BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 2 — The Town That Remembers

Morning came glazed and worn. The gutters had spilled a delta of silt across the front step. She swept it with the old straw broom, the dried grass whispering, the sound pinned to childhood like a label. In the street, a boy in a red shirt pedaled through a puddle and trailed a signature of dirty water behind him. His wheels clicked in the same pattern her mother’s sewing machine once had at this hour.

By eight, the heat closed. The market anyway thrummed—plastic tarps made their blue shadows dance, fruit piled into pyramids that wanted to fall. She followed Kelechi past a table of mangoes with the small black dots locals called their stars, past stacks of plantains, down an alley where the smell changed from spice to oil and iron. He wanted her to see his shop.

“Shop” was grand, but there was pride in the half-shuttered space: a true mechanic’s order to the mess, each socket set nested, each wrench hung. A cracked calendar on the wall still showed April for some reason, its picture a waterfall that made both their throats tighten.

“You could have called me to change the months,” she said.

“I was waiting for May to deserve it,” he said. “It didn’t.”

A youth with braids and grease-tattooed fingers poked his head around a door. “Boss, the van is back. The drone guys say they need a look at the inverter.”

Amara looked at Kelechi. Only for a second. Just long enough for him to look away.

“They pay on time,” he said. Too quickly. “They’re legal. The Mayor says so, and you love the Mayor now.”

“I don’t love anyone,” she said. “Especially politicians.”

“Dr. Rhea is not a politician,” he said mildly.

She blinked. He should not have known her name.

He spread his hands. “Small town. You were a headline once. You are again.”

At a lunch place with plastic chairs, the owner set a plate of jollof in front of Amara and kissed the air next to her ear. “You look like your mother when she was young,” she said. “A face for fighting with.”

Amara smiled because she had learned not to argue with compliments when they were maps to other things. She ate. She listened to the radio again: a talk show with the mayor and someone from the pilot program explaining “community co-benefits.” The words dripped with self-assurance. She knew the taste. She’d used it herself when pitching for grant money—softly lit phrases shaken over hard facts until both parties were distracted by their own reflections.

On their way back, they passed the mural again. Someone had laid a bouquet of cheap white flowers at the base. The ribbon said: STILL WITH US. The paint of her mother’s eyes glared in the afternoon sun.

She wanted to say something to Kelechi, something that would crack the shiny shell he wore, but the scripts they used as children were still in place. She was the one who left. He was the one who stayed. Every word they spoke now had to cross that line and climb down the ladder of their mother’s absence.

At home, she opened her laptop and sank into numbers because numbers were a language that didn’t punish her for breath. She pulled the station telemetry for the week and built a quick model to map microburst locations against tower activation logs. The tower logs, of course, were “proprietary,” but public press photos had captured install dates and coordinates. The internet—bless the chaos of it—supplied enough glimpses for her to triangulate.

She ran the model. The map glowed. The microbursts did not hover randomly; they lined up with angles too purposeful to be dismissed as play. But they weren’t centered on the towers; they traced a corridor between towers and the river, like someone dragging a fingernail lightly across a bruise.

She saved, encrypted, backed up to an offsite account she’d set up the day the contract arrived. She made a second password that was her mother’s first plant, the one that had kept dying no matter what they did, and then a third password that was a nonsense string. She had learned to layer safety after the city job that ended with a server on fire.

Her phone buzzed again. A message from a number with no name: a link to an audio file. She hesitated, routed it through a sandbox, and played it.

“Listeners,” a man’s voice said, bright with practiced curiosity. “This is Jax from Waterline. Today, a question: Who gets dry land, and who gets the flood?” A pause. “We’ve been tipped to a pilot project down south that looks like salvation on a brochure and like something else on the ground.”

She stopped the clip. Turned the phone face down. Stared at the map again where the angles met like a badly mended seam.

At six, thunder mumbled. At eight, the first fat drops landed heavy. At ten-thirty, she put on a light jacket and laced her boots. Kelechi appeared in the doorway. His face was hard to read in the watery light.

“Going out,” he said.

“Me too,” she said.

He shifted, then nodded. “Be safe.”

“You too.”

He left first. She closed her eyes briefly. The wind leaned into the side of the house with a long push. She picked up her bag, checked the spare battery, slung the strap across her chest, and stepped into the rain.

The road to the municipal meteorology station ran along the ridge where the town pretended it had height. The station itself surprised her: a low building that hunched like a fox in a storm, its instruments bristling. A woman stood under the awning, hands in pockets, her hair braided back and a scarf wound tight against the mist.

“Dr. Omondi?” Amara called.

“Rhea,” the woman said. “If we’re going to be up past midnight, let’s not waste syllables.”

They shook hands. Rhea’s grip was dry and calm. Inside, the station was warmer than it looked, the hum of machines like a purr. The Doppler screen pulsed, its sweep a luminous arm. Rhea flicked a switch, and the lab’s main display lit with an overlay she’d built herself: real-time wind vectors sketched the air’s intentions in swift, thin arrows.

“You sent a crisp brief,” Rhea said. “You also made enemies without meeting them. That’s a gift.”

“Not a gift,” Amara said. “An accident.”

Rhea smiled without showing teeth. “In my experience, accidents are just the names people give to outcomes they don’t want to own.”

She walked Amara through the station’s logs, the calibration schedule, the ways humidity could lie. She showed her the holes, too—gaps in the data where a technician had missed a sample or a cheap part had given up. Amara liked her immediately for the honesty of it.

“Tell me what you’ve seen,” Rhea said finally.

Amara swallowed and showed her the corridor. Rhea watched the lines without speaking. Then she sighed.

“You’ll want to look at this.” She slid a folder across the table, paper clipped tight. Amara blinked. Paper. She opened it. Inside: printouts of tower activation memos she shouldn’t have had, public remarks matched to days when rain moved the wrong way, a schedule stamped as “draft” in a hand that had been cropped badly. A set of drone flight plans filed by a subcontractor whose number she recognized from the mechanic’s shop calendar.

“How did you get these?” Amara asked.

“I still have friends,” Rhea said. “For now.”

“And why give them to me?”

“Because I read your work. Because you remember that weather is more than numbers.” Rhea’s face softened. “Because I know who your mother was.”

Rain battered the window in a sudden fist. The lab lights flickered, steadied. A printer in the corner woke up and spat one blank sheet.

Amara exhaled. “Someone will try to stop this,” she said.

“Someone already is,” Rhea said. “Which is why you should be careful who you answer when they call.”

Midnight came and went. They drank tea from chipped mugs. Rhea showed her the stations where the city’s budget had been faithful and the corners where it hadn’t. Just after one, Amara’s phone vibrated with a message from Kelechi: You up?

She typed back: Yes. You?

A long pause. Then: Almost done.

“Almost done with what?” she whispered to the empty air. But the lab’s hum swallowed the question and kept its counsel.