only ones who can fix it. So I’m gonna keep trying.”
Niko gives her a cryptic look before curling up on the couch with his head in Wes’s lap. August gives Myla a quick rundown of what she’s figured out so far.
“You’re missing something,” Myla points out. “Just being near the Q when the blackout happened isn’t enough for her to get stuck. There must have been thousands of people on trains and in stations during that surge, and none of them got stuck. There’s another variable you’re not accounting for.”
August leans against the fridge. “Yeah … shit, yeah, you’re right.”
“You haven’t talked to Jane? Told her what you learned?”
“She told me to leave her alone. But I.… I feel like if I could talk to her about it, she might remember the rest.”
Myla pats her on the shoulder and spins back to the board.
“So, basically, when you have an event like the blackout, and an outage is caused by a power surge—a lightning strike, in this case—there are actually two surges. The first one that overloads the line and makes the lights go out. And the second.” She points at August with the marker. “You know when you were a kid and the electricity would go out during a storm, and then when it comes back, there’s half a second when the lights come on too bright? That’s the second surge. So, if we were … somehow able to do this, we’d have two chances.”
August nods. They can work with that, she thinks.
“And how are we gonna access the substation?”
Myla frowns. “That, I don’t know. I can ask around and see if anyone who was in the engineering program with me has connections, but … I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” August says. She’s already thinking through contingency plans. Do they know anyone skilled in espionage? Or who’d be willing to sleep with a security guard for the cause?
“You have a bigger problem, though,” Myla says.
August snaps back into focus. “What?”
“If all this is right, and it’s an electrical event … when they cut the power in September, it’s not only that you won’t be able to see her. She might just … blink out.”
“What?” August says. “No, that can’t—the train broke down before, when she was on it. She was fine.”
“Yeah, the train broke down,” Myla says. “But there was still power in the line. And maybe it was okay before you, when she never stayed in one time or place for long enough to be there when they cut the power to the tracks for maintenance, but if we’re right about how strong your connection is, you’ve got her pinned, here and now. She won’t be able to avoid it.”
The reality of that spins out: Jane would have been fine if she wasn’t stuck here and now. The Q has probably lost power or had its power cut a hundred times before, but Jane always missed it, until August. Until August fell in love with her and got greedy with kisses and turned herself into a weight holding Jane in one spot.
And now, if she doesn’t pull this off, Jane might be gone forever. Not now. Not then. Nowhere.
Maybe Jane was right. This is her fault.
* * *
“August,” Myla yells through August’s bedroom door. “August!”
She buries her face in her pillow and groans. It’s seven in the morning, and she didn’t get home from work until four hours ago. Myla is really betting on not getting stabbed.
The door flies open, and there’s Myla, wild-eyed, a soldering gun in one hand and a string of lights in the other. “August, it’s a nerve.”
August squints through a wall of her hair. “What?”
“My sculpture,” she says. “The one I’ve been working on for, like, ever. I’ve—I’ve been looking at it all wrong. I thought I was supposed to be making something big, but it was right in front of me with all this Jane stuff—the branches, the lights, the moving parts—it’s a nerve. It’s what I do! Electricity of the heart! That’s what the point of view is!”
August rolls over to stare at the ceiling. “Damn. That’s … genius.”
“Right? I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before! I have to thank Jane the next time I see her, she—”
August’s face must fold into something tragic, because Myla stops.
“Oh, shit,” Myla says. “You still aren’t talking to her?”
August shakes her head. “Five days now.”
“I thought you were gonna go back after three?”
August rolls back over and curls around her pillow. “Yeah, that was before