BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 12 — Commitment Line

That night, as thunder barreled through the open window, Amara typed her commitment: a plan to cross-correlate public power grid records with tower logs, drone flight plans, and precipitation anomalies. She drafted a press release for city officials, vowing to publish her findings with full transparency regardless of professional reprisals.

Rhea brought over an encrypted USB hidden in a box of tea bags—her final archive, a comprehensive log of every intervention she'd witnessed or suspected.

“I can’t go public yet,” Rhea said. “But I’ll testify if it comes down to a formal inquiry.”

Kelechi arrived on the porch, wet and shaken. He gripped Amara’s hands. “You need to stop,” he pleaded. “They know. I owe them. I have one more delivery tonight, then it’s done. Stay out of it.”

Amara shook her head. “You’re in, whether you want to be or not. And so am I.”

Kelechi’s shoulders slumped. “You’re braver than you think. But sometimes brave means reckless.”

She spent the night rewriting contingency plans, setting up a system where even if she disappeared, the evidence would live on in digital hands.

At dawn, the storm had faded, leaving behind the hush that sometimes follows catastrophe—where the air itself waits, uncertain, to see what choices will be made.

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