SEVEN DAYS TO BUILD THE LAST SHELTER

Chapter 4: The Engineer Who Asked for Proof

I had a flooded building, a pile of food, and no way to keep a single light on.

The thought hit me at four in the morning, sitting on a crate in the dry room with a cold coffee and a notebook full of lists. Water filters need pumps. Ventilation needs fans. Medicine needs refrigeration. Every item I had bought depended on reliable power, and in the first life I had watched a shelter go dark in under an hour. I knew how quickly people stop being kind in the dark.

I needed an electrical engineer.

I searched the city's professional registers until the sun came up. Then I found a short profile with no photograph and a plain list of qualifications. Generators. Battery systems. Emergency electrical distribution for hospitals and data centres. Ten years of maintenance work, and a rate that made my stomach tighten.

Mara Voss. I called the number before I could talk myself out of it.

She answered on the second ring. "Voss."

"My name is Adrian Cole. I own an underground facility on the southern edge of the city, and I need someone to assess its electrical systems. I can pay for an inspection."

"What kind of facility?"

"A decommissioned municipal maintenance complex. The wiring is dead, and I suspect the old backup system has been untested for years."

There was a pause, and a machine whined behind her. "That is a liability, not an asset. Why do you want it running?"

"Because I plan to use it."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the one I can give you today," I said. "Come and look at it. If you think I'm wasting your time, charge me for the visit and leave."

She was quiet for a moment. "Two o'clock. Bring cash for the call-out f*e. And a hard hat, if you own one."

She arrived in a battered work truck with a toolbag over one shoulder. She was tall and sturdy, in a worn jacket with a multitool clipped to the belt, her dark hair tied back and a smear of grease on her cheekbone. Her eyes went over the fence, the ramp, and the rusted door the way a surgeon looks over a patient.

"You're Cole," she said. "Show me the main panel."

Inside, she worked in silence for forty minutes, a flashlight in her teeth and a portable meter in her hand. She opened breaker boxes that had not been opened in a decade and photographed the corroded junctions. In the room I had marked for the generator, she knelt by an ancient diesel unit and rapped her knuckles against its casing.

"Right," she said, when she finally straightened. "I'll tell you what I see, and you won't enjoy it."

"Go on."

"The wiring is unsafe. Half the insulation has perished, and the other half is damp. If you energized this system tonight, you'd either start a fire or electrocute yourself. The generator room has no proper ventilation, so you'd poison anyone sleeping nearby within an hour of running it. And the backup system is old, unmaintained, and untested. I wouldn't trust it to power a toaster."

"But it can be fixed?"

"Anything can be fixed. The question is whether it can be fixed cheaply, safely, and in the time you have." Her eyes narrowed. "How much time is that?"

If I told her the world ended in six days, she would be in her truck before I finished the sentence, and she would be right to go.

"Less than I would like," I said. "I'm not going to explain why, and I'm not going to ask you to take it on faith. What I'm going to give you is a work order."

I handed her a single sheet, and she read it standing in the corridor, frowning.

*Objective: a minimum viable power plan for the facility. Constraints: limited fuel, limited spare parts, and a maintenance schedule that can be followed by people with no engineering training. Priorities: water pumps, ventilation, emergency lighting, medical refrigeration. Everything else is optional.*

"This is better than most work orders I get from companies," she said, without smiling.

Before I could answer, the interface woke across my vision.

[SOCIAL MISSION: ESTABLISH A RELIABLE WORKING AGREEMENT.]

[OBJECTIVE: SECURE A SPECIALIST THROUGH CLEAR TERMS, SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES, AND DEMONSTRATED RESPECT.]

[WARNING: COERCION AND FALSE PROMISES WILL INVALIDATE THIS MISSION.]

The system had not offered me a shortcut. It had told me I could not buy trust with lies.

"Before you decide anything," I said, "I want to be clear. I can't promise you safety. I can promise you honest terms, and I'll treat your judgment as binding on anything electrical."

That earned me a long look. "That's an unusual thing to say to a contractor."

The argument began over lunch, on two upturned crates in the dry room.

"First priority is the entrance," I said. "The main door sticks, the frame is weak at the hinges, and anything strong enough to push through will find it in seconds. I want it reinforced before anything else."

"Then your shelter will be very secure, and very dark." She tapped the notebook. "A door doesn't keep people alive. Air does. Water does. Without power, your pumps stop, your ventilation stops, and your filters become paperweights. You'll have a fortress full of people who can't breathe."

"A door that fails is worse than a pump that fails. People can wait for water. They can't survive being overrun."

"You've never been in a sealed room with twelve people and no ventilation," she said. "I have. It is not a slow death."

I opened my mouth to argue, and stopped. She was right about the air. I was right about the door. Neither of us wanted to say so first.

"Fine," I said. "We price both."

"Both?"

"The reinforced entrance and the minimum power system. I'll cost every part, every tool, every hour. If the money won't stretch to both, we choose based on numbers, not instinct."

Mara studied me for a moment, then nodded once. "That I can work with."

I followed her back to the generator room with my notebook. She explained fuel consumption, load calculations, and the humbling difference between a machine that runs and a machine that runs when you need it.

We were in the lower corridor, beside a disconnected junction box that had been stripped of its cables years ago, when her meter chirped.

It was a short, sharp sound. She looked down at the display. I saw a spike on the screen, a jagged line in a circuit that carried no current. Then it flatlined.

"That's not possible," she said quietly.

"What was it?"

"A signal in a dead circuit." She wiped the probe on her sleeve, reset the instrument, and repeated the test. Nothing. She checked the meter against a known live source in her bag, and it read perfectly. "The instrument is fine. The circuit is dead. And I just saw it carry something."

I said nothing. She stared at the junction box for a long moment.

"Could be induced current. Could be a fault in the meter. I'd want three more readings before I say anything else." "I don't jump to conclusions, Cole. Not even strange ones."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

I walked her back toward the entrance.

"I'm going to tell you one thing," I said. "You don't have to believe it. I only want you to write it down and check it yourself."

"Go on."

"Within the next day, the city will have a power fluctuation. Citywide, not local. A drop, then a surge, and then it will go dark for several minutes."

She stopped walking. "That's a specific claim."

"It is. If it doesn't happen, you can keep your f*e and I won't call you again. If it does, I'd like you to document this facility's systems, test the backup, and help me prepare for a failure. I'm not asking you to believe anything larger than that."

She said nothing for a while, weighing the cost of being made a fool against the cost of ignoring a warning she could not explain.

"A short contract," she said finally. "Three days. Clear payment, clear duties, and the right to stop work the moment I judge the site unsafe. You don't argue with that."

"I won't."

"Then we have a deal."

We shook hands, hers rough and callused, mine still blistered from the corridor. The interface lit up.

[SOCIAL MISSION COMPLETE: WORKING AGREEMENT ESTABLISHED.]

[REWARD: MAINTENANCE RESOURCE CREDIT x1.]

For the first time since waking up, I had somebody who disagreed with me, and the shelter was better for it.

Mara was packing her tools when it happened.

She was kneeling by the entrance, closing her bag, and I was reaching for the door handle when every light in the corridor came on at once. Dead fixtures that had been black for years flared white along the ceiling, buzzing, flickering, and holding.

Mara froze with her hand on the zip of her bag. "That circuit is not live," she said. "I tested it myself an hour ago."

The interface slid across my vision in a hard red banner.

[UNSCHEDULED GRID EVENT INCOMING. 00:09:59.]