lauraanne_gilman | back on the pony...

New York City was used to blackouts. People had their emergency plans in place, their flashlights and their walking shoes, their alternate routes home. It was just another pain in the ass in the day of a major city. No big deal.

But the darkness kept spreading, from the small island of Manhattan outward into the outer boroughs and the suburbs of New Jersey and Philadelphia, up through Connecticut all the way up to Boston, and down the coast toward Delaware, fingers reaching into D.C. Pockets of power clicked on via emergency generators, and those who had lived through the great outages of decades before sighed and reached for candles and flashlights before the sun disappeared entirely from the sky and true darkness fell.

But some residents were inconvenienced more than others.

*? ?*

A mass query rose from the city, blended with curses as Talent felt their normal sources of easy current disappear. The overriding question was a familiar one: ‘who did it this time?’ Not every blackout or brownout was caused by a Talent overreaching or drawing down too much current at once, but it happened often enough to be a valid question.

As usual, nobody owned up.