All of that was true, but … “I'd rather not be in this one when it breaks.”
Sarah looked him then, laughing. “It won't break. Not for this.” Then her face went back to its normal passive expression. “It might, however, flood.”
Ice chilled his veins at the word, and he forced himself to watch over the backyard and breathe. He counted the familiar things in the grass: the smoker that had stood empty, as none of them knew how to use it. The green-painted picnic table. The log the squirrels kept hopping along that Joule had taken to leaving her toast crusts on. It had taken them a whole week to find out the gently sloping area beyond Squirrel Log did, in fact, lead down to a creek.
Floods were not his thing. It was difficult to keep his voice level. “Does that happen often?”
Sarah’s expression grew wary. “More often lately than before.”
Though her words didn’t say it, he felt the implication that she was mostly referring to one incident. So he next asked the question he dreaded, but that's why he was out here watching the world blow by. “Was there anything in the water?”
“No. The water itself is bad enough when it happens.” Sarah shrugged, a too-small gesture for the next words out of her mouth. “It took out a handful of houses and swept away some cars, though. We lost some neighbors.”
She said it as though the neighbors were of the same consequence as the cars or the porches. “I heard that out west, some bull sharks came inland with the waters.”
Cade didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He wasn't ready to tell the story.
Sarah seemed to catch on that he wouldn’t say more, and she turned to him as if to comfort. “This isn't a rainstorm. The radar looked really bad, but it picks up mass, you know—density—not water. So sometimes it looks like rain when it's really something else. Pressure. Clouds. Who knows?”
He did know that. He’d been prepared for a rain that would raise both the creek and his heart rate. “I'm not used to seeing things blow by horizontally.”
A piece of white paper whipped through the yard, followed quickly by a plastic bottle tracing the same path.
“It’s just high winds.” Though she was watching alongside him, she sounded mostly unconcerned. Cage was terrified.
He still didn’t quite trust the nonchalance she projected. He’d believe it when she returned to the brown leather couch and the quilt with the skull design and watched one of their three channels of TV. But Sarah stayed at the window, eyes on the gathering damage. “At least we're not in Tornado Alley.”
That was the whole point, he thought. A solar display that was toppled by tornadoes multiple times each year wasn’t cost-efficient. Building damaged the environment, so rebuilding each year wasn’t economically or environmentally feasible. It’s why Radnor was breathing down their necks now.
He knew this storm probably wouldn’t tear up any of the newly-installed test posts, because they had to build them to withstand more than this force. As harsh as the weather looked from here, Sarah was right. It wasn’t much.
Central Alabama had experienced one of the new F6 classes earlier in the year. An F3 had come through here. The good news was that, according to frequency, if they could build the solar array now, they should have an average of a ten-year span before it would need to be repaired again. But averages weren’t storms and they worked only if it didn’t get worse.
Unlike Joule, who was hiding in her room and not watching the storm, Cage preferred to keep his eye on the problem. He and Sarah stayed at the window, silent for a few more moments, each of them holding back their side of the curtains. He was trying to hide the tension that suffused every cell, but…
“Is that snow?” In Alabama?
The big, fluffy, white pieces blew across the yard. First, just a few came through, confusing him. But when they gathered steam and he saw the flurry of fluffy white …
“Hold on!” Sarah laughed at him as she dropped her side of the curtain. She headed out the door into the back sunroom.
“Wait!” Was she going outside?
“It’s just wind.” She tossed the words too casually over her shoulder as she headed onto the back porch.
His jaw clenched and he told himself she’d be fine, even though the screens that enclosed the porch billowed and shook furiously around her. Several of the small, painted wood pieces had blown from their perches and Cage spotted the decorative piece with the red, white, and blue star crammed into the corner, now upside down. He waited for the wind to pick it up again and aim for Sarah.
But it didn’t.
Unlatching the back door, Sarah fought the wind for a moment. She put one foot onto the step, then followed with her head and one hand, the other holding tightly to the frame. Cage grimaced, waiting for a stray shingle—or worse—to smack her, but it didn’t happen.
Instead, she snatched one of the little masses of “snow” from the ground and brought it back in. She handed it to him as she leaned against the door and bolted it shut with a misplaced grin.
“It’s cotton!” he said, squishing the soft mass between his fingers. It felt just like a store-bought cotton ball.
“Yeah. It looks like the wind stripped somebody’s field.”
Cage was still examining the piece she’d brought back in. Sarah was unfazed by it, but he turned it over with wonder. “It comes off the plant this way?”
“In the wind, all the time.” She’d already turned to look out the window again, as more debris blew through their yard. This time, the smoker tilted a little in a big gust, but Cage was now more impressed with the white fluff blowing by.
What he held in his hand looked like a slightly dirty, unraveled cotton ball. He examined it for another moment, thinking about the fields he’d
