BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 3 — The Anomaly

At four in the morning the storms here always developed a second voice. Not the grand pronouncements of thunder but a private whisper in the gutters and the trees—that creak and gullied hush the town understood the way farmers read the wind.

Amara, walking home with the folder zipped into her jacket, heard it and paused at the ridge. The town flashed briefly below her, lightning turning rooftops into coins. For one moment she saw the river lift and set itself down again, like a muscular animal settling. She laughed once softly at herself—superstition, projection—and kept moving.

The east drainage corridor lay a little lower than the rest of town. When she reached the first culvert, a new sound braided into the old: a high, mosquito whine that didn’t belong to insects. She stopped. The whine climbed, paused, then skated down the scale. A drone’s song.

She stepped into the shadow of a jacaranda and waited. A quadcopter tilted above the far field, lights muted, lifted in a careful diagonal, hung, then powered forward, following a line she could now feel in her bones. She raised her phone, kept the flash off, recorded. The drone traced another diagonal, a measured, deliberate hand.

She traced it with her mind across the map she’d made. The corridor. The angles. The bruise.

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Her foot slipped; she caught herself on the culvert’s lip. Her palm found metal. Not smooth like the culvert. Something ribbed. She crouched and groped into the shadow and her fingers closed on a broken blade of composite—a drone rotor, its edge nicked, its hub stamped with the rain pilot’s crest.

Her mouth went dry. She wrapped the rotor in her scarf and stowed it in her bag.

She followed the drone’s path with her eyes until it disappeared into the quilt of rain. Another took its place, smaller. Then another, farther away, just a glow in the mist like a trick star.

When she reached the house, mud slicked the porch steps. She wiped her boots, failed, left a map of her foot in the hall. The kitchen smelled like wet cloth and something else—hot plastic. She moved carefully, looking for light under doors, listening for breathing.

“Kelechi?” she called softly.

No answer. The spare room was empty, the bed’s top sheet thrown back. A note on the dresser, one line in his blunt block letters: Back soon.

She sat at the desk, kept her jacket on, set the bag on her thighs. She opened the laptop and slid the rotor blade out carefully, like an artifact or a knife. The crest was small, barely a suggestion—three lines making a drop. Nothing illegal yet, she told herself. Nothing but a strong correlation and a broken thing in a place it shouldn’t have been.

She wrote. She documented the time, the location, the vector of the drone’s movement, the sound changes, the weather state as measured by the station at 03:58. She attached the video clip. She logged the evidence with an encrypted hash. She did all the things that kept her from being the woman who hurled herself into a tide with nothing but a vow.

At five-twelve, power sagged, flared, and settled. Her phone chimed with a new message, a different unknown number. No audio this time. Just a sentence.

Look down, not up.

She looked down, and a picture arrived. A satellite photo of the house, slightly outdated—the jacaranda still small. A white dot over the roof. Someone had drawn a heart next to it.

Her throat worked. She opened the kitchen tap and let it run, listening to the mean sound of air in the line.

By ten, the rain eased. People emerged like secret notes in a margin. A neighbor woman knocked with a bag of garden oranges she refused to take back. “For strength,” she said, as if strength were a thing citrus could manufacture. Amara thanked her, peeled one at the sink, and ate the segments too quickly, the acid waking all the soft parts of her mouth.

At noon, her inbox spat a formal notice: PUBLIC RECORDS REQUEST—DELAY. The explanation, couched in cheerful bureaucracy, made an art form of refusing to say who refused what. At one, the Waterline podcast released its episode: a careful, coy fifteen minutes that gave away nothing and implied everything. She didn’t listen. She knew better than to feed herself salt when she was already thirsty.

She wrote the draft of her formal interim report instead. The language was measured, the tone dry, the claims neat and insufficient. She stared at it for a long time, then added a single risky sentence: “The concentration and timing of localized microbursts suggest deliberate intervention along a corridor paralleling municipal installations; further access to tower activation data is required to confirm or refute this hypothesis.”

She sent it to her city supervisor. She sent a less formal version to Dr. Rhea. She did not send anything to Kelechi, because she still couldn’t write the sentence that began with his name and ended with a truth.

When her phone rang at three, the voice was the man from Waterline, closer now, like a person leaning, elbows on your table. “Amara Tayo,” Jax said. “I think we’re working the same storm.”

“No,” she said, too quickly. “I’m working in the rain. You’re working a story.”

Silence, then a small, respectful laugh. “Fair. But stories are the way some of us learned to say what the rain already knows.”

“What do you want?”

“To share information,” he said. “To trade. To warn.”

“Me or yourself?”

“Both. And your brother,” he said gently.

Her heart flipped. “Don’t.”

“I won’t,” he said. “But someone else will. Meet me where the old bridge used to be. Sunset. I’ll bring questions. You bring your disbelief. We’ll see what survives the crossing.”

She hung up without answering. She stared at the rotor blade until its shape imprinted itself on her eyes. Then she went to the bedroom and found her mother’s old barometer journal in the box under the bed where Kelechi hid everything that hurt. She flipped to a page where her mother had written a note in her lawyerly hand: Listen before you measure. Then measure until they have to listen.

The afternoon peeled away, and the sky took on the color of a bruise healing. She put the journal in her bag next to the blade. She washed her face and tied back her hair. She wrote Kelechi a message: Be careful. He wrote back instantly: You too.

She didn’t ask careful of what. He didn’t say. The day held its breath, and for a second—one small second—she could see something like light behind the clouds.