Jane wondered if Alex had spared her even one thought all day-if it had even occurred to Alex to wonder how his sister was getting along. She very much doubted it.
Charlie emitted a not-entirely-necessary bell-and-whistle alert and extruded a map screen from the dash. It held Jerry's latest nowcast. Rick stopped pecking at his laptop and pretended a lot of deep professional interest in the map's colored contours of upper-air velocity fields.
Rick was doing this just to get back at her. Both of them could see at a glance that nothing was tearing loose at the moment.
Outside, up to the north, lurked the trailing tower of the squall line, rippling in hot midafternoon sunlight and sucking hard for the adiabatic juice. Jerry had been sending them the full spectrum of regular updates: satellite overviews, the progress of the squall's pseudo-cold front, SESAME's wind-shear estimates, big bulging downpours of rain off the Dopplers. The front was gushing precip, dropping hail in big lemon-sized chunks, and blowing some impressive gust fronts. But there were no spikes.
The Troupe had scared up an F-2 early in the day. The spike had come very suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, and Out in the middle of nowhere. And that was all to the good, because the Troupe had had the spike all to themselves. Greg and Carol had taped the entire development sequence, from wall cloud to rope-out, at close range from the ground. Buzzard and Martha had nailed it with chaff, so Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus had gotten some very good internal data. That one had to be counted a success.
Now the afternoon's solar heat loading was reaching its peak, and the chances had improved for a major F-4 or F-S. The squall line was headed for the Texas-Oklahoma border, moving fast and dragging the midlevel jet with it. The chase situation would be a lot different now. As the Troupe pursued they'd be leaving the abandoned lands, reaching places where the aquifers were still patchily existent, and where a lot of people still actually lived.
Once they had come off the arid plains of King and Stonewall counties and into the great flat floodplain of the Red River, any spikes would be swarming with storm-chase spotters. There would be environmental feds from the national storm centers, and heavy network brass from SESAME. Local cops and firemen, maybe Rangers or Oklahoma National Guard. Television news crews. And amateur chaser wannabes, out on their own, with Christ only knew what kind of homemade equipment. Plus the usual ugly scattering of lurking creeps: wreck freaks, structure hitters, and professional looters.
Plus, of course, the people who were there because they couldn't help it: the everyday, poor damned civilians, trying to mind their own business until a spike tore their town apart.
The help would be the last to show up: choppers food-bombing the disaster area, ground convoys of federal rescue paramedics, bureaucrat refugee managers with their hard-ass official charity of soup-kitchen tents and paper clothes. Eventually, help would arrive, all right. You couldn't keep the government help away. After so many years of heavy weather, the help didn't have a lot of genuine compassion left, but they sure as hell had had a lot of practice.
"For Christ's sake, Janey, lighten up," Rick blurted suddenly. "It's not like we killed the kid."
Jane said nothing.
"He took that a lot better than you think!"
Before joining Jerry and the Troupe, Jane had never been much good at saying nothing. But Jane was plenty good at saying nothing now.
She'd had a lot of practice. She'd learned how to say nothing in her second month of Troupe life, after her ugly scream fest and punch-out with Martha Madronich. Jerry hadn't scolded her about the fight. He hadn't taken sides, or made judgments, or criticized. But he had asked Jane to take a formal vow of silence for a week.
Jerry's style as a leader never ran to the standard sicko cult practices of public chew-outs and group humiliations. Jerry rarely raised his voice to anyone, and even in the Troupe's formal powwows, he rarely said anything beyond short summaries and a few measured words of praise. However, Jerry truly excelled at mysterious private conferences. Before the fight, he'd never called Jane in for one of his heavy private head-to-head sessions. But she had seen him quietly take people aside-even the Troupe's hard-bitten core people, like Carol or Greg or Ellen Mae-and she'd seen them emerge an hour or so later, looking shaken and serious and kind of square-shouldered and glowing-eyed.
A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seen Jerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her a deliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worst of all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had the necessary strength of character to go through with it.
So Jane had quickly made the promise to him, without any complaints or debate. She'd left the tent without a word, and for seven endless days she had said nothing to anybody. No talking, and no phone calls, and no radio links. She hadn't even typed commentary onto a network.
It had been unbelievably hard, far harder than she'd ever imagined. After several reflexive near blunders, she'd secretly kept her upper and lower teeth locked together with a little piece of bent metal pin. The bent pin was a stupid thing, and kind of a cheat, but it sure helped a lot whenever Martha limped by, grinning at her and trying to strike up conversations.
Silence had been truly painful and difficult for Jane. It had been like sweating off a drug addiction. Like fasting. Like running a marathon. It had changed her a lot, inside.
It was no secret to anyone in the Troupe that she deeply fancied Jerry, and she could tell that he knew, and that he was tempted. He'd let her join the Troupe. He'd trusted her with assignments. He'd always politely listened to her advice and opinions. But he'd been painfully scrupulous about keeping his hands to himself.
Jerry was tempted, but he wasn't quite tempted enough. That was the real reason he had set her the challenge. Like everything that really interested Jerry Mulcahey, the challenge was subtle and difficult and for big stakes. The rest of the Troupe might construe it as a punishment, but Jane knew better: it was a very personal trial, make or break. Jerry wanted her to make himasolemn promise and break it. So that he'd have the excuse he needed to politely usher her out of his life. And so she'd have no excuse not to go.
But Jane hadn't broken her promise. She'd kept it. Naturally, she had said nothing at all to anyone in the Troupe about her promise to Jerry. She'd simply walked out of the tent with her mouth shut. In the too close atmosphere of Troupe life, though, they had all very quickly caught on. Her vow had been a painful burden to her, but its effect on the other Troupers was profound and startling. She'd had their grudging respect before, but she'd never had their open sympathy. They knew she was going through hell, and they were pulling for her. By the end of her week of silence, all the Troupers were treating her, for the first time, as if she really belonged.
And after that happened, things between her and Jerry had quickly turned very mega-different.
"Okay, so he passed out," Rick whined. "So he's not exactly the brawny outdoor type. Did you know he's a cannibal?"
"What?" Jane blurted.
"Yeah, he was bragging to us about eating human meat! No.t that I myself got anything against cannibalism personally... ." Rick paused, hunting words. "Y'know, there's something to that kid. He's kind of an ugly, weedy, crazy little guy, but I think he's got something going there. Actually, I kinda like him!"
"Look, he can't possibly be eating human meat," Jane said. "He's only twenty. Well, twenty-one."
"Hell, we all knew he was bullshitting us! But that's why me and Peter had to stunt him. We're not gonna put up with that! Are we? So what if he's your brother? Come on, Janey!"