Mara

  Chapter One – What We Keep Sealed Up

  In a world of uncertainty, Helios keeps your lights on and your future bright.

  — Pre-Signalfall Helios ad copy

  The first thing Mara Selwyn did every morning was check whether the light was good enough to draw by.

  It was a stupid, old-fashioned habit in a city that had once bragged about “24/7 smart illumination,” but habits were older than smart anything. She stood barefoot in the middle of her studio, hands on her hips, and looked at the tall windows that faced the street.

  Detroit gave her grey.

  The kind of flat, overcast light that turned the buildings across the road into cardboard cutouts and made the power lines look like pencil strokes on a washed-out backdrop. It wasn’t pretty, but it was even. Good enough.

  Her tablet was already on, balanced on the adjustable arm above her work table, stylus waiting where she’d left it. The glow of the screen didn’t match the outside light, too cool, too clean, but she could fix that in settings. She could fix most things in settings.

  She could not fix the red banner at the top of her inbox.

  FINAL NOTICE, said the subject line. The preview text read: As per the terms of your lease…

  Mara clicked it open, skimmed the first three lines, and clicked it closed again before the anger could spread from her chest into her hands.

  “Rent is due, we will have no choice, blah blah,” she muttered. “You and me both, Sharon.”

  The landlord’s name tasted sour. She pushed the email into the folder she’d labeled LATER in all caps, even though there was no later where that problem went away by itself. The folder had a lot of company.

  On the other end of the table, her phone buzzed with a message from a client:

  hey sorry to bug u again!! can we make the name just a LITTLE bigger? like 10%? and can u send another mockup w the rose flipped? ??

  Mara typed out three responses, all of them technically polite and emotionally impolite, deleted them all, and settled on:

  Sure, I’ll send another revision later today. Any other changes after that will be a separate design fee ??

  She added a smiley face so the client would see it as friendly firmness instead of the weary triage it was.

  There. Emails checked, messages answered, today’s problems acknowledged and deferred. It was as much emotional housekeeping as she could manage before coffee.

  The coffee maker in the little kitchenette tried very hard to die every time she used it. It shuddered and wheezed and made a noise like someone grinding bolts in a blender, but eventually it produced something dark and hot. She poured it into her favorite mug and carried it back into the main room.

  Her studio was also her apartment, because Detroit rent had decided that only tech workers and ghosts got separate spaces. The front half was all business: tattoo chair, sterilization station, a bulky black toolbox filled with an array of supplies, and framed calligraphy pieces and healed tattoo photos mounted on the walls. The back half had a bed, dresser, the small kitchenette, and a curtain that pretended to be a wall.

  The box sat between the two like a boundary marker.

  It was medium-sized, the kind you got from the post office if you underestimated how much your life weighed. Her mom had written her name on the top in neat, looping handwriting more graceful than the printed PRIORITY MAIL text.

  MARA

  Her own handwriting was blocky, practical. This script was not hers.

  She had put the box there months ago, the day it arrived. Right where she couldn’t pretend not to see it, and then somehow she had managed to pretend anyway. It rested beside the edge of the bookcase, occupying exactly the amount of floor she’d convinced herself she needed for yoga.

  Mara went around it without looking directly at it, the way she always did when she wasn’t in the mood to remember how to breathe.

  On the tablet, her design software had frozen on last night’s work: a half-finished memorial tattoo. A name in blackletter, a pair of cupped hands, a date. The reference photo pinned under the corner of the tablet showed a middle-aged woman smiling in a kitchen, one hand resting on a gleaming pot on the stove. The client’s mother. Heart attack. “She loved to feed people,” he’d written, a line that had stuck in Mara’s teeth while she drew.

  The sketch on the screen was clean enough, but the letters weren’t behaving. The weight on one side of the N was wrong. The negative space inside the O was too small. The whole thing felt crooked, somehow, as if gravity were different on that layer of pixels.

  Mara set the coffee down, cracked her knuckles, and sat.

  “Alright,” she told the letters. “Again.”

  She worked in silence at first. The city’s morning sounds filled in around her, distant siren wail from a police car pretending to be busy, garbage truck groan, a bus sighing at the corner. Her pen tracked smooth arcs and hard angles, black strokes blooming under her hand.

  Once she had the name behaving, she switched on the stereo. A playlist she’d forgotten to update in months rolled in, guitar and drums and a woman’s voice sawing through the residue in her head.

  Her shoulders unwound. The design was coming together.

