Story Excerpt 1 - Asimov’s Science Fiction

Weather Duty
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Amala Navarro pulled one of the damp wipes from the dispenser above the counter and wiped the sweat off her face. She’d had to walk the last few blocks in the 110-degree heat because the light rail broke down for the fifth time this week. At least they’d managed to get the doors open. The last time, the doors stayed shut and rescuers had to smash their way in—taking nearly a dozen cars out of commission at a time when the city needed them most.

She wished she had brought another outfit. She would have slipped into the restroom and removed her shirt and matching leggings, so no one saw just how sweat-covered she was. She had chosen the outfit to impress her new colleagues, not thinking about how much the thin gray material showed the littlest stain—and her sweat stains from that light rail incident were not little.

At least she had her water bottle. She’d managed to refill that as she entered City Hall after realizing the bottle was empty while she was standing in the security line.

What a day. What a horrible start to her brand-new civic duty.

At least she had arrived—fifteen minutes early—at the bland little room in a not-so-bland building. City Hall had been one of the first buildings in Las Vegas to be certified energy efficient. Its solar pipes and panels were ancient—particularly by local standards—built in the teens. But they were still effective and, more important, they were pretty.

Light blue and gray panels formed trees in the plaza, and the building itself had lovely windows that captured the sun. Older buildings weren’t usually this beautiful, but somehow City Hall managed to hold up.

She had expected every room to have windows. The windows might have overlooked Civic Plaza or all the casinos on Fremont Street, but at least they would have had a view.

This meeting room didn’t have a view and was smaller than she anticipated. It seemed even narrower than it was because of the counters that lined the wall, as well as the long table in the middle that was too big for the space. Someone had placed fake ferns in the corners, and all four ferns were fluttering slightly, so at least the room had air movement.

The ferns were an unusual bit of whimsy in an aggressively brown and tan room. The tiled floor was dark brown; the walls were a lighter brown. The counters were dark brown, too, so that from some angles they disappeared against the tile floor.

The table was the same dark brown, which made it seem to grow out of that floor. Only a handful of the chairs matched. Those had tan cushions and straight backs. Other chairs had clearly been dragged into the room to reach the number of seats needed. Those newer chairs were a startling silver. They were somewhat modern, and might (she heard herself mentally stressing might) have comfort modifications so that the chair would conform to whomever sat in it.

She looked at those chairs in dismay. Every time she’d encountered them when she did her civic duty, it meant that the commission she was on was expected to work long hours.

She hoped these chairs had arrived only because of a seating shortage and not because she was going to spend her entire July in this room.

She tossed the used wipe in the recycler near the door, grabbed another wipe, and scrubbed off aggressively. The air conditioning had been set at the mandated 75 degrees, which she normally found comfortable, but on this day, it seemed much too high. That walk had really sapped her energy.

Doing anything in July was crazy, particularly in the years when it was a mandated “average” month, like this year. Average high temperatures here in Las Vegas in July hovered around 110, but the programmers always added a few degrees in either direction, particularly at the beginning and end of the month, just to make sure no one could easily predict the weather.

She had no idea why an easy prediction was something to be avoided. But she hadn’t been around when the system had been designed, so she had no say in the requirements.

She was going to have a say in the weather, though, because that was what the Weather Commission did. The commission was pretty controversial, because everyone had an opinion about the weather and none of those opinions were the same. The manual she had received describing her duties had been clear on that point:

Everyone from your family to random strangers will tell you what the weather should be. Some shadier characters will try to influence your weather decisions. Hold fast and make decisions based on what is best for the Las Vegas Valley. Report any untoward conversations to the chair of the commission or Las Vegas Metro Police.

That last line had initially sent a shiver through her. If that part of the manual hadn’t been clear enough, another part, which was repeated in red throughout and would literally lift above any page she was reading, stated:

Anyone accepting bribes or other forms of influence during their service at the Weather Commission will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

That phrase was repeated in the videos she had watched and even in the cheesy game she had been required to play (using ancient “virtual reality” software) that simulated a week in the life of a commissioner.

She had never had to do simulated service before actual service in all her years of civic duty, and it had unnerved her.

Apparently the Civic Duty Authority of the Las Vegas Valley took the Weather Commission a lot more seriously than she had expected when she signed up.

She stared at the chairs like they were her enemies. If she picked one of the comfort chairs, she was acknowledging that the Weather Commission owned her for the next several hours. If she picked one of the ancient chairs and the meeting did go on forever, she was dooming herself to backaches and discomfort.

