would cause problems anywhere else.”
Sierra blinked. “I’m just going to move a little water. I thought you said it would be okay.”
“From there, sure—but if you do it from here, you’ll be messing with a lot of currents between here and there.”
Well, yeah. She couldn’t just teleport to Hawaii. “I’ll be really careful.” She’d make darned sure no waves headed for any more baby birds, for starters.
TJ shook his head. “Show me which currents you’d tug on from here. Can you see them on the map, or show me outside?”
She closed her eyes a minute, visualizing, and tried to overlay that on the map. “Here, this one. It’s not the straightest, but it’s the easiest to pull from here.”
He began madly banging on his keyboard, and half a minute later, the lines on the screens began to move. “I’ve asked the model to project what would happen if you tugged hard enough from here to fix the problem off Maui.”
Okay, he was the coolest geek ever. Sierra watched the lines on the screen as they morphed and changed, and grinned as the storm brewing offshore in Hawaii dissipated. “It’ll work, see?”
TJ didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Keep watching. If I’ve learned one thing about weather, it’s that nothing is simple. No way you move the energies like that for thousands of miles, and nothing else happens.”
Magic was so freaking complicated all of a sudden. Sierra’s heart squeezed, thinking of her baby whales. She kept watching the screens, though. Seeing all those lines move was kind of mesmerizing. Suddenly TJ leaned forward and froze the screen. “There. Off New Zealand. See that disturbance? Keep your eyes on that.”
It was a tiny red dot. And as Sierra watched, it mutated into a big, ugly, green-and-red mess. “What’s that?”
“Class-four tropical storm. Almost hurricane status.”
Get out. “All that from fixing a little storm in Hawaii?” No way.
“Ninety-two percent likelihood. That’s pretty high. Might be a little bigger, might be a little smaller, but we’d probably make a lot of people in New Zealand pretty wet. Maybe some big waves, too.”
She’d never been to New Zealand. Momma said it was mostly sheep. “This is just a model, right? Maybe something messed up.”
“Maybe.” TJ shrugged. “But probably not. I’m pretty good at this stuff.”
She tried to wrap her head around messing up the worldwide weather just to keep the baby whales happier. It didn’t seem right to do that—but it didn’t seem right to just forget about them, either.
“Maybe there’s a different way to do this.”
“Maybe. From here, probably not, at least with your magic. Govin can use fire, and that’s sometimes easier when we need to reach long distances.” He leaned back from his computer. “But in this case, it’s probably going to be just as effective to leave Mother Nature alone and put out alerts to the surfers.”
“If it were a bigger storm, we’d want to do something, right?” She frowned, not quite ready to let the storm toss her baby whales around. “I could fix it more quietly if I were closer.” And take a swim with the whales, too.
“Yup.” TJ threw the Doritos bag at the garbage can and missed. “That’s why we’re trying to get things all sorted out for WitchNet. Jamie says they should be able to shuttle people through Realm—dump you out in Maui, or wherever. Or send the right spell to someone who’s already there.”
Okay, maybe Jamie was the coolest geek ever. “Is that what I’m going to get to do?” That would be pretty much the world’s best job, zapping in and out of Realm, being a weather superhero.
“Maybe.” He retrieved the Doritos bag and tried tossing it again. “Gotta solve the logistics and safety problems first.”
She frowned. “What’s that mean?”
TJ hit a few keys. “Here’s what could happen if five witches each did something along the lines of what you just did, without realizing what anyone else was doing.”
She watched as five spots on the map started flashing. Lines spread out from each, strange little ripples that traveled, and touched other lines, and sometimes met. She frowned as yellow alerts started popping up all over the world. “What are those?”
“Weather anomalies. Bad stuff the model wasn’t expecting.” He started pointing. “Storms here and here. Some flooding in low-lying areas, here. Big waves here and here. Those ones are forty-footers.”
A new alert popped up in the bottom center screen. “What’s the orange one?”
“Twenty-foot waves hitting coastal India.”
That was big, but she’d seen waves that big