Dara had grown up in the back seat of a truck, watching the sky.
Her mother was a meteorologist who studied severe weather. Dara had seen forty-seven tornadoes in her twelve years of life. She knew the difference between a wall cloud and a shelf cloud, could read a rotation before most adults noticed the sky had changed, and felt something close to love when a storm built on the horizon.
She was not afraid of storms.
What she was afraid of was the spring their truck broke down twenty miles from a large supercell with a confirmed tornado on the ground.
Her mother called it in and stayed calm. Professional calm — the kind Dara had watched her whole life, which was organised and purposeful and contained.
What Dara felt was different.
She sat by the road and watched the distant funnel and felt, for the first time, what ordinary people felt when they saw what she saw. The weight of it. The indifference of it. The reminder that the sky didn't care about them at all.
The truck was fixed. The storm passed five miles north.
In the silence afterwards, Dara said, "I think I understand why people are scared."
Her mother looked at her for a moment. "Understanding fear makes you better at the work," she said. "Not worse."
Dara nodded.
She looked at the clear sky where the storm had been, already dissolving into nothing.
She still loved them. She just respected them differently now.