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“Right. Okay. We know Jane was on the tracks during the citywide power surge that caused the 1977 blackout. So, my theory: the burst of power on the already super-powerful electrified rail created some kind of… crack in time that she slipped through, and now she’s tethered to the electricity of the rails.”
“C’mon, Doctor Who,” Wes says.
“Myla thinks that if we can re-create the event, we can break her out of the time slip. All we have to do is… figure out a way to re-create the conditions of the ’77 blackout.”
“Don’t you think that’s kind of a dick move?” Wes asks. “I mean, even if we could somehow find a way to do it, which we can’t, the blackout was like… universally considered a bad thing. You’d be throwing the whole city into Purge territory.”
“You’re right. We’d have to find a way to target only Jane’s line. Which is where this comes in.”
August jabs her marker at the photo stuck in the top right corner.
“The New York City Transit Power Control Center. Located in Manhattan, on West Fifty-third Street. These two blocks of buildings manage the power to the entire MTA, with several substations. If we can get access, we can figure out which substation controls the Q, and we can find a way to create a power surge… that might work.”
“Loving this TED Talk,” Wes says. “Unsure how exactly you plan to handle the if.”
As if on cue, there’s the familiar jingle of Myla’s five million key chains as she unlocks the door.
“Hey, we brought leftovers if you—oh my God.” Myla stops halfway into the door, Niko colliding with her back. “You started without me?”
“I—”
“You text me that you, and I quote, ‘scored the clue of a lifetime’ and are ‘about to bust this shit wide open,’” Myla says, throwing her skateboard down in a righteous fury, “and you don’t even wait for me to have a free afternoon to break out the whiteboard. Wow. I thought I could trust you.”
“Look, I can’t talk to Jane about it,” August tells her. “I needed to do something.”
“You’re still in a fight?” Niko asks.
“I’m giving her space.” August extends a dry-erase marker to Myla, who glares as she snatches it up. “She said that was what she wanted.”
“Uh-huh, and this wouldn’t have anything to do with the way you reflexively ice out anyone who even appears to have rejected or wronged you?”
“Don’t answer that, it’s a trap,” Wes calls from the couch. “He’s using his powers for evil.”
“That wasn’t a reading,” Niko says. “It was just a read.”
“Anyway,” August presses on, “she’s gonna come around. And she may not be speaking to me, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s stuck in the nebulous in-between—”
“Aren’t we all?” Wes adds, and August throws a stack of Post-its at his face.
“And we’re the only ones who can fix it. So I’m gonna keep trying.”
Niko gives her a cryptic look before curling up on the couch with his head in Wes’s lap. August gives Myla a quick rundown of what she’s figured out so far.
“You’re missing something,” Myla points out. “Just being near the Q when the blackout happened isn’t enough for her to get stuck. There must have been thousands of people on trains and in stations during that surge, and none of them got stuck. There’s another variable you’re not accounting for.”
August leans against the fridge. “Yeah… shit, yeah, you’re right.”
“You haven’t talked to Jane? Told her what you learned?”
“She told me to leave her alone. But I.… I feel like if I could talk to her about it, she might remember the rest.”
Myla pats her on the shoulder and spins back to the board.
“So, basically, when you have an event like the blackout, and an outage is caused by a power surge—a lightning strike, in this case—there are actually two surges. The first one that overloads the line and makes the lights go out. And the second.” She points at August with the marker. “You know when you were a kid and the electricity would go out during a storm, and then when it comes back, there’s half a second when the lights come on too bright? That’s the second surge. So, if we were… somehow able to do this, we’d have two chances.”
August nods. They can work with that, she thinks.
“And how are we gonna access the substation?”
