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“What?” Eliana turned toward him, a faint silhouette in the murky light. “That’s impossible. Aren’t the generators supposed to kick in? Or the atomic power plants—the city was supposed to set them up as backup, right? Remember? They got permission from the mainland.”
“It’s not impossible.” Diego pulled her closer. “It just happened.”
The murmuring from the crowd was louder, more panicked. People were starting to realize what Diego and Eliana just had—a blackout had happened. An old fragment of a nightmare from their youths. It was real.
“We have to get away from this crowd,” Eliana said.
That right there, that was why Diego loved Eliana so much. She wasn’t an idiot.
He gripped her hand tight, squeezing her fingers together. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife. He never brought his gun when he came to see Eliana, but the knife was better than nothing. He pulled her toward the edge of the crowd. “Get the fuck out of the way!” he shouted. Someone shouted back. The crowd jostled, surged, and a violent ripple cascaded down from the direction of the smokestack district.
Eliana screamed. Her hand slipped away.
For the span of a heartbeat Diego was paralyzed with fear. But you couldn’t let that happen in his line of work, and so he dove into the crowd in the direction where she’d been pulled. He caught the flash of her dress, orange in the firelight, and grabbed her upper arm.
“Got you,” he said, pressing his mouth against her ear. His heart was pounding. “You’re right, we’ve got to get out of here. Come on.”
They pushed on. The knife was enough to get people to move out of the way. Most of them were terrified, their panic poisoning the darkness. Another surge of the crowd. Eliana slipped, but she grabbed on to Diego and stopped herself just in time. Smart girl.
And then they were out.
Eliana pressed close to him, and her frantic breath warmed a spot on his neck. They slammed against a wall of cold hard brick. Bodies flowed past them, but they were, for the moment, in an untouchable bubble. Diego let out a long sigh of relief.
In his arms, Eliana shivered. It was a tiny movement, but it reminded him of their precarious position here in the dark.
A blackout meant no electricity.
No electricity meant no heat.
No heat meant the city would ice over in—Diego had no idea how long. This had never happened before, not in his lifetime.
Hours?
Minutes?
No. He forced himself to focus. He glanced at Eliana, and she was staring at the surging crowd, her body almost entirely subsumed by shadows, the only visible part of her the left side of her face. It looked carved out of molten stone in the orange firelight.
“This is bad,” Eliana said.
“No shit.” He pressed his back flat against the wall, squeezed Eliana’s hand. They needed to get inside, away from people. People turned to monsters in situations like this. Diego had seen it.
“Maria!” Eliana shouted suddenly, turning toward him. “We have to find Maria!”
Damn it. “Sorry, babe. That ain’t happening. We need to get inside.”
He pulled her again, skittering up against the wall. He could feel the start of a riot crackling around him, the air tightening like a wire.
“Something’s going to happen to her!” she shouted.
“Something’s going to happen to you,” Diego snarled. “Come the fuck on.”
Eliana seemed to shrink in on herself, and Diego felt a twist of guilt that he pushed aside. Time for that later.
The building’s door was only a few meters away. If it was locked, he could pick it. If it was barricaded—
He’d figure something out.
Somewhere to the left a fire flared.
A woman screamed.
Eliana muttered a string of frightened profanity.
And then the lights came back on.
They were at full power, daytime power, noon power. Diego’s eyes burned at the sudden brightness, little dots of darkness spotting his vision. Eliana threw her arm over her face. Diego stopped dragging her. The crowd had frozen in place, a garish cacophony of color.
A fire licked at one of the tenement buildings. Eliana dropped her arm away, and she stared at the fire like she’d never seen one before.
Diego’s adrenaline was still pumping through his body. He kept anticipating violence, but the tension of the riot was gone, and he shook his head, trying to clear out his brain. Eliana leaned against him and kissed his chest. She was shaking. Not from the cold. It hadn’t been long enough to get cold.
Distantly, an alarm rang out. Water poured down from the dome, falling across the crowd, across the burning tenement building. Diego looked up, squinting past the glare of the floodlights. A dark shape moved across the underside of the dome. A robot, a maintenance drone, tending to the fire.
“Everything’s back to normal,” Eliana said, although she didn’t sound like she believed it.
Diego certainly didn’t.
After all, he’d lived in Hope City for twenty-nine years—his entire life.
His entire life, and not once had the power ever gone out.
Not once.
CHAPTER TWO
ELIANA
Eliana woke up to Diego’s arm slung across her chest, their bodies tangled up in the bedsheets. She blinked up at the ceiling. Gray light filtered in through the window.
And then her alarm went off, screeching like a mechanical bird. Diego moaned and pulled the pillow over his head. When she reached over to turn it off, she knocked it to the floor instead. It let out a loud sprang and fell silent.
“What the hell, Eliana? Why’d you set the alarm?”
“Gotta go back into the office today.” She didn’t move to get out of bed, though, only snuggled closer to Diego. He was naked, his skin warm to the touch. Three days had passed since Last Night, and he hadn’t disappeared into the city for work once; Eliana thought this might have been the longest he’d gone, not leaving her. She liked it and didn’t like it at the same time. She liked waking up to find him sprawled under her blankets, but she didn’t like the break in her routine.
“Your office?” Diego rolled over onto his back. Eliana lay her head against his chest and listened to his heart beating. “Hell, that big PI office gives ’em a whole week after Last Night.”
“Yeah, but if you work for them, you get paid vacation. I don’t.”
“Nobody’s go
“They’re afraid the power’s go
Still, she also didn’t think the Antarctican Freedom Fighters would want to break down the system that let Hope City exist in the first place. They usually took their violence to the mainland, or went after big-time city politicians.
At least Maria’d turned up the next day, hungover but otherwise fine. “And someone might come in. Besides, I have filing to do.”
“Filing? Jesus, you really are a cop.”
“You want to come in with me?”
Diego laughed.
“It’s just me. It’s not like anybody knows who you are.”
“That so?” Diego dropped his head to the side to look at her, black hair falling across his eyes. In the dim early-morning light he looked like some classical statue, too handsome to be real. “The problem isn’t with your clients, Eliana. It’s with Mr. Cabrera.”