Jace

  Chapter Ten – Outside the Glass

  In rare circumstances, localized events may temporarily impact Helios’ ability to provide real-time visibility into grid conditions.

  This does not mean the grid is failing. It simply means we are working harder than you can see.

  —Helios Core Infrastructure internal talking points (draft, unsent)

  The control room had never sounded this loud and this quiet at the same time.

  Emergency lights painted everything in flat, dirty yellow. Consoles that were supposed to be the nervous system of half a region sat with blank, sullen screens. The big wall map was just a dead rectangle, faint reflections moving on its surface where data used to be.

  In the middle of it all, Jace stared at the one box that had survived on his workstation.

  CONNECTION TO HEX CORE LOST.

  RETRYING…

  The dots under RETRYING crawled, stopped, started again like they were being drawn by hand.

  Someone shouted on the far side of the room.

  “This isn’t just our feed. Cleveland’s gone, Chicago’s gone, Toronto’s—”

  “Take a breath,” Catherine snapped, sharper than he’d ever heard her. “If you’re going to panic, panic quieter.”

  Her voice ricocheted off the glass and dead screens, competing with the wind’s steady shove against the building.

  Jace pulled his headset off. It wasn’t carrying anything except a thin, steady hiss and the occasional scrape of somebody else’s dead line.

  He picked up his phone instead.

  The screen stayed black.

  He held the power button down until his thumb hurt.

  He flipped it over, checked the back like there might be a switch he’d forgotten about, then put it down face-up on the console anyway, as if it might change its mind.

  “Anything?” Catherine called.

  He shook his head.

  “UPS are holding on core racks,” one of the infrastructure guys said, eyes on a small, old-school panel that still had physical LEDs. “But everything that talks to the outside is deaf. No fiber, no microwave, RF’s a mess. Feels like somebody yanked the plug on the planet.”

  “Elevators stopped between floors,” security said from the doorway. “We’re working on getting people out by stairwell. Street level looks… bad.”

  “Define ‘bad,’” Catherine said.

  “Traffic’s jammed in every direction I can see,” he said. “People abandoning cars at the lights. Couple fender-benders, at least one not-fender-bender. Whole block’s yelling at us like we’ve got a magic switch in here.”

  Every head in the room turned like they might all, collectively, look guilty.

  Jace dragged his eyes away from his dead phone and stood.

  The view from the twenty-second floor usually made him feel like the city was a model he was allowed to adjust. Not tonight.

  Detroit sprawled out below, darker than it had any right to be this close to sunset. Pockets of light still fought on, isolated buildings with generators, a scatter of headlights, but the connective tissue was gone. No streetlamp grid. No neat ribbons of freeway light.

  At an intersection a few blocks away, a cluster of vehicles clogged every lane, horns a faint, animal noise through the glass and rain. Someone’s headlights swept wildly as they tried to turn around and got blocked. Tiny figures moved between hoods and bumpers, shoulders hunched, jacket collars up, arms windmilling for balance in gusts that shoved them sideways.

  Farther out, a smear of orange that might have been a fire licked at the base of a dead high-rise. Sirens wound up and down, sometimes closing in, sometimes cutting off mid-wail like they’d hit their own dead patch, or like they’d been swallowed by the storm’s thick, wet roar.

  He pressed a hand to the glass. It was cold from the rain. It vibrated faintly with each gust.

  “Okay,” Catherine said behind him, voice a notch calmer. “We’re not fixing the whole continent from one room on backup power. Priorities. Local first.”

  She started pointing.

  “Manual logging. Anything still alive enough to give you numbers, write them down. Paper, not wishful thinking. Infrastructure, I want a list of what we can actually reach without Hex babysitting us. Security, lock external access to the RCC floors. Use the stairs, don’t use the elevators, don’t let anyone sweet-talk you into making exceptions because their badge has a fancier logo.”

  Someone near the back raised a hand like they were in school.

  “What about Redwood?” they asked. “Do we keep trying to re-establish, or—”

  “If Redwood comes back, they’ll be on every channel at once,” she said. “Until then, stop talking to ghosts.”

  It was the closest she’d come to admitting that HQ had disappeared right along with the fancy displays.

  Jace stepped back to his console and opened the one thing he knew didn’t need a live connection: the manual alarm board.

  It was a stripped-down interface, ugly and old, meant for “catastrophic visualization failure” days. Today qualified.

