The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

a recent grad from another school where Helio Systems recruited heavily, she’d grown up nearby. Joule should have listened when her roomie had looked at the nicely pressed shirt and said, “That might melt before noon.”

Radnor had sent them all emails requesting they be here at eight a.m.. And while, right now, the sun was not fully overhead yet, the day was already far more humid than Joule was used to. Each time she inhaled, she felt the extra weight of the air and resented the extra energy just to breathe. Tonight she would shower in cold water, she told herself. Tomorrow, she would dress smarter.

The group trekked out into the middle of the open field, a not-short distance from the tiny, temporary building with its window-unit air conditioning chugging along in the background. As she high stepped forward, she missed the AC already.

Looking around, she noticed Radnor's newbies were sticking together, many of them wearing boots as clearly un-broken-in as hers were. She and Sarah and Cage and Deveron were still clustered tightly together and Joule wondered if some of the other little gatherings that had formed might also be roommates.

As they approached the edge of the lot, Joule’s eyes flicked back and forth. The pale blue footers jutted from the ground as if escaping their graves. Though some of them were still straight, most had been grotesquely bent and twisted.

What did this? Was it the same thing that had collapsed just half the store she’d seen the on the way back from getting groceries? The site had been cleared since the tornado, and the permanent damage was the only thing that still showed.

She raised her hand, though she hated being the center of attention. Radnor instantly hit her with, “You don’t have to raise your hand, Mazur.”

She nodded, wondering how he was going to distinguish her from her brother if he was using last names, but now wasn’t the time to ask.

“What was the rating on the tornado that went through here? The one just outside Montgomery was F6.”

“There’s no such thing as F6,” one of the newbies corrected from the other side of the gathering, as if she were ill-informed.

Joule raised one eyebrow at him, but didn’t get any further as Sarah jumped in. “The Montgomery tornado was the first one the experts are dubbing F6 officially, though they aren’t sure the new rating will take. They’ve discussed extending the scale for going on ten years.”

“Thank you, Carter,” Radnor bellowed. His voice didn’t seem to have a setting other than “booming.” “The one here was an F3.”

“And it still did this?” Cage asked from right beside her. Thank God for a good twin brother, she thought as he pulled the focus to himself.

“It was a new design,” Radnor reminded them. He had told them that before they moved out here, even before they graduated. She assumed all the other newbies had heard much the same thing.

“New designs are always amazing until they’re tested,” he sighed and went on to add that he was grateful the design had been tested before they fully built the site. “But if it was going to fail, we want it to fail early and hard. Before too much could be lost. ”

“Then it was a success,” Deveron whispered wryly next to her, and Joule fought the grin that pressed at her face.

That was an interesting way of looking at it. She pushed her expression back to neutral and saw that only Sarah remained stone-faced, giving nothing away.

“All right, we need another division!” Radnor announced, his pink Helio Systems Technologies polo shirt now shining even brighter in the sunlight. His jeans had splotches of white, as though he had painted his home in them at some point previously and his stained boots had shoelaces that showed their age.

“Environmental team over here!” He pointed, and Joule watched as both Cage and Sarah slowly stepped away.

“Engineering over here!”

She high-stepped through the grass to join the second cluster and noticed that, within each group, the old guard and new guard were fairly well mixed.

“Project managers to the back,” he boomed. “Y'all are going to fan out. I want you walking back and forth between the Enviro and Enge teams. Listen in on everything! Record whatever you need to. Each manager needs to talk to each team member at some point today. Everybody's job is to solve what went wrong. We meet again tomorrow morning at the new site to discuss what new ideas we have.”

And with that, he dropped his hands to his side and looked at them as if to say “Get to it!”

Joule and Deveron headed toward one end of the field and, as they got closer to the last of the pale blue metal pieces, she noticed several of the old guard were moving in.

“Brad Barker.” One of the guys held out his hand, and Joule took that moment to look at his feet. Yes, old boots. Radnor's old guard.

“Joule Mazur.” She held out her hand in return and she let Deveron introduce himself as two more of the old guard came up behind Brad.

“Saskia Kaczmarek,” the woman said, her fine features looking as old-school European as her name.

The other woman was clearly Indian. “Chithra Murasawa.”

Radnor hadn’t subjected them to the dreaded ice-breaker games and, while Joule had appreciated not having to “stand up and tell us a little bit about yourself,” she now thought it would have been nice to recognize faces. She filed the ones she had.

It was Chithra who led the way. “I want to stand to the end and look down the line. Let’s see what we all see.”

Joule followed along. Helio had promised her on-the-job training, but Radnor had basically just thrown them all out into the field as though he were rolling a big bag of dice.

“You can see the path the tornado took. Look,” Saskia added. Joule nodded along, tipping her head first one way then the other.

Before Chithra asked, What are you looking at? she