She wiped a hand over her clammy forehead. Yes, she was overthinking this. But, she finally realized, she was scared.

She had never been scared of her civic duty before, although she probably should have been. Fresh out of college, she had been assigned to the Public Health Commission. Everyone on that commission had been serious and dedicated, many of them three times her age.

They followed the latest science, made decisions in a bloodless manner, and talked in generic terms such as Is 15 percent an acceptable loss? It had taken her nearly a week on that commission before she realized that they meant a 15 percent loss of life.

It wasn’t the bloodlessness that had gotten to her, though. It had been the descriptions of pathogens or different types of contamination. The oldest on the commission—and the most fanatical—had lived through the Covid crisis of the early twenties, and had vowed to never let any future generation repeat that experience. Initially Amala had liked each of her colleagues, but over time, the older ones, who seemed to react to everything with fear and anger, unnerved her almost as much as the images of what certain biological agents could do to the human body.

When she first became eligible for a transfer to a new commission, she applied. It had taken two years to get off the Public Health Commission, which meant she had ultimately put seven years into the place.

Seven years I’ll never get back, she had told her friends one drunken Friday evening. They had looked at her without sympathy. Everyone had to do their civic duty. The system had been designed when it became clear that elected officials were more interested in their political careers then they were in the nitty-gritty of governing.

In many, many essential services, gridlock caused increased illness and death. Those services were removed from the political landscape by the Civic Duty Laws passed nationwide before she was born. Each community got to designate their own civic duty commissions, with the CDA mandating certain commissions nationwide. Public Health had been part of the CDA from the beginning; Weather got its own national designation after the passage of climate laws and a change in technology made it possible for certain regions to actually control the weather within their borders.

She had thought Weather would be interesting. She could still use her science background, and she wouldn’t be subject to images of biophages that ate human flesh.

But standing here, in this bland empty room, she felt a lot of trepidation. Maybe she had made the wrong choice after all.

She hovered, resisting the urge to pull out her designated phone. The phone had been given to her when she joined this commission. Personal tech shut down inside this part of City Hall for legal and governmental reasons; that was why so many commission meetings were held here. The phone was given to her so that she could record the meeting (apparently, she needed the legal protection, which also made her nervous) and so that she could contact friends and family if need be.

She had programmed the phone the week before the meeting and had had a sudden moment of panic as the names turned red after she inputted them. Red meant the names were unacceptable to the system. After a long five minutes, though, her contact list was approved.

Apparently, they all had to be vetted, and the old tech had taken an impossibly long time to verify each contact she had entered.

She had a hunch she would have to get used to weird requirements and impossibly long wait times. She had thought Public Health was paranoid—and they were—but they were paranoid about what might happen to the city, the county, or the state should something evil (the word used by the oldsters) get loose.

Weather seemed to be paranoid about everything.

She looked at her watch—which was missing, of course, because she wasn’t allowed to wear it here. The watch kept all but the most personal data for her; she had gotten the required implant with all of her identification embedded as well as the emergency contact information, but she had so hated the experience that she didn’t want to have any more implants. Hence the watch. The missing watch.

She supposed she could ask the room for the time or pull out her phone and check, but she didn’t want to appear nervous. Although there was a chance she was in the wrong location.

At that moment the door opened, and a harried elderly woman entered. The woman had had no augmentations. Her face was leathery—the kind of Vegas leathery that came from spending too much time in the sun without the proper amount of protection. Her white hair was thin and revealed age spots on the top of her scalp.

She wore a loose blue canvas dress and carried a sweater over her arm. To Amala’s dismay, the woman did not look like she had been in the heat at all.

“Oh,” the woman said, her voice going down with disappointment. “A newbie. Amala, right?”

“Yes,” Amala said.

“There will be two of you. Newbies, that is. Not Amalas. Although we did have two Luises once. That was annoying.” The woman rolled her eyes, then glared at Amala. “Try not to slow down the meeting with too many process questions. We have a lot to cover.”

Amala felt her tension increase. At Public Health, the first hour of the first meeting of the month was given over to explaining procedure to the newbies. It was a courtesy that saved time, or so she had been told.

She wondered how on earth she would understand what to do in this commission if no one explained the standard stuff.

