tips received, questions scribbled in her notebook to return to later. That was a part of her work she’d always loved, the moment she started picking at something new, peeling it up at the edges like wallpaper to get to the truth beneath. 

But flipping through them in her head now, what Caitlyn feels more than anything is tired. A new story, as she’d told Vi yesterday, just meant walking onto a new set. Everything else, none of it changed, not really. It was the same motels with the same inoffensive art on the walls, the same traffic. The same people buying their way out of consequences and the same tedious lies snaking through the same frustrating, manicured statements. The same Caitlyn, there to write them all down.

A simple I don’t know would be honest enough, would get them out of this conversation without having to have it. She could throw out some options, get Vi to laugh with a rant about all the problems people with money made for themselves trying to get more of it, and Caitlyn wouldn’t need to look her in the eye when she started talking about airports, about new roads leading to new faces in new cities. 

But it would be more honest to say I don’t know how, because that's the part she can’t see. How she’ll go from all of this back to the smallness of her life, and her chest aches with the realization that even when she and Vi have gone their separate ways, when they’re alone in places far from one another, far from this moment and this rooftop, they’ll still be looking up into the same sky.

Only, Caitlyn thinks, when she closes her eyes and sees only darkness, there will be far fewer stars in the places she’s used to. She opens her eyes and they’re already darker, the clouds beginning to build. They had arrived as silently as the stars they now obscure.

Caitlyn lets her chin fall toward her shoulder. Watches the dwindling starlight filter down over the scars on Vi’s face and wills her to look in Caitlyn’s direction, to look so she can see it there without Caitlyn having to say it out loud. But Vi just levels her eyes straight on through the universe. How many times has she stared up into the sky like this, willing it to speak to her? Enough that, more than a few times, it’s probably answered.

When the silence has stretched so far Caitlyn is afraid it’ll make like the universe and stretch forever, Vi begins to speak. 

“On our way into town,” she starts, her voice softer than Caitlyn’s ever heard it, “we passed these kids shooting at aluminum cans. One of them was maybe ten years old, scrawny, you know, could hardly lift her little BB gun. But I swear she hit every single one right through the tab.”

Caitlyn nests her chin in the crook of her elbow, allows Vi’s words to fall over her. “Then the mechanic, right, he had this dog.” Vi smiles, a memory, and for a moment Caitlyn can see it, too: tail wagging, sun-warmed fur buried under her hands. “Took Jayce’s guy a little while to get everything loaded up for us, so I’m waiting in the yard and that dog just puts his head right in my lap. He had the softest ears.”

Into the quiet, Vi adds, “Pow always wanted a dog.”

Caitlyn’s eyebrows furrow, but before she can say anything Vi shakes her head, not like no but like hold on , like please , her lips folded as if her mouth is considering the shape of each of the words she’s about to say.

“And there’s this house,” Vi says at last, and there’s a tremor running through the middle of the sentence. “A little ways up the road from here. I don’t think anybody’s lived there for a decade at least. But it’s in the middle of this big field, and it’s blue — every house around here is white or yellow, did you notice? Maybe brick if the neighborhood’s getting too nice, but it’s out there all honest-to-god blue. I always thought, that's all I need. Enough room for everyone I love. Maybe a whole bunch of books, if somebody wanted them. And the porch faces west. Southwest, if you can believe it. You could spend a lot of summer afternoons watching storms roll in from that porch, is what I’m saying.” She takes a deep breath. “Dog or no dog.”

Caitlyn says, “Vi,” small enough she can’t hear it over the sound of her own heart, wonders if Vi’s is hammering the way hers is.

“Yeah, I want your company, Cait.” Vi’s squinting up at the sky. She hasn’t looked at Caitlyn the entire time she’s spoken, and Caitlyn just needs her to look. Wants to see those eyes just once, the way they’ll open under the last of the starlight.

Vi swallows, one long movement of her throat. “It’s going to rain.”

There’s a fist in Caitlyn’s chest, something taking hold and pulling. It’s what drags her hand across that line between their bodies to settle against Vi’s cheek. It’s cool to the touch. Like this morning, her eyelashes sweep down against the tips of Caitlyn’s fingers. The sensation throws a switch somewhere inside her. 

“Look at me,” Caitlyn murmurs, surprised that her voice doesn’t shake.

Vi’s head falls toward her beneath her hand, but Vi keeps her eyes closed, screwed shut like she’s afraid to open them. The lines of her face smooth beneath Caitlyn’s touch, Vi’s lips parting around a ragged exhale, and she thumbs over those, too: the divot below Vi’s nose, the pad of her thumb pausing in the generous give of her lower lip.

It’s wet, just there in the center. Feeling it, a quiet noise breaks in Caitlyn’s throat, and at the sound Vi’s eyes fly open.

Her palm lands on Caitlyn’s hip and it’s so much better than what her body had spent all day remembering, heat curving out toward her spine — but Vi doesn’t pull her closer and she doesn’t push her away, either. Just lies there, eyes wide, fingers digging into bone.

“You'll go.” Vi says it with the same certainty with which she’d named the rain.

Take it, Caitlyn thinks. The deep breath, the plunge, the knife. “I’m going with you."

The first drops of rain land in her hair, on her knuckles where she clasps the back of Vi’s head. She accepts them the way she accepts the consequences of what she’s about to do, and then she leans in to cover Vi’s mouth with her own.

Their teeth clack when Vi surges forward; they readjust, Caitlyn gasping when Vi’s lips seal against hers. The hand on Caitlyn’s hip drags her forward until they’re pressed together all along the length of their bodies, thigh to chest to Vi’s other hand, skimmed over the hinge of Caitlyn’s jaw. It opens under her touch, the wet press of Vi’s tongue to her own.

Every touch is somehow tentative and desperate — Vi half-afraid to touch her, half-afraid someone will tell her to stop. Her arms are made of the kind of strength that could break her if Vi wasn’t careful. 

She doesn’t want Vi to be careful. 

Her hand shaking, Caitlyn drags Vi’s palm beneath her shirt to the bare skin at her waist, her grip vised over Vi’s fingers. Touch me, it says. Stop holding back.

“Wait,” Vi gasps, and it takes Caitlyn a second to recognize the sound for what it is: laughter, Vi tucking wet hair out of Caitlyn’s eyes, long tracks of rain broken between her chin and her neck. “We’re gonna get soaked out here. Come on.” A hand against her hip spills Caitlyn over to the side, that same hand reaching to help her stand. Caitlyn, not sure her knees are getting signals from her brain just yet, takes it gratefully. 

They shuffle across the roof, now slick with rain. Vi closes the door behind them, and in the blue dark they listen: no sound from behind any of the doors along the hall. It’s as if the entire house is underwater, Vi pulling her in against the wall like the deck is shifting under their feet. Caitlyn could drown in this, Vi’s open mouth, the kiss slow and deep. Vi cups her neck in both hands, licks against the inside of her teeth. When Caitlyn bites down lightly she feels the sound, the hitch of breath that escapes across her tongue.

She skims her hands up through the dust of rain on Vi’s bare forearms. A mystery that it doesn’t evaporate, that there isn’t steam rising from the places that they touch. 

Their fingers are intertwined against Caitlyn’s cheek, and she smears her lips against their knuckles. Vi’s eyes track the motion, a glimmer of pale iris hanging in the dark. 

They walk through a silence made of soft footfalls and breath. Sparing a glance over her shoulder, there’s a twinge in Caitlyn's chest: Vi, arm outstretched toward the tangle of their hands, a wash of blue. An image submerged within a dream.

Inside, neither of them reach for the lamp. On the edge of the bed, Caitlyn unclasps her watch as Vi’s fingers stray to the hem of her shirt. 

There’s a moment where their eyes meet, a frisson of hesitation — Vi with her shoulders turned in looks vulnerable, as exposed as if she’d already stepped out of her clothes, and Caitlyn has the brief thought that she’s utterly fucked this. Stupid. They haven’t discussed anything, not really, not what they’re going to do after this is over, not how they’re going to have to wake up beside each other tomorrow and put their clothes and their lives back on, figure out how to be something new or go back to whatever they were before this — and was it only this morning they’d done that for the first time, the waking up, Vi’s face so much less guarded in sleep than it ever was in the daylight, those long minutes before her eyes opened as soft and breakable as porcelain — 

“We can stop,” Caitlyn murmurs, steeling herself. They’ve gone too far for Caitlyn to be able to go back, now, but they don’t have to go any further. They could end this here, pretend to laugh it off in the morning. Her hands are cupped tightly around this moment, but if Vi asked her to she would loosen her fingers, would let it go.

Vi ducks her head — that silent laugh again — and pulls her shirt off by the shoulders.

Caitlyn swallows. “Or not.” She raises her eyebrows — Can I? — Vi lifting her chin, and Caitlyn lays her palm against the flat of her stomach. It tenses beneath her touch, tenses further when Caitlyn drags her nails lightly from rib to hip, and that — that’s interesting.

Caitlyn is abruptly flat on her back against the bed, wrist pinned overhead. Vi leans in, her thighs framing Caitlyn’s, and kisses the the pale line tanned by her watch band. There's a glint in her eye. “Do you want to stop?” 

Caitlyn shakes her head with a frequency somewhere between ‘frantic’ and ‘humiliating,’ but Vi’s already halfway down her body. Caitlyn hears her knees hit the floor and props herself up on her elbows to watch as Vi runs her hands down the inside of Caitlyn’s thighs. Her jaw has gone slack, mouth parting at the heat between Caitlyn’s legs. Enough room for Caitlyn to cup the side of Vi’s face, drag her thumb across her lips, slip it inside. Vi’s eyes flutter closed, her fingers tightening in Caitlyn’s jeans as she wraps her tongue around Caitlyn and sucks. 

The sensation sparks up her arm and plummets right to the center of her, Caitlyn fighting to steady the wobble in her throat as she commands, “Take these off.” She adds, in a smaller voice, “Please.”

Vi taps below both hips, Caitlyn angling her pelvis up to help Vi slide the denim down her legs. They get tossed in the vague direction of Caitlyn’s bag, Vi’s eyes busy with the creamy expanse of Caitlyn’s skin as Caitlyn struggles out of her shirt. The prickle of the air, Vi’s eyes focused and dark, spills goosebumps over her flesh, and that’s before Vi traces the edge of Caitlyn’s briefs and the curls of dark, sweaty hair there, so lightly it’s barely touch. 

Her lip beneath her teeth, she looks down at Caitlyn and can’t hold back a curse. “Fuck, you’ve already—” she says, and her thumb slips toward the inside of her thigh. “I can see you.” It stops frustratingly close to where Caitlyn needs her. “Can I—”

“God, yes,” Caitlyn says, her head thunking back against the mattress, and then she cries out again when Vi plays the pads of her fingers over Caitlyn’s cunt. Vi leans in close, the fog of her mouth where Caitlyn’s soaked through. Caitlyn shudders.

“You sure?”

“Vi,” Caitlyn says through clenched teeth, and Vi buries a groan between Caitlyn’s thighs. Fuck , Caitlyn thinks, and thinks it again for good measure. Vi mouths at Caitlyn like they’ve got days for this instead of hours, lazy strokes with the flat of her tongue, the rhythmic press of her face, an invitation Caitlyn’s helpless not to grind down against. The bite of Vi’s chin twists the crotch of Caitlyn’s briefs up against her, Vi teasing the tip of her tongue along each hem. Caitlyn has to muffle noises against her own hand whenever Vi slips from the path, tastes her skin.

“Goddammit, Vi,” Caitlyn says finally, the words ragged, and there were going to be more of them, she’s sure of it, only Vi hooks a finger in her underwear and drags it down to her knees, holds Caitlyn open with her fingers and kisses her there wet and slow.

Caitlyn lurches into it, one of Vi’s hands flattening against her abdomen to hold her in place. Fire snaps up through Caitlyn’s belly, jolting down each of her legs. Blue fire, she thinks distantly, like downed power lines, an electricity you can smell on the air. She can smell herself, too, the mess she’s making of the sheets, of Vi’s face — when Vi lifts her head, catching her breath, the grin she rests against Caitlyn’s inner thigh glistens. 

Caitlyn pants, watches Vi discreetly pull a hair from her tongue. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Vi wipes her hand on her jeans, which Caitlyn should find unsanitary and instead finds unbearably hot. Vi will smell like her tomorrow, she thinks, as her fingers sift through the shorn hair of Vi’s scalp, enjoying the rasp of it under her palm. She’ll smell like this.

Vi’s eyes close under the touch. “I love this,” she confesses. “I could eat you all damn night.”

Caitlyn, not really one to throb, throbs. “Well, then,” she says, a punch of air escaping her as she falls back against the bed. “Don’t let me stop you.” She briefly registers that her underwear is still dangling from her ankle, kicks it impatiently to the floor. 

Vi laughs, throwing Caitlyn’s knees over her shoulders and dragging Caitlyn back toward her face by the hips.

Caitlyn quickly learns that Vi had meant every word. She took her time working Caitlyn back up, content to test and taste while Caitlyn squirmed above her, said that again or to your left, offered increasingly intelligent notes like yes or yes, there and fuck, Jesus, fuck. One of her legs ended up splayed to the side, the foot of the other flexed and digging into the ink across Vi’s spine, and at that point she hadn’t had an intelligent let alone coherent thought in the last several minutes, not since Vi had done something pointed with her tongue that sent Caitlyn’s hand careening from the sheets to her hair. Caitlyn fisted her hands in it and pulled, Vi whining so high and pretty Caitlyn felt herself seep into the mattress. 

“Fuck me,” she gasped, and Vi had groaned hearing her say it, Caitlyn’s voice all chest, now, all air, had sucked on Caitlyn’s clit as she filled Caitlyn with two broad fingers.

Now, Vi rocks her wrist back and forth, pulses with enough force to knock the bed against the nightstand. Caitlyn bites down on her own wrist, the breath choked from her throat every time the pads of Vi’s fingers coax over the root of her. It’s surreal, that Caitlyn had watched those calluses slide over the steering wheel, had sat there trying not to envy any glass lucky enough to end up in Vi’s grip, wondering how it would feel to be sipped at, savored, to be the rim curving under the tip of that finger. 

Careful what you wish for, one of a hundred things she can’t unknow, now: how she tastes, the way her arm feels with Caitlyn digging parentheses into the back of it. How good she looks with Caitlyn smeared all over her face. 

Caitlyn’s barely finished the thought when Vi lifts her head. “Give it to me, Cait,” she pants, the words wrecked, mouthed against her as Vi’s forearm tightens, the stark lines of her veins in the dark, blood high in her cheeks. It’s pounding through Caitlyn, a blotchy flush on her chest spreading down her arms as Vi fucks her harder, Caitlyn beginning to shake in the back of her thighs, in her stomach, purple spots when she closes her eyes, and when they open—

Vi’s gaze is naked, stripped bare, a shock on her face like she’d turned around to find the storm upon her. An awe, like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. In her eyes Caitlyn can trace the light all the way back to where it burns. 

She comes blindly, one hand covering her mouth, the other falling over Vi’s hair, her face and her lips. That mouth moving, slick with words Caitlyn doesn’t hear. 

Everything rings, after, her body a bell the sound is still faintly passing through. Sound and color — when she opens her eyes, the room is stitched through with the kind of depthless blue that all middle of the nights are made of. Vi’s silhouette is draped over her thigh, elbow propped on the bed beneath her chin. A low glimmer Caitlyn can recognize as her eyes only because it disappears when she blinks.

Caitlyn shivers, cold or aftershock. “Thank you,” she says quietly, and the shape of Vi unfolds from the floor. Her shadow slips off her jeans before stretching itself into the gap between Caitlyn and the pillows.

Vi’s voice is rough when she speaks. “That was alright?” she asks, and there’s a bruise under the words, where they land in Caitlyn’s heart. Quietly, before she can lose her nerve, she shifts close enough to lay her cheek against Vi’s chest, her palm light against the heat of her shoulder blade. The embrace is loose enough that Vi could ease away, if she needed to. Instead, Vi’s arms circle over her back, hold her careful and tight. The way you would something rare or fragile.

Caitlyn nods into her skin. It’s warm and smells pleasantly damp, a trace of sweat beneath the clean edge of the rain. And soft — she didn’t know, her hand marveling down along Vi’s spine, that someone could feel so strong and so soft all at once.

All at once. That’s the way this has hit her, the way they’ve found themselves inside these days and now, this night. The way this thing between them feels as permanent a fixture as a chandelier, as carpets or windows in a house. 

A blue house, Vi had said. A blue house in the middle of a field.

Caitlyn’s lips brush against Vi’s shoulder. Vi would know better than most, Caitlyn knows, rolling Vi gently onto her back, that so little is permanent. 

A kiss under Vi’s jaw, to the inside of her wrist, when Vi reaches for her. Caitlyn’s hair paints its way down Vi’s chest as she feathers her mouth across her stomach, peels Vi’s other arm above her head to kiss from the inner elbow to the pit. Air shakes in and out of Vi’s throat as Caitlyn presses her mouth to the tattoo there, Caitlyn laying two fingers against her pulse to tip Vi’s face toward her own. Their noses brush. Vi’s eyes flick from her lips to her eyes. An uncertainty there, behind the desire. A need.

Any nervousness she’d felt, Caitlyn locks behind a door, seeing that look. She pushes herself back until she’s seated, straddling Vi’s hips, and pushes the straps of her bra down her shoulders. Vi drinks her in hungrily as Caitlyn undoes the clasp, her breasts falling into her hands.

Caitlyn splays her fingers in the space between Vi’s right ear and her shoulder. Their chests brush as she leans in, her other hand landing at the crease of Vi’s thigh. “Show me,” she murmurs, this thing she’s been asking of Vi since the start. “Show me how to touch you.”

For a moment, Caitlyn’s afraid she’s said the wrong thing. Vi looks up at her, stiff, her eyes wide, a strange shine in the dark — but then her fingers drift to the hand on her abdomen. Vi pulls her to the slit of her shorts. “Here,” she says, and that’s where Caitlyn starts, slipping her hand through and cupping it against soft heat.

Vi’s grin is crooked. “I like it a little softer than you do,” she says, and when Caitlyn laughs, there’s a small flex beneath her fingers. Dutifully, Caitlyn keeps her touch light, the barest of sensations. Her folds part like silk under Caitlyn’s fingertips, makes her wet all over again just feeling it. Vi sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes half-closed, and the ember in Caitlyn’s stomach sputters back to life. Without really meaning to, she grinds down, searching for contact, and oh —

Vi’s eyes snap open. “Oh, fuck,” she says, exposing the pale line of her throat. Her hands clutch at Caitlyn’s thighs. “I can feel you, baby, you’re dripping on me.”

Baby. The words are quick, breathless. They make the tips of her ears go hot. Vi wouldn’t have even noticed that one slinking out with the rest, but Caitlyn likes it anyway, how it sits in Vi’s mouth, soft, the way the consonants break against the plush of her lower lip. Caitlyn bends to taste it before pushing off from the hand she'd planted against the bed. She uses it to drag one of Vi’s hands up to the base of her throat instead.

An interested gleam in Vi’s eyes, one eyebrow pulling up. Caitlyn huffs as Vi’s fingers pet loosely down her chest. “You don’t need to be so polite,” Caitlyn says. The effect is lessened somewhat by a sharp intake of breath as Vi drags her thumb across a nipple.

Vi grins like the devil. “And you don’t need to be so bossy.” She cups Caitlyn in both of her hands, Caitlyn groaning despite herself, pushing out into the touch. Vi’s nostrils flare as Caitlyn picks up where she left off. There’s a gratifying dampness under her touch. 

“I think you like bossy,” she pants. 

Vi’s eyebrows are knit down over her eyes, screwed tightly shut in the middle of her face. If she’s digging around for a comeback, she comes up empty. “Yeah,” she admits, a sigh like she’s forgotten what exactly it is she’s admitting to, “Yeah, I do.”

“This is still good?”

The flicker of a smile over those lips. “Still good. I want to feel you again.”

Caitlyn parts her legs, allows Vi’s fingers to curl between them. It’s surprisingly intimate, the heat building thickly between their bodies as they touch each other without urgency, almost soundless, like they’ve left all of that behind in some other dimension. Their faces are so close that when Vi exhales Caitlyn can feel it on her chin. Vi throws a steadying hand against her flank when Caitlyn’s hips stutter over the ridges of Vi’s knuckles and it stays there, solid and warm, even when Caitlyn rubs a breathy sigh from Vi’s throat, sends her head tilting back against the bed. Lifting it again, Vi watches their hands disappear between their bodies.

“Look at me,” Caitlyn breathes, and Vi does, her eyes wide and glassy. Caitlyn’s breath catches. Vi’s looking at her like she’s water on the moon, the last road out of town. Vi looks at her the way someone from another time would look at you, another universe, if they’d traveled a very long way just to find you. And Vi looks at her like Vi, miraculous, splintered, choked noises in her throat as she clutches bruises into Caitlyn’s thigh, her back. Caitlyn feels her own face twist, loves the ache, a hurt just this side of pain. She’ll wear Vi, too, all over her skin. 

Caitlyn falls forward onto an elbow, the line of eye contact that tethers them unbroken. Vi’s body is one long tension under hers, her hips rolling up into Caitlyn’s hand. “Easy,” Caitlyn says. “That’s it,” and Vi’s mouth hangs open at the words, enough to make Caitlyn want to do it again. To tell her how gorgeous she is like this, how good, how well she fucked Caitlyn and how well she’s going to come for her now — but she must see it, there in Caitlyn’s gaze, because the hand on her side moves up to Caitlyn’s jaw, a messy grip, strands of Caitlyn’s hair caught between her fingers, shaking out of her vision where Vi’s breath puffs against her cheek. A wildness in the eyes pleading up at her, a welling.

Oh. Caitlyn’s heart swells with the trust of it, with tenderness, Vi putting all of herself in Caitlyn’s hands. With the urge to wrap her up tight and hold the world behind. It could be just like this, she thinks, and her thumb shakes as it swipes through the wet beneath Vi’s eye. It could be just like this.

There’s hardly room between their lips for words. Caitlyn says only, “So good for me, Vi.”

Vi jerks, a broken sound punched from her lungs, and then she’s quaking apart under Caitlyn’s hands, a dissolve so slow that Caitlyn can only take Vi between her arms and hope it’s enough to hold her together.

Awareness returns to Caitlyn slowly. Quiet taps against the windowpane, streaks on the glass, when Caitlyn glances over her shoulder. The rain is heavy on the ground below. It had rolled in so fast. 

