She held one hand up along her sight line. The damage provided an odd picture. “What was different about those beams?”
“Let's go find out,” Chithra suggested, and she began marching through the field, seeming to know the others in their new little group would fall in behind her.
Joule followed along, aware that she was the newest of the new kids. Sarah had the advantage of having grown up around here and being smart enough not to wear clothing that would stick to her. Joule plucked at her shirt, letting air under the fabric. Her only consolation was that a handful of others were also marked by their shiny new boots and too-warm clothing.
They trekked the tornado’s path, passing other small clusters of their teammates. Joule saw Cage in the distance, not looking at pylons but taking pictures of the space between. His “Enviro Team” was likely getting pictures of endangered flowers or lizards or something.
When her little group arrived at the one beam that was most upright in the middle of the path, they instantly quieted and took a moment to examine it. But there were no obvious answers.
Damn, if it didn't feel like Day One. She looked behind her at the horizon and the wispy white clouds that danced in the sky. Good. Nothing was bearing down on her.
Yet.
4
“Did you get yours?” Joule held her phone up, tipping it back and forth to catch her brother's attention.
Her first paycheck from Helio Systems Tech had been deposited into her account. She’d had paychecks before, but nothing like this—nothing that wasn't accompanied by pulling wadded bills out of her apron pockets at the end of a shift waiting tables.
“I want Italian,” she said. “Good Italian.”
Cage wasn’t paying attention as he tapped hurriedly at his phone, pulling up his own bank account. “Got it.”
It had taken three weeks to see their first paycheck. Between doing the first rounds of work and then waiting for the paycheck cycle to finish, she didn't feel quite so new anymore. Some of the shine had rubbed off, surely.
They'd spent a week in small teams, designing new pylons. The second assignment was testing what they’d designed. When their work made it through initial testing, the other teams were brought in to try to squash their victory.
Cage and the environmental teams had completed new surveys of both the old site and the new one. He’d complained that some of the work was a direct repeat, but Sarah had pointed out that it had to be redone. Getting it wrong again would mean starting all over. Mostly, it seemed the Enviro teams trashed the new designs for violating all kinds of environmental norms. There was nothing quite like her own brother questioning all her work.
He’d asked her in jest, at one point, “How much paint does a woodland creature have to ingest before we have feral mutant hamsters on our hands?”
She’d stared at him then, not caring that both teams were watching them. “That’s not funny.”
It was Sarah who chimed in, “I heard there a was a place outside Chicago that had mutant dogs a while back… that actually killed some people—”
Joule and Cage stared only at each other. They stayed silent in the eye of the conversation that swirled around them.
“They got rid of them. Didn’t someone make a video about how to kill them?” Mitch had asked. He was old guard and definitely not the person Joule would have guessed would be up to speed on that story. He was also smarter that the next four of them put together. She waited for him to make a comment she couldn’t quite wriggle out of.
“Yeah,” Sarah said, magically hauling the conversation back around without realizing it. “Your sister’s right. We could get dangerous feral hamsters, and it’s not funny.” But then she’d turned her gaze to Mitch. “So how much paint would it take?”
Now Cage pocketed his phone, looking at his sister with a warning in his eyes. “Around here, Italian only means pizza. And even that is only so-so.”
He was right, the others agreed. The pizza was barely passable.
“But I really want pasta,” Joule moaned. “I want Chicken Piccata. And green beans sauteed in garlic.”
She felt the need for green veggies in her whole body, and if she had Mexican or barbecue one more time, she was going to lose her mind. Though both seemed to be specialties of the area, Joule was already burning out on them.
“What we need is to start cooking for ourselves more,” her brother said, as though they needed to hone kitchen skills.
But the twins knew enough. Their parents had made sure that they each knew how to make a variety of basic meals. They’d shared an apartment over the summers, and they'd stayed with their grandfather for a while during a long break and cooked for him. But now Joule was realizing it had never become an everyday skill for them.
“Yes, we do,” she agreed as she stepped beside their nearly-empty fridge and opened it as if to present evidence. “But today is not that day.”
“We're taking Sarah and Deveron with us?” her brother asked as she pushed the fridge door shut to an unsatisfying thwack.
“Well, first we have to find an Italian place. And then, yes. We should also invite Mitch and Chithra and Brad.” She rattled off the others that she knew who hadn't moved their families down to Alabama, like Saskia had.
“Now you're talking about reservations,” her brother warned as he retrieved his phone again to find a restaurant.
“Any place that has the chicken piccata I want will take a reservation.” Joule pulled her own phone out to join the hunt. “And it will also be