But the woman no longer met her gaze. She had made her way to the back of the room and set her sweater on one of the comfy chairs. Then she removed one of the matching chairs from the head of the table and replaced it with the chair she had claimed. She sat down heavily, reached into a canvas bag that had so matched her outfit that Amala hadn’t noticed it before, and pulled out an old-fashioned tablet.

She placed it on the table with such force that the table protested. Immediately a group of warnings rose: No Personal Items Allowed! Power Down Devices! Do Not Place Beverages on the Table! . . . and Amala’s immediate favorite: This Is a Working Table, Not a Relaxing Table.

Duly noted. Even the table was cranky in this room. She tried not to smile.

“Ignore those,” the woman said, waving her hand at them. “They will disappear shortly. It’s a glitch in the system that no one seems to want to fix.”

She tucked a wisp of white hair behind one surprisingly pink ear and said, “Oh, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out, I’m Mirabelle. I am the lucky person who is the chair of this commission for two more years and counting.”

“Nice to meet you,” Amala said. She was too far away to offer a hand to shake, and besides, Mirabelle looked like she was of the generation that looked at any personal contact with great suspicion.

“Sit, sit,” Mirabelle said. “We will be starting in five minutes.”

Amala glanced at the empty chairs in surprise. It had always taken Public Health a good fifteen minutes to settle in before anyone officially started the meeting.

“I’m not kidding,” Mirabelle said. “Pick your chair. This is probably your last chance.”

Amala normally would have sat near the back, but that was where Mirabelle was sitting, and Amala just didn’t want to be close. She didn’t want to be noticed either, and she wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish both in this room. Finally, she picked the comfy chair in the right corner closest to the door. She had her back to one of the counters, but that didn’t bother her as much as having her back to the door would have.

She sat down gingerly, feeling a familiar buzz against her legs, as the chair commanded her to settle in. It couldn’t perform its magic if she didn’t sit properly. Some older chairs actually announced that.

She scooted the chair closer to the table so that there would be enough room for people to pass behind her, then eased toward the back of the chair. At that moment, the buzzing stopped, and the chair molded itself to her thighs and buttocks. If she got uncomfortable, all she had to do was shift and the chair would readjust.

At least it was a comfort chair in good working order. In the past, she had sat in some of these old models that had lost a good half of their functionality, which made them even more uncomfortable than so-called regular chairs.

“Phone on the table,” Mirabelle said. She wasn’t even looking up. She was scrolling through that ancient tablet. “In theory, the table will synch up and you can get all the minutes. In practice, doublecheck about fifteen minutes in. Sometimes this old tech does what it wants, and that isn’t always what we want.”

Amala swallowed hard. She hated first days of anything. The first day at Public Health had been particularly scary. Her parents and siblings had always complained about their civic duty months, and she had worried about hers.

There, at Public Health, the chair had explained that they would be making decisions that impacted the lives of millions of people, so each commissioner had to take their duties seriously. Amala had taken hers seriously, even though she hadn’t liked it. And because of the nature of that commission, she couldn’t even bitch about her service.

Public Health had the most stringent nondisclosure agreements of all of the commissions. Weather’s was surprisingly light. It had the usual penalties for revealing what occurred at meetings without the chair’s permission, but lacked the higher-level penalties of Public Health. There, if she had violated, she would have received an automatic five years in jail.

Here, if she violated, she would be subject to fines—albeit massive ones.

Fines were more than good enough to dissuade her. She didn’t have a lot of money. She had stumbled into a low-paying job she loved at one of the performance studios. She was a junior choreographer and had already worked on a dozen different shows in casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. The job was flexible, and her hours were often on nights and weekends, especially when a show was in rehearsals.

That was why she felt she could do three months civic duty service, so she could graduate from civic duty at fifty instead of at seventy, like everyone else. She had been the one to sign up for July (stupidly). She had also chosen December, since the city mostly closed down before Christmas. The third month was to be determined, depending on when the commission needed an experienced member . . . which she was not yet.

She was beginning to wonder if this was a mistake. Maybe she should have stayed with Public Health. The meetings there were easy and understandable, even if they were often grim.

Here . . .

The door opened and four more people spilled in. Two were men, one with a cowboy hat that he kept on as he walked toward Mirabelle in the back. A faint odor of horses rose off of him as he passed behind Amala.

The other man took a seat across from her. He was too thin and balding, his shirt baggy and a bit frayed.

Amala knew that some people sat on several commissions simply for the rather meager income, because they couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.

