Total black for one full second, the kind of dark the building's bones were never built for, the kind that didn't come from a blown circuit but from something that understood darkness wasn't the absence of light. It was the presence of something else.
The emergency lighting kicked in, weak and sickly red, pulsing as backup circuits stabilized. Shadows jumped to life across the tables and floor, stretched and fluid, moving in ways that shadows needed walls to do and didn't need walls to do.
"Power outage," Jamie said, though her voice already suggested she knew the word wasn't going to cut it.
Eliza was already moving, scanning the corners of the room with the pendant's clarity. In the deep red dark, she could see what the emergency lights couldn't touch. The shapes at the edges of the r
