An Oakland area code at the bottom. Muscadine Dreams. The hometown Jane told him about, passing wine back and forth on the porch. August can picture him and his red shorts and messy hair, cruising down the Panoramic Highway in golden sunshine.

It’s postmarked April 1976.

Augie didn’t die that night in 1973. He went to California.

 

* * *

 

“This is like an episode of CSI,” Wes says through a mouthful of popcorn.

“I’m taking that as a compliment,” August says.

She finishes taping up the last photo, and she has to admit, it is a little primetime television detective. There’s no yarn yet, though. August is proud of that. Yarn is the one thing separating her from a full-scale conspiracy theorist—also known as the Full Suzette.

(She hasn’t integrated what she figured out about Augie into the timeline yet. There’s not enough dry-erase marker in the world to work that one out, and certainly not enough space in her head. One thing at a time.)

Myla and Niko are out for dinner, but August couldn’t wait, so it’s just Wes and his huge bowl of popcorn watching her pace back and forth in front of the whiteboard in the kitchen. He looks deeply bored, which means he’s having a great time and finding this all very entertaining.

“Okay, so,” she says. She nudges her glasses up her nose with the end of her dry-erase marker. “Here’s what we know.”

“Tell us what we know, August.”

“Thank you for your support, Wesley.”

“My name is Weston.”

“It’s— Jesus, are you a fucking Vanderbilt or something?”

“Focus, August.”

“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?”

Myla frowns. “That, I don’t know. I can ask around and see if anyone who was in the engineering program with me has connections, but … I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” August says. She’s already thinking through contingency plans. Do they know anyone skilled in espionage? Or who’d be willing to sleep with a security guard for the cause?

“You have a bigger problem, though,” Myla says.

August snaps back into focus. “What?”

“If all this is right, and it’s an electrical event … when they cut the power in September, it’s not only that you won’t be able to see her. She might just … blink out.”

“What?” August says. “No, that can’t—the train broke down before, when she was on it. She was fine.”

“Yeah, the train broke down,” Myla says. “But there was still power in the line. And maybe it was okay before you, when she never stayed in one time or place for long enough to be there when they cut the power to the tracks for maintenance, but if we’re right about how strong your connection is, you’ve got her pinned, here and now. She won’t be able to avoid it.”