“Get out of here. Now,” Tate told their friends.
“Okay, yeah. Let’s get back in the truck. I’m sure we can outrun it,” Sabine panted, looking wide-eyed and truly terrified.
In his imagination Tate could see the two of them crushed in the middle of a mound of vehicles … just before they exploded …
“Tate!”
Foster’s voice brought Tate’s mind back to the present. He met her haunted gaze.
“There isn’t time to run,” she said.
“Hey, wake up you two! We need to get out of here!” Sabine cried.
“No. Not by driving,” Tate said. “The parking lot’s already a traffic jam. None of them are going to make it out of here.”
“Listen up!” a man’s voice boomed over the band’s loudspeaker system. “The Bennett Farm across the street has a root cellar! Everyone over there! Hurry!”
The panicked tide of people shifted direction, and instead of bottling up the parking lot, people climbed over Bella’s fence, crowded through the gate, and poured across the little two-lane road as the sky opened and rain began to pelt them along with the whipping wind.
“Go!” Foster told Sabine and Finn. “Get to the cellar!”
Finn and Sabine nodded and, holding tight to each other’s hand, started to rush off, but Sabine pulled them to a stop to shout over the wind. “What about you two? You stay out here you’re going to get killed!”
Tate and Foster shared a long look. He nodded, understanding the wisdom in Foster’s serious green eyes, and then he told Sabine, “We’re going to stop this tornado from killing anyone.”
“But how can—” Finn began, but Foster cut him off.
“Don’t worry about that. Just get out of here. Tate and I can handle this.”
Then, very deliberately, Foster took Tate’s hand, and squeezed it before looking up at him with those eyes and that beautiful, honest face. “We can do this. We can save these people.”
And suddenly Tate believed they could do it—they could save them. “Together,” he said. “We’ll save ’em, like we couldn’t save our parents.”
Holding hands, Tate and Foster walked in the opposite direction everyone else was running. They walked around the rear of the store and directly for the diving funnel.
“Okay, tell me again about how you got the willows to be your air orchestra,” Tate said. His voice was calm, but he and Foster were clinging to each other’s hand as if they were living lifelines.
Foster didn’t look at him. She stared at the funnel. He could feel the trembling of her body through their joined hands.
“Hey,” he pulled her so that she had to look at him. Her green eyes were wide and a little glassy. Her face was almost completely drained of color, and her pretty yellow dress had wilted against her skin like the long, dank strands of her muted hair. He thought she looked as terrified as he felt, and Tate knew that was bad. Real bad. So, he touched her cheek and spoke softly to her, like they had all the time in the world to chat and not like they were standing in lashing rain directly in the path of a descending tornado.
“Hey,” he repeated. “We’ve got this. I flew. You played an air symphony. We’ve been practicing for two weeks. So, remind me. What did you say about the willow music?”
“I—uh—I said it’s a-a-b-bout how I’m feeling,” she stuttered at first because her teeth were chattering from cold and fear, but as she spoke Foster steadied herself and got stronger. “If I’m negative, things don’t go so well, but when I’m relaxed and not really trying—or just having fun—then air is almost easy to control.”
“Okay. So. Let’s have a good time.” Suddenly, Tate grinned. “Hey! You said Cora liked the Rat Pack. Do you know the words to Sinatra’s ‘Luck Be a Lady’?”
In typical Foster fashion, she frowned and then rolled her eyes at him. “Seriously? You want to sing right now?”
He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Seriously. And dance. And make beautiful air music. If it’s about how we feel, it could work.” Then, not caring that he definitely looked like a crazy person—after all, the only person who could see him was Foster, and she already knew his kind of crazy—he started snapping his fingers to the rhythm of the old Sinatra tune. He crooned the first line.
“Luck be a lady tonight.”
And then nudged Foster expectantly.
“Luck be a lady tonight,” Foster repeated, speaking more than singing the line.
But Tate nodded reassuringly, picking up the tempo and starting to walk forward, doing a little sliding dance step, while he snapped his fingers.
From beside him, Foster’s strong, pretty voice picked up the next line.
“Luck if you’ve been a lady to begin with…”
Tate took both of her hands and began guiding her into a swing as he joined her singing “Luck be a lady tonight!”
They’d made their way to the beginning of the fields, all filled with ripening pumpkins and squashes, and Tate saw Foster’s eyes get huge as she stared over his shoulder at the the whining, rain-wrapped wall of wind and destruction.
“Sing it with me, Foster!” Tate shouted over the storm. Together their voices raised in harmony.
“Luck be a lady tonight!
Luck if you’ve been a lady to begin with…”
That’s when Tate heard it. The air around them quieted and stopped screaming in anger. Instead it picked up the melody and began to wrap it around them in shades of yellow and pink and blue.
“It’s working, Foster! Don’t look, just sing and dance with me!”
Foster’s green eyes found his, and he smiled at her, trying to show her with his touch and his expression how much faith he had in her.
And she did it. Foster nodded and sang as he moved her around the soggy, pumpkin-filled field while the air around them was colored by happiness and filled with music.
“Luck be a lady tonight!”
As they paused before the next lyrics, Tate met Foster’s gaze and dropped her hand. “Now, air! Sing with us!” He lifted his hands then, just like he’d seen her doing earlier that day, making little upturned, flicking motions with his fingers as he sang the next lines.
“Luck be a lady tonight!”