Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

Plenty was a prosperous household, with a half-dozen kids under eighteen. The baby was crying, and no one seemed to mind. Having to huddle in a cellar during a storm seemed like a good reason to cry. On the other hand, Tomas sat on the steps by the door, hand resting on the handle, like he wanted to reach through the wood and touch the storm. Thriving on the sense of urgency.

“You look like you want to go out and watch,” one of the household women said to him.

“I kind of do,” he answered. There was nervous laughter. A crack of thunder startled them into silence. Rain rattled on the doors like a million hands clapping.

Windows had been boarded up, doors bolted, rain barrels drained and secured, windmills lashed down. Livestock penned into barns and chickens into coops. Everything that could be harvested had been. Nothing more to do but wait it out.

Even in the cellar, the wind pounded, slamming against adobe walls, whistling through cracks in the door. Enid had never heard anything like it. She didn’t want to admit how the fierceness of it scared her. This wind could pick them up and carry them away. The rain was loud as thunder, the thunder like earthquakes.

It seemed to go on for hours. Enid found her own place sitting with her back to one of the dirt walls. Wrapped in a blanket, she hugged her knees to her chest and failed to sleep.

Most of Plenty’s thirty members had crammed into the cellar; a few had stayed at Haven’s clinic to help anyone who needed it. They had lanterns, plenty of water, blankets, food, and a bucket in a corner roped off for a latrine. But the time dragged. Most tried to sleep, but the next crack of thunder would wake everyone, and they’d go back to studying the ceiling, gripping one another’s hands.

“How bad is it, you think?” someone asked.

“Worst I’ve seen,” another answered.

“No, remember that one that flooded the river? Washed out Angel household? They never did rebuild, did they?”

A discussion ensued, all the old people talking about what storms they remembered, what the previous worst storm really was, and whether it was twenty or twenty-five years ago. People only fell quiet when the rain picked up and got so loud nobody could hear anymore.

The oldest among them was Auntie Kath, and she was old enough to remember before the Fall; she’d been a teenager in Haven’s earliest years. So, of course, folk turned to her for the definitive answer.

“Oh, no, not even close to the worst,” she said, shaking her head. A chair had been brought to the cellar for her, and she sat there, blankets piled on her. One of the little kids curled up asleep at her feet. Her frame was shrunken, bent, her hair thinned to wisps. Her vision was long gone. She didn’t work anymore, but the folk of Plenty cared for her, a precious grandmother to them all. The last who remembered. “The one that shut down L.A. was the worst. This isn’t anything as bad as that. But really, the storms don’t seem as bad when you don’t have as much to be broken by them.” She chuckled in her rattling voice.

This was definitely the worst storm Enid had ever been through, but she was only twelve. Listening to the others, she was pretty sure there’d be worse someday. She tried to think of what that might look like and decided Tomas had a point: she was curious to see what a worse storm could possibly look like. How bad was really bad, if this was only sort of bad?

More hours passed. The air in the cellar grew close and humid. The little kids were crying along with the baby now.

Enid was trying hard to be grown-up about the situation, but she thought about crying too. Or convincing Tomas to maybe open the door, just a crack, and let them have a look outside. People kept trying to talk to her, and she was tired of answering the same questions: yes, she was fine; no, she didn’t need anything to eat; and even if she was scared, she wasn’t going to admit it.

Several times, Peri went around to check on everyone and came to Enid last. “How’re you holding up?”

“Fine,” she said, her face wrinkling. What if the storm never let up? There’d been talk of flooding, of lightning strikes and fires. What would they do if anything like that happened here?

Peri smiled wryly and ran a hand over Enid’s hair. “It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s never been a storm in all of human history that lasted forever.”

“Can’t I go out? Just for a minute, just to look around.” Just to get away from the crying, the people fussing, the heat . . .

“Look at Tomas. He’s being patient.” In fact, Tomas was still on the stairs, hunched over. He seemed to be asleep even, despite the noise, the stuffiness, the still-pounding rain. “Just a little longer. Try to sleep, all right?”

Enid huddled back in on herself and glared.

More hours passed. The world quieted, wind letting up, rain slackening. The building above them stopped rattling. Restless murmuring started, folk asking one another when they might open the door and go out to see what damage had been done.

A hard pounding—a human pounding—knocked at the cellar door, and Tomas was right there to crack it open. The lingering rain was enough to soak the edge of the steps and Tomas’s tunic, but he didn’t seem to mind. He called a greeting to the visitors.

Two soaking-wet men in brown investigator tunics leaned in. The beard on one of them dripped water. This one spoke loudly, as if he had been shouting over the storm for hours and hadn’t noticed the quiet. “Tornado touched down. Ant Farm and Potter north of town got hit. Some of their folk are missing; they need help.”

“Right.” He pushed open the door, turning to Enid. “Latch it closed behind me, yeah?”

“I want to go,” Enid said, not thinking before starting up the stairs, as if she were a cat hoping to slip out the door before he could shut it again. “I can help.” She was done with sitting, done with listening to the breathing and the chatter and the crying. She didn’t know if she could help, really. But she wanted to get out and do something.

“Enid,” her mother commanded. It was uncanny, how her mother could make the name sound like “stop.”