Caitlyn’s eyes dart to Vi’s face and away. Her eyes are still closed, her chest still slowing. This is the hardest part, in Caitlyn’s experience. But this doesn’t feel hard. Steeling herself, she allows her gaze to land on Vi’s face. To linger there, this time, to reach out a finger and follow the curve of Vi’s skull across her temple, around her eyes and toward her lips.

Vi reaches up to capture her wrist. Caitlyn’s breath catches. The eyes on her are alert — not guarded, not anymore, Caitlyn decides. But watchful, as if she’s waiting to see what Caitlyn will do next.

“Are you alright?” Caitlyn asks, and the corner of Vi’s mouth lifts. She snags her shirt from the edge of the bed and holds it out to Caitlyn, a question in the gesture, sweet and shy. Caitlyn’s fingers close in the fabric, which is thin but soft, still faintly warm, and when she slips it over her head she sniffs subtly at the collar. It still smells like Vi, too.

They brush their teeth side by side, Caitlyn knocking a hip into Vi when she accidentally rams a vigorous elbow into her shoulder. Vi grins, a mouthful of foam.

Caitlyn spits into the sink, turns to leave. “Don’t forget to wash your face,” she says, just to hear Vi choke on her toothpaste. 

In the dark, Caitlyn feels her way back to the bed. Feels the mattress displace beneath her when Vi slips under the duvet. Feels her way, carefully, to Vi’s jaw again, feels the smile in the creases of her eyes and in the lines beside her mouth before she ever finds it on her lips. 

“Still with me?” Vi murmurs, gentle movement under the tips of Caitlyn’s fingers. 

Caitlyn hums sleepily. “I'm here,” she says. In the silence, a rustle of sheets, Vi throwing her arm over Caitlyn’s waist and pulling her closer. Sleep comes for them slowly as the stars and softer than the rain.

Chapter Text

“Cait.”

The dream, turned to vapor before she can grasp it: clouds moving in. A single light in the house, alone in a field. 

A hand on her shoulder. Caitlyn snaps awake, instantly alert. A weak yellow glow falls over Vi, seated at the edge of the bed. Her jaw is set, eyes hard, and Caitlyn follows them to the door. Jayce, standing in a bathrobe cinched at the waist, a lantern hanging from his hand.

The realization is immediate. “Is it close?” she asks, meaning how much time do we have, but Jayce shakes his head.

“Not to us,” he says, and his eyes don’t leave Vi.

They dress in silence, in the dim halo of the lantern — Vi tries the light switch to no avail. By unspoken agreement, they pack their bags, Caitlyn zipping her notebook in with her clothes and stuffing her recorder in the pocket of her jacket. Her hands, she notices oddly, don’t shake.

Despite the tension on her face, Vi smirks as Caitlyn sinks her gun into its holster. Caitlyn stops. “What?”

Vi shrugs, a confused moment where she hesitates before realizing she doesn’t have to. “You’re hot,” she says simply, and winks as she swings her duffel over her shoulder.

Downstairs, the kitchen table has been overtaken by a radio set, Viktor at the knobs. Mel gives them a tight nod from above his shoulder. She finishes lighting a series of candles and shakes out the match as they approach. “We’re doing coffee the old-fashioned way, if you need it,” she says, indicating the kettle on the stove.

Vi shakes her head, her attention on Viktor, listening to something very closely on his headset. “Where is it now?”

Viktor listens a moment longer, then pulls the headphones down around his neck with a sigh. “They lost it, or it dissipated,” he says, and ruffles a hand through his hair. “They’re not sure.”

Jayce hands Caitlyn a mug. “Who’s ‘they?’” she asks, cupping her fingers gingerly around the warmth.

“Spotters,” Vi explains, “people like me,” but Mel and Viktor exchange a glance.

“SIL Co. has people on the ground,” Mel says quietly, and Vi’s face hardens. She pulls a chair up beside Viktor, and he unplugs the headphones. Static fills the room, Viktor adjusting the transceiver until it resolves into a crackling voice.

“No funnel,” it sputters, a man’s voice, distant and growing more so, like someone walking into the next room. “No hail, either, so… this storm’s done.”

Vi’s eyebrows skyrocket. “Is that all he’s basing that on?” she asks. 

Jayce and Viktor shrug in unison. “Earlier he said that he was parked under an overpass,” Jayce says, “for his safety, so, you know. I wouldn’t exactly be surprised.”

Vi scoffs, appalled. “This guy’s an idiot,” she says, seizing the dials from Viktor and twisting. “How do I tell him he’s an idiot?”

Viktor attempts to gently tilt the set back in his direction. “I think he’s headed out of range.”

Vi throws up a warning hand and a glare. “You get other channels on this thing?”

Caitlyn sets her mug, untouched, on the counter and crosses to the windows. The wind keens, long and low, beneath the steady percussion of rain. No one ever really answered Vi’s question. “Where was it spotted?”

A hesitation behind her, so pronounced that she turns around. Vi is focused resolutely on the radio, which continues to fill the room with static, but Caitlyn doesn’t miss the nervous bob of her knee below the table. The half-moon of her eye when it lifts, finally, to Caitlyn.

It hits her, then, her heart turning to water. Vi with a tornado headed straight for her had been giddy, a sharp grin above quick eyes. There’s one direction a tornado could be headed that would put that look on Vi’s face.

“It’s north of them,” Vi says quickly. She shakes the thought loose, refocuses on Jayce. “That’s what you said.”

“Yes,” he insists. “Significantly. These things usually head northeast, die out after a few miles.” He says it to Caitlyn and for her benefit, but he rubs the back of his neck, a gesture Caitlyn knew well, once. Seeing it makes her think it’s a little bit for the rest of them, too, that he’s saying it the way other people might bow their head, close their eyes.

“Can’t we call them?” Caitlyn asks, already moving toward the phone in the kitchen. “We should be calling everybody, fire departments, police, how many towns are—” She stops dead in her tracks.

“Cordless,” Jayce confirms. The hand moves from his neck to his face, pinching his eyebrows. “We switched over last year.”

Caitlyn lifts it to her ear anyway, just to see, but there’s nothing. No dial tone, no sound when she depresses numbers at random. Shit. 

The message in Vi’s posture as she glowers at Jayce is clear. You should know better. But all she says is, “Cait’s right. We need to warn people, we can’t just sit here.”

“There are other spotters,” he tries to reason. “They’ll make calls.”

“Like who, SIL Co.’s guy?” Vi laughs and it isn’t a laugh.

“I know you’re worried, but there’s no way you’d make it in time,” Jayce cautions. “You’d be putting yourself and other people at risk.”

Vi looks at the floor, and when her face lifts again it’s fierce and stripped all at once. “I’ll go alone.”

“No, you won’t,” Caitlyn objects.

“I can intercept it.” Vi is continuing like she hasn’t heard her. “I can get us data, and I can—”

Jayce interrupts. “You can’t seriously be thinking about data right now.”

“It has to mean something.” Vi says it forcefully, a hammer driving the words into the ground. As if belief would be enough to make them true. “It has to.”

Jayce has the sense to look the smallest bit abashed, but he continues to protest. “You’d be driving into the path.”

Vi stands. “That’s my job. I don’t even know why I’m listening to you, it’s my fucking choice, my fucking—”

Jayce throws his hands up in frustration. “It’s the middle of the night. We don’t even know where this thing actually is, let alone—”

Mel meets Caitlyn’s eyes as they argue, then drops them. She stands from the table and exits the room without a word.

Jayce and Vi don’t seem to notice, their voices rising. It’s only when a new voice comes in, faint over the radio, that they stop, the strings cut from every sound. “— can see the rotation in it, the wall cloud is — two miles at least— ” 

They exchange a glance at this, and Caitlyn thinks it again, moving from one expression to the other: shit. She doesn’t need to understand the specifics to know it isn’t good. The three of them lean in over the table. Viktor’s face is hollowed out by shadow, flickering with the candlelight as he brings the microphone to his lips and announces his call sign.

“Can you tell us your location?” he asks. More static. No response. Vi cushions her chin on her hand as Viktor repeats the question.

Then, a thread of a voice: “Twenty-five north of Zaun — sh — oh, I think that’s contact, we’ve got contact — holy — doubling back, she’s going south, she’s— ”

Vi whirls from the room with so much force her chair clatters to the floor behind her.

“What are you seeing?” The sound of Viktor biting down the microphone follows Caitlyn into the foyer, the door swung open on its hinges, Vi a distant figure through the rain. No tornado is coming for them here, but Caitlyn still has to fight the wind all the way to the truck, arm over her eyes. She almost collides with Vi, who stops dead just before they reach the hood.

 “You should stay,” Vi says, yelling it over the rain. Her hair has flattened against her face, long pink streaks plastered across her forehead and neck. 

"What?” Caitlyn asks, uncomprehending.

“I don’t know,” Vi says, gesturing aimlessly out at nothing. “What we’re gonna run into out there. What we’re gonna find.”

“It might not hit them.”

“It might,” Vi snaps. She looks immediately taken aback, and confronted by her own words she could be sixteen again, sixteen and realizing one decision could alter your life forever. The Vi before this world had swallowed her, spit her out — it’s her standing there next, ten years old with her sister in the other room. The sky darkening overhead, the lights going out.

A drop of water slips beneath Caitlyn’s collar and trails down the length of her spine. “You shouldn’t be alone,” she says. A light catches her eye overhead, through the window. They’d forgotten it upstairs, the lantern Jayce had left for them to dress by.

They’re miles away from that bed now. Caitlyn wishes — there are a hundred things she wishes.

A sensation over the back of her hand, and Caitlyn looks down to see Vi running a knuckle across it. Vi’s throat works, but no words make it through. There’s a pain on her face that’s run in the same tracks for years and years, and last night, for a moment, Caitlyn had smoothed those lines clean. She’d give anything to be able to do that again now, to not have to watch the sadness around Vi’s mouth deepen.

A sudden, bright light to their left makes both of them flinch, hands thrown up against the glare.

Headlights, a wood-paneled SUV swerving to a stop in front of them, steaming as the ignition cuts. The door opens and Mel jumps out, pushing a raincoat up to her elbows. “Help me load this,” she orders, and only crunching to the other side of the drive does Caitlyn see the trailer hitched to the back, rain breaking against the tarp over the Hexvane.

Vi looks stunned for an entire half-second before she races to help Mel with the ties. Caitlyn jogs to the bed of Vander’s truck and throws the tailgate open. Collected rainwater spills out over the toes of her boots. 

The three of them get the Hexvane loaded and secured. Mel’s hair is tied back under her hood, but the knees of her trousers are soaked.

“Be careful,” Mel says, as Vi helps her down from the truck. “This is a loan. We’re still under contract.”

Vi ducks her head. A flash of something silver, tossed from Vi’s pocket to Mel’s fist. Mel holds them up to the light. It’s a set of keys. 

Caitlyn thinks of Jayce, digging through the bedside drawer. She looks to Vi, who shrugs. “Jayce should keep a better eye on those.”

Mel’s eyebrow arches. She opens her mouth to say something when there’s a bang so loud it turns all three of their heads: Jayce, the porch door swinging shut behind him, still shouldering into his coat as he sprints across the yard.

“SIL Co.’s guy came back on,” he pants. “He keeps insisting it’ll swing back north, but we’ve got eyewitnesses on two other channels now saying the opposite.”

Vi curses. “They’re going to get people killed.” She jumps into the driver’s seat, Caitlyn throwing open the passenger door and yanking the seatbelt down over her hips. In the back, Mel is digging under the tarp, checking the ties one last time, Caitlyn guesses. Through the open window, Jayce is relaying what little information they’ve gathered, wind speeds and ground, even as Vi starts the truck and throws it into gear.

“Something else you should know,” he says, grabbing the steering wheel so Vi’s forced to look at him. “Our instruments are pulling some crazy readings over what feels like half the state, pressure changes like you wouldn’t believe.” His eyes fix on Mel, coming up beside him, then Vi. “We might be headed into outbreak territory.”

Caitlyn plants a hand on the dashboard, leaning in so he can hear her. “Keep scanning channels,” she says. “Tell anyone you can get in touch with to get to shelter and spread the word if they can.” She can feel Vi’s gaze on the side of her face.

Jayce nods. “We will. Be careful,” he says to them both, and then, intently, to Vi: “Keep her safe.”

Caitlyn’s eyebrows furrow, but in front of her, Vi’s profile softens. Their eyes meet, briefly, and then Vi looks back at Jayce. Her chin dips, once. 

Jayce claps the inside of the door, stepping away as Vi peels down the drive.

Caitlyn spares a glance through the back window. They’d left in such a rush, there hadn’t been any time to say goodbye. To say thank you. The rain comes down so hard that the figures of Mel and Jayce under the cover of the porch are just streaks of dark paint. Caitlyn lays her palm against the glass and can only hope that they see it. She keeps it there until the sound beneath the tires smooths, Vi accelerating where gravel gives way to asphalt, and then she pulls the map from the pocket of the driver’s seat and spreads it over the dashboard.

She digs a pen out of her notebook as Vi glances over, watches her draw circles over Zaun and Academy Lane. Twenty miles north, they’d said — Caitlyn’s eyes study the different highways and backroads available to them. “How fast did the spotters say it was moving?” Caitlyn asks.

“Fast,” Vi says grimly. “Maybe thirty miles an hour, if they had to guess.”

“You need to get in front of it, before it hits Zaun?” Caitlyn confirms, and Vi nods. “If you don’t fall below eighty we might be able to get in with enough time to set up the device, get out, and get to town. Might,” she stresses.

“Ninety it is,” Vi says, the engine throttling under her foot.

“You should take the highway as long as you can,” Caitlyn continues. “I can tell you when I think you should exit, but by then you’ll probably be able to see it if it’s as big as they say.”

Vi cuts her head to the side. “Nope. Can’t see shit at night, especially when we’ve got rain like this. We’re going to have to hope for some lightning to help us out, otherwise,” she shrugs. “Your guess will be as good as mine. Chasing at night’s one of those stupid things you only do when you’re new to the game. Unless you work for SIL Co.” Her lip curls. “I don’t get why they bother putting people like that out here.”

“Credibility. People will look the other way if you can point to superficial evidence that you give a shit.” Caitlyn tries to keep her face neutral, but in between everything else, the excitement and the fear and the adrenaline, her anger sits in her stomach like a heavy black stone. “‘Here’s our scientist, and did we mention he’s an unqualified con artist?’ You should take this next exit.”

“They don’t care about anything except lining their own pockets,” Vi mutters. “How can people not know that?” She pauses. “You keep saying ‘you.’”

“Hm?” Caitlyn’s still poring over the map.

“‘You should go this fast, you should make this turn,’” Vi says. She urges the car faster as they hit highway, their headlights lost immediately against a wall of rain. “You’re in it now, too.”

They smile tightly at one another. Vi returns her eyes to the windshield. “You still doing okay?”

She says the words with an ease laid over them like the false bottom of a drawer, a trapdoor cut in the middle of a wooden floor: if Caitlyn knocked on it, the whole thing would fall away from her hand. She knows, instantly, what Vi means. Her eyes still trained carefully on the map, she asks anyway. “With the sex?”

An uncomfortable shift in the seat next to her. “Yeah, with the sex.”

Carefully, Caitlyn folds the map. “I think it was well-worth the knock to my journalistic integrity.” She smiles, to let Vi know she’s joking, and a mirroring one pulls across her face. 

“Well,” says Vi. “You’ll have to let me know if it can withstand a few more.” 

Warmth moves into Caitlyn’s cheeks, and she feels the tangle in her shoulders, knotted there from the moment she woke up, unwind the smallest bit. She fishes the recorder out of her pocket and camps it in the ashtray. “Is there anything in particular we should keep an eye out for?”

Vi grimaces. “This thing’s going to be so rain-wrapped I don’t think we’ll see it until it’s on top of us.” 

“Rain-wrapped, meaning…?”

“Pretty much what it sounds like. The storm pulls rain up around the base of the funnel, kind of like a curtain, so you can’t actually see it,” Vi explains.

“Any signs I can pay attention to?”

Vi thinks. “Storm like this, you’ll probably see straight cloud out to the horizon, but if you see something that looks like a little outcrop underneath it — kind of like a plateau, but hanging from the bottom of the storm — let me know. That’s a wall cloud, it’s where all your humid air is condensing, means it might drop a tornado. Any big changes in the wind or the rain that you notice, direction or intensity, those are good to mention. And obviously if you see a funnel, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. We’re doing this a little on guesses and a lot on prayers.”

They drive in silence, Vi focused on the road, Caitlyn keeping an eye out through the passenger window. It’s difficult to see through the sheets of rain overwhelming the wipers, and dawn is still an hour off. Headlights in the opposite direction and the occasional flicker of lightning illuminate a thick, low shelf of clouds blanketing the sky. Stare at it too long and you could be driving into nothing, Caitlyn thinks, a long road out toward the edge of the world. 

“I’m sorry.” Vi says it suddenly, bringing an end to nearly ten minutes of quiet. She’s got her bottom lip worried between her teeth, and her stare is miles up the road. “This morning, I thought we’d get to do that differently.”

Hearing that longing reciprocated, Caitlyn musters a smile. “Me too.”

Vi’s eyes stray briefly to hers. “I would’ve brought you coffee. Let you wake up slow.” She squares her shoulders. “I would’ve done things right.”

Caitlyn tamps down a sudden thickness in her throat. “We don’t need to think about that now.” She offers it because it’s true. Somewhere out there danger is bearing down upon the people Vi loves, asleep and unaware in their beds. What Vi had told her, just days ago in Vander’s bright kitchen, keeps tugging at the shirtsleeves of Caitlyn’s attention: they’d sleep through the end of the world. 

It’s such a small thing, in the face of that, to want one more morning with anybody. And she says it, too, because she’s sitting there sick with wanting it anyway. 

Though maybe she isn't alone in that, Vi risking a hand from the steering wheel to lift Caitlyn’s knuckles to her lips. “I would’ve.” 

Vi promises the words into her skin. Caitlyn shivers at the sensation, and at that moment a flash lights up the sky to the south. 

Caitlyn cranes her neck as far back as she can see through the rear window. Behind the Hexvane, tailing them in Vi’s blindspot, is a curtain of rain so massive Caitlyn would have missed it if not for the lightning. But in each brief moment of illumination, she can see it, exactly what Vi described: underneath the clouds roiling up into the atmosphere is a deeper darkness, jutting low above the ground. The grass against the side of the highway, in the second that Caitlyn can see it, flattens.

“There,” Caitlyn says, and Vi’s eyes flick to the rearview. Her foot punches to the floor, the car leaping forward. Vi passes an eighteen-wheeler in front of them, her shoulders taut as she navigates the pickup against the wind. Caitlyn braces herself with a hand on the shoulder of the driver’s seat, searching behind them, afraid to lose track of it. Another lightning flash. The storm pursues them at an ominous distance. Caitlyn curses under her breath. “They were right.”

“Right how?” Vi demands.

“It’s fast.” Caitlyn unfolds the map, searches the rectangle divided by the highway vanishing under their tires. A small dot labeled Zaun is a painfully short diagonal away. “You’d say we’re what, fifteen miles from Zaun?”

“Give or take.”

Caitlyn scans the map, calculating. It can’t be doing anything less than forty miles an hour. Outside, farmland surrounds them in every direction. Small service roads and driveways on the map fork promisingly off from the highway just to disappear inside flat green squares. They’d have to go into town to cut back anywhere close to where the tornado is headed — unless, Caitlyn thinks, her gaze tracing a series of small hashes cutting toward Zaun. Unless. “The railroad, half a mile up.”

Vi’s fingers drum on the clutch as she considers. “Think you can handle a little off-roading?”

Caitlyn’s already reaching up to tighten her seatbelt. 

Vi grins. “Hang tight.” The car slows just enough as they approach the crossing for Vi to swing onto the dirt shoulder without rolling. Caitlyn grits her teeth as all four tires slam against the ground, her recorder clattering to the floor. Their shoulders jostle as the axles squeal beneath them, and then they’re off again, Vi picking up speed over the bumps and ruts in the mud alongside the tracks. The rain has died enough here for Caitlyn to just make out the gray shape of the open gate as they blaze past, the crossing sign disappearing in the night above their heads.

The storm has gained on them, when Caitlyn looks out her window, now. The black wall hanging above the grass has advanced so silently and so close it rears up like a wave, consuming the sky. 

“How long should I follow this?” Vi pants. Her knuckles are white on the wheel.

Caitlyn’s eyes tear themselves away from the cloud to zero in on the map. “Two minutes.”

The grass is a wild blur as they follow the train tracks unfurling like a ribbon over the ground, seconds swept from the face of her watch. Counting them slows her breath, her heart reaching for the rhythm. One minute. In the distance, as the railroad curves back south, another wall: tall stalks of grass, close and getting closer.

Vi twists to glance out Caitlyn’s window. “Vander’s going to kill me for this,” she says mildly, and then, “Brace yourself.”

Caitlyn exhales, closes her eyes. Two.

They plow into the grass. Caitlyn jerks against her seatbelt, Vi’s arm flung out in front of her chest as the recoil knocks them back into their seats. The grass is so tall it’s hard to see, Vi accelerating blindly forwards as wet stalks tear against their mirrors and smear over the windshield. Vi fights to keep the storm hanging above Caitlyn’s right shoulder, the truck cutting a parallel line through the field. 

When Caitlyn says, “Here,” Vi pumps the brakes and makes a hard left. The pickup arcs to a stop, hasn’t finished rolling before Vi’s shoes hit the ground. Caitlyn stumbles after her, stops. 

They’re on the crest of a hill so low and gradual Caitlyn hadn’t even realized they’d climbed it. Grass fans out to the horizon in every direction, trampled underfoot by the storm. A black figure at their doorstep, raising its hand to knock.

“Cait,” Vi yells, and Caitlyn races to the bed. They throw the tarp back and get the device onto the ground, and this time when Vi depresses the latch, it opens, the Hexvane soaring up into the rain. Caitlyn shields her eyes, drops spearing down from a heavy sky. 

No wind, she notices. A silence so complete and eerie it makes all the hair on her arms stand on end. Vi’s palms open at her sides as she turns and faces the storm.

And then, Caitlyn hears it: a train whistle, just at the edge of her hearing, and her bones know before her mind does that no train on Earth has a whistle quite like that.

She grabs Vi by the shoulder, hauling her toward the cab. They race back the way they came, the sound building behind them, and it’s not until they’re at the railroad crossing that Vi slows and parks them against the shoulder. “Hang on,” Vi says, and when she exits the car, there’s a shift in her that Caitlyn can see, an axis, her body orienting itself first to Zaun, and then to the storm. “Hang on.”

Following Vi’s lead, Caitlyn opens her door and stands, the both of them watching the storm bear down upon the hill. If she squints, she can just make out the silver glint of the device.