She hoped he was not one of them.

The other two seemed joined at the hip. They looked too young to be on this commission, but she had learned that appearances, particularly youthful ones, meant nothing in this town. She couldn’t determine gender, either, which took away an easy way to identify them.

They walked together to the back of the room too, and sat—almost in unison—kitty-corner across from Amala.

That was six. There should be five more. As the manual said, an uneven number on the commission guaranteed there would be no tie votes. Everyone knew it didn’t really happen that way, but it was a good theory.

No one looked at Amala. No one greeted her. No one said anything about her being new.

It was so different from Public Health that she had no idea how to behave. She had been warned, back when she had civic duty training straight out of college, that on some commissions, the permanent members often saw the citizen commissions as interlopers.

She hadn’t encountered that at Public Health, but maybe it was the case here.

All she knew was that the Weather Commission, unlike Public Health, only had three permanent members. Mirabelle was one because she was the chair. Amala hoped the others would be introduced when the meeting started.

The permanent members were often the interface between the commission and whatever agency it oversaw. The commission functioned like a governing board. Some commissions even had a few non-voting members, people from the agency who sat in on each meeting. The agency people sometimes acted as advisors, and sometimes as conduits between the agency and the commission on a daily basis, instead of the biweekly basis mandated by law.

At Public Health, the agency people often explained the science, and were frequently the ones who had the scariest and/or grossest things to say. The agency people were useful, though. They helped prevent someone with an ancient biology degree from commandeering the meeting and pretending that they were the expert.

Amala didn’t see any agency people yet, nor did she see a place for them to sit. There were just eleven chairs around this table, which meant that there was no room for any kind of monitors.

She fidgeted and the chair froze, its soft curves suddenly hard. It was probably waiting to see if she was going to permanently switch position.

She had forgotten just how annoying these chairs could be.

The door opened again, and a heavyset man staggered in. He carried a suitcoat over his arm and his entire shirt was sweat-stained. He tossed his coat on one of the chairs—mercifully far from Amala—and then said, “Oh, good. We’re not all here yet. I’m going to change my shirt,” and walked back out the door.

At least she wasn’t the only one who had suffered in the morning’s heat.

Mirabelle’s mouth thinned. She looked annoyed. The man in the cowboy hat rolled his eyes, but no one else said anything.

The door didn’t have a chance to close before an older man walked in. His back was bent and his gait was slow. He appeared to be older than Mirabelle. He nodded at everyone and headed to Mirabelle’s side.

If Amala had to guess, and right now that was all she could do, she would have guessed that he was another of the permanent members.

Two women came in, both laughing, although the laughter stopped as they stepped inside. Unlike the earlier couple, these two did not sit next to each other. They both wore black dresses and heels, so they must have come from somewhere nearby.

No one except attorneys and government officials wore black downtown in the summer.

Finally, one more man entered. He was tall, with muscular arms peeking out of a tight T-shirt that covered very broad shoulders. His black hair was mussed, his jeans professionally pressed, and his red-and-black shoes so expensive that Amala could have lived off of the amount he spent on them for two years straight.

He scanned the room as if he expected to meet someone. As she watched him, she had a nagging sense she knew who he was.

Working on the Las Vegas Strip had attuned her to that feeling. Celebrities often looked different in person, but something about them would strike a chord. She never wanted to fangirl at any of them, but she always liked knowing who she was dealing with.

That was one of the things that irritated her about Public Health and now here: she never got names ahead of time. She had no idea who she was working with until she got there.

It would be different here. The manual said that people who were on the Weather Commission could only use their first names in the meeting.

Which suddenly made her wonder how they had handled the two-Luis situation.

The familiar guy hovered near the door. “Is this the Weather Commission?” he asked in a slightly strangled tone.

The strangle wasn’t enough to disguise his voice. Amala had heard it a million times in videos, movies, shows, and narrations all over the web. This man was Ezra Oliver, who had moved to Las Vegas two years before when he’d started a residency on the Strip.

She had heard that celebrities had to perform civic duty as well, but she had never seen any on Public Health. The fact that they had had to perform civic duty—all over the country, not just in the Vegas Valley—was why so few of them had permanent addresses anymore. There was a new bill in Congress to get rid of that loophole, and it looked like it was going to go through, since members of Congress had to perform civic duty if they ever retired from their work in government.

