The morning Maritza Delgado discovered she could see seven days into the future, she was sitting in her kitchen drinking coffee from a mug that proclaimed "World's Okayest Meteorologist" – a gift from her daughter before she'd left for MIT. The desert sun painted geometric patterns through her venetian blinds, and outside, the wind chimes sang their metallic prayers to no one in particular.
She'd been scrolling through WeatherWise Pro on her phone, the app she'd used for three years to track atmospheric pressure and wind patterns across the Tularosa Basin, when the numbers began their peculiar dance. The timestamp read July 23, 2024, 7:42 AM. But today was July 16.
Maritza set down her coffee with the careful precision of someone who'd just seen a ghost wearing tomorrow's clothes.
"No, no, no," she whispered to the empty kitchen, refreshing the app. The date remained stubbornly wrong. Temperature: 97°F. Humidity: 12%. Wind: WSW at 35 mph, gusting to 52. A dust storm warning flashed amber across the screen.
She knew she should report the glitch. She knew she should close the app, maybe restart her phone, certainly contact tech support. Instead, she screenshot everything and wrote the predictions in her moleskine notebook, the one where she kept pressed flowers from the Organ Mountains and fragmentary poems about cumulus formations.
The old Maritza – the one from before the divorce, before Sophia left for college, before the emptiness of the house pressed against her like atmospheric pressure – that Maritza would have dismissed it immediately. But this new Maritza, who talked to her succulent garden and sometimes ate cereal for dinner while watching Korean dramas, this Maritza was curious.
Seven days. She would wait seven days.
---
Tommy Chen burst into the National Weather Service office like a thunderclap wearing sneakers and too much cologne. Twenty-eight years old, with a YouTube channel called "Storm Rider Tommy" that had 847,000 subscribers, he was everything Maritza wasn't: loud, perpetually caffeinated, and convinced that meteorology was meant to be entertainment.
"Maritza! Did you see the models for next week? We might get actual precipitation! Actual water falling from the actual sky!"
She minimized her screen, where July 23's data still glowed like a premonition. "Twelve percent chance, Tommy. Don't buy a boat yet."
"You're such a pessimist." He perched on her desk, knocking over her pencil holder shaped like a saguaro cactus. "That's why you need me around. I bring the joy, you bring the... spreadsheets."
"I bring the science."
"Same thing." He glanced at her notebook, still open to her scribblings. "What's with the July 23 stuff? Planning ahead?"
"Just... patterns." She closed the notebook. "You know how I like patterns."
Tommy studied her with the intensity he usually reserved for wall clouds. "You okay, Ritz? You've been weird lately. Weirder than normal, I mean."
"I'm fine."
"You know what you need? You need to come storm chasing with me. This weekend. There's a system moving through West Texas that could produce some photogenic supercells."
"I'll think about it."
But she wouldn't think about it. She would spend the weekend watching the sky, comparing it to what her impossible app insisted was coming. She would water her plants and speak to them in Spanish, the language her mother used for secrets and prayers. She would not think about Elena, her sister who lived forty miles south in Las Cruces, who hadn't spoken to her since their mother's funeral two years ago.
---
July 23 arrived dressed in heat and wind, exactly as promised.
Maritza stood on the flat roof of the NWS building at 7:42 AM, watching the dust storm roll in from the west like a great brown wave intent on drowning the desert. The temperature was 97°F. The humidity was 12%. The wind was gusting to 52 mph.
Her phone buzzed. The app now showed July 30.
"Jesus Christ and all the saints," she breathed in her mother's voice, a voice she thought she'd trained out of herself with years of academic presentations and professional distance.
The dust storm wasn't particularly severe – they'd seen worse during the drought of 2018 – but it was precisely what the app had predicted. Every detail. Every gust. Every degree.
Back in her office, she pulled up July 30's forecast. Clear skies. Light winds. Temperature: 101°F. Nothing remarkable except for a small notation at 3:47 PM: "Microburst activity detected. Localized damage reported. Two casualties."
The coordinates matched Elena's daycare center.
---
"You're being weird again," Tommy announced, materializing in her doorway with two cups of coffee that smelled like hazelnuts and bad decisions.
"I'm always weird. You just said so yesterday."
