11:12 AM (Totality)
CLICK.
WHAM.
The sound of the contactor closing was a sharp, mechanical snap that echoed on the roof.
Then, the physics took over.
Current moves at the speed of light.
The 300 Amps stored in the lead-acid battery bank surged up the heavy copper cables. The electrons crowded into the tungsten filaments of the twenty halogen lamps.
The tungsten resisted. It heated up. It glowed.
And the roof of Tashi & Son exploded into fire.
It wasn't the polite, blue-white glow of the future. It was the dirty, furious, burning yellow-white of raw industrial power.
The Halogens screamed with light. They punched a hole in the darkness of Commercial Avenue so violent that people shielded their eyes.
A beam of searing brightness cut through the gloom, illuminating the dust particles in the air like a solid bar of gold. It flooded the street, casting long, stark shadows away from the shop.
The shop wasn't just lit. It was a lighthouse in purgatory.
But I wasn't done.
I hit Switch 2.
At the bottom of the hill, three kilometers away, a radio signal triggered a relay at the General Hospital.
The Hospital a place of death that had been dark and terrified a moment ago suddenly erupted in Blue Light.
The security floodlights we had installed on the roof turned on, powered by the brine-chilled batteries I had sacrificed the Thermo King to charge.
The sign MORTUARY lit up in neon blue.
The crowd gasped. It was a sound like wind rushing through dry grass. Haaaaah.
They spun around.
To their left, the Shop was burning with the fire of the living.
To their right, the Hospital was glowing with the cool peace of the ancestors.
While the Bookman sat in the dark of his mansion on the hill, while the Governor's residence was black, the poor of Commercial Avenue were bathed in light.
"Open the door!" Tashi's voice roared from inside the shop.
He hit the release. The chain hoist rattled.
The dented metal shutters rolled up with a crash.
The mob flinched, stepping back, expecting a weapon. Expecting the Witch to come out with fire.
Instead, they saw Liyen.
She stood in the center of the doorway, bathed in the harsh halogen glow from above. She looked ten feet tall. Her headscarf was bright red against the gloom.
Behind her, shoulder to shoulder, stood the forty women of the Union. They had stopped singing. They stood with their arms linked, a wall of mothers. They weren't holding weapons. They were holding their ground.
Liyen held a battery-powered megaphone one I had fixed for the church choir a month ago.
She raised it to her lips.
"LOOK AT YOU!"
Her voice boomed, distorted by the amplifier, rolling over the silent crowd like thunder.
"Cowards! You come to burn my shop? You come to beat my husband?"
She stepped forward into the street, into the pool of light. She walked right up to the front line of the mob the young men who had thrown the stones.
"The Bookman told you we stole the sun!" Liyen shouted, pointing a shaking finger at the roof where the halogens blazed. "Look! Did we steal it? Or did we save it?"
She turned to face the thousands.
"The rich men on the hill are in the dark! Their generators are dead! But here? Here we have light! Here we have the Union!"
She singled out a young man in the front row. Sunday. The boy who had tried to burn the house, the boy who had thrown the first stone today. He was shielding his eyes from the glare, trembling.
"Sunday!" Liyen barked.
"M-Mami?" Sunday stammered.
"Is your mother safe?"
"Yes, Mami."
"Who sewed your sister's school uniform?"
"You... you did, Mami."
"And you bring a stone to my house?" Liyen stepped closer. "You want to kill the woman who clothes you?"
Sunday dropped the rock. It clattered on the asphalt. He fell to his knees.
"We are afraid, Mami," he wept. "The sky is dead. It is cold."
Liyen lowered the megaphone. She looked at Tashi, who was standing just behind the line of women.
Tashi nodded. He stepped back into the shadows of the shop. He grabbed the handle of the large blue cooler box. He dragged it forward.
He flipped the lid.
In the surreal darkness of noon, the steam from the dry-ice effect rolled out of the box, illuminated by the halogens. It looked like a cloud.
"The sun is sleeping!" Liyen announced, her voice softer now, but carrying in the silence. "But the cold is awake. Tashi & Son does not give you fear. We give you Water."
She reached into the cloud. She pulled out a sealed plastic bag of water. It was frozen solid, white with frost.
She threw it.
Sunday caught it. He stared at it. It was so cold it burned his hands.
He ripped the corner with his teeth. He drank.
The water ran down his chin. He gasped.
"Ice!" Sunday screamed. "It is Ice!"
The word rippled through the crowd. Ice. Ice. Ice.
Liyen grabbed another bag. Then another. The Union women stepped forward, grabbing bags from the cooler, passing them into the crowd.
"Drink!" Liyen shouted. "Drink the work of the Union! Drink the power of the sun!"
The mob dissolved. The organism of hate broke apart into individuals of thirst.
They fell upon the ice bags. They held the cold plastic against their feverish foreheads. They drank the melting water.
They looked at the shop. They looked at the blinding lights on the roof. They looked at the glowing hospital.
"The Ancestors!" an old man shouted, pointing at the blue light of the mortuary. "The boy has lit the way for the Ancestors!"
They didn't cheer. You don't cheer in a cathedral. They stood in awed silence, drinking the communion of the new age, watched over by the electric fire I had stolen from the sky.
On the roof, I was fighting my own battle.
"Gemini!" I yelled. "Battery status!"
< Critical Warning: > Gemini flashed red. < Voltage drop detected. Bank is at 11.2 Volts. Cables are overheating. Insulation melting on Bus Bar A. Risk of fire: High. >
I smelled it. The acrid stench of burning rubber. The jumper cables were too hot. The current was cooking them.
"Hold on," I whispered, grabbing a heavy leather glove and slapping it onto a smoking connection to smother a small flame. "Just one more minute. Don't die on me now."
Below me, the scene was biblical. The light, the ice, the kneeling crowd.
But up here, it was a desperate struggle against resistance and heat.
Then, as suddenly as it had vanished, the sun returned.
A single beam of pure, blinding sunlight burst from the western edge of the moon.
The Diamond Ring returned.
Daylight rushed back into the valley with the speed of a shockwave. The purple sky bleached back to blue in seconds. The stars vanished. The birds woke up, screaming in confusion.
The Halogen lights on the roof suddenly looked dim, yellow and pathetic against the return of the true star.
"Cut it!" I shouted.
I slammed the levers back.
CLACK.
The halogens died. The hum of the tortured cables stopped. The smoke from the melting insulation drifted away in the wind.
The crowd blinked in the returning day. They looked at each other, dazed. They looked at the empty plastic bags in their hands. They looked at Liyen, who was still standing there, defiant, her red scarf bright in the sun.
They didn't applaud.
They lowered their heads.
One by one, the men who had brought stones dropped them in the gutter. Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
It sounded like rain.
They turned and walked away. They walked slowly, ashamed, shuffling back to their lives. They had come to kill a witch. They had been fed by a mother.
Tashi walked out onto the sidewalk. He put his arm around Liyen. He was trembling, the adrenaline crash hitting him hard.
I sat down on the hot roof. I pulled off my goggles. My hands were black with soot from the burning cables.
I looked down at my father.
He looked up.
He raised his fist in the air.
The Treasurer.
I raised my fist back.
The Engineer.
The Eclipse was over.
The darkness had failed