Some celebrities were trying to find a new loophole. Those who already had permanent addresses usually had them in a community that allowed civic duty to be transferred to another person, which let the celebrity pay an exorbitant amount of money for someone to take their place. Most of those places, though, were not anywhere that a celebrity wanted to live. Miami had the best benefits, but most of the city was underwater, and it smelled awful, as she had learned when she’d gone on her one and only dance tour.

The Vegas Valley followed the same rules as New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. If a celebrity lived in the valley, they had to perform their civic duty—and they couldn’t get out of it.

Mirabelle hadn’t even looked up when Ezra spoke. She continued tapping on her ancient tablet.

“Yes,” she said in an impatient voice. “This is the Weather Commission. You must be Ez.”

Seriously? Amala almost said. Ez? Because everyone had the option of making up a first name for this commission if they filed it with the Civic Duty Authority a month in advance. Maybe he had missed that detail, or his people had somehow screwed up.

“Yes, I’m Ez.” He looked trapped. Everyone else was watching him, everyone except Amala, because she didn’t want him to see the recognition on her face.

“That makes you the other newbie.” Mirabelle leaned back in her chair and looked at him. Her eyebrows went up for a moment, but that was the only thing that showed she had recognized him.

He waited, maybe expecting her to say something about his fame.

Instead, she launched into the same annoyed speech she had given Amala, and ended with, “I’d prefer it if newbies don’t ask a lot of questions. You’ll pick it up as we go.”

Ez nodded and contemplated the chairs just like Amala had done. He could remove the sodden suitcoat from the only remaining comfy chair or he could take the straight-backed matching chair beside her.

He clearly opted for the path of least resistance, and sat down.

“I’m the other newbie,” Amala whispered. “I’m Amala.”

“Ez,” he whispered back as if he hadn’t given his name earlier. “What have I miss—”

“Let’s not have crosstalk,” Mirabelle said. “Crosstalk leads to alliances and alliances make our jobs ever so much more difficult.”

Amala’s cheeks heated. Ez nodded and set his phone on the table, as instructed.

The group sat in silence while they waited for the heavyset man to return. He did a moment later, wearing a bright pink shirt that was a little too loose. It tied at the wrists and had strings down the front.

“You are officially late, Luis,” Mirabelle said.

“And you are a pain in my rear, Mirabelle,” the heavyset man—apparently one of the two Luises—said. “I had to go down to the first floor to grab my bag, not that it helped much. This was the only extra shirt I had left.”

“Let me guess,” the scrawny man in the frayed shirt said. “From the Pirates of Penzance Cabaret?”

“You know better, Wally,” Mirabelle said. “No personal details. Not in the meetings.”

The scrawny man—Wally—smiled at Luis in a way that people who shared a secret did. Luis did not seem to notice. He wandered around the table and grabbed his suitcoat, looking at it as if it offended him.

Then he tossed it behind him, as if it were a piece of garbage.

“Well, then, I guess we start talking about the heat,” he said as he sat down. The chair he had commandeered—a comfy chair—groaned as if it didn’t want to do its job. “Oh, great. You guys left me the broken chair.”

“You were late,” said one of the people that Amala had dubbed “The Twins” in her head.

“I was not late,” Luis said, then pointed at Ez. “That guy came in after me.”

“I had trouble finding the room,” Ez said, his voice still strangled.

Amala wanted to tell him to talk normally. She wanted to remind him that they had a month of meetings and he wouldn’t be able to maintain that weird voice the whole time. But she didn’t say anything. She was painfully aware that Mirabelle had twice expressed irritation at having newbies, and so Amala didn’t want to call more attention to herself.

“Finding your way around here is not that hard,” said the older man, half under his breath.

“Conrad,” Mirabelle said, “don’t antagonize.”

“Too late,” one of the women in the suits said cheerfully.

Amala folded her hands on her lap and wished she could disappear.

“I’m going to gavel this meeting to order,” Mirabelle said, “and as such—”

“You don’t have a real gavel,” the older man, Conrad, said.

“You say that every time, Conrad,” said the man in the cowboy hat with real annoyance.

“Because it bothers me,” Conrad said.

“Then buy her a gavel or shut up,” Cowboy Hat said.

“Crosstalk,” Mirabelle said firmly. “Stop now.”

Both men looked at her. Amala saw the kind of little boys they had once been, their jaws set in a make-me stance. The fact they weren’t little boys was evident in the fact that they didn’t say anything, apparently relying on looking stubborn and somewhat annoyed.

