This year's lockdown was predicted to last a month, and it didn't overshoot the projection too far. Most of the failure points were things Arind had already planned to replace. Having them blown across the yard just got the job started. The house itself, and the older outbuildings, sat at an ideal meeting point of having been tempered by previous storms, but also upgraded to strict modern codes. Some of the deeper infrastructure was worn, though. It would need to be carefully watched.
The four of us -- Arind, Jasha, Dio, and I -- divided our time between checking the hourly drone news, and catching up on some of the traditional activities of the holiday. Jasha and Arind had fun devising interesting meals out of stockpiled supplies and items from the gift boxes. I spent hours going through the backlog of entertainments my friends had recommended, that school and subsequent burnout had prevented me from getting to. The tower of books-to-read that stacked by Dio's chair slowly transferred to a finished pile on the other side.
Time went by. It rained a ton, and it got hotter.
The first reported emergencies were mercifully far from us. To the north, in the drier interior forests of this continent, the same wildfires broke out as every year. The lone habitations were by the wide central river, and they were carefully protected.
We kept up with it as we could. The news was by hourly drone descended from Roxi, and only during the hours when it was out of the sun. The advisories gradually grew longer. On both our internal broadcasts, and the lounge screens, I could follow details about air quality, UV levels, fire maps, cloud cover, and wind speed. At the height of Peri, still several weeks away, the house screen would look like the console of a larger ship.
I tried to be conscious of using the generator. But it grew warm enough in my bedroom that I began to use a fan at night while I slept. It had the added benefit of drowning out all but the loudest of the thunder.
In the deep of one night, I woke from a dream about Rai. I felt the dream hovering in my mind. But I didn't try to remember the details, and it quickly faded. Last Perihelion, we'd slept in this bed together. His family had spent it off-world, but we had been too close to spend months apart. Now I laid alone, and listened to the heavy raindrops knocking against the window. Seawater, from the sky. I didn't want to brood on it. It had come and gone.
After a minute, I turned my thoughts towards this drug of Jasha's. We never indulged in anything like that during the storm season. It was a good time to decompress. But just as Jasha was studying whatever chemical and biological details his notes contained, I wanted to look inside and consider its effect. I remembered the reverberation his words had, and the way my own thoughts had fractured and become nearly tactile. It wasn't something I'd have done for amusement. But it had felt compelling.
Almost as if the drug itself were trying to become more.
What did I want to learn from it, if Jasha asked me for help again? I assumed he would. He clearly wasn't finished with it. Speaking to him while on the chemical had been close to impossible -- I wondered if there was a way to explore its depths, then use my own record to describe it more accurately to him? The thought made me happy. It felt like being a partner in the experimentation, not just a test subject injected with an unknown molecule.
We didn't have any chance to discuss it, though. I knew he would want us to have more privacy away from his fathers, before we talked.
The weather itself also became distracting. One of the classic ocean storms changed course and hit us head-on, about a month into the lockdown. The weather map on the lounge screen filled with an enormous green spiral of clouds and rain, and we watched as the wind speed crept up past 100 kilometers per hour. Then 150. According to the instructions distributed to estates in our region, we were to cycle our electronics off for a set amount of time per hour, so that enough broadcast power was available to check the satellites for repositioning. After reconnecting, all the estates with monitors were asked to send their own hourly readings to the climate headquarters in Precipika. Jasha busied himself with this job. He confirmed the weather broadcasts for our small area, or reported any differences that we saw.
The cyclone eventually blew itself out, a day or two later. After nightfall, the air was humid, but almost tolerable, and Dio suggested having dinner on the back patio. The other three of us agreed. We were all heartily sick of being indoors at that point. I gave one more quick check to the forecast for the night, but it remained overcast and calm.
Jas and Dio pulled several of the lounge chairs out of the backyard storage. I kicked aside a few broken tree branches, and dragged out a table. It was far too warm to cook, so we ate cold salads and sandwiches, and I think we all felt like talking and laughing and making noise, almost pushing back the oppressive night.
"I never really asked you, Jessyn," said Dio. "How did your meeting go with Markus DeBlays?"
I took my time swallowing a bite. I had managed to avoid the topic, but it was probably foolish to think I could dodge it forever. "Uh, well enough. He didn't throw me out the window." I tried to make a joke of it. "He was an interesting man."
"I thought you might like him. I'm glad you gave the meeting a chance. With a minimum of fuss."
I felt my usual anger, but also amusement. After taking a deep breath, I said, "I'm glad I did, too."