"Different weird. Prophetic weird. You've correctly predicted every weather event for the past week. Down to the minute. Jerry in admin thinks you've made a deal with the devil."
"Jerry in admin thinks the moon landing was fake."
"Fair point." Tommy set a coffee on her desk, then noticed her hands shaking. "Okay, now I'm actually worried. What's going on?"
Maritza looked at this boy – because that's what he was, really, a boy playing with storms like toys – and wondered what it would mean to share this burden. The app was clearly some sort of anomaly, a glitch in spacetime's fabric, a window that shouldn't exist. In Bradbury's stories, such gifts always came with a price. The illustrated man couldn't escape his moving tattoos. The crowd that gathered around accidents brought death with their attention.
"If you could see the future," she said carefully, "would you change it?"
"Hell yes. Lottery numbers, baby."
"I'm serious."
Tommy's expression shifted, becoming something older. "I don't know. Depends on what I saw, I guess. Why?"
She almost told him. The words gathered like storm clouds in her throat. Instead, she said, "Just thinking about chaos theory. Butterfly effects."
"You know what your problem is? You think too much. You need to act more, think less."
After he left, Maritza stared at the coordinates on her screen. Elena's daycare. Twenty-three children, ages two to five. Elena, who'd accused her of caring more about atmospheric pressure than family pressure. Elena, who was right.
---
That night, Maritza drove to Las Cruces.
The daycare center sat on a quiet street lined with mulberry trees that shouldn't survive in the desert but did anyway, through stubbornness or spite. "Elena's Little Stars" read the hand-painted sign, each letter a different color of hope.
Maritza parked across the street and watched her sister through the window, moving between tiny humans like a shepherd among lambs. Elena had gained weight since the funeral, her hair was shorter, streaked with premature gray that she didn't bother to hide. She looked like their mother. She looked like home.
The phone in Maritza's hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She could walk in right now, warn Elena about July 30. But warn her how? "My weather app sees the future" sounded like the opening line of a commitment hearing.
A small boy pressed his face against the window, making fish faces at the world. Elena appeared behind him, laughing, and for a moment her gaze swept the street. Maritza ducked down in her seat like a teenager avoiding an ex-boyfriend.
When she looked again, Elena was gone, but the boy remained, now drawing shapes in the fog his breath made on the glass. Hearts. Stars. A crooked spiral that might have been a tornado or might have been nothing at all.
---
"I need to borrow your storm chasing van," Maritza announced the next morning.
Tommy nearly choked on his energy drink. "You? Want to chase? Did hell freeze over? Wait, can you predict that too now?"
"What?"
"Nothing. Just... you've been scary accurate lately. Like, algorithm-level accurate. It's freaking everyone out."
"I need it for July 30. Around 3 PM."
"That's next Tuesday. What's happening next Tuesday?"
"I want to... document something. Microburst activity."
Tommy's eyes lit up like a child seeing presents. "Can I come?"
"No."
"Oh come on! It's my van! Besides, you don't even know how to operate the mobile radar unit."
He was right. She needed him. But how could she explain that she was planning to park outside a daycare and somehow prevent a disaster she'd seen in an impossible future? How could she tell him that she was planning to change the timeline, to grab fate by the throat and shake it until it released those children?
"Fine," she said. "But we do this my way."
"Deal. But I'm livestreaming it."
"You livestream everything."
"Content is king, Ritz. Content is king."
---
The weekend crawled by like a dust devil, slow and destructive. Maritza checked the app obsessively. The July 30 prediction remained unchanged. Microburst. 3:47 PM. Two casualties.
She tried everything to get more information. Different weather apps showed nothing unusual for that date. The National Weather Service's own models predicted calm conditions. Only her corrupted WeatherWise Pro could see the danger coming, like a tooth ache that predicted rain.
Sunday evening, she sat in her backyard talking to her plants. The desert willow she'd named Fernando. The agave called Esperanza. The cluster of prickly pears she collectively referred to as "the committee."
"What would you do?" she asked them. "Let fate run its course? Or interfere and risk making things worse?"
The plants, wise in their silence, offered no judgment.
Her phone rang. Elena's number appeared on the screen – the first time in two years.
