Chapter 4 — Call to Inquiry
The old bridge had been gone for eighteen months, leaving only the stone footings and a ghost of its span across the water. Jax was waiting, a lean man in a rain jacket that had seen better storms, his recorder like a small black animal in his palm.
"You came," he said.
"I came to tell you to leave my family alone," Amara said.
"Fair enough." He clicked the recorder off, slipped it into his pocket. "But your family is in the middle of this whether I talk to them or not."
She studied his face—sharp cheekbones, eyes that held attention like water in cupped hands. A face that had learned to look trustworthy without actually committing to trust. "What do you know about my brother?"
"I know he drives for subcontractors," Jax said. "I know the subcontractors have contracts with the pilot program. I know the pilot program has an interesting relationship with weather patterns."
"Correlation," she said automatically.
"Maybe. Or maybe someone figured out how to make it rain where they want and not rain where they don't want." He leaned against the stone footing, watched the river move below them. "Question is, who decides which places deserve dry crops and which places get the flood?"
The question hung between them like smoke. She wanted to dismiss it, to retreat into the safety of insufficient data, but the rotor blade seemed to pulse in her bag like a second heartbeat.
"Why podcasting?" she asked instead.
"Because radio waves travel farther than print, and people trust voices more than faces." He smiled without irony. "Also because I got fired from three newspapers for asking the wrong questions about agricultural subsidies."
"What questions?"
"The ones that follow money upstream instead of downstream."
A fish jumped in the river below them, silver arc and splash. The evening air held the day's heat like a cupped palm. She found herself thinking of her mother's journal, the careful notes about pressure and wind direction, the way she'd taught Amara to read the sky like a text with grammar and syntax.
"If I were to hypothetically share information," she said carefully, "what would you hypothetically do with it?"
"Verify it. Cross-reference it. Find more sources." Jax straightened, his attention sharpening. "Tell the story in a way that makes it impossible to ignore."
"And if the story puts people in danger?"
"Then we tell it anyway, because ignoring it puts more people in more danger."
She watched him for a long moment, cataloguing the micro-expressions that might reveal deception or agenda. But his face held steady, patient as someone accustomed to waiting for truth to surface.
"I have questions," she said finally.
"Good. Questions are the beginning of everything useful."
They walked back toward town as the first streetlights flickered on. She told him about the microbursts, the timing patterns, the corridor that shouldn't exist. She didn't mention the rotor blade or the satellite photo or the drone she'd seen. Not yet. Trust was a currency you spent carefully.
"The Mayor's holding a town hall Thursday," Jax said. "Big presentation about the pilot program's success metrics. You should come."
"I don't do public meetings."
"You should make an exception. Sometimes the most interesting information is what people don't say when they know they're being recorded."
At the house, Kelechi's sedan was back in the driveway, steam still rising from the hood. She found him in the kitchen, shoulders tight with exhaustion, nursing a beer that was mostly backwash.
"Long day?" she asked.
"They all are." He gestured at the chair across from him. "Sit. You look like you've been thinking too hard."
She sat. "Tell me about the drone contracts."
His beer paused halfway to his mouth. "What about them?"
"Tell me what you do. Exactly what you do."
"I transport equipment. I maintain vehicles. I submit invoices and I get paid on time." His voice stayed level, but his free hand found the table's edge and gripped it. "It's legal work, Amara."
"Legal and right aren't always the same thing."
"Legal and employed aren't always the same thing either." The words came out harder than he'd intended. He set the beer down, rubbed his face. "Sorry. I just... this town doesn't have a lot of good options anymore."
She wanted to press, to push until he gave her the whole truth. But his exhaustion was real, and so was the weight he carried in his shoulders, the way he held himself like someone braced against wind.
"The town hall Thursday," she said instead. "Are you going?"
"Wasn't planning to." He looked at her sideways. "Should I?"
"Maybe. If you want to hear what they're not telling us."
That night, she dreamed of her mother standing in the rain, hands cupped to catch falling water. In the dream, the water turned to light in her palms, then to numbers that scattered like birds when the wind changed. She woke with tears on her cheeks and the taste of ozone in her mouth.
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