The sounds of hooting and hollering was heard throughout the pnt.

  255 MW

  “Wendy, are we getting a bump?” Anjali Patel from Four asked.

  287 MW

  The indicators were still showing 3000 RPM.

  “Tariq, we’re seeing a spike,” Wendy said.

  315 MW

  “Tariq?” Anjali asked. Something was wrong.

  “We might have a problem here,” Tariq said. From the sound of his voice, it sounded serious.

  355 MW

  “Is everyone else seeing this?” Asked a voice Edith didn’t recognize. “Is this real, or a gauge malfunction?”

  “Harry? You OK?” Tariq asked.

  God no, please no. Edith thought.

  402 MW

  Nigel’s handset beeped. He listened for a moment before replying. “It’s not a mistake, we’re experiencing a power surge.”

  “I need to get outside,” Aric’s voice said over the intercom.

  Edith looked at Ed Martel with a panicked face. They had all heard those words before. They all knew what was coming.

  476 MW

  “We need to back off!” Geoff Bexley shouted. “Were over two hundred percent capacity!”

  Tariq’s words stunned everyone to momentary silence. “He passed through the wall! He just passed RIGHT THROUGH THE WALL!”

  “What do you mean, passed through the wall?” Natalie asked.

  “The towers! Look at the towers!” Shirley Bains’ voice spoke for the first time, pleading for attention. “Their dead! There’s no steam!”

  “How can there be no steam? We’re running over 200% capacity?” Tom Dakers asked.

  “Oh my God, what the hell is that?” Anjali Patel asked.

  Aric’s glowing figure appeared, rising above the roof level of the pnt buildings. Four glowing tendrils flowed from him and disappeared through the wall of the turbine gallery as he hovered in the air.

  “What is that?” Colin Digby asked Delphine.

  “C’est l’homme que j’aime,” she answered, her face shining with adoration. That’s the man I love.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Gordon said as he beheld the glowing form of a man suspended higher than the windows of his control room.

  505 MW

  “We’re at 250% capacity and 95% thermal efficiency,” Wendy announced as she scribbled frantically in her log.

  The intercom stayed live. Voices overpped, clipped, rising one over the other — like trying to dam a flood with duct tape.

  Malcolm: “That can’t be right. We never topped 30% efficiency on our best day.”

  Wendy: “It’s right! I know how read a goddamn gauge! 97% now.”

  Geoff Bexley: “She’ll fly apart at this rate!”

  Don MacAllister: “Gordon, what’s the hell’s happening?”

  Natalie Holcombe: “SHUT IT DOWN! KILL IT!”

  660 MW

  Gordon: “We can’t just turn it off! Not with those turbines at that speed! You know how much inertia you’re talking about?”

  Wendy: “Somebody check my math! This torque calcution can’t be right.”

  Anjali: “I’m getting 630,300 Newton-meters per shaft!”

  “Holy shit, it is right,” Wendy said with awe.

  “We’re at 330% power?” Roy Tilley asked. “How is that possible?”

  “We’ll shear those shaft clean through,” Roy’s counterpart Malcolm said. “I’m surprised we haven’t already.”

  Gordon rounded on Ed, his voice an angry roar over the chaos. ’You need to stop this, Martell!”

  Nigel still had his handset to his ear. “HQ says we’re spiking their northern grid feed. They’re preparing to force a remote trip unless we stabilize in the next two minutes.”

  Carol heard the comment from the grid control liaison in One. “What happens to the power we’re generating if they do that?”

  Paul Chambers had a startling answer. “It has nowhere to go. Turbines will overspeed, bearings could seize, shafts might shear—”

  Gordon’s voice was immediate, and urgent. “Tariq, get the hell out of the gallery, NOW!”

  Tariq: “I should stay. In case something happens, I can—”

  Wendy: “If a turbine flies to pieces do you want to be standing next to it?”

  Paul: “Jesus, Tariq! It’s not worth your life! GET OUT!”

  Tariq didn’t have to think about his answer long. “Acknowledged. Evacuating now. See you in a few.”

  The power had stabilized, but at much too high a number.

  Ed didn’t have any way to get a message to Aric. But he knew someone who might.

  “Talk to him,” he said to Edith, “get him to dial it back before something bad happens.”

  The entire room had gone silent at his words. In every control room there were people who didn’t understand what he was saying.

  But there were some who did.

  Her senses — and the maelstrom they tried to convey — faded into the background as the thread between them came to life. It was like someone had introduced her to a sense she’d always had, but never known about. And in a manner of speaking, that’s exactly what it was. Aric had shown it to her. It wasn’t logical. It couldn’t be expined or defined. It simply was.

  Connection. In its purest form.

  Edith let her mind go bnk as she reached for the thread that connected them. It was still there, even during this turmoil. She felt his concern. He’d come close to losing control, like he had in the b. But he’d found an anchor, a heat sink for his overflowing power, that he was pouring into four turbines that had never run so powerfully before. That should not be able to do what they were doing now, except that Aric was keeping them alive, healing defects and fractures, reforming metal in ways that no Earthly science could.

  Tap the breaks, love. We did what we came to do. Now it’s time to let everyone take a breath. Including you.

  He did take a breath. She felt it, as the power indicators began to fall.

