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.