The Power Cut

The whole city went dark at twenty-two minutes past nine.

Maya knew the exact time because she had been counting the seconds between the air conditioner clicking off and the moment her phone would die, and the air conditioner clicked off first. Then the streetlight outside Soren's window. Then the glowing sign of the laundromat across the road, the one that buzzed all night.

Everything just stopped.

"Power cut," Soren said, from somewhere in the dark of his bedroom. "The whole block. Maybe the whole valley."

They climbed out onto the fire escape because inside was too hot to think. Soren brought his notebook even though he couldn't see to write in it. Maya brought nothing. She leaned her elbows on the iron railing and looked down at the city, waiting for it to come back.

It did not come back.

No headlights. No porch lights. No tower blinking red on the far hill. The valley below them had become a bowl of black, and the only sound was a dog somewhere and the wind.

"It's never been this dark here," Maya said. "Not once. Not ever."

Then she looked up, and she stopped talking.

Soren heard her go quiet, which almost never happened, so he looked up too.

There was a river over their heads.

It poured across the whole sky, edge to edge, a pale crowded band of light, brighter in some places and torn dark in others, thick with so many points that you could not separate them. It looked spilled. It looked like someone had cracked the sky and something was leaking through.

"What is that," Soren said. He was not asking a question. His voice had gone strange.

"I don't know." Maya did not move. "It was always there. It has to have been always there. We just couldn't."

"We couldn't see it," Soren said.

They stood with their heads tipped back until their necks ached, and neither of them said anything for a long time, which was a thing that had genuinely never happened between them before.

Maya found it first. The way she always found things, sideways, by noticing what didn't fit.

"It's not flat," she said. "Look. The middle of it is fatter. Brighter. Like we're looking edge-on into something. Like when you look down the length of a plate instead of at the front of it."

Soren turned that over. "A plate," he said slowly. "A disc. If you were inside a disc of stars, and you looked toward the thin edges, you'd see a few. But if you looked along the flat of it, through the most of it, you'd see."

"You'd see all of them at once," Maya said. "Piled up. That's the bright part. That's the band."

"We're inside it," Soren said.

The words came out of him quietly and then sat there in the dark between them, too big to take back.

"We live in it," Maya said. "This whole time. We're not looking at it. We're looking from inside it, out through the part that's thickest."

Soren put his hand on his notebook but he didn't open it. There wasn't a page big enough and there wasn't any light anyway.

"My grandmother," Maya said. "She grew up out past the reservoir before they built it up. She used to say the sky had a road in it. I thought she was making it up. I thought it was a grandmother thing."

"It's a road," Soren said, looking at the band. "Kind of. She wasn't making it up. She just lived somewhere dark enough to see the thing we're standing in." "Soren. How many people have never seen this?"

He thought about the laundromat sign that buzzed all night. The streetlight. The tower with the red blink. His own bedroom, where there was always a glow coming in from somewhere, every single night of his life.

"Everyone down there," he said. "Everyone in the valley. The lights were never off. Not in their whole lives." He stopped. "Maya. Maybe a third of everybody. Maybe a third of all the people who are alive have never once looked up and seen the thing they live inside."

Maya let out a breath.

"That's the part I can't hold," she said. "Not that it's there. That it was always there and the lights just painted over it. We turned our own sky off. By accident. By being bright."

"And it was waiting," Soren said. "The whole time. Just on the other side of the glow."

A door opened two floors down. Soren's mother, a flashlight in her hand, the beam jabbing yellow up the bricks.

"You two all right up there? Power's out across three counties, they're saying. Come down before you break your necks."

"We're fine, Mom," Soren called.

The flashlight beam swung up and caught them, and for a second it was bright and ordinary again, two kids on a fire escape squinting into a light. Then she clicked it off to save the battery, and the dark came back, and the river came back with it, pouring over everything.

"Don't," Maya said softly, when his mother's hand moved toward the flashlight again. "Please. Just leave it off. Just for a minute. Look up."

There was a pause down on the steps. Then the small sound of a grown woman tipping her head back. Then nothing at all from her, which was its own kind of answer.

Maya found Soren's arm in the dark and gripped it.

"They'll fix the power," she said. "It'll all come back on. The signs and the streetlights and everything. And this will be gone again. Painted over."

"It won't be gone," Soren said. "It'll just be hidden again. That's different. Gone means it stopped. Hidden means it's still right there."

"Behind the glow."

"Behind the glow. Every night. Whether anyone's looking or not."

Far across the black valley, a single window came back to life, then a string of streetlights stuttering on down a distant road, the city beginning to wake.

Maya did not look down at them. She kept her chin lifted, her eyes on the bright crowded spine of the galaxy, holding still in the last of the dark before the glow came back to swallow it.