“I will explain a few things for the newbies and as a reminder.” Mirabelle stressed the word reminder, as if just having to use it bothered her.

Cowboy Hat rolled his eyes. Luis shook his head slightly, and Wally looked down at his hands. Ez sat very still beside Amala. It was amazing how a man that well known could actually disappear. If he hadn’t been sitting beside her, she wouldn’t have noticed him at all.

“We are a 5724-C3 Commission,” Mirabelle said, enunciating the numbers slowly.

Amala knew vaguely what the numbers meant. The numbers were the section of federal law that established various kinds of commission. There were federal regulations on how each commission was conducted, the minimum it would pay its commissioners, and how it conducted some of its business.

“As such,” Mirabelle said, “we do not have to meet for a required number of hours every month.”

“We kno-o-w,” one of the twins said just loud enough to be heard.

Mirabelle glared at the twin. “We have a job to finish each month. Once that job is finished, we are excused, which means—”

“We can have the whole month off if we’re efficient,” Wally said.

“Don’t interrupt me, Wally,” Mirabelle said.

“Sorry, Your Highness,” Wally said. “It’s just that we do know this crap, as Khai said.”

“All except the newbies,” Mirabelle said tightly. “As you know from past experience, there’s no guarantee they examined the manual and the pre-meeting materials.”

“I did,” Amala said.

“Me, too,” Ez said.

Mirabelle gave them both a withering look. It took all of Amala’s strength not to cringe. She had worked with some of the most difficult personalities in entertainment on the Strip. She couldn’t let some woman on a local commission intimidate her into nothingness.

“Considering how many others over the years I’ve been on this commission had claimed that they too had examined all the assigned materials when they had not,” Mirabelle said, looking more irritated as the conversation went on, “forgive me if I give your word the same respect I would give a bucket of warm piss.”

“Mirabelle,” said the other black-suited woman. “You promised. Respect, remember?”

“I conduct this commission my way, Luna,” Mirabelle said. “You had your style when you were chair, I have mine.”

“Got that,” Luna said drily, and leaned back. She rested her heavily manicured right hand on the table, as if the movement would keep her calm.

“Because we have a task to finish,” Mirabelle said, making eye contact with the people on the other side of the table from Amala, “the more time we waste in idle talk, back talk, or crosstalk, the less likely we are to finish quickly.”

Amala nodded. That made sense to her. Ez hadn’t moved at all.

“The problem, my dear newbies, are the months in which there are a lot of distractions from the commissioners and . . . or . . . a lot of materials that will come from our regional, national, and international partners. I don’t know if you know, but we have to work together to approve major storms and out-of-district rains that could result in flooding for areas without a weather dome.”

Amala had seen mentions like that in the manual, but little of it was explained. She also knew that there had been some controversy a few years back when a ghost town north of Las Vegas was nearly wiped away by what was called once-in-a-century rainfall.

The blame for that fell squarely on the Weather Commissions in the region, and on the Vegas Valley Weather Commission in particular. They had had to change their internal structure and get rid of several long-standing commissioners.

Amala hadn’t heard any details other than those, but now she was curious. She wondered if she could look it all up when she got home.

“July is a particularly difficult month,” Mirabelle said, “and not the best time for newbies. We have a lot to do.”

“We always have a lot to do,” Conrad muttered.

“Conrad, seriously,” Mirabelle said. “I warned you last session that this kind of behavior might lead to a forced retirement.”

“And I warned you that your bullying was going to get us all in trouble,” he said.

“Conrad,” said Cowboy Hat, “with all due respect, shut the fuck up.”

Conrad’s mouth twisted. He shook his head and shrugged, then leaned back in his chair.

Mirabelle rolled her eyes, letting her face express her irritation at that interruption. Then she looked directly at Amala and Ez and said, “Because your predecessors, including a few at this table I might add, refused to follow the pre-meeting instructions, I am making this request to you. Let the experienced members handle the bulk of the work on this commission. If you have questions, save them for the break or ask me privately, using your assigned phone. That way there will be a record.”

Luna’s long nails tapped on the table. The sound provoked a flare of the This Is a Working Table, Not a Relaxing Table warning, which made everyone look at Luna.

“Tell them what happened last July,” Luna said.

Mirabelle’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not relevant.”

“Oh, it is,” Luna said. “I hit my term limit that June. You know that all chairs of all commissions are term-limited, right?”