Caitlyn closes her eyes. Please let this work.

A tickle of hair against her cheek. The wind, gentle as a hand. 

Only, it wasn’t coming from that direction before.

Caitlyn’s eyes open to Vi, who spins with a frown. Her brow is one sharp, dark line as her eyes sweep over the sky behind them, traveling through Caitlyn as they return to the storm.

Disbelief, an odd light on her face. “It’s dying,” Vi says.

She trips forward, their hands reaching and finding each other in front of the hood. They huddle together against the cold as the words, as if they’d been a spell or a prayer, come true. The impenetrable middle of the storm seems to lighten the longer she looks, like color leeching from a painting, blood leaving a limb, until all that’s left is a flat and harmless gray. Around them, the sky lifts, shakes the dark from its shoulders. It’s morning, Caitlyn realizes, has been for some time. A dawn neither of them had noticed arriving.

Rain continues to fall around the untouched Hexvane in the distance, like a sword raised against the dark.

—

A drop, rain or sweat, traveling down her forehead as Caitlyn secures the last knot. She wipes it with the back of her hand and gives the side of the truck a pat. Vi starts the engine as Caitlyn climbs back into her seat, and they begin the last miles to Zaun.

Watching the tornado unravel, Vi had locked her arms around Caitlyn’s thighs and spun them in a circle, laughter so loud it echoed back from every horizon. Caitlyn’s relief had trembled through her hands where they’d found Vi’s shoulders, her face. As Caitlyn’s boots hit the ground, a look in Vi’s eye, the same shade as the morning. 

“Could be the precip,” Vi is saying now, her shoulders rolling through a shrug. “Could be the wind. A lot of the time, these things choke themselves out — you need a downdraft of cold air to get going, but eventually it’ll cut off that fuel supply of warm air,” she explains. “I just wish we got something from it before it did.”

Her arm propped on the doorframe, Caitlyn rubs a hand across her mouth. “I should’ve looked for an earlier turn.”

“No,” Vi says quickly. “Neither of us knew that’s how it’d play out, and the tracks were the right move. We could’ve ended up in some real trouble if the truck had needed to mow more of that field than it did. Your instinct was good. We’ll get it next time.”

Despite herself, Caitlyn feels her mouth tug upwards. “Next time.” 

Vi’s cheeks go red. “You know, just. If you’re planning to stick around for a while. If you need to do more research, I mean — oh, fuck you,” she says, as Caitlyn begins to laugh, though she says it without bite, a grin stealing wide over her mouth. 

“I still need to talk to your sister and Ekko. Vander, too,” Caitlyn says. She reaches for the recorder between her feet, slipping it back into her pocket. “That’s a few more days, at least.”

And after — the question hangs in the air between them, its own strange cloud. Both of them hesitate to look directly at it in case it disappears, know that it could make like the storm: consume itself from the ground up, vanish.

Vi slows, approaching the exit. What she wouldn’t give, Caitlyn thinks, staring out at the curve of the road, to keep going down this highway instead, leave the world behind. Find somewhere they could lock themselves in a room for a week, some field open enough to breathe in. Give them space to figure it out. What Vi had said: I would’ve done things right.

Vi swerves, Caitlyn jolting out of her head in time to see them narrowly glide past the tree fallen across the middle of the road. Vi’s eyebrows slant down over her face as she looks over her shoulder, meets Caitlyn’s eyes. 

They manage to haul the tree to the edge of the lane. It’s splintered in pieces, the stump it once belonged to sitting crookedly in the ground. Vi touches the deep wounds along the sides of the tree, its tender insides exposed, like bone jutting from the skin. 

“This is wind damage,” Vi says, puzzled. “High winds.”

A cold fist clamps around Caitlyn’s spine. The tornado hadn’t come this way, and she fights the stupid urge to say so out loud as they tramp back to the truck. “It could’ve been like that already?” she offers instead. “Weakened, I mean, and just. Given a final push?”

“Maybe,” Vi says, not sounding convinced, and Caitlyn knows she’s trying to remember what that tree looked like when they drove past it two days ago because Caitlyn’s trying, too.

Long brushstrokes of green and yellow outside her window, now, Vi picking up speed through the fields and farmland that divide Zaun’s outskirts. Houses, if they’re there at all, are buried in thickets of grass far behind their property lines. 

It means that, at first, Caitlyn doesn’t notice. It’s only when they approach the gas station at the very edge of town that her hand lifts unconsciously to her mouth.

A pile of cement and twisted metal is all that is left of the Stop N’ Shop. The wooden sign has been completely stripped. Faint outlines on the white background where words used to be, their smudged shapes like ghosts, white as invisible ink. 

Caitlyn had parked here in her rental on the way to the motel, bought a stick of deodorant from a teenager with a spiky bob and black lipstick. Caitlyn remembers her smile, small and shy, as she handed back Caitlyn’s change. 

A red letter S leans against one of the pumps, tilting back and forth in the breeze. 

Behind the station, as they step from the car, in every lot as far back as Caitlyn’s eyes can see: 

Zaun, in ruins. 

Mounds of white lumber rise against the hard gray sky and spill into the street, pink insulation and dead branches catching on the air. Houses, her brain insists, shouting the words from very far away. These were houses. 

Asphalt snakes through the debris, all that betrays this as the long, flat road pointing straight to Vander’s. 

Caitlyn can feel it, her own head shaking on her neck, like someone is moving it for her. “It didn’t come this way,” she says, and it’s like someone else’s words in her mouth. Her tongue feels heavy, her hands. She has to steady herself against the side of the car.

Vi . Caitlyn looks wildly to where she stands, rigid, only the faint movement of her shoulders lifting with each breath. In again, and out. She lurches forward, two uncertain steps, and then she takes off at a dead run, shouting Ekko’s name, Vander’s. Her sister’s. 

Vi’s faster than she is, vaulting over fallen tree trunks and disappearing behind a tower of bricks that was once a chimney. Caitlyn’s boots crush a shower of glass into dust as she hauls herself over a fence slumped across the center of the road. On the other side, she passes a minivan turtled on its back, an empty car seat dangling from the second row, and a couch slanted on a caved-in roof. A crow brays from the armrest, its head cocked to watch her pass.

And she passes people. People who look right through her as she goes, their faces as stripped as that sign. An older woman, her white hair matted with blood at her temple, sitting with a bearded man on a staircase leading to a door that no longer exists. Someone in a backwards ball cap picks through a dirty stack of clothes, a mother holding two children against her, their faces buried in her thighs. 

A dog runs in circles in a yard, his tail wagging slowly. He barks and listens, barks and listens.

She wants to stop and help. She can’t stop. She wouldn’t know where to start if she could. She’s never seen this much need in one place. This much pain with nowhere to go. Her feet slam against the pavement as she runs. She’s lost sight of Vi, but it’s like there’s a string tied between them. She can feel it tugging at her chest with every new yard she passes, whatever nightmare it offers up to her eyes. The wedding dress soiled with mud. Book pages that catch against her ankles and land facedown in puddles of rain. 

There’s a voice calling someone’s name, a repeated sound over and over, but they’re far enough away, her heavy breath and her heavy heart loud enough that Caitlyn can’t make it out. Only the shape of it. The grief.

She inhales — musty wood, a chemical dampness — and pushes herself faster, sprinting toward the end of the road. 

Please. She thinks it hard in the direction of whatever might listen. Please.

The stand of trees in front of The Last Drop, the one she’d driven past that first night with Vi and Powder and Ekko, has been shredded. Long, bare arms open to the sky as if asking a question. 

Behind them, the bar. What little of it is left. Vi stands there staring through it, as if trying to see it for what it was.

“Vander!” she howls. Caitlyn’s stomach falls away from her, an instinctive fear of that sound and the everything in it. “Powder!”

Silence. Just a zapping sound, electricity thrumming, as Caitlyn passes the neon sign buried in a tangle of wires.

The stairs up to the house are slumped but intact, and Vi’s taking them two at a time before Caitlyn’s made it up the drive. Vi curls her bare hand into a fist and punches a hole through a window, her body disappearing through it a second later. Caitlyn scrambles after her, leaning her head down in time to see Vi creak precariously into the next room. 

The broken window tears at her hair as she slips through, Caitlyn dusting shards of glass from her shoulders as she stands. A sharp pinch, a warm tongue down the side of her face that she knows must be blood; she wipes it away with her shoulder. Inside is a chaos with no place for her eyes to rest — wooden beams pierce the drywall and up through the floor, sheets of wallpaper hanging by gluey threads. 

Emerging into wet light, a place where the roof has been lifted away like a dollhouse, Caitlyn shields her eyes. This is where she’d sat with Vi and with Vander, where he’d winked at her over pancakes and homemade syrup. The table is gone.

“Caitlyn!” The sound is urgent, terrified and trying not to be. Caitlyn hurries to where the second floor drops away, a rift sinking into the bar below. It’s a short drop to one of the pool tables, and she lowers herself over the edge feet-first. The table slants, a leg broken beneath it, and she skids over the felt to the ground, righting herself against the upturned side of a bathtub with an oomph. She scans the damage — and there she is, Vi, standing before a tent of wood and plaster, Vander trapped at the center.

Caitlyn’s hands join Vi’s on the slab of ceiling that has fallen across him, both of them straining to lift it. Dust cakes Vander’s face, and Caitlyn’s heart is in her throat until he coughs weakly, a shift that makes her think he’s trying to help them lift it, too.

“Don’t move,” Caitlyn commands, panting. “We’re going to get you out of here, I promise.”

White tracks bleed through the dirt on Vi’s face. A flash of red when she drags her hand across it. Her fist, bloodied from the window.

Caitlyn stands. No one’s ever begged Caitlyn for anything before and she’s not prepared for what it looks like on Vi’s face. On this face.

“Help me,” Vi whispers.

Caitlyn wheels around, searching for something, anything that could give them some leverage. Her eyes fall to one of the wooden ceiling beams slanting from the second floor. It lands with a thud, a shower of sawdust displaced into the daylight. Vi scrambles to help her nose it beneath the slab.

“Caitlyn’s going to drag you out,” Vi calls to Vander as she sets up near the wooden beam. She looks at Caitlyn. “You need to be fast, I don’t know how long I can—”

“On three,” Caitlyn says, her hands bracing under his shoulders. Vander isn’t a small man. The house caved in around him hadn’t been a small house. She’ll get one shot. She tightens her grip. “One.”

“Two,” Vi grits out, placing her palms flat on the beam.

“Three,” they say together. Vi screams, a sound like she’s tearing her own heart out by the roots. The ceiling slab lifts the tiniest fraction, but there won’t be another window. Caitlyn’s fingers dig in and pull, her feet skidding through the dirt as she hauls them backwards, backwards, Caitlyn not breathing, not thinking, stumbling to the ground as Vander’s feet clear the pile and Vi lets go of the beam, the whole thing collapsing in their wake.

Caitlyn sits there heaving, her arms still wrapped under Vander’s. She can feel him breathing, too, the solid expansion of his chest between her thighs. Vi sinks to her knees in front of them. Water under her eyes, her nose, a silent leak that tells Caitlyn she doesn’t know she’s doing it. She musters a brave smile down at Vander, and Caitlyn allows the relief to close her eyes for one small second.

“We’ve got you,” Vi is saying. Her hand shakes violently as she attempts to clean the dust from Vander’s face with the cuff of her jacket. “You’re safe.”

Vander groans, trying to lift up onto his elbows before Vi stops him with a hand in the center of his chest. 

“You need to not move,” Caitlyn says in his ear. “You might be injured.” Slowly, she extricates herself, laying him back against the floor and coming to crouch next to Vi. 

Vander’s frowning, shakes his head just slightly. He mumbles something, and it takes a minute for Caitlyn to recognize it for what it is.

“Powder…”

Vi’s voice cracks. “I don’t know. I didn’t — I can’t find her.”

Vander shakes his head again, Caitlyn reaching to still it. “Not here,” Vander rasps. “They weren’t here, when—”

Caitlyn’s heart drops and doesn’t hit bottom. Shock on Vi’s face, hope, dangerous as a lighter in a gasoline-soaked room.

Vi asks, “Where is she?”

—

It had taken the ambulance an hour to arrive, the road to Vander’s still so blocked with debris the crew had needed to park at the corner and maneuver a stretcher through it on foot. As they lifted him onto it, Vi had trailed them out onto the driveway, answering questions about allergies, medications, history.

History. Caitlyn stood for a moment, there in the wreckage of Vi’s, looking around in a wide circle at the broken dishes, the water dripping from the roof. Her foot slipped over something as she turned, and she leaned over to peel a playing card away from the treads. 

Vander had told them he’d been opening the basement door when everything hit, just a moment too late, and Caitlyn thought of that basement, somewhere under all of this: not just the models and the blueprints but the lamps and the old brown couches, the dinners Vi had told her about. Thirty seconds, a breath — that’s all it took to undo the lifetime this house had kept them all safe inside it.

Caitlyn turned the card over. Jack of Hearts. 

Briefly, there and alone, Caitlyn allowed a grief that she would never let Vi see spill up through the middle of her, come falling from her face. 

Then she inhaled, sharply, wiped a hand under her chin. Vi still needed her. Caitlyn tucked the playing card into the top of her boot and picked her way back out of the house. 

At the ambulance, Vi surprised her by stepping back when the paramedics said only one person could ride along.

“Give me your keys,” Caitlyn said, her hand outstretched. “I can take the truck.”

But Vi shook her head, said her name, said please in a way that would have had Caitlyn replying anything so long as Vi was the one asking. “I need to stay. Find Powder. If — I’ll listen to the damage reports, she’ll come straight here, if she—”

Caitlyn knew there was no way for her to finish that sentence and so she didn’t let her, just stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Vi’s shoulders. Vi’s hands clutched at her like she was dangling over a precipice, like Caitlyn was the only thing keeping her upright. 

“I can come with you,” Caitlyn said, holding her tighter.

Vi’s head, the smallest shake. “I want you with him.” And then she cleared her throat and pushed away, helped Caitlyn up into the back of the ambulance. Caitlyn watched her through the back window as they began the bumpy road to the hospital, Vi small and surrounded by the hulking piles of metal and wood and fog, small and getting smaller until she was gone.

Now, Caitlyn stares into a cup of coffee outside the emergency room. 

Vander had been taken immediately to surgery. His pelvis, a nurse explained, when Caitlyn let her believe she was his daughter. Something about blood loss. The nurse was sympathetic but firm that there was nothing more she could tell her and nothing more for Caitlyn to do but wait. Surrounded by a crush of people lingering on chairs and beds along the walls, small and silent children covered in dirt, all the sniffling and bleeding and crying and praying, Caitlyn let her get back to her job. She found a quiet bench in the corridor outside the waiting room and sat with her head in her hands.

It’s been several hours with no word on Vander or Vi. The ambulance brought them here with the lights and siren blazing, but the hospital’s at least an hour from Zaun if you’re not white-knuckling it with Vi. And what is there to race toward? More waiting. More of that awful hope. Vi’s face keeps appearing in her mind, stricken with it, and try as she might to tell herself that the odds are good, that Powder and Ekko were elsewhere when they very well could have been flattened in that house with Vander, she can’t stop picturing it: Vi in that decimated yard, waiting for headlights, for two figures to come running down that road.

Every time the doors slide open, Caitlyn looks up, but it’s never her. Another pinched face above another tense walk. Mothers and fathers, cousins, friends. The worst are those who know their way around, who don’t stop in front of the signs. The ones who walk down these halls like they’ve walked them before. How many times had they rebuilt the world just to see it upended? How many times, Caitlyn thinks, another exhausted face trudging past, could you stand it?

Outbreak territory, Jayce said. She feels ill, now, thinking about the way she and Vi celebrated as that tornado disappeared, while just a few short miles down the road a different darkness was gathering speed.

That they couldn’t have known doesn’t make her feel better, and that they just missed it doesn’t make her feel lucky. It makes her feel empty, and when she rushes to the bathroom and gags over the sink and finds there’s nothing to heave up it’s like the tornado’s sucked even that from her, too. She pats her face dry, blood from her temple blooming against the paper towel, and crumples her styrofoam cup into the trash. 

As she’s walking back to her bench the group clustered in front of it turns to look at her approach. She stops. 

Vi. Haggard and with deep purple marks beneath her eyes, but she’s here. 

And behind her: Ekko, his arm around a pair of shoulders. Powder.

Vi almost manages a smile as Caitlyn approaches. “Hey, cupcake.” Caitlyn’s arms collapse around Vi’s neck, and she tries to channel all her relief, all the comfort she can into the touch. She pulls back, a hand on the side of Vi’s face as she looks into it. It’s her instinct to reach for words but they wouldn’t touch it, would they? Wouldn’t even come close.

When she steps back she’s immediately enveloped in Ekko’s solid embrace. 

Surprised, her eyes find Powder’s over his shoulder. Powder looks away, but when Ekko releases Caitlyn, she inhales stiffly before marching up and clamping her arms around Caitlyn’s waist, too.

“Hi, girl reporter.” It’s muffled against Caitlyn’s shoulder. “Some story, huh?”

“Powder,” Vi sighs, but if Powder meant for there to be teeth in the words, they’d come out muzzled. Caitlyn glances at Vi, a minute shake of her head. Just holds Powder tighter.

“I’m glad you’re alright,” Caitlyn says firmly, and steps back. Her eyes sweep from one taut expression to the next. “He’s in surgery now. There was a pelvic fracture and some internal bleeding. They said they’d come find us once he’d been moved to a room.”

Powder blows out a breath, her bangs fluttering weakly in front of her eye. “Great. Good thing I like shitty chairs and the smell of bleach.”

Ekko inclines his head to the ceiling. “How about Pow and I grab us something from the cafeteria?”

“And hospital food! Can’t forget hospital food,” Powder is saying as Ekko tugs her toward the doors. 

Vi sinks down onto the bench, forking a hand through her hair. “They’d gone to Red Rock to visit one of Ekko’s friends,” she explains. “Benzo’s got a scrap yard of his own out there that Pow wanted to dig through. And wouldn’t you know it, SIL Co.’s guy, the one who said the storm was headed north? Apparently he’s all buddy-buddy with the cops over there, so they get the word out, and everyone’s holed up all cozy in their basements while we were getting ripped through twenty miles south. Didn’t even get near them.” 

Caitlyn’s fists clench against her sides. “It could have saved people,” she says. “If they cared what they were doing, people might’ve—”

Vi’s head thunks back against the wall. Her eyes closed like she’s too exhausted, in this second, to be angry anymore. “I know.”

Caitlyn holds her tongue, folding onto the bench beside her. They listen: machines beeping in the next hallway, footsteps and low voices. Vi’s hand rests on her thigh, the knuckles raw and red. 

“I should’ve,” Vi starts, stops. A long swallow moves through her throat. “Maybe if I hadn’t waited so long—”

“No,” Caitlyn says vehemently. “You did everything you could. More than most. We couldn’t have known.”

“I just keep thinking,” Vi says. She’s whispering, not because she’s trying to be quiet, Caitlyn knows, but because if she speaks any louder her voice will break. “Why the hell are we still here? This just keeps happening, and it’ll keep happening until something happens that I can’t protect anybody from.”

“Vi,” Caitlyn says, laying her hand overtop Vi’s. That words are her work only makes it worse, all of them seeming to fail her at once. She doubts any exist that can fix this. Caitlyn can only say, “I’m so sorry.” 

Her eyes still closed, Vi’s fingers find hers, lace them through. Their heads lean together, and when Caitlyn’s eyes next open Powder and Ekko are in front of them, plastic bags hanging from their elbows. They’re staring at a woman in scrubs at the entrance to the emergency room.

Vi’s on her feet in the next second. “How is he?”

The woman leads them to a room on the third floor. It’s cramped but the walls are light blue, peaceful, and there’s a window slatted with blinds. In the center of the room is a bed, and in the center of the bed in Vander. Tubes snake over his arms, and even though he’s groggy he’s awake, alive, and when they appear in the doorway his whole face gives.

“My girls,” he croaks, and when Vi and Powder rush to his bedside, he envelops them in a hug that could hold the whole world inside it.

They divvy up slices of cold pizza, pour pop into paper cups. On the long couch beneath the window, looking around at their faces as they eat — Ekko gesturing in the middle of some story that makes Powder snort bubbles, Vi doubling over and Vander smiling, winking, as he catches Caitlyn’s eye — Caitlyn has the thought that if this is the price of their survival, if she had to eat nothing but this horrendous pizza for the rest of her life just to be here, just for all of them to be here eating it together, she’d ask for seconds.

Quiet, she allows the conversation to flow through and around her. There’s a peace to it, after everything, to letting herself float among those voices, and at the same time she’s cognizant of the strange space she occupies here. That their life is a river she has stepped into only briefly. It would keep going without her — it will fill in whatever shape she leaves behind. 

But the boundaries of that shape feel porous, now, blurred, and if Caitlyn is honest with herself they have been since the start. Ever since Vi lifted herself out of that engine and looked Caitlyn’s way, since You better hop in and Caitlyn, failing to hesitate . And now, what they’ve witnessed together, what they’ve been through — if Caitlyn is brutally honest, that border’s been transparent ever since Vi reached for her from the other side of it and pulled Caitlyn into her bed.

Though an invisible line, she thinks, gathering up everyone’s paper plates and napkins and taking them out to the trash can in the hall, is still a line.

Caitlyn ducks into the waiting room for the floor, which is — she exhales in relief — empty. The lights are off but the television is still on, grainy local news coverage in that confident, unaccented American dialect, and Caitlyn finds a remote on the coffee table and mutes it. 

Rain again, against the windows. That sunny afternoon on the lake feels distant, impossible. All it ever does is rain, Caitlyn thinks, biblical rains, meant to wash them from the Earth. 

She’s just let her head fall back against the wall when the door opens.

Vi stands, shadowed in the gap. Awkwardly, she pulls the door back into herself. “Sorry. You, uh. You taking a minute?”

Caitlyn shifts upright. “Take it with me?”

Vi shuts the door behind her and joins Caitlyn on the couch. Their shoulders knock, Vi resting her elbows on her knees with her hands clasped in the gap. 

“He looks good,” Caitlyn says, and Vi attempts a smile. 

“We were lucky,” she says, as the smile fails. “They only allow one visitor overnight. I’m going to stay with Vander, but you and Ekko and Pow — you should find a motel near here, get a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. God knows you need it.”

“So do you,” Caitlyn reminds her, and Vi exhales a laugh through her nose. 

“I’ll come find you in the morning,” she promises. “Vander and I, we’ve got to talk about what we’re going to do.”

