He slid his notebook in his pocket. Said he needed a break. Sleep, food—time with maps, then he would be back, he promised.

The media team’s devices lit up with angry calls and tweets. They—the public—wanted him to stay. They needed him. Relied on him—their lives depended on his forecast.

He needed the storm.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

He sped home, listening to the broadcasts and weather reporters who tried to pick up where he left off, but who mostly talked about how he couldn’t know what he knew, instead of addressing the needs of their communities.

He ran inside, slipped and fell down the hard wood planks of the basement stairs—ice a half-inch thick coated them. A cut above his ear bled into the frost on the floor, congealing into a red slurry. He pressed at the wound, the inevitable headache already blooming.

Thunder boomed and shattered the ice sheet, sending him back to the floor, where icicle daggers pelted him from the ceiling. He covered his head till the world stilled again. The barometric pressure dropped, his ears popping as a wave of vertigo hit.

Jacob pulled himself up; small cuts across his body stung as he waded through the ice shards to the studio door.

The storm was inside the eye of a debris field. Everything was broken, every speck of it a little bit of Paula. Her scent was gone, replaced with the cool ions of lightning and snow.

Jacob’s temper rose like an updraft. He stomped through the room, pieces of his past, of his Paula, crunching underfoot. Here, all the debris was her. Every speck.

He lifted the storm by her hair.

“What have you done to this room?” He tossed her back down into a pile of broken glass.

She laughed and it blew the hair back off his forehead. “I do what I do. There’s nothing else that I can be but a tempest. Trapped in your teapot.” She laughed again and the blood in his lacerations froze.

His phone beeped and rattled against the keys in his pocket. More storms, unseasonable and unnatural, twisted across the country.

“Call off the storms.”

She smiled her ink-in-water smile. “I can’t call them. I can only meet their winds with my own. We push and pull each other through the sky.”

“Push them, then!”

“I can’t take my place in the pattern from here.” Her breath grew faint, her eyes more milky than stormy, not yet taking on the slightest cast of yellow.

“Then tell me what happens next. Those storms are deadly. I need to know where they’re going.”

“All storms are deadly.” The storm’s eyes roved in her head, shot through with white-hot lines. Her arms shook, scattering drops of rain around the room. She collapsed.

Jacob grabbed her and shook. “Where are the storms going?”

“To sea. All storms go to sea.”