Chapter Six — Yaz
The storm wasn't going to touch them, which was the only reason anyone was allowed to enjoy it.
It sat two hundred miles southwest, a tidy, well-behaved little system according to every model the ship was pulling, tracking north-northwest and losing steam as it went, the kind of weather you watched on radar with a mug of coffee rather than a life vest. Yaz had the satellite loop up on the aft monitor and the camera propped on a bracket beside it, catching both the storm and her own profile at a three-quarter angle she'd decided, some weeks ago, was her good side, on the theory that if this footage ever became evidence in some future inquiry, she'd at least look composed doing it.
"Storm day," she told the lens. "Not our storm. Somebody else's storm, currently minding its business two hundred miles that way, which we are going to watch anyway, because there is genuinely nothing else going on and Bram has already reorganized the spares locker twice today out of what I can only describe as nervous energy in search of a container."
Bram, three feet away, did not look up from the manifest he was cross-checking. "It needed reorganizing."
"It needed reorganizing the way I need a fourth cup of coffee. Which is to say: not really, but I'm not going to stop either of us."
She zoomed the loop in on the storm's leading edge, where a scatter of smaller cells had spun off the main body — squall-line stragglers, nothing dramatic, the kind of thing that showed up and dissolved inside an hour on a system this size. What caught her, idly, watching without really watching, the way you notice a word repeated too many times in a paragraph before you notice the paragraph itself, was that every single one of them was turning the same way.
Counter-clockwise. All of them.
"That's not — " she said, half to Bram, half to nobody, and stopped, because she wasn't actually sure yet what she was objecting to.
Bram looked up this time. "Not what?"
"These little guys." She tapped the screen at the cluster of stragglers. "The small ones. They're all spinning the same direction."
"Isn't that just how storms spin up here?"
"The big storm spins that way because the whole Northern Hemisphere agrees to spin that way, Coriolis, everybody's on the same page, fine. These aren't that. These are little — " she waved a hand, hunting the word, " — orphans. Spin-offs. They're too small and too short-lived for the planet to have bothered organizing them. They're supposed to be a coin flip. Half of them go one way out of spite just to keep things interesting." She counted, tapping each cell in turn. Six of them, peeling off the leading edge over the last forty minutes. Six, all counter-clockwise.
"Maybe it's a coincidence," Bram said, in the tone of a man who did not, personally, believe in the concept, but was extending it to her as a courtesy.
"Maybe it's a coincidence with a very consistent personality," Yaz said, and logged it — not as a finding, nothing that rose to the level of waking anyone up over, just a line in the day's notes under observations, unverified, the kind of entry that existed mostly so that if it turned out to matter later, somebody could point to it and say see, we did write it down.
She did not, in the moment, expect that to happen. It read, honestly, like the sort of thing that belonged in the same file as Bram's basalt and her own storm footage — interesting to look at, unlikely to survive contact with an actual explanation, the sort of curiosity a ship collected the way a fridge collected magnets, decorative rather than load-bearing.
Curiosity was on the monitor again that evening, same spot, same stillness, and Yaz — passing through the comms corner on her way to check the satellite feed one more time before dinner — paused long enough to scratch the cat behind one ear, which earned her nothing, not a purr, not a look, just the same fixed attention on the screen as if Yaz herself were a mildly interesting piece of weather passing through the frame.
"You and me both, honestly," Yaz told her. "Staring at something that's probably nothing. Building a whole personality around it."
The cat did not dignify this with a response, which Yaz felt was, on balance, the correct call.
At dinner, Heath asked, apropos of absolutely nothing anyone had said, whether anybody had noticed the storm's handedness, and Yaz opened her mouth to say yes, actually, I logged it this afternoon before William got there first with a question about sample size, and the conversation moved on, the way conversations at that table tended to move on whenever Heath said something that sounded like the opening line of a much longer speech nobody at the table had signed up to hear twice in one week.
Yaz let it go. It felt, at the time, like the correct amount of attention to give it — which was to say, some, logged, filed, not nothing, but not urgent either. A coin that kept landing the same way wasn't proof of a rigged coin. It was, at minimum, a coin worth flipping again.
[Cordero, personal log, day six, 22:50]
Six little storm cells today, all spinning the same direction, which statistically they should not be doing, and which I have decided to describe in the actual ship's log as "unverified" because "extremely suspicious weather doing a bit" felt like it wouldn't survive review.
Bram reorganized the spares locker twice. I've started referring to this as his hobby. He has not corrected me, which either means he agrees or means he wasn't listening, and at this point I genuinely can't tell which would worry me more.
Heath brought up the storm at dinner before I could, which I'm choosing to be annoyed about on principle even though I hadn't actually said anything yet, because there's a version of being right where somebody else gets there first and it still counts against you somehow. I don't make the rules. I just resent them extremely specifically.
Cat's still on the monitor. I scratched her ear. She billed me for it emotionally and I have accepted the charge.
Cordero, out.