  There was a special kind of attention that grief tattoos demanded. Regular clients came in with ideas, Pinterest boards, screenshots. They wanted to be marked, to change themselves. Grief clients wanted to stitch someone else into their skin. Every line felt like a promise: I will not let the world forget.

  Mara had stood on both sides of that urge now. Drawing made it easier to stay on the side with the pen.

  Her phone buzzed again. She ignored it. The coffee cooled. Light shifted on the table as clouds moved beyond her sight.

  She was putting the last little line weight adjustments on the date when the overhead fluorescent flickered.

  It was nothing, at first. Just a quick pulse. A hiccup in the hum. The screen dimmed a fraction, brightened. The stereo crackled, then caught itself.

  “Don’t,” Mara told the light. “I am not tattooing in the dark today.”

  The bulb surrendered and went steady. The ambient hum of the shop came back into focus, mini-fridge compressor, computer fan, the low, constant breath of an old building.

  Mara finished the line, zoomed out to look at the whole piece, and felt the little click she always hoped for. The one where the composition balanced and the letters stopped yelling at her.

  “Better,” she said.

  At 10:30 a.m., her first client of the day arrived.

  He was in his late twenties, shoulders slumped, eyes under-slept. He held his left forearm close to his body like it belonged to someone else.

  “You, Mara?” he asked.

  “No, I’m the other artist who works out of this clearly one-artist studio,” she said, then softened the words with a crooked half-smile so he’d know she was teasing. “Yeah. Come on in.”

  He introduced himself as Daniel. His mother’s photo went on the table. They’d already messaged about the design; she pulled up the latest version and turned the tablet so he could see.

  His eyes went wet, fast.

  “She’d like that,” he said, voice rough.

  Mara nodded. “We’ll put it right here,” she said, gently straightening his arm. “You eat yet?”

  He blinked at the change of subject. “Uh. Coffee,” he said.

  “Coffee is a suggestion, not food,” Mara said. “Snack in your bag?”

  He produced a squashed granola bar. She made him eat it before she even peeled the backing off the stencil.

  It was easier when she was working. The buzzing of the machine gave her a channel to pour into. The act of setting someone else at ease let her sidestep her own edges.

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  They talked, in the loose, sideways way people did around pain. He told her about his mother’s cooking, the way the whole house used to smell like garlic and onions when he came home from school. She told him about growing up over a corner grocery store, the way every season had its own scent aisle.

  At one point, he mentioned the storm last week, the way the lights had flickered three times in one night.

  “My apartment’s old as hell,” he said. “Thought the whole building was gonna blow. Good thing Helios did that Hex thing or whatever, right? Heard on the news it kept the grid from collapsing.”

  “Good thing,” Mara said, because what’s the point in arguing about news segments?

  She’d seen the clip he was talking about. Some Helios exec in a crisp suit talking about “adaptive load distribution” and “unprecedented resilience,” words that made her teeth grind by their third repeat. The news anchors had nodded solemnly while a bright animation showed neon lines zipping around a map of the Great Lakes region, leaping over trouble spots to keep neighborhoods lit.

  None of that imagery had included the places that stayed conveniently dim for the camera.

  “Take a breath,” she told Daniel as she hit a tender patch of skin. “You’re doing great.”

  He did. She felt the muscles under her hand loosen.

  The lights flickered again, twice in quick succession.

  This time, the stereo died.

  The machine in her hand stuttered, then cut out, leaving the needle resting on skin. The overhead bulbs blinked off. For one brief, weightless second, the only light in the room came from the tablet screen, glowing pale over the unfinished name.

  Mara lifted the machine away from his arm on pure reflex.

  “Oh… shit, sorry,” Daniel said, and then, “That wasn’t me, right? Did I move?”

  “Not you,” she said. The tone of her voice came out flatter than she intended. “Stay still. Don’t touch anything.”

  It couldn’t be the breaker. They’d upgraded the panel last year after the old one tried to immolate itself. The building’s hum had stopped completely now; even the fridge had gone silent.

  In the dim light, Daniel’s face looked younger.

  “This ever happen?” he asked.

  “Once in a while,” she lied. “Usually comes back fast.”

  His phone screen lit up his hoodie pocket as he fumbled for it.

  “No signal,” he said, a dry laugh cracking. “Of course.”

  The darkness lasted four seconds.

