He had to get down there. He had to get some of it—a leaf, a stone, anything to prove the "Then" was real.

He backed out of the driveway just as the first drop hit his windshield. It wasn't water. It was thick, viscous, and shimmered with a faint, iridescent oily sheen. Elias flipped his wipers on, but they only smeared the rainbow sludge across the glass.

He called them "The Weather Files." It was a stack of weathered notebooks and digital drives filled with data points that shouldn’t exist. Tornadoes that hummed in B-flat. Lightning that struck the same tree twelve times in a minute. Rain that smelled like ozone and old copper coins.