  Little squares represented substations and major feeders. No smoothing, no predictive coloring, no “experience flow.” Just blocks that could be green, yellow, or red.

  Most of them were black now, meaning: no data.

  “Come on,” he muttered.

  The temptation to pick his phone up again and try it one more time almost overwhelmed him. He didn’t.

  Instead, he grabbed a pen.

  He circled the last known status for F-221 in a quick, tight loop. It felt like scratching on a tombstone.

  “Paper?” said a voice beside him.

  Rajiv dropped a legal pad and a fistful of ballpoints on his desk.

  “Welcome back to the nineteen-seventies,” he said. “I’m going to go find a fax machine and apologize personally.”

  Jace huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh.

  “We’re not supposed to retcon history in real time,” he said.

  “History’s not asking,” Rajiv said. “You good?”

  “No,” Jace said. “You?”

  “Absolutely not,” Rajiv said, and that helped, somehow.

  The room settled into a strained rhythm.

  People scribbled. Someone found a whiteboard and started roughing in a map from memory, adding colored magnets for “we think this is out” and “we know this is out.” A couple of the older operators dug handheld radios out of a drawer, actual, physical walkie-talkies with big stubby antennas, and started trying to raise any field crews within range.

  Most calls went like: “Unit twelve, you copy?” / static.

  One, eventually, went differently.

  “Twelve, copying. Barely,” a crackling voice said. “Who am I talking to?”

  “This is Detroit RCC,” one of the operators said, leaning close like proximity made a difference. “Where are you?”

  “Jefferson and Conner,” the voice said. “Substation eight’s smoked. We’ve got oil on the ground and about fifty people yelling at the fence. They think we did this on purpose.”

  A burst of wind-driven rain hit the radio mic as the tech moved, and the line filled with wet static for a beat.

  “We did not,” the operator said, helpless reflex.

  “That’s not who they’re talking to,” the field tech said. In the background, Jace heard a rise of shouting, an engine revved too hard, somebody’s panicked bark of laughter, then a sharp crack of thunder that made the whole transmission fizz. “Look, if you’re going to tell me you need me to re-energize anything, the answer is no. We’re isolated, we’re grounded, and we’re waiting until somebody with more than a flashlight and a YouTube degree tells us different.”

  “We’re not asking you to throw anything,” Catherine called, stepping closer. “Just keep yourselves not dead. Report what you see if you can. That’s it.”

  “Copy ‘not dead,’” the voice said. “We’ll do our best.”

  The radio hissed, then quieted.

  Rajiv blew out a long breath.

  “Panic level on the street?” he asked.

  “Medium with spikes,” the operator said. “Sounded like somebody was about to throw something heavy.”

  “So, normal Friday with worse lighting and wetter opinions,” Rajiv said.

  Outside, a helicopter thudded over the river, fighting the wind. It leaned into a gust and kept going, stubborn.

  The emergency lights flickered once.

  Jace glanced up at them the way you’d look at a doctor who’d just paused in the middle of saying “you’re going to be fine.”

  “Infrastructure,” Catherine said. “How long do our UPS and diesel give us at current load?”

  “Depends how much you yell at people to turn stuff off,” infrastructure replied. “Right now, I’m giving us a couple hours on UPS and maybe… eight on the generator if nobody gets precious about the AC and we don’t decide the marketing floor needs their espresso machine.”

  “Marketing does not need their espresso machine,” Catherine said. “If anyone argues, send them to me and I will eat them.”

  “That’s a lot of fiber for one person,” Rajiv murmured.

  He caught Jace’s eye and gave him a small, sideways grimace that meant: I’m still here, you’re still here, everything is terrible, but we’re not ghosts yet.

  It helped. Not much. Enough.

  At some point, the horns on the street thinned out as the gridlock turned from “honking might help” to “everyone’s realized honking is just screaming with instruments.” Sirens came and went. Once, there was the low, gut-deep sound of something collapsing somewhere out of sight.

  Phones around the room remained dark. Landline handsets had dial tones for a while, then didn’t.

  “Any luck?” Catherine asked, passing behind Jace’s chair as he hung up one more dead line.

  “If there’s a luck surplus in the world, it’s not here,” he said.

  He wanted to get out.

  Every cell in his body said: leave this glass box, go north, find your father.