  The lights returned all at once, a hard slap of fluorescent glare. The stereo came back mid-song, like someone had hit unpause on the universe. The machine in Mara’s hand remained quiet; she flicked it off and on again to coax the motor back to life.

  She’d had power blips before. Everyone in the city had. Old grid, stressed infrastructure, storms, the trifecta. But this one felt… off. Like the outage had flared up from inside the walls, not down the lines.

  “See?” she said, forcing her shoulders to unkink. “Back already.”

  “You sure it’s safe?” Daniel asked. “I can come back another day if…”

  “It’s safe,” she said. “If it wasn’t, I’d send you home and charge you anyway.”

  That got a smile out of him. She locked eye contact for a second, steadying herself, before putting the needle back where it belonged.

  By the time the tattoo was finished, the outage had slotted itself into the “mildly annoying things to complain about” column in both of their heads. He paid, stared at his bandaged arm like it had answered a question he hadn’t known how to ask, and thanked her three times before leaving.

  “Keep it clean,” she reminded him at the door. “Mild soap, no picking, send me a healed pic in a few weeks.”

  When he was gone, the studio felt larger than it had with another person inside it. The ticking of the little wall clock sounded too loud. The box on the floor looked even more out of place.

  Mara cleaned her station on autopilot. Gloves, green soap, fresh barrier film. The motions were familiar enough that her brain wandered.

  She thought about the way the light had gone out mid-line, the way the sound had dropped out of the room. Not long enough to be a real problem, but long enough for a little animal in her chest to bare its teeth.

  Her second client canceled while she was wiping down the chair. The text: Sorry emergency at work, can we reschedule? Things are crazy with the grid stuff!!

  She stared at the message for a solid thirty seconds.

  “What grid stuff?” she asked the empty room.

  Her phone buzzed again. This time it was her dad.

  Dad: You see the news? Got some time to talk?

  She hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen. If she called, the box would be within her peripheral vision the whole time. Dad wouldn’t bring it up directly, he was too careful for that, but it would hang there between every sentence.

  Mara: Later. At work.

  She set the phone face down on the counter, where she couldn’t see any more flashing little demands.

  The rest of the afternoon blurred: sketching for a repeat client, ordering more needles, answering three different emails that all boiled down to: can you lower your rate a little?

  She said no, politely, because she still liked eating.

  By the time the sky outside the windows had faded from steel to the even darker shade that meant early evening, she was the only person left on the floor of the building. The hair salon on the first level had closed; the yoga studio above it was dark. Streetlights had come on outside, painting the sidewalk in twin pools of amber.

  She was halfway through rearranging the framed pieces on the wall, busywork, honestly, when the box finally tripped her foot.

  She hadn’t been looking where she stepped. The edge of the cardboard caught her ankle and she stumbled, hand shooting out to catch the bookshelf.

  The frame she’d been holding thudded into the wall instead of hanging. A print of an old piece, sharp black script spelling out YOU WERE HERE, tilted on its wire.

  “Shit,” she hissed, rubbing at her shin.

  The box sat there, patient. It had scuff marks on one side now, the faint ghost of her shoe tread.

  Mara stared at it.

  “You just had to be between everything,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  No answer, obviously.

  She could have nudged it back against the shelf with her foot and gone back to adjusting frames. She could have kicked it out of the way and pretended that was an accident too. She’d done both of those before.

  Instead, before she could talk herself out of it, she bent down and picked it up.

  The cardboard was heavier than she remembered. Not physically; the weight was manageable. Just dense in a way that made her arms feel unsteady. The tape along the top was still intact, though the corners had frayed where she’d pressed her fingertips over and over without quite tearing it.

  She carried it to the tattoo chair and set it down.

  She didn’t sit. Standing felt safer, like she might be able to walk away if something in the box reached up and grabbed her throat.

  Her phone buzzed again on the counter. She ignored it.

  The room was quiet. The overhead light hummed.

  The first strip of tape came up in a satisfyingly clean line. The second tore in the middle and had to be scratched loose with her thumbnail.

  Her hands were shaking now. Not enough to be obvious, if she’d been holding a machine, but enough that her fingers slipped on the cardboard.

  She told herself she could always stop. She could always close it again. Leave everything inside undisturbed. The past didn’t care if she opened it; the only person it would hurt was her.

  She lifted the flaps.

  A faint smell of paper and detergent and something sweet she couldn’t immediately place rose up.

  On top, folded with extreme care, was a hoodie.