Caitlyn studies her profile. Her eyes, set unseeing on some point in the distance, the soft ridge of her nose giving way to an unhappy mouth. “What are you going to do?” Caitlyn asks quietly.

The words become air, fall through it like rain. It’s a very long time before Vi speaks.

“I’ve only ever wanted to do this.” It’s a confession, whispered reluctantly into the space between them. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever—”

She cuts herself off. Caitlyn is quiet, waiting. The news has given way to an anchor in the field, to images of a wrecked Zaun. In the dimness of the room, the changing light of the screen throws new shadows across Vi’s face, Vi forcing herself to watch until she no longer can. “We don’t have anything to keep us here anymore,” she says, tearing her gaze away. She stares into the floor instead. “We could go anywhere. Powder could get her degree, finally. Do something with all that brain.”

Whatever exists between Vi and her sister is its own minefield, Caitlyn knows. But she’s seen the way Powder looks to Vi, is the first person she searches for walking into any room. Caitlyn says, gently, “I don’t think she would have stayed unless she wanted to.”

“I could have pushed her,” Vi says. “But I was selfish, I didn’t really want her to go.” She shrugs, helpless. “I didn’t want to do this alone. I thought if I could, I thought we could — but I can’t fix this. And it seems so stupid to keep trying.”

“It isn’t,” Caitlyn says, and Vi snorts. She stands and crosses to the window, and Caitlyn feels every footstep like a kick in the stomach. “You have changed things,” she insists to Vi’s back. “You have helped people.”

Outside, the rain continues to fall in soft gray sheets. Caitlyn can’t see Vi’s eyes, but she knows the way they will have fallen to the horizon, will be tracking the shape and movement of the clouds. As automatic as breathing, a limb you’d miss when it was gone. Vi knows how to read this world, wind and rain and light offering up secrets to her that they don’t to almost anyone else. They are fluent in the same language. Vi had taught it to herself, until all she had to do to understand was look. 

Vi could walk away, but she would never stop seeing it. They both understand this. It would be like trying to hold one eye closed forever. 

Weather, now, on the television. A stain of red, spreading across the screen.

“I should have gotten out of this a long time ago.” Vi is speaking almost to herself. “I keep thinking, maybe this is it. If you ever needed a reason to get out of a place for good…”

Vi’s head tips back, and Caitlyn is there again, standing with her in that golden field, looking up. A drop-tile ceiling, now, between them and that invisible sky. “But what else can I do?” Vi asks. “Where else would want me?”

The force with which Caitlyn feels the words leap into her throat pushes her to her feet. Anywhere, they protest. Everywhere. Caitlyn has the urge to take the keys, take her by the hand, run until they hit water or stars. And I’d go with you.

Silently, a warning has begun to flash across the screen. Caitlyn swallows all those other words back. Says only, “Vi.”

Something in her tone makes Vi turn around, immediately following Caitlyn’s line of sight to the television. They’re reading the text that scrolls across the bottom of the screen when the door opens again.

Ekko knocks his knuckles against the wood. “Hey,” he says. “I think Powder and I — oh, shit.” Following their gaze, he stops in his tracks. 

The storm is immense, a front running up half the state. Even with the clinical, computerized distance of radar it sends a shiver up Caitlyn’s spine. They’re only calling for a watch, here in the city and over Zaun, but it seems unthinkable that the danger isn’t over. That the storm isn’t done with them yet. 

Caitlyn thinks of those books, belly-up in the rain. Like when you cup your hands beneath the sink, water overflowing your palms.

“Take the truck,” Vi says. She hasn’t blinked. “I don’t want the Hexvane sitting in a parking lot overnight.”

Ekko’s eyes find Caitlyn’s. She shakes her head, once, but even with that warning it’s so unlike Vi that he prods, tentative, “You sure?”

“Keys are in the room,” Vi says. The tone is flat, final. “Caitlyn’s riding with you.” She pushes past him, out the door, meeting neither of their gazes as she goes. The warning continues to loop in silence, as outside, fractures of lightning ripple across the sky.

Chapter Text

Caitlyn is keeping a list of lost things. 

She’d started it in the hallway of the hospital. Someone had walked through the automatic doors and paused in front of her, reading the map. They were barefoot, dripping. It left a trail all the way to the elevators, where it disappeared, as if it belonged to a ghost who could walk through walls. An hour passed before the hospital sent someone to mop up the sheen of those footprints drying on the linoleum.

She thinks about it again, wedged in the narrow backseat of the truck, the road disappearing between Powder and Ekko up front. Powder combs out her hair with her hands as they drive, the ends flicking back and forth in front of Caitlyn’s nose as she redoes each braid. 

Grumbling something too low to be heard, she pats the pockets of her sweatpants, stretches a hand over to dig around in the jacket Ekko’s wearing.

Amusement on his face. “What’s up?” 

“Favorite scrunchie,” she says. Withdrawing her hand, she blows a raspberry. “Guess that’s gone for good.”

Scrunchies, Caitlyn adds, right there next to Shoes, and as they drive her memory adds to it: piano keys in a heap, a jumble of black-and-white silence. Lightbulbs and ashtrays, houseplants hugging their leaves in close. If they were just things then they were still somebody’s just-things. An accumulation of desires, of money and time. All of it out of place, all of it missing from somewhere. From someone, people looking around themselves and wondering where their lives had gone off to. Saying, It was here just a moment ago. 

You couldn’t put up a poster, put your phone number at the bottom and wait for someone to call, Caitlyn thinks, stepping out into the heavy gray light. You couldn’t walk around your neighborhood at night, calling its name. It was gone, and you’d never get any of it back.

At the front desk, Caitlyn signs for two rooms and pockets a thumbtack from the corkboard on her way out the door. 

Ekko and Powder are untying the Hexvane from the back of the pickup when Caitlyn emerges from the lobby. She hands a pair of keys to Ekko, who tosses one to Powder. Her long fingers snatch it easily out of the air. 

“I’m expecting five-star service from this place,” Powder says. Ekko snorts, throwing their bags over his shoulder and heading to their room. “Massages, champagne, the works.”

Caitlyn leans against the side of the truck. “Best they can do is two queens and a continental breakfast.”

“Well,” Powder shrugs. She’s busy loosening a knot with her teeth. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” 

Caitlyn helps her lower the device to the ground. It’s surprisingly light for as tall as it is, a thought Caitlyn’s had every time she’s handled it. Even dormant, before it’s deployed, it rises to the middle of her chest. It has a lot in common with Powder, she thinks, watching them lean into each other, its maker’s strange and spindly twin. 

Powder’s staring after Ekko, chewing her lip. “Weird,” she says suddenly, and when Caitlyn lofts an eyebrow, she gestures at the suitcase Ekko has set by the door while he walks through the room, turning on lights. “That's all I’ve got now.”

A tightening in Caitlyn’s chest. An overnight bag packed for a daytrip — that’s what’s left of her life. She thinks of the drawings tacked to Vander’s fridge. Of a young Powder in a photograph, smiling in the arms of a woman she would barely remember. 

Photo albums, Caitlyn adds to her list. Mothers.

There’s a field to the left of the hotel, a flat lot more dirt than grass. A battered sign stapled to a telephone pole proclaims it’s for sale. Caitlyn makes a decision that she hopes isn’t a stupid one and stoops to take hold of the Hexvane again. “Help me get this inside,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

The Hexvane locked inside Caitlyn’s room, Powder follows her out to the rocky field, looking dubious and shivering in Ekko’s oversized jacket. She wrinkles her nose up at the sky. “It’s going to rain again.”

“This won’t take long,” Caitlyn promises. 

Powder tracks the movement of her hand as it reaches for her holster. “On the record,” she says slowly, “I’m having kind of a bad day, and murder would not improve it.”

Caitlyn checks the chamber. “Do you want to learn how to use this or not?” Powder’s eyebrows launch into her hairline, and she peers at the gun with interest. Caitlyn identifies the different parts of the pistol, pointing to each and explaining what it does and how it works. She demonstrates how to safely check and load the magazine, then the basics of form, how to square her stance and hold her arms. Powder listens diligently, and as Caitlyn gets into position Powder mirrors her — the same set of her feet and the same brace of her hands, wrapped around an invisible gun.

When Caitlyn offers to set up some makeshift targets, the last of Powder’s nonchalance slips away. “I’ve never even held one before,” she confesses a little breathlessly. She hand-waves at Caitlyn’s surprise. “I know, I know, Oklahoma, right, people think it’s like a preschool graduation requirement around here. But Vander’s always believed in settling problems the old-fashioned way.”

“And what’s the old-fashioned way?”

“You know.” Powder holds her fists up in front of her face, takes a mock swing in Caitlyn’s direction. “‘Pow,’” she says, lightly knuckling Caitlyn’s bicep. “Not that he or Vi ever taught me how to do that, either.”

Caitlyn says, mildly, “Your sister was somewhat occupied.”

Powder makes an exaggerated face. “She wasn’t born in the slammer. And last year when I snuck into one of her fights, she was so pissed, even though I swore I wouldn’t—”

Caitlyn’s interest betrays her. “Fights? Like, boxing?”

A series of calculations flies over Powder’s face before it goes sly. “Sure. Like boxing.”

She doesn’t elaborate. This rare moment of loyalty to Vi convinces Caitlyn to leave it alone, but part of her brain files this diligently away. “Well,” she says instead, reholstering the gun. “They’re right. These things tend to create more problems than they solve.” 

The truck has two gallon jugs in the back, and Caitlyn sets them down ten meters away. “Let me see your stance,” she calls. Powder rolls her eyes but dutifully widens her feet until they’re under her shoulders, holding her arms out straight. Caitlyn issues small corrections, tapping on her shoulders to adjust each limb.

“Okay,” Caitlyn says when she’s satisfied. “Ready to give it a shot?”

“Har har.” Powder narrows her eyes. If Caitlyn knew her better, she might’ve said she was nervous. “You’re not just doing this so I’ll squeal.”

“Not just.” She adds, more seriously, “I want to hear your side of the story — how you and Vi developed the Hexvane and what you experienced at SIL Co. It’s your chance to set the record straight, and I hope it’s a story that will change things. But you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.” 

Caitlyn hesitates. “I’m also doing this because I need your help with Vi.”

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, she’s super into you.” Powder laughs, then gags for good measure. “Gross, by the way.”

Caitlyn sighs. “Thank you. I mean that she’s talking about giving up.”

Powder’s face is impassive, but there’s a subtle change in her posture. Nothing you’d notice if you were just watching, but something Caitlyn feels standing beside her. Like when the wind changes, or the pressure drops. “She wouldn’t,” Powder says slowly. “This is her whole life. Our whole life.”

“It's what she said.”

Powder looks confused. “Vi doesn’t give up on anybody.”

Caitlyn pulls earplugs out of her pocket and hands a pair to Powder. “That’s not always the same as giving up on yourself. Show me how you load it.”

Powder does, frowning down at the magazine as she loads the gun and racks the slide. Caitlyn nods her approval. “And your stance?” Caitlyn coaches her through aligning her sights. Powder’s eyebrows are furrowed as she adjusts, squints, adjusts again. 

“One more thing,” Caitlyn says. With a light touch, she indicates Powder’s index finger, then the trigger. “Every time you put your finger on that trigger you’re accepting responsibility for the outcome. This doesn’t move here until you’re absolutely certain what and that you intend to shoot. Do you understand?”

Whether or not she actually takes her seriously or because she knows Caitlyn would put a stop to this if she didn’t, Powder nods. “Why do you have one of these?” she asks. “If they’re so dangerous.”

Caitlyn hesitates again. In dark places, she’s been glad for the reassuring weight of it on her hip, in her palm. She liked knowing she had this ability to protect herself, herself and others, in a world that was often actively hostile to her and people like her. 

But it’s more than that, to Caitlyn. It’s her mother and the strange calm that would descend over her face when they were out on the range together, or hunting in the woods behind the property. It’s how Caitlyn feels with her shotgun in the notch of her shoulder. The way that even as the world fades out, it becomes imbued with an abstract clarity. Like diving into a clear pool, as she’s tried to explain it before — only she’s never been able to find anything quite like it, not in a pool or anywhere else. 

Not, at least, as she thinks of that room with its deep blue palette of shadows, of Vi’s lips finding hers in the dark, until recently.

Caitlyn tilts her head. “Sometimes I need to be dangerous,” she decides.

Surprise, on Powder’s face, shifting to something resolute. She cracks her neck, then walks through the steps that Caitlyn has described. She lines up to the label on one of the plastic jugs.

“Remember,” Caitlyn says, “it’s less of a pull, more of a squeeze. And the recoil will feel strange at first, that’s normal, though this one’s pretty smooth — focus on keeping your hands steady, and you can adjust on the second round if you need to.”

Powder nods. She breathes in deep, and then, like Caitlyn has taught her, a chipped pink nail curved deliberately over the trigger — a slow out as she fires. A blast cracks through the late afternoon. Powder’s first shot ends up in the dirt several yards to the right of the jug. 

Powder gives a low whistle, already shaking out her support arm and shifting her feet just slightly. She stretches the gun in front of her, closing one eye. 

Powder speaks down the barrel, so quietly Caitlyn almost misses it. “They treated me like I was dangerous at SIL Co.”

Caitlyn waits, listening.

“I had all these ideas,” Powder continues, “and they had all these reasons I wasn’t the right person to make them real. Or they’d tell me that I was the problem. That my data was bad, or that I was bad — when things went wrong it was always my fault.”

The gun fires again. This time, the jug explodes, plastic crumpling around the bullet in a fountain of water.

“Good shot.” Caitlyn expects celebration, but there isn’t any, just Powder taking aim at the next jug. 

“And then they told me they were moving me over to weapons,” Powder says. “Can you believe that? Little Powder who was such a massive fuck-up they didn’t want her working on her own device. Little Powder who’d never even held a gun.”

Powder stands, unmoving, for so long that Caitlyn almost says something, and right as she’s about to Powder’s stance gives, the gun falling to her side. She looks down at it. To Caitlyn, it seems unnaturally large in her small and slender hands. 

“I thought it’d feel… different,” she says, and offers the gun to Caitlyn. 

Gently, Caitlyn takes it. 

Powder says, “There’s no way she actually wants to stop chasing.”

“No,” Caitlyn agrees, as she squares herself off, her arms falling easily into their well-worn grooves. “I don’t think so.”

Powder stuffs her hands in her pockets. “Vi always feels like she’s got to be the one looking out for everybody. But Ekko and I, we’re the ones watching her back from the van. And you,” she adds, gesturing Caitlyn up and down. “You haven’t run screaming yet. I don’t know. Maybe she just needs to take the goddamn sky off her back, sometimes. Let somebody else carry it for a change.”

Caitlyn’s arms waver the slightest bit. She refocuses the gun. “The cap,” she says, just before she fires. 

The bullet slices the lid from the top of the jug.

Powder narrows her eyes. “Show-off.”

Smiling to herself, Caitlyn slips the gun back in its holster. They gather the broken jugs and troop back to the pickup. The rain has held since they started driving back from the hospital, but the sky has continued to descend, only a thin strip of light visible near the edge of the horizon, and the chill in the air has gone sharp. 

As Caitlyn shrinks inside her collar, she catches her thoughts wandering to Vi — what she’d see if she were here to look up at Caitlyn’s sky. In her mind, the path to Vi is as traveled, now, as the grooves she follows when she’s writing or lifting her pistol. She reaches for her without meaning to. It’s her voice in Caitlyn’s head, telling her to turn into the wind. When Caitlyn thinks shelter it’s because Vi would tell her to be prepared to find it, to always know where will keep you safe, and it’s because when she thinks it, Vi’s face rises in her mind like the answer.

The plastic lands on the crumpled tarp in the back of the pickup with a strange clink. Her hands halfway to Vi’s duffel, she frowns — the sound it made is not the sound she would have expected. She pulls back the tarp and exhales in surprise.

“What?” Powder asks. Her eyes widen when Caitlyn lifts a box out of the bed of the truck. Neatly racked inside are dozens of small blue spheres. 

“The Hexdrones,” Caitlyn breathes. She lifts the box out of reach, when Powder goes to touch one. “Mel must have put these here.” Caitlyn’s not quite sure Mel meant to, but then, it doesn’t seem a likely accident. Caitlyn thinks of her checking the ties that final time, and her eyes narrow. Why, then — unless Mel intended them to be used?

“‘Hexdrones’?”

“Jayce and Viktor have been working to streamline the Hexvane design,” she explains. “This is the result.” 

Powder looks confused and annoyed just hearing their names, and Caitlyn does her best to hastily explain what they’d told her about the design. The annoyance stays, but the confusion immediately devolves into skepticism. “You’d still have to plant them in the path, wouldn’t you? For the winds to pick them up?”

“They say the goal is to be able to control and fly each member, sort of like a hive. But they’re not there yet, and no — there aren’t a lot of other ways to get them into the tornado in the meantime.”

Powder thinks. “What about a gun?”

Caitlyn snorts. Powder’s eyebrows plummet down over her face, which is the only reason Caitlyn realizes she’s not joking. Caitlyn clears her throat and shifts the box under her arm. “Well,” she says slowly, attempting to consider it honestly, “it’d be inefficient, with so many drones. That’s a lot of rounds.”

“Not if you pack a bunch into a single round,” Powder says. 

“You’d need a much bigger gun.”

The light in Powder’s eyes sends an uneasy itch up Caitlyn’s neck. “Think about it,” Power says. “Aim the barrel into the storm, boom! And you could do it from a distance.”

Caitlyn pictures the face Vi would make if she found out her sister was even entertaining the idea of building what she’s describing — which is, essentially, a rocket launcher. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably illegal, or at the very least, getting cozy at a bar somewhere with illegal. 

But a small part of Caitlyn, one she attempts to squash, is curious. And Powder’s right, at least hypothetically, that it could be a bridge, tide them over while they wait on the full functionality of Jayce and Viktor’s drones. 

Not that any of this would matter, Caitlyn thinks, staring down into the box, if Vi was hanging it all up.

What the hell. For the first time in recent memory, Caitlyn attempts to channel her mother. “It’s an interesting concept,” she says diplomatically. Before she can think better of it, she hands the box to Powder. 

No harm in drawing it up, she thinks, Powder skipping ahead of her to the motel room she shares with Ekko. She hopes. Caitlyn winces as Powder bangs on the door, exchanging a tired smile with Ekko over Powder’s shoulder as she passes on the way to her own room.

“You have your own key,” she hears him sigh, before their voices disappear behind the soft closing of the door. 

Inside, Caitlyn blows out a breath, unclipping her holster and placing it along with her gun and keys on top of the dresser. She takes off her shoes, places the playing card on top of the dresser. 

Everything in the room is a dull brown, a dark, thin carpet leading to wood-paneled walls behind two beds that Caitlyn knows, just looking at them, will slump in the middle. It smells brown, the faint staleness of old boxes and attics, and Caitlyn is struck by a powerful dread, a feeling that she’s been here before. Of having stepped into a life at once horribly distant and familiar, the moment in dreaming just before you realize the dream for what it is. 

Caitlyn shakes herself and reaches for the lamp. 

The water, at least, is hot, hot enough that tears spring to her eyes as she rotates under the spray, and though the room is awful she is so suddenly, earth-shakingly grateful for it that for a long minute she has to plant her palms on the tile, focus on the rise and file of each unsteady breath.

She’s lost nothing. It’s Vi she aches for, Powder, everyone who’d gone to bed in one life and woken up in a different one. Powder, looking at her bag, saying That’s all I’ve got now. 

It was the one thing Caitlyn could give her, teaching Powder how to handle a gun. She’d been telling the truth — a gun doesn’t fix anything. It certainly wouldn’t fix this. But she would go to sleep knowing Powder had ended her day with at least one thing she didn’t have going into it.

Caitlyn steps from the shower and dries her hair in front of the sink. Her eyelids keep trying to close. The exhaustion makes her feel half-there and insubstantial, her only tie to this moment the deep ache that pulls beneath her shoulders and in her thighs, as if her body is haunted by what it had taken to pull Vander from the rubble. That haunting is there in her mind, too, every time her eyes do fall shut — Vander’s face coated in white, hair matted with blood. Everything they’d seen on the street to get to him. 

Caitlyn’s list unravels like a scroll, spills down past her feet to break against the floor: shattered vases and unlucky mirrors, baby blankets and plastic silverware, vinyl records snapped in two. Damp mattresses, coughing goose down into the street. That barking dog, those books.

Caitlyn wipes an unsteady hand through the condensation on the mirror. The face that stares back at her from a foggy distance is nearly unrecognizable. It belongs to someone much younger than she feels. It reminds her that the last time she’d stood in front of a mirror, on the edge of sleep, she hadn’t been standing there alone.

Vi. Here at the close of the day with no one to reach for and no one who will reach back, Caitlyn curves around the longing and allows herself to miss her.

It’s strange, that the weight of what she doesn’t have is the only thing to make her feel grounded and real.

Back in the bedroom, Caitlyn digs the thumbtack out of her jacket pocket. With her notebook’s pen, she writes VI on the playing card before pinning it to the door outside. 

If Vi comes looking, she wants to be easy to find.

The recorder is in her jacket’s other pocket. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Caitlyn rewinds the tape — she should dictate a few notes from what Powder had said, just before she forgets, needs to find the place she can record over what’s likely to be long minutes of highway noise and rain. 

Caitlyn’s own voice. “Any signs I can pay attention to? ” Too far. She hits the double set of arrows again, fast-forwarding. 

“—sorry. ” Just hearing that voice makes Caitlyn’s hand tighten over her knee. “This morning, I thought we’d get to do that differently.”

Her eyes crease. Privately, because she can, Caitlyn places the recorder down on the opposite pillow and curls over the sheets. “I would’ve brought you coffee,” Vi’s voice says, all hush. “Let you wake up slow.” 

A pause. “I would’ve done things right.”

Caitlyn rewinds the tape, plays it again.

The only thing in the room that isn’t brown is the Hexvane, its silver spire sitting quietly in the corner where she and Powder had left it. It glimmers when Caitlyn finally sets the recorder aside and turns off the lamp, a lighthouse at the edge of sleep as she lies awake, paging through the list. 

Home, she adds, staring up at the ceiling. Sleep.

—

Caitlyn wakes with the strange sensation of never having actually slept. Time distorted in the long blink between one wakefulness and the next. She sits up in bed, listening.

And there it is again — a knock, soft against the door.

Vi all but trips through it, unbalanced when it falls away from her arm. Caitlyn moves in to steady her, and they end up holding each other upright, there on the doormat, silver rain falling in their hair.

In the dark, Caitlyn searches her face. The light that disappears into the hollows beneath her eyes doesn’t reemerge, not even when Caitlyn lifts a palm to her face.

