There had to be a short in the control harness somewhere. Maybe it was the stuff in the drink Billie had given him or all that time he’d spent around Elton, but it was as if Michael could actually smell it—a faint aerial discharge of hot metal and molten plastic, somewhere in the tangle of wires above his face. With one hand he moved the circuit tester up and down the board; with the other he gave a gentle tug at each connection. Everything was tight.

He shimmied his way out and drew up to a seated position. The sweat was pouring down. Billie, standing above him, eyed him anxiously.

“Michael—”

“I know, I know.”

He took a long swig from a canteen and wiped his face on his sleeve, giving himself a moment to think. Hours of testing circuits, tugging wires, backtracking each connection to the panel. And still he’d found nothing.

He wondered: What would Elton do?

The answer was obvious. Crazy, perhaps, but still obvious. And in any event, he’d already tried everything else he could think of. Michael climbed to his feet and moved down the narrow walkway connecting the cab with the engine compartment. Gus was standing by the starter control unit, a penlight tucked in his mouth.

“Reset the relay,” he instructed.

Gus spat the flashlight into his hand. “We’ve already tried that. We’re draining the batteries. We do this too many times, we’ll have to recharge them with the portables. Six hours at least.”

“Just do it.”

Gus shrugged and reached around the unit, into its nest of pipes, feeling his way blind.

“Okay, for what it’s worth, it’s reset.”

Michael stepped back to the breaker panel. “I want everybody to be very, very quiet.”

If Elton could do it, so could he. He took a deep breath and slowly released it as he closed his eyes, trying to empty his mind.

Then he flipped the breaker.

In the instant that followed—a splinter of a second—he heard the spin of the batteries and the rush of current moving through the panel, the sound in his ears like water moving through a tube. But something was wrong; the tube was too small. The water pushed against the sides and then the current began to flow in the wrong direction, a violent turbulence, half going one way and half the other, canceling each other out, and just like that everything stopped; the circuit was broken.

He opened his eyes to find Gus staring at him, mouth open, showing his blackened teeth.

“It’s the breaker,” Michael said.

He drew a screwdriver from his tool belt and popped the breaker from the panel. “This is fifteen amps,” he said. “This thing wouldn’t power a hot plate. Why the hell would it be fifteen amps?” He gazed up at the box, its hundreds of circuits. “What’s this one, in the next slot? Number twenty-six.”