BETTY WAS a wreck. Watching Butters carted off like that and not knowing where he was started to drive her crazy. She would drive by his house for any signs of him, check obsessively online for any messages or hints of his location. It was on TV so there was a chance some gossip rag would cover it. But nothing. I tried to intervene when I found out that she had been driving by nearby mental hospitals, learning when they let their patients outdoors, and seeing if Butters was among them.

The rest of us weren’t much better, but we had things to distract us. Johnny and his band. Hamilton and his art. And me and my… well, I was splitting my time between researching Mom and improving my powers. I’d decided the best course of actions was to take a break from my normal training regime and start on a new one.

I’d been reading Dangerous Girls’ books on acting like they were SAT prep work. Every night I would open one up, read the chapter once, read it again with a highlighter, and then spend an hour or two doing the various proscribed exercises in the mirror. One week I spent every night crying on command for no reason. Well it started with reasons, but after a few days the book explained how to tap into the raw emotion. After eight hours of crying over nothing I checked off sadness and depression.

Unfortunately, not only did this mean I cried constantly for a week, it also meant Doolittle Falls got record rainfall and the weatherman was confounded as to why. “Aberrant system” was the best he could come up with for why we had seven sunny days with deluges from 7:30-9:30 each night, which ended precisely when my favorite show (there was a Hero Housewives of Gotham marathon that week) came on. When the Bureau of Palladin Affairs was called in to investigate, I decided to switch to another emotion. Had I had one of the power dampeners they keep at the Academy I could have cried to my hearts content without a single drop falling on the precious Doolittle ground.

I was slowly becoming a master of my own emotions, which was having some pretty strange side effects. Gale force winds hitting our house on a calm day, enormous balls of hail terrifying the neighbors dogs, snow, sleet, slain, sun showers, humidity on cold days, any and every form of terrestrial excretion. There were a million types of winds and precipitations and I was learning the precise emotions to make them happen.

 

THOUGH THE emotion itself wasn’t enough. It just created the raw nature. To build something bigger, like a system, required knowing how the weather worked. And for that I needed Sam and his toys at PeriGenomics. I could will myself to anger at the drop of a pin, but I needed to practice directing lightning or it would just strike anywhere and everywhere. Which it did. Dad, after losing cable because of a downed power line during a particularly exciting Maximum Fighting match, had a talk with me about my practice. Also, between researching Mom, my practice with Dangerous Girl’s books, and my practice with Sam, my schoolwork was starting to suffer.

Sam and I spent several weeks on what he referred to as supersonic winds. They were winds so strong that they were rare in nature. One gust could knock down a skyscraper and a sustained wind could level a town. But such forces were outside the hands of anyone because they required so much energy to create. The best most people could do was small, localized winds that could move objects at fast speeds. They could make simple objects into projectiles. The better (weather control people) could lift cars and send them flying with them, but even Sam didn’t have that level of power yet.

After honing my skills for the better part of November, he told me to meet him at the Richman State Forest in Asher Falls for the “next step” as he called it.