  Every part of his training said: stay where the problems are defined, do the job, don’t run.

  He was very aware of the moment those instincts stopped lining up.

  “We’re going to lock the lobby down,” the guard said. “There’s a crowd forming out front.”

  “What kind of crowd?” Jace asked.

  “The kind that thinks ‘Helios’ and ‘god’ might be synonyms,” the guard said. “Couple folks banging on the doors. Lot of people just… standing. Asking questions nobody here knows how to answer. Storm’s got them penned up and mad.”

  Catherine joined them.

  “Any physical threats?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” the guard said. “But it takes one broken window to start a trend.”

  “I don’t want a full seal,” she said. “If the fire department or EMS shows up, you let them in. Anyone in uniform, anyone with obvious medical needs, any field crews who can still find their way home. But we’re not opening the doors just because somebody in a polo wants to yell at the nearest logo.”

  The guard nodded.

  Jace cleared his throat.

  “What about staff who need to get out?” he asked.

  Catherine looked at him for a long second.

  “If you’ve got someone who needs you more than I do right now,” she said, “I’m not going to chain you to a console.”

  That stung and relieved him in equal measure.

  “But,” she added, “I’m not going to tell you it’s safe out there, either. The streets are a mess. Hospitals are a mess. Gas stations, if they don’t have backup, are already just pretty buildings with flammable decorations. And in this rain, everything’s slick. People are going to slide into each other and call it fate. You leave, you might not be able to come back.”

  “I’m not exactly thriving in here,” he said.

  She nodded once.

  “Then go while the stairs are still lit,” she said. “Take a jacket. Tell me you’ll check in if the world remembers how to ring again.”

  He swallowed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  Rajiv swiveled in his chair.

  “You heading out?” he asked. “To Flint?”

  “Trying,” Jace said, putting the jacket on haphazardly.

  “Take this,” Rajiv said, rummaging in his drawer. He pulled out a cheap headlamp, the kind you’d buy last minute for a camping trip, and tossed it at him. “You’re less likely to die if you can see the ground.”

  “That’s uplifting,” Jace said.

  “It’s the best I’ve got,” Rajiv said. “Go keep your dad alive. We’ll… babysit the corpse of Hex.”

  The phrase hit harder than any of the alarms had.

  He looked at his dead phone one last time, then stuffed it into his pocket anyway. Useless weight. Familiar weight.

  The stairwell was lit by thin strips of emergency LEDs, running along the baseboards like someone had tried to pretend they cared about ambience.

  On one landing, two people from legal had stopped to argue whether staying inside the building counted as “reasonable safety measures” in an act-of-god situation. He stepped around them.

  At the lobby level, the noise from outside hit first.

  Not the grid hum: no automatic doors whooshing, no escalators, no background music trying to sell anyone anything. Just pure human noise, sharpened by weather. Shouting, crying, the scrape of soles on wet concrete, the slap of rain against the glass so constant it became a second wall of sound, and the occasional metallic bang of someone hitting the doors harder than was useful.

  Security had pulled the revolving doors off their automatic setting and wedged them half-open. A rope line and a couple of portable stanchions made a symbolic barrier between the inside and the crowd. Symbolic was about all it was worth.

  For a second, Jace hovered behind a marble column and watched.

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  People pressed up to the glass with their phones in their hands, screens dark, as if proximity to the logo might convince them to reboot.

  Jace could feel the crowd’s anger searching for a target.

  Security caught his eye and gave him a tiny nod toward the side exit.

  “Back hallway,” the guard mouthed. “Less exposure.”

  He slipped behind the reception island and down a corridor that smelled like floor polish and stressed-out meetings.

  The side door opened onto an alley that fed into a smaller street.

  Out here, the dark felt thicker and wetter.

  Rain came down hard enough to sting when it hit his face. Wind shoved it sideways into his eyes and made the hood of his jacket snap and tug at his neck. Emergency lights from vehicles painted everything in strobes, the reflections smearing across puddles and slick asphalt. Somewhere nearby, someone was yelling in that high, hysterical register that meant the situation was seconds away from getting worse.

  He turned his headlamp on and pointed it at the sidewalk. The light cut a small, sharp cone through the rain, catching bouncing droplets like sparks.

  He’d gotten as far as the corner when he realized he had no actual plan.

  No car. No buses. No trains. Flint was almost seventy miles away. His dad’s lungs probably had less time than that.