We ate for a few moments, then Dio continued. "Zholya thinks well of him. And I think she's really seen benefits from that backup process for the comms records. That was a good suggestion."
"Thanks," I said.
"I know she'd recommend you to him in a moment." Dio shrugged. "But you probably don't want it to come down to nepotism. I asked her to wait."
I felt like banging my head on the table. But managed to suppress it, as usual. "I saw strangers in his building," I changed the subject. "Foreign people. They worked there, on another floor. And then later we saw them in a nightclub. I've been trying to figure out where they're from."
"What did they look like?" Ari asked. He was good at guessing a person's home from their accent or clothes.
"They had these tight tailored outfits, all the genders did, and the neckline and shoulders went like this --" I drew angled lines in the air with my hands. "Their hair was really short. I mean, short as if it were growing out from being shaved. Except it was trimmed into a style. There was something on it that made it glint." Beside me, Jasha nodded in remembrance. "They were pretty unfriendly."
I could laugh about it now.
Dio looked down, then over to Ari. "Ah," he said. "Them."
"They were in DeBlays's building, you said?" asked Arind. "Working?"
I felt uneasy. "Yeah. Floor thirteen. Who are they?"
"Trium."
Arind did not say it in his typical melodic voice. His tone was tighter than I'd ever heard. Beside him, Dio's mouth twisted.
"I thought those were military people?" I said. "The government."
"You mostly see them in uniform," said Dio. "Unfortunately. But there are plenty of regular citizens."
I felt the same thrill of fear that the storms brought. Everyone knew the old stories of their occupation during the Adjustment, and for a decade after. I had seen none of that. There had been little interest in Daltia from the central government for most of my life, except to tax our Arche's patience with their endless limitations on her oversight.
After dinner ended, Jasha and I took a walk around the nearest parts of the property, carrying out checks we'd been unable to do for several nights. Jas visited the greenhouse every evening that it wasn't actively storming, usually muttering and bringing at least one drooping plant back inside with him. We followed the line of trees towards the dark bulk of the garage. It was ominously quiet, except for the dripping of the leaves.
"You danced with some of them," he said out of nowhere.
I looked in his direction. In the powered-down darkness of the yard, Jas was a familiar dark mass next to me. "So?"
I felt him shrug, even if I didn't see it. We came to the door of the garage. I unlocked and opened it, peering my head inside. All seemed well. In the glow of the blue lights that ran along the base of the walls, I could make out all the vehicles where we'd left them. The air felt damp, and I decided to program the dehumidifier to run for a couple of days' cycle.
Jasha waited outside, alert to the night, while I placed my hand on the infobox nearest the door. The structural scan of the building appeared on my inner sight. I squeezed my eyes shut in concentration, and brought up the building's regular schematic. I compared the two. Nothing seemed cracked or peeling away so far. This was a newer building. It would never have survived what led up to the Adjustment. Sometimes it was hard not to think morbidly about how much worse those years must have been. We had all read the accounts.
When I was done, Jas and I turned back towards the house. I expected him to say more, perhaps bring up what Dio had told us. But he was quiet.
A week went by, and the air stayed thick and still. Very little marked the days, except for noting the slow creep of the window thermometer upwards, towards the 50°C crest I'd marked off a few years before. That, and idly noting, from the hourly satellite adjustment announcements, which company's equipment seemed least reliable. In other words, it was boring. We all began to relax.
Then one morning I woke early. The sun's light was like a knife-edge in my skull. I waved to increase the opacity of the nanoshades, but nothing changed -- they were at maximum. Bad sign.
I got a drink of stale-tasting water from the dispenser. And I was about to wander out to the lounge and see if anyone else was up, when I got the alert we all dreaded.
All across the southern coast and into the interior of the continent, the electromagnetic storm warning painted the map on my room's screen red. My inner update showed the same wretched news. Even as I peered out the window, seeing only the crisp empty sky, I could hear the distant siren at the ring-road station. I sighed. There would be wind. I was glad we'd already picked most of the debris out of the back garden.
I changed clothes, gathered up a couple things from my bedroom, and stepped outside to the lounge. Dio was there, pulling a couple of his favourite snacks out of the cabinet into a bag. He had the right priorities.
"Thanks for making us drag the chairs back in last night," I told Dio. "I'd swear you have a weather implant."
He nodded acknowledgement. "It felt dead outside. Didn't like it."
Jasha appeared, still yawning. "Arind's already downstairs," he said. "Time to go in the hole."
