Mark peered over her shoulder at the dials, pointing his flash at them. "Wow," he said in a respectful tone. "Man, you know your shit, let me tell you what."

The irony made Kerry smile briefly. "Thanks."

Another bright light suddenly interrupted them, and they looked up to find a television camera pointing its round, inquisitive eye at them followed by a reporter stumbling alongside almost losing his footing on the loose shale.

"Uh oh," Mark muttered. "This ain't' good."

Kerry exhaled as the reporter headed her way. "Wanna be a Vice President for a day?"

"Nuh UH."

"Didn't think so."

"Betcha wish Big D were here."

The sweat in her eyes felt very much like tears. Kerry had to look down for a long moment and wipe the moisture away with her sleeve before she could pick her head back up and face the music.

AT LEAST IT wasn't CNN. Kerry wiped her hands off as she walked over the broken stone and grass, lifting one to shade her eyes from the blaring lights as she recognized one of the local news stations. "Hello."

A woman in her mid-thirties, sweating like a pig, was unwinding a mic cord as she approached. "Okay, hold on, hold on, I'm almost there." She was obviously talking into her own ear. "Give me a minute."

Kerry stopped and hitched her thumbs into her front pockets. She watched the cameraman circle around and take a bead on her, and it gave her a moment to gather her thoughts as the reporter got herself together and made eye contact.

"This is Conchita Gonzalez, of Channel Seven news. We're here at the Bellsouth regional center, where we've been told someone is trying to get something going here in this wasteland of darkness."

She extended the mic. "Can I ask who you are?"

Kerry almost said Martha Stewart. But at the last minute, her better sense prevailed. "Kerry Stuart." She paused, then waited, a mildly inquiring look on her face. "Can I help you with something?"

"What's going on here?" the woman asked, as the camera panned over to the truck. "Are you from the city?"

"No." Kerry shook her head. "We're a private company working on getting our customer's service back." She looked around. "Nothing really interesting going on here."

"Okay." The woman talked to her ear again. "We've been told the emergency services tied through this office are down. Are you helping to restore that?"

"No." Kerry shook her head again.

"Can I ask why not?" The woman focused on her. "We have people who could be in trouble, who could be hurt, or needing help, depending on those services. Shouldn't that be the priority?"

Kerry felt her mouth go dry, as the camera zeroed in on her. "It's not my priority," she said, after a pause. "My priority is doing what I can for my customers. The emergency systems are important, but the people in charge of them are who you should be asking that question."

The woman nodded to herself. "Okay." She said into her ear. "Can you tell us what you're doing?"

It all felt very disconnected. Kerry had the sense that the reporter was only ten percent here with her, and ninety percent in some crazed television news land with people yammering in her head all the time.

"Sure," she said. "We're generating power so that we can bring up the circuits to our main offices, to restore service to our customers."

The reporter stared at her. "Why aren't you doing that for everyone?"

Kerry stared right back. "Why isn't the city doing that? If it's that important, shouldn't they have backup systems?"

"What?" The woman leaned her head to one side. "They are? Okay. I'm out of here." She looked back at Kerry. "Thanks for your time. I'm not sure what you're doing, but someone should be finding out."

She motioned to the cameraman who flicked a switch on his camera and turned to follow her as she trundled away, her hand pressed to her ear. "What? What? What street is that?"

Kerry put her hands all the way in her pockets and stared after them. "Jesus." She turned and headed back to the crew, pausing when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the caller id, disappointed it wasn't Dar. "Kerry Stuart."

"Hello, Ms. Stuart? This is Nelson Argos."

Oh crap. "Mr. Argos, I don't really have the time to talk right now, I'm in the middle of something."

"Oh, I'm sure you are. I just got off the phone with a couple of your biggest customers and they want to know where that famous bulletproof service is. So do I."

"You can call them back and ask them in five minutes. Until then kiss my ass." Kerry hung up the phone as she got back to the truck, dropping to her knees beside the generators. Her phone rang again, but she ignored it this time, as she braced her hands on the load balancer. "We ready?"

"Just about." Mark had a loop of cable over his arm, and he was feeding it out as he walked toward the open door. "Give me a minute."

Kerry's phone buzzed, then buzzed again. She left it in its holster, as a damp breeze blew in and the first patter of rain dropped on the top of the tent.

"Okay, we're done." One of the techs came out, with a roll of duct tape. "You want to check it out, ma'am?"

"I trust you." Kerry didn't feel like getting up, her stomach in a roiling, churning mess. The phone rang again.

Again.

"Boss, we ready? I'm gonna plug it in!" Mark called back. "Cross your fingers!"

The phone buzzed again. Kerry pulled it off her hip and threw it against the wall. It bounced onto the ground, and sat there rocking, a small puddle growing around it. "GO ON," she called back.

The techs watched her in wide-eyed silence.

Kerry ignored them, focusing on the load gauges as she listened to the phone rattle and buzz, and jump against the pavement. As she watched, the needles quivered, then vibrated, then finally jumped a little, moving from zero up to twenty percent.

"Ms. Stuart, do you want us to fetch your phone?"

"No." Kerry leaned on the balancer, taking a bit of weight off her knees since the broken pavement was cutting into them even through her denim. "C'mon."

"Coming up!" Mark hollered back. "I got blinkies!"

The rain started coming down harder, the mist starting to come in the sides of the tent. The techs rushed to secure them, blocking the rain, as Kerry pushed herself to her feet and made her way inside.