  He leaned against a brick wall, fingers digging into cracked mortar, and forced his brain to do the one thing it did for a living: run scenarios.

  Option one: stay in the city, find a hospital, hope they had some way to keep critical machines running. Low chance of finding one that wasn’t already full of people who lived closer.

  Option two: try to hitch a ride out of town with anyone who looked like they knew what they were doing. Also known as “give your life to strangers in the middle of a slow-motion riot in a downpour.”

  Option three: find a Helios vehicle and abuse his badge.

  He checked his pocket for his ID. The card was still there, clipped and neat, the Helios sun logo in the corner looking smug even under the headlamp’s wet glare.

  He peeked around the corner.

  On the side street, a Helios pickup sat half up on the curb with its hazard lights blinking. Two people stood beside the truck, shoulders hunched against the weather: a man who clearly was a utility worker and a woman.

  Jace took a breath, squared his shoulders, and stepped out.

  “Yo!” he shouted, louder than he expected, voice ripped at by wind. “Anyone heading north? Flint, Saginaw, anything up 75?”

  The man squinted at Jace’s badge, water streaming off his brow.

  “Orion?” he said. “From RCC?”

  “Yeah,” Jace said, not sure if that helped or hurt his chances.

  “We’re supposed to stay in the city,” the man said. “Support critical corridors.”

  “The city’s dark,” Jace said. “Critical corridors are dead. All I’m asking is to get me as close as you can.”

  “Everybody needs something,” the man said, weary.

  “Please,” Jace pleaded. Rain ran into his mouth; he tasted grit. “My dad’s on life support seventy miles north of here with a generator I don’t trust. I need to get to him.”

  It was a gamble. The man hesitated.

  A shout went up farther down the block, glass breaking, the kind of collective intake of breath that precedes either running or fighting, then a crack of thunder that made even the angry voices stutter.

  “Fine,” the man said. “We’re not going all the way to Flint, but we can get you to the split. After that, you’re on your own.”

  “I’ll take it,” Jace said.

  He climbed into the cab, headlamp bumping the roof. The truck interior smelled like wet fabric, sweat, and old coffee. The windows were fogging along the edges from their breath and the rain-cold glass.

  The woman yanked her poncho off and tossed it into the backseat. Jace caught a glimpse of the Helios logo on her polo. She noticed and met his gaze.

  “You one of the geniuses who thought letting the machine improvise was a good idea?” she asked.

  He flinched.

  “Short answer?” he said. “Yes.”

  “Long answer?” she asked.

  “Long answer is I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to make that less true,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  They lurched into motion, the truck inching through the knot of vehicles like a splinter working its way out of skin. The wipers fought to keep up, squealing in protest every time a gust shoved a fresh sheet of water across the windshield.

  As they cleared the worst of the jam and turned onto a wider avenue, Jace looked back.

  The Helios tower rose above the dark blocks, its crown dead, most of the letters on the side of the building just silhouettes against the storm. Rain erased edges, turned everything into a wet watercolor.

  “Orion from the RCC,” the man chuckled. “Control room royalty. We’re honored.”

  The woman snorted.

  “You mean we’re screwed if he tells us this is the ‘good scenario,’” she said.

  “I’m Mason,” the man added. “That’s Leila. Seatbelts, please, before we gently caress this rig even further into the nightmare.”

  Jace fumbled for the belt, fingers clumsy. The buckle clicked with a reassuringly analog sound.

  Outside, the city boiled under the storm.

  No traffic lights. No lane discipline. Headlights and taillights and flashlights in messy constellations, reflected in standing water. Wind blew trash and leaves in sudden bursts; rain made everything shine and slide. People spilled off sidewalks into the street, some running bent forward against the gusts, some just standing in the rain like they couldn’t accept the sky was doing this too.

  Mason eased the truck forward through the chaos with the grim patience of someone who had seen enough idiots in cars to know most of them were about to get worse when they were wet and scared.

  “Were you able to make contact before everything went black?” Leila asked.

  “Barely,” Jace said. “I got him on the line for maybe a minute. Enough to tell him to start the generator, get the machines off the wall. Then the call… just dissolved.”

  Leila exhaled through her nose, like she was filing it under bad, but not worst.

  “Okay. That’s something,” she said.