Now Amala was getting irritated. Not only had she read the manual and the pre-meeting information, but she had served for years on another commission. Of course she knew that chairs were term limited. Of course she did.

“The practical result of that,” Luna said, “was that last July was Mirabelle’s first as chair.”

A couple of people looked down. Conrad had a slight malicious smile on his face. Cowboy Hat had closed his eyes and was shaking his head.

“She decided that we needed to work as fast as possible. We had five newbies on the commission, the most allowed by law.” Luna glanced at Mirabelle—and the look seemed vicious.

Mirabelle kept her hands on the tablet. “We don’t need to—”

“Mirabelle got them to agree with her that July—this July, by the way—would be an average month,” Luna said. “Of course, Mirabelle hadn’t thought it through. I did try to explain it. She wouldn’t let me talk.”

“Oh, god,” said the other twin, who, as far as Amala was concerned, was nameless. “This again.”

“It’s important,” Luna said. “These newbies need to understand—”

“Here’s the thing,” the nameless twin said. “If you read the regulations, an average month is based on an average of the past fifty years, not on an average by all existing data. There’s some word missing or something in the regional law, which is being litigated, by the way, and we’re not going to get into it.”

The nameless twin’s tone had an edge to it, one that implied Right? We’re not going to talk more. Right?

No one responded. Amala sat very still. She almost didn’t see Ez beside her, which meant that he was even more still than she was.

“The last fifty years,” the nameless twin continued, “includes those killing heat domes of the twenties and early thirties, the ones that happened during the gridlock, before the commissions were even developed. So no one did anything, and the climate crisis—”

“Okay,” Khai, the other twin, said. “I suspect they get it.”

Amala kinda did and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

“Well, just to be clear,” Luna said, “it means that the entire Vegas Valley is going to live with Mirabelle’s mistake for the next thirty days.”

“You could have explained things to me last year,” Mirabelle muttered.

“I tried,” Luna said. “You refused to listen.”

“Can we not relitigate this entire mess?” the other woman in black said. “All I want to do is work on next July and then get the hell out of here.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment. It seemed like no one knew how to start the conversation again or what to do with the meeting.

So Amala did what she always did in these situations. She took control and she placated.

“Um, speaking for myself,” she said, “I promise to listen and ask questions only at the designated time. You all are the experts, and I’m new to the commission, so I will keep quiet, learn, and contribute only when asked.”

“Me, too,” Ez said so hastily he forgot to modulate his voice.

Khai and the other woman in black looked at him sharply. His cheeks grew ever-so-slightly redder. He realized he had screwed up and they’d probably recognized him.

“Good,” Mirabelle said. “Fine. Glad you understand.”

She tapped the tablet again and sighed. Everyone at the table seemed to stiffen, as if expecting something bad.

“All right,” she said. “We have a lot on our plates, as those of you who were with us in June recall. The International Weather Commission mandated that we will start into an El Niño pattern in March and it will continue through February of the following year. Yes, for those of you who haven’t been here since last July, the Southwest Region petitioned for a delay of the El Niño pattern, and we lost. So we have to follow the international mandate and stay within its regulations. Does everyone follow?”

No, Amala wanted to say, finally understanding why Mirabelle did not want any questions. Amala had heard of weather patterns, and the manual had said that there were International Climate Summits that determined global patterns, designed to keep the planet healthy.

The manual had told her that in cheery tones, implying that if she liked her work on the local level, she could apply to rise in the ranks, working on the regional level, then on the national level, and, if she was lucky, the international.

“Good,” Mirabelle said when no one answered. “In that case . . .”

And she launched into so much jargon that Amala instantly felt lost. This had happened to her in Public Health as well, but she had been younger, more willing to assume the problem was hers and not the situation she was in.

The difference between then and now was pretty simple: she knew how to solve the problem now, and it wouldn’t be using Mirabelle’s method.

Amala began to make notes in her phone, vowing to bring her ancient assigned tablet next time. She would look up each word she didn’t know, have some online expert explain the weather phenomenon to her, and maybe take the approved classes listed in the manual so that she could follow along.

Because right now, the meeting had become—for her—mostly empty words combined with concepts she did not understand, and a call for informed decision-making, which she clearly was not ready for.

She settled into her chair, glad she had chosen a comfy one, because she suspected that this meeting would consume its mandated minimums before anyone remembered that there were also required breaks.

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