Caitlyn’s breath catches. “Get inside, you’re freezing.”

Vi drips a trail to the first bed, where she sits to pull her boots off her feet. Caitlyn kneels, knocking her hands away. “These are soaked,” she says, struggling to undo the laces. Worry coils behind her ribs. “What happened?”

“Went back to the house,” she mumbles, and the coils wrap around her heart. She can feel it punching against her sternum as she looks up at Vi, refusing to meet her gaze. Vi had brought nothing with her — her bag leans against the nightstand where Caitlyn had placed it earlier — and Caitlyn knows that if Vi had found anything worth salvaging, she wouldn’t have left it behind. 

She swallows. “Here,” she says, standing. “Let me take your jacket.” Vi shrugs it from her shoulders, and Caitlyn wraps it around a hanger in the closet. “I’m going to start the shower. The beds here aren’t much but the water’s hot, at least.” On the way to the bathroom, her eyes slide to the dim green light of the alarm. It’s not even four.

When Caitlyn reenters the room, Vi has stripped out of her shirt and pulled off her socks, her bare feet in the carpet as she stares into the dark screen of the television. “It’s ready for you,” Caitlyn says. Vi nods, and catches Caitlyn’s wrist as she passes. The scabs on her knuckles have cracked, begun to bleed.

“Thanks,” she says, and then her voice drops to a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

Vi’s a wound with its hackles raised, ragged edges peeling back from hurts so deep you could throw your coins inside them, never hear them hit bottom. But what else would she wish for — just this, that she could be the one holding Vi’s cheek against her hand, that she could push back the hair from her eyes. “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she says firmly.

A swallow so hard Caitlyn can hear it. “I need to get back. I just came to shower. Change.”

Caitlyn holds her tongue around a protest — Vi needs sleep; Vander is in good hands and her exhaustion serves nobody, she shouldn’t even be driving like this — and forces herself to nod instead. “Let’s talk about it after you shower.”

Listening to the water and the muffled rattle of the bathroom fan, Caitlyn sits in the middle of the bed in her thin t-shirt and curls her arms around her shins, chin resting between her knees. Caitlyn had hung the rest of Vi’s clothes up in the closet and she can hear them now, slow drips against the floor. The coffeemaker she’d started gives a long peal before dispensing into a styrofoam cup, the room filling with the scent of grounds and steam.

The water cuts. Several long minutes later, there’s a thick grunt from behind the closed door. 

Caitlyn’s there in a second, knocking once. “Vi?” 

“Yeah,” says a strained voice, and Caitlyn takes this as an invitation to push open the door.

They’d left the lights off in the room, but here under the stark fluorescents, Vi looks even more tired. It’s as if the shower has washed all the color from her face, though there’s a raw pink flush climbing over her arms and across her bare back in the areas not covered by the tattoo — places Vi allowed the water to scald her skin. She has a towel slung across her hips and is leaning forward into the mirror, holding a smaller towel against her upper arm. When she peels it back, Caitlyn can see in the reflection that the white fabric is stained bright red, can see the ugly gash running across her bicep.

“Jesus,” Caitlyn says, rushing the rest of the way in. “What did you do?”

“Must’ve snagged it on something at the house,” Vi shrugs, and the motion sends fresh blood welling to the surface. She winces. “I didn’t really notice.” 

At her back, Caitlyn grips her by the elbow. “Like this. Above your heart.” Over her shoulder, Vi’s eyes dip down toward her mouth, and she does as asked.

Caitlyn goes to retrieve the first aid kit from her bag. When she gets back, the bleeding has slowed, Vi frowning down into the bloody towel. She offers her arm to Caitlyn before she can ask.

Caitlyn examines the wound. “This probably needs stitches,” she says, Vi’s teeth grinding when Caitlyn probes around the borders of the cut. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Seriously?” Vi scoffs, but a look from Caitlyn quells her. “Fine, okay, I’ll stop by the ER on my way in.”

An eyebrow climbs up Caitlyn’s face. Setting her doubt aside, or maybe because of it, she helps Vi clean and dry the wound again now that the bleeding has stopped, then retrieves a roll of gauze from her kit. “Sit.”

Vi sinks back onto the toilet, allows Caitlyn to wrap and secure the dressing around her arm. Focused, it takes a minute for Caitlyn to register the feeling of Vi’s eyes on the side of her face. “What?”

“I’m really fine,” Vi says. “But you’re sweet.”

Despite herself, Caitlyn can feel the corner of her mouth twitch. She tears the gauze off with her teeth and presses adhesive to the open edge. “Just because you’re used to taking a hit or two doesn’t mean I am.”

Vi stiffens. “Powder told you.”

“You had already implied it,” Caitlyn points out. For good measure, she wraps Vi’s knuckles, too. Her fingers linger over the dressing when she's done. Vi’s skin is warm, and she can feel the smooth, sculpted edge of the strength each arm is made of. The training it would have taken, the effort and the time — when Caitlyn trails her fingers toward the soft inside of Vi’s elbow, it’s over sharp ridges and deep swells, black ink stretched comfortably over a canvas of muscle. “Do you enjoy them? The fights.”

The words swing for humor, land somewhere short of tired. “When I’m winning.”

Caitlyn thinks she might know her well enough by now to tell when Vi is lying. Or maybe she just knows that Vi’s always been at her most motivated when there’s something to prove.

It fills Caitlyn with a sadness so deep it hits bone, how easily she can picture it: Vi, smiling around a mouthful of blood, losing.

Vi must see something on her face, because her other fingers graze up Caitlyn’s thigh and land softly against her hip. “Hey. I can take care of myself, promise.”

Caitlyn has kept her eyes from straying to Vi’s bare chest, from watching the drops of water traveling from her stomach toward the towel around her waist — but this simple touch, the warm palm closed around her hip bone, could unspool her. It fits, is the thing. Vi’s hand molded to the shape of her desire, like they were pulled from the same clay. Like they’re made of the same steel.

There’s a door in Caitlyn, a door she’s kept closed — but it’s inexplicable, extraordinary, the way that every time Vi touches her, Caitlyn feels something slotting into place. A mechanism turns, and the color of her longing goes blue and deep, the same shade as the inside of a keyhole when light is visible on the other side.

Caitlyn takes Vi’s face between her palms. “Yes,” she says. “But you could let someone else try.”

She brings her lips down to Vi’s. Vi accepts the kiss, opens to it, the hand on Caitlyn’s hip curving up against her waist. Her mouth is sleepy, soft as bruised fruit. As sweet, the way she offers herself up to Caitlyn, her lips still parted when Caitlyn pulls away.

“Come to bed,” Caitlyn says. Not a question or a command so much as need, focused into words. “Please.”

At the edge of the bed, Vi allows the towel to fall away from her hips, crawling up beside Caitlyn on the sheets. After the bright light of the bathroom, it’s hard to see anything but deep shadow — Caitlyn feels her way down the shoulder in front of her, gentle over the bandages. Her hand skates back up toward Vi’s neck and into her hair, circling her fingertips into the back of her head. Vi breathes in deep, and when she exhales Caitlyn feels it travel throughout the body in her arms, something shedding from Vi’s fingertips and the soles of her feet, through her eyes — Caitlyn watches Vi turn her head into the pillow, the faint glimmer against the inside of her nose.

Caitlyn opens her arms. There’s the smallest hesitation before Vi moves in and hides herself against Caitlyn’s chest. On either side of her spine, Vi’s fingers are as tight as Caitlyn can stand and no tighter. 

Even now, Vi is protecting her. 

It seems impossible that a body that has dealt and been dealt so much pain could be this careful, holding her back from the gentle edge of hurt. 

Vi had built this body for herself. To get back to Powder, back to her life, to be able to keep that life held and safe behind her. She’d built it out of need, out of fists and blood, and for her this was another way of saying love: I built it out of love . 

And still: there were so many times that her body had been touched without it. Caitlyn could spend years trying to match every bruise with tenderness, and it would still never undo what had been done to Vi. 

Their hearts, pressed to either side of the same wall, listening. Like if they weren’t separated by bone and muscle and skin, their souls would touch.

There’s no urgency in it, when Vi lifts her head, finds her lips in the dark. Just Vi’s warm breath across her tongue, Caitlyn swallowing the small noise Vi makes when Caitlyn’s hand grazes her chest. 

A tug at the bottom of her shirt. “I want to feel you,” Vi husks, and the words pull heat down between Caitlyn’s legs.

She strips the shirt from her shoulders, but catches Vi by the side of her face to find her eyes. “We can just sleep.”

“I know,” Vi says, “I know, I just—” her mouth against Caitlyn’s skin now, below her collarbone, at her breast, the barest hint of teeth. “I missed your skin.” She sucks a mark against Caitlyn’s ribs, Caitlyn’s hands finding her hair and sifting through the damp strands. She tugs until Vi moves back up the bed, sinks down to cover her body with her own.

They rock against each other, the slow thrust of Vi’s hips, of Caitlyn’s thigh between her legs. It’s like a dream they’ve stepped into, watery and indistinct. Pleasure warm as a bath, lapping at the rim. She’d forgotten her body could feel like this, that someone else’s body could feel like this next to hers. 

And still: it’s comfort more than it’s sex, Caitlyn thinks. It’s closeness — as if you can get close enough to someone to bring them back to themselves. As if Caitlyn bringing a shaking hand up to her face is asking where are you? , as if Vi turning into it to kiss her palm is saying with you. Spend enough time on your own and that’s what you start to feel, not just the distance between you and anybody else but the distance between you and who you used to be, until you're so far from that person you're afraid they don't exist anymore, that you've lost sight of them, gone past the edge of some horizon.

But there she is. There Vi is, real and with her, dragging her hips down the hard line of Caitlyn’s thigh, the quivering tension in her belly where Caitlyn’s fingertips scrape against it. Real when Caitlyn wraps one hand around the back of Vi’s neck, the other around the base of her thigh to drag her closer, gasping. Real, too, when Vi buries her face in Caitlyn’s shoulder, a groan as Caitlyn opens underneath her, knees flattening, Caitlyn’s teeth at the join of her neck when she comes, shocked and sudden, the orgasm wrenched from her throat. 

Vi’s hips snap forward, her eyes hazed and half-shut, grinding down with her lip between her teeth. 

“I’m here,” Caitlyn breathes into her ear, her teeth against the shell, “I’ve got you,” and Vi falls into her, saying only her name.

The green light of the alarm swims into focus on Caitlyn’s left. 05:16, and though the deluge outside continues in the same steady rhythm, it falls through a brightening sky. They lie together, listening to it as the light plays through the curtains, kaleidoscopes across the ceiling. Vi shifts to the side but keeps the steady weight of her hand pressed against Caitlyn’s hip, an anchor. 

Strange, the way their bodies slow when they touch, as when air condenses into rain.

Vi’s voice is a quiet hand, parting the dark. “I’ve only ever been good at two things,” she says. 

If Caitlyn hadn’t been so used to the changing rhythm of her breath by now, she would have thought Vi was asleep. Instead she’s been waiting, listening.

“Make it three,” she murmurs, and smiles when Vi snorts. Her hand skims up the flat of Caitlyn’s abdomen, sending another delayed shiver through her thighs.

“I can chase,” Vi continues, “and I can fight. I don’t — I don’t walk away from anything.”

Caitlyn twists onto her side. Her eyes fall over Vi’s face, the same profile she’d looked at even before they were this and realized there weren’t words for it, for her, though she had lingered in that bed for long moments trying to find them. “You could,” she says finally, watching Vi tilt toward her. Her eyes are wide, a sheen Caitlyn can see in the dark. “Do you want to?”

Vi doesn’t answer. Her pinky finger arcs in small sweeps across Caitlyn’s skin. 

“I don’t think I’d be good at anything else,” Vi says finally, a hard swallow. “And people need me, but no matter what I do, I just. I can’t seem to stop letting them down.”

Caitlyn shakes her head, but what she says is, “Tell me.” At the eyebrow that hooks in her direction, she adds, “What you’d do if you weren’t doing this.”

The ghost of a smile. “Dream job?”

“Dream job.”

“Astronaut,” Vi says, no pause, and quiet, unexpected laughter bends them into each other. Surprise, on Vi’s face, like she hadn’t expected to hear that sound again here, so soon. As Caitlyn watches, it transmutes into a kind of softness. “Those stars we saw, I’d take you to all of them.”

It’s so sincere that Caitlyn is grateful to the dark, hiding the blush that rushes under her skin. “What else?” 

“I could join the circus,” Vi says. “Work with the lions, throw people off the trapeze.”

“You’d have to be there to catch them, too.”

Vi grins. “I’d never miss.”

“Anything else?”

Vi is quiet. Caitlyn knows she is considering the question, honestly this time. That she is turning it over in her mind, feeling its shape, how it balances on the scales of her palms. That she is reaching down inside herself and coming up empty, fistfuls of water slipping through her hands.

Caitlyn finds Vi’s wrist on the pillow beside her. “I think you could be good at anything,” she says quietly. “But I’ve seen you out there.”

And she has. She doesn’t need to have developed the film yet to remember the shot: Vi framed by grass and sky, held in that horizon. 

And all the other images, the ones that exist only in her mind but are as real to her, as vivid as photographs would be — they come back to her now, too, and leafing through them, what Caitlyn finds there is longer than the list of everything that’s lost: the giddiness with which Vi had drawn lines in the dirt, gesticulated about wind shear and downdrafts. The gentleness with which she’d cupped a cricket to Caitlyn’s ear and laid a hand against her cheek to help her feel the wind. Vi’s chin turned up into the storm, blood on her neck, the lightning that had outlined her in fire. The intensity of her gaze listening to any radio or peering at the monitors in the back of the van, or staring up at those sketches on her bedroom wall — the way she would look at the Hexvane, sometimes, with that strange combination of curiosity and devotion. The same way she would look at her sister, the same way she’d lift her gaze to the storm. The same look that Caitlyn would catch sometimes, Vi’s eyes on her from the driver’s seat or up there on that starry roof, just before they looked away.

As if seeing anything just once, Vi could get inside it, understand it. Know it for what it was.

Her throat tight, Caitlyn says only, “I don’t think you should give up on this.”

Slowly, Vi props herself up on an elbow, head resting on her hand. The other frames Caitlyn’s waist, their bodies in parallel as Vi searches her face. 

There it is, Caitlyn thinks. That look.

They dress for the hospital, quiet, in the light of the small bedside lamp. Vi sips at the lukewarm cup of coffee, on the bed in just her jeans, and smiles. “We still haven’t gotten this part right,” she says. 

Caitlyn, clasping a bra behind her back, feels her mouth lifting up in response. “No?”

“Nope,” Vi agrees. The word is muffled, Vi wrestling a hooded sweatshirt over her head. She catches Caitlyn lazily around the waist as she passes. Her eyes are still tired, but laughter swims in each iris. Looking up at Caitlyn through the messy fan of her hair, she presses her lips to her bare stomach, and Caitlyn’s skin jumps. “Coffee’s terrible,” Vi says. “Bed was no good, and we’re not supposed to leave it. Maybe next time, Kiramman.”

“I admire your commitment to the cause,” Caitlyn says, and steps neatly away from the hands curving up around her backside. 

Those words again. Next time. Walking through a door, those words would be waiting for you at the kitchen table, wouldn’t they? Would be the chair you fall into, the one that knows your shape. Vi speaks them and it’s not just that this has become another thing she’s fluent in. It’s that when she does, and without needing to know what it looks like, exactly, Caitlyn can see it, too. With Vi showing her the way, Caitlyn can follow her through its rooms, can see herself inside it.

Eyes closed, blind faith — Caitlyn would see it all the same.

I’m going with you, Caitlyn had said, because Caitlyn is used to the going. To planes and adrenaline and taking only what you can carry. It’s gotten her this far, this far on her own two feet, but run that hard for that long and you forget how to do it, what might happen if you try to stop.

What would it look like, to stay? 

Vi slips past her in the bathroom, a hand at her back, as Caitlyn finishes washing her face. She plucks a towel from the rack before Caitlyn can ask, Caitlyn silently passing the toothpaste in return. Her reflection watches Vi’s spit into the sink.

“What?” Vi asks. She swipes the back of her hand across her mouth. 

Caitlyn wets her lips. She shakes her head, mutely, and Vi shrugs, sets her toothbrush back down by the taps.

“You don’t have to come,” she says. Her fingers are still tight on the toothbrush, straightening it to the left, then to the right. “He’s — it’ll probably just be a lot of waiting around.”

“No,” Caitlyn says quickly. “No, I want to be there.”

“You sure?”

When Caitlyn nods, Vi’s whole face relaxes, almost a smile. The sky just before the sun rises, Caitlyn thinks, the way you don’t have to see it for the whole morning to take on its shade.

Caitlyn follows her exit in the mirror until she’s standing there, alone with herself. 

Like that, her heart answers simply. It would look just like that.

Caitlyn races after her. Vi is sitting on the opposite bed, tugging her shoes on. “I…” Caitlyn starts, and when Vi looks up she stutters into silence. She hasn’t planned how to say any of this. Caitlyn, who only ever chose her words with care, about to say possibly the most important words of her life with no notes, no edits, no script.

Vi is still waiting, a quizzical line above her nose. 

“I am sure,” Caitlyn blurts. 

Vi’s head cocks. 

“I, I mean,” Caitlyn falters, “I just—” 

Her hands make an impatient gesture in front of her chest. Why is this so difficult? Maybe Powder’s the one who said it best, she thinks. Take the sky off your back. 

“I can set it down, with you,” Caitlyn says in a rush. “And you could set it down with me. It doesn’t — I’m not saying I’d be any good at it, and maybe it won’t work, but maybe I could, maybe we could—”

They’re interrupted by a banging so loud it makes them both jump. The door, she realizes. Vi lifts herself unsteadily from the bed and yanks it open. “The fuck do you—” 

It’s as far as Vi gets before Ekko shoves past her into the room. “Turn on the TV,” he demands, and Caitlyn stretches for the remote. The television comes to life on a channel playing grainy game shows, canned laughter cutting as Caitlyn clicks to the news.

What she sees cuts her breath short. The storm they’d seen last night has only grown — in intensity and in reach. In the radar image on the screen, what seems like the entire upper half of the state is covered in a monstrous, ugly stain, slim yellows and oranges giving way to an everywhere red. The image zooms, an anchor gesturing to the city names that appear in white font. In this spot, the storm has begun to crook like a finger, and Ekko jabs his hand at the screen so hard the lights fizz. “There,” he says. “That’s going to be your hook.”

Vi stoops over his shoulder, her eyes roving across the image. Behind her, Caitlyn tracks the movements of the anchor on the screen, their arm swinging from the hook Ekko’s describing to an area Caitlyn remembers circling on her map.

Vi’s eyes catch on her own, hold.

The direction of their thoughts is the same, headed for that farmhouse with the backyard lab at the end of Academy Lane. 

“I’m going to run our algos,” Ekko is saying to Vi. “Give me the van keys.”

Caitlyn tears the jacket still drying in the closet off the hanger and tosses it to Vi, who digs through the pockets until she finds them. She hesitates. She looks from the keys in her hand to Caitlyn, and finally back to the screen.

“Vi,” Ekko says, his hand still on the doorframe. His voice is soft with concern, but the current of urgency racing through it underscores the fact that their sand has run out, that there is no time. That this is a decision Vi must make now.

Vi’s fist tightens. She looks at Caitlyn, then, and something passes between them that Caitlyn will never be able to explain to anyone else. A shift in the wind, a feeling in the air. Just a feeling. 

We don’t know enough about how it begins, Vi had told her once, but your body would understand before your mind ever did. The hair on your arms would stand on end, your lungs would expand with the scent of rain. 

Your life, orienting itself in the direction it had always been headed, to the change that was racing to meet it.

Vi lifts an eyebrow. You in?

Caitlyn takes a deep breath. Lifts her chin. 

Vi nods, once, then tears her eyes away and throws the keys to Ekko. “Where’s Powder?”

“Finishing up your new toy,” he yells over his shoulder, already running out into the parking lot with his jacket lifted against the rain.

Vi twists back to Caitlyn in confusion. “My what?”

Even in the pouring rain, they can hear the whirring of machinery all the way down the line of rooms, and Caitlyn sends a mental apology both to Ekko and to Powder’s neighbors as Vi pounds on the door. It takes three attempts before the door slivers open, Powder’s round eye appearing in the gap.

“Oh, hey, sis,” she says, swinging it wide. “I thought you were management. Let me tell you, they are not happy with me right now.”

“Hey, Pow,” Vi says, her voice uncertain. She follows Powder into the room and stops short. Behind her, Caitlyn follows her gaze to where Powder is proudly hefting a long tube into her arms, a mess of scrap metal and power tools scattered across the floor and the desk that Powder has repurposed into a workbench. “Yeah, uh. What the fuck,” Vi finishes.

Powder says generously, “Caitlyn had an idea.”

“No,” Caitlyn interjects, “Um, no, this was not my idea. Where did you even get all of this?”

Powder throws her a glare as Vi approaches. Traitor, Caitlyn understands this to say. “My suitcase.” 

They stare at her in a way that communicates just how unsatisfied they are by this answer. “Mostly crap we picked up from the junkyard when we went looking for your truck,” Powder relents. “A few things we got from Benzo’s when we were there, oh — I did have to use one of your lenses for the scope. Sorry,” she says, not sounding it in the slightest.

“You went through my camera bag?” Caitlyn says, her voice rising. 

“Whoopsie.” Power beckons her over, kicking her welding helmet out of the way as she goes. “Come on, look how cool it looks,” she whines. “And even better than cool — it’ll work.”

Vi’s face is taut and impatient, like she’s annoyed she can’t punch her way to understanding what’s happening but would very much like to. “Work how?”

Powder explains what she’d discussed with Caitlyn the night before, Caitlyn’s curiosity pulling her up to stand beside Vi. The barrel is maybe double the width of Caitlyn’s wrist, and when she picks it up, surprisingly light. She examines the chamber — empty — and the small trigger Powder has fashioned before hefting it onto her shoulder. Her repurposed lens floats before her eye, Powder’s face appearing magnified from the other end when Caitlyn goes to look through it. “What do you think?”

Caitlyn sets the launcher back down on the dresser. “Is that one of the cartridges?” she asks, indicating a small gray cylinder standing upright beside the lamp.

“The cartridge,” Powder clarifies, passing it to Caitlyn. “If I had more time and better materials, we could talk reusables, but this bad boy’s a one-hit wonder.”

“The drones are in there?” Vi says, pointing, and when Powder nods the hand moves to rub at her forehead. “How close do we need to get to fire it?” She’s about to ask something else, then cuts herself off. “Actually, forget that, this is crazy, why the hell are we even — we have the Hexvane already.”