  550...500...450...

  With each dropping number everyone began to breathe easier. Her connection with Aric remained active. His own level of concern diminished, as he bled excess energy into the national grid. As he regained complete control she felt the shiver that ran through his body like it had past through her own. He was out of danger. They all were.

  350...300...250...

  200.

  “Thank God,” Natalie Holcombe said as her knees told her that now would be a good time to sit down. Gordon helped her to his chair. His rge frame needed to burn off some energy of its own. He wiped a sweaty face as he paced back and forth.

  Geoff Bexley’s voice reappeared, in much lower volume and intensity. “At some point, is someone going to expin to us what just happened?”

  Shirley Bains’ voice cut in quickly. “If either of you says it’s all Greek to you, I will throw you out that fucking window.”

  Malcolm ughed before he looked at a very sweaty Brian Ellis, who’d sat through the entire ordeal never having uttered a sound. Malcolm grinned as he leaned in and gave Brian a friendly pat on the leg.

  “So then,” Malcolm said, “same time tomorrow?”

  The drive back to campus was quiet, each person processing the events of the day. It was a 50-minute ride to Surrey—longer if the A23 was backed up. They had talked about stopping somewhere on the way for dinner, but everyone was looking forward to their own couch, and their own bed.

  Their parting with the pnt staff had been simir in many ways to any group of people who had collectively survived a disaster or life changing ordeal. Hugs. Handshakes, pats on the back or shoulder. A few longing gnces at people that some would never see again, no matter how much one might wish otherwise.

  But for Aric, for the man who had hovered fifty feet off the ground, glowing like a small celestial body as tendrils of energy drove their power pnt past anything physically possible, for him, there was only quiet awe—and a separation too painful for Delphine to watch.

  This is what his life has been like, what it will continue to be like. Beauty and power and loneliness.

  She wasn’t the only one who recognized it. Brian and Tariq, the two who had seen Aric in a tamer form as he drove the turbines of their power pnt, seemed immune. The three stood and joked about the day—sometimes quietly, other times joyfully, using hand gestures to mimic something that had happened that hadn’t been visible to everyone in the control rooms.

  Ed Martell, Gordon Muir, and the two representatives from CEGB HQ held a private meeting at the far end of the canteen. Tea was avaible for anyone who wanted it. Aric and Carol and Carlos wanted coffee, strong and bck. But for that they would have to wait.

  “You see now why we were light on the details,” Ed said to get the ball rolling. “CEGB would have thought I was barking mad. They would have had me committed. We’d never have gotten our test approved.”

  “You still should have told me,” Gordon said, his voice low so it wouldn’t carry. Even when he whispered his voice carried.

  “Told you what? That I have a man on my staff that channels a form of energy that we don’t understand? That he’s drawing it in from the bck hole at the center of our gaxy? Transforming it into something else? What would you have said it I had told you?”

  Gordon shrugged. “It’s a fair cop. Guess we’ll never know.”

  “So, what do we do now? Don MacAllister asked.

  “I’ll answer that question after you all take a survey: how many of you want to end up in the looney bin? Raise your hand.”

  Everyone sat motionless, no hands raised.

  “So...what we do now is report two successful tests, the second of which had a minor problem that was corrected quickly. Make sure all your people understand what’s at stake.”

  Gordon drank his tea. “They already know that. If any of them want to work in the power industry again, they’ll keep their gob shut. No one’s going to hire someone who spouts stories about glowing men and tendrils of light.

  “But I’ll tell you up front, we’ll be taking those turbines apart. Analyzing every component. Those shafts should never have survived. Nothing should have. But they weren’t even warm. It’s like they weren’t even running. 660 megawatts, for the love of God. They’re already talking about halting decommissioning. Croydon B’s just got a reprieve.”

  “That’s good news,” Ed said.

  Gordon drained his cup. “Tariq says those shafts look different than from before the test. Like they’d been treated.”

  Ed nodded. “Aric mentioned tuning the metal in the boiler room as the first test was underway. He probably did the same thing with the turbines. I wouldn’t mention that though. Let them assume it was work hardening or something else.”

  “What do I tell them if they ask me what I think happened?” Don asked.

  Ed’s face broke into a wide grin as he offered a suggestion.

  “Say, don’t know, mate. The Americans brought it. It’s all Greek to me."

  Aric was asleep, his head nestled in Edith’s p. Delphine had contorted herself into a position where she could y against him and doze off herself. Both of them had the unnerving knack of being able to fall asleep given five minutes notice no matter what they were doing.

  Edith looked out the window and thought about how the pool of individuals who knew Aric’s secret was widening. With each person added to that group, Aric’s secret, and his safety, was more under threat. It would have been different if all those people had also expanded his list of friends, but she saw for herself today how that wasn’t true. Too many of the men and women from the pnt had barely been able to make eye contact with him, let alone approach and talk to him.

  She’d felt the loneliness inside him. That had been bad enough. But watching his face as all those people kept their distance was more than she could bear. She turned away and swallowed hard against the sob that had been building up inside her.

  So beautiful, yet so lonely.

  They continued on in silence. Aric’s face was peaceful, resting in her p. Edith turned back to the window and offered a silent prayer to any god who might be listening: that he might someday feel that same peace inside.