“Big wind,” I said numbly.

  “Two of them,” said Noor, pointing in the opposite direction.

  Two. There were two tornadoes.

  They were quiet except for a faraway thrum, a low, almost subconscious droning that made everything around us, even the ground under our feet, vibrate in harmony. A moment later both tornadoes touched the ground, one and then the other, like thunderclaps in stereo. But, unlike thunder, the sound they made never faded. It rolled on and on. They weren’t on top of us, but we were pinned between them, and they seemed to be converging.

  There was nowhere to run. Certainly not into Noor’s old, destroyed house. We could only go forward—but which way?

  Frantic, I began pulling her away. “We have to find—”

  I was interrupted by a fire hydrant dropping from the sky through the roof of the house, which sent up a fountain of shingles and wood splinters.

  The impact seemed to snap her out of whatever trancelike state she’d been in. “We have to find shelter,” Noor said. “A deep cellar, or a bank vault maybe.”

  But there was no real shelter here where we’d landed, only flat fields and grain silos through which tornadoes had already passed, and might pass again, their tracks marked by uprooted trees, wind-dug ditches cutting through rows of corn, and the occasional old truck flipped onto its roof.

  We dashed out into the road. Not far away we could see a little downtown.

  We ran toward it.

  Rain began to fall, hard and pelting.

  “Can you remember anything else about this place?” I said. “Something that might help?”

  “I’ve been racking my brain,” she said, “but it’s all hazy . . .”

  I turned to look over my shoulder. One of the tornadoes was directly behind us, maybe a half mile back, zigzagging back and forth across the road. I had never seen one so closely or clearly before, not even on video, and the sight stole my breath. A tight, twisting spiral of cloud connecting ground to sky like a mile-high umbilical cord, and where it touched earth was a terrifying vortex of dirt and debris wider than a football field.

  It was heading straight for us. Chasing us.

  I screamed it—It’s coming—but Noor had seen already, or felt it, the waves of negative-pressure crackling the air. We broke into sprints, pumping our limbs until my lungs burned and my legs ached—and we reached the little town.

  What was left of it, anyway.

  We stopped, gasping for breath, at a square ringed by flattened buildings. Only a few remained. A flock of featherless chickens ran past us, strangely naked and clucking in baffled terror.

  On the other side of town, the second tornado was roaring. Trying to decide whether to smash us, to merge with its sister, or to rage alone.

  We searched for shelter. I led us inside one of the houses on the square, then Noor chose another, but we abandoned each when we realized neither had a cellar. We had only gotten a hundred feet from the second house when it began to rattle violently and then its roof lifted off, tumbled into the side yard, and exploded into a million pieces.

  We’re going to die.

  The words flashed through my head before I could quash them.

  We raced for cover, sprinting back through the square and diving behind a dirt embankment, where we covered our heads as a flurry of windborne shrapnel tore through the air above us. I lay there shuddering beside Noor, waiting for the furious gust to slacken.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Jacob. I never should have brought you here.”

  “You couldn’t have known.” My hand found hers on the wet ground. “We’re in this together, remember?”

  There was another massive boom somewhere close, and a plume of fire licked the sky. Gas station, I thought.

  She began to hum again. And then the humming turned to singing, and for the first time I heard the words to Noor’s song.

  “One, two, three, there goes Miss McGee . . .”

  Just then an old lady—the first person we’d seen—dashed down the road in front of us carrying a cat.

  A little shiver went through me. What were the chances . . .

  “Keep singing!” I said.

  “Two, three, four, run into the store.”

  The old lady ran up the steps of a grocery, threw open the door, and disappeared inside.

  I looked at Noor. She looked back at me, her eyes wide.

  “What’s the next line?”

  “Three, four, five, get there alive.”

  I grabbed her hand. “We have to—”

  “Go in the store!” she said.

  We jumped up and ran across the street like soldiers darting across enemy lines, and bashed through the swinging door. Miss McGee, or whoever she was, had ducked behind the cash register. Two men wearing grocer’s aprons peeked out from a door in the floor, maybe a basement stockroom.

  Noor was singing again. “Four, five, six, cinnamon sticks.”

  I shouted to the grocers: “Where do you keep your cinnamon?”

  “Aisle nine!” one of them shouted back—he was in shock, his answer automatic.

  “Get over here!” the other grocer cried, waving us toward the cellar door. “You’re not—”

  The rest of his words were lost beneath an apocalyptic roar. Noor and I dove to the floor. A metallic scream filled the air, and I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for a quick death, and then it got lighter and louder simultaneously, which could only mean the roof had peeled away. After that I thought I heard the walls go, and then it went quiet, which probably meant I was dead.

  Except I wasn’t. I uncovered my head and opened my eyes again.

  Neither of us was.

  We were fine. The entire spice aisle was fine. Untouched, in fact. The delicate little spice jars all in place.

  The rest of the store, however, including Miss McGee, had been vacuumed into the sky.

  “Your song,” I said wonderingly, my voice tiny beneath the ringing in my ears.

