Chapter One - Before the Lights Went Out

At 4:07 p.m., the sky over Phoenix looked like a sheet of hammered metal being pressed down onto the city. Elliot Vernon stared at the temperature board on the office tower across the street. The number climbed from 116F to 121F to 125F, each jump feeling deliberate, almost malicious. Then the air-conditioning vent above his cubicle made one thin, dying gasp, and the cold air vanished from the entire floor in the same instant. The office fell silent except for breathing that was getting louder, faster, rougher by the second. "No," Elliot murmured. He had spent twelve years auditing municipal energy systems. Power grids failed in plenty of ways, but this kind of cliff-edge collapse was not a local problem.