The first time Keisha Washington noticed the pattern, she was sitting in her dented Honda Civic outside Chen's Chinese Palace, waiting for order #447B to be ready. The rain hammered against her windshield like skeletal fingers tapping for attention, and her lower back was singing its usual song of sharp, electric pain—a memento from the accident three years ago that had started her whole downward spiral. Divorce papers, lost job, and now this: shuttling General Tso's chicken and egg rolls across Detroit for $3.50 plus tip, if she was lucky.
She was scrolling through her delivery history on the app, trying to calculate if she'd made enough to cover Marcus's basketball shoes, when she saw it. Mr. Chen, Apartment 4B at the Corktown Commons. Same order every Tuesday and Thursday, like clockwork. 7:13 PM. One General Tso's combination plate, extra spicy. One order of spring rolls. One wonton soup. And fortune cookies—but the quantity changed each time. Last Tuesday: eleven. The Thursday before: four. The Tuesday before that: seven.
Eleven. Four. Seven.
The numbers tumbled around in her mind like lottery balls, and then something cold crawled up her spine. November 4th. That was three days ago. The fire on Vernor Highway that killed the Nguyen family. She'd driven past the charred skeleton of their house just this morning, had seen the memorial of teddy bears and flowers growing on the sidewalk like some terrible garden.
"Order's ready!" The teenager at the counter called out, snapping Keisha back to the present. She grabbed the bag, checked the receipt. Tonight's fortune cookie count: fifteen.
"Fifteen fortune cookies?" she asked. "That's a lot for one person."
The kid shrugged, already turning back to his phone. "That's what the app says."
Keisha sat in her car for a full minute, bag warming her lap, staring at the receipt. Fifteen. November 15th was in three days. She shook her head, laughing at herself. "Girl, you're losing it," she muttered, putting the car in drive. "Too many true crime podcasts."
But as she navigated the wet streets toward Corktown, she couldn't shake the feeling. Her mother used to say Keisha had "the sight"—nothing supernatural, just a way of noticing things others missed. It's what had made her a good dental hygienist, spotting the tiny signs of disease before they bloomed into something worse. Maybe it's what made her good at this job too, memorizing shortcuts and customer preferences, building her ratings up to 4.9 stars through sheer attention to detail.
The Corktown Commons was one of those converted factories that developers had turned into "luxury" apartments, all exposed brick and Edison bulbs, trying to put lipstick on Detroit's industrial corpse. Keisha had been here enough times that the security guard just waved her through. She took the stairs—the elevator was broken more often than not—and knocked on 4B at exactly 7:13.
The door opened immediately, as if Mr. Chen had been waiting behind it. He was a small man, maybe seventy, with neat silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Same khaki pants and blue cardigan he always wore, like a Chinese Mr. Rogers.
"Good evening, Keisha," he said, and she startled. She'd delivered to him at least twenty times, but this was the first time he'd used her name.
"Evening, Mr. Chen. Got your order here." She handed him the bag, and he passed her a twenty.
"Keep the change," he said, same as always. The tip would be logged in the app too—he always tipped 25%, exactly.
As he took the bag, Keisha found herself blurting out, "That's a lot of fortune cookies. Having a party?"
Mr. Chen's eyes—dark brown, almost black—studied her for a moment. "I collect fortunes," he said simply. "Some people collect stamps. I collect possibilities."
The door closed with a soft click, leaving Keisha standing in the hallway with its buzzing fluorescent lights and the faint smell of industrial cleaning products. Collect possibilities. What the hell did that mean?
Three days later, November 15th, Keisha was making a delivery in Midtown when she heard the sirens. Lots of them, all converging somewhere nearby. Her phone buzzed with a breaking news alert: "Mass Shooting at Campus Martius Park. 15 Dead, Multiple Injuries. Shooter in Custody."
Fifteen.
Her hands shook so badly she had to pull over. She sat there in a Whole Foods parking lot, staring at her phone, reading the details as they came in. 3:07 PM. Lone gunman. Fifteen dead, exactly. No more, no less, though dozens were injured.
This couldn't be real. It was confirmation bias, that's all. She was seeing patterns that weren't there, like those people who think they can predict earthquakes from their joint pain. But her joints—the ones that actually did hurt, constantly, from her accident—weren't predicting anything. They just hurt.
She pulled up her delivery history again. Before the eleven fortune cookies on November 1st, Mr. Chen had ordered seven on October 28th. She Googled "Detroit October 7." Her stomach dropped. October 7th: Seven people dead in a pile-up on I-94 during the first real storm of the season.