  “Mama taught it to me. And now I know why.” She got shakily to her feet. “It’s how I’m supposed to find her.”

  The first tornado had moved down the street. But another was coming, the sound it made was like a monster chewing glass.

  “What’s the next line?” I said.

  Noor started humming to herself. Trying to remember. She frowned. “I always forget this part.”

  I waited in silent torment as Noor stared at the floor and sang quietly, the raging tornado drawing closer and closer.

  It wasn’t Noor’s fault. V hadn’t mentioned that lives might depend on perfectly memorizing this nursery rhyme.

  This doesn’t make sense, I kept thinking. Why was this loop so deadly? And why would V invite Noor here without properly warning her about it?

  It’s a tad bit dangerous, the man watching the entrance had said. Idiot.

  Noor had started the song over again. “Four, five, six, cinnamon sticks . . .”

  She bopped her head, mumbling to herself. Then clapped her hands and shouted, “Five, six, seven, money come from heaven!”

  She turned to me suddenly, grabbed my arms. “Money! The bank vault!”

  We ran out into the street. There was a man dressed like a farmer running in the other direction.

  “Where’s the bank?” I shouted at him.

  He pointed to the street behind us. “’Round that corner!”

  He looked at us like we’d lost our sanity, then was about to say something else when an object struck him. He stumbled back and looked down, stunned, to see a stalk of corn sticking out of his chest.

  As he crumpled and fell, we ran for the bank. Turning the corner, we could see it had already been destroyed. Fire spouted from its windows, and the walls and roof had been breached.

  So much for Noor’s song. But we had nowhere else to run, and no choice but to keep going, so we kept on down the street, feet pounding pavement in the vain hope that some refuge would appear.

  We’d only just passed the destroyed bank when we saw a bizarre vision ahead—a flurry of what looked, at first glance, like snow.

  No. It was paper.

  No. It was money. Money from the breached bank vault, whirling down from the sky in a blizzard.

  “Five, six, seven,” Noor chanted between frantic breaths, “money come from heaven . . . six, seven, eight . . . stand still and wait.”

  She put on an extra burst of speed and shot ahead of me. “This way!” she shouted. “Come with me!”

  We veered into the shower of bills, and when we came to the middle of it, we stopped and stood there.

  And waited.

  A tornado was coming right toward us, but we waited. Every structure near us had either been destroyed or was in the process of being torn apart. But we had now learned to trust the song. So we stood in the heart of this snowstorm of money, the bills whipping around us, sticking to our muddy bodies while the awful, awesome spectacle of the roaring tornado bore down on us. And then, just before it reached the road where we were standing, it stopped, seemed almost to stare us down for a moment, then turned and tore through a shed.

  The roar faded. We had been spared once more.

  “Next verse!” I said, shouting through the sound of a million flurrying bills.

  “Seven, eight, nine, by the whistling pine!” Noor recalled.

  Not far away, towering over the roofs of the houses on the next street, we could see a tall tree waving in the gale. We ran toward it, cutting through a backyard littered with flopping fish, no doubt sucked up from some distant lake, and past a horse whinnying at us from atop the roof of a barn.

  The pine stood in a wooded lot at the intersection of two streets, among smaller trees that had snapped and blown away, stumps of jagged wood where their trunks had once been. The one tree that remained was old and enormous and had a trunk twenty feet thick, and the wind whipping through its branches was making a high, keening sound—a whistle, almost a song—its pitch shifting with every change in the wind.

  We stared into the upper canopy of the massive pine, looking for a tree house, maybe, or a hidden door—the entrance to V’s bunker we were both praying to find.

  But there was nothing.

  “Now what?” I shouted. “Do we climb it?”

  Noor shook her head, brow furrowed, thinking. Then she sang, “Eight, nine, ten, three wise men!”

  Neither of us knew what to make of that, and there wasn’t much time to figure it out. Could it be a code? A metaphor for something? Every other line in the song had been a reference to some actual person or place, but wise men? There was no one around; every looped normal seemed to be either dead or hiding.

  Another tree crashed down in the middle of the street not thirty feet from us, spraying us with sharp pine needles and tiny crystalline hailstones. We covered our faces.

  When I dared to look again, I saw a street sign I hadn’t noticed before, quivering in the gale.

  WISEMAN STREET

  Noor cackled with hysterical laughter and clapped her hands, and we ran toward it together.

  The house numbers were painted on the sidewalk and started at twenty, but there was only one house left standing on Wiseman Street.

  Number three.

  It was a cute but humble bungalow—one story, robin’s-egg-blue paint, nothing special—except that it had completely escaped harm. There was a clothesline straining against its poles and laundry flapping in the wind. The mailbox shuddered but stood straight. The weathervane on the roof spun but was still attached.

  And, there on the porch, sitting in a rocking chair, was a woman who could only have been V. She had short gray hair now, but I saw the same sharp-featured face I remembered from her photo. She wore an old red cardigan sweater over a dress and sat with a shotgun laid across her lap, rocking gently, watching the tornado like other people watch sunsets.