"Don't call it that," I said with a shiver. He smiled innocently.
In the shield-room, on the lowest utility floor, Arind waited for Jasha to make one final check of the barn shelter and other outbuildings. They wouldn't be safe enough for the coming storm. Fortunately, no one had taken refuge in them this year. Once Jas confirmed they were empty, Arind powered down more of the estate's electronic devices. We'd have enough for necessary surveillance and records. But a greater part of the house's circuits were now isolated. So were we.
It didn't take long for the storm to develop, nor for my delight in the shield-room, already thin, to evaporate. I wouldn't call myself claustrophobic -- you can't do much in a starship if tight spaces bother you -- but the knowledge that we were at least three floors underground made me skittish.
All four of us had responsibility for monitoring different parts of the estate. Arind read quietly, which was honestly a calming sight. Around him were two adjacent walls of screens, showing readouts of the storm maps and regional heat monitors, and the main electrical schematic of the house. Everything showed a steady grey for now. I know he had inner alarms set, too. Dio fussed over some literary review submissions from his apprentices. Part of one of the main screens showed a wind-speed map, and the underground pipes and erosion monitors that he usually kept an eye on.
That left Jasha and me.
It was good to have something to work on, so I'd already brought in a few minor electronic repair projects and some broken bits that I wanted to see if I could renew, or at least figure out the source of trouble. I had inner alarms too, and the garage and farms on surveillance on a tablet right next to me. I also kept the regular hourly updates running in a sidebar. This late in Perihelion, forecasters often included amusing bits of commentary.
Jasha watched his barn and the shelter on his inner connection. As soon as this infernal wind stopped filling the air with dirt, he'd check and see if our part of the ring road would need to be cleared. For now, he'd spread chemistry books and tablets over one entire table and was bent industriously over them.
As the day wore on and turned into night, and then midnight, the winds only grew louder. We took turns keeping watch over the main screen, while the others slept in one of the two small bunk rooms to the side. Jasha took first watch.
I tossed on the unfamiliar mattress for ages. Even with earplugs in and sound-dampening walls, I still imagined I could feel the vibration of the air speed outside. I tried to imagine it was a cabin on a ship, piercing its way through a pitiless alien atmosphere. Somehow, that managed to lure me into rest.
The following day -- I think it was day, who knows down here -- I took the first solo shift. The lightning that EM storms brought was not quite as constant as the earlier Peri storms. But it was sudden, and so loud. The rolls of thunder could be felt through the stone floor.
So far, the house's map of currents looked fine. Arind had told me that a few spots on the top floor had briefly gone orange, but had resolved themselves. I found myself checking their placement on the screen more often that was probably necessary. It wasn't hard to imagine Jasha's piano up there, the strings vibrating in sympathy with every thunder crash.
But all in all, it was the same violence I'd experienced with Peri storms in the past. I held my hand against the empty wall, the only one without any screens. Despite it being buttressed right into the deep earth on the other side, it still vibrated.
There was no way to imagine the forces that caused this resonance, without feeling a bit of healthy fear. But it wouldn't go on indefinitely. Either on this watch, or while I rested next, it would likely lessen.
I still had to get through this shift, though.
The others slept in the two rooms behind me, the doors propped slightly ajar so that I could shout them awake if necessary. But I couldn't imagine interrupting that chorus of snores. In fact, it lulled me just enough that I jerked back to consciousness, having drifted off with my head leaned on my hand. I stood up and did a few quick exercises. There, by the tiny sink, was a jar of the vile powdered coffee Arind swore he liked. I made a mug of it with the lukewarm water from Dio's ancient kettle.
I checked the hourly weather update. The pressure was as low as it had ever been. No wonder my thoughts were such a jumble. I sipped the mug of sludge, thankful at least for the caffeine. I didn't have the concentration to continue with the tinkering I'd been doing, so I sat at the centre table and let my mind drift.
Images of my current projects, big and small, mixed with past engineering schoolwork, and all of it tipped inexorably towards the abyss of my most secret goals. It was a lot. And I knew I didn't have to do it all. Maybe there was a proper way to carve out some parts of the past to let go, and bring other parts along? I knew, from my near-obsessive checking of the garage's structural map, exactly which things I wasn't willing to give up. No way. I'd never question that again.
But other things? I imagined tossing them up into the air, watching them be blown all the way to the Coligue Range. It was easy to smile, then. And I passed the rest of my watch with a sense of contentment, despite the endless bullshit weather.