The Weather Machine
THE ONLY PLACE TO go was through the door right next to them, so Oscar threw it open and he and Saige bolted through and closed it behind them. Lights clicked on to illuminate the space as Oscar scrambled for something to block the door.
“Here!” Saige said, handing him the crowbar. Oscar took it and fit it through the door’s handle. Mr. Cleverer wouldn’t be able to open it from the outside now, unless…
“Do you think he’ll break the whole thing down?” Oscar asked.
“Yeah,” Saige said without hesitating. “I do. So we need to hurry.”
They turned around at the same time, facing the space in front of them.
There was a short ramp here that spiraled gently upward to the top of the lighthouse. Oscar could tell where the enormous light had once been, but the space had been gutted and replaced with, as he had seen on the blueprints, a series of cannon-like objects that were all connected to a central mechanism. These cannons extended outward through perfectly sized holes in the walls of the lighthouse.
“Something in here must produce whatever they use to control the weather,” Saige said, rushing up the ramp. “Then the cannons shoot the mixture into the atmosphere.”
“What could do something like that?” Oscar asked, following Saige. “What could change the weather?”
“Historically, this entire area has tended toward the wet side, anyway,” Saige said, speaking quickly, maneuvering around the small space to examine the central machine. “Before the rain got really bad, it was still rainy, like, sixty percent of the time. So it probably wouldn’t be that hard to increase that number. You’re already starting from a place of rain. It would be another thing entirely to make, say, a desert rainy. They could be using any number of things here. Potassium chloride, magnesium, sodium chloride. Maybe they’re supercharging the clouds themselves, adding more moisture directly into them. I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it’s clearly working.”
“You really are the smartest person in the world.”
Saige smirked. “I thought you said I was the smartest person you’ve ever met.”
“You’ve just been upgraded.”
“That works for me. Aha!”
Oscar jogged over to her, to see what she’d found.
There was a little metal door in the machinery. Saige removed it now, revealing a complicated-looking control panel with—
“A kill switch!” Saige exclaimed.
“What’s a kill switch?”
“It will turn off the machine!”
“Do it!” Oscar exclaimed. “Qui—”
The word he had been trying to say was quick, but he didn’t get to finish, because at that exact moment, there was a tremendous BOOM as the door to the room exploded inward. Oscar was knocked backward off his feet, and Dot was rocked sideways, crashing into the wall of the lighthouse.
Plaster and dust and dirt rained down from the ceiling. Oscar’s ears were ringing. Had Mr. Cleverer just SET OFF A BOMB?
“Saige?” Oscar said, his voice weak and raspy. In the haze of the space, he reached out for her wheelchair, struggling to find her.
“I’m all right,” she said, her own voice thin and scared.
“Did your dad just try to kill us?” Oscar said as his hand finally landed on Dot. He pulled himself over to Saige, sitting up so he was looking into her dust-streaked face.
“I did not try to kill you,” Mr. Cleverer’s voice rang out. “The idea is quite preposterous.”
“You just blew us up,” Saige squeaked.
“I blew up the door. I just want to talk with you.”
“If you wanted to talk to us you might have KNOCKED!” Saige screamed.
“An excellent point,” Oscar piped up.
“Instead you just skipped right to BLOWING UP THE DOOR,” Saige continued. “Which, you know, basically translates into you TRYING TO KILL US.”
“I have already explained that I did not try to kill you,” Mr. Cleverer said. His voice was strained now, like he was trying to keep his temper.
“Sorry, but I’m super not into trusting the word of someone who’s just tried BLOWING HIS DAUGHTER UP!”
“Saige, this has gotten completely out of hand. I’m sorry for blowing up the door. At the time, I felt it necessary—”
“Just like you felt it necessary to keep the people of Roan under constant rain for the past ten years?!”
“I’ve only been working for Brawn Industries for the past few weeks; please, Saige, let’s talk about this reasonably.”
“Officially,” Saige said.
Mr. Cleverer went quiet.
“He’s only officially been working for Brawn Industries for a few weeks,” Saige explained. “In reality, he’s been doing contract work for them for years. How did they put it? On a trial basis? You’d be brought on full-time once they knew you could be trusted?”
Mr. Cleverer cleared his throat. “How did you…”
“Oscar found the secret drawer in your desk, but what he didn’t find was the loose floorboard in the back corner of the room. You’ve been helping maintain this machine for a long time now, haven’t you, Dad?”
“Saige, I can explain…”
“It makes sense, though. Brawn Industries would never pull a nobody out of the Alley and give them a mansion in Roan Piers after a couple of interviews.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before now?” Oscar whispered.
“Because I was embarrassed,” Saige said, and when she looked over at Oscar, she had tears in her eyes. “He’s been working for the enemy for years. And he’s my dad and I love him and I thought there was a chance this was all a big misunderstanding, but clearly it’s not!”
