I'm silent for a while, glass still hovering in my hand as if I'm the statue of justice and it's the scales I'm weighing up. I'm tryin' decide if Elena is fucking crazy for even suggesting the Storm Guard could be in on infanticide -- 'specially of their own kind -- or if I'm the fucking crazy one, 'cause there's a sliver of gray matter in my head that's telling me to listen to what she has to say.

Should just down your drink, get up, and leave, Sammy. That's what you should do.

"Do you know what you're sayin'?"

She nods, her face solemn as a grave. But I already saw her acting from when we were in the cab and she looked in the rearview mirror. She's got an emotional gambit of faces that she swaps around like masks.

I put down the glass and rub a hand 'round my face. The world's suddenly feeling awful heavy. Kinda like someone pushing down hard on your ribs. I want to tell Elena that the Storms are my family. We were raised together. I know nearly all of them, and I might not like all of them, but they're good people. They're family.

"I hope you got something good, then. Some evidence."

"Yeah. A bit. And I've got experiences."

"Shit, a bit of evidence. You mean you've just got anecdotes, right?"

"You don't think it's strange there were no Storm Borns up until the baby a few months ago? That they just... stopped happening."

I shrug and recite a line I'd heard on the news. "Mother Nature don't need them no more. There are no bombs ripping into her body, poisoning her lungs. She's... She doesn't need them. Us."

"There are no-go zones in Arizona, Sam. They just don't get reported. They're not allowed to be. Then there are the islands in the pacific that are... well, no longer islands. Mountains in the oceans that are now pancakes, the sea lapping them up. There are bombs falling, Sam. Hydrogen. Just not on any enemy. At least, not yet."

My hand runs uneasily through my hair. "Yeah, we got 'em, but... We've shown our hand to the world already, and--"

"We test them, Sam. All the time. You're being willfully ignorant if you believe anything less. Not only that, we're finding ways to make them more powerful. Why stop at something just a thousand times more powerful than an atom bomb?"

Because we'll fucking destroy the world and ourselves along with it, I think, but I say, "You've got an active imagination." My palms are feeling clammy and I wipe them on my pants.

"This isn't speculation, Sam. I've seen the files, and as dumb as I look, I do have proof of that much back in my room. Hell, they brought the Storm Guard in twice to help pacify islands prior to testing -- just when I worked for them. How many other times, God only knows."

Pacify. I don't like that word. Evacuate has a nicer ring.

Ah shit, am I being "willfully ignorant?"

The waiter brings our meals, chicken for me and salmon for Elena. But I'm not feeling much like eating.

"Enjoy your dinner," he says, smiling way too broadly for his thin lips.

I prod at the potatoes as if they're mountains.

Then I push the fork hard into one until it becomes mush.

"You think we're trying to kill any new Storms so that, if there was a war, nothing is going to be around to stand up to our bombs? Unlike how the Storm Born once banded together to bring an end to the Atomic War."

Elena also doesn't seem hungry, her fork hovering above her fish as if she's hunting it fresh and waiting just for the right moment to pounce. But the fish escapes to live another day and she lays down her harpoon.

"That had crossed my mind." This time, her expression is more natural and understated. She's impressed that I strung out an idea enough to come up with a theory. I want to say to her that I'm not as stupid as I look, but I think saying that makes people sound at least as stupid as they look.

"I ain't saying I believe any of this."

"I know. But I can prove the testing -- I can show you two of the selected islands before and after."

"How about you tell me about the part you can't prove? 'Cause that one has me a lot more interested right now."

She nods. "The Storm Borns."

"Yeah."

Elena has a long swig of her white. "Okay. As you know, I was part of a team that chased the type of events that have historically created Storms. Of course, even historically it's rare for a Storm to come out of a natural disaster. Maybe sometimes we got there too late, but more often than not, there was just no Storm to find."

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Right. My ex always told me I was one in a million."

She gives me a polite laugh. "I think you probably are, Sam. But a usual Storm was more like one in a couple of hundred natural disasters -- at least that was the rate during the Atomic War and for a time after."

"Sounds about right."

"Then, Storms just... Stopped being found. For whatever reason. Except, I don't think they did. I know I was only at the agency for less than a year, but I chased dozens of events. Mostly in America, but not solely. We were sent to Europe and even less populated parts of Asia. And there were five groups in the agency, Sam, that chased. I was in Delta."

"And you're going to tell me you found something?"

She holds up a hand as if asking me to be patient. "I helped track natural disasters and I helped predict them, too. Prediction based on available analysis was my area. I went wherever Delta went to give my expert opinion or analysis. I was, however, never taken out to search the actual disaster zones -- I didn't have that kind of training. I would stay back in camp instead and look at data. Military personnel -- highly trained soldiers -- went into these search zones. Sometimes, depending on how bad it got, Storm Guards would be called in to go along with them, helping keep civilians back, or to uncover rubble, or whatever. They were escorts."