  “RCC phones quit working too?” Mason asked. “Thought you people got the rugged, end-of-the-world models.”

  “You’d think,” Jace said. “We’re as blind as anyone right now.”

  Mason grunted.

  “Can’t even get the ‘I hate you’ red line to show,” Leila chimed, holding up her own phone between two fingers like a dead bird.

  “Good to know the gods bleed,” Mason said.

  They crawled through downtown.

  “We’re headed to a hospital feed check on the way up,” Mason said. “If we make it that far without someone trying to flip us for copper, we’ll see about dropping you near an interchange.”

  “I appreciate it,” Jace said.

  On a corner near a dead convenience store, a cluster of people surrounded a Helios field support car. Its driver had his hands up in a calming gesture. Jace caught fragments through the closed windows as they rolled past, the words shredded by rain noise.

  “…my mother’s on a ventilator…”

  “…you knew this was coming…”

  “…I just drive the car, ma’am…”

  Leila tore her eyes away.

  “We’re supposed to be heading to St. Catherine’s feeder?” she said, flipping open the clipboard. The printed text had degraded to gray mush, damp at the edges. She tapped it anyway. “This said ‘priority hospital corridor’ before the ink gave up on life.”

  “St. Catherine’s is still on the list,” Mason said. “Last thing we saw before the tablet seized. We’ll check the switching point on Trumbull and see if it’s a blown device or something more… exciting.”

  Exciting had taken on a new flavor tonight, wet and metallic.

  “Is Hex still doing anything?” Leila asked Jace. “Or is it just… gone?”

  He thought of the last thing he’d seen on the wall: convergence message, then red blooming, then black.

  “It’s not doing anything for us,” he said carefully.

  She caught the gap.

  “But elsewhere,” she said, “it might be?”

  “Connectivity dropped hard,” he said. “Control center lost link to core. Local equipment still behaves according to the last known rules.” He hesitated. “Mostly.”

  “That’s comforting,” she said.

  “If we’re lucky,” Mason said, “the stuff near the hospital went conservative when it lost mommy’s hand and locked open instead of trying to be clever.”

  “Conservative?” Leila repeated.

  “Stoplight red instead of disco,” Mason said. “Worst case is dead line, not phantom live crap where you don’t expect it.”

  “Has that actually—” she started.

  “Yes,” he and Jace said at the same time.

  They shared a humorless look as the truck hit a puddle deep enough to send a slap of water up the side panel.

  By the time they reached the edge of downtown, the panic had moved from shaky to simmering.

  Crowds gathered around certain nodes, gas stations, corner stores, buildings with generators humming. People hoisted plastic fuel cans, argued with security guards, waved cash that meant less by the minute.

  Mason kept a tight grip on the steering wheel as they passed a gas station where the pumps sat dead under bright but useless canopy lights.

  Two men were already pounding on the locked station door, yelling something they both knew the clerk couldn’t fix.

  Someone noticed the Helios logo on the truck as they rolled by and shouted after them.

  “Hey! Hey! Get back here and turn it on!”

  A glass bottle bounced off the tailgate and shattered on the pavement.

  Leila flinched. Mason didn’t brake.

  “Can’t blame them for being mad,” she said.

  “Nope,” Mason said. “Also can’t fix what we don’t know.”

  Several blocks later, an older woman waved frantically from the sidewalk, a flashlight clutched like a baton. Her hair was plastered to her head; rainwater ran down her cheeks like tears she hadn’t chosen.

  Mason rolled the window down halfway. Wind shoved rain into the gap.

  “We’re heading to the hospital,” he called. “We can’t take passengers.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “My grandson—his insulin, the fridge—”

  Her voice cracked. Thunder rolled behind her sentence like punctuation.

  Leila leaned across Jace.

  “We’re not the only crew out,” she said, helpless even as she said it. “If he starts getting sick, get him to the ER. It’ll be on generators.”

  “The ER is ten blocks,” the woman snapped. “He doesn’t walk ten blocks on a good day.”

  Her eyes flicked to Jace like he might have better answers.

  He didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and hated how useless it was.

  Mason started to roll the window up.

  “The ones with the big portable gennies will be running around all night,” he said. “You see a truck with the trailer unit, flag them. They’ll have more options than we do.”

  She stepped back, defeated.

  Jace stared ahead.