Before that, September 30th: four fortune cookies. October 4th: Four bodies found in an abandoned house in Brightmoor, victims of a suspected serial killer.
"No," Keisha said aloud to her empty car. "No, no, no."
But she kept scrolling back, and the pattern held. Not every tragedy—Detroit had plenty of regular violence that didn't match any of Mr. Chen's orders. But his fortune cookie numbers? They always matched something terrible, always exactly three days later.
She thought about calling the police, but what would she say? "There's this old Chinese man who orders takeout, and I think his fortune cookies predict murders"? They'd Baker Act her ass faster than she could say "conspiracy theory."
Instead, she called in sick for the rest of her shift—she'd never done that before, couldn't afford to—and drove home to her apartment in Hamtramck. Marcus was at the kitchen table, hunched over his laptop, probably doing homework or playing those games that looked like homework so she couldn't tell the difference.
"You're home early," he said, not looking up.
"Yeah, wasn't feeling great." She grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge, her hands still shaking slightly. "Marcus, you know anything about patterns? Like, statistical patterns?"
Now he did look up, his seventeen-year-old face a perfect blend of her nose and his father's strong jaw. "Is this about your conspiracy theory?"
"What conspiracy theory?"
"Mom, you talk in your sleep. And you leave your notebook open on the coffee table." He turned his laptop toward her. He'd made a spreadsheet. Of course he had—the kid had inherited his father's methodical mind along with his jaw. "I mapped out all of Mr. Chen's orders against news events. The correlation is insane. Like, statistically impossible levels of correlation."
Keisha sank into the chair across from him. "So I'm not crazy?"
"Oh, you might be crazy," Marcus said with a teenager's casual brutality. "But you're also right. This dude is either psychic or..." He paused, and she could see him struggling with saying something too ridiculous for his scientific mind.
"Or what?"
"Or he's causing them somehow."
They stared at each other across the kitchen table, mother and son, united in a moment of shared impossibility.
"I need to go back," Keisha said finally. "I need to watch him, see who he really is."
"Mom, no. Are you insane? If this guy is somehow connected to mass murders—"
"Then someone needs to stop him." She stood up, her back protesting the sudden movement. "I'm not saying I'm going to confront him. I'm just going to watch. Figure out what's really going on."
Marcus closed his laptop with a snap. "Then I'm coming with you."
"Absolutely not."
"Mom, you need backup. And someone who can think clearly if things get weird."
She wanted to argue, but the truth was, she was scared. More scared than she'd been since the night of her accident, when she'd seen the drunk driver's headlights coming at her and known there was nowhere to go.
"Fine," she said. "But we're just observing. Nothing more."
They parked across from the Corktown Commons at 6:45 PM, giving them plenty of time before Mr. Chen's regular 7:13 order. Keisha had checked the app—no order from him tonight, which meant they had to wait until Tuesday. But she wanted to see if there was any activity at his apartment, any sign of who he really was.
At 7:10, a woman walked into the building. Asian, but younger than Mr. Chen, maybe forty. She used a key card to enter, nothing unusual. At 7:13 exactly, she emerged from the building carrying a bag from Chen's Chinese Palace.
"What the hell?" Marcus muttered.
At 7:30, a Black man in his fifties entered the building. At 7:33—exactly twenty minutes after the woman—he left with an identical takeout bag.
They watched for three hours. Every twenty minutes, someone entered the building. Every time, they left three minutes later with takeout from Chen's Chinese Palace. Men, women, various ages, various ethnicities. The only thing they had in common was the timing and the takeout bags.
"Mom," Marcus said slowly, "I don't think Mr. Chen is a person. I think Mr. Chen is like... a group. Or an organization."
Keisha's phone buzzed. A delivery request. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw the name: Mr. Chen. Tuesday wasn't for two more days, but there it was. The same order, but with a note: "Please deliver to loading dock. Door 3."
"Don't accept it," Marcus said immediately.
But Keisha's finger was already hovering over the accept button. "If I don't, someone else will. And they won't know what they're walking into."
"Mom—"
She accepted the order. The pickup time was in fifteen minutes, the delivery time exactly 8:13 PM. One hour later than usual.
"Stay in the car," she told Marcus as she drove to Chen's Chinese Palace. "If I'm not back in thirty minutes, call 911."
"Mom, this is insane."
"I know, baby. But someone has to do something."
The restaurant was nearly empty when she arrived. The same teenage employee handed her the bag without looking up from his phone. She checked the receipt: twenty-three fortune cookies.
Twenty-three. November 23rd. Thanksgiving.
