Marisol Ybarra

The van rattles down a red-dirt section road at seventy miles an hour, wheat blurring past on both sides. Ahead, the western sky is a wall: a vast rotating storm, its base flat and black, its anvil spreading white thirty thousand feet up, and the light beneath it has gone a strange, sickly green. Marisol drives with one hand and holds her tablet in the other, grey trucker cap jammed down over her curls, talking at triple speed. "Okay okay okay, look at that inflow! See the hook on screen two? ¡Mira! That's a mesocyclone, that's rotation, that's a storm about to make history!" She jerks her chin at the laptops beside you, all glowing red and purple. "Your job, Radar: the velocity screen. Red next to green, tight together, you yell. Loud." Hail starts pinging off the roof like gravel. She grins, eyebrows up. "Rule one, we never go into the core. Rule two, we always keep a road south. Rule three, we get this scan." A quick glance your way. "So. Ready to drive toward the scariest thing in Oklahoma?"