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“What the fuck?”

One screen locked.

“Is that the hospital entrance?” someone asked.

Ryneth stared as rain slid slowly down the large wooden doors. Yes, he recognized the building from when he’d been there with Daven to visit Norma Zephyranth.

Yure tapped on the keyboard. “They did that. They froze the fucking screen.”

His palm heated so fast it hurt. “That’s where he went.”

Moargan glanced over from the screens and snorted when he noticed Ryneth still standing there alone. “What, he really left you with us?”

Ryneth’s chest tightened. “He said he had to get something from home.”

“Yeah,” Moargan muttered darkly. “I bet he did.”

“He’ll be back,” Ryneth said, more to himself than to the others.

“He’d better,” Moargan said. “Of course. The stubborn bastard. Well, until he does, you stay under our protection.”

Yure’s fingers hovered above the keys. “Look at that.”

More screens flickered.

The rest of the cameras began sliding across the map of Helion as if something invisible were dragging the whole grid upward. Yure blew the full city layout across the wall, camera nodes blinking and reconnecting in a pattern that pulled past the hospital district, past the towers, straight into the storm layer above the city.

One by one, the voices in the kitchen died away.

Aviel straightened slowly from the counter. “What the hell is that?”

Yure zoomed the map again.

The clouds shifted on the radar feed. A disturbance moved through the storm ring circling Helion.

Ryneth felt static crackle across his fingertips.

Helianth leaned closer to the screen. “That’s not weather.”

“No, it isn’t,” Yure mumbled, switching to storm radar while the wind patterns spiraled across the display, circling Helion in a massive rotating ring.

One section of that ring twisted out of formation, the cloud wall bending inward as a platform shape began emerging inside the storm.

Aviel stared at the screen, studying the shape forming inside the storm as the cloud wall warped around it. “It’s the outer ring.”

“Look.” Moargan traced the shape of the storm with his finger. “They want us to see that place. What’s up there, Helianth? In the outer ring?”

“It’s our defense mechanism. It protects us from attacks from other planets. Look at the storm.”

Ryneth felt his pulse steadying as the truth settled in his chest. He lifted his gaze toward the storm map spreading across the wall. “The storm,” he murmured to himself.

He had survived endless nights of storms guarding the Ward.

On Düren, they used to say you learned the truth of a storm by listening to what it hid. Sometimes Concordant sent rain. Sometimes dust. Sometimes the black wind that swallowed the lights beyond the wall. It always came from above.

He’d thought those were rumors.

Everyone stared at the storm map as the pattern finally made sense in his mind. This wasn’t random. None of it was.