I'm letting my hopes rise up a little. There's nothing she's said, at least not about Storm Borns, that's making me itch. And yet... I know it's coming. I pull out a cigarette figuring it'll be good for my nerves, and am about to light up when the waiter hurries over and tells me "sorry, but no smoking in the restaurant" and I start to remember why I never go nowhere fancy.

The waiter scutters off and Elena continues.

"There was an earthquake, about six months back, northern Nevada. Six or seven on the Richter. Hopefully it wasn't going to be terrible as the area was fairly underpopulated. The nearest town was small, a little like that old frontier place I first met you at."

My mind snaps back to that dying prospector's place, where people should have left years ago but were either too prideful or too stubborn to leave.

"We were there by early evening, sun still falling. We got camp set up, and I could hear men and women hurrying around, even saw a couple of Storms that bad been brought in -- I remember seeing the Pitt twins and thinking 'shit, it must be bad to have called them in!' but also I was relieved in a way, because who would you rather have help fix up an earthquake than those two?"

She pauses and has another stab at her fish. This time the pink salmon falls apart as the fork finds its mark, but she doesn't bring it up to her mouth. Just leaves the fork lying there, salmon speared on its prongs. "It's about two in the morning, and I'm still awake. The slow response to the earthquake was in large part my fault, I felt, as I hadn't done a good enough job aggregating the results that I used to get daily from nationwide seismologists. So I'm just lying in bed, struggling under the weight of however-many people turn out to be dead. Sandman is definitely not creeping through my door tonight." She pauses and looks awkward. Like she doesn't want to tell me the next part.

Probably worried how I'll react.

Maybe I don't blame her for being worried about it. I don't even know how I'll react. But I nod and encourage her to go on.

"I get up, decide I'll go outside and have a smoke and see if that helps me to unwind. So I slip out of my dome -- which is different from where the military people sleep, and different again to where the Storms do -- but all the big tents are next to each other."

"You smoke?" I ask, stupidly.

"Back then I did. But I gave it up not long after. I'm trying to look after my lungs."

I shrug. "It's how I look after mine."

Ignoring me, she continues, "I've just finished my cigarette and stepped it out with my heel. And I'm all alone out there, outside the makeshift base, which was much smaller than the base you visited -- this was something put together in a couple of hours. I'm out there and it's dark and then I hear voices. They're hushed, but you could tell from the tone it was an argument." She pauses, her eyes flicking up as if she's reliving that moment exactly.

"Then what?"

"Then I see them. They have torches and the torches are like swords cutting through the darkness, heading towards base. Then, the lights turn onto each other, lightning each other up, as the group discusses whatever it is they're discussing. Most of them are military men. But I see the Pitt twins too, and it was the Pitts I heard talking. They don't seem happy and as their voices get closer, I notice one of them... His voice is cracking. He's upset."

"That's it? Ah, those boys always got upset. They're the in-touch-with-their-emotions type."

She shakes her head. "The Pitts then hang back, for whatever reason. They don't want to go inside the base, at least not with those men. Them separating from the group opens up the military men better to my view. And a torch hits something that one of them is holding over his shoulder."

This. This is what I knew was coming. Not knew what it was, but knew it was bad. I've been hearing the chug chug chug of the train coming, and now it's about to roar out of the tunnel and ram a hundred miles an hour into my chest. I brace for impact.

"It's a black bag. A body bag -- child size, and even then the bag is tied up at one end because it's too big for whatever's inside."

"A baby." My voice is tuneless. Sounds like rocks. Heavy as one, too.

"I don't know. But it was that size. The size of a baby. I waited for the men to go inside their tents, then slipped back into mine."

"Doesn't mean they killed it, even if it was a baby."

She shakes her head. "No. It doesn't. And I didn't think they had killed it. I thought it might possibly have been a dead Storm Born, because why else would they bring it back? And why else bring back just one body? If it was a Storm and they wanted to run tests on it, then it made sense. And of course, I blamed myself. If we'd got there sooner, we might have saved that baby's life. A Storm Borns." She pauses then adds, "Not that that makes it any more or less valuable than any other baby."

I let out a long breath. "You can't blame yourself for nature being unpredictable. That's what nature is, at its core."

She smiles and says simply, "Thank you."

"That it then?" I say, relieved. "That's why you think we're killing Storm Borns? Because a natural disaster that probably killed hundreds of people, also killed a baby? And you saw it brought back. Hell,--"I slosh back my red--"it probably wasn't even Storm Born, Elena. They just wanted to bring it back in to make sure it hadn't been a Storm."

She looks at her empty wine glass, then at me. "That's just it, though."

"What is?"

"Well, the next day, we got the official death tally."

"And?"

"No one had died, Sam. There had been no deaths at all. The earthquake hadn't been as bad as we'd first feared -- it had been downgraded to a five -- and it had barely rattled the town nearest to its epicenter.  If the only death was a baby, and its family hadn't even reported it missing..."

Suddenly, the wine isn't agreeing with my stomach.