Blackout (Darkness Trilogy)

BLACKOUT

We don’t have proof of what happened. All we have are the stories that we’ve passed down in the sixty-seven years since the Blackout. Things told and retold in the dark. From everything I’ve heard, this is what I believe.

I
n 2015, part of the sun erupted and shot a massive solar flare toward Earth. As a kid, listening to the stories, I always imagined the flare as an enormous ball of red flames speeding through outer space toward our planet. We didn’t stand a chance. When the flare hit, it short-circuited all satellites and power grids—everything—and every light in the world went out. All yellow windows turned black at exactly the same time.

My grandmother, Skye
Andrews, was six years old when the Blackout struck. It hit in the dead of night. All electronics—televisions, computers, phones—were instantly useless. Then came the terrifying chill. Temperatures plummeted everywhere until the air felt like ice. The next morning, the sun didn’t rise. With quivering hands over their open mouths, Skye’s parents huddled in front of their windows, shivered, and gaped. Jet-black clouds covered an ash sky. The whole world looked gray, and daylight was so dim that Skye felt like a shadow.

All hell was about to break loose.

Panic exploded, and government everywhere was silent. They didn’t say a goddamn word.
I don’t care if they were stranded—or scared, or unable to reach anyone out of earshot—they didn’t do anything, and they should have. They should have kept order when people started to steal and fight each other like monsters.

After
two months of hell, there was a wall. Out of nowhere, this
wall
. A giant barrier running from east to west across the middle of the nation, and it still stands here today. Its gray concrete surface towers over fields and cities, marked at every mile by gates no one has ever seen open. The gates look like massive doors: impenetrable, titanium.

My grandfather, Leiter Troublefield,
first saw the wall through gaps between the boards on his window. His townhouse in Washington, DC—now my home—is just a hundred yards away from it. That day, for hours, he watched small crowds gather by its base. Everyone looked to everyone else for answers, but no one on this side of the wall—the south side—knew why it was there or how it had come to be. They weren’t told
anything.
Leiter said some people bowed to the wall, believing it was a miracle sent by God. Others scoured the cracks between concrete blocks with their fingertips, and some ran dead away in fear.

Over time,
people on this side of the wall resigned themselves to the new reality. Days would be wretched and dim. The four seasons would be undifferentiated and cold. Filled with too much snow. Most days were devoted to surviving: hunting, making fires, boiling water over open flames, and searching for things to use. After a few years, people on this side stopped considering themselves part of the United States of America and, through word of mouth, gave their territory a different name: the Dark Zone. Virginia became known as Dark Virginia and DC became Dark DC. We got the title DZs. We named the wall the Frontier.

Then
—the plagues came. Four years after the Blackout, they hit one right after the other. Leiter was kept inside, but he heard about the outbreaks from his parents. His mom said DZs had started moving further south or west for country air, but the Troublefields wouldn’t budge. “Not us,” she said firmly, and Leiter’s father agreed. They wanted to honor their home and their heritage—and stay.

All along,
the Frontier towered indifferently beside the Dark Zone. Leiter and Skye met when they were both thirteen, and for a while, they didn’t know whether life was better on the other side. Then the answer to that question became clear.

They
were sitting next to each other on his porch when it happened. They were both my age, about sixteen. The plagues had been gone for a few years, and people no longer avoided touching in the Dark Zone. Holding each other’s hands and resting their feet on the front steps, they both saw a sudden bright glare from beyond the Frontier. Gazing at the light, they were mesmerized. Mystified. They searched the yellow glow in the distance for some sort of clue—a hint, a sign, or anything that would help them understand—until slowly it dawned on them that they were staring at electricity.

Their hearts stopped in their throats and time stood still as they
waited for the Dark Zone to light up, too.
Any second
, they kept thinking, but nothing changed. Darkness remained on their side of the Frontier. That’s when they finally understood what the Frontier was for: to keep them out. To keep everyone in the Dark Zone out. The United States must have found a way to restore power, and there wouldn’t be enough for everyone anymore. Leiter and Skye realized that Americans had built the Frontier to contain electricity in the northern half of the country. And DZs would stay in the dark.

Easies. What
Easies
. That’s what we call the people on the other side, because their lives are easy. We still don’t know how they live, but they have the electricity, so details don’t matter. Life with power must be better than life with nothing. DZs haven’t fought each other since the day light was restored in America, because that’s when we realized who the real enemy is: the Easies.

Now
, more than six decades after the Blackout, we still struggle to survive in the Dark Zone. I’m tough, and I’m smart, and it’s still not easy. Every day, we see hints of lives we can’t have and then fall asleep hungry. Cold. There have been no successful attempts at government, and our world is as grim and gray as ever. We’d use wind power or coal—or anything
that worked—but the plagues left us with too few people to fix the transmission lines. Or to come up with a better idea. So we live in small numbers. In ruin. In the dark.

