The Ten Seconds Before the Fireworks Went Dark

He turned. Mia stood at the edge of the crowd, her hair blown sideways, her face wet with tears. Grace was trying to push through the panicking families toward her, but the moving bodies kept splitting them apart. At Mia’s feet was a crushed paper plate still smeared with barbecue sauce, a tiny useless piece of normal life in the middle of the wreckage. A fireball exploded somewhere farther west. It lit half the sky and turned the waterfront into a silhouette of running people, overturned coolers, and dead police lights. Then Elias understood it all at once. The blackout was not the disaster. It was the opening. Someone had turned Independence Day fireworks, street closures, wireless traffic, and packed family crowds into the frame of a trap.