"Mari?" Her sister's voice was smaller than memory.
"Elena. Hi."
"I saw you the other night. Outside the daycare."
Maritza's throat constricted. "I was just—"
"I know what you were doing. Same thing I do sometimes. Drive by your work. Watch you through the windows. Wonder how we got here."
"Elena, I—"
"Mom would hate this. Us not talking."
"She would."
Silence stretched between them, filled with dust and regret.
"Maybe," Elena said finally, "we could get coffee sometime. When you're ready."
"I'd like that."
After Elena hung up, Maritza cried for the first time since the divorce. She cried for her mother, for her sister, for the children she'd never had, for the future she could see but couldn't quite grasp. The plants stood witness, offering their thorny comfort.
---
Monday arrived with thunderheads building over the Sacramento Mountains, purple-bottomed giants that promised violence. Maritza watched them from the roof, her notebook filled with sketches and calculations.
Tommy found her there at lunch, eating a sandwich that tasted like cardboard and destiny.
"Big day tomorrow," he said, settling beside her. "You going to tell me what we're really doing?"
"Saving lives, maybe."
"Whose?"
"I don't know yet."
He studied her profile. "You know, my grandmother back in Taiwan, she used to say she could smell earthquakes coming. Three days before, she'd get this metallic taste in her mouth. Saved our whole neighborhood once, made everyone camp outside. They thought she was crazy until the buildings started falling."
"Did she really?"
"Who knows? But everyone believed her after that. Sometimes being right is more important than being rational."
"And sometimes being right is a curse."
"Only if you do nothing with it."
That evening, Maritza called the daycare.
"Elena's Little Stars, this is Elena."
"Hi, it's... it's Mari. I was wondering if you're planning anything special for tomorrow afternoon?"
"Just normal activities. Why?"
"Maybe... maybe you could take the kids to the park instead? Around 3:30? The weather should be nice." The lie tasted bitter.
"The park? It's supposed to be over a hundred degrees."
"The one with the splash pad. The kids would love it."
"Mari, what's going on?"
"Please. Just... trust me. Please."
Elena was quiet for so long Maritza thought she'd hung up. Then: "Okay. Okay, we'll go to the park."
"Thank you."
"Mari? Are you all right?"
"I will be. Tomorrow, after 4 PM, I will be."
---
July 30 dawned clear and vicious, the sun a bronze coin in a white sky. Maritza met Tommy at the NWS at noon, her stomach churning with coffee and dread.
"You look terrible," he observed cheerfully.
"Thanks."
They loaded into his van, a converted Ford Transit painted storm-gray and bristling with antennas, radar equipment, and enough technology to track a butterfly's sneeze. Tommy's pride and joy, bought with YouTube ad revenue and genuine passion.
"Where to, captain?"
"Las Cruces. Elena's daycare."
"Your sister? I thought you two didn't talk."
"We're working on it."
They drove in relative silence, unusual for Tommy, who normally narrated everything like a documentary host. The desert scrolled by, all beige and resilience, dotted with creosote bushes that could live for thousands of years, cloning themselves over and over, immortal in their stubborn way.
At 3:15, they parked across from the daycare. The building looked peaceful, a small stucco structure painted cheerful yellow. The playground stood empty, its swings moving slightly in the breeze like metronomes keeping time with disaster.
"So what now?" Tommy asked.
Maritza checked her phone. The prediction remained unchanged. 3:47 PM.
"Now we wait."
At 3:32, Elena emerged with a line of children holding a rope, each tiny hand gripping their section like it was a lifeline. They walked down the street toward the park, Elena singing something Maritza couldn't hear but remembered from childhood – a song about elephants balancing on spider webs.
"That's your sister?"
"Yeah."
"She looks like you. If you ever smiled."
At 3:41, the sky began to change. Subtle at first, a darkening in the west that could have been anything. Then the clouds started to rotate, forming a wall of amber dust and darkness.
"Holy shit," Tommy breathed, already reaching for his camera. "That's forming fast. Too fast."
At 3:44, the wind hit. Not gradually, but all at once, like a fist made of air and sand. The trees bent horizontal. A trash can flew past like a missile. Car alarms shrieked in harmony.