Her blood turned to ice water. Whatever was going to happen on Thanksgiving was going to be big. Twenty-three people were going to die, and she was literally carrying the prediction in a paper bag that smelled like soy sauce and desperation.
The loading dock of the Corktown Commons was around back, poorly lit, the kind of place where bad things happened in movies. Door 3 had no markings, just a rusty number painted on gray metal. Keisha knocked, her other hand on the pepper spray in her pocket.
The door opened, and Mr. Chen stood there. The same Mr. Chen she'd delivered to dozens of times. But behind him, she could see others. The woman from earlier. The Black man. At least a dozen people, all sitting in what looked like a repurposed storage room, fluorescent lights harsh on their faces.
"Hello, Keisha," Mr. Chen said. "We've been expecting you. Well, not you specifically, but someone like you. Someone who would notice."
"Notice what?" Her voice came out steady, which surprised her.
"The pattern. The burden. The terrible mathematics of it all." He stepped aside. "Please, come in. Your son can join us too. Marcus, isn't it?"
Keisha's blood froze. "How do you—"
"We know all the drivers. All the watchers. You're not the first to notice, Keisha. Just the most persistent." He gestured to the room. "Please. Let us explain before you do something that can't be undone."
Every instinct told her to run. But twenty-three people were going to die on Thanksgiving, and these people knew about it. She walked into the room.
The others looked up at her with expressions she recognized: exhaustion, sorrow, and something else. Relief, maybe. The woman she'd seen earlier gestured to an empty folding chair.
"I'm Dr. Sarah Kim," the woman said. "I lost my family in the Paradise Creek mall shooting three years ago. Seventeen dead."
The Black man nodded. "Jerome Patterson. My daughter was one of the seven on I-94."
Around the room, they introduced themselves. Each had lost someone in one of the tragedies that matched Mr. Chen's fortune cookie numbers. Keisha sank into the chair, her legs suddenly unable to hold her.
"You're all survivors," she said.
"Survivors and witnesses," Mr. Chen said. He wasn't Chinese at all, she realized. His accent was pure Detroit, probably Polish if she had to guess. "My real name is Stanley Kowalski. I lost my wife in a mass shooting in 2016. Nine dead. That's when I first noticed it."
"Noticed what?"
"The numbers come to us," Sarah Kim said quietly. "In dreams, mostly. We see them, and we know what they mean. Deaths that are going to happen. Not how or where at first, just when and how many."
"That's insane," Keisha said, even though she'd driven here precisely because she believed it.
"Insane but true," Jerome said. "We tried to stop them at first. Went to the police, the FBI, anyone who would listen. But you can't prevent something when you don't know what it is, just when it will happen. And after a few of us got arrested or committed for observation..."
"We found another way," Stanley/Mr. Chen continued. "We learned that the numbers are fluid until we lock them in. By ordering the fortune cookies, by acknowledging the number formally, we can... direct it."
Keisha's mouth went dry. "Direct it?"
Sarah pulled out a map of Detroit, covered in red dots. "Twenty-three people are going to die on Thanksgiving. That's set. We can't change the number or the date. But we can influence where. Whether it's a family gathering in Palmer Woods or a shelter dinner for the homeless. Whether it's children or..." She paused, swallowing hard. "Or people who've already lived full lives."
"You're choosing who dies," Keisha whispered.
"We're choosing who lives," Jerome corrected. "The deaths are coming anyway. We just try to minimize the suffering. Send it toward those who cause pain—drug dealers, abusers, the violent. Or sometimes, when we can't find enough evil, toward those who are already dying. Hospice wards. Nursing homes where people are begging for release."
Keisha stood up so fast the chair fell over. "This is murder. You're talking about murder."
"No," Stanley said firmly. "We're talking about triage. When you were a dental hygienist—yes, we know about that—you performed triage every day. Who gets seen first? Who can wait? Whose infection is spreading fastest? This is the same thing, just... larger."
"It's not the same thing at all!"
"Isn't it?" Sarah stood too, facing Keisha across the small room. "My children died because someone decided to shoot up a mall. Random. Senseless. No meaning at all. Now I can at least make their deaths mean something. I can make sure the next tragedy takes the life of someone who deserves it instead of another child."
"Nobody deserves—"
"Robert Wayne Marshall," Jerome interrupted. "That name mean anything to you?"
Keisha's blood chilled. Robert Wayne Marshall. The drunk driver who'd T-boned her three years ago. Who'd walked away without a scratch while she spent six months in physical therapy. Who'd gotten probation and community service for his third DUI.