Mark was standing in front of the rack, which was not cool, but not as stifling as it had been. There was a hum in the darkness, and red and green lights reflecting against his profile.

Kerry came up next to him. They watched in silence as the LED's moved from a testing pattern to something else.

"That's traffic," Mark finally said into the quiet.

"Yes, it is," Kerry agreed. "You think it worked?"

Mark opened his phone and watched the display. "We'll know in about a minute."

IT WAS DARK in the hotel room. Dar was lying curled up on her side on the bed, her laptop open in front of her and her cell phone resting near her hand.

But the screensaver whirled unmolested, and the cell screen was dark. Dar merely lay there and watched the hypnotic pattern, waiting through what seemed to be the longest night of her life.

It was very quiet, and after a while she lifted her hand and let it drop on the keyboard, bringing the screen to life and exposing the network map she'd placed there. The lines leading into Miami were still mostly dark, and she felt a moment of intense shame as she hoped they stayed that way.

Not for Kerry's sake. For her own, because if they didn't come up, the phone would ring, soon, and she'd grab her bag and head for the airport and home.

Home.

But as she watched, there was a flicker in the lines, a slow ripple that went from red, to yellow, to green as she blinked and sat up, leaning forward to stare at it. The lights steadied and held, pulsing a healthy color that reflected brightly against the dark background.

She did it. A burst of pride drove aside the gloom, and despite it all, Dar found herself smiling. Unless the power came back but... She checked a gauge. No, the office was still on generator. She released a held breath into a whirlpool of mixed emotions. "Good girl."

The phone rang. Dar looked at the caller id for a long moment before she answered it, cradling the phone next to her ear. "Hey."

A long, long, long sigh. "It worked." Kerry sounded lightheaded with relief. "Oh, my god, Dar. It worked. It worked. We're up."

Shoving aside her own ridiculous disappointment, Dar determined herself to rise to the occasion. "I knew you'd do it," she said. "Tell me how it went."

"Hang on, let me sit down." Kerry was almost out of breath. There was the sound of a car door shutting, then a brief rumble of an engine starting. "Oh god. Sorry. Had to get the AC on in here. I'm dying in this goddamned heat."

Dar closed her eyes and just drank in the voice. "Must be like hell."

"Oh, honey...where do I start." Kerry sighed. "Shit, I have such a headache."

Dar's fingers twitched in pure reflex, a testament to her natural inclination to answer the comment with a gentle knead of Kerry's neck. "You take anything?"

Another sigh. "I want to eat first. Otherwise it gets me sick."

"You haven't had dinner?" Dar checked the clock.

"I didn't have lunch," Kerry admitted. "Just some of my bars. Anyway...they fought me tooth and nail, Dar. No way did they want me to do this, because everyone's up their butts wanting favors and screaming at them."

"I'm sure they were." Dar said. "Where are you now?"

"Outside the central office. Mark and the guys are cleaning up. We're leaving two techs here to keep filling the gas tanks."

Dar opened her PDA and tapped out a message, hitting send quickly. "Good idea."

"Thanks," Kerry said. "We kept running into obstacles, but everything worked out. I got the generators hooked up together, and we were just going to start the power..."

"Hooked them up together?"

"Yeah. I got a gizmo, a thing that let me connect all of them. A load balancer. You know...I mean, you must know because you told me to get a bunch of generators, but I didn't think about how to make them work together and I guess you assumed we'd know so..."

Dar's eyes widened. "Shit." She exhaled. "I didn't even think of that, Ker. I just figured you might need more than one in case our stuff was on more than one switch."

Kerry was silent for a little bit. "Oh," she finally said. "Wow. Well, no...I got this thing to make them all work together, so we didn't have to take the lines down to refill the gas or anything like that."

"Go on."

"So then I had to figure out how to keep the switch cool." Kerry said. "I put some air conditioning duct from the switch out the door to the truck we rented...it had AC in the back."

Dar rested her chin on her fist, a genuine smile appearing on her face. "Uh huh."

Kerry cleared her throat. "So it was going great. Then the reporters showed up." She let out an aggravated breath. "Dar, they treated us like a bunch of squirmy hooligans. Like I was cheating or something to get what I wanted."

"Sweetheart, you were," Dar told her. "But it's okay. It's what you get paid for."

"That's what I told her," Kerry said. "She went away, but I think she's coming back. Anyway, I got it all going, and plugged the switch in, and we all sort of just held our breath."

"And it worked."

"It worked."

"Kerry?"

"Mm?"

"Outstanding job. You went over and above, and I really appreciate that. Well done. Very well done," Dar said, meaning every word.

Kerry exhaled, and there was a soft sound as though she'd let her head rest against the glass window. "Thanks, boss," she replied simply.

They were both quiet for a little while. Then Dar shifted the phone from one ear to the other. "I'm damn proud of you."

A faint sniffle traveled down the cellular link. "Even though it meant you didn't get to come riding to the rescue?" Kerry asked, making a wan joke.

"Yeah."

Kerry made a small sound of contentment, but then she sighed again. "Know something?"

"What?"

"I was just thinking about something you once said to me. About how you felt when you got promoted, that time? And how you just went back home and it was like..."

"It ended up not meaning much, yeah," Dar said. "What brought that up?"

"Uuugh. Because I just was sitting here thinking that after all this, after this crappy, disgusting, horrible day--all I have to go home to is a dark, hot house and an empty bed."