I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: Wind Shift

The brush truck was gone before the bay doors finished going up.

My phone rang.

It was the professor.

"Where are you?"

"The station."

"Bring the laptop," she said. "Incident command is at the Goldstream school. They want to know about the ridges."

"They want my model?"

"They want anything they can get, Carmody. Move."

She picked me up in an old station wagon with two weather masts out the back window.

Smoke was already a brown wall across the north end of town.

The sun came through it orange.

The command post was a high school gym with folding tables, maps taped to the bleachers, and thirty people on radios.

The incident commander was a heavy man with a white helmet and a voice that didn't need a radio.

He looked at me, then at the professor.

"This is your freshman?"

"This is my freshman."

"I've got a weather service forecast," he said. "Southwest wind, steady, all afternoon."

"The forecast doesn't use the ridge logs," the professor said. "She does."

He waved a hand at the table.

"Two minutes."

I opened the laptop.

My hands were shaking so badly I typed my password wrong twice.

The captain came in from the parking lot while I was loading the morning numbers.

He stood behind my chair without a word.

I pulled the live humidity reading off the weather station on Ester Dome.

It was falling.

Fast.

Seventeen percent. Then sixteen. Then fourteen.

I ran the model.

The screen came up red.

"Northwest shift on the Goldstream ridges," I said. "About three-thirty."

The commander looked at his watch.

It was 2:58.

"Says who?"

"Says thirty years of logs," I said. "Every time the humidity falls like this, the wind swings northwest about forty minutes later. Every single time."

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