THE LAST WEATHER REPORT

Every window in Station Theta had a painted sky. The real one had gone white twenty years ago, stripped of weather by the orbital mirrors that kept the world warm. People born after the change believed clouds were a kind of ancestor.

Oren's job as junior forecaster involved reading maintenance schedules for the mirrors and announcing, twice a day, that nothing would happen. On Thursday, at 04:17, the obsolete storm receiver crackled. It printed a warning in blue ink: THUNDERSTORM, WEST DISTRICT, YESTERDAY.

When he examined the date, he found the last seven digits of his mother's old phone number. His mother had been a climate engineer. She had disappeared the year the sky was switched off.

The alarm offered two coordinates. One led to the roof where the receiver could send a warning to every household. The other led to a locked archive of obsolete atmospheric machines.