BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 6 — The Hook—Inciting Incident

At 3:47 AM, Amara's phone screamed.

She jolted awake, muscle memory from years of emergency alerts dragging her from sleep to full awareness in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The screen showed multiple warnings cascading: flash flood, severe weather, seek higher ground immediately.

Through the bedroom window, the sky strobed white and purple. Thunder arrived in waves, each crash closer than the last. She grabbed clothes, boots, her laptop bag, and was moving toward Kelechi's room before her conscious mind caught up with her body's certainty that something was wrong—not just storm-wrong, but wrong-wrong.

His bed was empty. The window was open, curtains whipping in the wind-driven rain.

She called his phone. Voicemail. She tried again. Nothing.

Outside, the world had turned liquid. Water sheeted across the road, curb-high already and rising. The storm drains choked and spat, overwhelmed. But this wasn't the broad, democratic flooding of a normal deluge. This was targeted, purposeful—a river of water carving a deliberate path down the east drainage corridor toward the low-lying neighborhoods where people couldn't afford to live anywhere else.

She waded to her rental car, the water already at her knees. The engine turned over grudgingly, the exhaust pipe gurgling. She drove carefully toward high ground, following the evacuation route her mother had drilled into her memory two decades ago.

The municipal weather station sat on the ridge like a lighthouse, its instruments spinning and measuring the storm's fury with mechanical calm. She found Rhea there, surrounded by screens and printouts, her face pale in the monitor glow.

"How bad?" Amara asked.

"Unprecedented," Rhea said. "Look at this."

She pulled up the Doppler feed. The storm cell hung over the valley like a malevolent eye, its rotation tight and focused. But what made Amara's stomach drop wasn't the storm's intensity—it was its precision. The heaviest precipitation, the strongest winds, the most dangerous downdrafts, all concentrated in a corridor barely two miles wide.

"This isn't natural," Amara said.

"No," Rhea agreed. "It's not."

They watched the data stream in real-time: pressure readings that spiked and plummeted in patterns no natural storm could create, wind shear measurements that suggested atmospheric manipulation on a scale that should have been impossible with current technology.

"The towers," Amara said. "They're active."

Rhea nodded to a secondary screen. "Full power since 2:30 AM. Someone triggered the whole array."

"Who has that authority?"

"Emergency protocols allow automatic activation during severe weather events," Rhea said carefully. "But this wasn't automatic."

"How do you know?"

Rhea highlighted a section of code on her screen. "Because I wrote the emergency protocols. And this isn't my signature."

The implications hit Amara like cold water. Someone had deliberately weaponized the storm, turned what should have been manageable rainfall into a focused assault on the most vulnerable parts of town. The microbursts she'd been tracking weren't side effects—they were test runs.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: Valley Road bridge. Come alone. Your brother wants to see you.

Her blood turned to ice. She showed the message to Rhea, who cursed softly in a language Amara didn't recognize.

"Don't go," Rhea said. "It's a trap."

"It's Kelechi."

"It's leverage."

Amara stared at the message, at the storm raging outside, at the data proving someone was treating her hometown like a laboratory and its people like test subjects. She thought of her mother's journal, of the careful measurements and the growing certainty that the sky was trying to warn them about something they weren't ready to hear.

"Can you document this?" she asked. "All of it?"

"Already am." Rhea's fingers flew across the keyboard. "Timestamp, weather data, tower activation logs, everything."

"Good." Amara shouldered her bag, checked that her phone was recording. "If I don't come back—"

"You're coming back," Rhea said firmly. "Because your mother didn't teach you to read storms just so you could walk into one unprepared."

"My mother died in a storm."

"Your mother died saving you from a storm. There's a difference."

Outside, the rain had developed teeth. Amara fought her way to the car, the water now waist-deep in places. The drive to Valley Road took twenty minutes that felt like hours, the headlights carving weak tunnels through the downpour.

The bridge approach was flooded, but she could see the span itself still clear above the churning water. A figure stood at the center—too tall to be Kelechi, too broad to be anyone she knew. As she got closer, she could see it was a man in tactical gear, military-style boots, a radio crackling at his shoulder.

He raised a hand when he saw her car, gestured for her to stop. She rolled down the window, rain immediately soaking the interior.

"Ms. Tayo," he called over the storm. "Thank you for coming."

"Where's my brother?"

"Safe. For now." He approached the car, water streaming from his jacket. "But that depends on your cooperation."

"What do you want?"

"For you to understand that some investigations are more dangerous than others." His voice carried the calm authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed. "Your interim report raised questions that certain parties would prefer remained unasked."

"Scientific questions have a way of answering themselves eventually."

"Not if the scientist stops asking them." He pulled something from his pocket—a small device she didn't recognize, waterproofed and blinking red. "Your choice, Ms. Tayo. Complete your assessment with the data you already have. File a report that acknowledges weather variability without drawing uncomfortable conclusions. Accept your payment and return to your life in the city."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you'll discover that storms can be very unpredictable things." His smile was professional and empty. "Accidents happen. Equipment fails. People disappear in floods all the time."

Lightning split the sky directly overhead, thunder following instantly. In the white-hot flash, she saw something in the water downstream—debris, maybe, or a body. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

"Twenty-four hours," the man said. "File your report. Leave town. Everyone stays safe."

He turned and walked back across the bridge, his figure dissolving into the rain and darkness. Amara sat in the car, water still pouring through the open window, watching the storm tear at the sky like something with claws.

When she finally drove home, the streets were rivers and the silence in the house was absolute. She found a note on the kitchen table in Kelechi's handwriting: I'm sorry. They said you'd understand. They said it was just weather.

She crumpled the note, then smoothed it out again. Outside, the storm began to weaken, its fury spent. But Amara could feel something else building—not in the sky this time, but in her chest. A pressure system of her own, low and dangerous and ready to break.

She opened her laptop and began typing her real report. The one that would end her contract, destroy her professional relationships, and probably get her killed.

The one her mother would have written. 

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