Silence. Then: “Leo… the logs show a modification timestamp from three hours ago. Administrative access. User ID traces back to… sector seven.”

Sector seven. The sector that had refused to join the grid’s emergency pooling agreement last month. The sector that stood to gain the most if the central grid failed and its microgrid became the only lights left on.

“Patch installed,” Leo breathed. “Surge protection active.”

He opened a raw terminal and tried curl with verbose logging. The response came back instantly:

Maya’s voice came back, quieter now. “What do we do about sector seven?”

The progress bar snapped to life. 10%… 40%… 80%… Complete.

Outside, the first wave of the solar flare hit. The lights flickered once—and held.

He leaned back in his chair, the stale air of the server room pressing against him. Outside, the city had gone quiet. Too quiet. The emergency patch was supposed to fix the grid’s routing algorithm before the surge hit at midnight. Without it, the power distribution nodes would treat the incoming solar flare as a cascade failure. Blackout. Every sector.

“We don’t patch them in next time,” he said. “Let them sit in the dark and think about what trust actually means.”

Leo stared at the error message still ghosted on his screen. Unable to download endpoint data. The lie had almost cost them everything.