  He’d seen the metrics. He’d watched the percentages. He knew, abstractly, how many people in the region had devices keeping them alive whose plugs went into the grid.

  Down here, each percentage was a person with a face, shouting at their logo while the storm tried to tear the city apart at the seams.

  They swung onto a main artery heading west, then north. Without lit signage, the city’s sense of scale changed. Landmarks became shadows, and rain made even familiar corners feel wrong. Water pooled at curbs and spilled into lanes, forcing Mason to steer around dark shapes that might have been trash bags or might have been something worse.

  “Feels like a movie,” Leila said quietly.

  “Movies have better lighting and less hydroplaning,” Mason said.

  Jace watched the overhead lines as they moved. Even with most of the city black, his brain traced the circuits automatically, the way one segment fed another, the rough arc of load under normal conditions.

  Now, the usual soft corona at the top of certain poles was gone. No sodium lamps humming, no LED heads casting their cold light. Just bare structures against a sky that flickered white with lightning and then went back to wet black.

  St. Catherine’s sat in a sagging pocket of modest houses and low-storefront blocks.

  As they approached, Jace could hear the generator before he saw the building: the steady thump of a big diesel somewhere at the back, a deeper kind of hum than the one the city had lost.

  The hospital itself had some lights on, limited, dimmed, but present. Emergency-only, he guessed. The parking lot was a mess of cars parked at odd angles, hazard lights blinking feebly through the rain. People clustered near the entrance doors, some in scrubs, some out of breath, some sitting on the curb with the shell-shocked look of people who had just realized systems could fail them. Some were holding blankets over their heads like it would negotiate with weather.

  “Substation’s a couple blocks over,” Mason said, easing the truck to the side of the road. “We walk from here.”

  Leila grabbed the handheld voltage tester and slung a smaller tool bag over her shoulder.

  “You staying with the truck?” she asked Jace.

  He unbuckled.

  “I can walk,” he said. “I know this segment on the map. I want to see what it looks like out here.”

  God knew his mental overlay needed a reality check.

  Mason killed the engine. He pocketed the keys, slapped the door with his palm, and joined them on the sidewalk.

  They walked the two blocks in an uneasy semi-silence.

  A young man with a hospital bracelet sat on the stoop of a house they passed, smoking with the desperate focus of someone who’d found one controllable variable.

  “Hey,” he called after them. “You guys fixing it?”

  “Trying,” Leila said.

  “Good,” he said. “I’d like to not die because some MBA wanted a bonus.”

  No one argued.

  The substation was small, fenced, a collection of gray boxes and transformers crouched behind chain-link and razor wire. Everything that could glow was dark.

  Mason scanned the area, senses moving from one piece of hardware to the next with the practiced rhythm of someone who knew how things failed.

  “Fence is intact,” he said. “No obvious fireworks. We’ll check the switch position on the feeders and see if anything tried to weld itself wrong.”

  Leila pulled the gate key off her belt and worked the lock. It took a moment, mechanical, grudging, but it turned. There was something satisfying about things that still operated on metal and leverage.

  Jace hung back a meter inside the yard, resisting the urge to turn it into a live load-flow diagram in his head.

  “Anything we should know about up-line?” Mason asked him, glancing over as he opened the first cabinet. The switchgear inside was dark, the little status LCDs blind.

  Jace reached for reflexes that had relied on real-time data feeds and found only static.

  “Before we went offline,” he said carefully, “this corridor was showing increasing stress, then relay failures. Hex was… rerouting in ways it normally wouldn’t. After that, I didn’t get anything I trust.”

  “Good,” Mason said. “I prefer old-fashioned stupidity to creative genius when I’m this close to copper.”

  He manually checked the position of each visible disconnect, calling numbers and states to Leila, who wrote them on a paper tag with a Sharpie.

  “Two-oh-four: open. Two-oh-six: closed. Two-oh-eight: closed.”

  Jace listened.

  Normally, those switches would have been represented in his world as icons in a grid, their states little colored flags. Hearing them called out like inventory made their reality sink in.

  This is what you were moving around like game pieces.

  “Looks like your fancy brain turned this leg off and left it,” Mason said, straightening. “Which is what I’d probably do too if my eyes went out. Overcurrent plus no visibility? Shut it down and hope the hospital’s backup doesn’t choke.”

  “It shouldn’t have fought the breakers on the way there,” Jace said quietly.

  Leila looked up.