"Microburst!" Tommy shouted over the roar. "Straight-line winds, maybe seventy miles per hour!"
At 3:47, the daycare's roof peeled off like the lid of a sardine can.
Maritza watched the building collapse in slow motion, walls folding inward, windows exploding in glittering shrapnel. The playground equipment twisted into modern art. Where Elena and the children would have been, had they stayed, was now a pile of rubble and regret.
"Jesus," Tommy whispered. "If anyone had been in there..."
"But they weren't," Maritza said quietly. "They weren't."
The storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving behind a crime scene of destruction. Sirens wailed in the distance. Tommy was already outside, filming, narrating to his future audience about the unprecedented weather event, the miraculous timing of the evacuation.
Maritza's phone buzzed. The WeatherWise Pro app showed an error message: "No future data available. Thank you for using WeatherWise Pro!"
Then it crashed, never to open again.
---
Elena found her an hour later, sitting on the curb across from the destroyed daycare, counting and recounting the children who surrounded her like small, bewildered planets.
"Mari. My God, Mari, how did you know?"
"I just... had a feeling."
Elena pulled her into a hug that smelled like childhood – their mother's perfume, playground sand, tears both bitter and sweet. "You saved us. You saved all of us."
"I couldn't lose you again," Maritza whispered. "Not after everything."
"You won't. I promise."
Tommy approached, his camera finally lowered. "The news wants to interview you both. They're calling it a miracle."
"No interviews," Maritza said.
"But you're a hero! You predicted this!"
"I got lucky. That's all."
That night, after the parents had collected their children, after the insurance adjusters had come and gone, after the news vans had reluctantly departed, Maritza sat in her sister's kitchen drinking wine from coffee mugs because all the good glasses were packed somewhere in the garage.
"Mom used to know things," Elena said suddenly. "Remember? She'd know when Dad was going to call. Know when rain was coming even when the sky was clear."
"Bruja intuition," Maritza said, using their grandmother's term.
"Maybe it runs in the family."
"Maybe."
They talked until dawn, filling in two years of silence with words that tumbled over each other like eager children. About the divorce, about Sophia at MIT, about Elena's failed engagement, about their mother's last days. About everything and nothing, the way sisters do when time suddenly feels both infinite and precious.
---
A week later, Maritza stood on the roof of the NWS building, watching monsoon clouds gather over the mountains. Her new weather app was boringly accurate, never showing more than ten days out, never revealing anything beyond normal atmospheric data.
Tommy joined her, as she knew he would.
"That video got twelve million views," he said. "I donated the ad revenue to rebuild the daycare."
"That's good of you."
"It was a miracle, wasn't it? The timing. The evacuation. Everything."
Maritza thought about fate and free will, about butterflies in Tokyo causing hurricanes in Texas, about the weight of knowing and the freedom of not knowing. About gifts that come and go like desert rain, precious and temporary.
"Yeah," she said finally. "It was a miracle."
The clouds opened then, releasing the first real rain in ninety-three days. It fell on the desert like a blessing, like forgiveness, like all the tears that hadn't been cried. Maritza lifted her face to it, letting it wash away the dust of seven days of thunder, seven days of carrying tomorrow's weight.
Somewhere in Las Cruces, Elena was probably standing in the same rain, maybe thinking of their mother, maybe thinking of nothing at all. The children she'd saved were sleeping in their beds, dreaming whatever dreams five-year-olds dream, unaware of the timeline that had bent around them, the casualty report that would never be written.
"Want to chase that system heading toward Carlsbad tomorrow?" Tommy asked.
"Just normal chasing? No prophetic visions? No saving the world?"
"Just normal chasing."
Maritza smiled, the expression feeling foreign but good on her face. "Yeah. Let's do that."
They stood together in the rain, two meteorologists in a desert that shouldn't exist, in a moment that almost didn't happen, watching the sky write its autobiography in lightning across the dark. The future stretched ahead, unknown and unknowable, the way it was supposed to be. The way it had to be for humans to remain human, for choices to matter, for love to mean something more than just inevitable chemical reactions.
Her phone stayed silent in her pocket, showing only the present, only this moment of rain and possibility. And that, Maritza thought, was enough. More than enough. It was everything.