He pulled the strange knife from his bag. The driftwood handle curved into his palm, its surface smooth but fibrous, polished as if by a hundred years of holding. The scrimshaw blade arced away from the wood, fiercely serrated, carved with strange symbols. Some resembled waves, funnels, and branching lightning; others were impossible to discern.

He slid open a drawer, lay the knife on a messy stack of files, and locked it.

He watched the video again, and again. It never showed the face deep inside the wind. It stopped before he’d pulled the knife from her center, pulled down the storm. None of the debris looked like Paula.

He clicked over to a live feed of the news.

No one reported the storm. It was as if no one but him had even seen it.

Beneath his feet, the storm raged.

***

Thunder shook the house every few hours through the night. By dawn, the pulses became less frequent, less urgent. Jacob sat in bed watching layers of feathered ice spread across the insides of his windows.

He revived his old phone and scrolled through the overnight weather maps and radars. His frown deepened with every refresh of the page. The currents were all wrong. The hot gulf winds arced west, dropping rain storms across Arizona. Arctic fronts sank like rocks across the east and well into Florida. Windsocks across the Midwest hung limp.

Climate scientists around the globe sweated against green screens, stumbling over words like “unprecedented,” “anomaly,” “unpredictable.”

Jacob’s heart hammered. Unpredictable. They can’t predict any of this.

He grabbed his notebook and ran down the basement stairs just as his phone chirped a series of texts from Dan asking him to hurry—they needed him live ASAP.

He unlocked the studio door and peered inside.

His heart cartwheeled for a moment at the sight of the empty room, till he saw the storm plastered to the ceiling, glowering down at him. Her eyes were nearly full gold. He swallowed the lump in his throat and spoke quickly.

“I’ll give your knife back—not yet, but soon. Just, first, tell me everything. What’s happening with the wind? Where are the storms? Where will they be?”

***

The vapid anchors of channel four weren’t laughing anymore. They were tuned in—watching Radar. Everyone was. Not just locally, but nationally. He put off questions about his sources, muttering half-formed information about studies he and Paula had conducted on the road.

“There’s no better way to understand a storm than to chase it. Corner it and see what it does.”

He saved lives. Hundreds. He sent people to basements before the clouds even began to spin—and they listened.

Jacob called the shots till his voice gave. Near midnight, he reached the end of his notes. The end of the storm predictions.