“You said that tornado you were chasing died right before it could give you any data,” Powder protests. “Not to mention that the Hexvanes keep keeling over the moment we hit hundred-twenty winds. Neither of those things are an issue when you’ve got one of these.”

Vi doesn’t look convinced, but Caitlyn tucks the launcher under her arm. “We can take it as backup,” she sighs. They don’t have time for this. She’s thinking of that red storm curving above their heads. Over Jayce and Mel and Viktor. If anyone is prepared for this it’s them, Caitlyn knows, but there are others in those neighborhoods that won’t be so lucky. She’s thinking, too, of the squat building at the end of a parking lot and all the people who had gathered inside it, brushed past her on their way to find someone who would offer a shoulder or a cigarette, a drink or a dance. A night, and Caitlyn holds the image of it in her mind, time encased in amber, as if there she can keep it safe.

As they jog back out into the parking lot, Powder rattles off a series of instructions. “No recoil,” she pants, “so, you’re welcome, but a thousand feet out is about your max if you want any accuracy at all. The good news is that you’ll know pretty much immediately if you fucked up because it’ll cover that in about a second. Oh, and make sure Vi’s not behind you like an idiot when you fire, that’ll be a long hospital stay.”

Caitlyn does her best to file each of these notes away as they approach the van. The doors are open, Ekko in the back with his headset on. “I’ve got your meso,” he says to Vi as she hops up to take a look. “If there’s not a tornado there yet, there’s about to be. At least we can take the 44.”

Vi studies the screen. “I think I need to be closer,” she says, shaking her head. “More open space out there, better view.”

“Fewer roads,” Ekko disagrees. “Fewer escape routes. Rain like we’ve had, it’s going to be straight mud, and that’s if it’s not already flooded. You need paved for as long as you can get it.”

Vi taps her lips. “Here.” Her hand traces a right angle over the screen. “Swing over, come right back. Easy.”

Ekko nods, an eyebrow poking up toward his hairline. “Easy,” he repeats, and he and Vi share a tight smile. She claps him on the shoulder, then jumps back out, landing on the asphalt with a splash.

“Let’s load her up,” she says.

Though the rain is slowing, they’re both soaked through by the time they climb into the cab, the tarp-covered Hexvane obscured in the watery rearview. Caitlyn drips from every angle, her elbows and the tip of her nose, vainly attempting to dry her hands on the front of her jeans before unzipping her camera bag. 

As Vi reverses out of the parking space, her hand on the back of Caitlyn’s headrest, Caitlyn snaps a photo.

Vi’s mouth crooks. “Real exciting stuff.”

“You wanted to be cool.” She slips the camera around her neck and zips it inside her jacket. “I figure I’ll have other things to think about when it’s actually exciting.”

A cloud moves in over Vi’s face, even as she nods. “Good point.” 

The roads are empty, this early, even on the outskirts of the city. The only car that passes is a police sedan blaring its sirens as it races down the opposite side of the street. A honk, to their left — Caitlyn looks over in time to see Ekko reaching through the passenger side window to slap the outside of the door with an open hand, waving as they take the next exit.

“They’re not coming with us?” Caitlyn asks.

“He and Pow will set up below it, report on conditions. That’s where they’re going to be most useful. There’s not a lot they can do for us at this point.”

They’re silent until Vi scrawls a hand across the back of her own neck. “Look,” she says finally. “If things get too exciting—”

“No,” Caitlyn says, anticipating this, and Vi exhales a sigh so deep Caitlyn’s surprised it doesn’t fog the windows. 

“You don’t need to do this. You’ve got enough for your story by now, I’m not expecting—” Vi stares out at the wash of their windshield, the wipers beating rhythmically from one side to the other. The light they’re sitting at is a splash of red. “What happened to Vander,” she says instead, soft. “That’s not happening to you.”

The side of Vi’s face is unreadable, shaggy, wet hair pushed back from her forehead, the unhappy slice of her mouth twisting when Caitlyn places a hand on her thigh.

“I’m in this now, too,” she says quietly. “Let me be in it.”

A refraction of green as the light changes, Vi nosing into the next lane as they pass the sign for the interstate.

“This storm isn’t going to be like anything you’ve seen before,” she says finally. “Anything I’ve seen before. It’s massive, high-precip, and you don’t usually find a supercell buddying up with a squall line like this. This front’s been sitting on us for days and the storm’s not getting any weaker. An outbreak sequence like this is just…” Vi shakes her head. “A tornado’s never a sure thing but I’d put my money on one today.”

Caitlyn digests this for a moment. “So what’s our plan?”  

Vi’s gaze jumps quickly to her and back to the road. She tries to hide a smile by folding her lips. “I’m going to try to get us right up in that inflow notch,” she says. “That’ll put us where the action is, but if we’re not fast enough, getting out’s going to be intense,” Vi says. “Chasers call it the bear’s cage for a reason. It’s going to be all about what we see on the ground and we won’t be able to see much. We’ll just have to act and do it fast.”

Vi angles into the left lane, the speedometer creeping up. “What I don’t want,” she continues, “Is for this storm to get too far ahead of us. Then we end up in that RFD we talked about, and that’s the last place I want to be when it’s taking in winds like this. You don’t have to be in the path itself to get smacked in the face by a hundred miles an hour of debris from all the wind that’s being pulled into the storm.”

A dizzy sensation, suddenly, beneath their wheels. The car lifts, the slickness of the road drifting them across the white line. “Shit,” Vi says. “Shit, shit.” 

The truck begins to arc between the lanes. Vi locks the steering wheel straight, her teeth gritted as she eases up on the accelerator. Fountains of water fan up outside their windows, carrying the truck toward the side of the road. It evens out just before they tip off the edge, and it isn’t until the tires find traction again, chewing into the road with a mechanical grunt, that Caitlyn’s grip on the door handle loosens.

“You alright?” Vi asks, checking her mirrors. No one is behind them on the road, and out the back of the cab Caitlyn can see the sunken area of the highway that has flooded behind them, several inches of brown water rippling under the rain. 

“Fine,” Caitlyn says, though her heart is racing in her chest. “Hexvane looks okay, too.”

“Yeah,” Vi pants. “God, I hate that feeling. Give me wind over water and mud any day.”

Caitlyn looks behind them again. “Probably not the last we’ve seen of any of those.”

“Nope,” Vi agrees. She says, suddenly, “Atlas.”

Caitlyn blinks. “Pardon?”

Vi puts her hands back on the wheel. “Good name for a dog.”

The words make Caitlyn freeze, then send a warm flood through her bloodstream. “Seriously?” she smiles. “You’re doing this now?”

Vi shrugs, also smiling. “Don’t want to die without making my intentions very clear. And wasn’t that what you were trying to do this morning?”

Caitlyn flushes. So she had been understood.  

They’re interrupted by a distant flash in the dark sky to their left. A crack, loud enough that they both jump. The engine rumbles as the arrow behind the steering wheel begins to climb back up, drops of water racing each other across the windows.

They make it to the turn, a road that serpentines west before sloping to the south. The advancing edge of the storm is visible outside Caitlyn’s passenger side window, now, a huge, dark line falling like a veil between them and the rest of the world. It swells with a heaviness Caitlyn can feel in the air even from here, the fatal, deep gray of an infection about to burst. 

But ahead — ahead is as stunning as it is terrible. The storm moves in time lapse, arms reaching and receding, so that it isn’t the same thing from one moment to the next. A dance, led by the invisible wind. Beyond the wall of precipitation to the north, the sky has a harsh and sickly lightness, stark against the contours of the cloud unfurling so far into the sky she can’t see where it ends. 

Caitlyn steadies the awe trembling in her hands, lifts the camera up to her eye.

“That’s your flanking line,” Vi says, pointing toward a curve of clouds to the southwest. “Ekko’s hook, right where he said it would be. Couldn’t get ourselves a better approach than this.”

The electricity isn’t just in the storm. It’s here, too, Vi looking at her with a brightness that, seeing it now, Caitlyn realizes she’s been missing ever since she saw it during that first chase. 

It steadies her, that light. And it strikes her, too, like flint, like lightning reaching for the ground. A week ago she’d had no idea what it would feel like when an eerie dawn turned those gray eyes clear as glass, clear as the certainty that has found them here, in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

A flash of Vi’s teeth. “Get ready,” she says, and they set their sights on the storm.

At the point where the road zips west again, Vi slows the truck and pulls off to the shoulder. There are two abandoned barns to their left, weathered gray wood sagging around absent windows and places the roof has caved in. Another barn is hazy with distance and rain behind them. They’re the only structures for miles, and when Caitlyn steps from the truck she can feel it, that there is nothing but wind between them and the storm.

A dirt road meanders through the property up ahead, but there are places where it's turned to sucking mud, obscured by puddles that shiver in the breeze, deceptively shallow.

“I think we’ve gotta get out there,” Vi says, her eyes shielded under the flat of her hand. “I don’t want to risk it veering off and missing us.”

The truck protests, but with coaxing Vi creeps it slowly down onto the dirt road. Every bump jams Caitlyn’s ribs into her throat, her arms splayed between the dash and her door. Their progress is painfully slow, especially as Caitlyn practices what Vi taught her to do, focusing on the shape of a tree in the far distance. The dark pipe at the heart of the storm appears stationary, scrawling neither left nor right across her field of vision. It only seems to get bigger, its bulk stretching in every direction. Which means, Caitlyn knows — a pothole so deep bouncing out of it cracks her neck against her headrest — that it’s headed straight for them. 

Caitlyn looks back the way they’d come. Far in the distance, light, like the end of a tunnel, and she realizes with a cold shock just how dark it’s gotten in a matter of minutes. “We need to be able to get back out,” Caitlyn says.

“I know, Cait,” Vi grits out, hardly moving her mouth. The car jams to a stop, their wheels sputtering underneath them. Vi revs the engine and it shrieks, a high-pitched sound that makes all of Caitlyn’s nerves stand on end. 

“Shit,” Vi says, launching herself out of the car. “Take the wheel,” she calls behind her, and Caitlyn scrambles across the bench. Vi muscles her jacket off her shoulders and disappears below the front of the truck. When she pops back up, her arms are coated in mud and grass and her jacket is nowhere to be seen. 

Vi slaps the hood. “Go,” she grunts, stepping back, and Caitlyn does, easing the pedal down. With a wrenching pop, the truck breaks free, the suspension protesting weakly as Caitlyn hits the brake.

Vi opens the door again. “You’re right, that’s enough,” she says. There’s a black streak running from beneath one eye to her jaw. “Let’s set up and get the hell out of here.”

They’re in the middle of the field. It’s deserted, silent. No birds rise from the yellow grass, and the wind has died. A kind of quiet where Caitlyn is aware, suddenly, of the rise and fall of her chest, like someone has dialed the world down low.

Vi sweeps the tarp away from the Hexvane. She lays her hand against the gleaming surface. “One last shot,” she murmurs, and Caitlyn can tell by the volume that it wasn’t meant for her so much as it's a prayer, offered to the device itself. To the storm. 

They set the Hexvane up on the flattest ground they can find. Vi drives each spike into the mud with her boots, her face contorted with effort, but the ground is so soft it’s almost soupy. 

She pauses to brace herself against the Hexvane, her boot propped on one of the metal legs, and stares behind her into the storm. 

Their clothes have begun to ripple with wind. A scent in the air, the same heaviness as cut grass. Bursts of light originate from the deep anvil overhead, a pattern so constant it could be gunfire or fireworks.

Caitlyn takes another photo before tucking the camera back inside her jacket. She finds Vi’s arm, gives it a squeeze. They take one last, long look into the cavernous dark, and then Vi says, “Let’s go.”

Vi turns the key in the ignition, reversing beside the Hexvane. The rearview could be opaque, a wall of slate gray above a narrow strip of grass, and Vi maneuvers as fast as she can back toward the barns. They’re cresting down a gradual hill when something plinks against the windshield. 

Caitlyn is alert, listening. Another object rams against the windshield, and Caitlyn catches a glimpse of it as it recoils away. Pebble-sized, like a small white stone.

“Was that—”

Before she can finish her sentence, hailstones begin to thunder off of the truck, a noise so sudden and intense they could be driving through television static, in the pause between radio stations. Visibility shrinks to a few feet ahead of their headlights, the barns an amorphous shape in the distance. Vi drives as fast as she dares, leaning up against the wheel.

Vi says something that Caitlyn can’t hear over the ringing in her ears, just the shape of her mouth moving to Caitlyn’s left. She’s about to ask her to repeat herself when there’s a crash to her right that sends them both hunched and flinching away, the car squealing to a halt.

Caitlyn opens her eyes. Small chips of glass litter her lap, and when she looks up there’s a hole in her window, cracks spidering across the surface in a ring.

“Are you okay?” Vi asks breathlessly. She twists the wheel, but nothing happens. Her thigh tenses as she presses the pedal to the floor, but all that happens is a shrieking they can barely hear over the sound of the storm. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

This time, she and Caitlyn throw open their doors together. Wind nearly throws Caitlyn’s back into her face. She catches it against her shoulder with a wince, arm raised against the hail spiking down from above. She can see it all around her feet, stark white. They’re maybe an inch in diameter but they sting as they fall, small whips when they strike her face and hands. The gusts buffet against her ears as she struggles around to the front of the truck, but in the beam of the headlights, Vi catches her by the arms.

“Leave it,” she shouts. She shoves Caitlyn ahead of her up the hill. “Cover your head and get to the barn,” she yells in Caitlyn’s ear, and Caitlyn raises her arms high as she sprints toward the nearest gray shape. They’re running into the wind, now, and it tears at her hair and sleeves as she runs. She keeps her head down, watching her boots flatten the grass as she fights up the hill, both of them slipping on hail as they make for shelter.

The nearest barn is little more than a shed, and if it ever had a door it’s long gone by now, just a dim mouth yawning open to swallow them. Caitlyn ducks up against the inside wall, planting her palms on her thighs as she fights to catch her breath. On her heels, Vi skids around with a hand on the doorframe, wheels to peer back out. Her other hand steadies itself against Caitlyn’s waist, and her eyes dart from the storm outside to her face. They track from her lips to her forehead, widening in concern.

“You’re bleeding,” she says, hushed. Her fingertips pad against Caitlyn’s temple — the scrape from yesterday reopened against her scalp. Caitlyn goes to touch it herself, her fingers coming away stained with red.

“I’m fine,” Caitlyn says, waving her off. Her watch is broken, too, she realizes, catching sight of her wrist. The face is shattered and still. She tries to refocus, shaking out her arms, which ache from the onslaught of hail. “What do we do now?”

Vi angles back around the open door. “Hail’s just going to get bigger,” she says grimly. “But I can’t see a damn thing, I don’t even know how close—”

There’s an ominous creaking above their heads. Vi falls instantly silent, lifting her hand to Caitlyn in a listen gesture. Old hay shivers across the dirt floor, hail continuing to ping against the ground.

“I don’t trust the structural integrity of this one bit,” Vi says. She nods at the other barn, maybe a quarter mile up the road through the foggy gray curtain. “But I know that one’s got a cellar.”

“How can you tell?” Caitlyn asks, incredulous.

“Just trust me,” Vi says, and then another shudder runs through the wooden slats. A cobweb in the corner above Caitlyn’s head billows like a flag before it goes sailing into the dark, and then the sound of the hailstones changes. A shattering, and when they look outside, now, they’re fist-sized spheres that explode into pieces against the ground like shrapnel. Farther out, they pummel the truck so intensely the metal is pocked, the passenger window nothing but a massive hole between shreds of glass still clinging to the frame, and beyond that—

“No,” Vi says, “no, please, no—”

In the far distance, with the black center of the storm rearing up above it like the head of a snake, the upper half of the Hexvane is bent at an angle, broken like an arm and shaking under the force of the ice raining from the sky. 

As they watch, a hailstone crunches directly against the top half and knocks it loose, bits of metal spiraling toward the ground. The force of the blow pulls the device onto its side, the base sinking unevenly into the mud. 

They stare as the upper half wavers back and forth across the ground in the wind like the needle of a broken compass. An expression on Vi’s face, when Caitlyn drags her eyes to it, that comes from another place, another time. 

Vi, emerging into the light, hugging her shoulder. Looking around for a house that wasn’t, calling out for her parents. Reaching for her sister.

“Powder’s launcher,” Caitlyn manages, her voice shaking. “It’s still in the truck.”

“No.” Vi says it so firmly it rings in the air. A desperation in her eyes as fierce and total as if it’s the only feeling left. “This is bad, Cait.”

“I can fix this,” Caitlyn protests, but Vi’s arm plants itself on the wall beside her head.

“We’re getting into that cellar and we’re praying it doesn’t bring the whole barn down on top of us, alright?” The words are clipped and intense, but her hand shakes when she lays it against Caitlyn’s cheek. “Nothing, nothing is worth losing you. You hear me?”

Caitlyn’s lip trembles. She knows what she needs to do. “You won’t,” she says, and fisting her hand in Vi’s shirt, she drags her in by the mouth. 

Everything, all her trust and her fear and her sadness, that this is what it’s come to, that no matter how many times she’s stooped to carry it, not once has this world gone easily upon Vi’s shoulders — she takes all of it and hopes Vi can feel it everywhere they touch, and then she sets it down.

Vi breaks the kiss. “On three, we run, and you don’t look back,” Vi says. She’s so close that their lips brush when she speaks.

Caitlyn grabs her wrist. “Wait,” she says.

She wants to see them one more time, and Vi doesn’t keep her waiting.

There. That beautiful gray, tinted with blue. 

It’s exactly what you’d see when it’s rained for a goddamn week straight, the world underwater, your life and everything in it wrung-out as a rag. And then that morning comes when you step out onto your porch and look up through the watery sky and inhale, inhale all the way down to your bare feet, and you open your eyes and realize that the worst is finally over.

She smiles and hopes it doesn't tremble. “Atlas is a great name.”

Vi huffs, something that, on another day, would be a laugh. “One,” she counts, tugging Caitlyn up beside her at the entrance. They stare at the fall of the hail, the roar of the wind, at the end of the world. “Two—”

“Three.” With a final squeeze, Caitlyn drops Vi’s hand and sprints for the truck.

“Cait!” Vi shouts behind her, the sound torn away long before it reaches her.

A steam engine’s rhythm hisses in her ears. Her vision narrows down to the truck still being bombarded with hail, hail that pelts against the forearms crossed over her head. One catches her on the shoulder as she approaches the truck and she stumbles into it, wrenching the door open so hard that white pain shoots up through her arm.

She finds the launcher safe and intact under the backseat where she’d left it, doesn’t bother closing the door behind her as she races further into the storm. 

The tornado is nearly impossible to see through the thick wall of precipitation that precedes it, but she knows it’s there. Everything Vi had taught her flashes neon in her brain in the same way pain does, the same urgency, and the closer she gets the more it screams at her in a voice with the same cadence as Vi’s — to look at the rotation of the clouds, to find the point where they converge, and as Caitlyn does, she sees it: the vortex billowing up from the ground like a stairway to the sky, like a nightmare, like something from a holy book about the end of days.

She sinks to her knees and loads the canister, wheeling the launcher onto her shoulder. She smears her wet hair out of her eyes, water dripping from her chin as she lowers her face to the scope. A thousand feet, Powder had said. She glances behind her, confirms, with a distant pang, that no one is there.

Caitlyn doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t blink. Her body waits, counting, staring down the black barrel of the end.

Come on, Caitlyn thinks. A memory: hunting with her parents, the first time she’d sat, still and waiting, waiting for a deer to step into her sights. Come to me.

And then it does, the funnel roaring into view. Caitlyn lifts her finger to the trigger. She waits, a few vital seconds longer.

And then she exhales. Fires.

Without recoil, it’s hard to tell that anything’s happened, the subtle shift of weight, a sudden heat at her back the only thing that indicates the gun has fired at all. The round is long gone by the time she finishes her breath, disappearing somewhere in the cloud of debris. 

It worked. It had to have worked. She hopes, distantly, that somewhere in that van Powder and Ekko are looking at their screens and seeing them light up like the fourth of July.

There’s no time to feel anything as Caitlyn hauls herself up by her hands and knees, fistfuls of grass coming away from her palms as she stumbles to standing and takes off for the barn. But the tornado is faster. Caitlyn risks a look behind her when she’s almost to the car: it’s barreling down in her wake, a torrent of sound curling violently around and in on itself with such power it makes her, briefly, lose control of her limbs. 

She goes down in a heap, her thigh landing on something sharp. Wind punches from her chest, but there isn’t time to stop. She rolls to her feet, grunting when sees red spreading from a tattered slash in her jeans, a blood-spattered rock on the ground. 

An icy hand draws a line of fear down her spine as Caitlyn wonders what it would be like for the tornado to catch up to her here. No more chances, no more time. Destroyed by something so much bigger than you, so much more powerful than you could ever be alone.

At least she’s put up a fair fight, she thinks, preparing to run again, a burn hot and bright in her chest.

She’d learned it from the best.

A sudden hand levers Caitlyn’s arm across a broad pair of shoulders and pushes her upright. It grasps her own so tightly Caitlyn gets the sensation it’s trying to reach inside her, take hold of something impossible to touch.

Vi, her eyes looking wildly into Caitlyn’s face, secures her other arm around Caitlyn’s waist and presses them forward. “I’ve got you,” she yells in Caitlyn’s ear, and together they race toward the barn.

There’s a set of doors angled into the ground, just like Vi said there would be. Vi sets her down to throw them open, concrete stairs disappearing into a pitch black square. She levers herself down inside, turning to help hand Caitlyn in behind her. 

Before Vi pulls the door shut, she gives the storm a last, long look, and then the darkness swallows them whole.

Vi covers Caitlyn’s body with her own in the back corner of the small room, both of their hands braced above their necks. 

“I’ve got you,” Vi says, again and again, the words mouthed against her hairline. In the utter darkness, with so little else for her senses to latch onto, Caitlyn can feel the way she trembles in each one of the limbs caging Caitlyn close.

Caitlyn curls up tighter and tries to focus on the rhythm of Vi’s breathing as the roar of the freight train hurtling toward them overhead intensifies. In, out as it cracks through the shed, wood splintering apart like kindling. In, out as the ground under her knees begins to shake. In, out as the barn beside them gives way, the building buckling, a thunder like hooves above their heads, like the storm is trampling the world beneath it. 

It’s no more than seconds, but the seconds forget they’re part of time and fall out of it, get lost on their way back in. In, out. She keeps time by Vi, now. The slow expansion of the chest against her spine, the air against her cheek. 

In, out.

In, out.

Six breaths, and it’s over.

