The girl on table three was seizing again, and the overhead lights guttered like a candle in wind. Doctor Jerry pressed one gloved hand to her forehead and watched the monitor with the other. The hospital generator upstairs hiccuped twice more before the current steadied. He counted five seconds. Five seconds was enough to kill her. Five seconds was enough to end everything he had built under Marshwood Medical Hospital. He had six children in the basement tonight. Three were sedated. Two were tubed. One, the girl, was mid-procedure, her small veins carrying the compound he had spent four years refining. If the power dropped for a full minute, they would all die. If they died down here, the board of directors would stop returning his calls, and the city he blamed for 1996 would go on breathing. He needed a second source. A quiet one. Tonight. He stripped his gloves and climbed to his office. The number he dialed was not in any directory. It rang once. Garrett Harvey arrived within the hour, in a navy suit, smelling faintly of cologne. He did not shake Jerry's hand. He looked at the elevator that had no button and said, "Show me the load." Jerry took him down. Garrett walked the lab without touching anything. He looked at the girl on table three. He looked at the ventilators. He looked at the breaker panel and the thin copper feed stolen from the hospital's surgical wing. "You're pulling from a maternity ward," Garrett said. "It was what I had." "It's what will bury you." Garrett's voice stayed level. "I can wire a clean feed. Panels on the roof of the school you use for placement. Storage cells under my building downtown. The draw shows up on my books, not yours." "And the cost." Garrett almost smiled. "You're asking the wrong question. The cost is later. The question is whether you want the children alive on Tuesday." Jerry watched him. He had known men like this. He had never needed one before. "Do it," Jerry said. By dawn, Garrett's crew was on the roof of the preparatory school Jerry used to house his finished subjects, bolting angled solar panels into the slate. A second team ran fiber and conduit from the school, across a buried line Jerry did not ask about, into the base of the glass tower Garrett owned downtown. The tower would hold the batteries. The tower would take the blame if anyone ever measured. By the end of the week, Jerry threw the transfer switch himself. The lab lights held. The girl on table three opened her eyes and asked for water. Jerry gave it to her. Then he looked at his phone, at the new number saved there, and understood what he had signed. His lab would never lose power again. It also no longer belonged only to him.