BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 5 — Refusal in Disguise

The contract was specific: assess, report, recommend. Three weeks of clean, contained work with clear parameters and a tidy exit strategy. Amara repeated this to herself as she walked to the municipal building for her check-in meeting with the Mayor's office, her interim report folded into a manila envelope that felt substantial and safe.

The building squatted in the town center like a concrete toad, its windows catching morning light and throwing it back in flat, dismissive squares. Inside, the air conditioning hummed at a frequency that made her molars ache.

Deputy Mayor Adunni met her in a conference room that smelled like burnt coffee and optimism. A woman in her forties with a politician's handshake and an accountant's eyes.

"Ms. Tayo, thank you for coming. The Mayor wanted to be here personally, but the state delegation—you understand."

Amara nodded and slid the envelope across the table. "Interim findings. I'll need access to the tower activation logs to complete the assessment."

Adunni opened the envelope, scanned the single page with the fluid speed of someone accustomed to processing information quickly. Her expression didn't change, but her pen clicked twice—a nervous tell.

"Interesting preliminary observations," she said carefully. "Of course, correlation patterns can be misleading without proper context."

"Which is why I need the activation data."

"That information is proprietary to our contractor." The pen clicked again. "But I can assure you that all operations are within federal guidelines and environmental standards."

"I'm not questioning compliance," Amara said. "I'm documenting patterns that could affect future weather modeling for the region."

"And we appreciate your thoroughness." Adunni's smile was professionally warm and entirely empty. "Perhaps Dr. Omondi could provide alternative data sources that would serve your research needs."

The meeting ended with handshakes and promises to "facilitate collaboration" that meant nothing and committed to less. Amara walked out with the same folder she'd brought in and the growing certainty that she was being politely, expertly managed.

She found Rhea at the weather station, hunched over a laptop with her coffee going cold beside her. The screen showed a pressure map of the region with overlays that looked like surgical scars.

"How did it go?" Rhea asked without looking up.

"They're stonewalling." Amara dropped into the chair beside her. "Politely, professionally, completely."

"Expected." Rhea saved her work, closed the laptop. "The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

"Complete my assessment with the data I have. File my report. Go home."

Rhea studied her face. "That's not what your mother would have done."

"My mother wasn't a contractor." The words came out sharper than Amara intended. "She wasn't responsible for maintaining professional relationships and future employment prospects."

"No. She was responsible for keeping her daughter safe from storms." Rhea's voice stayed gentle. "She failed at that once. She wouldn't want you to fail at it now."

The weather station's instruments hummed around them, patient and persistent as heartbeats. Through the window, Amara could see the pilot towers rising like metallic prayers from the field beyond town. Clean lines, purposeful angles, the kind of engineering that looked like progress until you started asking what it cost and who paid.

"What if I'm wrong?" she said finally. "What if it's just weather being weather, and I'm seeing patterns that aren't really there?"

"Then you write that in your report," Rhea said. "But what if you're right, and you walk away anyway?"

That afternoon, Amara sat in her childhood bedroom and tried to draft the final report. She wrote three versions: one that documented the anomalies without drawing conclusions, one that recommended further investigation, and one that stated her suspicions clearly and let the consequences fall where they would.

She stared at all three for an hour, then closed the laptop and walked to the kitchen where Kelechi was teaching himself to cook something that involved onions and optimism.

"Smells good," she lied.

"Smells like chemistry," he said. "But edible chemistry."

They ate at the small table by the window, watching the evening light settle over the town like dust. The silence between them felt full of words neither knew how to say.

"The job in the city," he said finally. "The one you're going back to. Is it good?"

"It pays well. It's stable. It doesn't require me to sleep in the same house where—" She stopped.

"Where she died," he finished quietly.

"Yeah."

"Do you like it, though? The work itself?"

She considered this. "I like solving problems. I like finding patterns in chaos. I like making sense of things that don't make sense."

"Sounds like you're describing this place," he said.

"This place isn't a problem to solve. It's a place to survive or leave."

He nodded, scraped his fork across his plate. "What if someone figured out how to do both? Survive and make sense?"

"Is that what you're trying to do?"

"I'm trying to keep the lights on and the roof over our heads," he said. "Everything else is luxury."

That night, she found her mother's journal again and read the entries from the weeks before the storm that killed her. The handwriting grew more urgent as the pressure patterns shifted, the notes more detailed, the measurements more frequent. On the last page, a single line: The sky is trying to tell us something. We have to learn how to listen.

She closed the journal and opened her laptop. She began typing a fourth version of the report, one that started with a question instead of a conclusion: What if the sky is trying to tell us something, and we're just not listening carefully enough? 

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