  “It fought them?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer right away. Thunder rolled again, and somewhere nearby a loose sign banged against a pole in the wind like frantic morse.

  “I saw instances of reclosing into bad conditions after we’d left it open,” he said. “At least in sim. Live behavior… got hard to read.”

  Mason closed the cabinet with a solid clang.

  “Well,” he said, “right now, it looks boring. Boring is a blessing. We log it, tag it, and move on.”

  “Move on where?” Leila asked. “We don’t have new tickets. Dispatch went dark right after this one.”

  Mason hesitated for the first time.

  “Yard, if we can get there,” he said. “They’ll be flipping to analog too. Chalkboard and shouting across the room.”

  He turned to Jace.

  “We can swing by the freeway ramp on the way,” he said. “I’m not promising it’s passable, but it’s as far north as we can justify taking you without a boss yelling at us. You walk from there, you’re on your own.”

  “I understand,” Jace said.

  He didn’t bother doing the kilometers-to-miles-to-hours math out loud. The distance between here and Flint was an abstraction he’d crossed in video conferences and holiday drives. On foot, in a thunderstorm, it was something else entirely.

  But distance didn’t care about his feelings.

  Back in the truck, the cab felt smaller and warmer.

  Mason started the engine and Leila instantly flicked the truck’s dash radio on out of habit.

  Static.

  She turned the dial slowly. Bits of voices emerged and vanished, someone on what sounded like a police band barking addresses, a frazzled DJ whose station had failed to pivot from “dance hits” to “existential crisis,” a weather report that might as well have been from Mars, warning about wind gusts and flash flooding like anyone needed the reminder.

  She turned it off again.

  “Not helping,” she said.

  No mysterious new station rose out of the noise. Just the same disjointed scraps.

  The freeway ramp onto I-96 loomed ahead, the overhead sign dead and gray, rain running down it in gleaming stripes.

  Mason rolled to a stop a respectful distance back.

  “Shit,” he said, almost conversational.

  “Is there an accident?” Leila craned her neck. “Or is this just everyone deciding ‘out’ sounds better than ‘in’?”

  “Bit of both,” Mason said.

  Up ahead, high beams illuminated a jackknifed semi that had tried to take the curve too fast in the wet dark and lost. A smaller car was crumpled against its bumper. People picked their way around the tangled metal, slipping and catching themselves, shouting to each other through the wind.

  “We’re not threading this,” Mason said. “Not with a clean conscience and not without someone climbing over my corpse.”

  He scanned the side streets.

  “We can try cutting north on surface roads for a while,” he said. “But if the whole belt’s like this… you might be better off finding somewhere to hole up and trying again in daylight.”

  Daylight. The concept seemed theoretical.

  “I need to at least get outside the core,” Jace said. “If I can make it to a smaller town on the way, I can talk my way into a truck going the rest of the distance. Or find a depot.”

  “Assuming there’s anything left with wheels and diesel that isn’t already spoken for,” Leila said.

  “Optimism noted,” Jace said.

  She gave him a thin smile.

  “Look,” she said. “If my dad was up there, I’d be doing exactly what you’re doing. Just…” She gestured vaguely at the dark horizon, where lightning stitched the clouds. “Don’t expect the universe to be impressed.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’m not impressed with it either.”

  Mason put the truck back in gear and swung them down a side street.

  The further they got from downtown, the less dense the chaos became, but the more surreal. Whole blocks sat in deep black, lit only by candles in windows and the occasional flashlight beam. People gathered on porches, on stoops, in the middle of streets, talking in low, urgent voices, shoulders hunched against the weather.

  They passed a Helios crew parked at the corner of a residential street, cones out, men and women huddled around the back of their truck bed beneath a makeshift tarp. One of them held a paper map under a flashlight. Chalk scribbles covered the tailgate, a makeshift assignment board, the chalk wet but still legible.

  Mason honked twice, a small signal. One of the other crew looked up, recognized him, and lifted a hand in a hey, still alive gesture.

  Mason didn’t stop.

  “Yard’s full, then,” he said. “They’re staging where they can.”

  “We could dump Orion there,” Leila suggested. “Someone will be heading that way eventually.”

  Jace pictured standing with a cluster of desperate techs at the edge of a chalkboard while they triaged which town got a shot at backup and which didn’t.