"He was one of the four in Brightmoor," Jerome continued. "The ones the news called serial killer victims. They weren't. They were four unconnected deaths that happened to occur on the same day, in the same area. We just... guided them there."
"You killed him."
"The universe killed him," Stanley said. "We just made sure it was him instead of someone else. Instead of someone like you, Keisha. Or your son."
As if summoned by his name, the door burst open. Marcus stood there, phone in hand, eyes wide with panic.
"Mom, we need to go. Now. I called 911, told them about—"
"You did what?" Sarah grabbed his phone, but it was too late. They could already hear sirens in the distance.
"I told them about a suspicious gathering, possible terrorist cell," Marcus said, defiant even in his fear. "They'll be here in minutes."
The room erupted in controlled chaos. People grabbed papers, bags, anything that might be evidence. But Stanley stood perfectly still, looking at Keisha with those dark, knowing eyes.
"You have to decide now," he said calmly. "Take the bag. Place the order. Lock in the number. Or let it go wild. Twenty-three people will still die on Thanksgiving, but without direction, it could be anyone. Could be a family gathering with children. Could be your family gathering."
"Mom, don't listen to him," Marcus pleaded.
But Keisha was thinking about Thanksgiving. About the dinner she'd planned at her sister's house in Dearborn. Her sister with three kids. Her elderly parents. Marcus. At least fifteen people would be there, maybe more if cousins showed up.
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" she asked.
Stanley pulled out his phone, showed her a news app. "Every tragedy we've predicted. Every one we've directed. Check the victims. Check their records."
The sirens were getting closer. Sarah and Jerome were already at the door, ready to run. But Keisha took the phone, scrolled through the articles Stanley had saved. The patterns were there if you looked. The victims in directed tragedies were overwhelmingly people with violent records, terminal diagnoses, or both. Not all of them—some innocents always got caught in the blast—but enough to show intention.
"Ten seconds," Stanley said. "Decide."
Keisha looked at Marcus, her beautiful son who still believed in clear rights and wrongs, in a world where calling 911 solved problems instead of creating them. Then she looked at the bag of Chinese food in her hand, felt the weight of twenty-three fortune cookies inside.
"How?" she asked.
"Just log the delivery as complete. Take a photo of the receipt showing the number. Post it to the app. That locks it in." Stanley was already backing toward the door. "Then we'll contact you about the where. You don't have to be part of that if you don't want. Just locking in the number is enough."
The sirens were right outside now. Red and blue lights painted the walls through the high windows.
"Mom, no," Marcus said.
But Keisha was already pulling out her phone, opening the delivery app. She snapped a photo of the receipt, the number twenty-three clear in the frame. Her finger hovered over the "complete delivery" button.
"Detroit Police! Open the door!"
She pressed the button.
Stanley smiled sadly. "Welcome to the burden," he said, and then he was gone, along with the others, scattered through exits Keisha hadn't even noticed. Only she and Marcus remained when the police burst in, found them standing in an empty storage room with nothing but folding chairs and a bag of cooling Chinese food.
The questioning went on for hours. Keisha stuck to a simple story: she'd gotten a weird delivery request, found the room empty except for her son who'd followed her out of concern. No, she didn't know anything about a terrorist cell. No, she hadn't seen anyone else. The security cameras, conveniently, had been spray-painted black earlier that day.
They let her go at 3 AM with a warning about accepting suspicious delivery requests. Marcus didn't speak to her the entire drive home, didn't speak to her for three days. But on Thanksgiving morning, he finally broke his silence.
"There was a news alert," he said, standing in her bedroom doorway. "Mass shooting at a compound in River Rouge. Some kind of militia group was having a Thanksgiving gathering. Twenty-three dead. All members of the group."
Keisha sat up in bed, her back screaming its usual morning protest. "A militia group?"
"White supremacists, apparently. They were planning something for Black Friday. Cops found a whole arsenal, bomb-making materials." Marcus came into the room, sat on the edge of her bed like he used to when he was little and had nightmares. "Did you know?"
"No," Keisha said honestly. "I just... I just locked in the number. I don't know how they chose the location."
"But you knew they would choose. You knew those twenty-three people would die somewhere specific instead of random."
"Yes."
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. "The news is calling it a miracle. They're saying if these guys had carried out their Black Friday plan, hundreds might have died."
"Maybe."
"No maybe about it, Mom. They had bombs. They had a manifesto. They had targets picked out." He looked at her with eyes too old for seventeen. "You saved hundreds of people."
"Twenty-three people still died."
"Twenty-three people who were planning to kill hundreds."
They sat in silence as the morning sun painted strips across Keisha's bedroom wall. Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: "December 2. Eleven. The dream came to Jerome last night."
