Eye of the Storm Read Free

another one with all kinds of rocks and gems. And Mom was crying. “Mostly, I remember Mom being sad.”
    Dad nods. “It broke her heart when the government decided most of the major museums needed to close so artifacts could be protected in underground bunkers until the storm crisis is resolved. But this place”—he looks in the rearview mirror—“is the museum of the future. It’s all holograms, so it changes every night. What did it say for this week?”
    â€œJurassic and American History.”
    â€œGreat shows; you should go,” Dad says. “You walk a path through the dome, and you’ll see dinosaurs approaching. The T-Rexlooks like it’s about to eat you for dinner.” He chuckles. “They’re just holograms, so they don’t bite, but they’re realistic. American History is fascinating, too. You meet history makers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Al Gore—and former presidents, too. I think they have Barack Obama and Grace Farley in this show.”
    â€œInteresting,” I say, and it is. But then I have another flash of memory from the museum’s closing night—the feel of a cool, rough dinosaur tail under my hand when I ducked under the velvet rope to touch it, even though the signs said not to. It felt real, like it might come alive and roar any second. A hologram could never feel like that.
    We turn a corner, and Dad slows down. “That’s Risha Patel, the girl I told you about on our video-call last week.”
    The girl looks about my age. Her long black hair has a bright green streak along one side. She must have a BeatBud in her ear because she’s bobbing her head back and forth to something fast and playing imaginary drums in the air, right above the handlebars of her bicycle as she rides along, hands-free.
    Dad speeds up again, but I turn in my seat and stare.
    She is riding a bike.
    Nobody rides bikes anymore at home. The storms churn up so fast, there’s not a kid in our neighborhood who’s allowed to ride more than halfway down the block, so why bother? Amelia was the last of my friends to give hers up. She held out right through last summer and never cared how ridiculous she looked riding up and down the street, back and forth, alone. When we laughed, she toldus that in her mind, she was going all over town, through the woods past the big tree house where our moms used to camp out when they were little, branches brushing her cheeks as she flew down the trails. But at the end of the summer, we got our StormSafe Mall and Teen Center, and even Amelia figured that was better than imaginary trails. The recycling crew picked up her bike at the beginning of October.
    Was this girl imagining faraway places, too?
    â€œDoes she live right around here?” I ask Dad.
    He shakes his head. “The Patels live on the other side of the development. Closer to the Eye on Tomorrow campus.”
    â€œWow.” I scan the horizon. The storm we just saw has already barreled off, but there are more clouds churning in the west. “She’s far from home for a storm day.”
    Dad laughs. “I see it’s going to take you a while to get used to being a StormSafe kid.” He slows down and pulls into the driveway of an adobe-colored concrete box. “It’s different here.” He presses a button on the dashboard, and a dome-shaped mouth yawns open on one wall. He pulls the HV forward into what must be the Storm-Safe version of a garage. Three bicycles are lined up inside, one in my favorite color, electric blue.
    â€œWe ride bikes all over the place here. In fact,” he says, nodding to the fleet along the wall, “it was supposed to be a surprise, but the blue one’s yours. You’ll love having that freedom again.”
    â€œBut . . . how can that be safe? I know the
houses
are safer here, but if you’re outside . . . I mean, the