BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 1 — The Storm Returns

The plane banked low over the delta, and Amara watched the water stitch silver threads through the town she’d sworn never to see from this angle again. From thirty thousand feet, storms looked harmless. From here, the river’s swollen braids glinted like a warning.

An alert pulsed faintly on her tablet—an automated summary of the past month’s precipitation anomalies—color‑blocked rectangles stacking on a graph like unreliable promises. She silenced it. Another ping. Then a distant siren floated up from the tarmac, not the clean, contained tone of airport procedure but the unsettled keening that always yanked her backward in time.

She kept her breath steady, counted through the sequence her therapist had taught her years ago in a cramped city office smelling of cedar and printer toner. Name five shapes. Rectangle—window; circle—fan; triangle—plane wing; oval—armrest; star—rivets. It steadied her until wheels scuffed down and the flaps groaned open.

By the time she crossed to the terminal, humidity had turned her shirt collar into a soft seam of discomfort. Posters lined the arrival corridor: a smiling Mayor Durojaiye with a rolled blueprint; a tagline beneath: “Resilience Begins at Home.” Another showed gleaming panels—a schematic of “rain harvesting towers,” their slim spires reaching into gray-blue.

In baggage claim, the conveyor belt dragged, clunked, and stalled twice. A child pressed his face to the glass; a woman lifted a palm-leaf fan to her cheekbones and closed her eyes. Amara felt the familiar pressure—grief as barometric weight—gather at her forehead. She checked the airport Wi‑Fi, tethered instead to her phone when the captive portal refused her. Where her city network was a slick river of low-latency pings, this one sputtered like a garden tap someone had half-forgotten to turn off.

Her brother was late. Of course he was.

When Kelechi finally appeared, his hug was quick, his smile one he saved for other people, then tried on her like a jacket that didn’t fit. He grabbed her suitcase in the same motion he kissed her temple.

“You got thinner,” he said.

“You got dramatic,” she said.

They stepped out into the sun just as clouds tugged themselves tight—ragged cumulus welding their edges like welded metal. The air tasted metallic. She raised her face and read the sky the way some people read tea leaves: low ceiling; heat still trapped; a bruise along the far horizon.

“In twenty minutes, the airfield will turn to soup,” she said.

“Welcome home,” he said wryly, and led her toward the parking lot where his old sedan waited with one window stuck jaggedly half open, a towel wedged into the gap.

They drove in a loose, old rhythm, the radio low, transmissions from a station she didn’t recognize leaking between stations: a pastor’s hallelujah clipped by a pop hook and then by the steady voice of a woman reading the weather. Precipitation likely. Roads advised to remain clear. Avoid the east drainage corridor.

She glanced up. “Why east?”

“Construction,” Kelechi said. His fingers flexed on the wheel, calluses catching the light. “Rain harvesting.”

He delivered the phrase like a joke and a dare, and she let it pass, cataloguing his micro-flinch for later, the way she would mark an anomaly line in a spreadsheet. She looked out the window as a mural slipped by—blue paint peeled, but the faces still bright: a woman with her headscarf tied back, reaching to a child’s hand. Her mother’s face, captured by some generous student with a knack for planes and light, had not been vandalized this year. Someone had retouched the whites of her eyes too much. They glowed.

At the house, a narrow building with a sagging eave and a neat yard, she stopped on the cracked step and inhaled. A smell climbed off the cement in the heat: river mud and limes and the ghost of kerosene. She swallowed. She set her suitcase in the corner, made herself walk into the kitchen and open the cupboard to count the bowls, like a meaningless ritual. Four. There used to be five.

“Power’s been reliable,” Kelechi said too brightly, flipping a switch. The light hesitated, then steadied. “You’ll like that.”

“I like honesty,” she said.

“You like numbers,” he corrected.

She smiled despite herself, and he handed her a glass. “To numbers,” he said. “To you saving the town in three weeks, then fleeing back to your safe city.”

“I’m not saving anyone,” she said. “I’m auditing.”

“Do you ever hear yourself?” He laughed. “Auditing the sky. Only you.”

That night the rain arrived early. It came in a sheet, then a veil, then the little hammering that meant gutters would fail. She sat at the borrowed desk beneath the bedroom window and opened her laptop. The dashboard greeted her: a mosaic of precipitation heatmaps and a timeline of microbursts flagged in cautionary orange. The east drainage corridor was a thick, improbable smear of color, one she’d never seen in her models—not here, not in this pattern.

✨ Follow blastserial.com for new episodes

Her cursor hovered over a spike four days ago, 04:11 local time. Preceded by a small but distinct rise in negative ion counts along a narrow band. She clicked into raw numbers, metrics spilling across the screen: barometric dips measured in seconds, wind shear inconsistent with storm structure.

There was a code she used when something needed outlier attention and a human eye—“cloud whisper.” She clicked the star, tagged it, and felt the old unease of being a child holding a secret that was too heavy for her hands.

When the thunder hit, it hit close. She flinched and then stayed very still, counting between flash and sound out of habit. Eight seconds. Seven. Six. A low groan in the walls of the house she felt more than heard—the river’s voice throbbing in the foundation.

Her phone buzzed. An unknown number, a local code. She let it go to voicemail, then curiosity caught her like a fish on a hook and she touched play.

A woman’s voice, steady, unhurried. “Amara Tayo, this is Dr. Rhea Omondi from Municipal Meteorology. I read your brief. I’d like to show you our station at midnight. Less traffic, less heat interference on the equipment. Come alone.”

The line clicked off. Outside, the rain thickened until the world behind it looked like it was hiding. She typed one note against the sound of it. Midnight. Then, because old rituals had gravity, she stood, turned off the desk lamp, and let the storm have the window. In the reflected dark, her mother’s cheekbones hovered where her own should be, a ghost of bone going about its business.

In the spare room across the hall, a floorboard whined softly. Kelechi moving quietly. Or someone else.