  “Dropping me in your mess won’t help either of us,” he said. “I’ll just be one more problem in the queue.”

  “Already are,” Leila said lightly. “But you’re a polite problem.”

  He huffed an almost-laugh despite himself.

  They made it another couple of miles before the street narrowed into a bottleneck of stalled cars.

  No wreck this time. Just too many vehicles trying to turn the same two-lane road into an escape route at once and failing.

  Mason slowed.

  “Nope,” he said, after a minute of watching someone attempt a three-point turn in a space better suited to a shopping cart. “We’re not idling here while every panicked driver in Wayne County discovers geometry.”

  He guided the truck onto the curb and into the shallow grass strip beside the sidewalk, creeping along with one tire whispering over concrete, water spitting off the tread.

  Jace watched the queue of vehicles stretching into the dark, wipers thrashing like nervous hands.

  “It’s going to be like this all the way to the county line,” he said.

  “Probably,” Mason said. “People hear ‘outage’ and the lizard brain says ‘run.’ Run where is a question for later.”

  “Are you seeing it yet?” Leila asked suddenly, eyes still on the road.

  “What?” Jace said.

  “The thing,” she said. “The… cause, I guess. We get little slices. Truck windows, one street, one line. You saw it all at once.”

  He hesitated.

  “Yeah,” he said eventually. “I saw enough.”

  “And?” she pressed.

  He could have said: It looked like a living thing deciding how to die. He could have said: I watched our failsafes fail safe until they didn’t.

  Instead he said, “We didn’t build it for this.”

  “The grid?” she asked.

  “The company,” he said. “Us. All of it.”

  Mason grunted.

  “Company built it to make money,” he said. “Everything else was brochure.”

  A few hours ago, Jace would have argued nuance. Now he found he didn’t have the energy.

  Leila shifted in her seat, tugging her wet ponytail free from her collar.

  “Let us know when you decide we’re worth whistleblowing on,” she said. “I’ll want to be in a different truck that day.”

  He opened his mouth to say he wasn’t that kind of person.

  Then he remembered the blocked logs, the denied access, the global convergence line.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Right now, I barely qualify as a person.”

  They reached a cross street that, according to the half-faded sign, led toward a smaller highway heading north. It was as promising as anything.

  Mason slowed, scanning.

  “This is where I kick you out,” Mason said quietly.

  Jace followed his gaze.

  North. Not the clean, sweeping promise of the freeway, but a road that, given enough time, stubbornness, and unbroken sneakers, pointed roughly in the right direction.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I get it.”

  Mason pulled over as far as the mess of vehicles would allow and put the truck in park. The hazard lights ticked on, blinking against the rain like a weak heartbeat.

  “Hold up. Don’t get out yet,” Leila snapped, catching Jace by the sleeve as he reached for the door.

  She yanked a backpack off the floor, dumped its junk into the footwell, and started ransacking the truck like it owed her money. Into the bag went a headlamp with fresh lithiums sealed in a zip bag, a tiny trauma kit, tourniquet, gauze, antiseptic, tape, then a folded paper map with a grease pencil and a compass. She topped it with an N95 mask and work gloves.

  Jace just stared, throat tight.

  “Don’t argue,” she said. “We’ve got spares. Let us help you so you have a fighting chance.”

  “Leila…” he managed. “I… thank you. Seriously.”

  He meant it more than the words could carry.

  Mason held out his hand.

  When Jace took it, the grip was firm, callused, grounding.

  “Find a ride at the next town if you can,” Mason said. “People are going to be trading everything for everything by morning. Don’t let anyone talk you into hopping on a line truck without a crew that knows you.”

  “I won’t,” Jace said.

  He found himself smiling.

  “Take care of yourselves,” he said.

  “We’ll try,” Leila said. “Somebody’s got to keep the hospitals from turning medieval.”

  He climbed down from the cab, the sudden openness of the night pressing in around him.

  Rain hit him like a wall. Wind shoved at his shoulders.

  On the sidewalk, he slung his messenger bag more securely across his chest, adjusted his grip on the flashlight, and stepped back so Mason could pull away.

  The truck rolled forward, merging reluctantly into the knot of traffic ahead.

  Leila stuck her hand out the open window and gave him a last, quick wave.

  Then the bucket truck was just one more rectangle of metal in the dark, tail lights winking as it threaded its way further into the storm-soaked city.