Instead, I pushed my way up from my knees, knowing that my mom had won this round. Her weather vane was going to get fixed or there’d be no peace for any of us. Up here the air conditioner hummed, and a mysterious substance was leaking from a spot near our chimney. Adam was afraid of heights, but they didn’t bother me. My dad used to come up here and take notes on the cloud patterns. Sometimes I came with him and lay bellydown, reading my textbooks. That was why I didn’t want Mom to take down his weather vane.
But as I crossed the ridges of our roof, I realized that his presence had disappeared. My dad was gone from this place. Barely his memory even lingered. It’d been years since I’d seen the weather vane up close. From here, I could see that the rooster ornament used to be painted red. By now, though, most of the paint had flaked off. The directions were each marked with elegant letters: N, S, E, W. It must have been an antique even when my dad got it.
I kneeled beside it, put my hands on the crossbars, and wriggled it off its post. The weather vane fell to the roof with a clatter, and I dropped backward on my rear end.
I wiped my hands together and stared out at the horizon. From here, I could see the whole of the town clearly. The lights cropped up from the town center, the factory, and the rest of the city limits, which faded into the Hollows, an evergreen forest that bordered our town. For a moment, I just sat there and stared out at the fuzzy green treetops that carpeted the horizon. They were beautiful. A peaceful stretch of countryside. It was strange seeing them this way again. The last time I’d been into the woods, my dad had been killed. Now, when I thought of the Hollows—if I ever thought of the Hollows—it was about how they hid the flashbacks from me, or, if I thought too hard, about how their branches reminded me of the scars left behind on my dad’s chest, the angry rivers of red that charted the course of his death. I leaned forward, cupping my hand and staring harder out into the forest. Because I remembered now that they hid something else, too.
In a second, I was pushing myself to my feet. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? In the Hollows was hidden my father’s great masterpiece. His prized experiment. The thing that killed him. Three dormant behemoths rested in the woods, waiting. They had killed my dad, but electricity had killed my dad when it had saved Adam, and this just might be the same thing. My heart pounded in my chest. This was it. This was the answer. The solution I’d been looking for.
The generators would need to be reawakened.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The lightning generators work off a series of silk pulleys, a belt, wire combs, a metal dome, an electric motor, and a column. The design is similar to that of a Van de Graaff generator, though on a much larger scale. A similar endeavor was first attempted without the generators by German scientists in the Alps. The scientists used a two-thousand-foot iron cable and an adjustable spark gap across a valley, but the space between the mountains was too vast for harnessing and the experiment ultimately failed.
*
“Back up and tell me where we’re going again. Am I being kidnapped? Because if I’m being kidnapped, I’d like to make some demands up front.” Owen scooted to the middle of the backseat, wedging his head between Adam and me. Outside, evening fell in stages. The darkest blue began at the top, where it stacked itself onto brighter hues that ended in a golden ribbon of light on the horizon. “First of all, I’ll need a bathroom break every hour. Second, I have a sensitive stomach, so I’d like to suggest a bland diet of Pop-Tarts and Nutri-Grain bars. No sodas, or we’ll need to up the bathroom-break quotient.”
My broken windshield fractured the sky, turning it into a giant puzzle as I edged my car up to the fringe of the Hollows. The forest bordered the western edge of Hollow Pines like a prickly petticoat made from pine trees and oak. Beside me, my dad’s old map was sprawled over the center console.
I glanced in the rearview mirror, still annoyed with Owen. Only as annoyed as I was, I happened to need him more at the moment, so I’d have to play nice.
“We’re going in there.” I nodded to the tree trunks now framed in the windshield like a photograph. Once off the rutted side road, I pushed the gear in park. We’d been driving for ten minutes. The headlight beams penetrated only a short distance into the woods’ heart, where gnarled branches crossed arms as if in warning to keep out.
Owen ducked his head to peer through the glass. “Oh, great, that quells all of my worst fears. The creepy woods at night. Perfect, just perfect, Tor.”
“Victoria has a plan. She told me,” Adam said without turning in his seat. He stared after the high beams into the forest. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it should have been the complete opposite, but I somehow felt safer going out there with Adam nearby.
Owen patted Adam on the shoulder. “That, my friend, is exactly what I’m afraid of. Is part of that plan getting murdered by the Hunter?”