Rick kneels beside a utility hatch near the bar, tools spread across the floor in organized chaos.
A coil of wire hangs from his shoulder like a badge of survival. His shirt is half-untucked, sweat darkening the collar despite the chill of the emergency air system.
“This place was never built to handle the kind of power Vale wanted to push through it,” he says without looking up.
“Half the circuits in this tower were already running on borrowed time.”
He flicks open a burnt connector and taps the edge of it against the floor, watching the sparks jump.
“See that? That’s what happens when you make engineers patch a miracle out of spare parts and budget cuts.”
Rick leans back on his heels, running a hand through his hair.
“Vale used to call me paranoid. Said I ‘slowed down innovation.’
Funny how fast things stop working when you cut the people who keep the lights on.”
He looks up at the broken SmartServe cart, its polished casing warped by heat.
“I told them the adapters weren’t grounded right. The insulation wasn’t rated for direct integration with that much current.
Frost’s code might’ve been fancy, but it doesn’t change physics.”
He grabs a nearby drink napkin and sketches a rough circuit on it, the ink smearing with his thumb.
“Ground to battery to relay,” he mutters, marking each with a line. “That’s the safe loop.
You skip the ground, the energy finds its own way out — usually through a person.”
He stares at the napkin for a long moment, then crumples it and tosses it aside.
“You wanna know the truth?” he asks quietly. “I warned him twice this month.
He said if I didn’t like how he ran things, I could take the stairs on my way out.”
Rick exhales through his nose, jaw tightening.
“Guess he got there first.”
He picks up his wrench and goes back to work, tracing the power line along the wall, the same way he’s been tracing blame for years.