Vi lifts her head first, a subtle shift in the body above her. She listens, and then a warm palm covers the globe of Caitlyn’s shoulder.

When Vi throws the door open, Caitlyn has to slant a hand up in front of her face, it’s so bright. Vi tucks a shoulder beneath her arm again, and carefully, they hand each other up into the daylight.

It takes Caitlyn’s eyes a minute to adjust. For a minute she thinks it’s the sun, like it’s found them again at last, and then she registers the sensation of rain falling on her skin, over her head and her hands. 

The tornado is gone but the tail of the storm slouches in its wake, trailing along like its heart isn’t in it, as if it means to apologize for what it follows. It offers them gentle rain and this pocket of stillness, light wind playing through the ends of Vi’s hair as her gaze sweeps over the space where both barns used to be. Caitlyn squints into the distance, her arm still tight around Vi’s shoulders, the other hand flat against Vi’s waist to steady herself. The Hexvane is long gone, carried who knows where, but, miraculously, when the grass parts under the wind, Caitlyn can see the truck. It lies on its side, its windows broken, the metal battered, but it’s there. The lights are still on.

They pick their way carefully down to it. Vi reaches through the shattered passenger window, scrabbling through the glass for the stereo microphone. Sitting on a large stone in the ground, Caitlyn watches Vi lean against the truck, the cord stretched up to her fist.

“Powder?” Her voice is shot, and she has to try again, swallowing and letting her eyes fall shut. “Come in, Powder, Ekko.”

They wait. Cool air, against Caitlyn’s closed eyelids. The storm, blown away on those southwesterly winds. The same ones that had carried her here. The same ones that could carry someone elsewhere, if they needed to go, and the same ones that could bring them home.

A crackle of static. 

Caitlyn opens her eyes.

There’s a sound on the other end of the line that Caitlyn doesn’t register as laughter until Vi turns to meet her gaze, and Caitlyn finds it there, not lost: a smile overtaking her face, as sure as the sun.

Chapter Text

Oklahoma,
June 1997

The radio in the kitchen is on, and the soft notes of a country song escape through an open window to blue sky. Mid-verse, the singer is interrupted by a soft click, and a series of three short tones pierces the silence that follows. An automated voice begins reading through a pre-recorded message that starts: This is the National Weather Service.

On the porch just outside, Caitlyn’s pen pauses. 

It’s a gorgeous, sunny afternoon, a hot breeze playing through the stray hairs at the base of her neck. She undoes the clip, letting her hair fall to the middle of her back, and turns her face in the direction of the wind. Not a cloud in the sky, but Caitlyn knows enough about storms, by now, to not be fooled.

She regathers and fixes her hair in place, then pushes back from the table. “Come, Atlas,” she says to her feet. The dog lying under the chair yawns, turning round eyes up beseechingly to Caitlyn before stretching and trotting after her into the house.

The kitchen is empty, silent but for the radio and the faint toll of windchimes outside. Caitlyn pauses in front of the fridge, skimming from the grocery list pinned beneath a magnet to the post-it notes stuck directly to the surface. Question marks scribbled above an angular diagram, an answering doodle of Atlas taking a shit — Caitlyn wrinkles her nose. The design phase must be going well, then. 

There’s a photograph in the corner, five faces grinning into the camera, and another one below it of two figures, their backs to the lens. They lean into each other beside a blue truck, their attention on something in the distance.

A magazine clipping, too, the page fluttering as Caitlyn pulls open the door and reaches for the pitcher inside:

But she insists that the answer to problems created by this lack of care is simple: to care more than they don’t. “My parents died trying to make this place better,” she says. Most comfortable behind the wheel of a truck heading into a storm at ninety miles an hour, the self-professed adrenaline junkie admits she’s never been good at sitting in one place, with a habit of bouncing her knee when she’s nervous or impatient or bored. But, as we talk during a brief break in relief efforts following the June 1996 outbreak that killed three and caused tens of millions of dollars in damages, Lanes is clear-eyed and completely focused. “I learned early that if I’m going to put my life on the line for anything, it should be something that matters.”

Her chase partners agree, and the refrain I heard over and over again from the volunteers I spoke to that day was, “We look out for each other.” Neighbors cooked and shared meals, cleared debris and watched one another’s children. They cried and laughed together and, pulling instruments from battered cases, they even sang. I had never and have not since seen so much loss visited upon a single place — but in a career spent reporting on the worst of humanity, neither have I seen any clearer proof of the best of it.

Though there is evidence for it in Violet Lanes. Atmospheric scientists at NOAA acknowledged that the death toll for what has been deemed a once-in-a-decade event was unusually low for storm sequences of this power and scope, thanks in part to early warning systems fed by data from Lanes and her team — a team that now includes her partner (and my former colleague at The Piltovan), freelance journalist Caitlyn Kiramman, who met Lanes while consulting the latter as a source.

Lanes is not immediately forthcoming, hesitant to talk about herself beyond her storm-spotting techniques, but from the backyard of the home they purchased here in Oklahoma last month, Kiramman explains that what initially drew her to Lanes’ case was the same thing that drew her to any other: her story. “I wanted to understand the truth of what was happening at SIL Co.,” Kiramman says, “but whenever I approach a story I’m most interested in the people that truth affects — on a broader scale, where we’re talking about communities, but also at the individual level, with Vi and her sister.”

She continues, “I saw how they were failed in countless ways by systems that should have protected them. But I also saw how Vi refused to let that stop her.” Kiramman provided her initial primary source documentation and recordings to me for the purposes of this article, but chose not to report on it herself out of concerns that a conflict of interest would damage the credibility of the story. “I didn’t want our relationship to be a distraction from that truth,” she explains, though she admits that their personal connection has only served to deepen her appreciation for the traits she admires in Lanes professionally. 

“Vi loves chasing,” Kiramman says with a smile, “and I love watching her do it. The only thing I think either of us like more than getting to do this together is getting to come home that way, too.”

Caitlyn pours herself a glass of water and replaces the pitcher, drinking it in one go at the sink as she waits for the warning to repeat. Outside the window, she notices that the backyard is empty.

The tornado she and Vi encountered that day had gone on to be rated an EF4 once the damage was assessed — but there had been no injuries, no deaths. Sitting in the van only slightly to the south, watching the storm move up over Vi and Caitlyn’s location, Ekko and Powder described what happened on their monitors after Caitlyn fired the launcher as “a supernova on steroids,” every screen lighting up at once. The drones did their job, feeding information about the storm’s path and intensity to them in real-time, and in coordination with other spotters on the ground they’d been responsible for the activation of early warning systems in ten counties.

Though: the outbreak hadn’t stopped there. 

For three days, they’d chased tornadoes across the state, stopping at gas stations only to fuel up and wash their faces beneath fluorescent yellow lights. Without either the vanes or the drones to work with, they were forced to act as spotters only — reporting on conditions as they encountered them, relaying what they knew back to news stations and emergency personnel. Of the nineteen storms they went after during the sequence that resulted in tornadoes, none had the chance to become killers.

But you couldn’t be in two places at once, and Caitlyn hasn’t forgotten it yet: a diner somewhere near the northern border, Vi in ripped sleeves and sleepy eyes, laughing in the middle of some story with a cup of coffee halfway to her lips when the news alert flashed on the television above the bar. 

The way that cup hovered, suspended in time, slow curls of heat rising toward the ceiling.

The state had wanted to honor her at a ceremony, when it was all said and done — for “extraordinary acts of public service,” the invitation said. But Vi looked up from the shiny cardstock in disbelief. 

They were still living in temporary housing, then, a dark basement apartment with few windows and only two bedrooms, which meant that, having drawn the short straw, she and Vi were ending every night on the fold-out couch in the living room (Caitlyn suspected Powder of rigging this). There had still been debris on the ground, still whole towns without power. The gashes on Caitlyn’s thigh and over Vi’s arm were still holding together with stitches.

Vi declined in terms that would later, retelling the story over dinner, make Mel drop her face into her hands, and then she immediately jumped into restoration efforts. 

She and Caitlyn would exit their rental each morning (a little flushed, straightening clothes and tugging fingers through their hair, since it seemed to be the only place they could get any privacy at all in those days), greet Ekko (busy, but never too busy to call them out for being late again), get their separate assignments and go their separate ways.

It would be hours before Caitlyn would see her again, especially as the days dragged on — Vi working longer, later, until she was taking the last bus back, stumbling through the door half-asleep and half-herself.

Caitlyn woke, more than once, to Vi staring at the ceiling, her eyes sleepless, haunted. One night, a nightmare so deep it took every light in the living room to drag her out of it. Caitlyn saying Vi’s name, over and over again.

Later, when her breathing slowed, when Caitlyn let go of her only to flip the switches before climbing back in in the dark: “What if I’d made a different choice?” 

Vi asked it of the space between their bodies, not meeting Caitlyn’s gaze.

Caitlyn’s hand folded over hers on the pillow and squeezed. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Vi still hadn’t looked at her, choosing instead to rotate onto her back, to stare again at the ceiling. “I just don’t know why I can’t shake this one. People die, it sucks but it happens. I should be used to it by now.”

“No,” Caitlyn said, and rolled to stare at the ceiling with her. “You shouldn’t.”

Caitlyn ducks into the hallway leading off of the main room. Vander’s guest room is empty — he’d left before the sun was up; not enough hours in the day, as he’d been saying for months, and especially now with the reopen little more than 24 of them away — but she can hear voices and low music behind the closed door to Ekko and Powder’s room. She knocks.

A muffled series of footsteps, and then the door clicks open. Caitlyn smoothly schools her face. 

The room is a wreck, boxes heaped with unfolded clothes and cosmetics next to the closet, a stack of CDs on the desk so tall and precarious it’s probably breaking a few building codes. Ekko returns to his spot on the floor and the shoeboxes he’s stacking deliberately along one wall. 

On the bed, Powder’s concentrating on her sketchbook. What looks like almost every colored pencil she owns is lined up in rainbow order on the duvet beside her, though she’s given up halfway through the aquas, or — no, there the rest of it is on the floor. A Fishbones casualty, most likely, though the culprit is currently curled into a sweet orange circle at Powder’s feet.

“How’s packing?” Caitlyn asks neutrally.

Without looking up, Powder says, “Right about now Ekko’s wishing he’d lost everything he owns, too.”

Ekko glares at her, then switches two of the boxes, satisfying some cryptic pattern known only to him. “I just don’t know where it all came from,” he mutters. ”There’s no way I had all of this in the apartment. I think my shit is multiplying.” 

Ekko had moved in when his lease ended earlier that summer, and Caitlyn knows from the single trip it took, his belongings wedged neatly in the back of the new truck, that he’s not nearly the pack rat Powder is. Nevermind the head-start she was given when the house was flattened. 

Caitlyn’s eyes stray to the boxes by the closet. “I don’t think Ekko’s responsible for the—” she pauses to count, “—thirteen boxes of hair dye.”

“What are you, a cop?” Powder asks in disgust, flipping her sketchbook closed. 

Caitlyn isn’t fazed. Powder had locked herself in her room for an entire day when the first manila envelopes came, two thick packets emblazoned with Stanford’s logo, and the whole application process before that had been an ordeal all its own, Powder ricocheting wildly between manic excitement and dramatic, Oscar-worthy displays of existential despair. That Ekko was applying with her only seemed to spike her anxiety, not ease it the way Vi had hoped, and Powder and Vi ended more than a few nights shouting at each other across the then-unfinished living room the closer the calendar crept to the deadline.

“Everybody who goes to college sucks,” she moaned, staring down at the essay Caitlyn had marked for her in red pen. “I don’t want to suck.”

“I went to college,” Caitlyn pointed out, and Powder gestured wildly. 

“You see?!”

Vi hadn’t understood what the problem was. “She got in once, she’s going to do it again.” Leaning against the kitchen wall, toying with the cord of the phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear, she asked Vander, “Was it like this the first time?” and Caitlyn heard the laughter on the other end from the opposite side of the room.

The morning after a blowout so spectacular Vi and Powder had refused to speak to each other at breakfast, Caitlyn tossed Powder the keys. “Help me pick out paint for the kitchen.” 

This was a gamble in more ways than one, but Powder was slightly less sulky than usual as she flipped through swatches at the hardware store, and though Caitlyn was prepared to put her foot down about any electric pinks, the colors Power settled on were fresh, smart — a light blue for the kitchen that Powder said would pull the sky down through the windows, a pale green for the nook where the table would go.

“I like a new coat of paint,” Caitlyn said, unsubtly, as she walked them to the bakery down the street. “A fresh start can be a great thing.”

Powder narrowed her eyes at Caitlyn like she couldn’t believe she was that particular brand of stupid. But, sitting at a bistro table, she stared over Caitlyn’s shoulder and picked at her muffin until, finally, she dipped her chin and said, quietly, “What if Ekko and I don’t get into the same place?”

“I don’t think that’s very likely,” Caitlyn said. When Powder’s shoulders deflated, she added, quickly, “But I suppose you could write letters, do phone calls. You could visit. And sometimes—” she hesitated. “It’s good, learning how to be on your own.”

Powder considered this in silence. “I’m different, now. Than I was.” Caitlyn waited, listening. “What if I do this and it’s not right and I’m miserable, or what if — what if I change again?”

Caitlyn sipped at her tea before stating, gently, that this was both unavoidable and the point. “And if you’re not happy there or not happy with who you are, then,” she shrugged. “You come home. And we’ll figure it out again.”

On a ledge by the door was a cork board covered in flyers for events in the city, free stickers for local bands and shops. A paper with a fringe of strips along the bottom advertised a new counseling center; Caitlyn tore one free for herself and handed another to Powder. “Your sister’s been talking to someone,” she said, and left it at that, the bell ringing as they stepped into the morning, and though it hadn’t been perfect after that it had been easier.

On that day in March when the two identical envelopes arrived with a California address in the corner, Powder had actually hugged her, right there in that blue-painted kitchen.

(Though: they’d both decided on OSU. “Why go halfway across the country to do the research I want to do when I can do it right here?” Ekko argued.

Less inspiringly, Powder said, “I’m just really into Pistol Pete.”)

“The truck’s gone,” Caitlyn says. “Did Vi tell either of you where she was headed?”

Powder shrugs, and Ekko shakes his head. Caitlyn leaves them to it, frowning as she makes her way up the stairs toward the bedroom she shares with Vi.

It was the light that had convinced Vi, despite her misgivings, to take the bedroom on the second floor. When they’d first walked through the house, there were places the stairs had long given way — you could look through the holes and see straight through to the rooms below. 

But choosing their way carefully up the steps, they lifted their faces to golden light coming in through an absence of roof, from the front windows stretching almost the width of the room. Sun fell through slats in the walls the way light hangs in a church, dust motes rising through the beams, and they looked at each other and decided, unspoken, that whatever life they built, they would build it here.

Much of the house had been in the same shape as the stairs or worse, but they’d been so eager to get out of that terrible basement that they’d spread a mattress over a pallet downstairs and gotten to work. 

It was July, scorchingly hot as they stripped wallpaper and tossed ancient, crumbling tile into a series of rented dumpsters. But Vi had a vision, bought one of those pun-a-day calendars at the dollar store and flipped through it until she hit November. She smirked.

“Hey, Cait.” Kneeling beside a pile of musty carpet, Caitlyn dragged her wrist through the sweat across her forehead, raised an eyebrow to indicate she was listening. “You hold the tur-key to my heart.”

Thanksgiving, they’d decided. If they could get Vander and Powder moved in by Thanksgiving, get it livable, they could take their time on the rest. 

Caitlyn had become used to the routine: “How much does a pirate charge for an ear piercing?” Vi would say, passing her a cup of coffee in the morning. “A buccaneer.”

Or: Vi taking out a sheet of drywall with a sledgehammer and poking her head through the gap: “What happens when you eat aluminum foil?” Caitlyn sighed as Vi grinned. “You sheet metal.”

And: “How many flies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Vi handed one down from the top of the ladder and snickered long before she ever reached the punchline. “Two, but how they hell did they get in there?” 

A small, annoying part of Caitlyn wanted to climb up there and kiss the laughter off her face, and the rest of her failed to resist it.

Everyone had told her it would be difficult. Well — Grayson had implied it, setting up a question, mid-interview over beers in the backyard just days after Caitlyn and Vi moved in. Gently noting how single-minded Caitlyn could be, sometimes, when she got an idea in her head. That she was the kind to look before leaping, but that she’d always leap feet-first. “You’re not afraid that it’s too fast?”

And then there were her parents. Caitlyn had finally steeled herself enough to call them a week after they’d gotten the landline installed. “I’m staying here for a while,” she said at first, and then shook her head at herself. “For good,” and stirring a saucepan over the stove, Vi bit down around a smile.

There were a good number of questions, and Caitlyn did her best to answer them honestly and patiently. “Her name is Vi. Yes, I’m sure. She’s a storm chaser, it’s — it means she tracks severe weather to gather real-time meteorological data. Yes, kind of like a scientist.” Her mother was somewhat mollified. “No, she didn’t go to school.” Less mollified. “You’re being elitist, not everyone needs—”

This continued until Caitlyn’s mother exhausted herself, and her father asked instead, warmly, “How did you meet?”

“I was working on a story.” Caitlyn leaned against the cabinets they’d installed yesterday, reaching for the glass of wine Vi had poured for her silently about ten minutes into the conversation. She sipped, rolling it and the words she was about to say on her tongue. “I think it might make a good book.”

When Caitlyn hung up at last, the shadows were long outside. There was a chill in the air — fall would arrive soon, evenings that would slant from dusty oranges into deep indigos, and afternoons porous with gold. 

She was going to miss it, she realized. The utter endlessness of that summer. For the rest of her life, she knew, that first warm day of the season would send her back, back to those days: the bar, the platform on the lake, the field by the highway or the passenger seat of Vi’s car, feeling the expansion of the air in her chest until it had become impossible to ignore. Aware that something was changing, that she was, that something was waiting for her up the road the way the sun does when you head east before dawn. That it would reveal itself to her only in time.

But the realization was warm. Sometimes you say goodbye to something knowing that’s the only way you’ll get to see it again, and like a penny flipped from your thumb there was another side to it, too, a curl of anticipation at everything she didn’t yet know: if the tip of Vi’s nose would turn red in the cold, if she would steal covers at night. How she’d look shivering in the copper glow of a cigarette, of streetlamps when snow reflects them back against her face. If she’s the kind to dip her face toward new tulips, returning for spring.

(Yes.)
(Yes.)
(Beautiful.)
(Yes.)

Too fast was for everyone who’d never raced a supercell up the 35. To the question, Caitlyn shrugged. “I like fast.”

Which wasn’t to say there weren’t times that the engine stalled. Times that, looking across the cab, you wondered who the hell you’d strapped yourself in with.

When Caitlyn got an idea in her head, she found it hard to let it go. When she thought she was right, it could be hard to convince her otherwise if she hadn’t already decided that she was open to being convinced. At her best she was curious, independent, determined. At her worst, superior and inflexible. 

Caitlyn had lived with herself long enough to know all of this, but throw someone else in the mix, watch that dial crank to its extremes. Vi got the worst of her in a way no one else did, but Vi would say that she gave as good as she got — patient except when she wasn’t, disorganized in a way that set Caitlyn’s teeth on edge, a tendency to assume the worst. When you’ve had to fight for everything, Caitlyn figured, you went into everything prepared to fight, though this wasn’t an ideal default setting for difficult conversations. 

Money was hard, that first year, probably always would be. She was still freelancing, had the trust — a fact that would never fail to make Vi’s eyebrows defy the laws of gravity — but Vi had her pride, had the odd jobs and the fights, though they argued about these, too.

(Even if, as Vi reminded her, once: 

“Those fights saved our lives, you know,” Vi told her, spitting blood into the brand new sink while Caitlyn folded her arms against the doorframe. “Wouldn’t have known they had a storm shelter if I hadn’t done a couple rounds in that barn.”

Caitlyn had attended a few. Watching Vi in whatever ring they’d set up in the dirt, getting jeered at, cheered for, made Caitlyn feel like someone had taken every emotion she was capable of and bottled them, shaken them up, poured all of them down her throat at once — a queasy mix of worry, of revulsion and anger, a pride so fierce she’d shouted her throat raw the first time she saw Vi win. Caitlyn flinched with every hit, felt Vi’s adrenaline like it was her own. 

Felt, when Vi turned to find her in that crowd, her arms lifted in victory, the sharp zing of arousal traveling through her, like lightning to ground.

“I like your face the way it is,” Caitlyn said, and watched Vi’s reflection grin at her from the mirror. 

Vi kept fighting. Caitlyn kept reaching for the gauze.)

More than once, Caitlyn crunched out into those bare fields, alone or with Atlas, went to stare up at the night, her breath fogging toward the stars. More than once, they sat in moody silence on opposite ends of the couch until one of them broke (and one of them always broke): Vi, setting down a bowl of wild blackberries in front of her like an apology, or Caitlyn huffing out a breath, slumping until her cheek hit Vi’s shoulder.

They were both stubborn. Their interpretations of headstrong made them a formidable pair on the road; in the hardware store, arguing about sealants and adhesives, it made people skip to the next aisle.

But the more they settled into something like balance, the more Caitlyn felt the pendulum of herself swing back to center. The sides of Caitlyn that Vi coaxed into the light were new to her, strange, trembling on thin legs under her careful touch. And every day, it seemed, there was some new facet of Vi for Caitlyn to tuck carefully away, the same as she dries flowers between the pages of her favorite books.

She’d never felt this grounded, a sense that her roots were reaching down into the earth beneath her feet, intertwining with Vi’s. Had never lifted her face to so much light.

They’d painted their bedroom blue. Same color as the kitchen, the only shade that could hold all that sun. But at night, that first night, once they’d carried their things up from the living room: 

Not the sun but the moon, the moon filling the room like milk, a reflection on Vi’s skin brighter than light on the surface of a lake as her clothes fell soundlessly to the floor. 

Caitlyn kissed each pale thigh as she kneeled to tighten the straps of the harness, looking up to find her eyes. These were heavy, dark moons of their own as Vi reached to adjust the base, slid herself across Caitlyn’s cheek, along her parted lips.

They made love with the windows open, Vi on her back following the slow undulation of Caitlyn’s hips with her hands. Heat at a simmer, sweat pooled in sheets kicked to their feet. When Caitlyn’s thighs spread, sinking against an angle like god, like yes, Vi, Vi’s fingers bit into her waist so tightly they went white, and she pulled Caitlyn down around strokes that hit some place so deep and sweet inside her that if Vi had slipped a hand low to coat her fingertips between Caitlyn’s lips, brought them up to her mouth, Caitlyn would’ve tasted like honey.