This
—yes, this—is my world.

I pace back and forth outside her shelter. My boots cut neat tracks into the dustlike layer of snow. As I turn, I check the front door in growing anticipation.

The door is slightly open. It broke during the lootings and
doesn’t close right. No matter how hard I shove it—and I’m strong—a one-inch crack remains between the door and the frame. As always, that space is filled with darkness.

Star should be here soon.

I exhale hot air into my gloves and walk another lap. One more turn and I glance at the shelter again, but nothing has changed. Dim twilight barely illuminates the sign above her door, where in faded letters it reads
Silk.
Before the Blackout, this place used to be a nightclub. I moved her family here from the grocery store three years ago because, hands down, Silk
is better shelter. No windows, just two doors. Easier to keep warm. I could have found them a decent apartment, but Star didn’t like the idea. She said apartment buildings felt like cemeteries, and she didn’t want to fall asleep every night imagining the last DZs who lived there. Died there. When she put it like that, I understood. Haven’t brought it up since.

Footsteps squeak inside
the nightclub, and I jerk my head sideways to see one of her red gloves curl around the door. Finally, I stop and smile.
Star
.

She stands on the threshold in her favorite orange parka. I found it for her. When she sees me, she ducks her chin shyly into her scarf and smiles back. We don’t mov
e much for the next few seconds. I shove my hands in my pockets and face her from the sidewalk, and she stands quietly in her door. Right now, I just want to look at her. Really look at her. It’s easy to feel invisible down here, spending all of your time in the dark, but I want Star to feel seen. So whenever we meet at her shelter, I take a moment to stare.

Star has wide blue eyes, a small nose, and a round face I can cup in my hands.
Her light-brown hair is soft and fine, and it falls straight down her back. She shuffles toward me, meeting my gaze, and I watch her smooth skin glow. Even in the dark, her cheeks just beam. She’s my age, but something about her seems young—or honest, or unguarded. After five years together, I still can’t figure out the right word to describe the rare and tender way that she carries herself. It’s different and special and just…Star. Our eyes stay locked.

S
he trips suddenly over her boot strings and I run to catch her tiny frame before she hits the snowy pavement. She’s barely noticed the fall and keeps staring at me. Shaking my head, I help her regain her footing and kneel back down to tie her shoes.

She can be
shockingly careless with herself. Maybe this is what draws me, I don’t know. She’s never taken her own safety—her own needs—seriously. She cares more about other people, and she just loses herself in them. Last night, this almost got her killed. Star was asleep in Silk, safe for the moment, when a gunshot outside woke her up. Then she thought someone screamed. Without thinking, she bolted out of bed and ran toward
the noises. Toward
them. Didn’t even take the time to put on a real coat or tie her boots. She looked up and down the street, searching everywhere for a wounded DZ, but found no one. Star had wandered halfway to my family’s townhouse before she spotted me toting two raccoons home. She croaked my name and, when I saw her standing behind me in the dark, she was convulsing violently with cold. I mean: no
coat.
I dropped the raccoons immediately and built an emergency bonfire in the street. Zipping her inside my coat with me, I held her close to the flames. She told me what happened, and I realized she must have heard me shoot and mistaken the animal squeals for screams. As she struggled to tell the story, still shivering, she felt so fragile in my arms—but worse than that, out of her own control.

I stand up.
Star tucks her shoulder into my armpit and I feel like I’m whole again. I kiss her old hat, and we start to move in tandem: left boot, right boot, left. After so much time together, our bodies just fit. We stride next to the Frontier and I watch its smooth concrete face pass beside us. Glare from the other side illuminates a shopping cart in the middle of the road, and cold bites my face as we steer around it. I grit my teeth. No one likes walking by the Frontier and being reminded of who holds all the power.

I
turn us away from the Frontier, and we venture into the night. Without any more scraps of light to guide us, I’ve had to memorize the way through the useless streetlamps, abandoned cars. Star and I take this route every night around Dark DC to visit the seven families left. Only twenty-four DZs remain in what used to be a capital, and we visit them every night to remind them that they’re not alone. Star’s idea. She suggested it four years ago and thought she’d make the rounds without me, but of course that was out of the question. She can’t be trusted not to let herself get hurt. I pull my backpack’s straps tighter and together we walk on.

We slow
down outside the Bank of Dark America, where someone spray-painted the word
Dark
before
America
on the sign. Star and I step through an empty doorframe onto the bank’s first floor. We trudge past the counter together, passing a decrepit wall lined with shoes, lots of buckets, and a bike, precious these days. Torch and Ember Ford—the only two Fords left—live downstairs in the vault. Like every DZ, they were named after things bright and warm. It’s why my Star Windsong was named Star. And I’m Phoenix.

