Chapter 19 — The Spark of Agency
The storm had quieted to a restless murmur when Amara noticed the misalignment that changed everything. Her mother’s journal lay open beside the live feed: hand-drawn pressure curves from twenty years ago echoing the jagged telemetry on Rhea’s screens. The old storm and the new manipulation shared a pattern—an interference rhythm that the towers amplified but did not fully control.
Her breath steadied. She overlaid the journal’s barometric notes against real-time vectors and saw a path through the chaos—a precise sequence of power cuts that could starve the towers without collapsing the grid.
She called Kelechi first. “I need linemen—people who can work a grid blind.”
“I can get three,” he said. “Maybe four. They trust me. They trust you more.”
“Tell them this is local, not political,” she said. “Tell them we’re saving the hospital, the pumps, the mast. Everything else goes down in minutes-long pulses.”
She called Rhea. “I have a stagger plan. I need you on radios and emergency channels.”
Rhea’s voice returned with a crackle of relief. “I knew you’d find a way through. I’m ready.”
Amara drew the last line on her brownout map. The pages trembled slightly under her fingers, not from fear now but from the voltage of choice.
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