In the morning, coffee waiting on the bedside table, Vi lifting up the duvet to slide back in beside her. Just like she’d promised.

Now, though, the bedroom is empty, and if she’d hoped for a clue to Vi’s whereabouts there isn’t one here. Just dust, drifting through squares of sunlight on the floor, over the neatly made bed and the book resting on the bedside table, finished the night before. 

Caitlyn tucks this under her arm and exits the room. There’s one more place left to check, Caitlyn trotting back down the stairs and heading for the study at the front of the house.

When the outbreak had finally ended, there’d been one final stop to make.

The neighbors had helped lay tarps across the massive hole in the roof while they were gone, but most of what once belonged to the house in Zaun was sitting, rain-logged, in the street. With plastic tote bags hanging from each arm and thick gloves on their hands, they went through all of it to see what could be salvaged: some cookware, still tucked inside the cupboard that had housed them, a box of Powder’s art supplies that Vi laid carefully at the bottom of her bag. 

But the books were swollen and pulpy, and photographs, when they found them at all, had been shattered free of their frames, smiling faces raised to the rain. If you tried to pick them up with your hands, the paper disintegrated. 

The study, at least, had been an opportunity to start a new personal library. They were starting from scratch: years on the road meant Caitlyn didn’t have a single book to her name, either, and Saturday mornings, before they got to work on the house, they’d drive into town to pick up pastries and browse through shelves at the secondhand bookstore. 

They decided to build shelves into the entire back wall — an aspiration, a belief that one day they’d struggle to find space here, that books would begin to collect in stacks on the floor and atop the desk. 

Walking through the arch and heading to shelve the book, it’s not quite there yet, but Caitlyn figures they’re not in any rush. 

On a private mission to rebuild Vi’s collection of meteorological texts, Caitlyn would feel a small thrill when a dense new volume would appear on the tiny shelf labeled SCIENCE at the back of the shop. It wasn’t entirely selfless — Caitlyn was trying to learn everything she could ahead of the next storm season. She was determined to be prepared when that warm, moist air began to creep up across the plains again, when the clouds moved in and turned black. 

At night, they would read to each other, Vi lying with her head on Caitlyn’s chest, Caitlyn scratching her fingers through the soft fuzz of her hair, lifting them only to turn the page.

But photographs weren’t the kind of thing you could replace so easily. That day at the house, Vi called her over to a spot by the mailbox, staring down at the ground. In the mud, that picture of Vander and his boys and the fish. 

Caitlyn felt the lump rising in her throat, and she crouched, lifting her camera free of her jacket to snap a photo. It was the only way to keep it. Vi’s hand found her shoulder, squeezed.

And then a voice, calling Vi’s name. One of Vander’s neighbors was picking her way over the street. Caitlyn was surprised to find that she recognized her — one of his regulars, the woman who’d been smoking at the bar on Caitlyn’s first night here, sharp eyes in a chiseled face. 

There was a stack of something in her hands, and it wasn’t until she got closer that Caitlyn recognized them for what they were: photo albums, a little worse for wear, but dry and intact.

“Wasn’t sure when you’d be back,” she said gruffly. “Didn’t seem right to leave them out there.”

Vi paged through one of the albums and, seeing her face, Caitlyn threw her arms around the woman’s neck. 

Back in the apartment that night, going through the albums on the pull-out couch, Caitlyn learned that some of them predated Vander. That they’d survived more than one disaster. 

Vi had been a curious baby, looking up at the camera in every shot with a look like she was trying to puzzle that black eye out. In a photo of her with her new sister, little more than a pink wrinkle wrapped in a blanket, she gazed down with something a little like confusion, a little like wonder. 

Caitlyn touched her fingertips to the gloss of a woman in front of a firetruck, posed and smiling with her arms around both daughters. “She looks kind,” Caitlyn said.

“Yeah.” Vi smiled, one of the first Caitlyn had seen since the diner. “She was.”

This photo hangs above the desk, now, beside one of Vi and Powder with their father, and there are others on the walls and shelves. Some are from the rescued albums — Vander with a baby in the crook of each arm, or standing with gawky, pre-teen Powder and an aloof teenage Vi in front of The Last Drop (opening day, Vi had explained, “I was so pissed he wouldn’t let me sample anything on tap.”). 

Others are more recent: Powder and Ekko in the back of the van, Jayce and Mel and Viktor leaning into each other at their booth. Fishbones, asleep in Caitlyn’s lap, Atlas at her feet. 

And the shots of Vi, they’re here, too. Caitlyn had hung the one from the field in the living room, looking out over the wide backyard. But the one of Vi in the truck, reversing out of the motel parking lot, her face set, ready, the one the magazine had chosen for the cover when the story was published — Caitlyn keeps this on her desk.

The desk is what she checks first. Vi will leave notes for her here, sometimes, small post-its, picking up grout, back soon or lunch at garnett’s? or, often:

how’d i get so lucky?
—♡, V

Nothing, this time. Just the photograph and pens in their cups, Caitlyn’s draft stacked neatly in the center. 

Caitlyn sighs and hefts the draft back into her arms, and, calling for Atlas, she returns to her spot on the porch to keep an eye on the weather. Wherever she is, Caitlyn knows Vi will be doing the same, that driving through town or walking down the street it would find her there, that feeling at once inexplicable and unmistakable: a familiar static lifting the hair on her arms, something in her chest attuning to the invisible shift in the air as her sharp eyes ascended to sky.

Vi had understood Caitlyn’s misgivings about publishing the investigation herself, though they’d both balked when Caitlyn’s former mentor called them back to say she was interested, but only if she could pitch it as a feature.

“If I take this, my connection to you still calls your integrity into question,” Grayson said, Caitlyn and Vi leaning in toward each other over the speaker. “But if you’re willing to be part of the telling, there’s a story there.”

They said they would think about it, and hanging up, Caitlyn’s eyes flew to the clock. “We’re going to be late.”

It had come up earlier that week, driving around town in the rental just to escape the apartment, that they’d never actually been on a date. 

Pulling her shirt over her shoulders in the backseat, Vi recaptured Caitlyn’s lips in a searing kiss, broke it again to add, teasing, “I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“Wrong idea?” Caitlyn was half-listening, her hands preoccupied with Vi’s shoulders, the sweaty base of her spine. One of Vi’s knees dropped between her legs, and Caitlyn readjusted the foot braced against the door to squirm down against it. 

They’d gotten rather good at negotiating all of the available space offered by a 1991 Toyota Camry, of which there was not much. More often than not Vi would step from the backseat afterward hobbling around a crick in her hamstring, muttering, “This is only fun if you’re in high school.”

Caitlyn disagreed. She always found it exciting, a little illicit — the deserted parking lot, steam fogging the windows, the thrill at any pair of headlights in the distance. And maybe there was something a little high school about it, their sneaking around, the way she’d feel herself getting wet whenever Vi threw her that look as she reached casually for the keys. 

Pathetic, how often she thought about Vi’s hands on her or in her, and Caitlyn couldn’t even care, could only suck those fingers into her mouth the way she did then, Vi’s other arm circling Caitlyn’s bent knee for leverage as she dragged the seam of her jeans across the seam of Caitlyn’s.

“Don’t want you to think I’m only in this for one thing,” Vi said over rough pumps of her hips. Her voice distracted, all husk, Vi looking down to watch them move together. The window, opaque and slippery under the flat of Caitlyn’s hand as she pressed herself into each thrust, gasping around the fingers on her tongue. 

Vi came with her clothes still on, and though they both knew she didn’t think that even a little, Caitlyn agreed to a date.

Vi hadn’t told her where they were headed, just when to be ready and not to worry about dressing up. She drummed on the steering wheel with nervous energy as they drove, and it wasn’t until Caitlyn saw a wheel of light turning in the distance that she remembered, in one of last week’s newspapers, an article about the state fair. 

She felt, in her chest, a tiny, bubblegum pop of delight, Vi watching the realization travel across her face with a look so soft it made Caitlyn blush. 

Even on a weeknight, it pulled a crowd, long lines at each ride and parents trailing screaming children toward the bathrooms, teenagers prowling in packs. People drank loudly at picnic tables and slathered ketchup on hotdogs as long as Caitlyn’s forearm, and livestock nosed through the mud in blue-ribboned pens. Lights and oil sizzled in the air, sweet with sugar, and Vi felt bold enough, invisible enough in the crowd, to take her by the hand and pull her toward the carnival games. 

They brought the call up again only at the end of the night, the attendant lowering the arm of the seat, the ferris wheel carrying them up toward a navy blue sky. The lights below them were too bright to see much of anything, but if she really searched, she could find a few stars. 

Caitlyn adjusted the bagged goldfish on her lap. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with this,” she said, frowning, and Vi grinned. 

“Get a cat.” Caitlyn shoved her with an elbow. They looked out over all the people below them, distant voices living their distant lives. Zoomed out, Caitlyn thought, wisps of hair fanning against the side of her neck, the world could be a place where bad would never find you, a place that was only ever beautiful.

Vi squinted up into space. “There need to be consequences for SIL Co. If we do this, does that go away?”

Caitlyn thought about it. “It might. But attention is currency. If we frame it right, maybe it nudges the spotlight, gets the right people interested enough to do their own digging. I’m not sure there’s an alternative where we even get that.”

Vi was silent, considering, and Caitlyn hesitated. “She’ll want to talk about us.”

This brought her gaze back down to Earth. Back to Caitlyn as, far from the eyes of those who might have tried and failed to find something to judge in it, she took Caitlyn’s hand. 

“Well,” she said. “Good thing we’re officially dating now.” 

She lifted her arm, and Caitlyn leaned in to rest her head against the warmth of Vi’s shoulder. She inhaled, deep. “Are you wearing Vander’s cologne?”

Vi looked away, the tips of her ears burning. “Shut up.”

Vi had checked the mailbox multiple times a day for days, waiting for a copy of the feature to arrive. When it did, the glossy front-page story of The Piltovan’s weekend magazine, Vi raced up the drive so quickly she’d had to pause in the doorway, waving the magazine over her head as she leaned over her knees and sucked in lungfuls of air. 

Everyone crowded around to read it together, spread open on the counter, Powder complaining each time Vi turned the pages too fast.

The story paired full-scale images from the chase and its aftermath with a profile of Vi and the people of Zaun. It was both informative and, as Caitlyn had been relieved and grateful to see, full of Grayson’s trademark, flinty empathy. And, she’d been unafraid to turn a critical eye to SIL Co. It was subtle, the link between their particular brand of corporate exploitation and the changes being recorded in the climate, but in Grayson’s telling — as they finished the article, she’d met Vi’s gaze, found it blazing with something like hope — irrefutable. Damning.

The official investigation that followed several months later led to charges against some of the company’s top executives, and the article had been cited in documents requested by the court. 

Caitlyn expects they’ll be asked to testify, but whatever it looks like, the road to convictions would be a long one. When Grayson called early that spring to tell them the news, Vi rolled her shoulders, set her chin as she lifted her eyes to Caitlyn’s. They’d be ready.

After the article, they’d wondered if other things would change, but for the most part, they hadn’t. Or: they changed, but only in the way things always do.

Powder had practically moved herself over long before their Thanksgiving deadline, spent more nights than not in the room she’d claimed for herself with bright cans of neon spray paint. When Vi wasn’t busy with the house, and Powder wasn’t working herself into a tailspin about her applications, they’d be at the kitchen table with their heads tipped together or running tests in the backyard. With Ekko, they were adapting their algorithms and modifying the Hexvane, but Vi told her one night in October that there was something else.

“I don’t completely follow it myself,” Vi winced, trying and failing to explain about satellites and antenna systems. “But Powder thinks it could be big.”

Vi had gone so far as to ask Mel about helping them get grant funding. The business with her thwarted attempt to steal the Hexvane mostly forgiven (if never forgotten), Mel was happy to oblige. 

Powder still hadn’t given up on the launcher, either, had a habit of happily pulling Caitlyn from whatever she was doing to have her fire test shots in the fields out back. The work was interesting enough to Viktor that Caitlyn was getting used to seeing his car in their driveway, and though Powder had never fully warmed to Jayce, she’d been grudgingly consulting on the drones, too. 

(Caitlyn had her suspicions that this was all to get access to more things she could catapult very loudly into the stratosphere, but she’d resolved to say something only if Powder started setting things on fire, accidentally or otherwise. And, if Caitlyn was honest — she was enjoying getting to be part of the catapulting.)

A week before the holiday, they hammered their last nail in the guest bedroom, Caitlyn hanging the photo of the photo of Vander and his boys beside the bed. Vander slept his last night in the apartment before taking a cab to the house, the handle of his suitcase in one hand and the goldfish bowl tucked behind the other. 

Except for the back pain that would find him at night, especially after long days, he’d recovered completely, enough to boss everyone around the newly finished kitchen while he stuffed a turkey with butter and herbs and stirred cranberries on the stove. Declaring Vi hopeless on the potato peeler, he pawned this task off on Caitlyn and later, inspecting her handiwork, declared her, gently, not much better — though, on her second glass of wine at the table in front of a cutthroat Scrabble board with Mel and Viktor, watching Jayce and Vi argue over dishes while Powder and Ekko dabbed whipped cream on the forehead of a dozing Vander, Caitlyn thought privately that, as holidays go, it had turned out alright.

When people did stop Vi on the street, it wasn’t to raise an eyebrow if she happened to be holding Caitlyn’s hand. It was to thank her, or to ask how they could help, too. Vi was perplexed by the attention, but never missed an opportunity to point someone to Ekko and the initiatives he’d continued to lead on the ground in the weeks and months following the storm.

Often, though, someone approaching Vi on the streets by their home was more likely to be a neighbor with car trouble, asking if she could take a look at a faulty engine; more than once, Vi had walked through the door with a carton of fresh eggs, thanks for helping replace a rotted fence post, or jars of homemade jam just for stopping to chat about the weather, Vi stopped not because she was Vi, the storm chaser, or Vi from the cover of the magazine, but because that was just the kind of thing you did around here. 

Once, early December, walking through the door red-cheeked after shoveling the driveway of the young family next door, Vi looked up at her from beneath the border of her hat as Caitlyn brushed snow from her shoulders. “Mercury’s newest litter’s pretty cute.”

“Vi,” Caitlyn started warningly. They’d agreed: no dog until the house was finished. 

Vi put up her hands, but Caitlyn noticed the way her days began to stretch. Asleep hours before, Caitlyn would wake sometimes to an empty bed in the dark, and she knew that if she slipped on her robe she’d find Vi still in the downstairs bathroom, kneeling in the tub in her glasses and laying shower tile with intense concentration. 

Another way they were alike, she supposed — once there was an idea in that head, it was hard to shake.

Caitlyn had gone to talk to the neighbors, and on Christmas morning, she crunched there and back through the frost, her coat zipped up tight.

“Where’d you get off to so early?” Vi called from the kitchen as she walked in, nudging a hot chocolate down the countertop. “Last minute shopping?”

Poking the fire, Powder grumbled, “We should have been opening presents an hour ago.”

Caitlyn took a deep breath. “We were missing someone,” she said, and unzipped her coat around the small brown puppy wriggling against her chest.

Progress was slower, after that, but Atlas got into a can of paint just the once, so it could have been worse. Caitlyn hadn’t regretted it for a second, loved getting to watch Vi love anything, whether she was throwing a tennis ball into the grass behind their house or burying her face into his belly on the couch. They were two sides of the same coin, troublemakers with faces made to be forgiven, and true to form the only thing Atlas adored more than Vi was Caitlyn. 

He’d trot after her from room to room around the house, grinning that puppy grin up at her every morning in the kitchen or nestling between her legs while she read. Every time, she’d remember how small his body felt that first morning, tucked against her heart.

(Fishbones’ arrival on the scene had been a little less… sentimental. 

Powder, plunking her fleas and all into the middle of the breakfast table, where she promptly started gnawing on Vi’s sausage links.

“Where—” Vi started, confused.

Powder shrugged. “Trash can.”

It was the only response that could have stopped Caitlyn from saying what she wanted to say, which was Not on your life. Eyes not leaving the newspaper, she said instead, “You’re cleaning the litter box.”)

Atlas is currently nosing on lanky, teenage legs through the long grass in front of the house, and Caitlyn can lift her eyes from him straight back through the miles and miles of nothing to the southwest. Vi had been right, the way she’d described it to Caitlyn: there’s no better place to watch the storms roll in.

A change in the blue sky Caitlyn had been writing under before. A subtle drop in pressure, clouds beginning to condense, a new thickness to the air. Caitlyn keeps writing — it won’t reach them for a while yet, and though there will be revisions and new drafts to get through, she’s busy trying not to look directly at the fact that she’s about to finish the final paragraph of her first book. 

The book both is and isn’t a memoir, is and isn’t a case study. Briefly, it’s about storms and the community they leave in their wake, that trail as real as and more lasting than the damage. 

Less briefly:

The idea had been gnawing quietly at her insides since the outbreak, had followed her into the new house, where she first confessed the urge to write it to Vi. 

On their living room pallet, in the middle of the night, they gazed from the shadowy disrepair around them up through a hole in the roof. They couldn’t know what the life they were headed into might look like but they asked it of the stars all the same, the way, for thousands of years, people had used the sky to find their way:

“I want justice for you and your sister. For everyone in Zaun,” Caitlyn said quietly. “And whatever happens, with Grayson’s article or with SIL Co. — I want people to know what happened here. How brave you have to be to live through this. How much love it takes, to get through something like this.”

Vi shifted, rolled to face her. “You keep saying ‘you.’” Caitlyn stroked her knuckles down the side of Vi’s face as Vi added, “This is your home now, too.”

Quietly, she pressed her lips to Vi’s forehead.

As they drifted toward sleep: Vi, murmuring, “What’s blue and not heavy?”

Sky. The feather of a blue jay, tossed in the air. Caitlyn’s eyes in the mirror each morning, or reflected back to her in Vi’s. A drop of rain in the very center of your palm. 

She thought for a moment. Said, “Light blue.”

They fell asleep pressed together like two pages, like falling briefly into the space between words.

A car door slams, somewhere around the other side of the house. 

Caitlyn can feel her heart recentering itself in her chest at the sound, like when a compass needle finds north. 

A few minutes pass before the screen door opens. Vi, one hand holding two beers by the neck as she closes the door behind her. Atlas bounds up the steps, and Vi fends him off with the other hand as she makes her way to Caitlyn, a lift, small and shy, at the corner of her mouth. She extends one of the beers. “Want company?”

Caitlyn indicates the seat next to her, and Vi folds into it. Sweet-talking Atlas, she scrunches up the fur in his neck and rubs behind his ears as his tongue lolls, his tail smacking against the leg of the table. “Where’d you get off to?” Caitlyn asks, lifting the bottle to her lips.

“Vander needed me to pick up a couple things for the bar,” she says. She stretches her arms overhead, exposing a flash of stomach. “Space looks good. A little smaller than the last one now that all the stuff’s in it, we might be in trouble if everyone who says they’re coming to the open shows up.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Caitlyn says, setting down her beer, “Mel called earlier.”

“They’re still coming?”

“They are, and,” Caitlyn smiles, “She says you can look forward to some good news this time next week.”

“You’re shitting me. The grant?” When Caitlyn nods, Vi’s whole face splits. She lays a hand, palm open, on the table, and Caitlyn takes it. Feels Vi squeeze her fingers between her own, thumb sweeping over her knuckles. “That’s — I never thought—” Shock prevents her from finishing her sentence, so she takes another swallow of her beer, blinking down into her lap.

“I know,” Caitlyn says quietly. It’s a life-changing amount of money. The device it will allow Vi and Powder to build will help them study the entire life cycle of a tornado, will give them the insights Vi’s spent her whole life chasing. Insights they can use to build better warning systems, jumpstart new research. Insights they can use to save towns and houses and people. It’s her life’s work, at last coming into itself.

“We won’t be able to do much with it before the season’s over,” Caitlyn adds. “But next year, we’ll be ready.”

Vi squints up at the sky. “We’ve got time,” she says, like if she’s waited this long she can wait just a little longer.

And they do, don’t they, Caitlyn thinks, her eyes falling over Vi’s profile. She’s thinking about the gray hair she’d found at her own temple earlier that morning in the mirror, the first of its kind. About the gift it is, all that road still ahead of them, to know that the one person she wants to do and see it all with is beside her with her hands on the steering wheel and her foot on the gas, a smile on her face like an invitation. 

That the windows are open, that the sky’s reaching toward them like a hand, that there is time for all of it.

Vi jerks her chin at the pages. “Almost done?”

Caitlyn takes a deep breath. “Just searching for a perfect last line.”

Vi lifts a finger, a hold on gesture, and reaches into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulls out a small, rectangular box and nudges it across the table.

Caitlyn’s eyebrows furrow, and her eyes lift to Vi as she picks it up. Her face is the one she wears when she’s trying not to give something away, but Vi’s a terrible liar, and her leg is bouncing beneath the table. 

Caitlyn opens the box. It’s a watch, a simple gold face with letters in roman numerals. A fourth red arrow wavers as Caitlyn leans forward in her seat. Not only a watch, but a compass. 

“You never replaced your old one,” Vi says in a rush. Caitlyn hadn’t — there had been bigger expenses to worry about, and she’d been able to make do between clocks and car displays. “I saw this a couple weeks ago and it just — the first anniversary is paper and clocks, and I figure you’re set on paper.”

Caitlyn’s throat catches. “First—?” And even as she says it, she realizes with a pang that it’s been a year: a year to the day since she first stepped off the plane at Stillwater, since she drove into that junkyard outside of Zaun. Since she stepped into the red dirt and looked at the woman leaning over the engine. Since Vi lifted her head, looked back.

She flips the watch over. The engraving reads:

WITH YOU IS WHERE I’M HEADED  

Caitlyn looks up and pulls Vi into a crushing hug.

Vi laughs, her hands closing over Caitlyn’s spine. Each breath warms her jaw, and she can feel the solid, steady beat of Vi’s heart against her chest. As if it’s possible to hold Vi in the very center of her life, to keep her there and not let go, and she’s not sure she would have at all but for the roll of thunder that whispers from the distance.

Vi releases her, looking out to the horizon. Her eyes are clear, full of sky, and Caitlyn lingers on her face, watching her watch the storm. 

Vi’s gaze cuts back toward her, sharp. A grin like a shot, fired like a flash of lightning. “Ready?”

Caitlyn smiles. The ending can wait. “Show me.”

Vi takes her by the hand, and they race down from the porch into the field, the grass beginning to stir around them, a scent like rain on the air. The storm isn’t here yet, but out there somewhere it’s beginning, racing across the plains to where they stand looking up, listening for a change in the wind, waiting for the sky to fall.