Meadow's POV
Storms always reveal things. Most people think storms hide the world. Rain blurs the glass, thunder drowns out distant sounds, and lightning fractures the skyline into jagged flashes of light. But storms don't hide structures. They expose them. Weak foundations show themselves. Fault lines widen. Systems either hold… or they break.
That night the storm sat over the city like a living thing. Rain streamed down the tall glass windows of the monitoring room while distant thunder rolled slowly through the skyline. The office lights were dim except for the glow of the network displays spread across the wall. Hundreds of data points flickered in quiet motion. Transactions. Corporate affiliations. Infrastructure links. Each one a piece of a puzzle that was rapidly becoming more complicated than any of us had expected.