We reach the staircase
to the basement. It drops down straight and steep. Before we go, I stop Star for a second and look at her. She tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear and turns her face away from me. I pull her chin gently toward me and see her eyebrows knit together in worry. These days, there’s only one thing that worries her: her little brother, Wick. He’s been bedridden with a hacking cough for months now, and we don’t know what he has. Star’s pored over every old medical textbook we could find, and for nothing. She’d be with him right now if her mom didn’t make her get fresh air once a day. I cup the side of her face in my hand and stroke her cheek to let her know that I understand her fear. I want to help her diagnose him—treat him, even—but right now this is all I can do.

I take her hand as w
e descend the cold iron stairs. Their vault sits at the bottom behind a large circular door that the Fords always leave open for us. Inside, little crayons burn as candles. Their wax bases stick to mirrors that reflect the light, doubling the brightness they shed. Star and I enter to see Mr. and Mrs. Ford lying on sleeping bags, playing cards. Mr. Ford leans against an upside-down stack of buckets, where a dense clump of crayons burns on top to illuminate the right side of his face. When he sees us, the wrinkles on his forehead deepen in delight. We’re late, I know, but this won’t bother him because Mr. Ford has always enjoyed a small amount of frustration.

“It’s about time,
Phoenix,” Mr. Ford barks when he sees me. A shrewd smirk plays at his lips as he extends an upward-facing palm. I put my hand on top of his in the common DZ greeting. After me, Star does the same. “I almost froze to death waiting.”

“Ha!”
Mrs. Ford cackles. “I’d like to see that!”

I laugh
quietly. The Fords were both born before the Blackout, and they’ve been together for most of their lives. Mrs. Ford is a sharp, fierce woman who likes to get at her husband. She’s smacked him so many times in the back of the head that he flinches whenever she gestures, but I
know
they’re still in love. Mr. Ford enjoys the aggravation, and no one survives in the Dark Zone without someone to live for. Fight for. For them, it’s each other.

“Tell them what you told me,”
Mrs. Ford says.

“What did I tell you?”
Mr. Ford asks.

“
The thing about the neighbors! Oh, I’ll just tell them,” Mrs. Ford cries. She turns to us with an expression like she’s got a big secret to share. Her eyes are wide beneath bushy gray eyebrows and her dry lips purse on the brink of revealing something important. Star creeps her hand into my own, and I hold it firmly. “They’re back.”

M
y stomach drops. Like I said, there are seven families left in Dark DC: the Troublefields, Windsongs, Fords, Campbells, Garcias, Rosens, and Browns. Well, actually, there are eight. I don’t count the eighth because they stick to themselves and travel. When they disappear, we don’t know where they go. We don’t even know their names, but we know they live in the library across from the Fords. The “neighbors.”

“
Yes, they are back,” Mr. Ford says thoughtfully, remembering now.

“I just said that!”
Mrs. Ford says. Exasperated, she throws her arms up, and her husband watches her in amusement. “Torch was on the first floor about an hour ago, getting the crayons for tonight, when he heard voices in the street. Through the window, he saw all four of them walking back into the library. The woman said, ‘Tonight’s the night,’ as if something big was going to happen.”

“
It sounded like something
very
big was going to happen,” Mr. Ford adds.

“
You’re just repeating what I say!” Mrs. Ford says, throwing her cards at him. He holds his forearm up to defend himself, but he’s grinning.

“
So they’re back,” Star murmurs to herself, suddenly looking very pale. The Fords fall silent. I hold Star’s hand tighter. Star has never said it outright—she doesn’t like to talk about herself—but I know how the neighbors scare her. Their strange behavior makes her uneasy. She won’t admit it now, but she definitely doesn’t want to stay here so close to them anymore. It’s time to move on to the next stop, the Garcias.

“
Well, we’d better get going,” I say, helping Star stand. She wobbles slightly and I grab her tight around the waist. Her mind is not here right now. It’s across the street. The Fords both look downtrodden to see us leaving so soon, but I won’t have Star feeling like this if I can avoid it. She takes priority.

“See you tomorrow then,
” Mr. Ford says gruffly.

“Of course,” Star says.
She tries to smile, but it comes off distant. I wave a friendly good-bye to them and exit through the vault door toward the stairs. As we ascend, I squeeze her harder to get her out of her head and back into this moment.

At the top step, she freezes
abruptly, and I look down at her to see what’s wrong. She’s staring across the street at the library. I follow her gaze to the neighbors’ window frames, which are a mix of jagged glass, duct tape, and thick blankets. Right now, through the glass parts of the window, a bright and strange light shines: contained like fire, but quiet like the sun. I step warily onto the street with her, confused. None of the other buildings are lit this way. The brightness hurts my eyes, and I look away, back at Star. Her smile is euphoric. And now I understand.

It’s electricity.