Storm Shades by Olivia Stephens

words come out in a mumble as Sofie hugs him in gratitude. “Alright Sofe, I get all freaked out when you go girly on me,” he grumbles until Sofie releases him. “Darwin can’t find out about this.” Finn is already picking up his laptop and disconnecting the cables from the television.
    “I agree, we don’t want this going any further up the chain. Besides, he has other things to worry about,” Sofie says, nodding in agreement and feeling more excited than she has in a long time.
    Finn is half-talking to himself, already mentally out the door. “It’s going to take a little while.”
    “Thanks, Finn.” Sofie heads over to her desk where she’s set up a make-shift laboratory and lays out the samples Ashton had handed over. It’s only when she takes them out of the containers that she realizes what she’s looking at. “Son of a bitch,” she mutters under her breath.
    “What? What happened?” Finn walks over to the microscope she’s looking down and takes a peek. “What am I looking at? They look like rocks.” Finn is a genius, but he knows next to nothing about Sofie’s area of expertise, and it’s the one subject where she always feels like the teacher rather than the student.
    “Exactly, they’re just rocks.” Sofie nudges Finn out of the way of the scope and peers down it again to check she’s right about what she’s seeing. “They’re random bits of stone. They’re not the samples I took from the woods. He switched them.” As the realization dawns on her, it only gives her more questions.
    “Who switched them? The Diet Coke break guy?” Finn frowns in confusion, clearly hating that he’s a step behind Sofie, his ego taking a bit of a bruising.
    Sofie nods slowly. “He wants us to think that there isn’t any oil, and that we’re looking in the wrong place, so we don’t start drilling. The rock that I saw in the woods is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I would go as far as to say that it might not be something that anyone has seen before.” The words that she hadn’t trusted herself to even think the day before come pouring out. “I need to go back out and get another sample.” Sofie pushes her chair out and starts to stand up before Finn stops her with a hand on her shoulder.
    “I agree, but whatever weird shit is going on here, you can’t go out in a hurricane to get another set of samples.” Finn speaks slowly, as he would to a child and doesn’t take his hand from her shoulder until Sofie sits back down with a thud. “Why don’t you check in with Jennie, see if she’s gotten anywhere with the samples you overnighted?” He winks at her theatrically.
    “How did you know about that?” Sofie wonders what else Finn knows that the rest of them don’t.
    “The power of the internet. I have eyes everywhere.” Finn does a fake bad-guy cackle, and Sofie can’t help but laugh.
    “Good to know,” she says, dryly. “Sometimes you’re not as stupid as you look, Finnbarr.” He makes a vomiting face that signals how little he likes his full name. It was one of the things that they’d bonded over—how their parents had given them both names that no one ever knew how to spell correctly. “Now get out of here, slacker! You’ve got work to do.” Sofie nudges him playfully towards the door.
    “There’s the bossy, pain-in-the-ass Sofie Braun that I know and love! You had me scared for a little while there, thought you’d gone soft on me.” Finn doesn’t wait for a reply before slamming the door shut so hard she’s pretty sure everyone in the motel would have heard it.
    Sofie doesn’t waste any time trying Jennie at the office, but her phone just rings through to voicemail. She tries Jennie’s cell but the same thing happens, causing Sofie to frown. Jennie is someone who’s never more than a few feet away from her phone and obsessive about checking for email and messages. It was more than strange for her not to answer. She types out a quick text on her