Saige burst into tears. All the anger seemed to drain from her body, leaving only a deep sadness behind.
The air was clearing in the small room, and Mr. Cleverer was slowly coming into focus. As Oscar watched, he took a step toward them.
“Don’t move,” Oscar exclaimed. “Don’t move, or we’ll hit the kill switch!”
Mr. Cleverer froze.
“Let’s all relax and talk about this calmly,” he said.
“How could you do this?” Saige said. “You’re my dad.” She was crying harder now, fat tears falling fast down her cheeks.
“Saige…,” Mr. Cleverer said. “Sweetheart… I can explain everything. I promise. Please… Please just come with me to the elevator, we’ll get inside, we’ll go home, and we’ll talk about everything.”
“Wait,” Oscar said. “There’s an elevator?”
“Of course there’s an elevator.” Mr. Cleverer sighed, sounding a bit like he was losing his patience. “You think we renovated an entire eighty-year-old lighthouse and didn’t put an elevator in?”
“That’s it!” Saige said.
“But you took the stairs,” Oscar mumbled. Then, to Saige, he asked, “Wait, what do you mean that’s it? What’s it?”
“The dimensions don’t add up,” Saige said, sniffing loudly, pulling herself together. “The ramp over there is wider than the space over here, which would mean the lighthouse is lopsided, but it isn’t, it’s perfectly symmetrical, because Florence Perchance would never have built an asymmetrical lighthouse. Which means—there’s a hidden room! Quick, Oscar, the kill switch! Hit it!”
Oscar didn’t hesitate.
He leapt toward the kill switch and pounded his palm against it.
There was a terrible noise.
The room was filled with it—gears grinding to a halt, metal on metal, a shrieking, angry, crunching sound. Oscar covered his ears with his hands even as Saige grabbed his arm and pushed him forward, through a small door that, like the main entrance, had blended seamlessly into the wall around it. Saige came in after him and the door shut automatically behind her. Without missing a beat, she picked up a desk lamp and smashed it into a control panel next to the door. The control panel sparked and whined, then finally went dark.
“He won’t be able to get in this way,” Saige said. “Come on, we need to hurry.”
“I think I need just one quick second to stop my heart from exploding,” Oscar said. He took a deep breath, then looked around the small room they were in. It was skinny and long, and the outside wall fit the curvature of the lighthouse. There was a desk, a now-broken desk lamp, a tall filing cabinet, a blackboard filled with complicated equations and unreadable chicken scratch, and, at one of the skinny ends of the room, the entrance to a small elevator.
“Of course,” Saige said. “An office. Look—we need proof, Oscar. We can’t leave here without solid, irrefutable138 proof. I’ll take the desk.”
Suddenly the door shook—Mr. Cleverer must have thrown his entire weight against it. Oscar and Saige looked at each other for half a second and then leapt into action.
Oscar searched the filing cabinet as Saige took the desk.
He found a lot of things that would have been convincing but not, as Saige had specified, irrefutable.
There were receipts for different pieces of equipment, lumber, and supplies. There were invoices to dozens of different contractors. There were fifteen separate receipts for screws alone.
“I don’t understand,” Oscar said, holding up a stack of these receipts. “Why would they order the same exact screws from so many different people? There’s like, fifty from this person, twenty from this person…”
“An abundance of caution,” Saige said. “So nobody in Roan could have figured out what they were doing. This is virtually untraceable. And completely useless to us. Keep looking!”
Mr. Cleverer kept pounding on the door and then—abruptly—stopped.
Oscar and Saige froze.
“He could be setting up another bomb,” Saige said.
“In this small space? That would kill us!” Oscar exclaimed.
“I know.”
“Do you really think—”
“I don’t know,” Saige said, her voice tight and scared. “I don’t think I know him at all.”
And that is when they became aware of a beeping sound on the other side of the door.
A beeping that sounded suspiciously like…
A countdown.
“Oscar!” Saige shouted. “Abort mission! We have to go!”
But at that exact second, Oscar’s hand closed around a piece of paper. Not pausing to double-check what he had just read, he shoved it into his pocket, dove across the room, and hit the button for the elevator.
It took an eternity139 for the doors to open.
The whole time they had to listen to the beeping sound outside the door. When the elevator doors slid open, they scrambled inside. The doors shut behind them and the elevator began its descent and for a few seconds everything was quiet and peaceful—
Then they heard a tremendous BOOM from above them. The elevator shuddered violently, stopped moving, went completely dark, then plunged downward.
Footnotes
138 This meant proof so good that nobody would be able to argue with it, like a piece of paper that said, “I’m Mr. Cleverer and I’m guilty!”
139 About three seconds.