  Mara recognized it by color before shape: worn burgundy, the cotton thinned at the seams from years of pulling it on and off in a hurry. There was a bleach stain near the right pocket shaped like a continent.

  Her fingers slid over the fabric, then curled into it.

  Memory flashed, sharp and unwelcome: the feel of that same hoodie under her cheek once, years ago, when they’d both fallen asleep on a couch in front of some terrible movie. The mall lights where it had been bought. The way they’d argued, loudly and at length, about whether the stain looked more like Africa or South America.

  None of those things existed anymore. The mall was gone. The couch was in somebody else’s living room or a landfill. The hoodie had made it here; somehow that felt worse.

  Her vision narrowed. The air in the room shifted, thickening like water.

  The overhead light went out.

  No flicker this time. No warning pulse. One second the studio was brightly, artificially day-lit; the next it was dark.

  The tablet on the work table gave off a faint rectangle of glow. The streetlights outside cast slatted shadows through the blinds. The hum in the walls died.

  Mara’s breath hitched. Her fingers dug into the edge of the tattoo chair.

  “Not now,” she whispered to the ceiling. “Come on.”

  As if in answer, the stereo roared to life.

  It didn’t come back with music. There was no song, no playlist, no commercial. Just static, cranked to a level she would never have chosen herself.

  Not normal static, either. Not the thin, familiar hiss of dead air. This was thicker, churning, full of low growls and high, sharp pops, like someone had mic’d up a thunderstorm and run it through a broken amp.

  It pierced through her head. It made the thin hair on her arms stand up.

  For a moment, just a moment, she thought she heard something inside it.

  Not words. Not even syllables. Just… pattern. A rhythm that didn’t belong.

  Mara moved on instinct, lunging over to slap the power button on the stereo.

  The static cut off mid-snap, leaving the room abruptly, vertiginously quiet.

  She stood there, palm flat on plastic, chest heaving, waiting for the light to come back, for the hum to resume, for the world to explain itself.

  After a few seconds, the overhead fluorescents blinked on again. This time they didn’t flicker; they just came back like nothing had happened. The fridge in the kitchenette hummed. The tablet’s brightness adjusted to the room.

  The Helios ad she’d left paused on her screen earlier, some banner on a news site about “unprecedented reliability,” had been replaced by an error icon.

  CONNECTION LOST, it read. RETRY?

  “Same,” she told it under her breath.

  Her hand had left a faint smear of sweat on the stereo casing. Her other hand still rested on the open box, fingers brushing the fabric of the hoodie inside.

  The sight of it, in the suddenly-normal light, felt indecent. Like she’d walked in on someone changing.

  Her phone vibrated again, persistent. A new text popped up on the lock screen:

  Dad: Call me when you can. Please.

  She backed away from the chair, from the box, from the hoodie.

  The air smelled like ozone and detergent.

  Maybe it was just the grid being old. Maybe that Hex thing Daniel had mentioned was causing half the neighborhood’s breakers to sneeze. Maybe she was tired and hungry and primed to see ghosts in ordinary machine failure.

  She knew how to tell herself those stories. She knew exactly how they went.

  The static had a shape, though. That was the part her brain kept circling back to, like a tongue worrying a broken tooth.

  Something had been in there, just beyond hearing. A rhythm trying to become a voice.

  Mara closed the box.

  Not all the way; she didn’t tape it shut again. She folded the flaps back down and stacked a couple of sketchbooks on top as if weight could change what it contained.

  Then she went to the door, flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED even though she still had hours left on her posted schedule, and slid the deadbolt with a click that sounded too loud in her ears.

  The studio suddenly felt small.

  The lights were on. Everything hummed. The world, as far as anyone outside could see, was working.

  Mara leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the door for a moment and let her eyes close.

  She had rent due, designs to draft, a box full of someone else’s life waiting for her in the middle of the room, and now, apparently, a new entry on the list: the sense that something in the electrical bones of the city had started paying attention.

  She didn’t know yet that people in other neighborhoods were texting each other about brief outages. That a control room nearby had flagged an anomaly and dismissed it. That a Helios dispatcher was being overwhelmed with the amount of power-related questions.

  She only knew the way her own walls had gone quiet, and then strange, and then normal again like nothing had happened.

  She straightened up, forced her shoulders back, and went to turn off the stereo at the wall.

  Even with the power button popped out, she could still hear the echo of the static in the back of her skull.

  “It’s fine,” she told herself. “Just a blip. The power always comes back.”

  She didn’t completely believe it.

  That was new.