The green line on the CRT monitor took a sudden dive, dropping from forty-eight megawatts straight down to zero.
Inside the back office of Starlight Mart #04, the old PosLink server chattered like a telegraph key. Strips of thermal receipt paper fed out of the side tray, piling into loose coils on the linoleum floor. Lin Mei adjusted the cracked bridge of her spectacles with a chalk-dusted thumb, leaning over the phosphor screen.
“District One feeder trunk just collapsed,” Lin Mei said, her voice dry and steady. “The District Four substation crew pulled the knife switches clean out of the wall. Current to the Uptown Spire is flatlined.”
Julian Vance leaned against the metal shelf holding twelve-volt truck batteries, his arms crossed over his faded blue clerk smock. Beside him, Elena Rostova was checking the seal on a roll of sterile gauze, while Marcus “Mac” Cole sat on an overturned milk crate, clicking his steel ticket-punch with a rhythmic double snap.
“What about their water mains?” Julian asked.
“Corvo’s team shut the forty-eight-inch gate valves at Line Zero five minutes ago,” Lin Mei answered. “The hydraulic pressure gauge in the Spire’s lobby dropped from ninety pounds per square inch to zero point four. Their gravity tanks on the eighty-fifth floor have maybe forty minutes of head pressure left. After that, nothing flows uphill.”