"What are you going to do?" Marcus asked, seeing the text.
Keisha deleted it without responding. "I don't know."
But that was a lie. She already knew. She would accept the next delivery request from Mr. Chen, would photograph the receipt with eleven fortune cookies, would lock in the number. Because now she was part of it, part of the terrible mathematics that kept the random universe from destroying everything she loved.
She thought about her mother's saying about having "the sight." Maybe this was what it really meant. Not seeing the future, but seeing the patterns. The awful, inevitable patterns that someone had to manage, had to guide, had to bear.
"I'm going to make breakfast," she said, getting out of bed slowly, carefully, the way she'd learned to move with chronic pain. "You want pancakes?"
"Yeah," Marcus said. "Mom? I'm sorry I called the cops."
"No, baby. You did the right thing. You did the normal, sane, right thing." She kissed his forehead. "It's the world that's insane."
Two weeks later, Keisha made another delivery to Mr. Chen. The real Stanley was there this time, looking older, more tired. The order was for seven fortune cookies.
"It gets easier," he said as she handed him the bag.
"Does it?"
"No. But you get better at carrying it."
December 7th, a gas leak explosion killed seven members of a drug trafficking ring in their lab house. The news called it karma. Keisha called it nothing, said nothing, just delivered other people's food and tried not to think about the mathematics of death.
But late at night, when her back pain kept her awake, she would lie in bed and wonder: Was this always happening? Had there always been people like Stanley, like Sarah, like her, managing the unmanageable? Guiding the universe's violence away from the innocent when they could, accepting the losses when they couldn't?
Her phone would buzz with delivery requests, and mostly they were just food. Just normal people wanting normal things. But sometimes, every Tuesday and Thursday at exactly 7:13 PM, the request would come from Mr. Chen. And Keisha would accept it, would pick up the order with its precisely counted fortune cookies, would photograph the receipt and lock in the number.
She never asked where the tragedies would happen. That wasn't her part of the burden. Her part was just the numbers, the terrible clarity of knowing that death was coming and being able to shape it, just a little. Just enough.
Marcus started coming with her on the Chen deliveries. He never said why, but she knew. He was protecting her, making sure she didn't carry this weight alone. Her beautiful, brilliant boy who should have been worried about college applications and basketball games, not the mathematics of managed tragedy.
"Do you think we're good people?" he asked one night as they sat outside the Corktown Commons, waiting for 7:13.
Keisha thought about all the definitions of good she'd known in her life. The church good of her childhood. The professional good of her dental hygienist days. The mother good she tried to embody every day.
"I think we're necessary people," she said finally. "And maybe that's enough."
The clock in her Honda clicked to 7:13. She grabbed the bag with its cargo of seventeen fortune cookies, seventeen futures that would end on December 20th, five days before Christmas. Seventeen deaths that would happen no matter what, but might, through their terrible work, happen to people who deserved them more than others.
Or at least, that's what she told herself as she walked to the door, knocked three times, and handed the bag to Stanley Kowalski, who wore Mr. Chen's face like a mask against the unbearable weight of knowing.
"Thank you, Keisha," he said, like always.
"Just doing my job," she replied, like always.
But they both knew it was more than that. It was a calling, a curse, a kindness, and a cruelty all wrapped in brown paper and the smell of Chinese takeout. It was the burden of those who could see the patterns, who could guide the chaos, who could make the random universe a little less random.
It was necessary work in an unnecessary world.
And tomorrow, Keisha would wake up with her chronic pain and her chronic knowledge, make breakfast for her son, and deliver other people's dinners to other people's doors. She would check the news for the tragedy she'd helped aim but not prevent. She would carry the weight of those seventeen deaths, and the weight of all the others who didn't die because of where those seventeen happened.
The fortune cookies would be opened. The fortunes would be read. And somewhere in Detroit, seventeen people were living their last three days, not knowing they'd been chosen by a mathematics they'd never understand, guided by people they'd never meet, saved or condemned by patterns they'd never see.
But Keisha would see. She would always see. That was her burden now, her sight, her terrible gift.
She drove home through the dark Detroit streets, Marcus quiet beside her, the radio playing Christmas music that seemed to come from another world entirely. A world where fortune cookies were just cookies, where numbers were just numbers, where Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7:13 meant nothing at all.
She envied that world. But she no longer lived in it.
She lived in the real world, where someone had to do the awful work of choosing. Where someone had to carry the burden of knowing. Where someone had to deliver the fortune cookies that told the future but couldn't change it, only aim it.
That someone was her now.
And May God have mercy on her soul.