Page 50 of Into the Tempest

He looked up at me, and when he saw that I was joking, he almost smiled. “I’m from the tropics,” he yelled back. “We can’t move to anywhere it snows.”

I laughed and kissed the side of his head, holding him tighter. I love that he included thewepart to that.

That we’d be aweto factor in all our decisions.

Was it probably far too early in our relationship for that kind of thinking?

Maybe.

In the middle of a cyclone in a building that felt as if it was seconds from crumbling around us, did I give one fuck about what anyone else thought?

No.

This man who loved me, who sat huddled in my arms, trembling and shying from every sudden noise, every bang, every creak and groan of bricks and mortar and steel. At the sound of hell being unleashed outside.

In the face of uncertainty, priorities are made clear.

If this was our last day on Earth, I wanted it to be with him. And if it wasn’t our last, I wanted many more with him.

So I held him a little tighter, cradled him closer.

I knew, theoretically, what to expect from enduring a cyclone. I’d read data reports and heard accounts of people who had lived through them. I’d seen the footage of the aftermath, and I knew the power of nature it took to amass that kind of destruction.

What I had grossly underestimated was the noise. Or perhaps one had to experience it firsthand to really grasp what the sound of a cyclone was like. It sounded like a plane was landing in the room. Or a train. Or both.

But the strangest thing for me was time.

Time felt wrong.

Every second was a minute, every minute was an hour.

I could see the radar from where I sat. I could see it still moving in real time, but everything else was in slow motion in almost three-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds.

It made everything feel surreal.

And I realised then that I was having a moment of disassociation. That perhaps this level of fear had made my brain disconnect the emotional reasoning, and I started to assess the storm clinically, methodically. As if it were happening to someone else and I was simply analysing the data.

Winds up to 280 km per hour.

Low down to 925 hectopascals.

Another 100 ml of rain.

And those numbers, those statistics, meant high level destruction. That meant buildings would be gone.

People.

There would be a death toll. A fact those numbers couldn’t deny.

And I’d warned people. I’d tried to tell them when that news reporter asked me.

Had they listened?

Tully didn’t. His family didn’t. Apparently they had acyclone-proof cellar, but the more I looked at those numbers, and given their house was fully exposed, fronting the ocean... I had to wonder howanythingwould survive.

Like the islands that had been mowed off the map.

I glanced up at the screens.

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