The rain stopped falling on Avalon on a Tuesday, and Rachel Creighton was the first person on the operations floor to understand that it was not the weather.
She had grown up in the North, where the sky was something you read the way other people read newspapers. She knew what a storm front looked like when it was moving naturally: the slow turn of it, the way it bent around mountains and stalled over lakes. The front that had been sitting over the Avalon basin for three days did none of those things. On Tuesday morning, it simply moved, all at once, northward, as though someone had picked it up by the corners and carried it away.
"That's Hydryne," she said.
Dr. Chen looked up from her console. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure. Look at the edges." Rachel traced the satellite image with one finger. "Natural fronts fray. This one's been folded. Someone is pulling it."
