Free Call Forth the Waves by L. J. Hatton

half-accurate. We didn’t have to worry about Warden Files or the Commission, but at this point, Baba was far more likely to be the bogeyman than Nafiza was.
    “Relax,” Winnie told us. She took our silence and blank stares as reason to continue. “He’s just starting a mealtime protocol to make room for the extra bodies at the table. These rooms are modular, like the dining and kitchen compartments on the train. If you need a bigger kitchen, you get it by shrinking the next room over. And since the front door only opens into the living room, all Ollie will see on the other side is a metal wall.”
    “Astute as always, Winifred dear.”
    “Baba, you can’t!” Nola said. If she’d been a little younger, she would have been jumping up and down.
    She seemed as tired of making the complaint as we were of hearing it, and while Baba’s face grew younger as he carried out his plot to thwart the local busybodies, Nola’s aged. She cracked like parched earth broken by the sun and ready to be blown away, exhausted by the constant drain of having to be more mature than her elder.
    She took a deep breath and tried to respond more calmly.
    “We’ve already had six shorts this month. Two of the rooms upstairs were taken completely off the grid because they kept frying breakers. Do you realize how much power this is going to draw? Because I guarantee you it’s more than the system can handle.”
    She looked to us pleadingly, as though we might be able to sway the old man. Maybe she was hoping that Winnie would step in and do exactly that, without her having to ask, but Winnie was high on her grandfather’s acceptance. She nearly tripped over Birch in her rush to be included in his scheming.
    “Bah! Those circuits were worn out. The kitchen’s haven’t been used in years. They’re practically brand new.” Baba flipped the switch beside the door. “Winifred, close the circuit, dear.”
    The system was set up so that no one could start the sequence by accident, just like on the train. My father didn’t want to accidentally trap someone in a shrinking room because he flipped the wrong switch while looking for a light.
    “Don’t. Please, ” Nola begged.
    Winnie hesitated with her hand poised over the switch on the other side of the room, but only for a moment. Then her face hardened with the same resolve I’d seen the day she commanded Warden Arcineaux to choke the life out of himself.
    “That’s the thing about the dead,” she said. “We have a hard time sympathizing with the living.”
    She flipped the switch, and the whole house started to shake.

CHAPTER 7
    It started with a tremor and tinkling glass. The kitchen light was an industrial octopus of a thing, based on a climber light but fixed in place, with extra arms to hold extra bulbs. The creepers abandoned their posts and fled to higher ground on the kitchen stairs as the different arms of the overhead light clinked against each other and began to flicker.
    Dishes rattled from their cabinets. Dev and my sister rushed to catch as many as they could, but plenty fell between the gaps, bouncing or shattering against the floor, depending on what they were made of.
    Baba looked completely unrepentant for the mess, barely bothering an “oops” for the trouble.
    Beneath our feet, a wave rolled the floor, causing me to stumble into Jermay, him into Birch, and the whole group of us to lose our footing and land on Klok.
    Birdie screamed. A sound of primordial terror I was too familiar with. She scrambled into Klok’s lap, wrapped herself around his armored body, and hid her face in his neck, crying, “No, no, no, no, no,” in an endless stream that dissolved quickly into blubbering gibberish. On the ground, this kind of commotion was the hallmark of a Commission raid.
    The feeling of destruction was too familiar, dredging up memories of my bedroom being derailed and the night I caused my first earthquake, but the Mile had no ground under it to shake. The Center had