Voltage

Dayo

Dayo picked up on the third ring.

"Hunter." A pause. "It's four in the morning."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Another pause. Longer. "Are you hurt?"

"No. I need to ask you something and I need you to not ask me why. Not yet."

Dayo was quiet for a moment. Hunter heard him move — the sound of someone sitting up in bed, feet hitting the floor. "Go ahead."

"You worked the substation crew before Vantage. Electrical infrastructure."

"Three years."

"If a conductor was carrying more current than its rated load, and the source wasn't external — not tied to any grid or generator — what would cause that?"

The silence this time was different. Not sleepy. Careful.

"What do you mean the source isn't external?"

"I mean the current is coming from the conductor itself. Or from whatever is in contact with it."

"That's not how conductors work, Hunter."

"I know."

"Conductors move current. They don't generate it."

"I know that too."

Dayo did not say anything for several seconds. When he spoke again his voice was lower. "Where are you right now?"

"Drewe Street. Behind the fabrication lots."

"Stay there," Dayo said. "I'm coming."

He arrived twenty-two minutes later in a grey work van with a tool chest in the back and a thermos of coffee he handed to Hunter without comment. Hunter took it and drank. It was the first thing he'd had since the hospital food the previous morning.

Dayo sat on the wheel arch of the van and studied him. He was a stocky man in his early forties with close-cropped hair and the particular patience of someone who had worked industrial jobs long enough to know that panic solved nothing and observation solved most things.

"Show me," he said.

Hunter set the thermos down. He picked up the section of copper drainage pipe he had been testing on for the past two hours. He held it in both hands, breathed slowly, and pushed.

The pipe heated from the inside out. The surface temperature rose fast enough that it ticked — a series of small metallic sounds as the metal expanded. At the midpoint of the pipe, where both his palms were in contact, the copper glowed a dull red-orange for four seconds before Hunter released it and set it down on the ground.

The pipe sat in the dirt, cooling.

Dayo stared at it. He did not speak for a long time. Then he leaned forward, took a pen from his shirt pocket, and used it to roll the pipe so he could see the full circumference. The glow had been consistent across both contact points. No external heat source would produce that pattern from the inside of a metal tube.

"How long since the accident?" Dayo said.

"Five days."

"And it's been like this since you woke up?"

"Getting stronger," Hunter said. "Not weaker."

Dayo set his pen back in his pocket. He looked at Hunter the way he had looked at the pipe carefully, without alarm, as if he were reading a load rating on a component he had not seen before.

"Anyone else know?"

"No."

"Good. Keep it that way." He picked up the thermos and took a drink himself. "You need to understand what you're working with before anyone else does. If you walk into a hospital with this, they'll study you. If the wrong people find out, it gets worse than that."

"I know," Hunter said.

"Do you have somewhere to stay?"

"Not currently."

Dayo looked at him for a moment, then at the ground, then back at him. "There's a guy. Nate Duval. He runs a repair shop on Callister Road, goes by Wire. I've moved parts through him before he's not clean exactly, but he's quiet and he minds his business and he has space in the back of that shop. I can make a call."

"What does he want in return?"

"I don't know yet. That's his conversation, not mine." Dayo stood up. "You want the call or not?"

Hunter looked at the cooled pipe on the ground.

"Make the call," he said.

Callister Road was twenty minutes south of the industrial district, in a block of mixed-use units that had been commercial once and were now split between a tyre shop, a halal butcher, and whatever Wire's operation was. The sign above the door said Duval Electrical Repairs. The lights were on at six-fifteen in the morning.

Wire opened the door before Hunter knocked.

He was shorter than Hunter had pictured lean, mid-thirties, with sharp eyes and the hands of someone who had spent years taking things apart. He looked Hunter up and down the way someone does when they are deciding whether a transaction is worth their time.

"Dayo says you have a situation," Wire said.

"That's one word for it."

"What's another word?"

Hunter held up his right hand and ran a current through his fingers. A visible arc jumped between his index and middle finger a short, controlled discharge, no more than he needed to demonstrate the point.

Wire watched it without blinking. Then he stepped back from the door.

"Come in," he said.

The back room was a long workspace with a concrete floor, two workbenches, and shelving units loaded with components, cable spools, and stripped-down electronics in various states of repair. It smelled like solder and machine oil. There was a cot in the corner with a folded blanket on it.

Wire pulled a stool up to one of the benches and sat. He pointed Hunter to a section of cleared floor near the far wall.

"Show me what you can do. All of it. Don't manage it for my benefit."

Hunter set his bag down. He spent the next forty minutes demonstrating everything he had tested in the scrubland — controlled discharge through a copper wire, the phone charging, the glowing pipe, and the ground conduction he had used on the Ashline man without meaning to.

Wire watched and asked precise questions. How much contact time before the discharge peaked. Whether it worked through rubber or only conductive materials. Whether the arc between his fingers was consistent or variable. Hunter answered what he could and said he didn't know when he didn't.

At the end of it, Wire stood up and walked to the shelving unit. He pulled down a rubber mat and spread it on the floor.

"Stand on that," he said.

Hunter stepped onto it.

"You're grounding through your feet every time you don't mean to discharge," Wire said. "The current is running down your legs and bleeding into the floor before you can build pressure. That's why the output has been inconsistent. Insulate your feet, your baseline control goes up immediately."

Hunter looked at his boots. Standard issue work boots. Steel toe cap. Not insulated.

"I can fix that," Wire said. "Twenty minutes with a heat gun and some non-conductive lining. Won't hold forever but it'll work long enough for you to practice without accidentally frying my floor."

He went to the shelf, came back with the heat gun and a roll of rubberized lining material, crouched down, and started on Hunter's left boot without asking.

Hunter stood still and let him.

"Dayo said the accident was five days ago," Wire said, working the material around the inside of the boot.

"Yes."

"And it's already strong enough to drop a man through ground conduction."

"Yes."

Wire nodded slowly, like he was processing a load calculation. "It's going to keep growing."

"I think so."

"Then we need to know how fast." He moved to the right boot. "You sleep here tonight. Tomorrow we start measuring this properly."

Hunter said nothing. He was looking at the cot in the corner. It had a metal frame.

"I'll get you a wooden one," Wire said, without looking up.

That night, after Wire locked up the front of the shop and disappeared somewhere without explaining where, Hunter sat alone on the rubber mat in the back room with the lights off and worked on control.

He had been at it for an hour when he heard the notification.

His phone charged now to sixty percent from his own body had connected to Wire's shop WiFi. A news alert had come through. He almost ignored it.

He read the headline.

VANTAGE INDUSTRIAL CAPACITOR INCIDENT UNDER REVIEW THIRD UNREPORTED FAILURE IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS.

He opened the article. It was short a local industry reporter, not major press. But the details were specific. The capacitor array on Level 3 had failed twice before Hunter's accident. Both incidents had been logged internally and not reported to the safety authority. Both had involved the same weld seam on the same coolant pipe.

They had known. Someone at Vantage had known the pipe was going to fail and had deferred the repair twice.

Hunter read the article again. Then he set the phone down on the rubber mat and sat in the dark.

The waiver he had signed was a single page. He had given up his right to legal action against Vantage Industrial for forty-three dollars in his bank account and a hospital stay they were legally required to cover anyway.

He sat very still. The charge in his hands built slowly, the way it did when he was not actively managing it.

He thought about the legal representative who had shaken his hand.

Then he pulled the charge back down and made himself breathe.

Not yet, he told himself. Not like this.

But he saved the article.