  When she saw us, she stiffened and jumped to her feet.

  And then she raised the shotgun.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Don’t shoot!” I screamed, frozen in place as we waved our hands in the air. “We come in peace!”

  V stalked toward us, eyes ablaze. “Who are you and what do you want?” she bellowed.

  “It’s me!” Noor said.

  The gun whipped toward her. V looked surprised, then baffled and sad for a moment as she searched Noor’s face—and then her caterpillar eyebrows mashed together into a furious scowl.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she shouted.

  Not the welcome we’d been expecting.

  “I came to see you!” Noor said, and I could tell she was working hard to keep her voice calm and level.

  “Yes,” V replied impatiently, “but how did you find me?”

  Noor gave me a wide-eyed look. Can you believe this?

  “We followed the address!” she said.

  “From your postcard!” I added.

  V seemed confused. Then the blood drained from her face.

  “I never sent any postcard.”

  Noor looked at V like she couldn’t possibly have heard that right.

  “What?” I said.

  V’s eyes bounced between us. “Were you followed?”

  Just then the clothesline snapped off its poles and went flying over our heads, and we all ducked to avoid being decapitated.

  “Come inside before we all get killed,” V said, and she tucked the shotgun under her arm and took each of us by the arm.

  We ran inside. V slammed the front door and pulled a series of heavy deadbolts, then began darting between windows, pulling down heavy metal shutters. “We almost got killed five times already,” I said. “Why do you live in such a deadly place?”

  It looked like a cross between an old lady’s house and a weaponry museum. Leaning in a rack beside a table set with teacups were three scoped rifles. Hung over the arm of a green-velvet sofa was an ammunition belt. It reminded me of my grandfather’s house.

  “Because I looped it that way,” she said, and pulled on a dangling cord to make a periscope rattle down from the ceiling. “I designed it to be impenetrable. It repeats the deadliest event in the history of this region on the half hour.” She peered into the periscope. “Can either of you shoot a gun?”

  I nearly fell over. “Wait—you looped it?”

  She pulled her face away from the periscope and looked at me. “I’m an ymbryne. And of course you can shoot, you’re Abe Portman’s grandson.” She turned to glance at Noor, who seemed almost too stunned to speak, and her expression softened. “We were never supposed to see each other again, dear. Not that I didn’t wish it a thousand times . . .”

  “But it’s not impenetrable,” Noor said. “The song.”

  I was standing next to her, but she seemed, in that moment, very alone.

  V let her hands fall away from the periscope. “After all these years, I never thought you’d remember it.”

  “Of course I did,” said Noor. Her voice was barely audible above the wind outside. “You did want me to come.”

  V smiled and crossed the room to Noor and me, and I thought she might reach out and put her arms around Noor, but she stopped short. “A sentimental mistake.” Her smile began to waver. “I knew I shouldn’t have let myself grow attached to you, but you were such a dear, sweet child. I knew that eventually, for your own sake, I would have to let you go, but I suppose I wanted to believe that maybe, one day, you and I could . . .” V looked down. Took a long breath. “I never should have taught it to you. And it was meant to be used only in the gravest emergencies.” She looked up again. And now she looked afraid. “But only if I reached out to you first.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “If you didn’t send that postcard, who did?”

  “That would be me,” said a peppy voice from behind us, and we spun to see a man standing by the door to the kitchen. It was the old man from the storage unit. His cast was gone, and he had a gun pointed at us. “I sent several, actually, to a few different addresses. I know the post is a little old-fashioned these days . . . but so is Velya here.”

  “Murnau,” V snarled.

  He let out a dry laugh, then untwisted his posture, broadened his shoulders, and flashed a familiar, arrogant grin. And suddenly I saw him, clear as day, through the beard and makeup: Murnau. He had a leather bag slung across his back.

  “Did I interrupt a family reunion? My timing is, as always, impeccable.” He took a step toward us. His gun, and most of his focus, was trained on V. “All right, sweets. Where do you want to do this? Kitchen floor? Bathtub, save the rug? Not that any of that’s going to be here in a few hours.”

  “Leave her alone!” Noor said. “If you’ve got some issue with her, you can settle it with me.”

  “No thanks. You’ve served your purpose already. But if you try anything tricky, I’ll make your mom suffer more than she needs to.” His eyes cut to me. “And your boyfriend.”

  “I know what you’re after,” I said, “and there’s nothing for you here.”

  He ignored me. “Do you know we’ve been trying to get into this loop for years? Wasted a lot of good men, but were never able to crack it . . . until today.” He flashed a grin at Noor. “You forgot to lock your back door, Velya.”

  And then he shot her.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Before the shot had stopped ringing, before V had even hit the floor, before I could react at all, Noor ran at Murnau. She had no weapon, no light stored up inside her, just her two hands and the power of her hatred. But he was ready: He stepped deftly to the side, drew back his muscled arm, and slammed her to the floor. And then I was diving toward him—ready to tear him apart—but in the time it took to close the distance between us, he had snatched another gun from his belt, raised it, and fired.